GEW-04 GOD'S MANDATE IS COUNTER-CULTURAL: LIVING GOD'S WAY IN A WORLD WITHOUT LOVE

The culture of Rome, and even to every person living where this letter to Titus arrived, on the island of Crete was a world framed by mighty armies, where daily life was lived around over-powering architecture, when most cities were fed by aqueducts with gravity-defying engineering, and with Emperors known for their absolute life and death power. So most people had grown up:

Living in a
World without Love

For some this morning, you may have been raised in an environment of conflict, hatred, abuse, or danger. You understand what it means to have grown up in a world without love. Others have known and felt the warmth of a loving parent’s embrace, the encouragement of their words of affirmation, and the depth of their loving investment.

So all of us either relate to the world of Rome without love, or to the love God calls us to shape our families through. But wherever you came from, this passage is a call to choose to have a lifestyle of Nurturing Love in the midst of a Loveless World. Please stand and hear God’s Word to us in Titus 2:4-5:

that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

To those steeped in the Roman culture of Crete, anyone seen as loving, sensitive, and caring were considered to be weak. Only the tough could endure all the hardness of the day.

So to be told by God that He desired a lifestyle of tender, gentle, nurturing love; and that priority made up His top-two qualities all wives and mothers were to possess—must have been shocking to these early followers of Christ on he island of Crete. Lifestyle change, social non-conformity, and peer-offense were all the probable results of such a significant change of direction.

But for a moment, think back to what you know deeply about our God from His Word: God is love, the greatest of all Christian virtues is love, and love energized by God lasts forever. So what God desired in Crete He had always desired in the past, and still expects it today.

What Does God Say
Can Last Forever

And, what does God say will last forever from all the endless and mostly unseen hours of work that being a wife and mother entail? God has promised that ALL the deeds wives and moms have offered in obedience to Him as Lord, prompted by grace-energized-love, are ETERNAL, front-line ministry, that shall never go unrewarded.

So today we learn what can be the most powerful aspect of a wife and mother’s life on earth as she obeys God’s calling for her life: her grace-energized love.

Titus 2:4 contains the key, that produces eternal rewards from every day of a godly wife’s marriage and a grace-energized godly mother’s family. Paul explains that the key is love. The first calling of a wife and mother in God's Word is to do all she does, and say all she says prompted by God LOVE.

If you miss everything else today from this message, remember this. If you do all your duties as a wife and mother prompted by God’s love, He will give you an unending reward. Everything you say as a wife and mother that is prompted by God’s love will generate from Him an unending reward. That is the most liberating and motivating truth that any woman of grace could ever learn! Listen to this same idea once more:

[Our] gifts, [and our] ministries, all one day will cease to exist because they will cease to have purpose or meaning. But our showing love [to our husbands and children], practicing [that] love, [and] living [that] love now—are of utmost importance, more important than having any of the other virtues or gifts, because love is the link God gives us with His eternal Self.
(GEW-04; 100509AM)
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