As most of you know, I am preaching
a series of messages Sunday nights called The
Angel Before Thee.
And tonight I want to talk about how
to make your enemies work for you.
I'd like to have you here and bring
others here and learn, literally, this is not
a trick sermon, this is literally true, and
I shall develop it and show how it
can be done, how I think I do
it, make my enemies work for me.
While they think they are getting me down,
they're getting me up.
Then don't forget that next Sunday night, we'll
continue with it, next Sunday morning I'll be
present and then we'll introduce the president of
the Lions Churches in the Philippine Islands, Mr.
DeJesus.
But in the evening I'll resume my series.
And on Wednesday evening at 7.30 sharp,
we teach for about 40 minutes on the
Sermon on the Mount.
The rest of the time is spent, we
have in prayer, we have fine discussions.
It's a class, which of course the teacher
always ends up by being right, but we
do allow discussion.
I enjoy it myself, I believe others do,
Wednesday at 7.30. Now, the words of
our text.
You know, I am going slowly through the
book of Titus.
A tightly packed little book is filled with
theological meat, as a boiled egg is filled
with meat.
In verse 11 of chapter 2, there is
the little word for.
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,
looking for that blessed hope and the glorious
appearing of the great God and our Savior
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that
he might redeem us from all iniquity and
purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of
good works.
Now, it would be a total impossibility for
any man, I don't care who the man
might be, to treat this all in one
sermon and do it any justice at all,
so I'm not going even to try.
I'm going to allow my thoughts to wander
a bit around the word for there.
For the grace of God.
Now, that little word for is very important.
I don't go along with that type of
Bible teacher that takes some unimportant verse, looks
mysterious, and said, this is the key to
the whole Bible.
I've heard that so much that I have
become inured to it, immune to it would
be a better word, because I don't believe
it.
Some expositors take that 117th, isn't it, Psalm,
that shortest of all the Psalms, and they
look very wise and say, undoubtedly, this is
the most important Psalm in the entire Bible.
It says, oh, praise the Lord, all you
nations, praise him, all you people, for his
merciful kindness is great toward us and the
truth of the Lord endureth forever.
Praise ye the Lord.
And they want me to believe that that's
the most important Psalm and that all the
rest of the Psalms center around that.
Well, I believe in faith and I also
believe in skepticism.
I think a good hearty dose of skepticism
is the only way to treat some teachers.
So I don't want to fall into this
trap and say that the most important word
here is for, for it isn't by any
means the most important, but for my purpose
this morning, it's quite important in that I
want to show you something here.
This is, of course, a preposition, but theologically
it's, it's, it's conjunctive here.
It's, it joins two great thoughts.
Now, Paul had been saying above this, that
aged men should be sober and grave and
temperate and sound in faith and in love
and in patience.
And that older women should be, be as
becometh holiness, not gossipers and not given to
wine, teachers of good things.
And that young women should be sober, love
their husbands and their children, be discreet and
chaste and good housekeepers and obedient to their
husband.
And that young men also ought to be
sober and that Titus himself should show himself
a pattern of good works and that employees
should be obedient to their masters and to
please them and not steal from them and
should be faithful to them.
And that, that a doctor might be adorned.
Now that's what he had been saying.
Now we say, Paul, wait a minute here.
We, we don't believe in just being pushed
into things.
Uh, you want the older men to be
grave and sober and righteous.
You want the older women to be holy
and good and pure and tight mouthed.
You want the younger women to be good
housekeepers, love their families and be an example
to others.
You want employees to work for their, their
employers faithfully and well, and not be guilty
of stealing little things here and there, but
remember that, uh, that stealing is wrong at
any time.
Now, why Paul, uh, this isn't the way
the Romans talk nor the way the Greeks
talk.
This isn't the way the average American looks
at things, Paul.
Why?
What, uh, what can you say to us
that will give us a reason for this?
What, what's the reason that you want us
to live like this?
Paul said, well, this is the reason.
This is the reason.
And the word for gathers up all of
that.
Uh, it means this, which I have previously
required of you.
The reason for it is this, that the
grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to
all men or for all men, teaching us
that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should
live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present
world, looking for the blessed hope and the
glorious appearing of the great God in our
savior, Jesus Christ.
When the Bible makes a statement or lays
down a commandment without any reason being given,
it is the immediate duty of all Christians
to believe that statement and obey that commandment
and wait to know why God made that,
gave that commandment and made that statement.
