TEXT: Titus 2:11-15 (for both the content of vv. 11-14 and the exhortation regarding that content in v. 15)

I had been thinking for some weeks about how I would use this single Lord's Day evening in August. We had completed a short series on the assurance of salvation before I left for my vacation and will not begin another series until I return from Europe three Lord's Days from now. As often happens, things fell together in such a way as to set a particular subject on my mind. Two things in particular.

The first was that in the conversation with the pastor of the church in Cripple Creek -- a Calvinist by the way and a man who, though he has had the advantage of neither Bible College or Seminary, has thought carefully about the faith and the message that he is charged to bring to men -- he raised for discussion the dislike of doctrine that he finds in some of his people.

Now I grew up in a communion full of people who had a suspicion about the virtue of doctrine and instruction in doctrine. It was often referred to in terms of the inferiority of head knowledge to heart knowledge, with doctrine, of course, being knowledge only of the head and not the heart. They argued that doctrine was dry and stuffy and unhelpful. What is more, because you can hardly discuss Christian doctrine without acknowledging the differences of opinion that exist in the church, the doctrinal divisions that have fractured the church, preaching and teaching doctrine, many have argued, is divisive. It accentuates our differences instead of that which all Christians have in common. These people wanted sermons that aimed for the heart more than the head, that taught us to love Christ and one another and left doctrinal matters to the private judgment of Christians or to Presbytery meetings where ministers and elders could dispute out of the hearing of the congregations. In an extreme form there were evangelicals whose rallying cry was "no creed but Christ, no law but love."

The other side weighed in with arguments of its own. Doctrine, they pointed out, was simply another name for teaching and if one was to be loyal to the Bible one could not avoid the preaching and teaching of doctrine, for the Bible was full of it. What is more, in the Bible itself, doctrine is regularly presented controversially, with attention to other views that, though attractive to some Christians, are, in fact, wrong and dangerous. Paul distinguishes his view of justification from that of the Jews and the Judaizers, John refutes the doctrine of Christ held by Cerinthus and his followers, and so on. And, then they argued, no Christian should find doctrine boring or dull for that would be tantamount to admitting they found the great themes of the Bible boring, the great subjects of God and his works dull, something a Christian might guiltily admit but certainly should never defend.

This debate died down somewhat in our circles in the 1960s and 1970s as the church rediscovered her past. She learned that doctrinal preaching that was boring was the fault of the preacher and not the doctrine, for great preaching in the past -- that of the Puritans for example, or the Great Awakening men (Whitefield, Edwards and the like) -- was both highly doctrinal in content and riveting and life-changing and soul-stirring in form. What is more, men like Martin Lloyd-Jones in London, reminded our churches and their young ministers that the teaching or doctrine of the Bible was to be the subject of their sermons and it was the minister's job to ensure to demonstrate how profoundly interesting and relevant all of that teaching truly is. The remarkable thing about the sermons of Lloyd-Jones, and you notice this still today when you read them, is how much they are given over to doctrinal argument, doctrine even down to the fine points. They are, to be sure, intensely interesting, helpful, and relevant and they are deeply spiritual -- by that I mean that they deal in a profound way with the life of the soul and communion with God -- but they are primarily doctrinal argument. Often they are 12 to 14 pages of argument and there isn't an illustration to be found in all of those pages. Yet these were the sermons that filled that huge church in London all those years, even on Friday nights; these were the sermons that brought new life in Christ to so many and that stirred the souls of so many Christians who heard them, who flocked to hear them.

Anyway, my friend was wondering aloud how best to respond to the charge that doctrine was dulling and divisive and I began to think about your knowledge of biblical doctrine and what I wanted to be true about you in that regard.

[I should say, as an aside, that in our own day doctrinal preaching is once again disappearing from Christian pulpits. Its revival has been short-lived. In the so-called "seeker friendly" churches it is thought too daunting and difficult and uninteresting for unbelievers and so it has been replaced with sermons about human experience and relationships, ethical issues, and so on. "Transactional theology," the doctrines of classical Christianity touching on the salvation of sinners: the nature of God, creation, fall, human guilt, atonement, regeneration, faith, justification, and so on, has been replaced by what is called "Interpersonal theology" a concentration instead on the experience of people, their relationships in the world of grace, their responsibilities in those relationships, and so on. For every sermon on the divine holiness or the nature of the atonement, there are 25 sermons on how to be happy in marriage, how to raise your children, how to handle you money, how to deal with your disappointments, etc.]

