“…who [Jesus Christ] 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. Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.” + Titus 2v14-15
The Nature of Christ’s Death
The first thing we observe in verse 14 is a very important aspect of the nature of Christ’s death.
A Gift
The first portion of our text testifies to an aspect of the nature of Christ’s death. The Scripture says that Jesus Christ, “gave himself for us.” Part of the nature of Christ’s death is that it was a gift. It has been given for us. This is not something that we can purchase. This is not something that we begged for. This is not something we bargain for. This is not something that He sells to us. There is no catch and no strings attached. It’s a truly free gift. Christ’s death was not something that was taken from Him. This wasn’t a victory for Satan and his demons. This was not a victory for the power of sin or the power of death. This was not the Roman Soldiers, or the Jews defeating Jesus. Jesus Himself said that, “No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord.” Christ gave Himself up for us.
This reveals to us the generosity of God to save. In order to save us wretched sinners, this is what it would take – the giving up Christ’s life. Christ generously gave His life for us. He emptied Himself, and humbled Himself, even to the point of death – death on a cross. He didn’t just give part of Himself. He didn’t just give some. He didn’t just give a lot, even. He didn’t just give a piece of Himself. He gave up all of His life for us.
If we ever think that God is holding back good things from us, let us remember that He didn’t hold back His very life from us. He gave it all up for us.
Think about the nature of giving a gift to someone. No one gives gifts from compulsion or because they are forced to. If that were the case then it would cease to be a gift. Christ did not owe us His life. His giving up of Himself as a gift was grace. A gift is grace. It’s unmerited. Unearned. Un-owed. Christ Jesus, free of all obligations gave Himself up for us.
In our pride we can often struggle with receiving gifts. If you ever go out to eat with someone and one person wants to pay for the other, they often say, “No, we don’t want you to pay for our meal, we got it.” We all know how that goes. Our mentality of wanting to earn – which in many aspects of life is a very good thing – but from a human perspective that mentality can become a stumbling block to the gospel for many people. “I just receive salvation? I don’t have to do anything or contribute anything?” That often becomes just too good to be true for many people. But that’s just it – the gospel is too good to be true, except it is true! There’s no catch 22. It is a gift that we receive through faith.
Distinct from all other Religions
This aspect of the gospel is one of the many things that makes Christianity distinct from all other religions. Our God gave Himself up for us. All other religions require you to do something to work your way up to whatever the goal of that religion is. Not so with the gospel. No other religion has a gospel. No other religion has good news of God giving up Himself to redeem His people.
There is a history podcast that I listen to. The guy who does the podcast is a professor who is an atheist. He almost always does a great job of just giving you the facts of whatever historical event he’s talking about. But in one episode that I was listening to the other day he was talking about different world religions. And in the episode he broke down some religions and summed it up by saying that all religions are ultimately the same – they just have different rules, different gods, etc. And I just wanted to shout at him and say, “Not Christianity! Christianity isn’t like all other religions! Christianity is different! We have the gospel!” But alas, he could not hear me. We have a God that gave Himself up for us. We have a God that has done for us what no un-gospelized human version of God would ever do for mankind. He debased Himself to redeem us. He did the undignified thing for us.
Just as in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when the Father saw the son returning He threw His dignity out of the window, hiked up his robe, and ran for his son. This is what our God has done for us.
Why Did Jesus Give His Life for us?
Jesus Christ gave Himself for us. But why? Why did Jesus Give His life for us? There are two reasons that Titus 2v14 gives us. The first is that Jesus Gave Himself for us to redeem us. The second is that Jesus gave himself for us to purify us.