But it is very rare that God requires
anything of his people that he doesn't either
before or after explain why.
God knows we're intelligent people and a Christian
should be one of the most intelligent of
all persons.
I have never accepted the implied creed that
a Christian is one who, he's, he's retarded
and the Lord comes along and puts him
in a home for retarded children, that the
church is a home for retarded children.
I never have believed that.
I still don't believe it.
I well know that a wild intellect, uncontrolled
and egocentric and filled with sin, can be
a very dangerous and terrible thing.
I also know that a brilliant intellect filled
with the Holy Ghost can be a very
wonderful thing, as David and Isaiah and Paul
and John and Augustine and Luther and Wesley
have taught us.
So I believe in the intelligence.
I believe the Bible's an intelligent book.
It goes beyond intelligence and that is one
of the glories of the scripture and one
of the glories of Christianity, that we go
beyond intelligence.
We never go contrary to it but we
often go beyond it.
The prophets of the Old Testament and the
apostles of the New heard and saw things
which their intellects were never able to equate
with anything else they knew or with anything
taught by mortal man.
They saw visions and dreamed dreams and looked
into the face of the awesome God with
the rainbow around his shoulders and they rose
above the power of the mind to climb.
But it was never anything they saw, never
anything was contrary to good sound reasoning.
It was above it, I repeat, but never
contrary to it.
So God has given us reasons for things
and has said here take this book and
you'll know not only that you should be
good but why you should be.
Not only that you should believe but why
you should believe.
It was Anselm that said we think because
we believe not in order that we might
believe.
The believing man, faith is always first and
the believing man believes and then he can
think as deeply and intensely and widely and
imaginatively as he wants to do it because
he has faith to start with and he
never goes beyond faith and never rises above
faith.
He rises above reason but never above faith.
So Paul gave us the reason here.
He had been exhorting.
Paul didn't do it that way usually.
Usually in his epistles Paul begins with heavy
theology and lays the foundation down, good and
solid, and then builds up on it exhortations
and commandments and urgings that we're to do
this and thus and this and live this
way and go there and do this and
we're to live in in this way and
that way in order or because these other
things are true which were previously stated.
Here Paul reverses himself and gives us first
the commandments and then gives us the reason
for.
Now he said for the grace of God
hath appeared to all men.
I think it should read for the grace
of God hath appeared bringing salvation to or
for all men.
Now what does this mean?
I find a very convenient and I believe
helpful way of going about Bible study and
Bible teaching to find out what a thing
doesn't mean.
If you can't know what a thing means
you can save yourself a lot of confusion
by finding out what it doesn't mean and
some people not knowing what this doesn't mean
they have read into it meanings that it
does not contain.
As a young Christian on attending a church
over on Locust Street in Akron, Ohio I
used to pass by every Sunday used to
pass by a great expansive imposing looking church.
It said Universalist church.
I don't know whether they've changed their name
I haven't seen a Universalist church signed for
years but the Universalists weren't wholly bad.
They believed in the redemption which is in
Christ Jesus.
They believed that God so loved the world
that he gave his only begotten son.
They believed that Jesus Christ when he died
paid the price for all men.
At least I think this is a fair
statement of what they believe.
But they took verses like this in this
chapter the grace of God has appeared bringing
salvation to all men and they said well
that just means what it says that God's
grace is so vast and infinite and all
comprehensive that it leaves nobody out and therefore
everybody will be saved.
They believed in Universalism.
I didn't intend to tell you this but
it fits in so beautifully that I must.
A man said that he had he was
Universalist preacher and he said he went into
a neighborhood and decided that he wanted to
establish Universalist church or went around finding if
he could find looking about seeing if he
could find any Universalists of the Universalist persuasion.
He finally ran on to a man and
yes I'm Universalist.
Oh he said that's fine perhaps we can
interest you we want to establish Universalist church.
Well he said I think it's fair to
tell you though that I'm not quite the
kind of Universalist that you are.
He said you are Universalist and your creed
is that everybody will be saved.
Now he said I've lived in the world
a long time and I've mingled with men
and I've mixed with them everywhere all out
over the world.
I've watched them live, I've had them lie
to me, I've been cheated and skinned and
sold down river and deceived and betrayed and
he said I've decided in the that I
believe in the universal damnation of all men.
Said I'm that kind of a Universalist.
