Philippians 2:1-4
Let’s hear God’s Word together,
Philippians chapter 2, beginning at verse 1. It says, So if or
since there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love,
any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete
my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in
full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition
or conceit, but in humility, count others more significant
than yourselves. Let each of you look not only
to his own interest, but also to the interest of others. Amen. Let us pray together. Our
God and heavenly father, we thank you for this, your holy word
today. We thank you that in it, it tells us who we are saved
by Jesus. And it tells us then how we are
to live out of those realities, those graces, those special acts
of your redemptive work that are in us. We pray, Father, that
we would look to the example of Jesus, the one who considered
being God and being on the throne of God as nothing and emptied
himself. He left heaven and became a man.
He became a servant and he served us even unto death on the cross
in order that we might live for him. And so we pray now that
we would see the work of Jesus, the life of Jesus, and we would
look at our own attitudes, look into our own hearts, and we would
see how we can become of one mind or of one accord with one
another. And we pray all this in the name of Jesus. It’s his
name we pray. Amen. Some of you today are spending
time with your parents, your mothers, and so maybe you’ll
laugh around the table about some moments in your early life. Some of you remember parental
speeches that come in the course of your childhood. Maybe there’s
one that has to do with eating your food. And your father looks
at you and he says, you eat all that food. I went to work and
I worked hard and that’s 50 cents worth of chicken left on your
plate. And I don’t want you to waste my work and my energy. And you
know how it goes. But then your mother chimes in and you’re being
too hard on him. Honey, you need to eat that because
I want you to be healthy and strong. I want you to grow up
and be a big boy. So you eat your beans and you eat your carrots
and I want you to be able to see and you eat your broccoli
and all that. We have different motives from different parents.
We have different speeches that we get from them. Maybe the speech
is about getting along with your siblings and you’ve heard the
speeches before. The dad says, there’ll be no
fights in my house. No children of mine will ever
fight. If you want to fight, you go out in the yard and settle
it, that kind of thing. But the mom’s speech is something
like this. I carried you in my womb for nine months, and I suffered
with you, and I gave birth to you, and you don’t want to know
how that went. And then you would go and repay me with fighting
with your sister or your brother. You know how the speeches go.
They’re different from mom and dad. It’s different perspectives. We come to a passage of scripture
today where a pastor, Paul, gives a little parental speech. And this parental speech is one
that says, OK, Church at Philippi, get along, be unified, be of
one mind. Now, before we read Paul’s little
speech to the Philippians, think about some of the pastoral charges
you may have heard in your life. You hear things in church squabbles
of, well, let’s give a little, let’s see things his way a little
or her way a little. Let’s decide on the paint color,
the carpet color this way. Or if we’re super spiritual,
we get the advice of, you just let people walk all over you
and you just be gracious as God would be gracious. And sometimes
we may hear, it’s my way or the highway, we may hear all kinds
of things, but church squabbles come And there is difficulty
in the church at Philippi. And I want to tell you that the
apostle Paul does not give some little, oh, what would you call
it? A wimpy speech. He doesn’t give
a little speech about, let’s all get up a little and get along,
and let’s all be peaceful and all that. He says to them, if
the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been at work
in you, and those realities of his saving your soul from eternal
damnation and his blessing you with the spirit of God for Christian
growth. If that has taken place in your
life, then let your unity flow from that. Now, how much more
biblical and theological and weighty could you get? You see,
sometimes as parents, we give our children a motivation that’s from our heart. Sometimes
as parents, we give a motivation that we hope will accomplish
the ends we desire. And it could be that way with
pastors, too. We sometimes just want to, you know, fix things
and get it settled. But here the Apostle Paul gives
the greatest motivation. It’s not from a human perspective.
It’s not from a get along and be peaceful perspective. It’s
from a Trinitarian God at work in you, salvation perspective. And he’s going to say to us in
this passage, if the spiritual realities I list, and there are
going to be four of them, if those spiritual realities have
existed in you, and God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
has been at work in your life, then godly behavior in the church
or the household of faith will lead to unity. This is a passage
about unity, being one minded. This is a passage about humility. I want us to look very briefly,
if you will, at verse two. It says, complete my joy by becoming
of the same mind, by having the same love, being in full accord
and of one mind. The goal of the Apostle Paul
has for the Philippians now as they fight external battles,
that’s that they would strive together side by side like an
army. but internally with their unity issues, their internal
struggles, he says, I want you to have the same mind, the same
love, be of full accord with one mind. How is that going to
be achieved? Well, a couple of ways. First,
let’s look at the motives for unity. He says in verse one,
if or since there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from his
love, participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy, then
complete my joy. What words can the Apostle Paul
use to compel, to motivate, to move the people of God at Philippi?
