Hope Blog

▶ 1:08:29

Mark opened with a line from Steven Wright — imagine a world without
hypotheticals — and then asked the room to try a thought experiment just as absurd: imagine
Christianity without repentance. He was candid that preparing the message had exposed something in
himself. “I’ve got something whacked out in my brain about repentance,” he said. “I almost think of
it as this really negative thing that you kind of have to go through before you get into faith. But
it’s not that at all.”

1. A word we have made heavier than it is

▶ 1:10:14

Most of us, he suggested, picture John the Baptist with a raised fist and a red face. So he went
to the etymology instead. The Old French root means the state of being penitent — sorrow and
contrition for wrongdoing — “resulting,” and he leaned on this part, “in vigorous abandonment of it
in one’s life.” A second dictionary entry, from no Christian source, put it this way: repentance
goes beyond feeling to express a distinct purpose of turning from sin to righteousness; the biblical
word most often translated repentance means a change of mental and spiritual attitude toward
sin.

Which produces the definition he returned to all morning: to repent is to agree with God that he
is right and you are not, and to love him enough to say so out loud.

▶ 1:11:47

Jesus is being playful there, Mark noted — there is no set of ninety-nine people who need no
repentance. Either you understand that you need it or you don’t.

2. The gift Peter kept describing

▶ 1:13:05

At Pentecost the crowd is cut to the heart and asks what to do. Peter’s answer is the one every
Christian knows:

Two thousand years later, Mark pointed out, every person in the room is one of the ones who are
far off. Peter was prophesying about them. But the language he uses a few chapters on, hauled before
the Sanhedrin, is the part worth slowing down for: God exalted Jesus at his right hand as Leader and
Savior to
give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And when the church has to reckon
with a Roman centurion’s household receiving the Spirit, the room lands in the same place — “Then
to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life”.

So is repentance the work we do and salvation the gift we get? No, Mark said. Both are gifts.
“Hey, I am going to change your heart so that you are going to agree with me about your sin.” He also
liked how fast the apostles pivoted once they saw it — no further objections, only praise.

3. Four ways the conviction arrives

▶ 1:17:26

If repentance is granted, how does the awareness of needing it reach us? Mark walked four
routes, and did not claim they were all of them.

Mercy. The woman dragged before Jesus was not accused of adultery, she was caught
in it. Her accusers leave, and Jesus tells her
to go and
sin no more. Mark refused to hear that as a warning. Picture his face lit up instead: you
don’t have to do this anymore. He staked it on a conviction he named as his own leap — Jesus
does not require anything of us that he does not also give us the power to do.

A vision. Saul was zealous for the law and, by his own lights, walking in
righteousness, until the
risen Christ told him whom he had actually been persecuting — and that he had been
kicking
against the goads.

A miracle. A carpenter tells a fisherman who has worked all night to put the nets
out again. Mark made the offense concrete: imagine an electrician strolling up while you are
clearing a main line and suggesting a different cable. Peter does it anyway, the nets fill, and he
is on his knees — “Depart
from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Power arrives and sin becomes visible in the same
instant.

A healing. Two blind men call out, Jesus in pity touches their eyes, and
they
followed him — not for a few steps, Mark argued, but for good. Set against that,
the
ten lepers, of whom one came back. “That tells you that you can actually experience a touch of
God and still reject him. That’s terrifying.” His remedy was the old one: set up Ebenezer stones,
stones of remembrance. Tell the stories to your children and your friends, because rehearsing what
God has done builds the faith back up.

He read A. W. Tozer quoting Horatio Bonar — a seared conscience is the sinner’s heritage, and it
is the first thing the Spirit lays his hand on when he wakes a soul from its sleep of death. The
struggles of conviction come; then he quiets the conscience by showing it Jesus and his cross, and
gives it the taste of forgiveness.

