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,
Titus 2:11-12
New. Year’s Day is just a day away and so when we’re considering the idea of focusing on what matters most, there’s one point I think is clear to most of us. In order to reach a goal, we must plan to do so and then carry out the plan.
Last week I referred to a quote from D.A. Carson. I’ll include it here again just in case you missed it.
People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
D.A. Carson
As I thought about Carson’s quote I was reminded of Thomas Chalmer’s sermon “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” The principles of that sermon written in the early 1800’s are on full display in today’s passage.
“The love of the world cannot be expunged by a mere demonstration of the world’s worthlessness….It is not enough to travel the walk of experience along with you, and speak to your own conscience and your own recollection, of the deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the heart is set upon.”
THomas Chalmer
“The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is through the expulsive power of a new one. It is therefore only when admitted into the number of God’s children through faith in Jesus Christ that the spirit of adoption is poured out on us — it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great, predominate, and supreme affection is delivered from the tyranny of all its former desires and the only way that deliverance is possible.”
So Paul, D.A. Carson and Thomas Chalmer all remind us that we both abandon what is ungodly and embrace a life centered on Christ’s work in our lives. Too often we try to rid ourselves of the “ungodliness and worldly passions” in our lives, when the secret is in a life that is consumed with nothing else but following Christ and cherishing Him above all.
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