======================================================================== 'THE LIFESTYLE OF GRACE by Steve Gallagher ======================================================================== Summary: This sermon emphasizes the importance of living a lifestyle of grace as taught by the Apostle Paul in Titus chapter two. It highlights the shift towards antinomianism and the need for true repentance and transformation through God's grace. The message focuses on renouncing ungodliness, living self-controlled, righteous, and godly lives, and the danger of twisting the concept of grace to justify sinful living. Duration: 46:44 Topics: "Living a Lifestyle of Grace", "True Repentance and Transformation" Scripture References: Titus 2:11, Hebrews 12:6, 1 John 2:29, Jude 1:4, 2 Timothy 3:1, Matthew 22:37, Proverbs 29:7, Psalms 112:9, Matthew 25:35 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This sermon emphasizes the importance of living a lifestyle of grace as taught by the Apostle Paul in Titus chapter two. It highlights the shift towards antinomianism and the need for true repentance and transformation through God's grace. The message focuses on renouncing ungodliness, living self-controlled, righteous, and godly lives, and the danger of twisting the concept of grace to justify sinful living. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Good morning. That's the way to wake up, right? The title of my message this morning is the kind of lifestyle you would expect from someone who has been tutored and trained by grace. Some of you are just sitting there with your mouths hanging open. I know it's overwhelming, isn't it? We'll just call it the lifestyle of grace. The lifestyle of grace. And we're going to be in Titus chapter two this morning. Let me just say something about Paul and just as way of background for this. The apostle Paul was saved probably in the late 30s and he came into a very dark, Hellenized world. It had all of the sinfulness and carnality and wickedness of the Greek culture and the brutality of the Roman culture all mixed together. And the Jewish people, unfortunately, even though they were the possessors of the sacred scriptures, they weren't doing anything to help things get better. They just weren't. They had turned the worship of Jehovah into a dead religious system of scrupulous rule keeping. Thousands of petty little regulations and laws that people were supposed to just rigidly keep this system to have a relationship with the Almighty that would save them from their sins. And when the apostle Paul got saved, God gave him a tremendous revelation of his grace. And his job was to take that revelation forward. He made it real to him that people were desperately in need of grace because grace was going to pave the way to salvation. Salvation was not to be found in the law. It was to be found in God's character. Now one of the themes in his letter to Titus is that God is a God who saves. And let me just blow through the book real quick. Titus 1-3, he's called God our Savior. And the next verse, God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. Chapter 2 verse 10, God our Savior. Verse 13, our great God and Savior Christ Jesus. Chapter 3 verse 4, God our Savior. And verse 6, Jesus Christ our Savior. Almost every time God is mentioned in the book of Titus, it is to reflect his passion to save souls. And the inference there is that mankind is in deadly peril and desperately needs a divine rescue operation. And if you are still bound by Satan to do his will, you also need the God of salvation to rescue you. You can sing those songs about grace till the cows, what do the cows do? Come home. Pastor Steve's sharp as a tack this morning. So the Apostle Paul brought forth the gospel, which was the message that God's grace could save sinners. But the Judaizers were these kind of half-baked, kind of half in the Jewish world and half in the Christian world. And they were trying to force-fit Christianity into the old Jewish religion. And so they were hounding him everywhere he went, just disputing this message of grace. And so Paul spent his life, most of his life, fighting for the truth that it is by grace that you are saved, not by the works of the law, not by religious rule-keeping, not by ceremonial rituals and all of that. It is not by that old system that you are saved. It is by putting your faith in Jesus Christ. It is by his grace alone that you are saved from your sins. Okay, so that was what Paul fought for for years. But by the time he wrote this letter, this was right towards the end of his life, the pendulum was starting to swing the other way. And this is what the devil does. You know, the devil will try one thing, and if it works, if he can find people that will take up some false teaching, he will continue to energize that teaching and keep it going forward and keep a momentum going to drag people into falsehood. And that's what the devil does. And if that starts petering out or if God raises up men of God who will refute that falsehood and start proclaiming the truth and what the enemy inevitably does, he'll go to the other side and he will twist that around and he will present another falsehood. And by the time Paul was getting, you know, to this point, to the end of his life in 65 AD, people had