4. Two people who were given it

▶ 1:24:44

Mark told the story of Daryl Belarus — everyone at Hope Chapel knew him as Bear — who was a
fixture in this church for a dozen years or more before he died. Long before that, Bear was the most
recognizable man in Austin’s piercing and scarification world, and deep into practices meant to
reach altered states. He was also on dialysis and needed kidneys, which is a place where a person
finds out what he actually believes. He went outside at the hospital and bargained: give me kidneys
and I will serve you the rest of my life. Instead the Holy Spirit fell on him. He ended up on his
knees, weeping, born again on the spot — and the thing he said afterward is the reason the story was
in the sermon: it doesn’t matter if I get the kidneys. I’m forgiven. The doctor came in the
same day with kidneys. Six months later, with no discipleship and no church home yet, he had read
the Bible cover to cover and was halfway through it again.

▶ 1:32:59

The second story was his wife’s, from about twenty-three years ago, and he got weepy telling it.
She had been attending Hope Chapel roughly six weeks when Carlos Calderon said from this platform
that you can come to Christ today, and you don’t have to do it in a church — you can do it at home,
in your own bedroom. She shook her head, no. Mark called her that afternoon and asked what she had
been thinking. “I was just thinking I wasn’t going to do that today.” She got off the phone angry,
and then she started to pray, and small things began surfacing — hitting her brother when she was
eight, stealing candy from a grocery store. She started crying and could not stop. What she told him
the next day is what convinced him: for the first time in her life she understood that every sin she
had committed was not only against a person, it was against God himself. She asked God to forgive
her and to be her father, was overwhelmed with peace, and fell asleep. “There’s no surer evidence of
salvation,” Mark said, “than true conviction of sin and repentance.”

5. It does not stop at the door

▶ 1:34:49

Everyone wants to become what God intends them to become; the enemy’s work is to convince you
that in this particular area you never will. Mark put Simone Biles on the screen and asked what it
costs to become the best gymnast who has ever lived. Not one correction. Ten thousand of them —
being told, at ten years old, after your best attempt yet, how it could be done better. “Greatness
requires constant reevaluation, or what Christians call repentance. You have to repent from doing it
the wrong way and do it the right way over and over and over.” Then the sentence the message turns
on: “Repentance is actually our secret weapon, but too often we leave it in our toolbox and we try
to build our Christian lives without it.”

6. Seventy times seven, from the other side

▶ 1:38:12

We remember the number because we are asked to do the forgiving —
seventy
times seven. Mark asked the room to run it the other direction. If someone is forgiven that many
times, someone has repented that many times. Compress it into a single day and it gets embarrassing
fast — you apologized for this two minutes ago — and yes, forgiven again. That is not the
system failing; that is what it looks like to live with an
advocate
with the Father. Outsiders find it offensive that you can sin and be forgiven, and Mark agreed
the wrong posture exists — but the answer to abusing grace is not rationing it.

▶ 1:39:39

Which is why he re-read a verse most of us hear as a test:
“If you
love me, you will keep my commandments.” Not prove your love by performing — hear it the
way Jesus spoke to the woman in John 8. Come and spend time with me, love me more, and watch that
thing you have been fighting fall away. He allowed the other reading too, the mornings you get up and
obey because you love him and not because you feel like it. But the engine is love.

7. Sin grows in the dark

▶ 1:41:00

The definition is built into the proverb: confess, and forsake. Mark named the trap he
falls into himself — handling it privately between him and God, calling it settled, and then falling
back into it. So he asked the room to think of specific names: who in your life can hear your darkest
temptation? He was careful about how. He remembered college concerts of prayer where several hundred
students would confess things in mixed company that would have been better handled otherwise, and he
was blunt that he does not mean handshake confessions in the foyer on a Sunday morning. He means
people who know you.

He set two passages beside it. The Lord to the church in Laodicea:
“Those
whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.” And Paul, pleading three times
over his thorn and hearing
“My
grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Confessing a struggle to a
brother or sister is exactly that weakness, and it is what releases the strength to walk out of the
sin.

▶ 1:44:18

His picture for concealment was the grade-school science experiment: keep a slice of bread damp,
keep it in the closet, and come back to mold. Hidden sin does the same. Bring it into the light
instead.