To Redeem Us
The basic idea of redemption involves doing something on behalf of someone else because they are unable to do it themselves. Whoever the redeemer is, in the act of redemption, he or she is providing for the redeemed as a man would provide for his own immediate family. A redeemer is one who pays the debt of the debtor. Redemption is being bought back from something. So someone who is in need of redeeming is there because they cannot do whatever it is that needs to be done for themselves. Someone who needs to be redeemed has not the power to get himself out of his situation. So that person needs someone outside of themselves who is more powerful than them, and more powerful than what they are under to come and get them out of it and provide redemption for them. Our redemption is fundamentally the sole act of God. It is single handedly a work of Christ. The one who is in need of redeeming is at the mercy of the redeemer to redeem them, otherwise they stay in their situation.
Among many other things in Scripture, the fact that our salvation is redemption, reveals to us that our salvation is 100 percent monergistic – meaning that God alone is the saver in our salvation. According to the testimony of Scripture we full-throatedly reject any doctrine that teaches a synergistic salvation – God and man working together to accomplish salvation. It is single handedly an accomplishment of Christ Jesus. And it is so because we cannot redeem ourselves. We have not the ability.
Redeem us from what?
This begs the question, from what are we redeemed? What is the state that we are in that is in such a dire need of redemption that we cannot get ourselves out of?
All Lawlessness – Sin
Scripture says that we are redeemed from all lawlessness. In other words we are redeemed from all our sin. We are lawless people apart from Christ. We are perpetual law-breakers – sinners. We see this throughout the life of the nation of Israel in the Old Covenant. They had the law, but yet, time and time again, they lived and acted as if they were a lawless people. They could not keep it. They were sinners; and God’s holy standard was too much for them to keep. And for the Christians in Crete who were the first recipients of this letter – they were saved from the lawlessness of the culture around them. As we have mentioned in past weeks, the Cretans were a proudly immoral people and everyone knew it. But for the Cretans whom Christ redeemed – he redeemed them from their lawlessness and immoral living. This is us today as well.
One of the purposes of the law is to show us, when we measure ourselves against it, that we are indeed a lawless people – a law-breaking people. When the holy standard of God is held up above us, it crushes us, because we are an unholy people unable to keep it. But the good news of the gospel is that Christ gave Himself for us to redeem us from that lawlessness. He gave Himself for us to buy us back from our sinning and our law-breaking.
To Purify Us
Scripture continues, Christ “gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people.” So what are we redeemed to? To purity. To be purified by the blood of Jesus. In the place of lawlessness and sinning, we are purified.
In the Old Testament, specifically the book of Leviticus, there are tons and tons of highly detailed laws for purification. Everything from purification rituals for a woman who had just given birth, to the purification rituals for the Levitical Priests. One of the themes throughout those commands was that of blood causing one to become unclean – human or animal blood. So if they came into contact with blood or something unclean they had to be cleansed from it. Yet as the New Covenant unfolds according to God’s master storytelling, the precious blood of Jesus is the very thing that ultimately cleanses, washes clean, and purifies His people once and for all.
But what’s the deal with the need for purification? One of the corresponding themes to this in the book of Leviticus is that the Israelites were to be holy because God is holy. Impurity cannot stand in the presence of God. There are ample examples throughout the Old Testament of God striking dead someone who did not properly honor his holiness and His purity. If we are to stand before God we must be pure. Impurity cannot live in His presence. As Isaiah encountered the presence of a holy and morally pure God, he saw the wretchedness of his own sin and confessed, “I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips!” And what did God say to that? He didn’t say, “Oh, it’s okay Isaiah, I’ll let it slide.” No. What did God do? He purified Isaiah when the white hot coal was put to his unclean lips – Isaiah was purified before a holy God.
We are a people of great sin and impurity. We are a people of unclean lips, unclean lives, unclean minds, unclean hearts, unclean eyes, unclean hands, and unclean feet. And it isn’t a burning coal that purifies us. It is through the blood of Jesus who gave himself for us to redeem from all lawlessness and purify for Himself a people that we are purified. Without being washed and made pure by the blood of Jesus we die. This is one of the ways in which Christ’s death applies to our lives. It purifies us from our wretched sin. The theology of the death of Christ is the most practical thing in the world because it immediately addresses our most urgent need – to be pure before a holy and just God.
