Titus 2 "The Grace Tutor" Scott Hoezee

"I must have been out of my mind!" "Oh dear, it looks like she's lost it!" "I don't know what came over me!" "I don't know why I did that but all I do know is that all of the sudden I was insanely jealous!" "Whoa, I need to get a grip here because I feel like I'm losing touch with reality!" These phrases reflect various ways by which we try to explain the terrible things we occasionally do. And over and again when doing this, we find ourselves claiming some kind of temporary insanity. We claim we are losing our grip, out of our ever-loving mind, overwhelmed by something that takes control of us.

Probably most of us know both what it is like to witness another person's descent into irrational behavior and what it is like to act that way ourselves. Often this is seen best in fits of furious anger. Some years ago I read a woman's account of what happened to her one day when her kids pushed her too far. The children had been difficult from the moment they got out of bed. They had been crabby and oppositional, had been bickering and fighting almost constantly. The mother tried to keep her cool but was rapidly losing the battle. Finally the kids hopped into the car in the driveway and insisted their mother take them to the swimming pool. They refused to get out of the car when told to do so and even started laying on the horn to coax their mother to get behind the wheel and do what they wanted. And she snapped. As she herself describes it, "I lost it. I lost myself. I jumped on the hood of the car. I pounded on the windshield. I could not stop pounding on the windshield. Then the frightening thing happened: I became a huge bird. A carrion crow. My legs became hard stalks; my eyes were sharp and vicious. I developed a murderous beak. Greasy black feathers took the place of arms. I flapped and flapped. I blotted out the sun's light with my flapping. Each time my beak landed near my victims, I went back for more. Finally I had to be forced to get off the car and stop pounding. Even then I did not come back to myself and when I did, I was appalled. I realized I had genuinely frightened my children. Mostly because they could no longer recognize me. My son said to me, 'I was scared because I didn't know who you were.'"

I didn't know who you were. If you have ever had someone say something similar to you, then you know how devastating that is. And it is all the more withering because you sense that this is an accurate way to put it. You know deep down that for a little while, you didn't know who you were, either. You were in the grip of something so powerful that you did feel out-of-control. You were out of your mind, out of sorts, irrational. You could not be reasoned with because your reason had fled. And this happens with far more than just angry outbursts. People make similar claims about being in the throes of irrational passions when explaining how it is they ended up having sex with someone not their spouse, why it was they just kept ordering more drinks at the bar even though they knew they were already sloshed, or what it was that impelled them to very carefully and deliberately write, seal into an envelope, and then mail a nasty letter that ripped the hide clean off of another person.

All of this is prologue to our look at Titus 2. Not only is this a fitting passage for church leaders--like the dozen new elders and deacons we have just now ordained--this is likewise a good passage for each one of us. Because throughout these verses Paul hammers home a couple of salient ideas. First, you no doubt took note of how often "self-control" pops up. Paul recommends this in verses 2, 5, 6, and 12. What's more, he several times encourages Titus to encourage his congregation to be eager to do what is good even as they make every effort to adhere to sound teachings. And although it may not be immediately evident in the English translation, what Paul is really talking about is spiritual hygiene.

Paul peppers this chapter with some version of the Greek word hygiainos, from which we derive the English word "hygiene." When he talks about "sound doctrine," "sound teachings," and "soundness of speech," he uses this word. This is all about spiritual health, spiritual hygiene. What's more, Paul claims that if you can stay spiritually fit, then self-control will follow. Because the Greek word translated here as "self-control" literally means "to be in your right mind." The word sophroneo means to have a mind in which all is well, healthy, and sane. Thus, the opposite of "self-control" would be the kind of thing we talked about a few moments ago: to be temporarily insane, to be out of your mind, to be irrational.

We will talk more in a moment as to what that may mean but not before noticing the core of this passage in verses 11-12. The source of all this spiritual hygiene, the thing that enables us to develop healthy minds, is the grace of God. Paul says that grace has appeared through Jesus Christ and that this grace now becomes our teacher, our spiritual tutor, who helps us to think right, to practice good hygiene, to stay in our right, God-given minds.

