Titus chapter 1, beginning in verse 12, this is God's word, eternally true. Even one of their own prophets has said, credence are always liars, evil broods, lazy gluttones. This testimony is true. Therefore, rebuke them sharply so that they will be sound in the faith, and will pay no attention to Jewish myths, or to the commands of those who reject the truth. To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny Him. They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good. Now look down to chapter 3. And we'll read on from verse 3 of chapter 3. Verse 3. At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated, and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us. Not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth, and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom we poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that having been justified by His grace we might become heirs, having the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. These things are excellent and profitable for everyone. Herein's our reading. We have a response of thankfulness that's printed for us and our bulletins. The word of the Lord. Thanks indeed, let's pray. This is our last time we'll be in Titus. We've looked at Titus in terms of different themes. It's a small book that we've seen over three chapters, and then we've chopped our way down through chapter two as Paul addresses various categories of people. And here we come to this passage here primarily, the passage in chapter three, verse three onward that tells us that we are a changed people. Where people have gone from one state of being into another state of being. And that there's really this distinction we can know upon the earth, that there are people who are this way, and people who are that way, and people who are believers in Jesus are distinctly different. Their composition in many ways has changed. So first of all, as we talk about this, we do what Paul does here, and we talk about what the unbeliever is like. So if you'd like to fill up blanks in an outline, there you go. We're starting out here with asking the question, what is an unbeliever like? And we note first of all, A, there in your outline, this is what you can write in there, I. This is what I was like. This is what all of us were like. It's like Paul writes in Ephesians too. It's like we were all like this. Disobedient and members of the kingdom of the power, the prince of the power of the air. Part of the kingdom of darkness. Most of us were led about our own passions and desires that were evil. And Paul has this language here, and Titus as well, he writes this book later, he'd already written the book of Ephesians. And so he talks about us being people who rejected the truth. And we're corrupted, and we're verse three at chapter three at one time. Two, he said, we're foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. So we note A there, this is what you and I were like before we believed. So what were we like? B, we were people of corrupted mind. We were people of corrupted mind, looking at chapter one and verse 15. Paul writes there, to the pure. Now at this point, talk about Christians, not that they're utterly pure, but he's talking about they've been through this purification process that happened at their spiritual birth. He says, to the pure, all things are pure. And so we look at things from a whole different perspective. How's this related Christ and how is this bear and seen accurately before him and before me? But to the pure, all things are pure. But to those who are, and this speaks to what we were before, Jesus saved us. But to those who are corrupted and do not believe. So what's true of someone who does not believe? Paul says they're corrupted. And you and I, we were corrupted. We weren't good people. We were a corrupted people. Those who do not believe, verse 15, chapter one, those who do not believe are corrupted. Nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. And so there's this corruption of mind that's a part of the unbeliever. That was a part of us before we believed. And now we're working our way out of that. We'll talk more about that as we go through this. But that's the natural state of us before we believed in the natural state of the unbeliever. A corrupted mind. From the fall, our minds are not seeing things accurately. In addition to this, see you and I had corrupted actions. So corrupted minds, we didn't think properly. Remember when we talked about self-control, part of the definition of self-control is that we're seeing things accurately. That we're seeing things as they are in an uncorrupted way that our minds are constrained by what's true. But before we believed, not only had these corrupted minds, but out of these corrupted minds, we had corrupted actions. Our minds were the seeds for the fruit, the cause, the source of these corrupted actions. And so look at verse 16. They claimed to know God, chapter 1, verse 16. They claimed to know God, but by their actions, they deny Him. The corrupted actions that show they don't know Christ. So those who don't know Christ, those who aren't believers, have these corrupted actions going on. They're a detestable disobedient and unfit for doing anything good. Or as he said in verse 12 of chapter 1, look there, our funny verse. Even one of