In Titus 3:3, Paul identifies six characteristics that were true of each and every one of us before God saved us. It is important to take a good look at who we were before God saved us if we are going to understand and appreciate just how big what God did in saving us really is.To begin, we were foolish.He writes,“For we ourselves once were also foolish.”Another word for it, senseless.Because this is a word that literally means, ‘lacking sense, lacking judgment, ignorant, unable to perceive God’s wrath.”Now it is important to understand that when Paul says we were foolish, he’s not talking about mental capacity.He’s not saying that before we were saved we weren’t intellectually with it. He’s not saying that before God saved us we failed every test in school, but now that we are saved we are passing with flying colors.That would be nice if that happened, I guess but it didn’t.You know that when you became a Christian it wasn’t like Whamo, you were suddenly given this incredibly large brain and you could win every game of Trivial Pursuit you ever played.No, what Paul is saying is that though on a worldly level unbelievers may be brilliant, when it comes to God and to spiritual things they are completely ignorant.Here it is:Not mentally deficient, but morally deficient.Before God saved us we got a big fat F when it came to true religion, to truly knowing God and understanding the point of life. We were foolish when it came to things of God.Another way the Bible describes it, (if you want an image) it says we were spiritually blind.We couldn’t see the truth.In fact if you look over at 2 Corinthians 4:3 and 4, Paul writes “But even if our gospel is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God should shine on them.”People said to Paul your message is hard to understand, it is veiled and Paul says to them, it is only hard to understand because Satan has blinded their minds to the truth, lest they understand it and be saved.We were confronted with the reality of God every day. This whole world is designed to shout out with a megaphone the glory of God. But even as intelligent men and women, we were willing to believe anything but the gospel. And Paul tells us here, it is because we were blind, unable to see truth.To make matters worse, and this is really where the foolishness comes in, we were committed to staying blind. Being blind is sad. Foolish is dumb. And we weren’t just sad, we were spiritually dumb because while you would think a blind person would want their sight, not us, we hated the light, we enjoyed our blindness.I remember hearing an old fictional story about a tribe of people isolated from the rest of the world and this tribe was full of people who were all blind from birth. Every single person in this tribe had been this way for hundreds of years. One day, a seeing person hiking through the jungles happens to stumble across their village. Everything looked pretty odd to him, because it had all been built by blind men. He stays for a while and he begins to talk to them about the things he sees, and you know how they respond? By trying to shut him up. They think he is crazy. They actually try to get him to sew his eyes shut so he can be blind like them.That is our world, blind and loving it. Tell them what you see now that God has opened your eyes and they will tell you that you are crazy and that you need to get your eyes sewn shut. And listen, not only was that our world. That was us.You want to know how foolish we were?We denied God, we blasphemed God, we thought sin was fun, we love to think about sinful things and talk about foolish things we have done, we didn’t do things on the basis of God’s Word but rather made decisions on the basis of our own ideas, evil was like a sport to us, we wanted to be professional evil doers, we didn’t listen to advice from wiser people, we tended to really trust in our own opinions, we clung to our folly, we kept doing things that were hurting us and our families.Day after day we found new ways to demonstrate our folly, but probably the biggest way we proved how ignorant and foolish we were was that before God saved us, we called God’s wisdom foolishness and man’s foolishness wisdom.That’s how Paul explains it.In 1 Corinthians 1:18ff he writes, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”Here you have got these people who are dying, they are perishing, they are in an absolutely terrible situation and here you’ve got God’s plan of salvation, God who made the universe comes and says here is the way that they can be rescued, that is through the work of Christ alone, the message of the cross, and this rescue plan is no-fail, it is without a doubt, certain.But those who are perishing, they are in the process of being destroyed, they see this plan, and you know what they say, they say it is foolishness. They say we would rather find our own way out. Even though God Himself said they would never be able to do that.It is absolute madness.God made us. He is King over everything and everyone. He is the one who has been sinned against. And He comes and He tells us the way that we can be saved from our awful predicament. He says this is the way of salvation, and all these other ways are dead-ends.You can’t be saved that way.But we heard this, unsaved man hears this, and says oh that is nice God but I think you are wrong. You are God, you are Creator, but I am going to tell you how I can make my relationship right with you.I remember a number of years back we met a survivor of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, this was a war-ship that sank out in the middle of the ocean in the early part of the 20th century, there were all these soldiers stranded in the middle of the ocean for days, just treading water. Eventually, a plan spotted them and came back and rescued them.But can you imagine, here are these guys in the middle of the sea, sharks all around them, treading water for days, and the plane comes.The pilot yells down, “Here, I will save you. I am sending someone down there for you who will grab hold of you and pull you up to safety.” But the soldier just looks up and says no way are you crazy. Then a bunch of other soldiers swim over and they start talking about it and they yell back at the pilot, your idea stinks. Here’s what we are going to do. We are going to swim back to shore. The pilot yells down, that’s too far. You can’t possibly swim 5000 kilometers. It’s impossible. Just trust me. But the soldiers just laugh at him. “Pilot you are the one who is foolish. We are so wise. Leave us alone and don’t bother us anymore.”That’s the world.That was us.That was you.“For you also once were foolish yourselves…”Senseless.Sinners.