Mrs Effiong had run her canteen near Watt Market in Calabar for nineteen years. Everybody knew it: three wooden benches under a zinc roof, a long table covered with a flowered plastic cloth, and the best afang soup on the street. She kept her takings in a biscuit tin under the counter, and in nineteen years nobody had ever touched it.
Then one Friday afternoon, at the busiest hour, a thin boy of about fourteen slipped behind the counter while she was dishing rice, grabbed a fistful of notes from the tin and ran. He did not get far. Someone shouted “Ole!”, and within seconds a crowd had caught him at the corner. By the time Mrs Effiong reached them, pushing through with her ladle still in her hand, the boy was on the ground with his arms over his head, and somebody was already asking for a tyre.
“Leave him,” she said. Her voice was quiet, and people in that market knew it. “He is my matter. I will deal with him.” The crowd grumbled and slowly let go.
She took the boy to the back of the canteen, sat him on an upturned crate, and counted the crumpled notes he handed back. Then she dished him a plate of rice and fish. He stared at it as if it might be a trick. His name was Obioma. His father had died two years before. His mother was sick in the village. He had been sleeping in the market for four months.
When he had eaten, Mrs Effiong said, “Come back tomorrow at six o’clock. Not seven. Six.” He did not come at six. He came at half past five, and he was waiting on the bench when she arrived to open up.
That was the beginning. She did not hand him over to the crowd, and she did not hand him over to the police. But she did not leave him as he was either. The same morning that he arrived early, she put a scrubbing brush in his hand and pointed to a mountain of pots.
A letter to an island with a reputation
Paul’s letter to Titus is one of the clearest places in Scripture to see how grace and holiness belong together. It was written to a young pastor left on the island of Crete, “that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city” (Titus 1:5).
Crete had a reputation. Paul quotes one of the island’s own poets: “The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies” (Titus 1:12). Lying, brutality and idle greed were what the ancient world expected of Cretans. And some of the people troubling the young churches there were no better. “They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him” (Titus 1:16). They talked about God and lived as though He made no difference.
So Paul writes to Titus about ordinary behaviour. He tells him what to teach older men and older women, younger women and younger men, and household servants. Be sober. Be kind. Be self-controlled. Be honest. He tells servants to show “all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things” (Titus 2:10).
That word adorn is kosmeo, from which we get cosmetic. It means to arrange beautifully, to make attractive. A believer’s everyday conduct either decorates the gospel or disfigures it. A household servant who would not steal, in a society where stealing was expected, made the teaching about God look beautiful.
PunchlineThen, having given all these practical instructions, Paul explains the reason behind them. And the reason is grace.
The grace that has appeared
Here is the sentence on which the whole letter turns:
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.
The verse begins with “For.” Everything Paul has just said about honest, sober, kind behaviour rests on what he is about to say about grace. In Titus, holiness is what the gospel produces.
“The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared.” The word appeared is epiphaino, to shine forth, to become visible. Grace appeared in a Person. When Jesus was born, lived, died and rose again, the grace of God became visible in human history. And it “bringeth salvation” to all men, offering rescue to Cretan liars and Lagos traders and you.
Then Paul says something that surprises people who think of grace only as pardon. This grace is “Teaching us.” Earlier articles in this series have looked at the word Paul uses, which describes the training of a child by a parent over many years. That is exactly what Mrs Effiong did with Obioma. Her mercy at the corner was where his training began. The same grace that rescued him from the crowd put the scrubbing brush in his hand.
What does grace teach? First, a refusal: “denying ungodliness and worldly lusts.” The word denying means to say no, to disown. Grace teaches us to say no to things we once said yes to without thinking. It does not leave us helpless before every desire.
Second, a way of life, described in three words that face in three directions. Soberly faces inward: a clear-headed self-control over one’s own appetites and impulses. Righteously faces outward: just and fair dealing with other people. Godly faces upward: a life of reverence toward God. Grace reorders a person’s relationship with himself, with his neighbour and with his Maker.
And all of this is “in this present world”: here, in the market, in the office, in the household, among people who expect you to behave like everybody else.
NuggetGrace is not only the pardon that receives us. It is the teacher that trains us, in this present world, to live the life its mercy has made possible.
Redeemed and purified for Himself
Paul continues with two more verses that complete the thought. Grace teaches us to live this way while we are “Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Grace has appeared once, in Christ’s first coming; it will appear again in glory. Holiness is lived between those two appearings, with the eyes of the heart lifted toward the second.
Then Paul tells us why Christ came at all: “Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14).
Look at the purpose. Christ gave Himself “that he might redeem us from all iniquity.” The word redeem means to set free by paying a ransom. The word iniquity here is anomia, lawlessness, the life that answers to no one but itself. He paid the ransom to set us free from that life, and to leave us living it with a quieter conscience was never His aim.
And He did it to “purify unto himself a peculiar people.” The word peculiar does not mean odd. It means belonging to Him in a special way, His own treasured possession. The Greek word is the same one used in the Greek Old Testament when God told Israel at Sinai that they would be “a peculiar treasure unto me above all people.” We will look at that verse in a moment, because it holds the key to the whole relationship between grace and holiness.