their own prophets on Crete has said, Cretans are always liars, evil broods, lazy gluttons. We've all got a little bit of Cretan in a snowy way. We tend to lie. We tend to be brutish instead of sensitive and kind to people. And we tend to be lazy. And we tend to want too much of things that we like to be gluttons, whether it's food or something else. And then chapter 3, verse 3. At one time, we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, that's a corrupted mind, and then interactions enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy. Those were actions of malice. When someone didn't treat us well, we were malicious toward them. We lived in malice and envy. We looked at others and said, they have this, and I don't, and I'm mad about it. We didn't, as Paul said, that we're to do with each other, we're to rejoice with those who rejoice. And mourn with those who mourn. But before Christ took over our lives, we lived in envy. We saw other people's had this, and I don't have this, that's not fair. I always think of Bernie and Earth, Bernie and Earth. Bert and Ernie. Bert and Ernie, the grape juice and pizza skit with them. You know, and Ernie figures out that the way he can get more and more of Bert's slice of pizza and glass of grape juice is to say, well, Bert, there you've got more grape juice, more delicious grape juice, and a larger slice of pizza than I do. And Bert says, well, how can we solve that? Ernie says, I know, and he eats some of Bert's pizza to make it even. And he drinks some of his grape juice, and he says, well, now Bert, I have more delicious grape juice and a bigger slice of pizza than you do. And Ernie has the solution for that, too. He eats some of his piece of pizza, and he keeps doing this back and forth. But envy, we look at what the other people have and say, wait, that's not fair. Even if it's as much as we want. If someone has more, we say, well, that's not fair. And so we live in envy. And then he goes on, verse three, being hated, well, no wonder. Or eating someone else's pizza and drinking those delicious grape juice and hating one another. So corrupted mind and corrupted actions. I'll tell you about my corrupted mind and corrupted actions in a funny way. I run in the morning without glasses. One, they fog up, two of my pastor, and I never want to be accused of looking in someone's house during the morning when their lights are on. And so if every time anyone would accuse me of looking in their house in the morning when their lights are on, to see if I can see something I'm not supposed to see, I can say, I don't run with my glasses. Ask anyone in the neighborhood. Have you ever seen me run with my glasses? And I can't see. Even if I attempted to look in your window, I can't. But what this means is when I'm running early in the morning and I see a stop sign, I think it's a person. And I'm just determined that when I'm riding along in my car, especially in my neighborhood or when I'm jogging, I'm always going to wave. Because as soon as I know, it's somebody I know, and they waved at me, and it's too late, and then I feel like a jerk. I always wave at people and say hi to them. And so, you know, I see the stop sign and I'm, you know, that's my corrupted mind. I don't see clearly. I don't see accurately. And so then what happens? I get ready for a corrupted action. I get ready to wave. And this also happened with a bush on the trail. It's all bush up. It was about three weeks ago. This just routinely happens with different things. I get ready to wave and they get closer and I go like that. But even the past three weeks on the trail, I've seen this bear crouching to get me on the trail. And let's see, Allison, uncover that for a second here. So I took a picture of it because I knew this was, I had written this into the sermon and I was out the other day. Here it is. This is seven feet from the newspaper trail. Turn off the light there so people can see this. Thank you, Bill. Can you see it? Actually, turn them off. If you're close to the light switch, turn it off. Alex, could you grab that one back there? Bill's got it. Can you tell what that is? That's a tree stump. But three times. Okay, that's good. You can turn it back on. Thank you. Three times now. I've gone by this tree stump. It's northward. If you live in Riverwood, if you turn right, it's about a mile and a half down the trail on your left side. But when I'm coming back, it's really close. And I'm just drawing along like this and all of a sudden in my personal vision, I see this thing and I think it's a brown bear sitting there. And I actually flinch off to the side, but it's this corrupted vision, corrupted mind and wrong actions that I have. And so pulsing, this is what we are, this is what we are like. This is what we are like in our lives that we have corrupted, corrupted vision in our lives which causes corrupted, corrupted action. So, deep, this is the condition or state of unbelievers, corruption. That's your blank there. Corruption is the condition of those who don't know. So God, Paul stated a few different ways there in chapter one versus 1560, those who don't believe, those who say they know God, but don't, they have corrupted minds and corrupted actions. But with Christianity, if sacred book, the Bible tells us that this, this corruption of thought, corruption