Mark pressed on the word light. The first thing God ever spoke was
“Let
there be light”; the author of light is the one asking us to live in it. All of it comes to light
eventually, so why not now, while there is forgiveness in it?

He closed with the question he wanted the church to sit with. What are the chances there is no
darkness left in you? Slim, he said, and named himself first. So what if, instead of the pressure to
have it together, we admitted we don’t and started living transparently with each other — how would
the body of Christ look, and how would the kingdom of darkness handle a church like that? Repentance,
in the end, is a series of dyings, and there is a verse for that too:
“If
anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

▶ 1:14:24

Hope Chapel spent this summer on what Matt has been calling a tour of tiny texts — the very short letters, mostly in the New Testament. First John sits at the large end of tiny, maybe twelve minutes if you read quickly, and Matt took the whole of it in one sitting rather than a chapter at a time.

An eyewitness, not an idea

▶ 1:15:43

Matt loves John’s writing for its angle: the same gospel Paul preaches, told by someone working in metaphor and impressionistic brushstrokes, with word choices that look simple and are not.

That opening runs deliberately parallel to the gospel John wrote, which itself runs parallel to Genesis 1:1. And the verbs are physical. Heard, seen, looked upon, touched. The word of life is not a message about life but a person they ate with.

▶ 1:17:17

Which settles the question people outside the faith like to press: who could possibly know what God is like? “God knows exactly what God is like,” Matt said. “I think we could all agree on that.” Big brains have worked the problem through philosophy and metaphysics for centuries. But here the life chose to be made manifest. The one who knows is the one who decided to be known.

No darkness at all

▶ 1:18:25

Matt stopped on the word none. We think of the best people we know as mostly good, and we think of ourselves as mostly on his side. That is not the claim being made about God. The darkness in view is not nighttime either — it is a corrupt manner of life, and the light is his own character.

And the end of verse 7 is the same gospel Paul, James and Peter preach. It is not the blood of Christ plus a satisfying amount of light-walking. Cleansing starts where knowing started: with him.

An advocate who is also the judge

▶ 1:20:07

Propitiation is simply the means of forgiveness — the answer to why forgiveness is available at all. And Matt drew out the arrangement: the advocate who speaks for us is the very one who comes to judge the living and the dead. John is not encouraging sin, only acknowledging it will happen. Readers who come away from this letter feeling inadequate and lost have missed the sentence that was put there for exactly that moment.

Hatred of a brother, and the habit of trashing the church

▶ 1:22:44

Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Matt called it one of those lines that will get you — and added, “it’s a good thing we have an advocate.” The brother in view is the family of God, so no only children get off on a technicality.

The blind-spot version is the one he pressed: the witnessing move where you say you know Christians are terrible, you hate them too, but you should love Jesus. “He already looks great. He’s fine, he’s super glorious — more glorious than you could ever paint a picture with your words.” Criticize behavior, criticize deeds; the sweeping contempt for people you have never met is dark even when it is deployed to make Jesus shine. Matt’s practical footnote: he has never met more than a tenth of one percent of Christians worldwide, and neither have you.

Which world we are told not to love

▶ 1:25:30

Verse 16 is the clarification that keeps verse 15 from becoming nonsense. Not the Grand Canyon, not trees, not penguins, not people — Matt had just spent a section on why hating people is out. You do not have to hate city parks to impress the Lord. What is named is desires of the flesh: comfort chosen over obedience, gluttony; desires of the eyes: envy, wanting what someone else has and taking it; pride of life: an abiding sense of one’s own importance.

The antichrist, defined by John rather than by the movies

▶ 1:27:30

Everyone has a candidate — a horned figure who runs banks, the pope, a president, a chip. John’s own definition is the denial of the Father and the Son. What we should watch for is an animus against the gospel, not a science-fiction villain.

And the two do not come apart. Claiming the Father while rejecting the Son is not a position that is available; because of their unity, it is not even a thing one could sincerely hold. Matt did not say that coolly — for those of us with devout friends in other faiths, he said, our hearts should still be broken. Then verse 28: abide in him so that we have confidence, not shame, when he appears. On the end times Christians disagree about nearly everything, but Matt put his hat on the Nicene line — he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. “I don’t know if it’s going to be live on Twitter. But I do know this.”

