Prepared for good works

Prepared for Good Works
Text: Titus 3:3-8
Proposition: The Christian must be ready at all times to do good works.
While serving in the Persian Gulf, our entire battalion discovered that we were
unprepared because of deficient gas masks. I believe that many believers are like
that, unprepared for the calling at hand. Rather
than being ready at any moment to do good, we are
absorbed with our own agendas and miss out on divine
opportunities. The Christian must prepare himself to
be ready to live a life of good works.
How do we prepare ourselves to do good works? If I
were the Apostle Paul I would have immediately listed
a number of practical things to do, like free up your
time, set aside money , volunteer for a ministry. But
instead of doing this Paul goes a level deeper and
reflects on the inner components that must combine
to make a person prepared for good works. These
three attitudes, if you will, are the soil out of which
a prepared life grows.
1. The Christian never forgets the life from which
he/she has been rescued.
Explanation: Paul reflects on life before Christ, and
says that in that condition we were “objects of God’s
wrath” (see Ephesians 2:1-3). Not only were we
unprepared to do genuine good works but we were
predisposed to do evil works. In our fallen state, our
entire life is oriented around self so that we
generate not good works but selfish works. This is not
to say that as unbelievers we were as evil as we could
be, but it does mean that self was the center of life
and not the things of God. As Tim Keller has said
“Not many of us are Attila the Hun or Adolph Hitler,
but it’s not for lack of potential.”
It is from this life that we have been rescued.
Therefore, we must always look back on our previous life with gratitude and humility
that we have been saved from it, knowing that but by the grace of God we would still
be living in our own selfish worlds bound for hell. We have been rescued from disaster.
And so it is that this knowledge of our past makes us painfully aware of those still
left behind and needing rescued. We make ourselves prepared by always remembering
where we came from.
Illustration: Some of the most poignant pictures of the World Trade Center tragedy
were those that showed people covered with soot that had escaped just in time. Many
of them looked back upon the others that were left behind and actually felt guilty
that they had been spared and not the others. And many of them that were able
were the first to wander back and look for survivors. Those that escaped the
collapsing buildings could never look upon those left behind with any sense of
superiority or condescension. But by the grace of God they too would have been
crushed. Instead they wanted to go back and help save them. Their own rescue or
escape made them utterly willing and desirous to help others.
Application: We must always live with a humble acknowledgment that we too have been
rescued. And therefore, with dust still on our souls so to speak we look back for any
that we can help. We are prepared because we have been rescued and are keenly
aware of those that have not escaped yet. And obviously we have no ground for pride,
arrogance, prejudice or aloofness, rudeness or unsociableness. Instead, we remember
our original state and identify with sinners as those that have been
Pages 1 2 3 » view sermon