Three Advent Gifts | Titus 3:4-8
Brian Hedges | December 14, 2025
I want to invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to the book of Titus. This is one of Paul’s pastoral letters, letters he wrote to Timothy and to Titus. Today we’re going to be looking at Titus 3:4-8. This is following on the message Brad brought us last week from Titus 2.
Every December we sing these words: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” It’s one of my favorites of the Advent hymns, but it is a song that’s not so much celebration as it is a cry for help, it is a prayer. It is the cry of God’s exiled people, longing for the appearing of the Savior, Jesus Christ.
That first line says it so well:
“O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.”
That’s part of what Advent is about. It’s about longing for the appearing of Christ, and it’s one reason we’re studying together in this Advent series the “appearing” statements of these pastoral letters. They are the great salvation statements that focus on the incarnation of Christ, the appearing of Christ; and we’re going to read another one of those here in Titus 3.
I think it’s important as we begin this morning to just tap into those emotions expressed in the Advent hymns, the emotions of longing, of yearning for a Savior. For many of us, Christmas is a season of great joy, and there are things that we celebrate together as we remember the birth of our Lord and we enjoy the fullness of joy and blessing in our families.
But for others, the more dominant emotion is one of longing. We are conscious of the gap between the way things are and the way we wish they were. We sing about peace, but we know that there’s anxiety in our hearts. We talk about joy, but we carry sorrow and regret. We surround ourselves with these beautiful lights, and they are beautiful, but maybe we do so when we’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
So it’s in that need that the gospel comes as such good news to give us hope in the midst of those longings. Once again, we will see that gospel expressed so clearly today in Titus 3. Let me read Titus 3:4-8. Verses 4-7 are really just one sentence in Greek. It’s one of the great statements of salvation in the New Testament. Then verse 8 is really the application of everything that goes before. So Titus 3, beginning in verse 4.
“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people.”
This is God’s Word.
So, you really have the theme of the passage expressed in verses 4 and 5: “When the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us.” And once again, that word “appeared” signals for us the historic appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ in his first advent, in his incarnation.
But the focus of the text is not only on the historic appearing of Jesus Christ, but also on the application of Christ’s work to our hearts through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And when you put that together, I think it teaches us that the advent or the appearing of Christ brings three great blessings into our lives. And we can express these blessings in everyday language as being:
1. A Clean Slate
2. A New Beginning
3. An Eternal Hope
Let’s unpack it together, beginning with number one, a clean slate.
1. A Clean Slate
Here I just want to focus on the righteousness language in the passage. You have verse 7: “...so that, being justified by his grace…” It’s a little bit obscured in the English, but it’s closely connected to the word that comes in verse 5: “He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.”
So, put it together, and Paul is saying we’ve been saved not by our works of righteousness, but we have been justified or made righteous or declared righteous by God’s grace.
This is a word for salvation that comes from the world of the law court, the courtroom. It’s a legal word that means to be declared righteous before God. It is to receive the verdict of “not guilty” from the divine judge. Sometimes people put it like this: justification means it’s just as if you’ve never sinned. And that’s pretty good, that’s right, but it actually means a little more than that. It means not only that your sins have been pardoned, erased, done away with, but it also means that you are counted as righteous before God the judge. You are counted as if you had done everything that God required, as if you had perfectly obeyed, you had perfectly fulfilled the law.
Of course, this is that great doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, that has changed so many lives throughout history—not only ordinary believers such as us, but also you think of some of the great historic figures in the church. It was Luther when he discovered the doctrine of justification by faith, reading Romans 1. He felt that he had entered through the gates of paradise and he was born again. Or John Wesley, when he was in that little chapel service and he heard these words read, said that his heart was strangely warmed.
So it is this great doctrine of justification by grace through faith. And Paul here is telling us that this is a gift that comes to us through the work of Christ, Christ who has appeared for us in history in his advent and incarnation.
Now, in some ways, I think this is the best news in the world, but maybe not the easiest news for us to believe. I wonder for how many of us does it really rest in our hearts that we are fully absolved from sin, that we really are saved by grace, and that our works contribute nothing to that process.
I think it’s especially hard to believe in a couple of cases. I think for those who feel deep emotions of shame and guilt and regret, maybe because of big sins. You think about the really big sins—maybe you’re someone who’s committed adultery. Maybe you’re someone who, long ago, hurt someone terribly, committed even a crime against someone. What do you do with those kinds of regrets, with that kind of guilt? You might question, “Is it really possible for me, for God to forgive me of my sins? Maybe he can forgive the ordinary person, but can he really forgive such a great sinner as I am?” That can make it hard to believe.
