Philippians 1:27-30
Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to the New Testament book of Philippians. Our reading
today is Philippians chapter one, verses 27 through 30. Some of you will remember back
to your composition classes in middle school and high school
and even college where you had to have a thesis statement. And that thesis statement was
the theme of your paper. It was your paper in a nutshell. Well, verses 27 through 30 of
chapter 1 of Philippians are, in a sense, Paul’s thesis statement. His overall goal in writing to
the Philippians is to find out, or he has found out how they
are doing through the visit from Epaphroditus, and he’s writing
to encourage them to live in a way that matches the realities
of the gospel. He’s in a sense saying to them,
live true lives, not lives of hypocrisy, but live true lives
out of the resources of heaven that are yours, and out of the
realities of you being a new creation in Christ. And he’s
gonna say to them today, I want you to live in a manner worthy
of the gospel, and then he’s gonna give several reasons why.
Now, in Paul’s writing, this is a long, long, long sentence
that is very confusing. And thankfully, our English Bibles
have made it a little easier to read, but not easy to understand. But let’s pray for God’s help
and see what happens. Reading from Philippians chapter
one, verse 27 says, only let your manner of life be worthy
of the gospel of Christ. So that whether I come and see
you or I’m 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 here that I still have. Pray with
me. Our gracious God, we pray that
your word in these next moments might be very real to us, that
they won’t simply be words on pages of our Bible that we’ve
picked up again this week, or words from an ancient letter
from a time gone by, that these would be the real living and
true words from your very voice through the mouth of a preacher,
but for our lives, for our instruction, for our encouragement, for edification.
We pray, Father, that you would give your help and blessing and
grace so that we can read, hear and understand, and most importantly,
we can do what your word says. We pray that this would all be
by the help of your gracious Holy Spirit, our helper and our
comforter. And it’s in the name of Jesus
we pray, amen. I’m sure that many of you have
experienced all sorts of tactics in Christian evangelism. Christian
evangelism being telling the good news of the gospel. There’s
no doubt that you’ve encountered the car salesman type evangelist. And that person’s bottom line
is this. What’s it going to take for me to put you into heaven
today? You know, the old saying, what’s
it going to take for me to send you home in this car today? Well,
their job is at least in their mind to figure out how to get
you into heaven. That’s their goal. It’s a worthy
goal. Or how about the well-meaning Christian who says to you, If
you come to Jesus, all your problems will vanish away. Well, that’s just well-meaning
Christianity, isn’t it? Well, then there’s the evangelist.
There’s the evangelist who preaches on the reality of hell. Think of Jonathan Edwards, Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God, where he speaks of pagans walking
over a bridge with rotten boards, with the fires of hell lapping
up towards those rotten boards. Well, then you get preachers,
preachers of all kinds of strikes. They want to They want to say
all the right things to comfort you. And they want to avoid all
the wrong things that will afflict you or make you uncomfortable.
Well, then you come to the apostle Paul, who in his thesis of his
letter, his four chapter letter to the Philippians, he says to
them, it is Jesus who has given you the gift of belief. And it
is that same Jesus, and by that same grace that has saved you,
he causes you to suffer. Now, how many of us would have
signed up for Christianity if we had had the full disclosure
type evangelist who said, you’re a sinner, you need Jesus. And if you come to Jesus, life’s
not going to get any easier. It’s probably gonna actually
get harder. Well, that’s the kind of message
that the apostle Paul speaks. If you look at verse 29, he says
to the Philippian church, he says, for it has been granted
to you that for the sake of Christ, you should not only believe in
him, but you should also suffer for his sake. Who wants to sign
up for suffering? Well, none of us. Who wants to
sign up for belief in Jesus and a ticket to heaven? Well, that
would be all of us. And then notice verse 30. He
says, you are engaged in the same conflict that you saw I
had and now hear that I still have. You see, the gospel saves
us. The gospel grants us salvation. It does ensure our being in heaven
with God almighty forever and ever. But the gospel also ensures
that in this life we will suffer. Over and over in many places
in the Apostle Paul’s letters, he says that we are filling up
what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. The sufferings or
the persecutions that are directed at Jesus come to us because where
is Jesus? He has ascended into heaven and
is at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. But because
we are in Christ Jesus, the sufferings intended for him come to us. And so we have to understand
the Christian life in the ways the Bible describes it. It is
belief in Jesus. It is, oh, full of joys and riches,
but it does come with suffering. And so why does the Apostle Paul
write to the Philippians? Well, he wants to make sure that
they, under suffering and hardship, will live faithful Christian
lives so that God is glorified and that the gospel is advancing. Now, in this particular passage,
his focus is gonna be on the Philippians. I want you Philippians
to live in a way that is beneficial to the advance of the gospel.
