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Living Sensibly - Titus 2
Living Sensibly - Titus 2
An oft-repeated statement: “Common sense is not common”. Common or not, God’s people are to be sensible. In Paul’s letters Titus, he writes of this in 5 verses. Here Paul says that “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age” (Titus 2:11-12). The grace of God instructs that “elders are to be sensible (1:8), older men, in general, are to be sensible (2:2), younger women are to be sensible (2:5), and young men likewise are to be sensible (2:6).
So, what does that mean?
People often make unsensible choices. Funny, as I write this, auto-correct keeps flagging this word as ‘wrong’. Unsensible simply means ‘not sensible; silly, foolish’.* It means to make choices that just don’t make sense when they are thought through. How often have we said: “This doesn’t make sense!”? That is what the prodigal had to come to understand: ‘he came to his senses’ (Luke 15:17). His lifestyle had brought him to poverty and desire to eat ‘pig slop’, but it didn’t have to be this way. Such a life just didn’t make sense! At home there was plenty of good food, clothes, shelter, and love of family. There was a better way – the way that he had abandoned. The way of righteousness and godliness. His lifestyle was a choice that didn’t make sense, was unsensible.
To choose a life of sin and rebellion against God is unsensible because it engages us in a battle that we can’t win. It will in the end bring us ruin, condemnation, and damnation. To choose the joy of sin for a moment doesn’t make sense when one contemplates eternity. Hence, Timothy was to preach with the goal that sinners would “come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil’ (2Tim. 2:26).
Think. Does your life make sense? How will you fare when you stand before the judgment seat of Christ?
Hugh DeLong
* http://www.yourdictionary.com/unsensible; https://www.definitions.net/definition/unsensible
