God’s grace is indeed amazing—and it is so contrary to human nature. We want to do it ourselves.

Materialism says, “Buy your way out.” Politics say, “Legislate your way out.” Militarism says, “Fight your way out.” Industry says, “Work your way out.” Philosophy says, “Think your way out.” Deception says, “Bluff your way out.” But the grace of God is the only way out of our sin and its all-encompassing consequences.

Christians, this world is not our home. A stranger is someone away from home; a vagabond has no home, but a pilgrim is someone who is going home. We are pilgrims. We are on our way to glory, but while we are on our way, we are to demonstrate the wonderful grace of God to all of those about us.

The Apostle Paul wrote to Titus to encourage him in that very thing—and to remind us why we can, and must, live grace-filled lives.

Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men. For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3:1-7).

In this passage, Paul divides our spiritual life into three categories that are quite natural: the past, the present, and the future.

God’s Grace Delivered Us From Past Guilt

Paul discusses what each of us used to be, when we were dead in our sins.

For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another (Titus 3:3).

These include intellectual sins, moral sins, and social sins. It’s all right there.

Grace Means Deliverance from Intellectual Sins

The Foolish—Cannot Understand Grace

The word foolish does not mean lacking in intelligence. You can have a big IQ and be foolish; the Bible says that great men are not always wise. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Question: if we are so smart, why are we in such a mess?

The movers and shakers, the statesmen, the philosophers, the educators, do not understand this. The Gospel is foolishness to them.

The Disobedient—Obstinate Against Grace

Paul says we were disobedient in our state before grace. Do you know what disobedient means? It does not simply mean that we do not obey, but has the idea of willfulness, obstinance, stubbornness. It is disobedience to the light of truth—that is, not wanting to know the truth.

It has the idea of being unyielding. And then, as Paul says, we were deceived.

The Deceived—Blind to Grace

Why were we so foolish? Why were we so willfully disobedient before we were saved? Because there is a devil, the great deceiver.

That is how we all were, intellectually, before we were saved. No one like this—and again, we were all like this—would be saved apart from the grace of God.

Grace Means Deliverance from Moral Sins

In addition to our intellectual sin, in our sinful state we were all “serving various lusts and pleasures.” We were habitual slaves to our fleshly passions.

Living in sin is not only a vice but also a trap. The more we are into it, the deeper we sink. This may be the sins of the back alley, the drugs and sex and violence. It may be the refined pleasures and treasures of the social club and the boulevard and the niceties of this world. But it makes no difference: sin is sin.

Grace Means Deliverance from Social Sins

Then Paul talks about what we were socially—sinful people relating together in further sin.

Without grace, we are naturally hateful—that is, full of hate.

The problem is in us. You may say, “I can’t get along with other people.” It is because you cannot get along with yourself.

Most of us have a distaste for hatefulness, even though we are hateful ourselves. But did you know that self-righteousness is the most stinking sin of all?

It is not the amount of sin, but the fact of sin that condemns us.

We Walk in God’s Grace in the Present

In Titus 3:3, Paul told us what we were. That was our past guilt, from which we needed redemption.

Now let’s look at verse four. What is the first word? “But…” You should love that little word, “but.” God turns the corner in this verse.

Grace Means Unmerited Favor

But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit…(Titus 3:4-5).

God does not love us because we are valuable—we are valuable because God loves us. That is grace. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). That is what the Gospel is all about.

Grace in Christ Jesus, the Only Hope of Salvation

Paul reminds us, in Titus 3:4 above, that we are not saved by works of righteousness that we have done. How could we have saved ourselves that way? “We are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6a). If you are still trying to work your way to Heaven, how do you plan to do it? You have no righteousness of your own—without grace, you are filthy in God’s sight.

Here is how the grace of God describes salvation: it is not do, nor is it don’t. It is done. It is not addition—there is nothing good you can do that will take away the consequences of what you have already done. It is not subtraction—there is nothing you can stop doing to earn righteousness. If you stop getting drunk without getting saved, you will just go to Hell sober.

Sin must be atoned for, and if you try anything other than the grace of God for it, you will die and go to Hell.

There is a story somewhere about a man who fell out of a boat into the Niagara River, flowing toward the falls. People threw him a rope and he held it for a while, but then he saw a log coming past—and he let go of the rope and grabbed hold of the log. Both he and the log went over Niagara falls. No matter what else you are holding onto, if you are not linked by the rope of grace to the heart of God, you will perish.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).

The Gift of Grace

Grace is a gift to your everyday life—think of it as such! Be thankful that it does not depend on you! It is by grace you are saved from your past guilt, and by grace that you continue to walk with Jesus through your Christian life.