Notice the last phrase: “zealous of good works.” Grace produces zeal, eagerness, enthusiasm for doing good, where law so often produced reluctant, minimal obedience. The people Christ has purified are meant to be keen on goodness, the way a young footballer is keen on the game.
Belonging comes before behaviour
When God gave Israel the law at Sinai, He did not begin with the commandments. He began with a reminder of what He had already done:
Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.
“Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.” Before there was a single commandment, there was a rescue. God had already redeemed Israel from slavery. He had already carried them. He had already brought them to Himself. Only then does He speak of obedience.
The Ten Commandments themselves begin in the same way: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). The first word is a statement of relationship. I am your God. I brought you out. Then come the commands, as the way of life that fits a redeemed people.
The order matters enormously. God never said, “Keep these laws, and I will rescue you from Egypt.” He rescued them first, and then He told them how a rescued people should live. Moses later explained why God had chosen them at all: “The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people” (Deuteronomy 7:7). His love came first. It was not earned.
Peter takes these very words and applies them to the church: “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9). The same pattern holds under the New Covenant, and even more fully. We are holy, set apart, God’s own, because He has redeemed us in Christ. Then we are called to live out what we are.
That is why holiness grows from belonging to Christ. It is not the price of admission into God’s family. It is the family likeness that grows in those who have already been brought in. Obioma did not earn his place in Mrs Effiong’s canteen by scrubbing pots. He scrubbed pots because he had been given a place.
Holy in every part of life
Peter develops this same theme in the opening chapter of his first letter. Writing to scattered believers who had been born again “unto a lively hope,” he says, “Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:13).
Notice that Peter places holiness between two experiences of grace. Grace has already given these believers new birth. Grace will be “brought unto” them when Jesus is revealed. The Christian life is lived in the space between grace received and grace still to come, which is exactly what Paul said to Titus. Holiness is a life suspended between two great gifts.
Then Peter says: “As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves according to the former lusts in your ignorance: But as he which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:14-16).
The word fashioning is the same word Paul uses in Romans 12:2, where he says, “be not conformed to this world.” It means to be pressed into a mould. Before they knew Christ, these believers had been shaped by their own desires, in ignorance of anything better. Now they know better. They need not let those old desires press them into the old shape.
“In all manner of conversation.” In the King James English, conversation means conduct, the whole way a person lives. Holiness reaches far beyond Sunday and religious habits. It reaches the way you speak to your house help, the way you handle the company car, the way you talk about your in-laws, the way you treat the boy who once stole from you.
And the reason Peter gives is a family reason: “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” Children grow to resemble their father. The holiness God asks of us is His own character, reproduced in His children. That is a call to growth, and it carries no threat of rejection. It is what belonging to Him naturally leads to.
Servants of righteousness
Paul faced the objection that grace would make people careless. In Romans 6 he asks it directly: “What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are” (Romans 6:15-16). Everyone serves something. Then he presses the point home:
I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
“I speak after the manner of men.” Paul apologises for using the picture of slavery, because it is imperfect. Serving God is nothing like the crushing servitude of sin. But the picture helps. Just as you once handed your body over to uncleanness, “even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.”
That phrase unto holiness is important. The word is hagiasmos, and it describes a process: sanctification, the ongoing growth of holiness. Paul does not imagine that believers become perfectly holy in a moment. He pictures a direction of travel. Each choice to yield to righteousness leads further into holiness, just as each choice to yield to sin once led further into iniquity.
Then comes one of the most searching questions in the New Testament: “What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed?” Paul asks his readers to look honestly at the old life. What did it actually give you? What did the lies, the bitterness, the immorality, the greed produce? Only shame, and finally death.
“But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.” The new life bears a different crop. And then the famous summary: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The word wages was used of a soldier’s pay ration. Sin pays exactly what it owes, and what it owes is death. God gives what no one has earned. Holiness grows in people who have received a gift, and it grows as the fruit of that gift.
Grace never blesses what harms
This brings us to a confusion that has done real damage in the church. Some people speak as though receiving God’s unearned favour means that nothing a believer does can be called wrong, and that any call to holiness is a return to legalism. In that atmosphere, people begin to treat tolerance of anything as the highest Christian virtue. Cruelty in a marriage, dishonesty in business, gossip that ruins reputations, the exploitation of workers: all of it is covered with the words “we are under grace.”
Paul would not recognise that as grace. And he was no stranger to how deep God’s mercy goes. In the third chapter of Titus he describes the life every believer once lived: “For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Titus 3:3). Notice the word we. Paul includes himself. Then he says that God saved us by His mercy, through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, and never by any works of righteousness we had done (Titus 3:5).
Look closely at that description of the old life. Malice, envy, hatred: it is a description of people harming one another. When Paul thinks about what grace rescued us from, he does not think only of private guilt before God. He thinks of the damage we used to do to the people around us. Grace saved us out of that life. It would be strange indeed if the same grace then asked us to make peace with it.
That is why, immediately after describing God’s mercy, Paul writes:
This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men.
