¹¹ For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, ¹² training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, ¹³ waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, (Titus 2:11-13 ESV)

Renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age. Seems straight forward enough. A simple recipe for how we are to live faith based lives. Our passage ends with hope and expectation as well, which should be the output of living in this way.

But life gets hard or we easily are led astray. In either case, our simple recipe can become very difficult indeed. But it is when we put our hope and expectations in Christ that we have the strength to stand against all of the worldly desires and the enemy’s schemes.

I feel like I write on this quite often. Maybe it is because I need to hear it quite often, or maybe someone out there needs to hear it. I think more than anything we just need to have the regular reinforcement in our lives. If we can stick to this simple recipe we can live a much better life of faith, hopeful and expectant.