Salvation in Christ Jesus

Titus 3:4 calls God our Savior. But verse six calls Jesus Christ our Savior.

He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior (Titus 3:5b-6).

Is God our Savior, or is Jesus Christ our Savior? Yes. The answer is yes.

Jesus Christ died for us. That was the sacrificial work of the Savior. He provided Himself as an innocent sacrifice. He bore our sin. Jesus stepped out of Heaven, came to this Earth, lived a sinless life, and allowed the puny hands of man to strike Him. In the judgment hall of Pilate, they beat Him, mocked Him, played games with the King of Kings. The Son of God was brutalized by wicked sinners. Human spittle covered the face of God.

Then they took Him out, stripped His garments from Him, and put Him on a rack until His back was smooth as silk. Then some psychopathic dungeon keeper, who was probably a volunteer for the job, took a whip called a “cat of nine tails” with little bits of bone and nail and glass on the ends and began to flay open the back of the Lord Jesus Christ. Flesh would have hung down like ribbons. Many people died just from this type of flogging.

But they were not done with Christ. They put a purple robe on Him, a wilted reed in His hand, a crown of thorns on His head, and they bowed down and mocked, “Hail, King of the Jews!”

Then they stripped Him of that robe, stretched Him out on a hellish cross, took great spikes and a cold hammer, and drove those nails through the quivering, torn flesh on His hands and feet. They lifted up that cross and dropped it into place.

Jesus Christ hung there above the taunting rabble and suffered as no one else has ever suffered.

Why more than others? Other people were flogged and crucified, too.

But it was not the fists in His face, nor the nails in His body, nor the crown of thorns on His head, nor the mockery. Consider this: God the Father had to turn His back on Jesus. Jesus, He who knew no sin, became sin Himself. The Bible says of God, “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13a). Jesus carried our sin to the cross, to pay our price, and suffered like no one else before or since has ever suffered because He was cast away from His Father entirely.

Do you know what to call that? Grace.

The Holy Spirit Applies Grace to Everyday Living

God’s grace is the sovereign love of the Father and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

…according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit… (Titus 3:5b).

Salvation is supernatural. This washing of regeneration is not referring to baptism, as you might think at first glance.

In that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness (Zechariah 13:1).

What is this fountain?

In Revelation, John sees a multitude of people clothed in white robes and worshiping at the throne of God.

Then one of the elders answered, saying to me, “Who are these arrayed in white robes, and where did they come from?” And I said to him, “Sir, you know.” So he said to me, “These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 7:13-14).

This is a shouting passage if ever there was one:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Emphasis added).

Paul does not say, “Such are you.” You may have been a fornicator, an adulterer, a pervert, a thief, an extortioner. But when you are saved, you are washed whiter than snow in the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and you receive the Holy Spirit to guide you in a grace-filled life.

What is this present grace to us? It is the love of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit by the washing of regeneration. The Holy Spirit makes you new, and He keeps renewing you. Day by day, moment by moment, He keeps you, renews you, restores you, refreshes you. His mercies are new every day.

Grace Leads Us to God’s Favor and Future Glory

Guilt. Grace. Glory.

…He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3:6b-7).

That is what is coming. Christian, that is talking about your future.

We are heirs—heirs of God, joint heirs of Jesus Christ. A joint heir means we share and share alike. We inherit all things, and the best is yet to come. The Holy Spirit in our hearts is the earnest, the promise of the future glory. We will see the full legacy later on. That is why this world is not our home.

There is a story in the Old Testament that illustrates this point.

We Love What We Have Not Yet Seen

When Abraham was aged, he sent the oldest servant of his house to get a bride for Isaac. (Read Genesis 24.)

Remember: Isaac is a picture, a type, in the Old Testament, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here, Abraham is a picture of God the Father, who sent Eliezer to seek a bride for His son. And Eliezer the servant is a picture, a type, of the Holy Spirit, who seeks a Bride (the Church) for Jesus.

Abraham handed all kinds of incredible wealth to Eliezer. So, Eliezer had all of the belongings of the father in his hand to go seek a bride for the son.

Eliezer went into a far country, where Abraham’s kinfolk still lived, and there he found the one woman led to him by God, whose name was Rebecca.

But talk about persuasion… Eliezer now had to convince Rebecca to go with him, a man she had never met, to marry a man she had never seen. He would have told Rebecca about Isaac—how handsome he was, how strong, how wealthy; how blessed she would be in his house of Abraham. And she went.

That is an illustration of how the Holy Spirit teaches us to love Jesus, “whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8).