of mind and corruption of action changes when we, when we believe. This changes when we believe that is this corruption of mind and action when a person believes in Jesus gets broken, this corruption does. It gets interrupted and then it gets to be less and less and our minds become more and more clear and begin to see life in ourselves and God more and more accurately. So we know, you know, that's just a tree stump or that's there's a stop sign there. I used to think it was people, people waiting at the, when the bus used to come, I used to think it was high school students waiting at the corner to wave at me, but it was just the stop sign. But it gets less and less, our clarity of mind becomes more and more in our actions progressively, get less corrupted and more pure. So E Christianity changes, Christianity changes, God in Christianity, God changes the corruption of a person's mind and action. The Bible tells us that it gives a person, you know what, you know what, make that change if I, as I'm running along on the street or on the trail, light and glasses. Now I never have glasses on the trail, but when I'm walking along the street, which I do with my wife before dinner time or after dinner time during the summer, walk along, I have my glasses on and I have no confusion, no corruption as to what that stop sign is. And that's what solves it for me, light and glasses and God gives us light and glasses, so to speak, when we believed. And that's what Paul writes about when he writes in chapters three, really kind of beginning in verses four through six there. Okay, so Christianity changes the corruption of a person's mind and action. So number one in your outline number one, God washed and renewed or regenerated right in there regenerated. God washed and renewed he regenerated you by his Holy Spirit so that first of all, you came to trust in Jesus. That's how he came to trust in Jesus, how he came to believe in him initially, he regenerated you. That means he gave you eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand. He gave you new life when you were when you were dead. We see this in chapter three, verse five, he saved us not because of the righteousness we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the through the washing, how do you save us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This is how you came to believe a whole spirit entered into you and washed you, regenerated you, renewed you, gave you new life, new birth. Peter puts this way in first Peter one too, he calls this the sanctifying work of the spirit. The spirit begins to sanctify you at the moment of your birth spiritually and then remains in you to progressively sanctify you to make you more and more like Jesus, but he begins that work right at the point of your salvation. He comes in God's spirit and sets you apart, he sanctifies you, does this sanctifying work and he sets you apart in the world. He takes you out of the kingdom of darkness, out of this world where you were in slavery to a sin master, same do this sin now using your own corrupt desires that were present in you. So he saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. So A there in your outline regeneration what that means is new life. If your power goes out, you have a generator that gives your house new life. Your lights can go on, your refrigerator can work, your heater can work or whatever your generators is hooked up to. Regeneration means new life or it means spiritual birth. So those are your blanks there in A. Regeneration is new life for spiritual birth, again from chapter 3, verse 5. But we see this with Jesus. He speaks to Nicodemus about this. Peter speaks to us as well about this in first Peter 1, 3. Peter says, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in His great mercy. He has caused us to be born again. He has caused us. God in His mercy has caused us to believe us. He has caused us to be born again. What we talked about this before, you as a human being did not cause your own birth. Your dad did. Your mom didn't have a dad, no birth. Your father initiates this and God the father initiated your spiritual birth. And that's what Peter says, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Right Jesus came and saved us but praise be to His Father who caused us to be born again. It was His decision to bring about our spiritual birth. Jesus talked about this with Nicodemus. And he says, of course you don't understand Nicodemus. You get that scene. Now Nicodemus is a leader of God's people. He's a Pharisee. And he ends up coming to believe. You know he's one of the people that treats Jesus dead body and puts Jesus in the tomb with Joseph Verimetha. And we find out Nicodemus is a believer among the early Christians after the resurrection. So that's a wonderful thing. But Nicodemus sneaks away because he knows all his co-workers are evil. And he knows what they eventually will plan for him. He sneaks away and he talks to Jesus. And he says, we know you come from God because no one could do the things you do or teach the way you teach unless he come from God. And Jesus says, but you don't get it. Nicodemus is like, no. Jesus is well, of course you don't get it. Because unless one is born again, born of the Spirit, regenerated of New birth, has the Holy Spirit sanctified by the work of the Spirit. The less one is born again, he cannot see the King of God. And Nicodemus, I'm talking about the King of God and you don't see it. You don't get it. You don't understand. And so unless one is born again, he cannot see the King of God. And Nicodemus still doesn't understand because he's not regenerated yet. He says, you mean go back into my mother's womb? And be born a second time. I can't fit. And Jesus is now. