When you meet Christ, you either drop all the stuff that you've been counting on for your salvation and take Christ alone, or you hold to all the stuff you've been holding on to for your salvation and turn your back on Christ. You're either trusting yourself and your achievements or Christ. And when you come to trust Christ, all the achievements become rubbish. If you're a Christian, you're the recipient of astounding amounts of divine grace. Your sins have been forgiven. You've been rescued from eternity in hell. You're guaranteed a future with God in heaven. But how should a knowledge of God's grace change the way you work, care for your family, interact with your neighbors? John MacArthur, president of the Master's University and Seminary, today will answer the question on grace to you as he shows you that God's grace isn't only applied to your past sins and your future in heaven, it also empowers your life and your battle with sin today. The study is a part of John's series, The Gospel According to Paul. And now with today's lesson, here's John MacArthur. Turn to Titus chapter 2 and verses 11 to 14. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds. The simple message of Christianity is God saves men from sin. That is Christianity's message. So, starting in verse 11, Paul launches into this brief but very rich discussion of saving power, saving grace. And I think the easiest way to sort of sum it up is to describe saving grace by four features. Four aspects, four perspectives, four viewpoints. First of all, saving grace is designed to deliver us from, first of all, the penalty of sin. the penalty of sin. And although that's not the primary point in this text, we must add it because it's so very basic. The penalty of sin is hell. The wages of sin is death, and that is eternal death. And if we do not put our faith in Jesus Christ, John 3 says, we will perish. Jesus said elsewhere in the gospel of John, you will die in your sins and where I am you will never come. Jesus repeatedly said hell was a place of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched, eternal judgment. Salvation saves us, saving grace saves us, delivers us from that fearful eternal penalty. Let's go back to verse 11 for a moment and talk about that verse just briefly. The grace of God has appeared. Remember now, that's referring to the incarnation. Grace there is personified in a person no less than the Lord Jesus Christ, just as in verse 4 of chapter 3, kindness and love are personified in the person of Christ. Grace appeared in verse 11, kindness appeared, and love appeared in verse 4 of chapter 3, and all of that embodies the attributes of Christ who Himself appeared as grace incarnate, kindness incarnate, and love incarnate that day at Bethlehem. Paul put it this way, God was in Christ reconciling the world. And so, God has, in sending Jesus Christ, demonstrated His love for the world and offered to the world an opportunity for salvation. This must be understood along with the understanding of God's special purpose for the elect. And the purpose of salvation then initially and ultimately and finally is to deliver us from the penalty of sin, which is death. And when you come to the Lord Jesus Christ and you put your faith in Him and you acknowledge that He died on a cross and rose again for your justification and you believe and you come in repentance as a sinner, pleading for salvation, God in His mercy will not cast you out, it says in John 6, you will be delivered from the final ultimate penalty, which is hell. You will be delivered from hell and on a course toward heaven. Saving grace does deliver us from the penalty of sin, but a more important issue is saving grace delivers us from the power of sin, and that's the second point. It delivers us from the power of sin. This is really what is in Paul's mind here, and this is what is so crucial in this text. The grace of God has appeared and it has brought a salvation to all men, a salvation instructing us to teach ungodliness...to deny ungodliness rather, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. Salvation not only affects a change in our future, it affects a change in our present. It not only eliminates the penalty of sin, but it becomes for us a teacher. Here you have the grace of God appearing in Christ, now personified as our teacher. For the first time now in our lives since we were saved, we are getting constant instruction coming from within us about righteousness and godliness. Saving grace breaks sin's dominion. In Romans chapter 6 and verse 14, it says, sin no longer has mastery over us. It no longer dominates us. Saving grace breaks the power of sin. It breaks the dominion of sin. It breaks the mastery and the dominance of sin. In fact, this is so very evident that The Apostle John reminds us in 1 John chapter 3 of some very compelling words. Little children, let no one deceive you. The one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous. God is righteous. We are made righteous in Christ and therefore we practice righteousness. Verse 9, no one who is born of God practices sin because His seed, that is God's seed, abides in Him. He cannot sin. He is born of God. He has a new life. He has a new nature. He is a new creation and the dominion of sin is broken and He does not continually, habitually, in an uninterrupted and unbroken pattern continue to practice sin. That's very basic. Salvation not only deals with our future, it deals with our present. Whereas there was a time when we could do no good thing, there was none righteous, Romans 3 says, no, not one. There is none that understandeth, there is none that doeth good. The poison of snakes or asps is under their lips. We're all gone out of the way. By the deeds of the law, none of us can be justified, to put it in the terms of Ephesians 2. We were under the power of the prince of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, and we were by nature the children of wrath. We were doomed to damnation, and we were living in an uninterrupted and unbroken pattern of continual sin. We couldn't do anything right. What He is telling us here is