You see, for the last several verses that we’ve looked at over
weeks past, Paul has been telling them about his situation. I’m
in prison. His situation, I’ve been able
to preach to the Praetorian guard under Caesar’s household. His
situation, I’m in chains. But now he shifts to their situation. And everything that you read
in today’s passage, you can understand better by reading the next three
chapters of Philippians. So how do you understand Philippians
1, 27 to 30? Well, you read Philippians 2,
3, and 4, and it will explain what he is gonna say. So today,
in this passage, we want to understand that we must believe in Christ
by his grace, but that we also must suffer for Christ by his
grace. And in the Philippian church,
suffering is coming in two ways, and it’s always this way. It’s
coming from the inside. He’s going to, at the end of
the letter in chapter four, he’s gonna encourage Euodia and Syntyche,
two ladies who have labored in the gospel in the church with
Paul when he was there serving, to get along. They’re not getting
along and their disunity is hurting the church body. But then he’s
gonna speak of opposition coming from the outside and say, don’t
be afraid, don’t be frightened, don’t be intimidated when opposition
comes. Now that’s a good reminder to
us. that the success of our church, the success of First ARP Church
here in Burlington on Saddle Club Road is going to be in the
midst of opposition. And it will be internal opposition
when we squabble with one another, but it will also be through outside
opposition, whether it’s persecution in our current culture or the
unbelief of the world around us and our succumbing to it.
We will have to endure Christian living with some sort of suffering,
both from the inside and from the outside. But one encouragement
the apostle gives in this passage, it’s a strange piece of encouragement. And he says it in verse 28. He
says, this is a clear sign to them, meaning those who oppose
you, of their destruction of your salvation. So one way to
determine if you’re a true Christian, or one way to determine if your
church is a true church, is by the amount of opposition you
are receiving. If you are a Christian and you
are on easy street, something is not right. If you are a church
and things are going too well, and understand that you can have
a good life and God can bless it, you can have a good church
and God can bless it conflict free. But generally speaking,
do you wanna know if you’re a true Christian? Are you being persecuted? Do you wanna know if you’re a
true church? Are you enduring hardship both
from the inside and the out? So I told you this was a complicated
passage. So all that by way of introduction
helps us to understand what the Apostle Paul is going to encourage
the Philippian church to think about and to do. And you may
say, well, this is 2017. What does a letter to the Philippian
church 2000 years ago have to do with us? Well, might we face
division within? Might we face persecution from
outside? Do our churches from time to
time go through periods of disunity and splits or even receive opposition? Of course they do. And so the
way the apostle encourages the Philippians can encourage us.
And we wanna begin by looking at the first main thing that
he says to the Philippians. He says in verse 27, 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. What does the apostle Paul mean
when he tells them to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel?
Well, in order to understand that, we have to understand that
our English translations don’t give us exactly the sense of
what he’s saying in the original languages. He’s literally saying
to them, live in a manner worthy of your citizenship. Now, some
of you may know that the Philippians, were a Roman colony, many of
them retired military. Well, if you’ve been in the military,
you kind of stick together. There’s a pride, there’s a common
sense of loyalty and camaraderie in your military service and
in the life that you have led on behalf of your government.
