For 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, 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.(Titus 2:11-14)
That’s an amazing sentence! It frames our Christian lives between two appearances: the appearance of God’s grace that brings salvation and the appearance of God’s glory in Jesus Christ, our blessed hope.
We Christians live between those two poles. Ours is a life of continuing appearances–grace and glory.
One place short on grace and glory is the Cretan neighborhood. Very little of life gets interpreted in light of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. And most often glory gets associated with the grit and grime of this fallen world–materialism, hedonism, violence and the like. The people we hope to reach in tough neighborhoods, hard places, Cretan contexts need very much to come into this great in-between of true grace and true glory. In fact, all humanity needs to taste and possess grace and glory.
Here’s how we know we live there. Keep reading
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