this, that when the grace of God appears and brings salvation, inherent in that is a transformation that involves reprogramming the very inner man so that, verse 12, We are taught to deny some things and to affirm some things. So there's both a negative and a positive feature in what Paul says. In this process of sanctification, moving us more and more away from sin, separating us further and further, which is what sanctified means, and more and more toward Christ, there is both a negative and a positive. Look at the negative, verse 12. We are instructed at the point of salvation to deny something. Simply means to reject, to renounce. And I think it conveys the idea of a decisive act, initially, with certainly ongoing implications. I'll tell you, when you came to Christ, you came because you wanted to be delivered from sin, right? There are some people who would say, well, no. When I got saved, all I wanted was fire insurance. When I got saved, all I wanted to do was make sure I didn't go to hell. But frankly, you might question someone who comes like that. To reduce in some kind of a reductionist mentality salvation to deliverance from hell and not deliverance from sin is to adolerate biblical salvation and to really deal unfairly and unjustly and with great error regarding the work of the Holy Spirit and the conviction of sin. At the point of salvation, there is a denial. And there is a denial of ungodliness, he says, and worldly desires. And so, when a person becomes a believer, the first thing that happens is there is a break with irreverence. There is a break with all false ideas about God, all lack of respect, lack of honor, lack of worship, failure to adore God. And then he adds a second component. He says, salvation instructs you not only to deny ungodliness but worldly desires. kosmikos epithumias. It means lusts which are characteristic of the godless human system, desires that reflect ungodly culture. Peter calls them fleshly lusts. Paul calls them foolish lusts. He also calls them hurtful lusts. In writing in 2 Timothy, he speaks of youthful lusts, but here you have worldly lusts. The stuff, the foolish, hurtful, youthful, fleshly, worldly passions. At the point of salvation, there is a clean break with wrong ideas about God, and there's a clean break with patterns of living that were dominated by lust. There's a renouncing. There's a transformation. There's a reprogramming. So much for the negative in verse 12. Look at the positive. Not only does salvation become an immediate pedagogue to teach us to deny some things but to affirm some things, that is to affirm living sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. This is the positive side. Here comes the evidence of transformation and three expressions that really sort of sum up how we've been delivered from the dominating power of sin. One thing sin does is it teaches you to live rather insensibly, unrighteously and ungodly, This is the opposite. So the mastery of sin is broken and we live sensibly, righteously and godly. Sensibly is that same word, sophronos, we've seen over and over again. It means self-control. One of the things that happens when you're saved is you have self-control. You can control yourself. The natural man can't. He can't do the things of God. It's impossible for him. He's powerless to do them. All he does is sin, sin, sin, and more sin. But a Christian can bring himself under control. You can bring the unredeemed flesh under the control of the Spirit of God and the redeemed inner man and do what is right. The self-control means proper balance, spiritual priorities, wise choices, all of that. Then he says, secondly, moving from the individual himself and his own self-control, he mentions righteously, which means you obey the divine standard of what is right. You start to live right and then you affect everybody else. People who live right, of course, impact those around them. So he's saying, first of all, when you were saved, it made a change in you. Secondly, it made a change in how you live. Toward others, you live righteously, demonstrating what right living is. Thirdly, he mentions the word godly, and that looks toward God. You became reverent. You became respectful of God. You honored God. You worshiped. You adored. You praised. You lived under His authority. So here is the evidence of transformation. Salvation then delivers us from the penalty of sin in the future, namely hell, and the power of sin in the present, namely the unbroken pattern of continual sin. And we are now in a pattern of holiness, no longer practicing sin, as 1 John says in chapter 3, as I read earlier in verse 10, because we have the life of God in us, we have the seed of God in us, John says, we no longer continue in the practice of sin. Third point. Verse 13, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. The third point that Paul lays upon us here, very, very important, saving grace delivers us from the presence of sin. Saving grace delivers us from the presence of sin. We live in hope, verse 13 says. And the hope is that someday Jesus will come, and when He comes, we know He will deliver us from the presence of sin. We are delivered from its punishment, we are delivered from its power, and we long to be released from its presence. That's why Paul said, far better to depart and be with Christ. That's why Paul said, for me to live is Christ, but to die is gain. It's a better place. That's why Paul said the whole creation groans waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies. That's why we long for the glorious manifestation of the children of God. That's why we bask in 1 John 3, 2, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is and then it will appear what we really are as the children of God. So the longing of the heart of the believer is someday to be delivered from the presence of sin. What in the world would salvation mean if it wasn't ultimately to deliver us from the presence of sin? If sin burdened my heart, if sin concerned me and debilitated me and crushed me, and if I hated sin when I was an unbeliever, I don't hate it any less, I hate it more. And