That is what the dear Holy Spirit does for us. He walks with us through daily life, reminding us what is to come. He sees our fears, He sees our tears, and gives us a pearl of joy, a jewel of peace, saying, “This is from Jesus. And there is more to come.” This is the precious, grace-filled life we get to live!

And the full inheritance is still yet to come.

Traits of a Grace-Filled Life

Exhibiting Grace

Is God’s grace to you meant to only bless you? No! We are saved to serve. God consecrates us as His holy people, and then commissions us to carry the Gospel—the message of grace—to the world.

You are to do this every day. Your job may be putting hubcaps on tires. You may be typing up data. You may be washing dishes. You may be doing one of a myriad of what you think are mundane things, but if you are a Christian, your work is to be the platform of your witness.

Every Christian is doing full-time Christian service.

If you work in the name of Jesus, for His glory, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, you will receive the same reward that the full-time pastor does. God knows about you and is watching you.

Remember, Jesus was a carpenter. Jesus’ childhood home was the cottage of a working man. Whether He was mending plows or mending souls, Jesus was doing the work of God, because people need houses to live in and furniture to sit on.

If you know you are serving the Lord, that dignifies whatever you are doing.

Praying for More Grace

God does not need our help. God could do His work without us. God also knows exactly what we need before we ask Him.

But God has brought us near to be one with Him, and He teaches us to be dependent upon Him and have fellowship with Him. The Holy Spirit keeps us in grace, and one of the ways He does this is by drawing us to prayer.

We do not pray to impress God, nor to inform God, but to enjoy God.

Feeding on the Grace in God’s Word

The Bible speaks of the “manifold” grace of God. What does that mean? It means we can experience God’s grace in many ways.

For instance, when Paul and Silas were in prison, God gave them grace to sing praise in their trials. (See Acts 16:25.)

God will give you the ability to speak, even about your troubles, with His grace. “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one” (Colossians 4:6).

God also gives us strengthening grace. Timothy was often sick with many infirmities, and Paul told him to “be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1b).

Which do you need today? Singing grace? Speaking grace? Strengthening grace? All three? All of these can be found and nurtured by time in the Word of God.

A Peaceful, Restful Spirit

Too often, we are emotionally fatigued, physically drained, and spiritually defeated.

Stress and anxiety not only steal our enjoyment of life but also make us more vulnerable to spiritual attacks. When we are stressed, smaller irritations can seem like impossible mountains to climb. Beyond this, an anxious spirit does not glorify God, and being anxious is something we are told to flee.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God (Philippians 4:6).

When you are stressed, take a few minutes to pause, be still, and be quiet. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and ask God to lead and guide you.

For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5b).

Remember, His Holy Spirit is near. He will give you a fresh supply of grace and enable you to do what He has put before you.

List of Scriptures Referenced in This Article

Titus 3:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:18, 6:9-11; Romans 5:8; Isaiah 64:6; Ephesians 2:8-9; Habakkuk 1:13; Zechariah 13:1; Revelation 7:13-14; 1 Peter 1:8; Acts 16:25; Colossians 4:6; 2 Timothy 2:1; Philippians 4:6; Hebrews 13:5

More Bible Verses About the Grace of God

Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been very guilty, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plunder, and to humiliation, as it is this day. And now for a little while grace has been shown from the LORD our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a peg in His holy place, that our God may enlighten our eyes and give us a measure of revival in our bondage. For we were slaves. Yet our God did not forsake us in our bondage; but He extended mercy to us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to revive us, to repair the house of our God, to rebuild its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem (Ezra 9:7-9).

For the LORD God is a sun and shield; the LORD will give grace and glory; no good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly. O LORD of hosts, blessed is the man who trusts in You! (Psalm 84:11-12).

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness of Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for He was before me.’ ” And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace (John 1:14-16).

Adrian Rogers had a unique gift for making deep biblical truth simple and practical. As founder of Love Worth Finding, he was a powerful preacher, trusted Bible teacher, and respected Christian leader. Known for his passion for the Gospel and unwavering commitment to God’s Word, he shared the message of Jesus Christ with conviction, compassion, and integrity. A devoted husband to his childhood sweetheart Joyce, he was also a loving father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Of all his accomplishments, Dr. Rogers often said his greatest joy was found in his relationship with Jesus, his family, and the church he served.

©2025 Love Worth Finding Ministries, Inc. Used by permission. Transcripts used with permission of the Rogers Family Trust. Many thanks for the use of this important message.

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God reveals Himself to us through many different names in the Bible. No single name can describe all that God is. In fact, God uses each and every one of His names to reveal a different part of His character to us. Shown in Scripture, each of these names has great significance.