And, then, a particular doctrinal issue surfaced again and again in my summer reading. I mentioned last Lord's Day morning the little collection of the sayings of Rabbi Duncan, Just a Talker. Duncan's was a very fertile mind and one of the marks of his genius was his ability to state the implications of biblical doctrine in a most striking, memorable, and helpful way. Time after time, while reading this book, I have stopped to take something down from it into the margins of my Bible because he shows the practical effect of the Bible's doctrine so clearly and usefully.

You remember that I cited him frequently in that short series on assurance because he was a man who thought very deeply and well about that subject -- it being so important and, in a way, so confusing to him personally.

It was Rabbi Duncan, you may remember, who said in regard to the two main pillars of the three pillars of the assurance of salvation -- the promises of the gospel in the first place and the marks of a renewed life in the second --:

"Let us seek to have well-grounded marks of saintship, but when the push comes, nothing but imputed righteousness will stand the day. It is there we began, and it is there we must end." [32]

Well, brothers and sisters, "marks of saintship" and "imputed righteousness" are doctrines and they are the kind of doctrines Christian people ought to understand with real spiritual sophistication. They bear mightily on the most important questions of life and salvation, they bear, as we said in our series on assurance on our happiness and our fruitfulness as Christians in a most telling way, they bear on our worship, on our holiness, on our usefulness to God and others.

But, then I was doing other reading on my vacation. I was also trying to finish a magnificent new biography of Thomas Cranmer, the great Reformer of the English Church, author of the Book of Common Prayer -- the greatest single influence on the worship of the English speaking Christian church --, and a particularly heroic Christian martyr during the days of Mary Tudor, the infamous "Bloody Mary." This is the way with me, I confess. I get a book, read enough here and there to gather its gist, pick out the best parts, and then, often set it down because there are so many other books to read. Only later then do I have to force myself back to that book to wade through all the details. And, believe me, in this book of almost 700 large pages, there are a lot of details! Every thrust, every parry of the long battle for the soul of the English church is described. If you want to know what a true scholar is and does, read this book, the fruit of what must have been unending labor by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

But, in the course of this reading, I came across the issue of justification and the relationship between imputed righteousness and Christian works or sanctification over and over again -- between as Duncan put it, "the marks of saintship" and "imputed righteousness". We had discussed this question not so long ago, you may remember, in the series on Roman Catholicism, but here it was again. In fact, I thought several times that I wished MacCulloch's book on Cranmer had come into my hands before I preached that series on the contemporary challenge of Roman Catholicism.

Henry VIII was not only a man with marriage on his mind, he prided himself on being an amateur theologian. And Cranmer, whose convictions about justification by faith alone and salvation by grace alone were growing clearer and more firm all the while, sometimes found himself having carefully and delicately to sidestep the wording that the King was proposing for some theological document or another. For Henry was a man of the medieval church, and if you have any doubts about the fact that the reformers faced a church that had replaced grace with works at the key points, you have only to read what King Henry VIII would write from time to time about justification, about how salvation came to sinful man.

What was especially interesting indeed, was how the debate between King Henry and Cranmer (others were involved, of course), was conducted along virtually the identical lines along which it is conducted today between the former evangelicals who have converted to Rome and those who maintain the Reformation viewpoint. It was and it is a doctrinal dispute over the relationship between faith and works in justification and salvation.

Henry often expressed his worry -- the kind of thing that might particularly worry a King concerned about public order -- that to say that justification came through faith alone was bound to undermine morality. (Catholic apologists make the same argument today.) By removing our works from justification, you remove the real value and importance of good works and thus undermine public morality. [210-211; 346-347] Henry was always wanting to return to the old medieval way of stating the point in order to defend the place of morality and good works in the Christian religion.

In one case, he wanted to add to a statement about the faithful inheriting the kingdom of God the words "as long as I persevere in his precepts and laws" [210]. In another case he suggested changing the statement "we may attribute all to [God's] will" to "we may attribute all to our desert" [210].