And so when he says to these folks, these are veterans, these
are folks who are loyal to their
brotherhood, but also loyal to their country, which happens
to be Rome and the emperor Caesar. And he’s saying to them, live
in a way that shows that you value your citizenship. Now,
is he speaking of their Roman citizenship? Is he speaking of
their Philippian citizenship? No, he is speaking, as he will
later in chapter three, of them being citizens of heaven. But
he’s appealing to something that they know very well, that who
we are and how we live represents something greater than us. And
so if we’re to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus
Christ, that means we should live In our daily life, our ethics,
our morality, our behavior should match the profession of faith
that we have given before the world in Jesus Christ. I had
a teacher in school who used to say, if you’re gonna go and
do this and do that, don’t tell anybody that I taught you. And
what he meant by that was don’t tell people you’re one of my
disciples if you’re not gonna go and live the way I’ve told
you to live. And that’s the understanding
that we have to have. If we profess Jesus, if we claim to have faith
in him, if we claim to be new creations in Christ Jesus, that
we’ve been changed from the inside out, then we need to live like
it. Oh, sure, we’ll still sin. Sure,
we’ll still fall short. But what will our reputation
be if we live faithful, consistent Christian lives? Now, I like
to ask this question or to make this statement. And sometimes
it appears in our pastoral prayer when I ask that God, will help
us to be faithful Christian witnesses in the world so that people will
say, who are you and where have you come from? Now, you know
that question, who are you and where have you come from? We
ask that when we see somebody with a different color skin,
or maybe their accent is thicker than ours, or their attire or
their customs are noticeably alien or from somewhere else. And this encouragement from the
Apostle Paul reminds us that we have a citizenship in heaven
with customs and lifestyles and ethics and morality and ways
of living that are different than the world around us. And
so say we take a little field trip to Washington, D.C., and
we go into an embassy of a foreign country. We’ll see their flag.
will see their colors. Likely their building will reflect
architecture from their own country. As you enter the building, you’ll
notice that their decor is different from ours. The accents or even
the language that is spoken in that particular building may
be very different. You see, it’s an outpost of whatever
nation they represent. And one of the things we must
remember is that the Church of Jesus Christ, and we who are
members of it, are an outpost of heaven. And so we should look
different. We should speak differently.
We should live differently. And the people around us should
say, I can’t put my finger on what’s different, but I want
to know who you are and where you have come from. And so if
we as Christians are living a life in a manner worthy of the gospel
of Jesus, living a life, living like citizens of where we’re
actually from and not dwelling here and becoming like the world
around us, It will be an effective witness of almighty God. And so he’s appealing to their
dual citizenship, their citizens of heaven, citizens of Philippi.
We are citizens of Burlington, but citizens of heaven. And so the first thing he says,
the main thing he says is to walk in a manner worthy of the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, what does that mean? So
the second thing we want to consider, what does it mean to live in
a way that is worthy of Christ Jesus? Well, first of all, you
have to understand that Romans worshiped their emperor. They
said Caesar is Lord and they meant it. He was a God to them. He was the Lord of this vast
Roman empire and they worshiped him. It was a cult. It was a
way of life. And so for the Apostle Paul to
come along and say to the Christians who were converted under Roman
citizenship to say, Jesus Christ is Lord was a strange thing. No, it was worse than strange.
It was blasphemy against the state. And so this gives us a
little bit of insight. What is the opposition that the
Philippians are facing from the outside? We know from the inside
it’s division in the church, but from the outside it is likely
pressure for them to continue to worship Caesar and not worship
Jesus. And we say, well, we don’t worship
our president. Well, some people may. But what could be the pressures
on us in this 21st century? Well, we can very easily worship
sports. We can very easily worship new
ways of thinking. We can worship clothing and lifestyle. We can worship the American culture
so very easily. and be sucked in and washed over
with its pressures. But he’s saying, live in a manner
worthy of Jesus Christ. Now think for a moment, how do
you define the worth of Jesus Christ? Well, what has he done?
He’s made you, he saved you, and he is at work making you
like himself, recreating you in the image, conforming you
into the image of Jesus. And so for us to live in the
world under the pressures of persecution or disunity in the
church, for us to live in a way of jealousy or envy or strife
or fits of rage, or to live in ways opposite of the fruit of
the spirit, is to live counter the new creations that we are
in Jesus Christ. Now, no doubt some of you young
ones have heard your parents say, No child of mine will act
like that. Some of you have been grabbed
by the ear before, yanked by the arm and said, no Jones or
Smith or Cross or no child with that last name will live like
that. That’s a good reminder to us
that we should say from time to time, no child of Christ should
live and behave in this way. But our behavior, our ethics,
our morality, should show that we take pride in our heavenly
citizenship, that we have been born from above by Almighty God,
and that we are not like the world around us. You see, the
Philippians had great pride in their Roman citizenship. They
had great pride in their past military service. They had great
pride in their little pension plan and their little city where
they dwelled at Philippi, where all that they had done in life
was represented and had given them a place to live out their
final days in glory. And Paul is appealing to that
and saying, for the good of the kingdom of Christ, live like
your commander in chief, live worthy of Jesus Christ. There’s
a third thing to consider from this passage, that to live in
a manner worthy of the gospel. What does it mean to be worthy
of Jesus? Well, the final thing to consider is this little report.