What words can God use this day in time in 2017? What words can
he use to compel us to church unity, to gospel unity, to being
one mind of one accord, one heart, of one mindset. What words can
he use? Well, he can go no better place
than to the words of the gospel. He says, if there is any encouragement
in Christ, he’s appealing to their experience of salvation,
that they at a point in time knew they were sinners in need
of grace. He appeals to their testimony,
to the radical work of God in them. If you have any encouragement
in Christ, The second motivation he gives us any encouragement
from love, that God has loved you, that he has set his affection
upon you, that he has taken you an unlovely, sinful person, and
he has made something of you by the work of salvation through
Jesus. If there’s any participation
in the spirit, he uses that fellowship word, which you’ve seen a couple
of times now in the book of Philippians. if there’s any fellowship in
the Holy Spirit, that life-giving source, that life-changing force
that is in us, if there is any participation in the Holy Spirit,
and then fourth, any affection and sympathy. He’s saying to
them, he’s appealing to them, God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Spirit have worked in your lives, and it
has brought forth fruit. And you’ve slipped, you’ve fallen,
gotten off the regimen of diet and exercise and Christian faith
and whatever other diligence you’ve been upon, you’ve slackened
a little bit. You know how we do. And you need to remember
Jesus. You need to remember the Father.
You need to recollect what the Holy Spirit has done in you.
And those are the motives for unity. What are the motives for
unity sometimes we hear in the church? Well, if we don’t have
unity, we’re not going to make budget. Well, if we don’t have
unity, what’s attendance going to be like or if we don’t have
unity. And those are things that are cause and effect. We understand
that. But what are the real motives for unity? It’s the gospel at
work in each of us. And if the gospel hasn’t changed
you, then you continue to be full of conceit. You be continue
to be full of envy and strife. If you are not changed by the
gospel, then you will live like the pagan world. But Paul is
appealing to them. He knows them. He’s the first
preacher to ever preach the word to them. He knows that they have
been convinced and converted of their need of a savior. And
he’s saying, if those things are true, then prove it by your
unity. The Philippian church has received
all kinds of outside opposition. They are being pressured by those
in their Roman culture who worship the emperor to say, you worship
Jesus. We’re supposed to worship Caesar.
The Roman culture was just as bad as our 20 17 culture today,
they have outside opposition. And so we may say in our minds
and hearts, what does an ancient letter have to do with our modern
day? Well, it’s 2017. We live in a postmodern culture,
we live in a world that says truth is relative, there is no
authority. Life is mediated moment by moment
by the smartphone, so we call it, that is in our hands. And
we don’t think, we don’t live, we don’t dwell on the realities
of this world like we ought to. We are the Seinfeld generation.
We are no longer thoughtful or connected to spiritual realities.
And the Apostle Paul has gently reminded them there are spiritual
realities that are true and you have experienced them in your
life and they are motivators. They are motivators towards unity. in the faith. Now, there’s internal
strife in the church at Philippi. There’s Euodia and Syntyche who
are fighting. They’re struggling together.
There are no doubt other factions and difficulties, and he’s appealing
to them because of the gospel work of Jesus to be like minded,
to put away selfish ambition, to put away conceit and to put
away the idea that you are better than others and to dwell together.
because of the gospel realities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And do you know, do you know that the effect of the Apostle
Paul’s appeal is not one, maybe like our parents put on us, of
guilt. You eat all your beans and potatoes because I went to
work and I work for those, and you’re not going to put 50 cents
in the trash can. That’s guilt, isn’t it? Maybe true, but it’s
guilt. But what does the Apostle Paul say? If the gospel is real,
then live this way. And that melts our hearts. It
leads us to repentance. And my thought is that the Philippians
after hearing this would say, let’s go. Let’s go together for
the sake of the gospel. Let’s put aside our pettiness
and go. Some of you probably have been
following politics lately and you watch the Sunday morning
news channels and we got to criticize because this guy got fired and
this person wasn’t dealt well or healthcare this or that. You’ve
watched it all. And there are those who criticize.
