Between Two Appearings

My kids are six, four, and two, and they turn into small sentinels the week before their grandparents drive up from Baltimore. The guest bed gets made up days early. Someone keeps flipping the porch light on, even at noon, "so they know which house." A day gets circled on the calendar, and by dinnertime the two older ones are at the window, watching the road for headlights that won't come until Friday. None of it makes Memaw and 2-Pop come — that was settled the moment they said they were on their way. The house is kept, and kept ready, for one reason: they are coming.

Paul hands Titus a whole Christian life pressed into four verses, and it turns on two appearings. "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people" (Titus 2:11); the word is epiphaneia, an appearing, a shining-out. That first appearing was a quiet one — a child, a manger, a Savior who came in great humility. And a second appearing is still ahead of us, "our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13), one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven (Daniel 7:13). Between those two comings — grace behind us and glory before us¹ — lies the long stretch Paul calls "the present age" (Titus 2:12): the circled day not yet arrived. It is where we live, and where most of the Christian life is quietly spent.

Grace does not leave us idle in the meantime. It "trains us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age" (Titus 2:12). The word for train is paideia — the patient schooling of a whole household, not the summons of a courtroom. The order in the sentence is the whole gospel in miniature: the godliness comes after the grace and grows out of it, never the other way round. We do not scrub the house to earn the homecoming; we keep it because Someone is coming, and because grace itself is patiently teaching our hands what to do. The waiting is not empty time to be killed. It has a shape, and the shape is holiness.

We keep the house so carefully because we remember what it cost to give it to us. "Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession" (Titus 2:14) — a ransom paid, a stain washed clean. He did not wait for a household already worth keeping. He bought it at the price of himself (Galatians 1:4), swept out the old rooms, and moved in as its rightful owner. The manger and the cross turn out to be the same story told twice — a God who stoops low enough to be born in straw is a God who will go low enough to bleed for what he loves. So we are not tenants hoping our lease gets renewed, dusting nervously against inspection day. We are sons and daughters keeping our Father's house, because it was, long before we ever tidied a single room, already ours.

So the hope is not wishful, and the waiting is not idle. It is hope with a certainty set under it — the sure appearing of a Savior who has already died to secure it. In other words, it is the very hope prayed for in the ancient collect below — grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, until he comes again in his glorious majesty.² The day is circled. The porch light is lit. He is coming — and grace is teaching us, in the meantime, to keep the house ready for the One who is already on his way home to us.