At Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, where I serve as the pastor, we have recently begun a sermon series on that seldom-preached New Testament epistle, Titus. (Incidentally, I asked for a show of hands of who has ever heard a sermon series on Titus and don’t recall seeing any!).
In this and the following two posts I would like to mention several reasons why we need a series on Titus.
The first is our need to make-up for what I will call a discipleship deficit. It has become a well-worn cliché to describe North American Christianity, in particular, evangelicalism, as a mile wide and an inch deep. That is a rather unflattering way of acknowledging that even though forms of evangelical Christianity are widespread in American cultural and society, the actual depth and substance of our lives is rather thin. Although we’ve been good at winning converts, we’ve not been so good at making disciples. We can fill big churches, but we struggle to grow godly men and women. This is what I mean by our discipleship deficit.
For years Dallas Willard has been emphasizing this very point. In fact, listen to what he says in an article written in 1980 for Christianity Today (included in his Spirit of the Disciplines):
For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of begin a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.
He then concludes:
So far as the visible Christian institutions of our day are concerned, discipleship clearly is optional.
Why is this? There are doubtless a variety of reasons: some social, some cultural, some historical. But, ultimately, I believe the reason for our discipleship deficit is theological: too many preachers and Bible teachers have taught a truncated gospel, one that fails to draw any real link between faith and obedience, or between grace and good works. Again, I think Dallas Willard nails it when he writes: “Obedience and training in obedience form no intelligible doctrinal or practical unity with the salvation presented in recent versions of the gospel.” The effect is that we can “believe” the gospel but not live like Christians, or “trust Jesus” even though it has very little impact on our life.
The book of Titus, and I hope and trust this sermon series on Titus, will help redress this discipleship deficit by reminding us that the gospel is fully orbed and to embrace grace is to be transformed, necessarily and inevitably, into a doer of good works. For that is what grace does: trains us to renounce a life of sin and seek a life of righteousness (Titus 2:11-14).
Willard, Spirit of Disciplines, p. 258.
Willard, Spirit of Disciplines, p. 259.
Willard, Spirit of Disciplines, p. 259 (emphasis added).
3 comments ↓
I’ll be interested to see what you think about Titus 3:5-7, where Paul seemingly links together the “having been justified” of verse 7 with the regeneration of verse 5…
I don’t really see any contradictions in Titus 3, or in any of justified-by-grace-alone passages with what Todd’s saying in this post.
The thing that I observe, though, is that many contemporary evangelical Christians tend to treat justification by grace as the end of the story. It is as if salvation is a simple “get out of hell free” card, some kind of club membership you attain and then that’s it. Much of the good works attitudes that I hear in this tradition are of the now-that-you’re-in-the-club-here’s-the-rules-we-follow variety. I have experienced that tending towards legalism, forgetting the very gospel we received.
I, personally, am passionate about viewing the gospel as the absolute central feature of all biblical discourse. The thing with the gospel, though, is that it leads somewhere. God doesn’t save us in order to make a fanclub, he saves us in order to create a People. As His People, our hearts should (hopefully) be transformed so that–because of the free gift of the gospel–we desire to find out what He loves, and act upon it. That’s the good works… and we do them because we love God, not because we feel enforced obligation.
To quote my former pastor, “Religion says ‘I obey therefore I am loved’ but the gospel says ‘I am loved therefore I obey’”. Being discipled by more mature Christians helps us to work our the implications of our salvation in our day-to-day lives: what does it look like to do things that God loves in this particular place/time/situation? We inherit the wisdom of how to be God’s People from those who have come before us. In that way, I think, the gospel marches forward as the unfolding story of God’s redemption and renewal of the world, until the day comes when He does so fully in His return.
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