Well this is an issue of Christian doctrine and a supremely important one. How are we to relate justification by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ -- that is, we are right before God because his righteousness is counted as though it were ours because he performed it for us on our behalf and because we have received him as our Savior by faith -- how are we to relate that

to the demand for good works and holy living that we also find categorically set before us and all men in the Bible.

It is the same issue to which Rabbi Duncan gave himself in his day -- not so much against Roman Catholics, as against various protestants with different views about assurance and different views about the relationship between faith and works, between Christ's righteousness and the believer's righteousness. It is "marks of saintship" and "imputed righteousness" all over again. It is an issue that separates Roman Catholics from Protestants, but as well Protestants from one another.

It is hardly a small issue, hardly a dry and uninteresting question of mere doctrine. Failure to get this right has destroyed countless multitudes of souls. And failure is as possible on the one side as the other. There are hosts of people in the church who think themselves Christians and who die and wake up in hell because they were trusting their salvation not to Christ's work for them but to their own goodness, their own religious observances, even their own evangelical faith and life [As Rabbi Duncan wisely says in another place, "It was not your faith that was crucified for you."]. A very large part of the Bible is an impassioned protest against this error of a misplaced trust and warning of its dire and eternal consequences. This was the message of the OT prophets, of Jesus in his own preaching, and of Paul in his letters, especially his letters to the Romans and to the Galatians.

But, on the other side, the Bible warns in no uncertain terms of the equally fatal error of supposing that because we trust in Christ, because we call him our Savior, because we are not counting on our own righteousness, we grow lax in obedience and good works. Jesus spoke of those whom he would shut the door against on the great day because, though they called to him "Lord, Lord," even served him by driving out demons in his name, they did not do the will of the Father in heaven. This is the theme, in Matt. 25, of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and of the Lord's solemn account of the separation of the sheep and the goats on the day of judgment.

You have Roman Catholics arguing the place of the believer's merit in justification on the one hand, and you have the men of "The Grace Evangelical Society" -- the opponents of John MacArthur in the dispute over his book The Gospel of Jesus, defenders of what is widely called "the carnal Christian theory", teaching that a person can be righteous before God in the righteousness of Christ received by faith, and never actually go on to live a Christian life, a devout or obedient life; he or she is in the church but of the world, but still is saved. The Catholics argue that the doctrine of justification by faith alone leaves out good works and is heretical. These evangelical men argue that any insistence on the necessity of good works for salvation undermines the doctrine of salvation by grace alone and is, for that reason, heretical. Always, everywhere, Christians are pitting these two doctrines against one another. You will hear this being done all your lives long. An emphasis on obedience will be mistaken for legalism; an emphasis on grace leads others to carelessness of life. We had an examination in Presbytery not so long ago when a PCA minister seemed to confuse an emphasis on obedience with legalism.

There is hardly a set of biblical doctrines more easily confused that this brace of doctrines: justification by faith and judgment according to works, or justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ and the absolute necessity of holiness for salvation. But if there is an area of doctrine in which we all must be expert, it is this area of doctrine. Our sinful hearts are always falling to the left or the right, it is very hard to maintain a proper biblical balance, but Christian fruitfulness and salvation itself depends upon that balance. How essential then that we understand these doctrines and hold them in their proper relation to one another. But that it is no simple thing.

Paul puts them together very naturally here in Titus 2:11-14. On the one hand, God's grace brings salvation, Christ has redeemed us from all wickedness. On the other that saving grace of God teaches us to say "No" to worldly passions and Christ redeemed us in order that we might be eager to do what is good. He does not reflect on how these two emphases go together, the Bible almost never does. He simply states them both together.

Each of those points is elaborated in thousands of texts in the Bible. On the one hand there are those emphasizing salvation by grace and justification by faith alone on the one hand and the impossibility of achieving peace with God through our own efforts -- our guilt completely and everlastingly swept away by the imputation to us of the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ and our being, consequently, held in God's sight as if we had, like Christ himself, never sinned nor been a sinner. And so with Bernard of Clairvaux we say, concerning the possibility of offering to God any obedience worthy of a divine verdict of justification, "So far from being able to answer for my sins, I cannot answer even for my righteousness." [In James Buchanan, Justification, 92] And as our old fathers would have put it, "A convinced sinner seeking justification must have nothing in his eye but this righteousness of Christ." [Robert Traill]

On the other hand, we have also text after text teaching in the sternest possible fashion that we will not be saved if we are not holy, if we do not obey, if we do not perform the works of God, if we do not confess Christ before men, if we do not give up houses, fields, husbands, wives, etc., if we do not take up our cross to follow Christ, if we do not walk in his steps. Or, as our old fathers would have said, "The garments of Christ's righteousness must not be made a cloak for sin."

