Let's open our Bibles now in the letter of Paul to Titus, chapter 2. We will read beginning in verse 11 through verse 14. The letter of Paul to Titus, chapter 2, beginning in verse 11. This is the word of the living God, and He speaks to His church by saying, "'For the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and unworldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope that, appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealots for good works." Let's pray again. Our Heavenly Father, we read Your Scripture and we ask You that may you can guide us through these verses, helping us to see the greatness of our God, the greatness of your salvation, and the necessity of our works in response to our salvation. Please, God, speak with this church through the works of the Holy Spirit, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. We also will read the Lord's Day 32, which is in page 237 of your Forms and Prayers book. We will read two questions, and I invite you to read the answer for Lord's Day 32, question 86 asks, since we have been delivered from our misery by grace to Christ without any merit of our own, why then should we do good works? because Christ, having redeemed us by his blood, is also renewing us by his Spirit into his image, so that with our own lives we may show that we are thankful to God for his benefits and that he may be praised through us and further, so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits. And by our godly living, our neighbors may be won over to Christ. Question 87, can those be saved who do not turn to God from their ungrateful and unrepentant ways? By no means, Scripture tells us that no unjust person, no idolater, adulterer, thief, no covetous person, no tramp guard, slanderer, robber, or the like, will inherit the kingdom of God. Thank you. we are in a very important subject to the church of Jesus Christ. For a long time, the Roman Catholic Church took this statement that we need to do good works improperly, and they cause a lot of damage to Christianity for centuries. They use this statement making a relationship between our works and our salvation. So in order to be saved, the church of Christ needs to offer good works to God, and through these good works, they will pay for their own salvation. For hundreds of years, that was real for many people that was trying to please God. But in the time of the Reform, many people around the world, many Reformants, they were fighting against this truth. The first one that we know more, it's Luther. He was responsible for making many works in order to find his own salvation. He even went to Jerusalem to offer many things to God. He was trying to find relief for himself. He was trying to find peace in his heart. And even going through Jerusalem, he said he didn't find any peace or any grace or even the presence of God in that place. A lot of people during the ages, they gave their money, they gave their time, they offered everything they had to buy salvation in this way. but the Reforms said that this is not true. They realized the Scripture was not speaking about good works relating it to our salvation. In order to be saved, we must believe in Jesus Christ, and only believing in Him we will find salvation. And this truth was spread, and now we are, many years after that, speaking the same truth. We are saved by faith alone and not by works. But then we need to understand the position of good works. If we are not saved by good works, why does we need to do good works? Why do we need to make something to God? And this is what Titus is telling us, and also what Heidelberg is expressing so beautifully through questions 86 and 87. We will see that works, good works, they are a response to salvation and not a way to receive salvation. This is what verse 11 will start to say, for the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people. We need to understand that here Paul is telling Titus that the grace of God already came upon him and upon the people of God. They are already saved. The same truth is brought for the church of Jesus Christ in the first letter of Peter to those in dispersion. He will speak the same thing. Salvation came to this world, and we are saved. You are saved, He said, and because you are saved, we must do something else. Salvation is real because Jesus Christ came to this world, and He offered His life for us. We were lost. We were in the darkness. We were slaves, and Jesus came to take us out of this place. But He didn't ask anything for us in order to save us. He just made it. And that is the meaning of grace. We are receiving something from God, and we are not giving anything in response to that. We just receive gracefully the salvation of Jesus Christ. We were slaves, and we became free. We were living in darkness, and now we live in the light. We were part of the kingdom of man, and now we are part of the kingdom of God. And all those things, including the eternal hope that we receive when we know Jesus Christ, that one day we will be in His presence forever, we will go to heaven, live with Him, this hope is also received completely by grace. This probably, it's a subject that we are not able to understand so easily. First, because we have hearts that cannot deal with grace like God is showing grace for us. even when we take care of other people, and when even we serve other people, even knowing that we are doing that in order to follow Jesus Christ, sometimes, and actually most of the times, we expect something in return. We expect at least a thank you, or we expect a recognizement of our good service. We expect some response from them that we are doing good things for them, and we want to receive a little bit of glory to ourselves. This is common because we are still sinners and because we are still fighting and struggling with our own desires. But the grace of God came to this earth, and Jesus Christ redeemed us by His blood completely. This is what Heidelberg says. We are redeemed by His blood, and we are redeemed through His blood in order to do something. So, pay attention here. We are not speaking anymore about salvation. We are saved by His blood. And this is the statement we can just enjoy and praise the name of the Lord because we are saved. But being saved we need to look to the salvation and respond to the salvation in a proper way. This is what Heidelberg and Paul are saying in this content here. Paul