twisted and corrupted his message to basically say that it doesn't matter how you live. Everybody's saved by grace. And so, you know, the theme of this book, the main theme of the book of Titus is that your behavior matters. If you are a believer, then there is going to be a lifestyle that reflects that. Now let me just take you through the book again real quick. Titus 1, 16, they profess to know God, but by their deeds, they deny him. Chapter 2, verse 7, in all things, show yourself to be an example of good deeds. Verse 14, Jesus Christ who gave himself for us. Why? To redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds. Chapter 3, verse 1, remind them to be ready for every good deed. Verse 8, those who have believed God should be careful to engage in good deeds. Verse 14, our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs so that they will not be unfruitful. Are you getting the message? I think he cares about what we do with our lives, right? The way we live our lives. And if you look at chapter 2, it's all about behavior. He begins by talking about the elderly and how they should live their lives. And then he talks about the younger people. And if that isn't enough, he gets into what the slaves, the way the slaves live. And then he comes to this grand statement in verse 11, starting in verse 11. This is out of the ESV, the English Standard Version. For the grace of God has appeared, praise God, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled righteous and godly lives in the present age. All right. Now, if I pull out all the adjectives and adverbs in there and just get that statement down to the bare bones, it would say something like this. For the grace of God has appeared to train us how to live in the present age. And that's really the theme of the book right there. That's what it's all about, is how we should live our lives. So it's kind of a two-part message. Basically, what grace is teaching us, instructing us, training us, is this. You have trained yourself in how to live an ungodly life. You developed spiritual ruts way back in probably adolescence. And then you compounded them and dug them deeper in your teenage years. And then in your young years, you went even deeper. And the sin became more pronounced in your life. And by the time that you came, well, I'll just say to you guys, by the time you came here, it has become entrenched in your life. You had developed ungodly patterns. You had developed an ungodly lifestyle. Amen? Not hearing any amens on that one. Beginning to worry me. And so grace wants to train us how to reverse course, how to turn it around, and how to live a godly lifestyle. Now, I'm going to illustrate this by a very special woman. And I'm going to introduce you to Agnes. Go ahead and put Agnes up there. This is Agnes. Now, Agnes is really a profound woman. Let me just tell you about Agnes. Well, in fact, I'll just tell you a little story about Agnes. A reporter heard about this amazing woman. And he thought, you know, this could really be a great, you know, one of those stories that would just really warm people's hearts. So he tracked her down and went to interview her. And he said, ma'am, I think it would really be of great interest to my readers, you know, to learn the secret of your great longevity. You know, what, how did you do it? And she said, oh, that was easy. I smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and I drink two pints of whiskey. And he said, ma'am, that is amazing. Really? Well, can I just ask you how old you are? Sure, I'm 37 years old. Now, Grace has got a word or two for Agnes. Agnes, you're a mess. You have a lifestyle problem. You have developed a lifestyle of living for momentary pleasures. But Grace has appeared to teach you to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age. Even Agnes can turn things around. Okay, you can get rid of Agnes. No, my wife's helping me. All right, so now, the reason I use the English Standard Version, I usually use the NAS. The reason I did is because I like the way it worded this statement. It uses the word training rather than, some of the translations have instructing, some have teaching, actually most. But I don't know why they do, but the ESV, I believe, got it right. Because, actually, the Greek term doesn't perfectly translate into the English. That's the way it is. It's like they don't always line up exactly perfect. And so, there isn't a word that perfectly describes what the Greek word is. The Greek word's too long for me to remember, so I didn't even bother with it. But, for instance, in Hebrews 12, for those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines. Same word. He disciplines us for our good so that we may share his holiness. That's the same word. In fact, Pilate, speaking about Jesus, said, discipline him. When they scourged him, same word. So, we're not talking about just a simple, you know, little teaching. We are talking about when grace comes into your life, it is going to bring about a whole work in your life. You know, if we're going to undergo a complete transformation of the way we do life, we need more than just a simple little classroom teaching. We need grace to come into our lives and to just kind of revolutionize the way we do life. Now, the Bible never uses the