Yes, as Paul writes all through his letters, God's grace brings us salvation but here Paul immediately goes on to say that no sooner does grace deliver salvation to us but that it also begins to teach us about other things. Chiefly we are instructed on how to say "No" to bad things so that we can instead lead level-headed, sane, and right-side-up lives smack in the middle of this often insane, upside-down world. Notice, too, that Paul sees an automatic, natural connection between being saved by grace and then being educated by grace.

Although Paul does not make a big deal out of this here, this yoking together of salvation and education may be yet another way of saying what Paul writes extensively about in other places; namely, there is no such thing as cheap grace. A person cannot say, "Grace means that it doesn't matter what I do. So why not do whatever I want!? If God is in the sin-forgiving business, I'll send a lot of business his way! Let us eat, drink, and make merry for tomorrow . . . tomorrow God will forgive me anyway!" But that's wrong because in Paul's opinion, grace not only saves, it transforms. It not only washes dirty hearts, it instantly initiates a hygiene program to keep those hearts clean.

This is one of those places where we encounter again the paradox of grace. Those of us in the Reformed, Calvinist camp work very hard to make it clear that we are not saved by good deeds or works of any kind. God does not grade on the curve. God is not like the banker who refuses to lend you money until making sure you have some collateral. God does not keep a cosmic tote board where merit points are tallied. Salvation is not about what we bring to God but what God brings to us.

In other words, before a person is saved, we repeatedly say, until we are theologically blue in the face, "Stop thinking about your works and focus on the work Jesus did for you! You can never save yourself. So stop trying!" But then, after all that, we turn right around and tell those who now have been saved to start paying very close attention to what they do! In a flash we pivot from saying "Stop trying" to saying "Try harder!" But to Paul's mind this is not a contradiction. As Titus 2 also makes clear, being a moral, upright, and good person will never be the root of salvation but it is the fruit of salvation once grace arrives.

Maybe it is a little like romantic love. It is impossible to force yourself to fall in love with someone. You can try. Especially if you sense that the other person is already in love with you, maybe you'll try to reciprocate when he gives you a hug. After he sends you a gushy note or email, perhaps you can try to reply in kind, but you sense all along that it's forced and sooner or later the day will come when you just can't do it anymore. You have to be honest, drop the pretenses and the fake outward gestures, and break up. Ah, but if you really do fall in love with someone, then there is no stopping all the outward signs of that love. The amorous deeds and words and gestures flow naturally once love is present.

So also with grace: if grace is not there, then a person probably won't feel much motivation to lead a God-glorifying life in the first place. However, once the grace arrives, there is no stopping the virtues that will follow. Grace is not just something to get you caught up in the salvation of God, it also sticks around and remains with you as a tutor, patiently educating you and instructing you on how to say "No" to those things that run counter to God's desires for this creation and for your life in it.

But like all good teachers, grace does not and cannot teach us in a vacuum. Even the best teachers in the world rely on good resources, textbooks, field trips, and the like. In the classroom of grace, what are the teaching aides? Well, based on the rest of Titus 2, it appears that chief among the components in this grace curriculum is healthy doctrine. Titus is told over and over to teach well, to teach diligently, to provide the information needed to help people make level-headed decisions as to what counts as Godly conduct and what constitutes ungodliness.

In some ways it is unfortunate that the Greek word that means "to be in your right mind" has been translated as self-control. Putting it that way makes this look like it's all up to the individual. As it is, our society is saturated with talk about self-motivation, self-esteem, self-worth. We have high-paid gurus who will teach you about how to love your self, who will give you a battery of self-help techniques, and who will just generally tell you that you alone can order your private world, take charge, and do what needs doing.

But that kind of individualized, self-centered and self-activated picture is not what Paul meant. Being in your right mind, and so leading a level-headed life, begins by having grace as your teacher. It continues by listening for the voice of grace as it comes through preachers, teachers, friends, family, and anyone else who is interested in what Paul calls sound doctrine or healthy teachings.

In a way, so-called self-control is not up to you. As Paul makes clear in this chapter, this could more accurately be called "community-control" because we are all in this together. We encourage each other: older people encourage and teach the younger folks (even as they model in their own lives the will of God in action). Elders and Deacons rule the church by instructing its members and likewise providing examples worth imitating. Pastors teach the truth and so pour this into the hearts and minds of the congregation. Of course, "self-control" does finally involve the individual and the choices he or she makes, but even those choices are based on everything that has been learned within the context of the church.

