“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age” (Titus 2:11-12).
A core part of pastoral ministry is calling God’s people to look like Jesus and to live holy lives. Pastors often go about this by encouraging people to make a list of rules to live by. Unfortunately, this inadvertently traps them on a treadmill of moralistic religion. They resolve to change, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and vow on a stack of Bibles not to sin and to do better - only to fail completely. This exhausting cycle of self-reliance ultimately produces two types of people: Those who fail fall into despair, cynicism, or depression; those who “succeed” become utterly insufferable, self-righteous pharisees. Seeking to live a holy life by legalistic effort or personal willpower, or by ways you event, is the center of every false religion in the world. Holiness is not about mere behavioral compliance or mind control. Real, lasting, transformational holiness only happens when the Gospel captures and changes your heart’s deepest affections and longings. External rules can restrain the flesh, but they can never compel the heart. Holiness and obedience flow naturally only when you are utterly melted by awe and wonder at what Jesus, by grace, has done for you - not by what you have done for Him.
Another means pastors misuse to inspire holiness is guilt - often framed as conviction or godly sorrow. They design sermons to make people feel completely unworthy, focusing heavily on the threat of God’s distant favor or the looming shadow of judgment. This manifests as what might be called “guilt-trip preaching.” It holds up a high and beautiful biblical standard - like an intense prayer life or Bible study practice - not to show the beauty of Christ, but to show people how badly they are failing. It forces them to look exclusively inward at their own spiritual bankruptcy and what they must do. The Puritan John Owen was onto something vital when he argued “…load your conscience; and leave it not until it be thoroughly affected with the guilt of your indwelling corruption, until it is sensible of its wound, and lie in the dust before the Lord.” Owen’s core insight is profoundly true: if you try to mortify sin without deeply confronting its gravity and danger, you are not actually growing in grace. You are just practicing raw human willpower or trying to ease your own psychological discomfort. If you brush off your guilt too quickly, you get a superficial cosmetic cure while leaving the root of the sin completely intact. But here is the crucial distinction: guilt on its own has absolutely no power to produce holiness. If you try to pursue holiness apart from the Gospel of grace, you will end up in a spiritual chokehold of legalism and despair. Guilt tells you what you owe; grace tells you it has been paid. True biblical conviction means you allow yourself to feel the full, crushing weight of your sin, but you do so while standing on the absolute, unshakeable assurance of your security in Jesus Christ. You are far more wicked than you ever dared believe, but at the very same time, you are far more loved and accepted in Christ than you ever dared hope.
So, while you must take the weight and the reality of your sin seriously, the answer is not to try harder to fix yourself. You have to hear the good news that in Christ, you are already clothed in a righteousness that is not your own (11 Corinthians 5:21). When you realize this, it creates a radically safe harbor. You can finally stop the performance. You can drop the masks, quit pretending you have got it all together, and bring your actual, messy, broken self out into the light, trusting that the Holy Spirit works from the inside out. This is what drives the religious spirit - the elder brother syndrome in the Prodigal Son story - absolutely crazy: the Gospel says the only people who actually begin to change are the people who know even if they never change, God loves them anyway. God is not standing over you with a ledger, tapping His foot. Because of Jesus, the debt is paid in full (John 19:30), your sins past, present, and future are forgiven. This means you are free to stumble, free to fail miserably, and yet remain utterly unshakably anchored in God’s delight, forgiveness, and love. You do not clean up your life so God will love you; you realize He already loves you, and that love becomes the engine of your obedience and holiness. Most of us spend our entire lives acting like onions - layering on persona after persona, terrified that if someone actually sees the core, they will reject you. You try to be nice, sweet, and put-together. But scrubbing the outside does not change the heart. To find your true self - the self that actually belongs to God - you must stop hiding inside your own resume and come empty-handed to the cross. Grace is the only thing powerful enough to actually transform your life and rescue you from guilt.
