Grace

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the 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 zealous for good works” Titus 2:11-14.

I caught up with a friend tonight for a few hours and we often get stuck on the same theme: this construct of absolute truth and absolute right and wrong. That’s vague I realize but I love how this particular friend sees the world so incredibly different than I do- different upbringing, different eyes, different almost everything and yet we are so very similar in so many other ways. But that’s beside the point.

Self-discipline is something I have always struggled with. I’m terrible at it. I hate waking up in the morning; it’s pretty close to torture to me. I hate exercising; it’s too strenuous and makes me feel like I’m going to pass out. I hate doing a lot of things when I’m not in the mood or I’m too lazy to do something productive. Getting the picture I’m bad with self-discipline?

So we sway the other way when self-control and self-discipline don’t work for us. We steer towards grace and let grace cover all our short comings and faults. We let grace cover all our sins. Sounds great and it’s true. But I don’t think it’s always true in the same blanket approach we often think. Look at the passage- “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing…training…to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age…” Did you see it? Not exactly the picture or definition of grace we always think of. But look here: it says grace trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and teaches us to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives right now. It’s not training us for Heaven it’s training us how to live TODAY. It’s training us to be servants, to be soldiers, to be fit for whatever may come. It’s training us that in this world we don’t always get our cake and get to eat it too. In the next, we will but for now the grind in the some freeing place to be.

We often think of grace as this band-aid that covers our scars and ugly spots and makes everything great so we don’t really have to work out our faith or make an effort at being godly or Christian. But then we see passages like this one and it clearly exemplifies grace as something very different indeed- grace as a very active thing that instructs us how to live not just a free gift given to cleanse all our poor living.

And then later on- did you know He came to redeem us from lawLESSness? As though it’s better to have rules and strict guides to adhere to instead of what we would consider freedom in our world? Yet again, God’s definition of freedom is indeed very different from our own. What a great God we have to take us and love us in spite of how fallen and confused we often are.