We are halfway to completing our reading through the New Testament! Where is the Sousa marching band music? No matter, we have come a long way to accomplishing our goal and that is awesome! Not only is it awesome to see milestones achieved, like the pages turned in our bibles to the halfway spot, but it is even more awesome, yea verily, to take in the message that God’s word has for us. I know I am learning and I hope you are also.
Today we finished with what bible scholars have come to call the pastoral epistles, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. We read 1 Timothy yesterday and completed the trifecta today with Titus and 2 Timothy. Obviously, these are great books for the prospective and current leaders of the church to read, but they are also wonderful texts for the challenge that we all have to live lives that are consistently in harmony with the word of God and one another.
Here’s my thought on what I read today.
Paul writes to Titus, “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures.” In this sentence and the following one, Paul outlines our state without the Lord in our lives. He clearly identifies that we all were really good at doing our own thing, according to our own likes, and doing so with “the pedal to the metal.” In other words, we were lost in sin and enjoying the ride. But it wasn’t just those dirty rotten sinners who were doing those things. Paul says that both he and Titus use to be those kind of people. And if Paul and Titus were those kind of people at one time, what does that mean for us?
I am so thankful for passages like this in the word of God, because they remind me that we all were those dirty rotten sinners at one point. We all were foolish and disobedient, totally given away to almost immeasurable negative desires and their fulfillment in our lives. We might not have expressed these things in our genteel society, but they were in our nature and in our hearts. Paul’s statement is at least one line on our resume, pre-Jesus.
This is important theologically and practically for those of us that call Jesus our Savior. It is important for the latter, because, in living out our faith, we aught to be consistent in expressing from where we have come in honesty. Too often we believers act and talk like we never were not saved. Too often we act and talk like sin never had a hold on us and we don’t have any challenges even now. Too often we go about our business as if we are the judges of righteousness upon the earth, because we are so pure, inherently. What a trap! That is why Paul reminds Titus out of what tree they had fallen.
(Most people who have not come to a saving knowledge of Christ hate the uppity attitudes of some believers who have either forgotten this truth or don’t want to acknowledge it. This is one impediment to sharing the truth about Jesus with those who have not come to this grace in which we stand. It is called grace for a reason.)
It is also important for the theological position we hold. Paul reminds Titus that God’s mercy to us has made the difference. It was His kindness, His grace, His love, His washing us clean, His Holy Spirit that renews us and His Son that sealed the deal! God did these things for us who could do nothing but be enslaved to our own pleasure. As hackneyed as it may sound, we cannot get good to get God, rather it has always been the other way around!
So Paul ends this section encouraging Titus and those to whom Titus would minister (and to us as an extension to that ministry) to be devoted to doing good, remembering who we used to be. Living lives that reflect the goodness of God in the land of the living, not based on our lofty self perspective, but the mercy of the Most High God, Jesus Christ.
I pray that we Christians can get over ourselves, tossing the old man into the back seat (he is still there because we are still in this old flesh), as we live the new man, the spiritual one, who should be devoted to good, with grace and mercy to everyone, the man who should be at the wheel, for that would be “excellent and profitable for everyone,” just like Paul says.
Until Monday. May God’s grace envelop you. Blessings!
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