There is a word in Titus 2 that most people skip over on the way to the more familiar phrases. Paul writes that the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, “training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (). Not just saving us. Not just forgiving us and leaving things where they were. Training us. The grace of God, in Paul’s understanding, has a direction. It shows up, and then it keeps moving — forming who we are, pressing us toward something we were not before.
Grace Has Appeared
The word Paul uses in verse 11 is the Greek word for epiphany. Not a vague sense of enlightenment, but a sudden and decisive arrival. God himself came in the flesh as man, gave himself for our sins, and delivered those who would follow him. It happened. It changed everything. And it happened — Paul makes this clear in the letter — for everyone, including the Cretans.
That last detail matters. Titus was working on a difficult island. Early writers including Epimenides, Polybius, and Cicero had all written about the people of Crete and their reputation for dishonesty, greed, and self-indulgence. Paul actually quotes Epimenides directly: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” To be a Cretan was cultural shorthand for being untrustworthy. And yet Paul tells Titus that the grace of God has appeared to all people — even these people, in this place, with this reputation. The epiphany of grace has no exceptions based on what someone was before it arrived.
The same word for appearing shows up three times across Titus 2 and 3. The first is the appearing of grace in the person of Jesus. The third is the appearing of Christ in glory at the end. Everything in between — the whole shape of the Christian life — belongs to the middle, to the time between the two appearings. Grace trains us to live in that middle time well.
What Grace Trains Us to Renounce
The first movement grace requires is one of getting rid of things. Not trimming them down or managing them more carefully — renouncing them. Paul names two categories: ungodliness and worldly passions.
Ungodliness is the opposite of piety, the opposite of devotion. It is the orientation of a life pointed at something other than God. Worldly passions are the desires that grow from that misdirection — desires that are not wrong in themselves, but have been shaped by the world’s priorities rather than God’s. Grace does not accommodate these. It trains us to say no.
This renunciation is what baptism is actually a picture of. When someone is immersed, what they are saying is not merely that they know the right facts or have joined the right group. They are saying their old self is dying. describes it as a circumcision made without hands, a covenant in Christ — buried with him, raised with him through faith in the power of God who raised him from the dead. The old life goes under. Something different comes up. names what that life looks like afterward: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
This is why Romans 6 handles the question of cheap grace the way it does. Paul asks whether believers should continue in sin so that grace may increase. The answer is not a gentle no. It is “by no means” — followed by an argument about slavery. You were once a slave to sin. Christ redeemed you. Now you are a slave to righteousness, obedient from the heart to a new standard of life. The renunciation that grace trains us in is not an extra requirement added onto the gift. It is the natural shape of someone who has understood what they were saved from and is no longer willing to go back.
What Grace Trains Us to Build
Grace does not stop at what we leave behind. Paul gives three qualities it trains us toward: self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.
Self-control is Paul’s signature theme throughout Titus. It comes up repeatedly in how he describes older men, younger men, younger women, elders, and overseers. In the context of Crete, it was a direct challenge. The Cretan reputation was for indulgence and excess. Self-control — the moderating of how much we give ourselves to various things, the ability to say enough and mean it — was the opposite of what surrounded Titus’s congregation. Grace trains us toward it not by making the world less appealing but by reorienting what we are living for.
Living uprightly means standing before God as someone whose standing is in Christ, and then actually living accordingly. There is a consistency between who we are declared to be in Christ and how we carry ourselves in ordinary life that grace is always working toward.
Godliness is piety — the honest devotion of a life that has decided God and his people are the first priority. Not religious performance, but actual orientation. Jesus described it plainly: seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Everything else fits under that or around it. Paul told Timothy that everything we do — including daily work, caring for a household, raising children, even sleep — can be done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Grace trains us to bring all of it under that heading, so that the ordinary hours of life are not a distraction from devotion but an expression of it.
The Danger of Cheap Grace
In the middle of the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer named the problem that Paul had already named in Romans 6. He called it cheap grace. Cheap grace, Bonhoeffer wrote, is the grace we bestow on ourselves. It is preaching forgiveness without repentance. Baptism without accountability. Communion without confession. Grace without discipleship.
The problem is not that grace is extended too freely. The problem is that the transaction is made one-directional. Someone receives the gift and nothing moves in the other direction. Bonhoeffer’s most pointed phrase is that cheap grace is grace without discipleship — and discipleship is not a set of practices to perform but a person to follow. To be a disciple is to walk with Jesus, to see how he lived and treated people and what he asked for, and to work to incorporate all of that into a life that becomes more like his.
This is not a new error. Paul anticipated it. 1 Peter confronts it from another angle. Peter writes that his readers were ransomed from their futile ways by the precious blood of Christ — not by silver or gold but by something of incomparably higher value. What follows from that? “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (). The ransoming does not end the story. It is the reason the story continues in a different direction.
The Question Grace Asks Every Morning
Paul closes the section in Titus 2 with the third appearing: “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (). The first appearing of grace made something new possible. The second appearing is what we are orienting our lives toward. The middle time — now — is the time of training.
That training is not a burden imposed from outside. It is the natural response of someone who has genuinely considered what God has done. In the first century, the word grace carried the idea of obligation within it — not the dull weight of duty, but the warm pull of gratitude toward someone who has done something remarkable for you. When someone saves you, you are grateful. When you understand that God delivered you from slavery to sin at a cost you could never repay, the response is not indifference. It is the willingness to live differently because of it.
The question, then, is not whether grace was once received. It is whether grace is actively working now. How is it transforming you today? Not at one earlier moment — today. What decisions are you making differently because of who you are in Christ? What are you still holding onto that grace has been asking you to put down? The grace that appeared did not arrive to leave things unchanged. It arrived to train.
