The Grace of God Has Appeared • Titus 2:11-14 • Christmas Eve, December 24, 2025

When Grace Appeared: The Sound of New Life

There's something transformative about a new sound entering a familiar space. After decades of quiet, the cry of an infant pierces the air—sometimes cooing with delight at a ceiling fan, sometimes wailing with urgent need. That sound, whether peaceful or piercing, carries one unmistakable message: life has come.

This is the essence of Christmas. Not the decorations, not the festivities, not even the traditions we hold dear. Christmas is about the appearance of grace in human form—God choosing to enter our world not as a distant observer, but as one of us.

The Radical Choice of Incarnation

"The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people" (Titus 2:11). These words from Scripture invite us to consider an astounding reality: God could have accomplished His purposes from a distance. He could have remained untouched by human suffering, unmarked by human pain. But He didn't.

Instead, He chose the harder path—the path of true solidarity with humanity. He chose to feel what we feel, to endure what we endure, to experience every dimension of human existence. The Creator became a creature. The Eternal entered time. The Infinite became finite.

Why would God make such a choice? Because genuine empathy requires genuine experience. True compassion flows from shared suffering. And perfect grace needed to meet us exactly where we are.

Experiencing Everything We Experience

Consider what this means. The baby in the manger would grow to know hunger and thirst. He would experience the ache of fatigue and the sting of injury. He would feel the weight of loneliness and the pain of rejection. He would know frustration, grief, and even righteous anger.

Nothing about the human condition remained foreign to Him. He didn't observe our struggles from a safe distance—He entered fully into them. When we face dread in our own gardens of difficulty, He has been there. When we experience the loneliness of being misunderstood or abandoned, He knows that feeling intimately. When physical pain racks our bodies, He remembers His own.

This is what makes the Christmas story so profound. We're not talking about a distant deity offering theoretical solutions to our problems. We're talking about God who got His hands dirty, who felt the dust of the road on His feet, who knew what it meant to be human in all its complexity and challenge.

The One Critical Difference

Yet there was one crucial distinction in Christ's human experience: He lived without sin. He felt every temptation we feel but never yielded to it. He experienced every emotion we experience but never allowed those emotions to lead Him into wrongdoing.

This matters immensely. When we face pain, we often handle it poorly. We lash out in anger. We speak words we wish we could take back. We make choices we desperately wish we could undo. Our suffering frequently leads us into sin, creating a cycle of pain that multiplies rather than resolves.

But Christ broke that cycle. He showed us that it's possible to experience the full range of human emotion and challenge without sinning. More importantly, His sinless life positioned Him to do something we could never do for ourselves: redeem us from our lawlessness and purify us for relationship with God.

Training in Grace

The passage from Titus tells us that grace does more than simply appear—it trains us. It teaches us "to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age" (Titus 2:12).

This training isn't harsh or distant. It comes from One who understands our struggles intimately because He has walked through them. When Christ calls us to resist temptation, He does so having resisted every temptation Himself. When He invites us to trust God in difficult circumstances, He does so having trusted perfectly even unto death.

He can walk us through our pain because He has walked through pain. He can guide us through our temptations because He has faced temptations. He can be present in our suffering because He has suffered. This is the beauty of grace that has appeared—it's not theoretical or abstract, but deeply personal and profoundly practical.

The Hope of His Return

The same passage that speaks of grace appearing also points us forward: "waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). The One who came will come again.

He came first in humility, as a vulnerable infant. He will come again in glory, as the triumphant King. He came first to experience our condition. He will come again to fully transform our condition. He came first to redeem us. He will come again to complete that redemption.

This is the full arc of grace—from manger to cross to empty tomb to throne. And it all begins with that simple, profound truth: grace appeared.

Keeping Christ Central

In our world, there's often pressure to minimize or eliminate Christ from Christmas. To speak of "the holidays" rather than Christmas. To focus on generic goodwill rather than specific grace. To celebrate the season while ignoring its meaning.

But we cannot afford to do this. Christ is not an optional addition to Christmas—He is the heart of it. The grace of God has appeared in Him. The salvation of humanity has come through Him. The hope of the world rests in Him.

When that new sound enters a home—the cry of an infant—it changes everything. Priorities shift. Schedules adjust. Hearts expand. Life has come, and nothing remains the same.

This is what happened when grace appeared over two thousand years ago. Life came into the world in a new way. God became present with us in an unprecedented manner. And for all who receive Him, nothing remains the same.

The grace of God has appeared. It continues to appear in every life that welcomes Him. And one day, that grace will appear in its fullness, completing the work that began in a humble stable.

This is Christmas. This is hope. This is grace embodied and grace extended. May we keep Him at the center of it all.

(Content generated by PulpitAI from sermon transcript)