Quite a shock I take it to the
brother who believed in the universal salvation of
all men.
But the Universalists and others believe in the
universal salvation of all men grounding it upon
such passages as this.
Well I say they're not wholly bad but
they're not certainly right about it because this
doesn't mean.
You say well how do you know that
it doesn't mean it?
I know it for this reason that the
bible is to be understood not by what
this verse says but by what this verse
and this verse and this one and this
one and this one says.
And when you get a dozen of them
to agree on something then you have bible
dogmatics.
And when these dozens agree and then you
find one you can't understand if he doesn't
agree with these plain ones then you say
well we put that aside as gypsy smith
did with the bone when he was eating
fish.
You ask him what he did with the
passage he couldn't understand he said the same
as when I'm eating fish and I ran
into a bone he said I just lay
it on the side of the plate.
And so when you find a passage that
seems to contradict the plain teachings of 25
other verses lay that one on the side
of the plate because you don't understand that.
And always remember there'll be some blazing-eyed
fanatic rushing in and telling you that because
you don't know what that teaches therefore he
is now sent to enlighten you.
And what he says it teaches is what
25 other passages deny.
So I know this doesn't mean that all
men are to be saved that the grace
of God has appeared to all men savingly
and that the grace of God is working
actively in all men I know better than
that for the man who wrote this said
not all men have faith and said that
evil men and seducers should wax worse and
worse until the came.
And then I know also that it doesn't
mean that all men have heard of the
grace of God.
The grace of God which bringeth salvation has
appeared to all men that would leave us
with the false impression if we don't watch
it that everybody in the whole world has
heard of the soul.
I wish that everybody that lives everywhere from
the youngest inhabitant of the jungle to the
oldest man in London or Paris had heard
of the grace of God but it just
isn't so.
And I might add that it is perhaps
one of the great and serious crimes of
all time that the church of our Lord
Jesus Christ has failed so dismally to instruct
the world that the grace of God has
appeared bringing salvation for everybody that will take
it.
That we've had nearly 2,000 years to
do it and that we have succeeded not
in doing it.
The revolution, the Bolshevistic revolution came in 1917
and 31 years later one-third of the
earth population are under the hammer and the
sickle.
They did in 31 years what the church
has not been able to do.
That is they did for the devil in
31 years what the church has not been
able to do for God in 2,000.
No, it doesn't mean that everybody's heard.
If it meant everybody had heard Christ would
have been back long ago and this terrible
nightmare we call history would have ended.
And Christ would now be raining from the
river to the ends of the earth and
every man would be sitting under his own
vine and fig tree and no man should
be wicked nor sinful nor harmful all over
the earth from sunrise to sun up and
from sun up to sunrise no evil would
be anywhere about.
So it doesn't mean that.
What does it mean?
It means that there has been a shining
forth epiphany, a shining forth.
The word is used here for the shining
forth of the sun.
For the grace of God has appeared.
This is the epiphany, the shining forth of
the grace of God like the mighty sun
in the heavens.
It is shown forth around the person of
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Shown forth in his love and pity and
mercy.
Shown forth in his willingness to die for
his enemies.
Shown forth.
It was not a gleam of light as
some would say but it was a shining
forth as the sun at ten o'clock
on a June morning.
Shining forth in its glory all over the
earth wherever the clouds will withdraw and let
the sun shine.
So that's what it means.
The grace of God has shown forth like
the sun and this grace brings salvation and
that salvation is for all men everywhere that
will receive it.
That's what this passage means.
And the grace of God has appeared teaching
us.
I want to bear down a little on
that.
The grace of God has appeared teaching us.
Now in what way can the word grace
has two meanings, at least two meanings and
two meanings here.
It means an attribute of God, a quality
in God of love and mercy and kindness
and goodwill that predisposes God always to be
kind to those that don't deserve it and
to be good to those that deserve only
judgment and to pour out himself and his
love and even the blood of his son
for the salvation of those that deserve nothing
but hell.
That is a quality in God, a characteristic
of the heart of God.
Now I'm conscious that both when I use
the word quality and characteristic that I am
humanizing God because we can't rise to the
elevation where we can talk about God in
divine terms.
We have to talk about him in human
terms.
Actually there's no such thing as a quality
in God or a characteristic in God.
God's unitary being has about it a unicity,
a oneness.
And anything we say about God is simply
our minds attributing things to God, for God
dwelleth in light that no man can approach
unto.