will say, training, verse 12, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age. This is the response to our salvation. Okay, we are saved, but are we saved to live our lives as we want? Paul is telling us, no, we are not saved to live as we want. Heidelberg will also speak about that, talking about the Lord's Prayer. This is in Heidelberg, chapter, Lord's Day, 4 and 9, which speaks about Matthew 6, verse 10, part B, and there we will find, your will be done. not our will, but His will. Once we are part of His kingdom, once we are part of His family, we need to understand that His will is what is important for us. And when we say, your will be done, we are saying that it doesn't matter our will. We need to understand that His will, it's exactly what we need, and we must follow His will completely because there is no other way in which we can please the name of the Lord. There, Heidelberg would say that we need to renounce our own will. And this is the point also here because here we are seeing Paul teaching that as believers being saved, we must renounce ungodliness and worldly passions. We must renounce, we must say we don't want to follow our own heart. We don't want to follow our own desires. It doesn't matter if our bodies or our mind says that we need something or something else. We must desire what God wants for us. His will needs to be done, and His will will only be done if we renounce ourselves, renouncing ungodliness and worldly life, living a self-controlled life as godly people living in the present age. Heidelberg will say exactly the same with different words, renewing us by the Spirit into the image of God, which means God will change us to be like Jesus Christ was. And it's very important to look to Jesus Christ here because Jesus is the one who said that He came to make God's will. He didn't come to do what He wanted being a human, but He came with a purpose to fulfill the will of God in the council of peace, which was established before the creation of everything There was only the Trinity there, there was only one God in three persons, and this one God decided that through the Son's work in this world, salvation would come. Jesus was fulfilling this will. He was fulfilling everything we need to find salvation. And for what? To make us live like we were before Him? No, to be like Him. The idea of Jesus Christ being shined through our faces through ourselves. It's a very wonderful idea, and this is what the Bible is telling us. We must show this Jesus Christ through everything we are and through everything we do. But we need to understand that it's impossible to show Him making our own will. We will just show ourselves. One of the most difficult things for men is to die while they are alive, and here it's what Heidelberg and Paul are calling us to do. It doesn't matter who you were before. It doesn't matter your name or your skills or what you can offer. What matters is Jesus Christ living on us and changing us in the image of the Son of God. our whole lives, Heidelberg says, needs to be in the image of Jesus Christ. We must show that we are thankful to God for His benefits. And we only can show this through changing our lives according to His law. It's difficult to understand. because suddenly it appears that we are coming back to that discussion that the Romans made before the Reformation. Okay, so we need works? No, we don't need works for salvation. Just remember that. We need works to respond properly to our salvation. we receive the most important gift of this world. There is nothing in this world who can buy salvation. Someone can have all the money of this world. Others will have power. Others will have possessions. And any of them can use these things to buy salvation. In the last day, the only important thing for any person is, are they with Christ? Are they washed by the blood of Jesus Christ? The judgment will come to every person that already was born in this world, and they must respond to that. Is Jesus Christ our treasure, or are we putting our faith in other things? And knowing that He is our treasure, we will understand what is the meaning of taking our cross and following Him. taking our cross and follow Him, it's the same thing as renounce our passions, renounce our will, renounce our desires, and live according to His passions, His will, and His desires. We are seeing this in Scripture all the time. And it's very good that we are reading here titles because Paul, who wrote this letter, he is responsible for this amazing testimony of someone receiving salvation and responding, offering his own life to Christ. We remember how he was going to Damascus with letters in his hands to persecute the church in Acts chapter 9. He was with his planes very well organized. He was going to bring damage to the church, and suddenly he received salvation. The Son of God appeared to him, he showed himself to Saul, and he said, why are you persecuting me? Saul started to call him Lord. And by calling Lord, he suddenly was saying, well, tell me what to do, Christ. Tell me what I need to do because I don't know anymore, because my will is not important anymore. What I know is not important anymore. What is important is I must follow you. So what do I need to do? And he went to Damascus, he found Ananias, he found the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we saw him being threatened many times, they beat him many times. Some of these times, it seems that he was dead, but he stand up and he went to another city to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ because he was willing to fulfill God's will. and not His will. It doesn't matter what they were doing with His body. It doesn't matter what they were doing with His life. What matters is are we offering ourselves to Him? Are we serving Him? Are we following Him by making good works in response to this gospel, in response to this salvation? This is the point. This is when we will understand that our hearts are loving Christ more, or if they are loving this world more. Because if we respond to the gospel with goodwill, serving one another, loving one another, we will have Him in the throne of our lives. But if we are saying that we don't have time to serve one another, that we don't have time to love one another, that we don't have time to take care of the widows, of the orphans, if we don't have time to love those who are crying among us, we are