From Cretan to Christian W/Rev. Reggie Smith

Today we welcome Reverend Reggie Smith, who brings a message from Titus 3:4–7 titled, "From Cretan to Christian."

Drawing from Paul's words to Titus, Pastor Reggie reminds us that our transformation is not achieved through our own goodness or effort, but through the kindness, mercy, and saving grace of God. In Christ, we are made new and invited to live as people marked by His Spirit.

Thank you for joining us. Let's listen together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's good to be here with you, Madison. Our text this morning comes from Titus chapter 3, verses 4 through 7. And if you can, if embody and soul stand for the reading of God's Word. But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us. Not because of righteous things that we've done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the wash and the rebirth and the renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior. So that having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs, having the hope of eternal life. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Most of you know, I'm not gonna take that though. Most of you know uh that I pastored at Roseville Park Christian Formed Church for 20 years. And I think there are even some refugees that might be here, even among us. I see a couple in the back. They're just waving. And when I started there 20 years ago, uh I had to hang out with the young people, and so they had this thing called gym night. And gym night was where a lot of the uh neighborhood kids would come and play basketball, and then we would do Bible study afterwards. And when the first time that I came, they thought to themselves, this old guy's gonna try to play basketball with us? Really? Well, I could hold my own. I can just say that. I can hold my own. But I remember there was this one kid, and this king was Carl. And Carl was uh a little scrawny white kid, only about this high, had mop brown hair, and he had a little smudge nose. And he was always like the kid who gets picked last. That's never experienced by any of you. He would always get picked last. And whenever he would get picked, everybody knew how to push his buttons. Everybody knew how to push Carl's button. Because all we had to do was say something to him, and that was it. And when Carl got upset, there was nothing that can calm him down. Nothing. And Carl would go fighting and kidnap people and throwing things, and we have to throw them out and say, You Carl, you gotta leave, you can come back next week. Carl would come back, same thing. Poor Carl. He could he couldn't just say, I said, Carl, they're gonna do this to you. Don't give in to it. You can do this, you can be calm, cool, and collected. And he said, Yeah, alright. And give it next time, he's cussing at folk, and I have to throw them out again. Carl just couldn't get it in him to have that kind of control, to have that kind of mindset, to have that kind of composure, that he could keep his emotions to himself, that he didn't have to operate this way. And if we think about it for even ourselves, we also know that we can get a little bit out of control too. There's certain people in our families who know how to push our little buttons. There's certain folk who know how to get under our skin at work, and there's certain people who get under our skin even at church. I at least I've been told. I've been told this. I don't know for sure, but I've been told. And this is a world in which we enter in with Pastor Titus. Pastor Titus is left on the island of Crete by the Apostle Paul to now pastor this wild bunch called Cretans. They were wild, they were undisciplined, they didn't care what people thought about them. And now Titus has to bring everything that he has been taught by Paul to turn these Cretans into Christians. Lord have mercy. Titus had his word cut out for him, and so what Titus is trying to do, he's trying to reframe, recreate the things of what it means to be a Christian under the conditions of Jesus, in order that they will move from credence to Christians, that they will have a totally different mindset, a totally different heart of what it means to operate under the auspices of the love and power and the mercy of Jesus that they have never ever experienced before. What was Titus gonna do? What was this brother gonna do? Well, he had to be a pastor, and he had to learn how to be in their country under their conditions in a way in which would be also that they're not being who they are, but they're being more and more like Jesus. I was a kid who grew up in the 70s. Anybody grew up in the 70s? Yep, yep. And and we all got the scars to show for it. And in the 70s, as a kid growing up, uh I watched boxing, and one of the greatest boxers of all time is blah blah blah blah blah. What what what'd you say? Muhammad Ali. What Muhammad Ali. And so I grew up watching Muhammad Ali, and in 1972, he was fighting Joe Frazier. Joe Fraser. And Muhammad Ali, when they would meet on TV, I would watch on ABC, Wild World of Sports. Now I'm really dating myself. And Muhammad Ali, they would have them both like they would have like WWF or UCF. And Muhammad Ali would come on and say, Joe Fraser, I can beat you. I know it. I'm pretty, I can do it. Two hands behind my back. I don't even have to lift up one arm and I can beat you. And Bob would be like, I'm pretty, I'm pretty. And Joe Fraser would say, I'ma whip him. I'ma whip him. That one fight was called the Thriller in Manila. Ain't that a name? Ain't that a name? The thriller in Manila. And Muhammad Ali won. He won that. That was the third fight in which he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. Fighting was the way in which you got known in the 70s. Well, think about that. With you on the island of Crete, the thing that you got known