It can also be hard for those who have the more deeply ingrained sins. So these are sins that have kind of been woven into the very fabric of your temperament and personality, and it’s the often-repeated sin, and you try to repent, you try to conquer it, but you find yourself slipping into it again and again, and it affects your life in adverse ways. Think of addictions, think of adverse effects in relationships. There’s brokenness in those relationships because of sin. You may wonder, “Is it possible for me to be fully and completely forgiven of those sins?”
But what Paul is telling us here is that indeed it is, that God through Jesus Christ justifies us and counts us as right before him, not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what Christ has done for us, because of his grace.
I could illustrate it in this way. A number of years ago, I was on a mission trip to South Africa. Some of you will remember when our church was sending people down to South Africa, we were working with a Bible college in a very remote part of the country, and we would take literally hundreds of books with us, which meant that we would pack light in every other way. Only the clothes we could stuff into a carry-on suitcase, only what we just—you know, the bare essentials, what we needed. So this was one of those trips. We were headed to this Bible college, and I had packed very light, and I had not even taken a suit or even a suit jacket or sports coat or anything like that.
But before we got to the college, on Sunday morning I was to preach at an upper middle-class church in Johannesburg, and I arrived without a suit, without a jacket. Of course, you know, this is the way I dress—pretty casual—in our church. And I realized pretty quickly that this was socially unacceptable in that church. In fact, the guy who greeted me was kind of one of the leaders of the church. He was the son of the recently deceased pastor, and he was a little shocked that I was not wearing a jacket, and it was such a big deal that he loaned me his jacket, which was two sizes too big. Then, when his little mother, this little old lady—she was the widow, she was kind of the matriarch of the church—when she showed up and she saw that her son was not wearing a jacket, she scolded him. She was like, “Why are you not wearing a jacket?” And he was like, “The pastor’s wearing it!” He gave up his jacket to kind of help me out of the disgraceful situation.
I just happened to be preaching on Titus 3 that morning, and so I just turned it into a sermon illustration and helped this guy save face. He gave me his jacket so it could be a covering for me. In the same way, this is what the gospel tells us Christ has done. He has taken our shame so that he could clothe us in his honor. He has borne our disgrace so that we could be covered and clothed in the righteousness and the obedience of Christ. He carries our sins so that we could be decked out in full and arrayed in the garments of righteousness and of salvation. And it’s because we are covered in just that way that we are declared righteous before God.
Now, I think one of the most important things we can learn in our lives is how to apply that practically. It’s a great theological concept, but what’s the practical cash value for that in everyday life? Luther said you have to beat this down into people’s heads continually, because it’s so easy for us to forget it.
Here’s a concrete thing you can do. As you think about your sins, as you spend time before the Lord and you remember the sins that you’ve committed—maybe it’s the sins of the past week, maybe it’s the sins of your life—write them down. Write down even the worst ones. Write down the things that you would want nobody else to know. Read over that list, confess it before the Lord; then read these verses again over those sins, and then throw your list into the fire, or tear it up in a million little pieces, because just as surely as the fire burns away that list of sins, so surely are your sins removed from you by God’s grace through Jesus Christ.
Listen to the Word of God. Psalm 103:11-12 says, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.”
The prophet Isaiah, Isaiah 1:18, says, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”
It’s a clean slate! All of your sins are forgiven. You now stand completely righteous in the sight of God, by grace and grace alone. We get it because Jesus Christ, born in that manger of Bethlehem, was born to bear our sins and carry our sorrows, take them all the way to the cross. He was born to die for us, and we through his death receive the righteousness of God.
2. A New Beginning
This text tells us that we not only get a clean slate, we also get something else. We also get what we could call a new beginning. If the clean slate is justification, the new beginning is found in these words “regeneration and renewal.”
Look at Titus 3:4-6 again.
“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.”
Now Paul’s using a different metaphor. This is a word that’s not so much from the law courts; this is a word of creation. In fact, this word “regeneration” is an important word. It’s used only two times in the New Testament. It is the word palingenesia.
If you take the Greek word apart, palin means “again,” genesia, “beginning.” It is a second genesis. It is a fresh beginning. It is new life or new birth.
Paul uses the word here. Jesus uses this word in Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the new creation at the end of time, the time when all things are restored.
It seems that the idea is something like this: through the power of the Holy Spirit, God someday is going to make the world new through the power of the Spirit, the power of the risen Christ. But that newness has invaded the present in our lives as we receive the Holy Spirit and we become participants in the new creation in the here and now.
This is what we commonly refer to as new birth. Listen to these verses again, part of verse 5 and verse 6, this time from the New Living Translation. I think it gives a good gloss to these words.
“He washed away our sins, giving us new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. He generously poured out the Spirit upon us through Jesus Christ, our Savior.”