term lifestyle. Actually, that word, I found out, is less than 100 years old. It uses the word walk, you know, and the biblical perspective of that is the Bible writers would see a long journey of many, many years. And so, every day, you're just, you're walking. You're doing life. You're heading somewhere, right? And so, we see this throughout. I just grabbed a couple verses to illustrate it. Second Corinthians 5, we walk by faith, not by sight. Galatians 5, we walk by the Spirit. First Thessalonians 2, we walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls us. Second John, we walk in truth, and we walk according to his commandments. And Psalm 81, the Lord just kind of like cries out, oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways. That's describing lifestyle, the way we live our lives, the way we behave. So, let's take a look here for a few minutes at what grace has to say to us about lifestyle. Number one, grace trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions. You know, before addressing the new lifestyle, grace first addresses the old lifestyle, the one that we've been living. Before you can fill your cup up with something good, you've got to throw out the bad, right? Or let's say you have a rental. Before you can move the new tenant in, you've got to evict the old tenant. However you want to say it, before you are filled with the Holy Spirit, you must be emptied of self. I'll just put it that way. And it's really the same thing Jesus said. Jesus basically said, before you can pick up your cross and follow me, you must first deny yourself, right? That's where it begins. Some kind of self-renunciation. In fact, I like the Amplified with that. The Amplified, you know, gathers up every adjective and adverb known to man and gets it all into one statement. So this is just, you must deny yourself, you must disown yourself, forget, lose sight of yourself and your own interests, refuse and give up yourself. You've got to do all that. The thing is, the reality is that these passions don't just disappear. You know, you have got to make an absolute commitment. I am going to be a different person. There's got to be a decisive break from the way you have been doing life. It can't be a slight little alteration. I'll just sprinkle in a little of this and, you know, just kind of make a little changes. No, it's got to be decisive. Let me explain it this way. It's kind of like quitting smoking. How many of you have quit smoking? All right, the rest of you keep trying, you'll get it. You know what it's like when you quit smoking. I mean, the first day is hell, right? You're chewing your fingernails down to the nub. You're just insane. You know, they have to lock you in a closet. And little by little, you start, you know, calming down, you start kind of coming out of it. And before you know it, you have completely forgotten about what cigarettes are like, you know, and you are living a new life really in that sense. And you're just completely free of it. And that's kind of, it's the same sort of thing, you know, with developing a new lifestyle. You guys just haven't been trained in how to live a godly lifestyle. That's why God has brought you here. He's brought you into a disciplined environment where you have to go to bed at 10 o'clock at night. You have to get up. You have to have a time with the Lord. You've got to come in here. This is why we, you know, bring you in here early for services and to discipline, bring discipline into your life. All of those wonderful things, you know, and that's what God has brought you here for. And of course, we teach you this in a million ways, but there's always the guy who thinks when he leaves here, well, I'm going to go back to my old lifestyle and I'll just add in some of the teachings they gave me and I'll be able to do this thing. And it doesn't work that way. It just doesn't work. You can't do it that way. It's not going to work. All right, number two, grace trains us to live self-controlled in this present world. Here again, we have another Greek term. I'll read this one. It's Sophranos. And again, it doesn't exactly line up with English terms, so let me give it to you in some different translations. Jerusalem Bible says we must be self-restrained. The Moffat Bible says to live a life of self-mastery. And the New King James says to live soberly. A whole different slant there. It's the same Greek term. You see how each of these translations, they're not wrong. They're just highlighting some particular aspect of this Greek word. I will tell you this about the Christian life. Discipline is everything. It is everything. Whether you're going to make it or not depends on your level of discipline that you institute into your life. If you can't control your money spending, your TV watching, your internet viewing, your eating habits, your work habits, your sleep habits, meaning going to sleep at a good time and getting up when you should, if you can't control yourself to get into the Word of God and into prayer in the morning, do you really believe you're going to change this habit of sexual sin? It ain't going to happen. You're not going to just suddenly become self- controlled in one area when the rest of your life is sloppy and out of control. But here's my problem with this. It