I want the kind of salvation that promises me that someday it won't exist. That's our hope. That's what he says in verse 13, looking for. It literally means to wait for, waiting for. We're not looking wishfully, we're waiting expectantly. It carries the idea of eagerness, anticipation, and longing. And what are we waiting for? The blessed hope. The blessed hope. What does that mean? The hope that will bless. The hope that will bring blessing. And what is the blessed hope? It is the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. That is our blessed hope. Jesus is coming. That's the hope that will bless. And when He comes, there will be joy and richness and peace and reward and perfection, sinlessness, glory. We live in that hope. We live longingly in that hope. One note about the end of verse 13. He calls Christ by this title, Our Great God and Savior Christ Jesus. Now here is another one of those very, very wonderful passages of Scripture which remove doubt as to whether Jesus was God. There are always people who want to deny the deity of Christ, and little statements like this great title here are helpful to affirm the deity of Christ. Frequently in the Scripture, the deity of Christ is presented to us. I think of another text that's not unlike this one in Hebrews 1.3 where it says that Christ, Jesus, His Son, the Son of God, is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature. There's one of those verses that definitely refers to the Lord Jesus Christ as being equal with God in very essence and very nature. Another one comes to mind. I was reading earlier today in Romans 9 and verse 5, a great statement. It says, Christ who is overall God, blessed forever. So here is a statement that simply says, our great God and Savior Christ Jesus. He came in a humble state the first time with grace. He comes in an exalted state the next time with glory. He comes to glorify His church in the rapture and then to return in glory with His church to glorify the remaining saints and establish His kingdom. And one other note, as you look at that statement, our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, it might occur to you that you could move the comma after the word Savior to before the word Savior and make them into two people, our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, so that one would refer to God the other, the Savior Christ Jesus, and avoid the necessary connection that Jesus is God. There are a number of problems with that. I'll suggest them to you. It is best to see it referring to one person for a number of reasons. There is one article here, one definite article rather than two. You will also notice in verse 14, who gave Himself for us takes the whole title with a singular pronoun, therefore referring it to one individual. The word great there would be quite interesting. Our great God could be pointless to use that if He's referring to God alone. It is never used in the New Testament to refer to God. Because so often in the Old Testament God is called great, it seems to have been assured and affirmed and it isn't used in the New Testament. Great is used in the New Testament to refer to Christ a number of times. He shall be great. Jerusalem is called the city of the great King. A great prophet is risen among us, Luke 7, 16. A great priest over the house of God, Hebrews 10, 21. A great shepherd of the sheep, Hebrews 13, 20. So great is used repeatedly to speak of Christ in the New Testament, never of God. And each time great is used to speak of Christ, I think it ties Him in as God with the use of great in the Old Testament, referring to God the Father. But the most telling point is this. Never in Scripture is the Father joined to the Son in His second coming. So you couldn't talk about the appearing of the glory of our great God and Jesus Christ. The Father never joins the Son in the second coming. The epiphany, the appearing, the arrival of Jesus Christ is singularly Jesus Christ. So all of those things indicate to us that The proper understanding of it is our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus. And therefore it becomes a massive testimony to the deity of Christ who is indeed called God and the Savior. So He comes then in the future to save His people. In the sense of what? Delivering them from the presence of sin. That's why Paul in Romans 13 says, now your salvation is nearer than when you believed. What kind of salvation? The salvation from the presence of sin. We already have salvation from the penalty and the power, but not yet from the presence of sin. But our great God and Savior Jesus Christ is going to come and He's going to deliver us from the very presence of sin in our own flesh. Philippians 3 verse 20 says that when He comes, verse 21, He will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory. He'll make us like Himself. We will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. And that great transformation eliminates from our very person any presence of sin. Even if we come back and reign on the earth in the thousand-year kingdom, we will be untemptable. We will be untouchable with sin. We will be pure and eternally holy. That is the blessed hope. And I really believe that is the ultimate thing that people have been looking for. to be delivered from the penalty of sin, to be delivered from the power of sin, but ultimately from the presence of it altogether. Saving grace comes to deliver us from the possession of sin, the possession of sin. Verse 14, who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds. Oh, this is such a wonderful truth. The unregenerate sinner is the possession of sin. He is owned, he is controlled. Romans 6, 16 and 17, he is a slave of unrighteousness. He is in bondage to iniquity. Saving grace breaks that ownership. Like Romans 7 says, the first husband dies and the partner is no longer in bondage. The first husband was sin and it is dead and there is no longer bondage. There is complete deliverance. And we become, I love this, verse 14, His own possession. Why? Because the Lord paid the price and the justice of God was satisfied and the purchase was