And there are those who say, let’s go. But you know, the sad
part about our world of politics is there will never be unity
of mind. There’ll be the liberals and the conservatives, the Democrats
and the Republicans, the libertarians and the whatever areas there
are. But you see in the church of
Jesus Christ, because of the reality of the gospel, one mindedness
is possible. Now, some of you probably been
looking at this sermon title and say, that’s a spelling error.
in the bulletin, it says, live like you’ve got Christian common
sense or living by Christian common sense. And that word sense
is there, not the S-E-N-S-E, but the S-I-N-C-E, because the
realities of the gospel are what help you live. If there’s encouragement
in Christ, if there’s comfort from love, if there’s participation
in the spirit, if there’s affection and sympathy in you, those realities
will translate into Christian community. life. And as a matter
of fact, they’ll translate into the home. And so in a sense,
moms and dads could use the same advice as the Apostle Paul in
the home. Instead of guilting your children into wasting food
or whatever it is, we just use the gospel terms with them. But if these gospel realities
are true, unity can be achieved. That is not possible in the world.
It’s not possible in politics. It’s not possible outside the
sphere of the church. Oh, there may be unity based
on some worldly thing, but it won’t last. It’s not eternal.
So can a deeply divided church turn around? Can a deeply divided
church become unified? And the answer is with the gospel.
Yes. And that’s what the apostle is
appealing to. So that’s the motive of unity.
The second thing we should consider is the goal of unity. We’ve been
asking as a session a couple of questions of each other. What
is our mission? What is our vision? What are
our values? Where do we want to go as a church? What do we
want to do as a church? What does Jesus tell us to do?
We’ve been thinking about that and pondering it. And then we’ve
said, secondly, we need to make sure everybody knows why we exist
and what we must do to accomplish that mission. And if we get on
board, if we get unity, we can move forward. Some of you work
in the corporate world and they call that alignment. We want
everybody to know who we are and why we exist and how we’re
going to accomplish our goals. How are we going to get there? Our church has a 52 year history.
Our church has 80, 90 families. Our church has a lot of opinions.
And over the years, it can be that a church or some organization,
maybe it’s the one you work for, it’s not doing the same things
it used to do. And the Apostle Paul is having
to step into the Philippian church, which is probably only three
or four years old, and say, have you lost sight of the gospel?
Some of you who are leaders in your workplaces sometimes have
to say to your workforce, have you lost sight of our goals and
the things we hope to accomplish as a company or corporation?
We have to do that from time to time as a church. And so we
want to have one heart. We want to have one mind and
one purpose. And the goal of unity is the
gospel. The goal of unity is the gospel
of Jesus Christ going out into the world to save sinners in
Burlington, in Alamance County, on the campus of Elon through
campus outreach, and to the ends of the earth through missionaries
and the gospel witness that we support. And so the Apostle Paul
has appealed to the Christian saints and said, let your manner
be one worthy of the gospel. That was last week. And today
he’s going to say, if the spiritual realities that I’ve listed are
true, let it lead to gospel mindedness. Now, common sense is gone in
this world. If you talk to anybody who’s
a practical person, they say A plus B does not equal C anymore.
That’s the culture we live in. Well, it’s very true in the Christian
world as well. Many people have lost the Christian
common sense because they’ve lost sight of the gospel. They’ve
lost sight of the encouragement in Christ, the comfort from his
love, the participation in the spirit and the affection and
sympathy that are ours through Jesus. But Paul is saying, since
these four things are true, then gospel unity ought to thrive
and gospel ministry ought to have success. Now, whereas Paul,
remember he is in prison in Rome. And what does he say at the very
middle of this passage at verse two? He says, make my joy complete. And he doesn’t say it as a typical
prisoner might by sending me dollar bills for cigarettes or
make sure I have enough money for the commissary so I can get
ice cream. He’s not in that kind of prison anyway. He doesn’t
say, send me blankets, send me books, send me a new iPad, mine’s
worn out. He says, get together one mind,
one heart, one accord for the sake of the gospel. So here’s
a man sitting in jail for the sake of Jesus. And he says, become
one minded. That will make my joy complete. Here’s old Paul in a prison chained
daily to a soldier, doesn’t know what his future is, doesn’t know
how soon or later he will die at the hands of an executioner.