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. I'm not talking about being reborn physically and talking about being born spiritually by the Spirit of God who blows upon certain people at certain times. Just like the wind blows upon certain trees at certain times. And you can't see the wind coming. But you can see evidence that it has come because you see the leaves blowing in the tree. And so it is with the Holy Spirit. He comes upon a person and you don't know who he's going to come upon. But he comes upon a person and causes that spiritual birth. And then Jesus tries Nicodemus for not understanding. You're a leader of Israel. One of the teachers and you don't understand these things. So regeneration came to you and to me, to all who have believed. God's Spirit blew upon you, gave you a heart to understand ears to hear eyes to see, to understand the truth of God's kingdom. That Jesus is a king who fights for you in life, who fights for you in death so your soul goes to heaven, and who comes back again to fight for you to raise your dead body to life, and to bring you back on this earth that he has redeemed. That he has made clean and purified a world that he's made without sin. And then the make will inherit the earth. This is the good news, the gospel, that we have such a king. And this is what we understand by the regenerating work of the Spirit, that this king is all we need. A king who fights for us is all we need. So by this new life, my spiritual blindness was taken away. By this regeneration, by this new life, your spiritual blindness was taken away, and you can see and understand the gospel. Again, Jesus said, I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again, or Jesus puts it this way after telling the terrible the sower. Matthew 1315, for this people's heart has become calloused. They hardly hear with their ears. They have closed their eyes. Jesus says to the disciples, the people I'm preaching to, they've closed their eyes like a little kid. I don't see, I don't see, I don't see. I don't want to repent. Don't change my life. Don't tell me something I have to respond to. They've closed their eyes. Otherwise, if they were regenerating, they might see with their eyes. And hear with their ears. And understand with their hearts and turn. And I would heal them. But blessed, he turns to the disciples, but blessed are you because your eyes see and your ears hear. You've been regenerating. You get it. It's a tree stop. It's a stop sign. You see it. You're not waving to those things anymore, or shrinking from them. So you didn't see that before. Your mind was corrupted, but not anymore. See, note this, whether we're in Ephesians 2 or John 3 or here in Titus 1 and Titus 3. This was God's work. This was God's work. Not yours. Chapter 3 verse, verse 5. Look at verse 7, it states, you've been justified by the kindness and love of God. Verse 5, because out of his way, he saved us not because of righteous things you've done. This wasn't your work. This wasn't my work. That's not how we got saved by doing things. Not by righteous things we have done, but he saved us by his mercy through the Washington River. It's renewal by the Holy Spirit when he poured out on us generously. Ephesians 2, 5, Bob Red Force, Christ made us alive with Christ even when we were really doing well. And God said, okay, you're ready. Christ made us alive when you were born. When you weren't born. When you were like Nicodemus, when you had some questions but no understanding. Even when he was given answers, he didn't understand. You mean go back in my mother's room again? So someone can talk about God but not understand. So blessed are our eyes because they see. Blessed are our ears because they hear. Blessed are our hearts because they understand. So God made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It's by grace you've been saved. Or Colossians 2, 13. This is our declaration of the gospel. Look there in the front page of your ball. Colossians 2, 13. Paul says, Paul says the same. He says, when you were dead in your sins, when you were dead, when you were dead, spiritually dead, when you were dead in the midst of your deadness, not when you were alive and could respond to his call. When you were dead, he made you alive with Christ. Right? So this is Jesus in John 11 with Lazarus. And he makes him alive. And then he says, Lazarus, come forth. That's what happened to us. He made us alive. And then we heard his call. He said, Carl, come forth. Christina, come forth. Rise up. Come out of that stinking mess of a tomb that you called your life. And follow. Rise up in your new life. So this was not our work. It was God's work. Number two, number two. So we see here, God has washed and renewed us, regenerated us by his Holy Spirit. So we came to trust in Jesus. And then your rebirth has two results. Paul talks about two results as a result of your spiritual birth