Purify us for what?
As our text continues to unfold we see more of the purposes for our purification.
For Himself – For His Own Possession
The text says, “to purify for himself a people for his own possession…” So Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession. Christ does all of this for us to make us his own possession. His own prized possession. This reminds me of 1 Peter 2v9 which says, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” What a work of grace it is that we have been bought back from the dirt of our sin, made pure so that we might be the very possession of Christ. This should make you shake in your boots with awe that Christ Jesus gave Himself up to death in order to have you as His own.
I get the picture here of someone buying a broken down, condemned house. They put money, blood, sweat, and tears into fixing it up, making it valuable and flipping it. Jesus of course doesn’t flip us and sell us out to someone else. But he comes to us in our broken down, condemned state – He put his blood, sweat, tears, and life into purchasing us, redeeming us, and purifying us and making us into something beautiful – something that looks like Him. We are flipped to be conformed into the image of Christ.
Again, our knees should buckle and we should be struck with awe at this. While we hated God and were enemies of Christ and loved our dirty sinful life, while we were completely despicable in the eyes of a holy God, Christ gave up His life to a cruel, tortuous death on a cross, so that He could have us as His own. Is this not the greatest news you have ever heard? Do you understand what has happened here? Our sin is so grotesque. Living in sin is worse than swimming in sewage and loving it. And yet, in our blasphemous state, God looked upon us and said, “I want them to be my own. Let’ go redeem and purify them, Son.” And Christ said, “I’ll give my life for them.”
How can that be? The love of God for sinners is beyond comprehension or understanding.
Now, the gospel is not a message of self-esteem. It does not pat us on the back and tell us we are special people who are enough. But the gospel does address self-esteem issues. It doesn’t cause you to look within yourself for self-confidence. But it does cause you to look to Christ. It causes you to look to Christ hanging on a cursed tree and there you see how he bought you back from your life of sin. It is there, at Calvary that you see how Christ prizes you, and cherishes you. The gospel isn’t about you, but it is for you. There is nothing in us that deserves that. There is nothing cherishable in us. But Jesus does anyway, because he does. Jesus loves us because He loves us.
The gospel addresses self-esteem issues by declaring that we are the prized possession of the God of the universe! We are His adopted children. He gives us all things in Christ – every Spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. He does this not because we are something special – but because Christ has redeemed us from our lawless sinful lifestyle and purified and made us clean and made us his own. Jesus gave everything to have us.
What do we do with this?
When we come to understand of this application of Christ’s death – when we understand the purposes for which Christ gave Himself for us – what do we do with such great news? Our text gives us two reasons. The end of verse 14 says that this makes us into a people who are zealous for good works. And then in verse 15 it says that we are to declare these things.
Zealous for Good Works
So first, at the end of verse 14, Christ gave Himself for us to redeem us from our sin, and to purify us for Himself and in all of that, Jesus makes us into a people who are zealous for good works. To be zealous is to be extremely passionate about something. When the death of Christ is applied to our lives, it makes us into a people who are gung-ho for good works. How is this so? It all comes down to the desires of our nature. Before our redemption, we were a lawless people, as the text says. We were sinners by nature.
Some people say that Calvinism teaches that people don’t make choices. That’s not true. Biblical Calvinism teaches that people make choices according to their nature. So before our redemption, we loved our sin. We were not zealous for the things of God. We were not passionate about simple obedience. But in our redemption and cleansing, a new nature is wrought within us by the Spirit of God. Our transformation, or sanctification, is that of working out our new nature desires. When we understand that Christ has done all the work of salvation for us, and when we understand that we are purified and made into His prized possession, we become radically zealous to obey God and do good works. We get passionate about living godly lives in this present age. We get jacked up about getting to obey our roles as men and women. This is part of the purpose of why Jesus died for us for. If we reject the purposes of our redemption we are rejecting our redemption. Ephesians 2v10 also testifies to this being one of the purposes of Christ’s death. Ephesians 2v10 says this, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Before time began God planned out good works that we should walk in – and as sinners – the only way that could be done is if Jesus died to redeem us, purify us, and make us new. This is part of the plan from the start.