Friends, we also get this through the advent, the appearing of Jesus Christ. We sang it this morning:
“Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that men no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.”
Second birth—new birth, new life, a fresh beginning, a fresh start.
I think if the first gift of advent—the clean slate—if that addresses the felt need of guilt and shame and regret, the gift of a new beginning—regeneration—addresses another need. It addresses another longing of the heart, and that’s the longing to not only be declared right, but also to be changed, to be transformed in our hearts and lives, so that it’s not just that our sins are absolved, it’s not just that we stand right before God, but we actually become new creations. We become transformed people. This means that we can begin again. We have been changed through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, and we now participate in ongoing spiritual renewal as we walk in the Spirit in our lives.
Let me give you another illustration. We’re in the midst of this winter wonderland, and I’m in a state of mourning because I can no longer play golf on a course. So let me just slip in a golf illustration.
So many of you, if you don’t know anything about golf, you maybe will know this: amateur golfers often give one another what’s called a mulligan. A mulligan is a do-over. It means that when you’re in the first tee box and you snap-hook your ball into the woods, a generous playing partner will say, “Ah, tee it up again. Don’t count that one. Hit a mulligan.” Or it means that, you know, when you miss the four-foot gimme putt, they say, “Oh, count that one in. You don’t need to put that on the scorecard. Like, that was a gimme.”
They’re essentially saying, “You don’t have to count that shot. You get to start all over. You get to begin again.” It’s as if it never happened. You get a fresh beginning. You can try again.
Have you ever thought how nice it would be to get mulligans in real life? You know, you’re speeding through one of those speed traps in Buchanan or wherever, and you see the flashing—I speak from experience; it was a long time ago—you see the flashing lights in the rearview, and the policeman comes up to your window, and he says, “Ah, take a mulligan. Just don’t speed next time.” You just get the warning instead of the ticket.
Or you say that wrong thing to your spouse. You know, you say the thing that you definitely shouldn’t have said. Instead of her getting angry, she just says, “Honey, try again. Take a mulligan.”
Did you know there’s one place in life, one relationship, where we always get a fresh start? That’s in our relationship with God. Over and over again, he gives us a new start. He gives us a new beginning.
Where do you need that in your life right now? Where do you need a do-over? Maybe you’ve slipped back into an old addictive pattern. Start again. Start fresh. There’s a new beginning. Maybe you have blown it in anger with your kids yet again. Take a mulligan. Start fresh, confess, move on—a new beginning. We get that through the Spirit.
We’re not talking here about self-help. We’re not talking about things we do in our own strength. We’re talking about learning to live in the power of the Spirit’s newness in our lives. And we do that as we use the means of grace given to us by God for walking in the Spirit.
So here’s kind of the simple three-step thing that will help you with that. You ask for the Spirit’s power and help—that’s prayer. You set your mind on the Spirit’s words—that’s Scripture. And then you walk in the Spirit’s power—that’s obedience. And this is a lifetime thing. It’s not instant transformation; it is ongoing, incremental, daily renewal; every day, a new beginning, a fresh start.
3. An Eternal Hope
That fresh start is anchored in a third gift of Advent, an eternal hope. We get a clean slate, we get a new beginning, and we get an eternal hope. Look again at verse 7: “So that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”
“Heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” What does that phrase mean? It’s easy to just read over that and not really think about the implications.
Does that just mean that you go to heaven when you die? Of course, it certainly includes that if you are a Christian, but there’s more to it than that. You’re heirs of something; that means there’s an inheritance. You’re going to inherit something. Scripture elsewhere says that we are “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” It means that if you’re in Christ, you get the same inheritance that Jesus Christ the Son gets. You are a joint heir with him.
“Heirs according to the hope of eternal life,” and eternal life means not just living forever, it means life in the age to come. So it’s pointing us forward to that day when Jesus returns and all things are made new. It’s reminding us that the present age is not all there is, that there is coming a day when all of the brokenness, all the sadness, all the grief, the sorrow, all of the dark things in this world will be done away with once and for all. It reminds us of the cosmic renewal that is found in the power of Christ.
Once again, we sing about it in our Advent songs. Isaac Watts says,
“No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.”
The curse that has been like a shadow on this entire created order someday will be reversed, it will be lifted.
I think this addresses another one of those felt needs in our hearts, as we think about the emotions of longing in the Advent season. Maybe this is where many of us feel it the most. You come to this season, and I think the older you get, the more you feel it. You experience the joy of being with your children and your grandchildren, but you also are conscious of the loss.