Children, and why the world’s hatred is not about you

▶ 1:30:33

We clean ourselves up and try to look appealing, and the enmity was never really about us. Being children carries everything you would hope it carries — steadfast loyalty, nurture we have not earned, even discipline that comes from a desire to strengthen rather than from someone who is merely angry.

That cuts two ways, and Matt named both. If your life and the world’s systems are entirely cozy — mutual respect, everything loved in common — that is a red flag. So is kicking the door open and spraying hatred at everyone in sight to prove how spiritual you are.

▶ 1:33:06

Then verse 9, where everyone starts sweating: no one born of God makes a practice of sinning. Matt read practice as a committed, devoted lifestyle, not the person who wants to walk with Christ and fails in weakness — and he grounded that in John’s own consistency. The man who wrote “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate” is not two chapters later telling you that a failure proves you belong to the devil. The confirmations run in both directions and stack up: hatred and rejection of Jesus on one side; believing in the name of his Son, loving one another, and the Spirit he has given us on the other.

Spirits, and a love that ran first

▶ 1:37:02

Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. The instruction assumes something about the room you live in: it is not only people who come up and say things to you. There are voices that whisper against the gospel and are content to leave everything else alone. And the verdict is already in — he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. You have overcome the propaganda.

Matt was careful not to let that become tribal. “We were them, and we are them.” The apostles did not reason their way to God while sitting in their boats having great ideas; Jesus walked up and wrecked their lives. That is why John can say he knows — not because he is especially prophetic.

“God is love” is the verse most likely to end up on a hand towel, and it is routinely read backwards — as though whatever we happen to call love is thereby God. It says the reverse. He defines the word, as he defined himself in chapter one, and the information flows in that direction. At our core we will have to accept that he is better than we are and will always outdo us in love.

▶ 1:41:13

Perfect love casts out fear — and a great many Christians are still living in the fear that has to do with punishment. As for the standard objection, that a particular brother is simply insufferable: one of the things God intends to teach you in a short life is unconditional love, which is very hard to learn while surrounded by people who always meet your conditions. Matt admitted he stole the line and could not remember from whom. He also noted the obvious: God himself will bother you. He resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Being bothered is not grounds for hatred; it is the ground where love grows.

What the letter was actually for

▶ 1:43:26

Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith. Against a constant supply of twisted versions of the truth designed to confuse and overwhelm, steadfast faith is, as Matt put it, a fairly satisfying act of rebellion. The letter closes plainly: we are from God, the Son has come and given us understanding, and little children, keep yourselves from idols.

▶ 1:45:54

Then the pastoral turn, which was the point of the morning. Some people hear all of this — light, dark, two camps, the call to loyal action — as one more entry in a long stream of condemnation. I knew it. I knew I wasn’t living up to it. I’m an idiot. Matt was blunt: “I didn’t say any of those things. John didn’t say any of those things. We put that there.” Because of upbringing or trauma or lies long believed, we bring a lens that makes conviction sound like a verdict. John did not sit down to write so that you would feel awful and give up.

There is no dark in him, no desire in him to tempt you, no secret wish to crush you. There is darkness in us, and we already knew that. He is love, he is our source of light and life, and he is faithful — which is precisely the thing to cling to. Seeing him in his glory does convict. Conviction should end in clinging, not in panicking and walking away.

Rally, or come sit down

▶ 1:49:05

Matt closed with a homely picture. A guest you did not want is coming, and the good china feels like a burden; the same evening with someone you love is nothing but delight — take the china, stay the night, let’s take a few pictures. The job, then, is the one the room had already been doing in worship: to behold him. He is light. He knows you are screwy.

And if you are not up for rallying — if you are empty and cannot give one more thing — Matt’s counsel was to sit at his feet and let other people carry the praying. He said plainly that he needs help there himself; he uses timers, he writes things down, his mind travels. The Heart Ministry teams were coming forward, and he recommended them for anyone who feels dark or discouraged or slow: people who do have the faith right now and will pray over you. “We only love him because he loved us. So we should be gluttons with his love. Third, fourth helpings.”

