Trinity 22
Phil
1:3-11
1/8/20
When I go
to meetings with other pastors and hear about what they are experiencing, there
are many times when I come home and tell Amy about how thankful I am to be
pastor at Good Shepherd. Now don’t get
me wrong, Good Shepherd is certainly not the only good congregation around.
There are indeed many other pastors who feel the same way I do.
But there
are also congregations - more than you would like to think - that make life
difficult for their pastor. I have
talked with a number of pastors recently who are in that situation. Doing the biblical and faithful thing is not
always accepted. Doing what we as
Lutherans confess to be our belief and practice is not always accepted because
sometimes it doesn’t match “what we have always done here.”
This is
nothing new. In fact, we can find examples of it in Paul’s letters to the
congregations he founded. So, the church
at Corinth made Paul want to pull his hair out.
They wanted to accept the culture of the world around them, and didn’t
see how faith in Christ set them apart and caused them to live
differently. They challenged Paul on
what should be believed, and were very willing to accept other teachers who
came in, contradicting and undermining Paul.
And then,
on the other hand, there were congregations who loved and supported Paul –
congregations who were very dear to the apostle for this reason. That describes
the church at Philippi. Paul had
preached the Gospel there during his second missionary journey. And from the
moment the congregation was founded, they had been supportive of his work.
Paul
begins our text by writing, “I thank my God in all my remembrance of
you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with
joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until
now.” This wasn’t empty rhetoric. Paul really meant it, because the support of
the Philippians was more than talk. They
put their love into action. The
Philippians had once again sent money to help support Paul in his mission
work. In the last chapter of the letter
Paul gives thanks for this and recalls: “And you Philippians yourselves know that in the beginning
of the gospel, when I left Macedonia, no church entered into partnership
with me in giving and receiving, except you only. Even in Thessalonica you
sent me help for my needs once and again.”
At the time that Paul wrote to the
Philippians, he was imprisoned, probably in Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast.
Paul makes no excuses for the strong expression of his love and appreciation of
the church at Philippi. He says in our
text, “It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold
you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of
grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and
confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn
for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.”
The portion of our text that I
really want to focus upon this morning is found in the last verses where Paul
writes: “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and
more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve
what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of
Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that
comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
Paul says that his prayer is that
the Philippians’ love will abound more and more. We hear a lot about “love” these days. Love is the great force that is supposed to
bring everyone together, not matter what differences may exist. We are told that love is the great equalizer
in which no differences exist – “love is love” we are told, even if it is
between two people of the same sex involved in a sexual relationship. Love is a warm fuzzy feeling that justifies
whatever I want to do.
But the apostle Paul has no use for
such definitions of love. Yes, Paul wants
the Philippians’ love to abound more and more. But what he writes is, “And it
is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with
knowledge and all discernment.” This is not love defined by what sinful
man decides. First this is love that is
defined by knowledge. Paul means the knowledge of God and of his will. This is
both his saving will that he has revealed in his Son Jesus Christ, and his will
for how he has ordered life. And Paul also says that this increasing love is to
be defined by “discernment.” It is love
that perceives matters on the basis of God’s word and will. It discerns between truth and error.
This is Paul’s prayer because he
says that only in this manner it is possible “that you may approve what is
excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of
Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that
comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” The Greek word translated as “approve” here
describes the outcome of testing and examining. And the phrase “what is excellent” can be
translated more literally as “the things that really matter.” Love that abounds in knowledge and
discernment is able to evaluate and recognize the things that really matter - the things that really matter because they
are about the salvation God gives, and life that please him.
Paul says that when this happens the
Philippians – and all Christians – will “be pure and blameless for the day
of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that
comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” Now notice that the goal that dominates
Paul’s thought is the “day of Christ” – the return of the Lord Jesus on the
Last Day. This is the same thing that we heard earlier in our text when Paul
expressed the confidence, “I am sure of this, that he who
began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day
of Jesus Christ.”
Paul says
in our text that Christians are to be “filled with the fruit of
righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.” Paul is describing the
fruit that righteousness produces, the righteousness that comes through Christ.
In chapter three of this letter, Paul rejects the idea of a righteousness
before God that is based in any way in us.
Left on
our own, a righteous standing before the holy God is simply not possible for
any of us. Look at your life and you
will find that you are not going to be pure and blameless on the day of
Christ. Instead, you will be guilty of
putting God second in relation to your time, attention and money when he should
be first. You will be guilty of not honoring, obeying and loving your
parents. You will be guilty of not
loving your spouse by putting his or her needs ahead of your own. You will be guilty of harming the reputation
of others by sharing gossip.
But Paul
says in this letter that our standing before God is not based on anything we
do. Instead, Paul now considers
everything about himself in which he once placed his trust as garbage, “in order that I may
gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own
that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the
righteousness from God that depends on faith-- that I may know him
and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings,
becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I
may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
Jesus Christ died on the cross so
that we could be justified – counted as righteous before God. He received God’s judgment against our sin.
Our sin has been judged and condemned in Jesus Christ the sinless One. And now through faith in Christ, God
considers us to be righteous. Faith
receives this righteous standing before God as a gift. It is a gift guaranteed
by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Righteous in God’s eyes because of Christ, we know that God will raise
us on on the day of Christ, just as he raised Jesus from the dead on the
Easter.
God’s righteousness is his saving
action in Jesus Christ to put all things right.
He has given us this righteousness – this innocent standing before him
now and on the Last Day - through faith in our crucified and risen Lord. Through the work of the Spirit – through
baptism and faith – he has made us a new creation in Christ.
And so Paul tell us that this saving
action by God directed towards us produces fruit. This fruit takes many
forms. But Paul mentions two of them in
this letter and I want to emphasize these. In this first chapter Paul goes on
to write: “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel
of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of
you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one
mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not
frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of
their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God.
For it
has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe
in him but also suffer for his sake,
engaged
in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still
have.”
One fruit produced by God’s
righteousness is our willingness to suffer for the sake of Christ. Make no mistake, if you are you going to let
your manner of life be worthy of the Gospel of Christ; if you are
going to strive for the faith of the Gospel, then you will suffer for the sake
of Christ. You will be derided for
saying that there is a holy God who judges sin, and that Jesus Christ is the
only way to salvation. You will mocked and pressured when you say that sexual
intercourse is God’s gift for marriage and is to be used only in that setting. You
will be condemned and labeled as a bigot for saying that homosexuality is a
sin, and that marriage can only exist between a man and a woman. But remember,
we are suffering for the sake of the One who has risen from the dead, and so we
know that final victory and vindication will be ours.
Another fruit produced produced by
God’s righteousness is described by Paul in the next chapter. He writes, “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit,
but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let
each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests
of others.” Paul then presents the Son of God’s incarnation and willingness
to humble himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even
death on a cross.” Jesus Christ humbled
himself in this way in order to make us righteous, and now through his Spirit
he leads us to humble ourselves in serving and putting others before ourselves
– an action that begins in your own home as you live with your family
members.
In our
text today Paul tells the Philippians: “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and
more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve
what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of
Christ,
filled with
the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the
glory and praise of God.” May the Spirit
of Christ lead us to abound more and more with love as God defines it – a
loves that is shaped by knowledge of God and discernment as we recognize the
things that that really matter.
What really matters is that God has
made you righteous in his eyes because of Christ. Through faith in the crucified and risen Lord
your sins have been taken away, and God regards you as holy. The righteousness
of God – this saving action by God to put all things right - has given you
salvation, and through the work of the Spirit it produces the fruit of a life
that is willing to suffer for the sake of Christ and to serve others.
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