Because in the end, what does it mean really to be in your right mind? It means having a mind that is already filled with the knowledge of God's will for life in this world. It means knowing not just that God wants us to avoid sexual immorality but understanding also why God desires that. It means knowing not just that God wants us to avoid being gossips and intrusively nosy folks but also perceiving why God deems this a good thing. No sooner do little children learn to talk than they begin to ask why questions, and very often they ask that in connection with some household rule laid down by the parents. "Don't go outside without a coat on!" "Why?" "Don't run around the house when your mouth is full of food!" "Why not?" "Don't sit so close to that TV screen!" "Why not?" And as most any parent can tell you, if the only answer to that question is "Because," the child's logical and natural counter-question will be "Because why!?" Children are born with the innate sense that rules should have reasons to back them up. And they are right. Among the things that grace teaches us is that if we ask God why it is he wants us to live such-and-such a way, the answer will never be "Just because I said so." God always has a reason and that reason, ultimately, will tie in with two grand realities: one is the order of God's good creation and the other is God's desire that we flourish and be healthy in every way.

But again, grace does not teach us these things in isolation. We need each other. We need to look to the example of, and heed the wise words of, those who are older. As we have noted before, there is a tendency these days to look down on the older population Younger people who live their lives riding the crest of the technology wave, who cruise along armed with palm pilots, cellphones, gameboys, and mini-GPS units tend to write off all those older folks who are "out of it" just because they don't understand all these gadgets. Paul would have some advice for such younger folks and his advice would be to slow down, sit down, unplug the laptop, be quiet long enough to learn about self-control and how life works.

Of course, honesty compels me to admit that like probably all of you, I also still find that there are times when I seem to lose my mind and do something wrong. That's why I'm glad grace sticks with me. The grace that saved me to begin with hangs around not only to be my tutor but also to assure me over and over of the forgiveness that is available to me every time I do something irrational and sinful. For all of us, there are those times when we seem to have taken leave of our senses, but thanks be to God that even so grace does not leave us!

And the end result of all this can be seen in a very intriguing Greek pun Paul uses here. The Greek word for "world" is kosmos and in verse 12 Paul uses a version of that word, kosmik, to refer to "worldly" passions. But at the end of verse 10 Paul said that if we live in the ways he has recommended, we will make the gospel attractive. Literally Paul says we will adorn the gospel, and the word there is kosmeo, from which we get our word "cosmetics." Cosmetics are things we use to adorn ourselves, make ourselves more attractive. This is what we should want to do for the gospel: make it over, spruce it up.

But the cosmetics of the gospel are opposed to the cosmetics of the world. At its most basic level, to "cosmetize" something is to adorn it by setting it in order. In theology, "cosmos" is the opposite of "chaos." And so in this sense cosmetics is about letting the natural beauty and order of something shine through. But because our God's created cosmos has fallen into chaos due to sin, now "cosmic" things are not necessarily Godly things. When Paul talks about "cosmic passions" in verse 12, these are wrong-headed passions precisely because they are disordered and chaotic.

But how wonderfully this ties in with the larger theme of this passage! This entire chapter is about being in your right mind, about seeing God's order for life in this cosmos and ordering your life accordingly. And when we are cosmic Christians in the best sense--when we perceive the right ordering of our passions--then the gospel itself gets a cosmetic makeover. The gospel way of life becomes transparent to the good cosmic order God wants us to enjoy. People will be attracted to the gospel for the same reason they are attracted to good music, good food, and good art: it's beautiful!

This morning we have installed a dozen people to serve on our Council. Too often we think that we do this only because it's the thing to do, it's how we keep this place up and running, it's a necessary administrative detail or else our committees won't function and programs won't be run properly. And, naturally, there is some truth to that. But this morning let me remind you new officebearers, you continuing officebearers, and all of us that the main goal of the church and of having people like Elders and Deacons is to make the teaching about God our Savior attractive! We want people to see the beauty of holiness! We want people drawn in by how gorgeous life can be if we are cosmic Christians! Our job at Calvin Church is to help each other be as level-headed a people for God as we can! For the grace of God has appeared to us. Let's keep listening to what grace has to teach us to the glory of God! Amen.