▶ 1:29:26

This one was a tour of a tiny text — the whole letter of Titus in a single sitting,
read mostly straight through with Matt stopping where it earned a stop. His recommendation before
he started: go home and read it out loud to yourself. It is short enough that you can.

1. Why Crete

▶ 1:30:03

Titus had been left on an island off Greece with multiple cities and multiple church plants, and
Paul wanted all of them put in working order. Matt was candid that he was leaning on historians
here, but the picture the commentaries give is consistent: Crete had a bad cultural reputation.
“I know that it’s not often appropriate in the modern era to criticize another culture,” he said,
“but other cultures were definitely criticizing Crete. And their behavior was so bad, they
criticized themselves.”

▶ 1:31:01

That is precisely why Paul liked it. In that kind of dark environment he saw an opportunity for
the gospel to permeate a society — not a place for churches to merely survive, but a place for
them to thrive. What Paul is after, Matt said, is gospel-inspired, Jesus-powered transformation:
“We’re not just floating heads that need to make a decision.” The goal is not a signature on a
card, as though we had voted for Jesus. It is a whole life, in community, visibly changed.

Which is why so much of the letter is about leadership. You want leaders who will stay on
message and also embody the message — “establishing beachheads of counter-cultural communities
that will show the gospel, not just spread it.”

2. A God who never lies

▶ 1:34:50

Paul’s greeting names the faith of God’s elect, their knowledge of the truth, and the eternal
life promised by a
God “who never lies”. Matt flagged that as deliberate. Set it against Zeus and his family —
gods known for playing tricks and deceiving not only people but each other, with worshippers who
behaved the same way. The Christian difference in that setting was not arbitrary etiquette. It came
from the core of who God is. Our God is a truth teller, so his people know truth.

3. The elder’s household, and the verse nobody can settle

▶ 1:35:20

▶ 1:35:51

Here Matt stopped and showed his work. Put that verse into Bible Hub and you will find dozens of
translations that do not agree: the New King James and the Holman Christian Standard, among
others, render it faithful children rather than believing children. The Greek
word is the same one Paul uses a chapter later of bondservants
“showing all good faith”,
which is not a statement about their theology.

Both readings are linguistically available, and he said so plainly. An elder with believing kids
is obviously an asset. On the other hand, you cannot control what your children believe — but you
can establish a family culture that is not chaotic, “because if you have crazy rebellious kids,
then it’s like, well, you can’t manage your own household. And if your interpersonal life is
chaotic, what if you have no business running a church?” He also pointed out the obvious wrinkle in
reading these lists too rigidly: Paul had zero wives and zero children, and it would be strange to
disqualify him from the churches he planted.

4. Evangelical panic

▶ 1:39:24

The one reading he did push back on is the version that makes your child’s unbelief your verdict.
Follow that logic far enough, he said, and you have to blame Jesus for Judas. Do adults make their
own choices, or don’t they?

He named the failure mode: “sometimes what I call evangelical panic. When we freak out to the
point of maybe cutting corners, compromising our beliefs so as to let people stay in the
believing — I want you to believe so bad and I want to manage your response so bad, I’ll cut
corners or do whatever or start screaming at you.” We can govern ourselves, our words and our
houses. “You cannot adopt responsibility for how somebody else responds to Jesus. That will crush
you, it will burn you out, freak you out, and it’s also just not true.”

5. Overseers, and the courage to rebuke

▶ 1:40:28

The list that follows is almost entirely about character —
not arrogant, not
quick-tempered, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy, but hospitable, a lover of good,
self-controlled, upright, holy, disciplined — and it ends with a working requirement: hold
firm to the trustworthy word, so as to instruct in sound doctrine and rebuke those who
contradict it. Matt did not soften that second half. Rebuke takes courage, and a church needs
leaders willing to do it, in communities that are otherwise safe and hospitable.

