What Grace Is - Sean Michael Lucas

What Grace Is

Paul wants to make sure we understand that when he says “grace,” he’s summarizing—with this one word—God’s gracious act of redemption in Jesus Christ.
It is God’s grace in Jesus that has “epiphanied,” has appeared or been revealed at this time, and this grace brings salvation (Titus 2:11). For Jesus came to give Himself for sinners like us, to redeem us from lawlessness, and to make us a new creation—people zealous for good works. All that grace does—the imperatives that are found throughout this section—flows from this appearance of God’s grace in Jesus. Paul goes on in Titus 3:3-7 to give a more detailed explanation of what grace is, and of what makes it so gracious.
In Titus 3:3, Paul tells us what makes grace so gracious: It meets us while we are still in our sins. Paul gives seven descriptors that help us not only name our sinful condition, but feel it. And while this sinful estate describes a former condition (“we ourselves were once … ”), we still see our spiritual deadness in three ways.
First, our sin and spiritual deadness were characterized by spiritual ignorance. Notice how Paul describes it: “foolish, disobedient, led astray.” Each of these words points to the deep deception under which we labored when we were lost. We lived foolishly and we acted disobediently because we were self-deceived.
Not only that, but our spiritual deadness was typified by moral enslavement: We were, Paul says, “slaves to various passions and pleasures.” We were captured by inward desires and outward pleasures, and both kept us bound.
Finally, our spiritual deadness resulted in destructive relationships: We were “passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.” Our hearts know the destructive poison of malice, wickedness, and evil. It knows, too, the all-consuming power of envy—the broken desire for what belongs to others—that always works itself out in hateful actions.
This is the human condition. This is your condition and my condition apart from Jesus. We don’t need to watch movies or TV to see this—we know it in our families. We know this reality in our own hearts. This is the blackout condition caused by our sin. But grace is gracious. In the darkness of our sin a light pierces through; God doesn’t leave us in our spiritual deadness.