of your new life. First result is eternal. What's the eternal result? That's your blank eternal. What's the eternal result? You now have the hope of eternal life. Look at chapters three, verse seven. Your eternity is taken care of by the kindness and love of God. Verse four, through the washing and rebirth, renew all the Holy Spirit. And you have become errors having the hope of eternal life. Since he's renewed you, since he gave you new birth, you have the hope of eternal life that you live here on this earth. In addition to this result of rebirth being eternal life, there's a second result. And it's this. Be now. There's a result for you now. Now in your life, you're in the process of your mind, of your mind and your actions being de-corrupted. Being de-corrupted. Your mind and your actions, that's your Christian life until you see Jesus face to face. The de-corruption of your mind, the de-corruption of your actions. Again, chapters three, verse three. What was your life like before? You were regenerated. It was awfully sinful. At one time you two were foolish, disobedient, deceived and slave all kinds of passions and pleasures. You lived in mountains and be being hated and hating one another. And you were saved by that. Or saved from that through the washing and rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. And then number one. So we note that you're saved first of all from a corrupted mind. You're saved from a corrupted mind. So you're blank there. Your mind can see. Your mind can see. Understand and evaluate life accurately now. Because of the Spirit's presence in you, it's de-corrupting influence on your mind, as Paul said in chapter one, to the pure all things are pure. And that's what the Spirit is doing in the mind of the Christian, turning all things to be pure. How is this in God's sight, this thing, this person, these events? Seeing things, understanding things with accuracy and greater and greater precision, greater and greater understanding. So John 310. Jesus chide Nicodemus, your Israel teacher and you do not understand these things, but we understand these things because unlike Nicodemus, we have God's Spirit in us. We've been washed and regenerated and he continues to live in us. Thus Jesus said, Matthew 1315, if there were new births, the people who were listening to him might see you with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts. But the Spirit in us, we understand our mind, understand life. I think this is one of the great things about being a Christian. You know, life stands, but we can understand what's going on around us. And we don't have to be baffled about stuff. We don't have to be surprised when an unbeliever acts like an unbeliever because the scriptures describe that for us. And we can say, no duh. This unbeliever is acting like an unbeliever. Oh, no duh. The unbeliever in the world, the kingdom of darkness is acting like it's in darkness. Go figure. Right? It doesn't mean that's great, that's the way it is, but we have understanding of it. We don't have to say, I don't understand why these people just don't, whatever. No, we do understand why they don't do what's good and righteous and loving, whether or not for life and for people's well-being, why they don't make sense of things like evolution and gender issues. They're inherently obvious, but they refuse to bend to them because they have implications of the existence of God. We understand that. It sort of allows us to have compassion and understanding of the people around us who are still walking in darkness. Oh, yeah. They still don't have their glasses on and it's 6 a.m. They think that's a person and it's a stop sign. So we have understanding of it. You know, the boy that passage in 1st Corinthians 2, the Bob Red Force, it describes the natural man, the man without the spirit. And it describes the man with the spirit, or woman, or boy, or girl, with the spirit, and how our minds are different. How we understand things because we have the spirit and we evaluate things, we pray things spiritually because we have the spirit of God in us. We can understand the world and the gospel with these spiritual eyes. And he says, we have the mind of Christ because we have God's spirit in us. It gives us understanding of life and people and hardship and joy. It helps us to put all things in perspective as we continue to progressively grow in the understanding of the way God sees things and guess what? Here's the understanding of how God sees the world. And so we know this book more and more and then we understand life better, more and more. Is it God's desire that we're all rich? Well, Jesus wasn't rich. Paul wasn't rich. Is it God's desire that we're applauded by the world all the time? Well, no, David is anointed. He was chased out of his home. He was hunted down by numbers of people. And Jesus was too. So that makes sense to us when people don't treat us well because we know this book. God is purifying our minds. He's making them less and less and less corrupted. We're seeing things. We're seeing things accurately. David rejoiced over this in Psalm 119. He says, with my regenerated mind, I can now look at God's commands. He says in Psalm 119. You've got it in your preparing to hear God's word. You can look up the path there, preparing for the hearing of God's word, Psalm 