But this is an attribute, this grace, and
of course this can't teach anybody anything.
An attribute of God can't teach a man
down in Grant Park on a park bench
anything.
An attribute in God can't teach a donny
in the Valley anything or an Indian in
Columbia.
The grace of God as an objective thing,
objective to us, outside of us, an external
thing, cannot teach us anything.
It can move God to act in our
behalf, but as long as it's outside of
us it can teach us nothing.
But the grace of God has another meaning
too.
The grace of God means a divine influence
upon the heart.
It means an inward enabling.
It means an active moral force.
Remember in 2 Corinthians 12 where Paul told
us how he had been praying that the
thorn might be, he might be delivered from
the thorn in the flesh which caused him
great distress.
He said he prayed three times about it
and on the third time the Lord said,
Paul, my strength is made perfect in weakness
for my grace is sufficient for thee.
He didn't mean my attribute of grace which
lies in me in the great undulating infinite
sea of the Godhead.
That would do Paul no good at that
moment, but he said there's another kind of
grace, another aspect of that grace, which is
an active working force that enters the heart
of a man and does things for him.
He said my grace is sufficient for thee.
My grace, my active grace, this influence, this
moral power within your bosom can lift you
above the thorn which you're trying to get
rid of.
Paul caught it in a second.
Paul was a spiritually intelligent man and as
soon as God said it, Paul added his
own comment.
He said, therefore, I'll glory in my infirmities
that the power of God might rest upon
me.
And he knew the grace of God and
the power of God were all one.
So the grace of God is a teacher.
It is a moral force.
It gets inside the intelligence, gets inside the
will, motivates the life, gets inside the heart
and disturbs the emotions and excites them.
So that's what it means, the grace of
God that bringeth salvation teaches us, teaches us.
Now, my brethren, it was a low moment
in the Orthodox Church when the word grace
lost its second meaning and was forced to
take only the first one.
It was a low moment, I say an
awful moment, in the history of fundamentalism when
the word grace lost its second meaning, that
of a divine power working within us and
was forced to be satisfied with its first
meaning, that of an attribute of God flowing
out of kindness and love and mercy which
sent God, which sent God's son to die
for the loss.
So the grace of God, for most people,
remains in God.
And it leaves the recipient of grace unchanged
by grace.
But you notice that Paul taught that grace
changed people?
He said grace changed them.
He said the grace of God has appeared
teaching us, inwardly teaching us, that denying ungodliness
and worldly lusts we should live soberly and
righteously and godly in this present world.
It was a very slick trick of the
devil, indeed, when he disassociated the two meanings
of the word grace and everybody goes out
and I teach him grace, grace, grace that
is greater than all my sin.
Do I believe it?
Oh, with everything in me I believe it.
Do I preach it?
Well, you know I preach it.
Do I believe in the grace of God?
Nobody, nobody can sing with a worse voice
and a happier heart, amazing grace how sweet
the sound that saves a wretch like me.
Nobody, nobody can sing it worse and nobody
can love it more.
The grace of God that brings salvation has
appeared to all men.
And that grace in God, that's why we're
here, brethren.
I'd like to prove sometime that everything God
ever did since the beginning of time he
did out of grace.
I'd like to prove and I believe I
can show you that everything God does is
grace, that God never did anything by law,
never did anything by law, all is by
grace.
The psalmist used to pray, have mercy upon
me and hear my prayer, be gracious unto
me and hear my prayer.
He knew that God's willingness to hear prayer
was God's grace in operation.
The very stars and sun overhead are the
grace of God in operation.
Nobody deserves anything from God.
They could only get that.
One time more see the sovereignty of God
that God owes nobody anything and gives everybody
everything and therefore we owe him every gratitude
in all the world and all is by
grace.
When God made the heaven and the earth
it was by grace.
When he laid the foundations thereof it was
by grace.
When he girdled the earth with the firmament
it was by grace.
And when he made man upon the earth
and blew into his nostrils a breath of
life it was by grace.
And everything that God has ever done has
been out of the goodness of his heart.
But if the grace of God was only
a principle of which causes God to operate,
could never get to me.
But the grace of God is more than
that.
The grace of God enters human hearts and
other hearts I suppose.
I believe that the very angels in heaven
are motivated by the workings of God's love
and grace in their own hearts.
Although they never understand it quite as you
and I will.
