How to live in this evil world …

There are days when the world feels terribly wrong. A child is killed in a war he did not start. A family is shattered by someone’s betrayal. An elderly person loses a lifetime of savings to a stranger’s deception. Someone who tries to do what is right pays dearly for it, while someone who lies and exploits others seems to flourish. Then the evening news ends, the screen goes dark, and the problem has not gone away. We still have to get up tomorrow morning and live here.

That has been one of the great human questions in every generation. How do we live in a world where evil is real, where it sometimes reaches directly into our homes and relationships, and where we ourselves are continually confronted with choices between what is good and what is wrong? For Christians, the question becomes even more profound. Scripture says that God “… has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son,” Colossians 1:13. We belong to Jesus now. But He has not yet taken us out of this world. We still have to live here.

Jesus knew exactly what that would mean for His followers. On the night before His crucifixion, He prayed, “I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one,” John 17:15. Jesus was leaving His disciples in the world deliberately. They would belong to Him while continuing to live among people who did not share their allegiance to Him, surrounded by influences that could draw them away from Him.

That remains our situation today. Following Jesus does not place us behind some protective wall where temptation can no longer reach us and evil can no longer wound us. We belong to another kingdom while our feet remain planted in this world. So how are we supposed to live here?

Paul answers that question in a few extraordinary sentences to Titus: “For the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation to all people. And we are instructed to turn from godless living and sinful pleasures. We should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God, while we look forward with hope to that wonderful day when the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed,” Titus 2:11–13.

Those words were written nearly two thousand years ago, but Paul places his finger directly on our problem. He calls this “the present age,” which the New Living Translation (NLT) renders “this evil world.” Paul is talking about the world in which Christians must actually live before Christ returns. His answer is neither escape nor surrender. God teaches His people how to live faithfully right here.

The surprising part is what does the teaching. Paul says it is grace.

We usually associate God’s grace with salvation, and Paul certainly does. He says that “the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation.” Yet his next words show that grace does not finish its work when a person comes to Christ. The grace that saves us also begins training us.

The word translated “instructed” was used for the training and education involved in bringing someone toward maturity. Paul pictures grace as actively forming people who have been saved by Christ so that they learn how to live as people who now belong to Christ.

That training requires us to learn to say no. Paul says grace teaches us to “turn from godless living and sinful pleasures.” “Turn from” carries the force of rejecting or renouncing something. “Godless living” describes life that lacks reverence for God, while the “worldly” desires of the Greek text are desires shaped by a world alienated from Him.

That means we cannot simply take our cues for living from whatever happens to be normal around us. A culture can normalize what God calls wrong. A crowd can celebrate what destroys people. A desire can be powerful without being trustworthy. Grace teaches us to recognize what is pulling us away from God and refuse to let it rule us.

But Christianity cannot be lived entirely in the word “no.” Paul immediately tells us what grace trains us to say yes to. He chooses three words: wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God. Those words are not three ways of saying approximately the same thing. Together they describe three dimensions of a life that can remain faithful to Christ in the middle of an evil world.

Live with wisdom
The first is wisdom. The Greek word sōphronōs carries the idea of sound judgment, sensible thinking, and self-control. It describes the ability to govern ourselves rather than allowing whatever we happen to feel or desire at a particular moment to govern us.

That kind of wisdom becomes enormously important when we remember how many decisions are made under the pressure of the moment. Anger can make retaliation seem reasonable. Fear can make a terrible decision seem necessary. Sexual desire can make a boundary that once seemed obvious suddenly appear inconvenient. The desire to be accepted can make compromise look harmless. When emotions and desires become intense enough, they can narrow our vision until all we can see is what we want right now.

Wisdom enables us to see farther.

Suppose someone says something cruel about you. The anger comes quickly, and so does the opportunity to answer. You can humiliate that person just as publicly as you were humiliated. For a few seconds, retaliation may feel completely justified. Wisdom asks you to look beyond those few seconds. What will your words accomplish? What kind of person are you becoming if another person’s cruelty can control your behavior? What response would be consistent with belonging to Christ?

Or imagine that you desperately want something you know you should not have. Wisdom does not pretend the desire is absent, it brings judgment to bear upon the desire. Where will this take me? What will it cost? What will happen if I keep feeding it? What does God say about what I am considering?

A wise Christian learns that feeling something strongly does not create an obligation to obey the feeling.

This is one of the great protections God gives us for life in an evil world. We cannot control everything that enters our lives, but by His grace we can increasingly learn to govern what happens next. We can think before acting, examine before believing, and consider consequences before surrendering to an impulse. Wisdom allows truth and sound judgment to have a voice when desire is shouting.

Live with righteousness
Paul’s second word is righteousness. Dikaiōs means to live rightly, justly, and uprightly. The emphasis has shifted. Wisdom concerns the sound judgment and self-control with which we conduct ourselves; righteousness concerns the moral quality of what we actually do.

That sounds simple until doing what is right becomes expensive.

It is easy to praise honesty when telling the truth costs nothing. The real test arrives when a lie could save your reputation, your money, or your job. Fairness sounds admirable until treating someone fairly means giving up an advantage you could have kept. Integrity is easy to endorse until nobody would ever discover the compromise.

And perhaps one of the hardest tests of righteousness comes when someone else has already behaved unrighteously toward us. Once we have been deceived, betrayed, cheated, or humiliated, wrongdoing can begin to feel justified. We tell ourselves that the other person deserves whatever we do next.

