Titus 2 "Health and Love" Scott Hoezee

Recently, in the course of working on a history of the Christian Reformed Church's past fifty years, I had a chance to review an issue that consumed the CRC during the middle years of the 1960s. At the same time when the war in Vietnam and racial unrest here at home were making lots of people urge that we find ways to love and not hate, the CRC was also caught up in wondering about love, but in this case the question involved not our love for one another but the love of God. It all began in 1962 when Harold Dekker, who was then the professor of missions at the seminary, published an article in which he wondered why CRC mission efforts had not been more effective over the years. Dekker's hunch was that maybe part of the reason could be found in the doctrine of "limited atonement," which says that the salvation worked by Jesus on the cross was never intended for everyone but only the elect.

Hence, we're just not sure, Dekker said, whether God's saving love really does extend to all people or if it is narrowly restricted. And so a Christian Reformed missionary never dares to say to someone, "Jesus died for you." How can we be sure that this is true? After all, if this person is not one of God's elect, one of God's chosen ones, then as it turns out Jesus did not die for this person after all, and so you shouldn't claim that he did.

Professor Dekker concluded that the mission of the church would be enhanced if we said that as a matter of fact, Jesus did die for all people. That didn't mean that all would be saved. Nor did Dekker want to go the way of the dreaded Arminians and make it look like the decision to come to God is up to us. We can still hold to being saved by grace alone and we can still believe in God's sovereign election. But if we are ever going to reach out to people in missions in a genuine way, we need genuinely to believe that the love of God is wide enough to include everybody. We should be able to say "Jesus died for you" to anyone and believe that somehow or another, this is true.

To put it mildly, this didn't go over real big! By the time the synod met in 1964, the debating of this in various publications had reached such a fevered pitch that a study committee was appointed to look into the ins and outs of all this and was asked to bring its findings to Synod 1966. That committee spent two years working and produced a mammoth report. But it didn't fly. The 1966 delegates said they needed more information.

So the committee was told to re-tool its report and come back to synod the next year in June of 1967. The committee did so, but the delegates that year still could not agree on what to do or what we should teach. After ten days of meetings, the president of synod that year did the extraordinary thing of declaring a two-month recess during which they'd work some more on this. So all the delegates went home but had to re-assemble here in Grand Rapids at the very end of August. After another two-and-a-half days of wrangling, they finally made a decision: Professor Dekker needed to be more careful in how he stated things.

In the end, that wasn't much of a result after nearly five years of controversy. But the intensity of it all highlights a fundamental issue that we need to think about as we conclude this year's Mission Emphasis Week. Because the passage we read from Titus 2 was a key player in that "love of God" debate in the 1960s. Verse 11 is the key. As you can see, the NIV has Paul saying, "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people." But most scholars are quite certain that this translation isn't correct. The natural sense of the original Greek says, "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people."

So does that mean everybody is saved? Well, if we do what we must always do and interpret the Bible with reference to other parts of that same Bible, then we won't conclude that Titus 2:11 is teaching a universal salvation that automatically comes to everyone. That can't be what this means because there is far too much other material from the apostle Paul that indicates he didn't believe in universalism. But if so, then what does this verse mean? And what does it tell us about the mission of God's people even yet today?

To begin, we need to back up and look at the first ten verses of Titus 2. In another sermon a while ago, I noted with you that this section is about what we could call "spiritual hygiene." Paul begins by telling Titus "You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine." But the word translated as "sound" is the Greek form of the word for "hygiene," meaning that which is healthy. This whole section ends up being about spiritual health. In literal, physical terms, your doctor will tell you that you are healthy only when every organ and part of your body is in its proper place and is working in an orderly and normal way. In that sense, being healthy is being in good order.

Throughout the first part of this chapter, Paul pegs this spiritual hygiene to being "self-controlled." Four times in this chapter people from all walks of life and people of all ages are told that a key to good spiritual health is self-control. Again, some of you may recall that in another sermon I noted with you that the word for "self-control" here is also a word that ties in with being healthy and in good order. The Greek word literally means "to be in your right mind." Apparently a sinful lifestyle is, among other things, an irrational way to live. To sin is to be out of your mind. To keep yourself in check and to be self-controlled is a more rational, orderly way to think and then to also act.