I can’t come to this season without thinking about my grandparents, Nana and Zan-Zan, as I knew them, and how many Christmas Eves I spent in that wonderful house in Amherst, Texas; and they’re gone now. That’s past. I can’t come to this season without thinking about my mom and my mother-in-law and a sense of loss at losing them, in 2020, so early.
Some of you this year have also faced this loss, some of you in recent weeks, in recent months. Some of you are on the brink of it with a loved one whose health is in rapid decline, or maybe even a loved one on the deathbed. What I want you to know is that if you are silently carrying those emotions of grief and loss and sorrow, God knows. God sees it, God cares for you in it, and he gives us resources for facing it, as we remember that we are the heirs of something better and that we have not received our inheritance yet.
There’s a great scene in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress when Christian and Hopeful are taken by these shepherds up into the mountains, and they visit several of these mountains, and one of the mountains is called Mount Clear, and on the mountain there’s a telescope. And they look through the telescope, and the sights are set on the celestial city, and seeing where they’re going gives them fresh hope for the journey.
That’s what passages like this and many others are meant to do: to set our sights on the hope that we have not received yet. There’s coming a day when we will receive the fullness of our inheritance. It hasn’t come yet, but the Scriptures, the promises of God nurture that hope and help us to set our eyes on the new heavens, the new earth.
You know, that promise is not just that when you finally meet Jesus face to face, everything will be better. It’s a promise that actually goes much deeper than that. It’s a promise that even the pain and suffering and sorrow that you experience now is somehow preparing you for that and will make it better. That’s how the Scriptures seem to speak.
Listen to this verse. 2 Corinthians 4 says, “For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.”
It’s preparing an eternal weight of glory. It’s somehow working it out. It’s doing something in us and for us, so that when we finally get to that final day, when we are finally reunited with our Savior, one millisecond of glory and we will understand and everything will be worth it and we’ll see that there was no pain wasted, nothing we went through was haphazard, by chance, or in vain.
C.S. Lewis said, “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that heaven once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into glory.”
Our agonies turn into glory. That’s the hope, the hope of eternal life, of life in the age to come, hope that is anchored in Jesus Christ.
One more thing to note here from the text. Verse 8 shows us that the hope we have is not simply resting on God’s promise, but it is hope that compels us to do good in the world now. Verse 8 says, “The saying is trustworthy—” another one of these trustworthy statements in the pastoral letters. “The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to do good works.”
This is the whole reason Paul’s writing all this, so that we will devote ourselves to doing good. That’s what “good works” means: doing good. What does that look like for us in this season?
I would suggest that you first of all just start in your immediate context, start with your family and your extended family. Doing good means that you serve those around you. It means that you love your difficult in-laws. It means that you do everything in your power to make the season not a dread but a delight, by being a kind and flexible person.
But it’s more than that, of course. It means also that we consider those outside of our family. And maybe you should ask questions like this: Who stands in need in this season that’s within my orbit of influence? Who needs generosity? Who needs compassion? Who needs attention? So we turn this into a season where we don’t just pull into our own little comfortable enclaves, but we also reach out to others.
We’re doing this so as to express the same love and kindness that has appeared to us in Christ, to express that same love and kindness to the world around us.
Friends, the advent of Christ gives us a clean slate—justification, sins forgiven, made right with God. It gives us a new beginning—regeneration, the renewing power of the Holy Spirit, a fresh start. And it gives us an eternal hope—the certain promise of life in the age to come.
The Puritan Thomas Watson put it like this: “Christ was poor that he might make us rich. He was born of a virgin that we might be born of God. He took our flesh that he might give us his Spirit. He came down from heaven that he might bring us to heaven.”
This Advent season, let me encourage you to receive the gifts that God has given, the gift of his Son, the gift of his Spirit. Rest in his justifying grace. Start fresh in obedience to God and walk in the hope that is set before us. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you this morning for the good news of the gospel. We thank you for the hope of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and of all that he has done for us in his life, his death, his resurrection. We thank you for the hope of the second coming, and we live in that hope as we look ahead to the day when Christ comes again to make all things new.
Lord, as we think about the brokenness in our own hearts and lives, as we think about the brokenness and the division, all the sadness in the world around us, Lord, it makes us yearn for something better. Would you help us bring those longings of our hearts to you so that in faith we will trust in you and in what you have promised to do through Christ? May it give us that certain confidence that helps us to keep walking. Even through the valley of the shadow of death we walk in the confidence that you are with us and that your good and gracious plan is being worked out in our world.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we ask you to meet with us by your Spirit. May the table be for us today a means of grace, as we by faith feast on Christ and on all that he has done for us. Lord, may it be a time that assures us that our sins are forgiven and that we are right with you because of Christ. Help us, Lord, to trust in your grace this morning and rest in grace alone. May you be glorified in our worship. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