That is one of evil’s most dangerous victories. It first wounds us and then tries to recruit us.

Corrie ten Boom knew something about that struggle. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the ten Boom family hid Jews and members of the Dutch resistance in their home. Corrie was eventually arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her sister Betsie died. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that the ten Boom family’s efforts helped save hundreds of lives.

After the war, Corrie traveled through a devastated Europe speaking about Christ’s forgiveness. Following one meeting in Germany, a man approached her whom she recognized as one of the former guards at Ravensbrück. He told her that he had become a Christian and then held out his hand and asked for her forgiveness.

Corrie later described the terrible difficulty of that moment. The memories of the camp and of her sister were not abstractions. Yet she understood that the evil committed against her could not be allowed to determine her own obedience to Christ. She extended her hand.

That is righteousness where righteousness actually matters.

Most of us will never face anything comparable to Ravensbrück. But the same moral choice appears in smaller forms throughout ordinary life. Someone else’s dishonesty does not make dishonesty right for us. Another person’s cruelty cannot become our permission to be cruel. The standards of an unethical workplace do not redefine integrity. What other people choose determines their conduct; it does not determine ours.

Living righteously in an evil world means that evil does not get to decide what kind of person we become.

Live with devotion to God
Paul’s third word takes us somewhere different. Eusebōs, translated “devotion to God” in the NLT, means to live with reverence and piety toward God. While righteousness speaks of moral uprightness, devotion to God speaks of the relationship around which the whole Christian life is oriented.

A person can be respectable without being devoted to God. Someone can pay his bills, keep his promises, work hard, treat his neighbors well, and still organize his life with little thought of God. Christianity reaches deeper than respectable behavior because Jesus did not merely come to make badly behaved people behave better. He reconciles us to God.

Devotion to God means that God matters to us as God. We know Him, love Him, worship Him, trust Him, listen to Him, and want to please Him. His presence is not confined to the hour we spend inside a church building. Our relationship with Him reaches into the ordinary places where life is actually lived.

That becomes especially important in an evil world because something will continually compete for the place that belongs to God. Money can begin promising the security we should ultimately seek in Him. Human approval can become so important that pleasing people matters more than pleasing Him. Political power can begin carrying hopes that belong to God alone. Pleasure can become something we organize our lives around rather than a gift received under His lordship.

Devotion keeps bringing the heart back to God.

When life is frightening, devotion asks whom we trust. When obedience is costly, it asks whose approval matters most. When success comes, it reminds us whom we have to thank. When we sin, it draws us toward confession and repentance because our sin is not merely the violation of an impersonal rule; it concerns the God we love and to whom we belong.

This is why devotion to God cannot be measured merely by the amount of religious activity in a person’s life. It is possible to be busy with Christian things while the heart is gradually being captured by something else. Devotion concerns the deepest allegiance of the person. It answers the question, Who has my heart?

In an evil world, Paul says, keep giving it to God.

Live looking toward the day that is coming
Paul could have stopped after wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God. He does not. He adds a phrase that changes the way Christians see the entire present world: “… while we look forward with hope …”

Those are important words because living faithfully in an evil world can become exhausting. Sometimes evil appears to win. Sometimes justice does not come in this lifetime. Sometimes the righteous suffer terribly. Sometimes we pray for circumstances that do not change. If this present world were the entire story, Christian endurance could eventually collapse into mere grim determination.

Paul gives us a horizon beyond it.

We live wisely, righteously, and devotedly while we wait. The Greek word translated “look forward” carries the sense of awaiting or expecting something. The “hope” Paul describes is not wishful thinking about something that might happen. Christian hope is confident expectation directed toward what God has promised.

And what are we waiting for?

Paul tells us: “… that wonderful day when the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed.”

Jesus Christ is coming again.

That means Christians live between two appearances. Paul begins by saying that God’s saving grace has appeared, and he ends by pointing toward the day when Christ’s glory will appear. Christ has come to save us, and Christ will come again. Our entire life in this present world is lived between those two realities.

That future changes the present.

When evil seems powerful, it reminds us that evil does not have the final word. When obedience is costly, it reminds us that the approval of this world is temporary. When suffering makes the present moment feel endless, it reminds us that the present moment is not endless. When the world offers something that requires us to turn away from Christ, hope reminds us that nothing this world can offer deserves to be exchanged for the One who is coming.

Christian hope therefore does not encourage us to disengage from life, it gives us a reason to live faithfully within it. Paul connects our manner of living directly with our expectation of Christ’s return: we live this way while we wait.

One day the question that has followed humanity through this fallen world will no longer need to be asked. We will no longer need to learn how to live faithfully in the presence of evil because evil will not remain forever. The Christian does not look toward an endless continuation of the world as we presently know it. We look toward Jesus Christ.

Until that day, tomorrow morning will come. There will still be decisions to make, temptations to resist, people to deal with, wounds to endure, and opportunities to choose what is good. And right there, in the world in which we actually live, the grace that saved us continues its patient work of teaching us how to live.

We live with wisdom so that the world does not govern what happens within us. We live with righteousness so that the evil done around us does not determine what is done through us. We live with devotion to God because our lives belong to Him. And through all of it, our eyes remain fixed beyond the darkness of the present age toward the One whose glory will finally fill our horizon.

We know who is coming.

Scotty