The apostle Paul speaks of accountability and he says so in Verse 27, he
says, whether I come to you and see you or am absent, I want
to hear of you that you are three things, standing firm in one
spirit, with one mind, striving side by side for the faith and
not frightened by anything by your opponents. You see, the
apostle has built in accountability. Live in a manner worthy of the
gospel. What does it mean to be worthy of Christ? Well, he’s
going to come and ask for a report. He’s going to either visit them
or he will send Timothy, the Apostle Timothy, to them to find
out and return back to Paul in Rome and tell them what is going
on. And he has three things that
he wants of the Philippians while they are walking in a manner
worthy of the gospel. He says, one, I want you to stand
firm in one spirit. Second, I want you to strive
side by side together as one person for the faith of the gospel. And then third is I don’t want
you to be frightened or intimidated by those who might oppose you.
Now here we have to think of Paul using not the citizenship
angle that he has just used, but he’s using a military angle. Now I’ve never been in the military
nor played a military person on television, but I know a little. And you have to understand a
little bit of military speak to understand. He wants them
to be an army of one. He wants them to stand side by
side, shoulder to shoulder, falling into rank, working together for
the kingdom of God. And you can imagine they understand
very clearly that when Paul comes, he’s going to inspect them. He wants to see that their swords
are clean, their shields are in order, their boots are shined,
their sandal straps are ready, their belts and their other attire
for fighting an army, whatever it was they wore in that day.
He wants to see that they are ship-shaped, fighting together
side by side for the sake of the gospel. And so he says, I
want you to stand firm in one spirit, one Holy Spirit, united
together. I want you to strive or to fight
or to labor side by side together as one person, not disunified,
not disorderly, not in a way of chaos, but in an orderly way,
and to strive for the faith of the gospel. He wants them to
be gospel proclaimers, even in the midst of hardship, and then
not frightened by their opponent. What happens when an army becomes
fearful? They run. They hide. They’re
not no longer a army full of ranks standing firm against their
enemy. And friends, that is very possible
for the Church of Jesus Christ through disunity on the inside
and from opposition on the outside to break apart a church in such
a way that its gospel witness, its gospel message, its gospel
effectiveness is weakened. And so ask the question to yourself,
Ask this question of our church. If the apostle Paul, or even
better, if Jesus were coming to inspect us, what would he
find? Would we be living lives individually
as families, but as a church? Would we be living lives worthy
of the gospel of Jesus? And think about those three things
that he mentioned he wanted them to be doing, standing firm as
one body or in one spirit, striving side by side and not frightened.
We think about the modern church today, it’s kind of sad. We’re
ignorant of the resources that we have through the Holy Spirit
and through the church. Often many churches have little
factions of disunity where Satan has come and dislodged people
from one another in the common goal. Sometimes the gospel is
unclear and so we don’t know what we’re striving for. We don’t
know what the gospel is. And then the enemies come and
we are scared off and we scatter. But what would Jesus find? What
would the apostle find if he came and had a standard attention
and said, I want to give you an inspection? would we be found
worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ? And so the challenge
for us is in our spiritual life to get things in order, to shine
our boots, to clean our weapons, to get the battle plan of the
scriptures in our minds so that we can stand firm as one body,
shoulder to shoulder in the power of the Holy Spirit. We can proclaim
the goodness of Jesus and so that the reality of Christ in
each of us is evident to the world so that they don’t look
at us and say, you bunch of hypocrites, you’re just like all the others.
They say, no, something is different. Who are you and where have you
come from? And friends, the only way that
can happen is to be found in Jesus. For He is the only one
who can pass the inspection of the eyes of the Almighty. He
is the only one whose righteousness can withstand the offseeing eye
of almighty God. And thanks be to God that in
Jesus Christ, by faith, we can lay hold of his righteousness.
We can lay hold of his obedience. We can lay hold of his forgiveness.
We can lay hold of all the tools, all the gospel tools needed to
fight the battle from the opposition to the gospel that will come
our way. Thanks be to God for Jesus. Let us pray together.