If we can display this kind of spiritual health, if we practice good hygiene of our hearts and minds, then Paul is very consistent in saying that this contributes to our witness and mission. We'll take all the ammunition away from our potential critics and detractors if we live such above-board and controlled lives that there is nothing bad to say about us. That line of thought climaxes in verse 10 when Paul writes that our goal should be "in every way to make the teaching about God our Savior attractive."

That word for "attractive" again ties in with this chapter's theme of health. Literally in the Greek Paul says that we have to "comsmetize" the gospel. This is a form of the word "cosmetics" as we use it even today. We apply cosmetics to make ourselves look more attractive. But a good application of cosmetics is meant to highlight our natural features. You would never call the make-up used by a circus clown "cosmetics" because in that case the make-up is applied to cover over and to cover up the person's face, replacing it with something very different and colorful and usually funny. But the goal of ordinary cosmetics is to let your natural appearance shine through.

That's pretty much the meaning of "cosmetize" in Greek, too. This word is directly related to the word "cosmos," which means "world." In John 3:16, we are told that "God so loved the cosmos that he sent his only begotten Son." But theologically cosmos is also shorthand to refer to the goodness and orderliness of God's original creation. In Genesis 1 cosmos is what replaced the primordial chaos. In chaos everything is out of place. Chaos is disorder and dysfunction.

Of course, although God created an orderly cosmos, humanity's fall into sin re-introduced chaos into our world. So in Titus 2 there is a sense in which Paul is saying that the cosmetics of the gospel shine through when our lives reflect the orderliness of God's good cosmos. Our self-controlled Christian example is "attractive" in the way verse 10 suggests because the beauty of God's design for life is on display in us.

This is the immediate backdrop for verses 11-15. We have a teaching that is healthy. But we must not only teach healthy doctrines, we have to do this from the context of healthy, self-controlled lives--lives that show us to be in our right minds with everything in good order. If we teach what is healthy, if we lead lives that are healthy, then we will make the gospel more attractive by revealing that the gospel leads us back to God's good cosmos of order and shalom. All of this is possible because of what verse 11 proclaims: God's grace has now appeared. Knowing that we'd never get ourselves out of the chaos brought about by sin and evil, God swooped in with his grace to make all things new.

But to get back to our original question: what does it mean that this grace now brings salvation to all people? If Paul is not saying that everyone is automatically saved, then what does that part of verse 11 mean? Following right on the heels of the first ten verses that address old women, young women, old men, young men, slaves, free people, verse 11 may be about the available offer of salvation to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender, or social status. Grace means that anybody can get saved because it doesn't depend on who we are or what we do. Salvation is all about grace, and grace is all about God.

There are no unworthy classes of people. There are no groups that cannot be reached with salvation. Grace says that God has done it all and so no matter who you are, God's grace is enough to bring you into the kingdom. Let me try an analogy. This may not be completely apt, but in a way this could be a little like my saying some Sunday morning, "After the service if you come to the kitchen, I've got Krispy Kreme donuts for everybody." That statement would be true and valid even though it is very likely that lots of people would go home that day without having eaten a donut. Some people just don't care for donuts and so won't bother lining up to get one. Some people like donuts just fine, but the line was long and anyway, they've been trying to take a few pounds off lately, so they skipped it. Some people are diabetic and so couldn't have one.

But by saying I had donuts for everyone, that meant that if you came to the kitchen serving window and asked for one, I would have to have a donut for you. I will not have run out. I will not decline to give you a donut because I don't like you, or because I'm a little ticked off at you just now, or because I myself think you could stand to lose some weight and so I'm just not going to give you a Krispy Kreme after all. No, saying there are donuts for everybody has to mean you won't be turned away for any reason if you come to get one. Even if not every person takes a donut, it was still true: I had donuts for everybody.

