Summary:
When Paul says something was “shed” on us (3:6), he means the grace of God exhibited in the kindness and love He showed (v.4) in saving us by His mercy and grace (v.5). We know this because about the only other time Paul used the word shed was to say that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 5:5). God the Father planned our salvation, God the Son accomplished it on the cross, and God the Holy Ghost sheds God’s love on us and “renew”s us (Tit. 3:5) when we believe the gospel.
When the Spirit renewed you, He made you a new man (Col. 3:10a). But as you live your life and sin and fail to serve God as you should, you fall back into living like your old man. When that happens, you must renew yourself “in knowledge” (Col. 3:10b), a knowledge of God’s rightly divided Word, until you reflect “the image of Him that created him”—Christ, the maker of your new man.
When Paul says God shed His love on us “abundantly,” that’s the adverb form of the verb abound. “Abound” means overflowing (Phil. 4:18), and just as the Philippians met all Paul’s needs and then some, God’s grace meets all our spiritual needs and then some!
To be “justified” (Tit. 3:7) means to be made just. The word “just” speaks of exactness, as when God insisted His people use “just” weights when buying and selling (Lev. 19:35,36). In the same way, God demands that we have exactly no sins to let us into heaven. That’s a problem since we’re not sinless, and so cannot be just with God (Job 25:4-6; Ps. 143:1,2). But God the Father’s “righteous servant” Jesus Christ justifies us when we come to know Him (Isa. 53:11).
Paul says that God justifies us, “that being justified by His grace, we should be made heirs” (Tit. 3:7). We’d all like to be Bill Gates’ heir, but only his children are his heirs. But “we are the children of God. And if children, then heirs; heirs of God” (Rom. 8:17). But what do we inherit from God?
Well, in the beginning God created two things, heaven and earth, which worked out nice because He has two heirs, Israel and the Body of Christ. God promised the father of Israel he’d inherit the earth (Rom. 4:13), specifically the kingdom of heaven on earth (James 1:1 cf. 2:5), from which they will rule the earth as kings in the kingdom (Rev. 5:9, 10)
But God also owns the kingdom of heaven in heaven, the one we can’t go to without being “changed” because it is beyond the stars (I Cor. 15:50-52). That’s our inheritance, but that’s not the best part of our inheritance! The best part of Israel’s inheritance is that Abraham and his seed will have to live forever to possess the earth forever (Gen. 13:15), and the best part of our inheritance is that we’ll have to live forever to possess ours! That’s why Paul says we are heirs “according to the hope of eternal life” (Tit. 3:7).
Now if you’re not saved and are thinking that it is too good to be true that we can have eternal life by grace and not by any works of righteousness of our own (Tit. 3:5), Paul knew you’d think that, so says that it is “a faithful saying” (Tit. 3:8). That means you can depend on it, unlike the “faithless” apostles upon whom the man with the demon-possessed son could not depend (Mark 9:17-19). It was also a faithful saying that Christ came to save sinners (I Tim. 1:15), and with this faithful saying here in Titus 3:9, we learn how He planned to save them—by grace without works.
That’s why Paul says these things should be “affirmed,” a word that is the opposite of deny (Lu. 22:56-59; Acts 12:13-15; 25:18,19). Paul knew that many would deny salvation by grace so he says to affirm it “constantly.”
The reason it should be affirmed constantly is “that” they which have believed might be careful to maintain good works (Eph. 3:8). The way to get believers to do good works is to constantly remind them that they are saved without good works. Grace puts you on spot, saying, “God did this for you, what will you do for Him?” We should be “careful” to maintain good works (Tit. 3:8), or full of care about it. Paul says this is “profitable”—and he knew about profit and loss (Gal. 1:14 cf. Phil. 3:7). He lived for eternity. Do you?
