Week 2: The Role of Grace in Change

Most of us have one sin that hasn't moved in months, and we handle it one of two ways: we tighten the screws, or we shrug and call the settling maturity. Paul knew both men. To Titus he writes that the grace of God appeared — it has a date and a face — and that the same grace is instructing us, a word a first-century household used for raising a child. Grace pardons, and then grace raises; one appearing does both, and nothing has to be added to grace to get obedience out of it. To the Romans he answers the man who had done the arithmetic on "where sin multiplied, grace multiplied even more" and concluded he could keep sinning. Paul doesn't answer him with a rule. He answers with a burial: we were buried with Christ in baptism, and what came up out of the water was a person with a life to walk in. That ending was total, the way a graveside is total, and it is why sin no longer rules a Christian even on the mornings he can't feel the difference.

The training that follows is usually undramatic — a sentence that won't leave us alone on a Tuesday, a conscience that stings earlier than it used to — and all of it is the same grace that saved us, doing the second half of its work. Christ gave himself to make a people his own possession, and he did not go to that trouble in order to leave us where he found us.