says self-control, self-restraint, self-mastery. Now, let me get this straight. Because back in the day, you tried to control yourself, didn't you? I did. I tried. Sincerely tried to control it. And I'm telling you, when those temptations came, I was like, you know, my resolve was like a puddle of water. Just nothing there. No strength. I just followed along like a, how's it go, like a fool led to the slaughter. Ox. Ox led to the slaughter. Well, there was a fool in there doing something or other. Now, I want to illustrate this by something that just happened last week. I like to bring, you know, recent experiences into my preaching. So, a week ago, the Lord surprised me, actually about a week and a half ago. And I woke up one morning and the Lord said, Steve, he doesn't call me Pastor Steve. He said, Steve, the Cincinnati Reds are in spring training now down in Florida. I want you to get on a flight and I want you to go down there and I want you to try out for the team as a pitcher. And I said, I'm not so sure that's a good idea, Lord. I mean, my fastball goes at a mind numbing 25 miles an hour. I have been known to strike people out with one pitch. That's impossible. How could you do that? Because by the time the ball gets to the plate, they've already swung three times. I don't think this is going to work, Lord. Trust me, just do what I say. Okay, so I went down there to the Cincinnati, you know, where they're having spring training. And I put on a uniform and everything, went out and got on the mound and looked the guy in the eye, you know, and he was like, and I wound up, I can't even remember how to do it. Wound up, threw the ball, throw out my back or something. Wound up and threw the ball and it went 100 miles an hour. It did. And my curveball was amazing. It went just like that. And I was unhittable that day. They put three batters up there, struck them all out, walked off the mound, left, got on the plane, came back home. And I said, Lord, what was that all about? And he said, I wanted to teach you that we initiate what we do, but grace empowers us. You need to get that one. We initiate, grace empowers. We initiate, grace empowers. God asks you to do things, but then he comes in and empowers you to do them. Now, you know, I like this King James slant about sobriety because sobriety is something we need. You know, you're not going to get anywhere having a flippant attitude about the things of God. There's got to be a part of you. There's a place for fun. Hey, I love to have fun. But there's got to be a side of us that takes the things of God extremely seriously. Sober, sobriety. I looked up some synonyms, earnest, solemn, grave, weighty, somber. You know, when it comes to the sacred things of God, we are never, ever flippant about those things. We treat those things with great reverence. God and the things of God. We can have our time of fun. It's okay. Hey, the Lord's there laughing with us, I guarantee you. He laughs at me all the time. But we have to have that side in us that is sober minded. Okay, number three, grace trains us to live a righteous life in this present world. Now, this isn't judicial righteousness that we're talking about here. That has to do with God's righteousness being imputed to us by us putting our faith in the Lord and His grace, you know, yeah. Saying we're free of sin, the guilt of sin. But other than that, righteous living is always, in the Bible, is always to do with our interactions with other people. Someone once said it's the other guy's bill of rights. That's a good way to think of it. When you're thinking of practical righteousness, it's the other guy's bill of rights. That we have to live our lives with being very conscientious of other people, their needs, everything. Proverbs 29, the righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor. Psalm 112, the righteous man gives freely to the poor. And in Matthew 25, when Jesus gave that last parable, He talked about people standing before Him, and He called them the righteous. And He depicted them as people who would feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners, and help the sick. That's how He represented righteous people. That's the kinds of things that come out of their lives. And I'm just going to read this. This comes out of 1 John. 1 John 2.29, if you know that the Lord is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him. You know, the one thing I love about 1 John is it really is a report card. You can look at 1 John, and it will tell you if you have truly been born again. And this is one of those kinds of things that comes out of this epistle. And He says it all the way through there. If you ever wonder, am I really saved, or have I been deluding myself? Have I just been kind of skirting around Christianity, but I've never really entered in? This is what you look for. These kinds of things. Little children, let no one deceive you. This is chapter 3, verse 7. The one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous. And verse 10, by this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious. Here it is. You're one or the other. There's only two camps. There is no in between camp. Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother. That's how you know. That's one of the ways, anyway. So righteousness is something that grace wants to train us to live in. And of course, you have to have the Spirit of God indwelling you before grace can teach you anything. All right, then in number four, grace trains us to live godly in this present world. Now, I don't know if you noticed there's a progression in these terms through this verse. First, we are to renounce the old life. Second, we're to bring our carnal propensities under control. Third, we are to live righteously by doing mercy to other people, meeting their needs, and so on. Now we reach the apex of the Christian life, to live godly. And again, let me read this in some other translations. Amplified, to live devout, spiritually whole lives. That's good. I like that. Waymouth, to live pious lives. Phillips, to live God-fearing lives. And another one says God-honoring life. And the voice, to live keeping yourselves holy. You know, there's something about god. I mean, to me, godly just means godlike. That's the way I would think of it. And I looked it up in a dictionary. I was actually kind of surprised at what a good job they did, a modern dictionary said to be godly means conforming to the laws and wishes of God. Yeah, that's right. I agree with that. Now we're getting very close to what Jesus said was the greatest commandment of all, that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the foremost commandment, Jesus said. Comes out of the Shema. You know, I think if we were to interview God and just said to God, God, just tell us exactly what you want from us. I think the Lord would say, I just want you to love me like I love you. I want us to have that kind of intimate relationship with each other. Now, the reality is you can't be defying his authority and have that kind of intimacy. You know, the reality is you can't do that. You can't live a life of rebellion and sinfulness, a life of selfishness and worldliness, and think that you're going to have intimacy with God just because you come into a chapel and sing some songs about grace. Your life backs up your words. You know, this is the kind of lifestyle that, you know, I'm talking about here this morning, that you guys have to develop while you're here, and then you have to take that thing that you have developed here. We've helped you. We've reigned you in. We've put walls and barriers around you, right, to keep you from just running amok like you've done in the past. We've tried to reign you in, get you into a disciplined life, let you taste and see that the Lord is good, that he will bless your life, that you will be happy and content and fulfilled. You don't need all that sin and carnality and worldly stuff. You don't need that kind of a lifestyle. You can live a whole and happy life if you'll just reign it in. So we do that for you, at least as much as we can. We do that for you. Everyone say, thank you, Pastor Steve. Make sure you say that tonight and tomorrow morning also. We do that for you, but now you've got to take that home and establish it there. If you don't take it home and establish it there, you have wasted your time here. It was just a big waste of time, because it's not about what you look like here. It's about what you look like five years from now, ten years from now, most importantly, your last day on earth. That's what it's about. All right, so I'm going to wrap this up. I said earlier that things started shifting in the early church towards the end of Paul's life. It was probably about 60, around in there. There started emerging a new type of heresy. A lot of it was tied in with Gnosticism, but all this new heresy, whatever name you put to it, it all revolved around antinomianism. Antinomianism, that's just a fancy theological term from some seminary somewhere. It just means that you are being lawless. So it went from trying to obey these religious laws, and it swung the other way to being lawless, like he said in chapter one, lawless for any good deed. That's not what it said. What did it say? Hang on. We'll get to the bottom of this. They profess to know God, but by their deeds, they deny him. Wow, that's pretty close. Okay, listen, the pendulum swung the other way. That's all you need to know. These false-hearted teachers had come into the church and had taken the teachings of the Apostle Paul, by grace you are saved, not by works. They had taken that and twisted it and corrupted it. I was watching a little clip of Donald Trump at CPAC the other day, and he was complaining about the media, what do they call it? The media, mainstream media, about how they keep twisting things he says and so on. And he was reflecting on something he said a few days before when he said, fake news is the enemy of the people. That was the statement he made. Fake news is the enemy of the people. And one of the main, he said Clinton network. I don't know if that's true, Clinton news network, if they were the ones that said it. But anyway, they reported it that he said the media is the enemy of the people, and that's how they proclaimed it. And that's what the enemy always does, you know, whatever with Trump and all that stuff. I don't care about the politics. I'm just showing you an example, but the media does lie. They do lie. Listen, this is actually tied in, it's brilliant, and it's tied in. The media