How do we hold those things together? How do we prevent an emphasis on obedience and good works from weakening our grip on justification by faith alone? And how do we prevent a commitment to justification by Christ's imputed righteousness received by faith alone from causing us to lose our zeal for the life of obedience. If our good works are left out of our peace with God must we not eventually care less to perform good works? But, if we concentrate on our good works, do we not take the attention to ourselves and diminish the place of Christ in our salvation? THERE IS THE PROBLEM! THAT IS ALWAYS THE PROBLEM!

And it will not surprise you to hear me say once more that there is only one solution to that problem, one way of holding these different emphases together in a properly biblical fashion, one way of doing justice to both and betraying neither.

And that to hold to both doctrines with a vengeance, without apology, and with much less concern to reconcile them than to do justice to their different emphases. As Chesterton put it: "Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious." Or as the great Charles Simeon put it: the truth does not lie in one extreme or the other, nor does it lie in the middle; it lies in both extremes.

McCheyne had a minister friend, John Muir, and he said about him on one occasion: "Muir is imputed righteousness to the backbone!" Well, good for him. That is what I want you all to be: imputed righteousness to the backbone. I don't want there to be a congregation in the far-flung church of Jesus Christ that more loves the doctrine of imputed righteousness, more loves to proclaim it, and is more ready to apply it to the wounds and the fears and the confusions of human beings than you. Christ for us; Christ in our place; Christ's perfect righteousness now our righteousness because we have trusted ourselves to him and to his life and death in our place. The utter annihilation of guilt -- however great the sin, whether our sin or the sin of a brother or sister -- because of the payment for that guilt that the Son of God laid at the feet of the Judge of all the earth when he died for his people on the cross. The promise of a full and free forgiveness to every sinner -- no matter what he or she has done; no matter how vicious the sins; no matter how defiantly committed against God and man -- if only he or she will turn to Jesus and believe. I want us to glory in that doctrine; I want us always to be talking about it to one another; and always applying its indescribably happy truth to our own hearts and the hearts of others. I want there to be in everything we are and do as a people this conviction as a burning in the heart: "God forbid that we should boast save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."

But, I also want you all to be good works and saying "No" to worldly passions to the backbone. I want you to believe that there is no salvation at all that does not produce this holiness in people, that does not set them to love the law of God and to strive to serve Christ as Lord and Master. I want you to refuse to budge at this point, to demand that our faith produce a real holiness -- to demand it of ourselves and to demand it of one another and to declare it in the explanations we make to those who do not yet believe. And I want you to do that as a people who love the imputed righteousness of Christ and believe in that righteousness as the ground of your peace with God and believe it to the backbone. I want there to be in our hearts always as a burning conviction "Unless we take up our cross and follow him, we cannot be his disciples" and "work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is in you both to will and to work for his good purpose."

For us Christ will be our Savior and our Lord, our Redeemer and our Master, our High Priest and our King, our atoning sacrifice and our example that we should follow in his steps.

Depending upon the person, the situation -- one or the other of these doctrines, these truths, will be in our mouth -- free grace and imputed righteousness or the demand to obey and the terrible danger of disobedience. On the one hand "The Good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep and they shall never perish" and on the other "we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds done in the body, whether good or evil." On the one hand, "the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord"; and on the other hand, "the day is coming and now is when the dead shall hear his voice and come out. Those who have done good will rise to live and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned." Believing the one as the other because it is the Word of God. Living the one as the other because only both together are the salvation of our God.

And loving the one as the other because we know that no one can really avail himself of Christ's righteousness who does not love that righteousness and wish to emulate it in his life and no one can possibly serve and obey God or deny the passions of the world who is not empowered to do so by the experience of God's mercy and the love he feels for his Redeemer.