This is a total 360 life change. We go from wallowing in the dirt of our sin to being radicals for obedience and good works. If we understand the deep generosity of God to give Himself for us, we in turn become zealots who generously and extravagantly love doing good works for one other. Do you desire to do good works? If not, then look at the cross, and don’t look away until you do! When you see people who are passionate about obedience and good works it is likely evidence that the Spirit of God has applied the work of Christ to their hearts. So when you find yourself lackluster about obedience and lackadaisical about good works, it is likely that you have become lackluster and lackadaisical about the cross. It is likely that you have forgotten what you have been redeemed from and to. It is likely that you have forgotten the lengths to which Jesus went to purchase you and make you His own prized possession. And in those moments, when you find yourself there, you must glue your eyes to the cross till your chest is burning with passion to do good works.
When we understand that our justification is based all the way on the work of Christ and not us, then that is when a passion and a zeal is lit underneath us to go and obey and do good, because we know we’re not on eggshells around God and our salvation isn’t earned by our doing. So we are free to go wild with good works.
Declare These Things
What else are we to do with this great news of redemption? We are to declare it. In verse 15 we see the mandate of the redeemed and the purified persons to preach the gospel. “Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.” Contextually this is referring to everything that Paul has wrote up to this point. So that means we are to teach elder qualifications, warnings against false teaching, men’s and women’s roles, a Christian work ethic, and the gospel. All of these things, with the gospel at the center, we are to declare.
So our zeal for good works applies to our actions –how we live our lives. Our declaring applies to our tongues – we are to use our mouths to declare this great gospel message. After all, how could we keep silent after having experienced such a great redemption? It doesn’t make sense to. But the command is here because quite simply, our mouths just get pretty quiet about the gospel sometimes.
When it comes specifically to Titus who first received this letter, this is what he is to do in the church at Crete as He is putting in order what remains. Obviously we know that we are to preach the gospel to the lost and dying world. They desperately need this message. And we must beg God to give us a zeal for the lost. But this is also what are to do within the church as well as without the church in evangelism. We are to declare these things to one another.
How do we stay passionate and zealous about good works and godliness? How do we not let that zeal fizzle out? The only way is by continually declaring the gospel to one another. Continually having our eyes redirected back to the cross and forward to the second appearing of Christ in glory.
If we want to be a people who are zealous for good works and action with our lives, then that will only happen if we are a people who are zealous for the gospel of Jesus Christ. We must declare it to one another. We must exhort one another and rebuke one another in the word. And we must have humility and meekness in receiving exhortation and rebuke from the Word.
The commands to declare, exhort, and rebuke imply that an authority is carried out in doing those things. The words themselves imply authority. But Paul states it out clearly for us that we are to do these things with all authority. And we are to let no one disregard us in doing so. Where does the authority come from to do these things? How can one sinner rebuke another sinner? Isn’t that judgmental and hypocritical?
The authority to declare the gospel, to exhort and rebuke with the Word does not come from man. It does not come from our lives. Our lives do not validate our authority to do such things. The authority that we stand on to declare the gospel and sharpen one another comes from the Word of God. Which means that it comes from God Himself. The Scriptures is our source of authority for these things. And no one is to disregard the declaring, exhorting, and rebuking precisely because of the authority source. We cannot disregard someone, because they are not the authority anyway – the authority is the Word of God. And to disregard the Word of God is to disregard God Himself.
So when we are outside of the four walls of the church and we declaring the gospel in evangelistic efforts – there will be people who will disregard us and tell us to keep it to ourselves and they will accuse us of being hateful, judgmental, and hypocritical. But we are to keep on declaring the Word of God because it is by the authority of God Himself that we are commanded to preach the gospel!
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