Philippians 1:6-8
In our study of Philippians,
we recognize that the Apostle Paul has written a letter from
a Roman prison to the church at Philippi. He is writing to
them after they have sent him a gift of monetary assistance. They’ve also sent one of the
brothers in the church there. He hears a report about the goings
on in the church at Philippi, some of which he’ll write and
speak about to correct some things that are wrong, but also to encourage
them. And along the way through Philippians,
you get from the pen of the apostle Paul some pretty amazing tidbits
about Paul’s view of the Christian life. And chapter 1, verse 6
today is one of those important phrases he makes mention of.
And it speaks about our confidence, our confidence in the faith that
when God is at work in our lives, he will finish what he started.
Let us hear from God’s word. This is Philippians chapter one,
beginning at verse six. This is the apostle Paul saying,
and 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. 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. Amen. Let us pray together. Our great
God, we thank you that you’re a God who speaks and that through
your powerful voice, that which does not exist comes into being.
That which exists is cared for and superintended over. And that
which is dead can become alive. And we pray now that your voice
would speak to us with thunder clarity and that we would know
that it is not the voice of men, but your voice, the very voice
of God. We pray now that the words we
hear, the thoughts we think, and that the life we will lead
because of these things will be pleasing in your sight by
the power of your Holy Spirit for the glory of God and for
the encouragement and good of our neighbors. This we ask in
the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. There’s a question that
probably is on many of your minds and it’s this question, how will
life work out How will all the items of unfinished business
in my life, how will they shake out? To what end will they come? What will become of them? And these are questions that
speak of the span of our life, the beginning, the middle, and
the end. Will I live long? Will I be healthy? Will I have a career? Will it
be a career that is a successful one, one that is fulfilling?
Maybe we have questions about our family. Will I have children?
What will my children grow up to be and do? Will they catch
the faith and live faithful Christian lives before God and men? We sometimes have ideas in our
head of a good life, a dream life, a high life. And we wonder,
will these things come to pass? How will it all shake out? Maybe
in a more acute fashion, you’re thinking of how will a certain
issue that I’m currently dealing with, how will it come to pass? How will it work out? Maybe it’s
a specific illness you’re facing or a relational struggle that
is at the forefront of your mind and at the current battle in
your life, a dispute, a financial situation, whatever it may be.
We have these life-spanning questions. How will my life work out? And
we often have these little acute problems. How will this turn
out in my life? And these are significant concerns. We want to be happy and healthy
and fully in good standing with other people. We want to live
a long life. We want to prosper. We want things
to go well. We don’t like trouble and hardship.
But what about when it comes to spiritual matters? Will God
make me holy? Will God take care of me? What if I don’t feel very holy?
What if I don’t feel like a Christian? What if I have doubts? What if
I don’t understand what the Bible seems to say? What if what my
parents have taught me isn’t really sinking into my own heart
and mind? Can I lose my salvation? Can
I somehow become unsaved? Will God get fed up with me and
say, I quit on you? Will I fall away from the faith?
Well, in Paul’s letter to the Philippians today, we read in
verse 6, we read these important words, I am sure of this, that
he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete
it at the day of Jesus Christ.” Those are words that we could
very quickly pass over because they are at the beginning of
the letter. We might say those are part of his greetings and
salutations. He’s just giving them words of nicety in order
to get to the real heart of the matter. And I want to tell you
this, that in the little tidbits, in the little words and phrases
that come at the beginning and end of Paul’s 13 epistles, you
will find some nuggets of gold. And when you find those, they
are the words and the scriptures that we should treasure. Because
they remind us, they encourage us, they tell us, They remind
us of things that are good and right and true and precious,
and they are things that though everything else in this world
may fade away or fail us, these words stand sure and true. And I want you to understand
this today. God will get you safely home
to heaven. There is not a shadow of doubt
in the Apostle Paul’s mind towards the Philippian church. And there’s
not a shadow of a doubt in my mind as the pastor of this church,
that if God is at work in your life spiritually, he will finish
what he started. He will get you safely home.