119. He says, your commands now that I understand them with a regenerated mind. Your commands make me wiser than my enemies. See how I understand life. They think revenge will be of long term good to them. I understand that it's not for instance, verse 99. I have more insight than all my teachers who don't have God's spirit. So I look at your commands. I have your spirit and I understand things. I have insight into life that the people around me who don't have God's spirit don't have. And then he says, verse 100, I have no more understanding than those who are older than I. Those who are wise and respected in the world. Who are seen as these gurus or as the new car gurus commercial says car gurus. You see that commercial. They don't say car gurus. I don't think the guy who did the voice over knows how to say guru. So there's this car gurus like the animals for those who are around in the in the 70s. But this is huge. This is one of the just a little quiet joys of being a Christian. I get it. My eyes are open. The world's all in chaos. Oh, no. I'm just cruising along. So there are things that disturb us. No, things disturb Jesus. He left it last. His death. He feared the crucifixion that was coming on. He swept tears of blood or sweat drops of blood. But we get it. You know, this is what calm Jesus in the garden gets them. I get it. Men are evil. This is what men do when they see God face to face. Hey, if you if you end slavery, guess what happens to you? You get shot. Right. The losers in the battle of good and evil. They don't give up. They shoot those. They kill those who are good. And so Jesus. He heals people. He has nothing but good all through his life. He teaches people and gives them some kind of understanding of God's word that they didn't have before. He's just compassion and mercy to those who are despised. And what do we do to him? We put him on a cross. Okay. And so we come to understand this. We come to walk through life. We come to walk through life with understanding. It gives us this quiet joy. We get it. I understand what two plus two is now. I understand what you do with a GH when you see it in a word. Okay. We have this understanding of life because of God spirit. So that's our mind. Our minds are working out of being corrupted. And becoming more pure and seeing life more accurately. And seeing God more accurately. And then second thing. Guess what? Number two. Secondly, you're safe from corrupted actions. That is your actions. That's your blank. Your actions become more consistently right and good. Your actions become more consistently right and good. We talked about this and passed our gospel lessons on Titus. Doing good is huge and Titus. Especially because he's writing the Titus who is ministering to Creedons. And they weren't doing good. They were very corrupted. It's all those verses there. One, eight, two, three, two, seven, two, 14, three, one, three, eight, three, 14, all say something about doing good. That's what Christians are about doing good. Two, ten, a great passage we have about salvation being of grace and by God's mercy and not of works. The Ephesians two, ten, pulses. And now that you've been rescued now that you've been made alive. You've been created in Christ Jesus. That means you've been given birth created in Christ Jesus. You've been in spiritual birth to do good works. That's Ephesians two, ten, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. Since your works, the things you're doing are no longer corrupted, corrupted in their motivations, corrupted in what you're actually doing. So, A, you go from three, three, chapter three, verse three, to three, eight. In other words, from lots of sin, that's your blank from lots of sin, to doing what is good, that's three, eight. Because the fruit, that's your blank, because the fruit of the Spirit who regenerated you and affected your spiritual birth. And who now still and dwells you is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. That's your blank, goodness. You've been regenerated by God's Spirit and so he's producing in you good works because goodness is a fruit of his spirit. And your faithful gentle and have self-control, unable to accomplish this goodness. Galatians 5, 19 through 21 is about all the evil stuff we were doing apart from God's Spirit and then 22 and 23 in Galatians 5, he says, but the fruit of the Spirit is all these things. Love, joy, peace, and goodness, goodness. And then B, we note that the doing of good, the doing of good and not bad, the doing of good and not bad, blesses your life. The doing of good and not bad, blesses your life. We see this widely in Psalm 119, 97 through 105. David concludes that little section of Psalm 119 saying, your light is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. I know where I'm walking, I know what I'm doing, I know what's around me and I understand it because the light's on. But doing good brings us blessing and James 125, the people who look at God's commandments. We look at the Bible and we see these commandments which are all variations of how we love God and how we love our neighbor and James says, don't look at these commandments and go away from them and then forget them. But look at these commandments and then do them and verse 25 of James 1 and you'll be blessed in the doing. You'll be blessed