And he says, fill me up with joy by being unified together
in the gospel, by living by Christian common sense. And so we’ve heard
a little bit about the motives of unity, the goals of unity. The third thing I want us to
consider today is that humility is the means for unity. Now,
we aren’t going to get to verses 5 through 8. That’ll be for next
week. But in verses 5 through 8, the means for unity in that
passage will be, look at Jesus. He emptied himself of heaven,
came to earth, became a servant, died for you, and you need to
do like that for your fellow believers. But today’s passage
at the end here in verses three and four, he says these words,
do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count
others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look
not only to his own interest, but also to the interest of others. You know, it’s rather sad, I
think, because the world has entered the church. The economy
of the world has entered the church. And the economy of the
world is very different than Jesus’ economy. It’s very different. I’ll give you an illustration
of this. In the Roman culture, and I think it’s true of our
culture today, for someone to tell you to be humble is almost
an offense. Be humble. What does that mean,
be poor? What does that mean, be uneducated?
What does that mean, don’t take advantage of all the opportunities
the world affords? Well, I’ll tell you, in the Roman
culture, at the day and time when the Apostle Paul was writing
to the Philippians, and remember, they were a colony of retired
military men, and they had special privileges in the Commonwealth
of Rome, to say be humble was rather offensive. No, you were
to take pride in your standing. You were to be number one. You
were to put anyone down or put anyone out of your path who hindered
you from getting things your way right away. And so for the
command to the Philippians and for even to us in this world
to come to us and say, be humble. Humility is the way of service.
It’s the way of Christ. It’s an offense to the world
and its systems. But remember, we are not citizens of heaven
or of earth, but citizens of heaven. And the economy of heaven
is very different. The Philippians were known for
their positions of pride. And so he says, dear Christian,
blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek. You see, we have to be able to
rightly evaluate ourselves in light of what the scripture says
so that we can then serve others. It’s why our Heidelberg catechism
today was so important. What is it that we need to know
in order to live life well? Three things. The greatness of
my sin and misery. Well, the world doesn’t want
to know that. How I’m redeemed from all my sins and misery.
Well, we do that ourselves in today’s world. We save ourselves.
And how I’m to be thankful to God for such a redemption. We
live in a world full of pagans who do not acknowledge God nor
give thanks to God for all that he is and has done. And so we
live in a world of arrogance. And that arrogance has seeped
into the church. It’s seeped into the church at
Philippi. And no doubt it seeps into our own congregation from
time to time. And what does the apostle Paul
say of that arrogance? It’s not the way for unity. No,
that’s the way for strife and fighting. In fact, in other places
other than Philippians, when the Apostle Paul is speaking
into the arrogance of the Christians, he puts it away saying it’s a
pagan way of life. He tells us in Corinthians that
we must come together at the Lord’s Supper and we must share
with those who do not have. We hear the story of Ananias
and Sapphira in the Book of Acts. They were put to death by Almighty
God. for their arrogance, or we think of the craving of Miriam
and Aaron for the position that Moses had as leader of Israel.
And so humility removes those cravings. It removes those desires. Think of our savior, Jesus. He
came to his disciples with a basin and a towel to wash their feet,
to be a servant. Think of Jesus who went to the
cross with his open arms in order to save sinners. Think of Jesus
now at the throne of God, interceding on your behalf, praying. So brothers
and sisters, since there are spiritual realities, gospel realities
in your life of encouragement in Christ, of comfort from the
love of God the Father, of fellowship in the Holy Spirit, of affection
and sympathy, since those things are true, we must lose our nerve
to fuss and to fight and to be people of disunity. And the apostle
Paul is saying, fill up my joy. Fill up my joy by being unified.
And Jesus, in a sense, is in heaven giving us this very same
message. Since I emptied myself and came to you and served you,
you fill up my joy and make it complete by being unified together. Pray with me. Our Lord and God,
we thank you for this, your word. We pray that we would take it
to heart. that we would put it to work in the life of our families,
the life of our relationships around. And we pray that we would
put it to work in the life of our church by your grace, by
your spirit and for your glory. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Let us stand and respond to God’s word as we sing together from
the hymnal number 390 made the mind of Christ my savior.