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“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world” (Titus 2:11-12).
Yesterday we saw how serious it was to disobey the Lord in the Old Testament, and we pointed out that it is still a serious thing to do that today. Because we are God’s children, He may discipline us in some way if we deliberately rebel against Him and commit sin.
However, this is not God’s preferred way of dealing with us. This is the day of God’s grace, and God wants to deal with us in grace. In our verses for today, we see that grace teaches us how to behave as Christians. If we really understand the grace of God, we will find that it is the strongest force to keep us from sin. Why is this? It is because we realize two things more and more. We realize how much we had sinned, and even more important, we realize what our old sinful nature is capable of. But then we also realize how much the Lord Jesus suffered for us, and what a price He paid to save us. All this deepens our understanding of God’s grace, and to go out and sin deliberately becomes more and more abhorrent to us. We all need to have this deeper understanding of God’s grace, and we need to allow it to teach us.
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