saying that we don't love Him more than ourselves. And the result of this is what Heidelberg will say in question 87. Well, can those be saved who do not turn to God from their ungrateful and unrepentant ways? Well, the answer is by no means. Because if we love our passions, our idols, if we love our desires more than Him, that means that we don't belong to Him. That means that we don't understand the gift of our salvation. That means that we are still struggling to understand what Jesus Christ made for us, the price that was paid for our salvation. We are here tonight not because Jesus just gave His life. Jesus gave an innocent life. to buy people guilty and that should receive death, an eternal death. We don't deserve grace. We don't deserve mercy. We don't deserve any kind of love that comes from God. What we deserve, it's the wrath of God. We should be there in that cross, not for our salvation, but for our destruction. If the wrath of God come upon us, we would be completely destroyed, and that's all, because we cannot offer anything for our salvation. But we are in a different position now. because God sent His Son, the Son of God. He made Himself like one of His creatures. He went to the cross to pray our debt, and that means that He paid in a huge price every sin that we commit. If we are not grateful for that, if we are not thankful for that, if we don't understand that this, it's the most precious thing that we have, we don't understand the gospel. We don't understand the salvation that He's giving for us. But if we understand There is no other response besides going to His presence and working to please Him. Look what Paul is saying in verse 14. who gave Himself for us to redeem us from our lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession. This is what God made. He redeemed us. He's purifying us. He's making us His church. But how this church lives, they are zealous for good works. Good works are part of our Christianity. They must be part of our Christianity, not because we need it to be saved. I will keep saying that so you will not feel confused, but in response to this salvation We must make good works. That is what Heidelberg is saying at the end, so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits. And by our godly living, our neighbors may be won over to Christ. Heidelberg is showing us by our fruits we are known. If it doesn't have fruits, how can they know that we belong to Christ? If we don't present fruits in this world, what is the gospel of Jesus Christ making in our lives? Today, we have a very difficult situation in the church of Jesus Christ because somehow the church believed that it's okay to be part of a congregation and just enjoy the benefits of our salvation. So we come to church every week. We receive the gospel. We receive the blessings of the Lord. We receive everything that we receive when we are together. and we just continue like this, not offering anything in response. Well, that's why the church of God is sick in many places, because the church It's a body, and that is what Paul speaks in the letter of Ephesus. We are one body connected, and together we are the church of Christ. But we must understand that we need all the members of this church to be a church. We cannot walk alone as many people believe they can today. They say, okay, I am a Christian, but I don't need to do anything. I just need to follow some preachers in Sermon Audio or YouTube, I don't know. And I will receive, and that's all. I am saved. I am receiving everything I can, and that's all. I'm not doing nothing to Christ and for His church." Well, you are expressing exactly what Satan wants you to do, because God's will calls us to work. He gave many gifts to the church, and that means that everyone here received gifts from His hand. I don't know what kinds of gifts, but all of us are blessed with gifts. And these gifts, they are important for this church. We need you, if you are good, to visit someone, to sing with them, to fill their hearts with joy, and to help them to deal with their struggles. This is not only for pastors, elders, and deacons. Everyone is responsible to do that. We need you to take care of our children. We need professors to send to school. We need teachers to help them to grow up knowing Christ and knowing the gospel. We need good examples of faith among us. We need people that show their love for the others. We need people that show that they don't want glory, they only want to glorify the name of Jesus Christ with their lives and with their possessions. We need people to help the old ones. We need people to help those who are crying. We need help to seeing people visiting those who are in hospitals. We need you. And if you are not working, we are in a bad situation. This is a small problem in our body that will grow and grow, and a lot of damage will be caused because of your omission. We are called to love and to work and to do good works. And the best example for that is what Paul is telling Titus to do. Titus, he was saying in the big content, go and offer to your people and offer to your church the full gospel of Jesus Christ. Show them God's love. Show them the power of Jesus Christ. And that's what we must to do. Good works, then, are not for our salvation, but they reflect our salvation. We are the people of God, and we must walk like the people of God. in the Scripture, every disciple was showing love to the Word. And as disciples of Jesus Christ, we must continue to show God's love to this Word by preaching, by serving, by loving, by doing something, but do good works in response to your salvation. Let's pray. Close your eyes. Our Heavenly Father, thank You once again for saving us from our sins. We are so blessed, that we can come to Your presence knowing that we are Your children and that happen by grace and only by grace. Thank You for saving us from the darkness. We are so thankful, God, because we found Your mercy. And help us, to respond to your salvation properly. Help us to love those who are around us. Help us to love our neighbor. Help us to love those who are sick, those who are crying, those who are struggling with many different situations. Help us to use our gifts to you. and help us to make Your light shine through ourselves. And may we be able to glorify Your name, and the world will know that there is a God who takes care of His people. Help us, God, we pray in Jesus' name.