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help lead a small group at our church that is slowly walking through Paul’s letter to Titus. We recently talked about the verses in Titus 2 where Paul encourages the believing slaves in the Cretan churches to be faithful in everything “so that they may adorn the teaching of God our Savior in all things.”
Not too many years before Paul’s letter, Jesus taught that the first would be last and the last would be first. He taught that the greatest would be least and the least would be greatest. So who else might we expect Him to choose to make a bold, public gospel statement than a group of people who, in many cases, were viewed as some of the lowest in society?
Before ending our Bible study that night, I repeatedly challenged our group in every circumstance to “adorn Christ.” I think I repeated it like five times for effect.
Taking my own advice, I wore Jesus loud and proud from that point forward. That lasted about 18 hours.
The next afternoon, after picking my wife up from school, I had to pause at a green light because another vehicle got caught trying to turn left at an intersection and ended up blocking traffic. The car behind me *apparently* didn’t see what was happening in front of me and started honking—at me!
To punish this honking bumper-rider, I decided to creep through the intersection at like two miles per hour because, you know, that’ll teach her. As she jerked her car around me to speed by in the left lane, we exchanged irritated glances.
My wife, watching all this play out from the passenger seat, flatly smiled at me and said the last two words I wanted to hear in that moment:
“Adorn Christ.”
Follower of Jesus, you are most likely walking through some situation you consider less than ideal. It’s not easy and you’re ready for it to be over. As you pray and wait for the Lord to act in that situation, adorn Christ.
As I reflected on the incident later that evening, I felt like the Lord had taught me a couple of things:
1. We who follow Christ never stop adorning Him. We either accurately portray His true character through the fruit of the Spirit, or we offer some hybrid version of Him that, when mixed with ourselves, paints a distorted and potentially damaging picture of Jesus to a world that desperately needs to see Him as He truly is.
2. The hardest moments to adorn Christ are also the ones that speak the loudest to the people around us. Do I talk a good faith game in safe, controllable settings and then mentally fall apart when the slightest thing doesn’t go my way? Do I preach patience, love, and kindness and then jam up an intersection to punish a driver who might just be having a bad day?
I believe this was one of Paul’s main motivations in addressing the slaves in Crete. They who legitimately had the greatest reason to feel used, abused, overlooked, and indignant had the greatest opportunity to tell the world that Jesus—not their circumstances—commands their minds, which, in turn, guides their behavior.
Follower of Jesus, you are most likely walking through some situation you consider less than ideal. It’s not easy and you’re ready for it to be over. As you pray and wait for the Lord to act in that situation, adorn Christ.
And for goodness sakes, please don’t honk at the car in front of you the next time he’s jamming up an intersection. It’s probably not his fault …