The grace of God teaches us, enters our
hearts and teaches us.
But you know the devil has through false
teachers and ignorant teachers and persons who will
not think nor pray about things disassociated the
two meanings.
And we have only one meaning and that's
the one I've been talking about here now
for a few minutes.
The wonderful goodness of the heart of God
which gave us everything that we have.
Which gave us his son to die and
gave us eternal life without money and without
price.
Gave us mercy, gave us forgiveness and gave
us a place in heaven itself.
All this by grace.
And you can't overdo it.
You know you can't sing too loudly or
too often of the grace of God.
But here's what you can do.
You can misunderstand the meaning of it and
you can forget that it has its second
meaning.
The second meaning being, I repeat now for
the third time, the divine influence upon the
heart.
The inward enabling, the active moral force working
to teach us morality, spirituality, ethics, inward goodness.
But anybody that talks the way I do
now is attacked by these one definition boys.
They say he's a legalist.
Or they say he's seeking to be saved
by works.
I read that passage once, not by works
of righteousness which we have done.
According to his mercy he saved us.
I read that and I believe it.
Or they say he's mixing law and grace.
No, never mixed law and grace in my
life consciously.
And I don't think I'm doing it unconsciously.
You know the habit is now to blame
everything on the Scofield Bible.
Not I've said a few sharp things about
some of the notes myself, but the Scofield
Bible can't be blamed for this.
The Scofield Bible is 100% right in
its attitude toward grace.
Let me read a note on 2 Peter
3.18. I don't know who wrote it,
of course, one of the half dozen editors.
But it says under the caption, grace imparted,
here's what it says.
It says, grace is not only dispensationally a
method of divine dealing in salvation, it is
also the method of God in the believer's
life and service.
Having by grace brought the believer into the
highest conceivable position, God ceaselessly works through grace
to impart to and perfect him in corresponding
graces.
Perfectly right.
The grace of God that set him as
high as it's possible to set anything, above
the angels ultimately, ceaselessly works in him to
impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces.
Grace therefore, it continues, stands connected with service,
with Christian growth, and with giving.
So let's blame the Scofield Bible for that
one.
The brethren have gone far beyond in separating
grace from grace, the grace of God from
the grace in man.
Oh, my friends, let's not be satisfied to
keep all God's qualities in God.
God wants some of his qualities to get
into us.
There are attributes of God which no man
can share, for instance, his eternity, his self
-sufficiency, his infinitude, his incomprehensibility.
Those are attributes which belong to God, and
God cannot share them with creatures.
But there are other attributes that God can
share with creatures, kindness, love, mercy, grace, goodness,
wisdom.
Now I close, or rather just break it
off here, and any preacher's presence will know
this is no way to close a sermon.
But I'm going to close it this way,
that we have every scriptural reason to believe
that if grace has saved us, it has
also changed us.
We have every scriptural reason to believe that
if we are not changed by grace, we
are not saved by grace.
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation
has appeared, teaching us, denying ungodliness and worldly
lusts.
We should live soberly and righteously and godly,
and I shall show in a succeeding sermon
that soberly and righteously and godly takes in
the triangle of man's possible existence, God and
man and self, and all the ethics of
an Aristotle, all the righteousness of a Moses,
the holiness of a Paul, can't take the
man out of that triangle.
He's there, but it's as big and vast
as the heart of God.
So remember it, that if you believe you're
saved by grace, but there is not a
corresponding working within your heart toward holiness and
righteousness, you have, I have, must in honesty
tell you, you're probably deceived.
For the grace of God, when it's received,
when a man says, I accept salvation by
the grace of God through Jesus Christ, God
smiles and goes to work inside the man.
If the man really receives God, he goes
to work inside of him to produce the
very graces that the New Testament is chock
full of.
And so if a man says, technically, I
am saved by the grace of God, and
then goes his own way and isn't changed,
I believe he deceived man and completely deluded
and will be lost at last.
We're saved by grace under good works.
We're saved by grace, and the same grace
by which we are saved now becomes an
active force working within us to make us
pure and good and righteous.
May God grant that we will not miss
this, that we will not go so far
out on a limb in our committal to
the one meaning of the grace of God
that we forget there are any other meanings.
There is at least one other.
Let's trust him.
If he saved us by grace, let's trust
him to save us in grace, and that
grace may operate through us to make us
the kind of Christians that will adorn the
doctrine of Jesus Christ.