6. The people Titus has to shut down

▶ 1:41:33

Empty talkers and
deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party, are upsetting whole families for
shameful gain. These are the people insisting Gentile converts submit to Torah and be circumcised.
Paul goes after them at length in
Galatians, and
Matt drew the line where Paul draws it: we want peace, we want hospitality, and there are still a
few topics Paul will draw swords over. This is one. There is freedom in Christ, and no
condemnation, entirely because of Jesus — by grace, through faith.

▶ 1:43:04

Then the famous line: “Cretans
are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true.” Matt acknowledged that
this lands badly on the mercy-hearted people in the room, offered the range of readings — from
“yes, they really did say that” to “there may be something to it” to the fully hardcore version —
and then declined to settle it. “You ask Paul when you see him.”

What he did work with is the instruction attached to it: rebuke them sharply, so that they may be
sound in the faith, “not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn
away from the truth.” Those commands of people, he thought, are still the circumcision party — and
the argument is the freedom argument again. “When Jesus declares you free in him and yet you submit
to ordinances because of men, you’re submitting to people.” Which is a great many regulations in
the Torah, most of them about purity. That, he said, is why Paul turns the corner where he does.

To those who are in Christ, not condemned, trusting him — including the uncircumcised — all
things are pure and the conscience is clean. To the defiled, no number of rituals, festivals or
regulations will get there: “no matter how many times you put on the ritualistic this, you go to a
festival that, you submit yourself to this regulation.” They profess to know God with all these
external things and deny him by their works. Matt read the verdict twice and then grinned at it:
“Man, Paul can really turn a phrase, can he?”

7. What the households are for

▶ 1:44:46

Chapter two opens on a hinge — “But as for you, Titus,” as in, unlike all that: teach what
accords with sound doctrine. Then older men, older women and young women —
sober-minded,
dignified, reverent, self-controlled, not slanderers or slaves to too much wine, teaching what is
good. He paused on that last pair long enough to wonder aloud whether Paul had somebody
specific in view: “I wonder if he had certain women in mind, I don’t know.” Then the harder lines —
working at home, that is, not lazy; kind; submissive to their own husbands — which he acknowledged
might be hard for some people to hear before explaining why he reads it the way he does. In
Ephesians 5
husbands and wives are acting out, theatrically, the gospel of Jesus and his church. We are showing
the gospel, not only saying it.

▶ 1:45:51

And the bride, he insisted, gets the good end of that deal. Does she get more out of it than she
puts back in? He let the question stand — and then handed the floor to someone who had pushed back
on him the last time he made the observation: you cannot really measure what God gets out of it,
“because his heart is full of delight for having a bride.” Fair enough, he said. He still wanted it
clear how lopsided the ledger looks from our side. “He’s giving us dignity and forgiveness, even
sharing in his glory, and I’ve given — I can just, I’ll speak for myself — I’ve given him problems
and lists. You see how many lists you give the Lord of things that you want?”

▶ 1:46:16

Which is why husbands cannot lift the verse out of its context and land on I’m the boss.
Jesus served humbly and did humiliating things. He is not domineering; he actually makes fun of men
who are, with their
best seats and their
greetings in the marketplace, and he told anyone who wants to lead to
serve like the
youngest.

▶ 1:48:03

A chaotic home in a young church tells the watching city something false. What are the Cretans
going to make of a whole community of this new faith that talks constantly about transformation and
is a total mess? “It’s not gonna change the gospel, it’s not gonna make the gospel not true,
because it is true, whether we’re completely screwy or not. But it’s really, really impeding
people’s ability to hear it or see it.” So let the transformation go deep — into the private place
of the home, the way you speak to your spouse, the way you interact with your kids. That is Jesus’
territory too, not just the sanctuary. He wants it to be his territory.

8. Younger men, and the opponents who are watching

▶ 1:48:44

“Likewise, urge the
younger men to be self-controlled” — and Matt stopped on likewise. Likewise to what?
To everything he just said: self-controlled, pure, working hard, kind. “So in that same way for the
young fellows too.” Then Titus himself: a model of good works, and in his teaching integrity,
dignity and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, with
nothing evil to say about us.