for the most part is in the globalist mindset. You understand what that means? The one world mindset. BBC and CNN are the leading proponents of it. They are trying to take, that's why the borders, you know, that's what Trump is trying to stop. He's a nationalistic, patriotic president, and you know, he's trying to stop this thing of just letting everyone flood in so we're all just one happy world. Now, I'm not saying the right or wrong, I don't know what the right or wrong of it all is, but I know what the media is doing. And they are taking the world in a direction, and we know because we've read the last book in the Bible, right? We know where that ends up. That's what's happening. Now, Trump is no godly man. He is a godless man from everything I can tell. But at least in this sense, he's trying to stop that for our country and stop that flow, you know? So, I know that had something really good to do with what I was talking about. These liars have come into the church and they have twisted the truth. And you know, it is kind of tied in with that whole global, it is, because they're trying to make it where we're all one family. It doesn't really matter how you live your life. Just praise the Lord, you know, we're all saved. I was thinking about a couple of those songs that we sang, and depending on whether you're in or out of real Christianity, you know, you could be singing that song. Like, Josh picked those songs. It wasn't the last song, but the two before it. Not shout to the Lord, but the two before it. He picked those songs because it's the reality of his life. He is thankful for the cross because he found freedom from the hold of sin at the cross. That's the message of true grace right there, is when you've experienced repentance of sin, you have renounced the old and have embraced the new. You've come into a new life where Jesus Christ is living within you. His grace is training you into a new lifestyle. And you can sing that song, but you know what? You can be completely out of it, unsaved, never converted, still in habitual sin. And that song becomes nothing but a self-deluding lie. Those two songs, because they're basically saying all of our sin is covered. Are you seeing what I'm saying? You know, if you've repented and you've repented of the major, at least habitual sin in your life, and you're walking with the Lord, that's true. But if you haven't, it's not true, but you can deceive yourself. And that's what we have in the church culture, is a lot of self- deception. You know, we have come into the same time. Listen, this was really interesting to me. As I was preparing this message, I came to find out that about the exact same time that Paul wrote this epistle to Titus, the half-brother of Jesus Christ, Jude is his name, he wrote an epistle at about the same time. Listen to what he said, because that small epistle, it lines up with 2 Peter 2. That small epistle is an end times epistle. I mean, it was true at that time, and you read all about the false teachers and all that stuff in there. It is all about the church in the end times. But listen to what he said, for certain persons have crept in unnoticed. Those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation. Ungodly persons who turn, what? The grace of God into licentiousness, and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. You know, it is exactly what Paul said in Titus. They deny him by their deeds. Right? It is the same thing, written at the same time. It is the Lord sending out a new word to the first century church, but this also, this book of Jude is one of those places in Scripture that comes under the law of double reference. Don't you want to know what that is? The law of double reference means that they are speaking it at the time, and it is applicable to the people they are speaking it to, but it is even more applicable to the end times church or situation. That is the law of double reference. And the book of Daniel, you know, the book is a good part of 2 Timothy and 2 Thessalonians and Jude and 2 Peter. These are sections of Scripture that were applicable at the time, but they also, the Lord is seeing off into the future 2,000 years later. He is speaking a word to us today that this is going on, and this is what is happening. I will just wrap it up with something Randy Alcorn said, because it really can't be said any better than this. Any concept of grace that makes us feel more comfortable sinning is not biblical grace. God's grace never encourages us to live in sin. On the contrary, it empowers us to say no to sin and yes to truth. Millions upon millions of Christian men are being enslaved by sexual lust, but in 1986, God raised up pure life ministries to offer a way of escape to those taken captive by pornography and sexual addiction. Everything this ministry teaches, preaches, writes, and counsels is built upon the unwavering truth of the Word of God. This is why we exist, to lead people into the truth that will set them free. ======================================================================== Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/se5cxTjk_r4.mp4 Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/steve-gallagher/the-lifestyle-of-grace/ ========================================================================