In Titus 2:11-13 we read, "For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;" This passage affirms that the grace of God that brings salvation teaches us. The salvation here mentioned is obviously salvation from sin and its power. There is a grace of God, however, that does not bring salvation from sin, and from its operation we can gain a good idea of the meaning of grace in its spiritual implications.
The word grace simply means "favor." Actually we live and move and have our physical being by the grace of God. By His grace we breathe air. By His grace we eat food to satisfy hunger. By His grace we drink water to quench thirst. Every physical blessing may be properly ascribed to the grace of God.
It is equally true that this grace by which we live is unmerited. This means that there is nothing inherent about sinful man which obligates God to bestow His favor upon him. Man has not and cannot do anything to obligate God to him apart from God's self-chosen love and will toward man. This is as true spiritually as physically.
If man lives by God's grace he cannot be passive toward that grace. God provides food but man must eat it. God provides water, but man must drink it. God provides air but man must breathe it. God does not force His grace upon man in the physical realm; neither does He force His grace upon man in spiritual matters.
With these thoughts before us it is not difficult to understand why Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mk. 16:15), and "Go ye therefore and teach all nations" (Matt. 28:19). Teaching or preaching the gospel was the means by which God's grace was to be made known to the peoples of earth. For man to reject the gospel, then, is to rebel at the grace of God which brings salvation.
Teaching the gospel is necessary, but teaching alone can profit none whatever. Where teaching falls on deaf ears and stubborn hearts it is as seed sown on hardened, wayside soil (Matt. 13:4). There must be a hearing of the Word, a hearing whose disposition is to heed, if the teaching is to profit; hence, Jesus not only said to His disciples, "Take heed what you hear," but also, "Take heed how you hear." A receptive heart is a necessity if grace's, teaching is to enlighten it.
The grace of God, then, provides the means for man's redemption from sin, but man in sin must appropriate this means (the gospel) by hearing, learning, and believing it. This argues that man is not passive but active in his salvation. For him to be otherwise is to make of him a mere machine, wholly without power to discern or choose between good and evil. If he is altogether passive he could not save himself if he would, and he would not if he could. In such condition if man is lost he cannot help it and if he is saved, he cannot prevent it. If we deny man's activity in salvation we thereby deny his free moral agency, and if man, as God made him, is not a free moral agent with power to choose between good and evil and thereby determine his own eternal destiny, the entire Bible is useless. All its pleadings, overtures and invitations plus all its warnings, threats and commandments are but sounding brass and clanging cymbals - they are empty, absurd and wasted. There is not one passage in the Bible which indicates man is not free to choose between good and evil, between God and Satan, between salvation and damnation. It is this one consideration which gives grace its efficacy as that grace is revealed in the gospel. The gospel is powerless to save him who refuses to believe it. It is God's chosen medium to save him who does believe it.
Then what about the expression: "that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast?" Obviously, though man is active in salvation his salvation comes neither through his own wisdom (1 Cor. 1:21), his own merit (Rom. 3:9-19), nor his own works as is the clear implication of the passage before us. God does the saving, not man. Jehovah has designed the plan of salvation, has revealed it to man in the gospel, and has invited man to embrace it. When man in sin accepts the divine plan and conforms his life thereto, by virtue of this action he acknowledges his own inability to design or execute a plan for saving himself. Though he submits to the will of God, salvation is not of himself but of God; hence it is "not of works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us" (Tit. 3:5).
If finite man could save himself through his own wisdom or his own standard of righteousness he would
have whereof to boast even before God. This is exactly what Paul declares in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 1,
man has not done and can never do. As indicated above, God designed and perfected the plan for
man's redemption; hence, salvation is not and cannot be by the works of man apart from God's
revelation and, therefore, man cannot boast about his salvation.
"It (salvation) is the gift of God" in exactly the same sense that Jesus Christ is the gift of God. "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" (Jno. 3:16), but because God gave His Son it does not follow that all the world receives Him. Actually, Jesus Christ is God's "offer" of a Savior and cannot be a "gift" unless and until He is accepted. So it is with salvation. Salvation is "offered" to sinners through the gospel, but does not become and cannot properly be a gift until accepted or appropriated. Man's action or inaction with reference to God's offer is that which determines salvation's remaining an "offer" or becoming a "gift." Here again we see salvation predicated on man's disposition or will toward it.