by, or that people looked up to you was to be a gladiator. And if you were a gladiator, this is how you make a name for yourself. This is how you become immortal. By being a gladiator in the ring, in the arena, when it's win-lose. If you lose, you lose your life. This was how you obtain immortality. And this is how most Cretans operated in their lives. They were wild, they were vicious, they were uncouth. And now Titus has to try to find a way in order for them to get this Jesus condition inside of them in order that they will be less of themselves and more and more of having the mindset and the character and the conditions of Jesus wrapping their entire lives out of the life they had already been living. So Pastor Titus does it this way: He reframes it. He says, out of the kindness of God our Savior, he saved us. He saved us not because of the righteous things that we have done, but that he showed mercy. He showed mercy. Cretans believed that they had to save their own life. Cretans believed that it was by their actions, by their advancement, by their credentials, by their achievements. This is how you become somebody. And so Titus had to change what it means to have an identity in Cretan to an identity in Christ. And to have an identity in Christ means that we have to change how we look at ourselves and how we see what it means for us to be saved. I like the words that Michael Card says of what it means to be safe. He says simply this to be saved is that somebody who owes you absolutely nothing gives you everything. Let that sink in. Somebody who owes you nothing gives you everything. That was gospel to the creations. What does that mean for us? We say that we as reformed Christians, that I am not my own, that I've been bought body and soul, life and death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. And in fact, that all things must work for my salvation, that not a hair, at least what's left of my hair, even if it falls, even he counts that. The moment that we say that we have been saved from something means that we are in gratitude to the person who did the saving. If you do, you don't need to be here. Because this is, as John Calvin says, a hospital for broke folk. That's in the French. Pastor Titus is trying to get inside of these creatings to say that to be saved means that God showed us his kindness and mercy, not when we were at our best, but when we were at our worst. Every time that we do something in this church, we think about and we should think about how God has been kind to us when he didn't really have to. How God showed us mercy when he really didn't have to. How God didn't take us and say, you are now throwaway people and say, oh no, you are redeemed people. That's how I woke up this morning with my man. Stayed on the Jesus who gave me mercy when I didn't even deserve it. I like the word that comes out of the movie Unforgiving when Clint Eastwood's uh character says, deserve ain't got nothing to do with it. None of us deserve God's love. Is grace is so great, why don't I like it? Paul, Titus is now telling these Christians in Cretan that grace has everything to do with not being fair, but by God being just. And by God being loving, and that God being kind, and that God saves us not because of the things that we do, but he says, I love you, just because of you. The message that we should be telling everybody, no matter if at work or at school or at home, please come to Madison. This is where the people who know how to live by grace come. But he talks a little bit about going to visit his grandmother in South Carolina. Whenever he goes to visit his grandmother, his grandmother would always grab him and and hold. Well, I'm gonna do this a little bit to Dave. He didn't know this house gonna do this. So I'm about to scare him. He she would go always and grab him so hard he couldn't breathe. Oh Lord Jesus! Thanks, Dave. And and he would say to her, Grandma, let me go! Jesus loves too hard. Which is probably true. But then she would tell Brian these words that when you're away from me, I want you to never forget my hug. I want you to never forget how much I feel for you. And that God's love is always approximate to us. Proximate simply means God is always close up and personal. You see, Titus is trying to get these words of what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. The Holy Spirit is always trying to rebirth and renew us in a way that gets us away from the old life to adopting this new life, this new life that is built on living by grace, living by mercy, living by this kind of sense of gratitude for what God has done for us. What the Holy Spirit always does is it's trying to hold us close, like I did David. But sometimes we always want to break away. Come on now. We want to say, God, stop holding me. I'm a grown-up now. I want to do my own thing. You can't tell me what to do. Come on now. Some of us get up every week and say, You cannot tell me what to do. I ain't gonna do it. Like a two-year-old. But you see, Pastor Titus is trying to hug these credence and say, I want you to feel that the Holy Spirit is holding you so close that you will never forget how much you are loved, and how much the Holy Spirit is close to you, and how much the Holy Spirit will not give up on you. You see, that they grow up on a steady diet of coercion instead of care. They grew up on violence instead of acceptance, they grew up on trying to get other people to do their bidding rather than inviting them in by way of hospitality. The Holy Spirit's main job in each of us is to hug us so close that it doesn't feel like we are losing out, but rather feeling the abundant love of God that we are able to give that to others and not feel like we are being cheated. Because there's enough love of the Holy Spirit to go around. Jesus never operates on a scarcity mindset. Never