Again, that's not a real perfect analogy, and neither do I want you to over-apply this image so that it looks like I am saying that salvation is a personal decision that you make such that all even God can do is to hang back and wait to see what you are going to do. Grace means that God takes the hidden initiative every time someone comes to believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord. If God didn't act first, we would never act on our own. God acts, we react. Salvation is about our responding to God, not God's responding to us.

But the point is that we do have a glorious hope and a joyous gospel that we must share with all people because, at its most basic level, it is meant to be extended to all people. The love of God has no limits in the sense of there being some people who are "out of bounds" by virtue of their skin color, their background, their ethnicity, or anything else. Even people who seem so utterly different from us are included. The possibility of salvation by grace is available even (or maybe especially) for people whose lifestyles seem so mired in sinfulness that we're not sure how to approach them. But we can approach them, and the potential availability of God's love for all people tells us that we must approach them in hope and with grace because we've got this great news called the gospel to share with them.

Because no matter who a person is, once that grace crashes into his or her heart, it will enable that person to say "No" to bad things and so say "Yes" to good ones. It's grace that enables people to get back into their right minds and makes even former sinners "eager to do what is good," as Paul puts it in verse 14. God's grace actually turns people around so much that they become eager about goodness!

In highlighting Jesus' words in the Great Commission, John Primus last Sunday morning noted the prominent role that teaching occupies in those words. The same emphasis emerges in Titus 2. The very first words of this chapter are "You must teach." The concluding words in verse 15 say it again: "These are the things you must teach." And in between, teaching crops up over and over. But in the midst of all that human activity where someone is the teacher and others are the students, we are told one other thing. In verse 12 we see that it is the grace of God that teaches us as well. The grace of God becomes itself a kind of tutor, a divine professor of sorts who teaches us all the joys of a well-ordered and healthy life. We must teach the world about Jesus because his grace has already instructed us. We must teach because we have been taught. We must teach from the context of lives that have been transformed by the glorious appearing of God's grace.

This is the church's mission. Yet so often we are not sure we can do this. Sometimes when you try to teach someone, they ask hard questions and what if you can't come up with a good answer? And anyway, anyone who would presume to teach had better be really well prepared and educated, right? If someone is not coming from a superior position of knowledge, then that person trying to teach someone else can come off as merely ignorant and arrogant. So even framing missions as a kind of teaching enterprise sounds scary.

But in a sermon where I have mentioned a lot of the original Greek of this passage, I need to mention one other such item. Because in both verse 1 and verse 15, where the NIV uses the word "teach," the original Greek word is simply the word that means to talk. The verb laleo means to make a sound with your mouth, to speak, to talk.

Our mission witness of teaching the glorious truths of Jesus' grace begins as soon as we do no more than open our mouths to share what we know, what we believe, and how it all makes us feel on the inside. Because in the end, this passage talks about our hearts. Paul talks about the "blessed hope" that we have. Paul speaks of the excited eagerness we have in awaiting the glorious re-appearing of Jesus. Paul talks about that central truth of the gospel: Jesus gave himself for us. This is all a lyric and moving gift.

If you are a Christian, then all of that has to mean something to you. Yes, there are theological depths that could be plumbed and there are, surrounding all this, theological equivalents of Mount Everest that could be climbed. But at the most basic level of our faith, we received a gift from God. We received a grace that has given us a hope, and this grace and hope changed our lives, set things in order again, made us healthy. That's what we need to talk about. Mission witness begins when we open our mouths and just talk about what we believe and how it makes us feel.

We began this morning talking about the relationship between the love of God and our motivation to do missions. But we already know how much God loved the world. He showed that love when he sent his beloved Son to die. The question is how much do we love other people? We need to have a love for the world that bears some resemblance to God's own love. It's love that will make us open our mouths to start talking about what we think and believe. The last line of Titus 2 has Paul telling his young pastor friend, "Don't let anyone despise you." But if we speak out of the depths of our own love, we may find that not only is it easier to teach about Jesus than we thought, the people to whom we speak may likewise find that even if they don't accept everything we say, it is finally pretty difficult to despise our love. Amen.