“That they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable unto men.” Paul wants Titus to keep saying this constantly. Holiness is owed to God, and it is also profitable unto men. It does people good. It makes homes safer, markets fairer and churches healthier. That is one of the plainest tests of whether something is truly holy: does it bless people, or does it harm them?
Love, Paul says elsewhere, “worketh no ill to his neighbour” (Romans 13:10). Love “Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). And he commands, “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good” (Romans 12:9). A love that shrugs at what wounds people is not Christian love at all. It is indifference wearing love’s clothes.
The prophet Micah summarised what God had always wanted from His people:
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Justice, mercy and humility before God. Grace has never competed with them. Grace produces them. When someone uses God’s favour as a reason to excuse injustice or cruelty, Jude says they are “turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness” (Jude 1:4). They have taken a gift meant to heal and used it as a cover for harm.
So let it be said plainly: receiving unearned favour never makes love for what harms people a Christian virtue. Where abuse is happening, grace never asks anyone to endure it in silence. It calls for safety, for truth and, where needed, for the authorities and qualified help. Where wrong has been done, grace calls for confession and repair.
But a word of balance is needed here too. There is a harsh kind of holiness that is just as far from the gospel. It is quick to condemn, slow to help, and more interested in looking pure than in doing good. Jesus, who was perfectly holy, was called a friend of sinners. His holiness drew broken people toward Him. If our version of holiness drives the broken away while leaving us feeling superior, it is not His holiness either. The holiness grace produces is warm, honest and good for people.
Love in deed and in truth
John brings the whole matter down to the most practical level:
Hereby perceive we the love of God , because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.
“Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us.” Everything begins with what God has done. Grace is first and foremost the love of God shown at the cross. “And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love we receive becomes the love we give.
Then John asks a question that cuts through all religious talk: “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” Holiness includes the good we do as well as the things we avoid. A believer who keeps every rule but closes his heart to a brother in need has missed the centre of it.
“My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” That is holiness in its simplest form: love made real in action, flowing from a heart that has been loved by God.
How does grace train us in this, day by day? Usually through very ordinary means. It speaks through the Scriptures, as we read them and let them correct and shape us. It works through the Spirit’s conviction, the inner nudge that says, “Not that word,” or “Go back and apologise,” or “Give to that person.” It works through the fellowship of other believers who encourage us, model godliness for us, and sometimes tell us hard truths. And it works through the steady practice of saying no to what we know is wrong and yes to what we know is good, until the new way becomes the natural way.
PunchlineAll of it is the fruit of having received God’s favour. None of it earns that favour.
Obioma stayed with Mrs Effiong for six years. He began with the pots. Then she taught him to grind pepper, to prepare the vegetables for afang, to judge the oil by its smell. Eventually she taught him to keep the accounts, and she put the biscuit tin in his care.
There was one bad week, in the second year. A small amount went missing from the tin, and Obioma did not deny it when she asked. Mrs Effiong did not send him away. But she sat him down on the same upturned crate and said, “I did not pull you out of that crowd so that you could become what they said you were.” Then she made him repay every naira from his wages, and she told him that she still trusted him. He told me years later that he had cried more that day than on the day the crowd caught him.
Today Obioma runs his own canteen near the university. It has four tables and an electric fan, and its afang is almost as good as hers. A few months ago a boy of about thirteen started hanging around the back, looking hungry. Obioma gave him a plate of rice and fish. Then he said, “Come back tomorrow at six. Not seven. Six.”
That is the relationship between grace and holiness. Grace pulls us out of the crowd that would destroy us. It feeds us when we have nothing. And then it puts a brush in our hands and begins to teach us a new life, patiently, in this present world, until we become people who can do for others what was done for us.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In Titus 2:11-12, grace “teaches.” What has grace been teaching you recently, in the inward, outward and upward directions of your life?
- Why does it matter that God rescued Israel before He gave them the commandments? How does that order shape the way you think about your own obedience?
- Paul asks, “What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed?” What honest answer would you give about your old way of life?
- Have you ever heard grace used as an excuse for something that harms people? How would you answer that use of it from Titus 3:8 and Romans 13:10?
- Is there someone in need whom you have been loving “in word” rather than “in deed and in truth”? What would one practical step look like?
This Week
Read Titus 2 and 3 at the start of this week, slowly, and underline every place where Paul links what God has done with how we should live. Then each day choose one of the three words in Titus 2:12: soberly for your own appetites and habits, righteously for the way you treat others, and godly for your relationship with God. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you one concrete way grace is training you in that area, and act on it before the day ends. At the end of the week, do one deliberate good work for someone who cannot repay you, as an expression of the grace you have received.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that Your grace has appeared in Jesus, and that it brought salvation to me when I had nothing to offer. Thank You for rescuing me before You ever asked anything of me, and for making me Your own. Teach me by Your grace to say no to ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. Make me zealous of good works, and let my life be good and profitable to the people around me. Keep me from ever using Your kindness as an excuse for harm, and keep me from a hard and loveless holiness. Let me love in deed and in truth, as You have loved me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.