in the doing. God gives us his commandments and gives us uncorrupted minds to understand the commandments so that we can do the commandments which is the definition of doing good. Loving our fellow man, loving God and it blesses us because we were created to live that way, created to live that way. So just in practical terms, if you do good to people, generally they like you. If you do good at work, generally your boss says I'll give the dirty work to somebody else. If you do good at work, generally you get the promotion, not always. But generally that's true, proverbially it's true. If you're good to your wife, she generally is going to be good back to you and vice versa. If you love your kids and sacrifice for them, they're not going to be wishing for your death and an inheritance when you get old. They're going to be mourning the thought of your death. This is just doing good works. It's good for you doing what's good for good to people. If you're good to the Lord, then there's good fruit that comes from it. And this is God's plea to the creatants from Paul to Titus to the creatants. It's God's plea to you today. Do what's good. The reason God came into your life is because at the end of chapter two in Titus, which we didn't cover, it's Jesus is creating for himself a purified people eager to do what's good for their own good and for the good of those who are around them. And don't learn how good it is like David says, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Walk in his ways and just let him work. Let him bless you. Live in his blessing and don't have, don't have him up in heaven saying, oh, try and let this one go by and grace. So do I need to discipline him so he learns to walk in my way so that he can walk in blessing. Just do good from the get down. The blessed life before eternal life begins with three, five here, the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, number three, we make a note about why this happened? Why did God renew you? Why did he get God give you new birth? So we know God did it. It's his work. He regenerated you so you get your mind could be in this process of getting interrupted. Your actions could be uncorrupted more and more. Why did you do it? What deals with the characteristics of God? The characteristics of God. Got a certain characteristics, certain things that are true of him that caused him to do this to you, to regenerate you onto eternal life through his spirit. The characteristics of God involved in this why you are now blessed in life and in death. A, you didn't deserve eternal life. You didn't deserve eternal life. You didn't deserve depth of understanding. I didn't deserve eternal life. I didn't deserve depth of understanding of this life and uncorrupted mind nor did I deserve the turnaround from a sin-dominated life where I was always looking out for my best and it wasn't working out so well to actions of doing good. I didn't deserve this. For God to bring about that turnaround of my life due to regenerating my soul, to being blessed, to being blessed as you do what's good. It's like Jacob said in Genesis 32, verse 10, Jacob looks at his sinful past and all the deception that his name Jacob means, deceiver, one who grasps at things, one who's envious, one who's deceiving his father and trying to get from his brother things that don't properly belong to him. And in Genesis 32, he turns to the Lord and he comes back to the promised plan and he says this in Genesis 3210, Lord, I am unworthy. I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness you have shown your servants. So we say this thing, don't we? We're unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness God that you've shown us your servants. Be your rebirth and the blessings in this life and in death that come from that were because of the fathers. Here's his characteristics that caused all this. You didn't deserve it but here the characteristics that are the base of this. The fathers kindness, kindness, love and mercy towards you. Look at chapter three, verse five, actually verse four, chapter three, verse four looked down there. But what changed from verse three with the sinful life we were in? What changed? He said, but when the kindness and love of God, those are the characteristics, the kindness and love of God, our Savior appeared. He saved us not because of righteousness we had done but because of his mercy. Here's why we were regenerated because God is kind, because God is loving and because God is merciful, not because of righteousness we had done. So we praise God for being a kind God, a loving God, a merciful God. That's who our God is. And then see, we in return are like Jacob. We never think I have deserved. We never think to ourselves I have deserved this blessing of God. I'm blessed because God's merciful. He's been merciful to me. I'm blessed because God's kind. I'm blessed because God has chosen to show his love to me. So our conclusion. So we look at this section showing the two kinds of people that are on this earth and realizing that we're part of the people who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. Conclusion. Clearly, I wasn't wonderful. God says that to us here in Types. Clearly, I wasn't wonderful, but God has been wonderful. God has been wonderful and will continue to be wonderful to me. Let's pray.