Holiness is the result of the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit implanting Gospel truth within the believer’s entire nature (spirit, soul, and body - 1 Thessalonians 5:23). It is God who sanctifies (1 Corinthians 1:30; Romans 15:15-16). As God gave us our being (Acts 17:28), so He gives us our holiness (Hebrews 10:10; Hebrews 13:12). It is not by nature but by grace we are made holy (11 Timothy 1:9-10). The power of grace for salvation and holiness is seen in Titus 2:11-12 where the Apostle Paul says God is the direct author of spiritual life and holiness through grace. In verse 11 Paul says: “For the grace of God has appeared that offers (makes possible) salvation to all people.” How does grace offer or make salvation possible? Romans 1:16 says, “The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation.” What is the Gospel? Simply put, the Gospel is: Salvation is a free gift (Romans 3:23–24) offered to humanity (Titus 2:11) from God (John 3:16) through Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1–2), received by faith (Ephesians 2:8–9), and visibly evidenced by our repentance (11 Corinthians 7:10) and obedience (Ezekiel 36:25–27). In verse 12 Paul says, “It (grace) teaches (coaches, trains) us to say, “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.” Grace is not merely a past-tense pardon from eternal judgment or a future ticket to heaven. With salvation grace acts like a wise, loving tutor or life coach. It looks at the empty, destructive traps of the world and fleshly desires and says, “You do not need that poison anymore. You are already fully accepted, deeply secure, and infinitely treasured in Christ. Why settle for counterfeit joy?” Through grace holiness stops being a heavy, miserable checklist of “dos and don’ts” and becomes the natural, breathing rhythm of a heart that knows it is safe. In 1 Corinthians 15:10 Paul says: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them - yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” Grace is the explosive present-tense power of God that breaks into your life, grabs you by the throat and supercharges your lives. It is an active force that pervades every season and aspect of your life. This means every single day, every word you say, every move you make, every breath you breath, every good thing you do, every victory you experience, every bit of rest, every effort is by God’s grace. Martin Lloyd-Jones expressed it this way, “It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come upon our deathbeds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, and it ends with grace.”
If you want to understand grace, you have to look at the vocabulary Paul uses in Ephesians 1:5-8. He does not say God doles out His grace with a medicine dropper. He says God lavished it on you. The original Greek word there means to superabound - to spill over the edges. It is overwhelming, it is too much, it is an almost scandalous abundance. But here is where you often stumble. Religion operates on a marketplace logic: “If I perform, I am accepted.” Religion says, “I obey; therefore, I am accepted.” The Gospel says, “I am accepted through Christ; therefore, I obey.” So, when you hear about grace, you naturally try to fit it into that old framework. You treat grace like a lowered bar - a spiritual safety net that allows us to coast, to stay just good enough to get by. But the Gospel is not a lower bar. It is a completely different universe. True grace is not an exemption from holiness; it is the only actual fuel for it. Think about it this way: fear and pride can make you moral, but only grace can make you holy. Fear makes you obey God because you are afraid of Him. Pride makes you obey God because you want to feel superior to others. Both of those motives are entirely self-centered. They use God to get things from God. But when the reality of what Jesus did on the cross truly hits you - when you realize you were so lost He had to die for you, yet so loved He was glad to die for you- the motivational machinery of your heart is completely rewired. You do not pursue holiness to get God’s love; you pursue holiness because you already have it and it has endeared Him to you. The waterfall of grace washes away the need to self-justify. So, we must ask ourselves a brutal diagnostic question: Is your understanding of grace actually transforming your daily behavior, your relationships, and your inner life? If it is not, the problem is not you need to try harder. The problem is you have not fully grasped the Gospel. You are operating on religion. As the Puritan Thomas Chalmers famously noted, it is the very freeness of the Gospel that gives it its sanctifying power. A grace that requires nothing of you cannot change you, and a grace that does not transform you ultimately cannot save you. It is only when you are thoroughly conquered by a completely free, over-the-top, overwhelming grace that you find the supernatural energy to live a life of holiness.
The same grace that brings salvation through the Gospel (removes the guilt of sin), is the same grace that sanctifies (removes the power of sin). It is the powerful, present-tense power of God that breaks into your life and gives a new standing before God (Colossians 3:3), that fundamentally brings about transformation from the inside out (Ezekiel 36: 25-27). This creates a new capacity for living life (1 Corinthians 15:10; 11 Corinthians 9:8; 12:9); and the engine that empowers and drives every righteous impulse to deal with disruptive behavioral patterns (Titus 2:11-12), and to repent when you fail to do so (Romans 2:4). Grace is not a passive standing or status, but an active, transforming power that necessarily produces holiness, mortification of sin, and fruitfulness. So, how is your growth in obedience and holiness? For all of us, it is mostly “one step forward, two steps back.” That is why it is so important to remember the only people who are moving toward an obedient and holy life are those who know, even if they are not doing so, God loves them anyway. It is all grace - our salvation, our obedience, and our holiness. “Grace is not the apologist of sin; grace is the mother and nurse of holiness” (John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace). So, rest and be secure in God’s grace. You will be surprised with the result – holiness.
Tom Anderson