Why so fixated on that? “Because there are opponents looking for an opportunity to criticize.
And he’s saying, Titus, you gotta watch yourself.” It is the same concern in a different key — the
gospel mission reaching down into behavior. “It matters that we let Jesus speak to us about our
self-control. That’s a perfectly adequate battleground for the gospel. It may be in the secret
place, but it’s totally a good place for the gospel to duke it out with dark forces in your own
heart.” The way we love our kids, the way we work at our jobs, the way we talk to our spouse.

9. Adorning the doctrine

▶ 1:50:14

Matt was careful about the setting here: slaves were treated as equals in Paul’s churches, and
Paul is also being careful not to look like he is fomenting a rebellion. He also stopped on
“showing all good faith” long enough to close a loop he had opened an hour earlier — that is the
same word Paul used of an elder’s children back in
1:6. “There’s that
same word again… that’s why I really mean it. Linguistically, it could just mean faithful and
obedient.”

But the phrase he wanted was the last one. Have you ever thought about how you get to live your
own life, and yet, because you belong to Jesus, it touches his mission? All that inconvenient
material — well pleasing at work, not argumentative, not pilfering — exists so that our lives
adorn what we say we believe. And he would not let it stay theoretical: “It’s a good
opportunity here just to reflect, to pause and reflect: do I wanna let the gospel transform me in
these hidden places? The gospel is a motivation behind our little choices.”

10. It is grace that teaches

▶ 1:51:25

Matt put the question directly to the room: what is doing the teaching in that sentence?
“Hardcore rules? No, it’s grace. See in verse 11, it is the grace of God that teaches us to say no
to ungodliness.” And what grace produces is not merely restraint — it is a people Jesus redeemed
from all lawlessness and purified for his own possession, zealous for good works. Then, dryly:
“Imagine how much that would stick out in a dark culture.” And a beat later, to the room: “I wonder
if you can relate.”

11. What we were, and what was poured out

▶ 1:52:43

Chapter three asks for submission to authorities, readiness for every good work, and speaking
evil of no one — where Matt interjected, “you got me on that one” — along with avoiding quarreling,
being gentle, and showing perfect courtesy toward all people. Then it turns to
what we ourselves once
were: foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to passions, passing our days in malice and
envy, hated by others and hating one another. That is the before picture, and Matt read it as
Paul showing his work — the cost of the transfer out of
the kingdom of
darkness into the kingdom of his Son.

▶ 1:53:44

The letter ends in logistics — see that
Zenas the lawyer and
Apollos lack nothing, and let our people learn to devote themselves to good works — and Matt
caught the verb. Learn. “That would be something you’d have to learn. We don’t all come
out rearing to do that.” And the learning has a use attached: so as to help cases of urgent need
and not be unfruitful. Then greetings, and the last four words of the letter, which are the same
ones it started with: “Grace be with you all.”

Where he left it

▶ 1:54:24

His hope for the letter was that it would be encouragement and wisdom for people trying to live
out the gospel in an environment that is arguably as full of madness as Crete was — without
becoming judgmental about it, since we were foolish and hating and hated ourselves not long ago.
The aim is to stick out in a way that is appropriate, showing that gospel transformation carries
the power we claim for it.

And if you suspect it is not carrying that power in your life, his counsel was not to try harder
in private. It was to preach to yourself and go to the cross on behalf of your family: “Lord, have
your way in us. Have your way in my mouth. And then my kid dynamic.” Not only for the sake of the
people at home, though that matters, but for the community watching. He closed by taking the
pressure off the outcome without taking it off the effort: God is merciful and no fool, and he
knows that the moment we try we will stumble. “Don’t worry, he will shine brighter than we do, and
he’s not incompetent. However, we should make every effort to shine the light of his gospel all the
same.” Then he prayed it rather than restating it: “God, thank you for today. I ask that you speak
to us, give us wisdom, help us by living in the transformative power of Jesus Christ.”