made. For someone to come along and teach you can lose your salvation. is basically to say that God did not pay a sufficient price for an eternal purchase. It is basically to say that God could get us started, but He may lose us along the way. It speaks about His being less than omnipotent. It is also basic, if you believe you can lose your salvation, to have to affirm that somewhere in the universe, someone is more powerful than God. You see, unless you understand the essence of what is in this text about salvation and elsewhere in New Testament, you can be very confused. You might think that salvation is only deliverance from hell. It isn't. It is deliverance from the power of sin as well as the penalty. You might think that there's some question about whether or not in the future we're actually going to be fully delivered from the presence of sin and exist as holy beings forever and ever. We are. And you might think that somewhere along the line, you know, we could sort of slip in and out of this deal. If any of those erroneous views are true, then we're going to have a hard time convincing the world that we have a saving God, aren't we? If God can lose us, if we can sort of be in and out of salvation, is that the kind of Savior the people in our world are looking for? When a sinner comes to the end of his rope, as it were, and he wants redemption and he wants salvation and he wants forgiveness, does he want a God who can't hang on to him? We have a God who can overrule all the minions of the pit and hell. We have a God who can break the devastating infection of sin which is in the fabric of human beings. We have a God who ultimately will so totally transform our bodies that we will never know sin forever and ever. We have a God whose possession we become, whose possession we will ever become, and never will anyone be able to break it. So if we're going to demonstrate the greatness of our God and His saving power, then let us exalt Him for being the Savior that He is. Let's not come up with some kind of salvation that is something less than that which properly exalts our great God. That's John MacArthur describing how God's grace can change you, lead to a life that reflects the truths of the gospel. Today's lesson is wrapping up John MacArthur's brand new series on the gospel according to Paul here on Grace to You. John, I know you'd say whether it's Paul or another Bible author communicating the gospel, it's the same message. There are no contradictions. So is there a specific benefit of studying the gospel according to Paul? Does he emphasize things that other writers miss? Yeah, that would be one way to say it. It's not so much that he emphasizes things the other writers miss. I don't think anybody gives us misdirection as to the meaning of the gospel. I would simply say that Paul was given the responsibility by the Holy Spirit to explain the gospel most exhaustively. If you pulled the 13 letters that Paul wrote out of the New Testament, if you pulled all of his preaching out of the book of Acts, you would still have the gospel. In fact, if you didn't have the New Testament epistles at all, if all you had was Isaiah 53, you would still have the gospel. Because Isaiah 53 explains that the servant of Jehovah is going to come. He's going to be pierced for our transgressions. He's going to be bruised for our iniquities. He's going to be chastened for our peace. You have the substitutionary atonement of Christ there. You have also His resurrection and glorification. So the gospel is in the Old Testament. The gospel is certainly in the gospels and in the book of Acts and the preaching of the apostles. But what Paul does is bring us the fullest explanation of the gospel, the rich, exhaustive explanation that is the complete revelation of God to us explaining the gospel. I want you to get a copy of the book, brand new book, I've been waiting for it to come for years, The Gospel According to Paul. This will help you to understand the fullness of the gospel. You may have read the earlier book I wrote, The Gospel According to Jesus, even The Gospel According to the Apostles, the second book. This is the complete story. The gospel according to Paul takes the rest of the New Testament epistles that he wrote and draws out the full richness as he explains the gospel. Brand new book. It will be your teacher and it will enable you to worship the Lord in ways that perhaps you've never been able to do because you didn't understand some of the glories of the gospel. It will make you more effective in your testimony and witness as well. Brand new hardcover available today. Because it covers topics like the sinfulness of man, the futility of good works, and the surpassing value of knowing Christ, the gospel, according to Paul, is an ideal resource for you to study as a new believer or with a new believer or young person that you may be discipling. Pick up a copy of John's newest book as you contact us here today. The hardcover book is available for $15. Shipping is free. Order it when you call this toll-free number. 1-800-55-GRACE or order at the website gty.org. The title again, The Gospel According to Paul. Order your copy today as you call 800-55-GRACE or visit gty.org. As you get in touch, please remember that we're listener supported. Every day the broadcast is heard on thousands of stations around the world. Here in North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond, the support of folks like you makes that possible. To partner with us, mail your tax-deductible gift to Grace2U, Post Office Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Remember, you can donate online, too, at gty.org, or when you call toll-free, 855-GRACE. Again, that number one more time, 855-GRACE. For John MacArthur and the staff, I'm Carl Miller, wishing you a great weekend and reminding you to watch Grace to You television Sundays on DirecTV, channel 378, or watch online at gty.org. And then please come back Monday as John kicks off a study titled The Pillars of Christian Character, highlighting attitudes that should mark your life. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.