look at the person to your right and your left and said, There's enough of Jesus for you and I. Tell them there's enough Jesus for all of us, there's enough Jesus to go around, there's enough love in the building that we are never ever at a place of scarcity. That's why we need community. So if you want to go from a Cretan to a Christian, you need to know nobody lives a singular, solitary life and becomes one. Nobody. More than you've ever thought before. Where do you need the rebirth of the spirit to do a new work in your heart and in your mind that you feel like an accepted child of God? When I was pastoring at Roseville Park, uh, and I did this while I was playing basketball, I I threw out my back. It happens when you turn 40. Some of the men here know about that, and you start getting that dad bod. Thank you for the dad bars this morning. Father's Day. Dad bars are sexy. I just want to let you know that. At least my wife tells me. Well, I had to go to rehab. I had to go to rehab, and I had this wonderful uh masseuse, and her name was Meg. And she's she told me to get into position and because I knew what was gonna happen, and she said, uh, so what do you do? Oh, you know, the moment that you say you're a pastor, she's gonna be doing a lot more talking and a lot less massaging. I've seen it, I know it happens. So I told her I was a pastor, and she said, Where at? Oh I said, I'm Christy Forward. She said, You are? I said, Yes. So what where do you pastor at? Oh I said, Roosevelt Park, which used to be Granville Avenue in Bethel. Oh, why did you say oh? She said, uh, I used to go to one of those churches. Oh. And then she began to tell me the story about her father. And that one day, one Sunday, that she was going to church hand in hand with her father, and as they got to the pathway and towards the church, towards the church door, her father stopped. And he he was in a panic. She could see him sweating profusely and not knowing why that was happening. And he said to her, I can't go in. I can't go in. He never told her why he couldn't go in. They both turned around and they walked back home. It was only later that her father told her these words. He had grown up with a steady diet. Every sermon, every Bible study. Every conversation drilled in him, he was never going to be good enough. And I call that the voice from the basement. The voice from the basement always tells us what's wrong with ourselves. It always tells us where we go wrong. It always reaffirms, yep, it is exactly what you thought. No, you ain't that good. And people can actually spend their whole lives hearing that voice from the basement and never really feeling like Jesus simply loves them. This I know. And maybe even some of us here today know exactly what that voice from the basement sounds like. And maybe even is even talking to you right now. And what do you do to quiet that voice of negativity? That's what Titus was dealing with. As he's trying to form Christians in Cretan, he knows that that voice is the most powerful thing that gets people to not accept a new life. So he had to reframe a new narrative. And he says it like this justified. Justified by what God has done in Jesus Christ. We now have eternal hope and eternal life that can never be taken away. Justified. One of the images of the Holy Spirit is advocate. Advocate simply means lawyer. That's what it means. Paraclete, lawyer. So whenever the devil puts us on trial, he is the prosecuting attorney telling us how much we have done wrong, telling us how much we end up short, telling us that we can never ever be good enough to be loved, and then Jesus gets up. He's our defense attorney, and he says, Yohan, Father, let me tell you something. That's in the Greek. Let me tell you. Look at my hands. Do you see the nail prints? Because of what I've done, they should be free. Look at what happened to my feet. If you see what has happened to my feet, you know I died for them. Get a good look at the grave. Am I still there? They are justified to be completely free because Jesus is the best defense attorney we will ever have. So whenever the voices from the bottom come up and say, Jesus stands up and says, uh-uh-uh, the mine. They hug, they belong to me. Not a hand can fall from their head without me knowing about it. Everything works for their redemption. Everything. You just have to receive it. And when we receive that, there is no revoktion. There is no taking back. We can say, yes, Jesus loves me. We can say yes, Jesus cares about me. We can say yes, because there's enough to go around for everybody. And that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever take that away. So we don't have to be at our best because Jesus is always at his best. And that's why I can say I'm so glad Jesus lifted me. I'm so glad. Jesus lifted me. I'm so glad. Jesus lifted me. Singing glory. Hallelujah. Jesus lifted me. You know what? Satan had me bound. Jesus set me free. Satan had me found you. Jesus lifted me. Satan had me found. Jesus lifted me. Singing glory, hallelujah. Singing glory, hallelujah. Singing glory, hallelujah. Jesus lifted me. Let's stand together. Saints, this is why grace is so amazing. Grace is so amazing because of what God has done in Jesus Christ by the way of the Holy Spirit sets us free that we can be free indeed. Justified because of what Christ has done. Because eternal hope has been given to us. And as you put your hands out, as God fills your cup with his grace, to go out this week to be his witnesses, to tell the good news of what has been done for you and how others can get in on it. Receive it. May the Lord bless you. May the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his presence upon you and smile upon you and give you the gift of his tremendous shalom, his peace on all the redeemed children of God's sake. Amen.