And oh yes, you will have ups and downs related to health,
related to life, related to finances. You will even have ups and downs
in your spiritual life. You will even have earth-shaking
and shattering events that may cause you to say, does God love
me? Will He give up on me? Can I lose my faith? Do I have
enough faith? Do I have what it takes to get
to heaven? And this little passage from
the Apostle Paul reminds us that it is God who works in us. to will and to do and to bring
us safely home into his heavenly abode where he desires for us
to be with him. In this beginning of the opening
to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we find some wonderful gold nuggets
where God greets us. He calls us servants. He calls
us saints. He offers a prayer of thanksgiving
which we’ll enter into next week, but he’s saying to us today,
if you look at verses 7 and 8, it is right for me to feel this
way about you. It is right for me to be confident
about you in this way. He says in verse 7, it is right
for me to feel this way about you 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.
God is my witness how I yearn for you. how I yearn for you
all with the affection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Apostle
Paul could not be more warm or gracious or confident in what
he’s going to say to the Philippians and to us. I want us to notice
a handful of things about this passage that should encourage
us in our Christian walk. You might be asking the question,
what does my daily Christian walk and God’s work in my life,
what does that look like? How does it work? What is the
benefit to me? I mean, we live in the South
and we have all these notions that we’re all Christians, we’re
all going to heaven, and that someday we’ll get there and be
together, there’ll be this great reunion. But we forget that while
that may be true, that our faith in Jesus saves us and that we
will be with him in heaven, God has a purpose for us in this
life. The Apostle Paul says in another letter to the Ephesian
church, he says that God has saved you unto good works that
he has prepared beforehand. So not only does God save you
to good works, he also is cleaning you up. He is making you heaven
ready. He is making you ready for Jesus,
the groom. We the church are his bride and
he’s getting us wedding ready so that at the great day when
he returns, we will be fit for such an occasion. Now the Apostle
Paul says it is right for him to feel this way. He says, I
hold you in my heart. God is my witness. He couldn’t
love you anymore. I couldn’t love you as an apostle
anymore. These are very tender words. But I want us to know
three things about Paul’s statement in verse 6 that I think can help
us. The first thing is this. Paul is sure of what he asserts. He is sure that if Jesus has
begun a good work in the Philippian church, if God has begun a good
work in you, that he will be faithful to complete it. The
Apostle Paul is convinced. He is sure of this. Now, what
are his reasons for being sure? Well, there could be human reasons.
The Philippians were a good little bunch. They were faithful in
receiving the gospel when he first preached it. They were
faithful in becoming partners in the gospel as we saw last
week. They make sure that others around the world are hearing
the gospel by supporting gospel endeavors. He could speak of
their gift to him. and say, that’s evidence, you’ll
give up your own resources to help a brother in need. He could
speak of even the fruit in their lives as the Holy Spirit is at
work in them. And those would be good reasons
for Paul to be sure that God is at work in them. But I think
there’s something more that is his focus here. He is sure that
God is doing a divine work in the people of God at Philippi.
And why is that? Well, I think it’s because the
Apostle Paul is a man of the Old Testament. Remember the Apostle
Paul, and he’ll tell us later in this letter, that he studied
under Gamaliel. He studied under one of the greatest
Old Testament scholars the world has ever known, even to this
day. And Paul himself knew the Old Testament, the Old Covenant
backwards and forwards. And if you read the Old Testament
beginning to end, you will find out that God loves with an everlasting
love, that he plays for keeps when he loves a people, and that
he will never ever let you go, even as bone-headed and meat-headed
and foolhardy and idiotic as we, his people, can be. Think
of an example. Think about how in Ezekiel chapter
20, God is speaking to his people and he says, look, I have loved
you. I have called you by name. I have made you my people. Yet
you have turned to idols. I have rescued you from Egypt.
And I’ve told you that if you’ll live for me and obey my commands
and believe my promises, that things will go well for you.
Yet you rebel. And over and over in that passage,
God says, you rebelled, you rebelled, you rebelled. But he says, but
for the sake of my name, for the sake of my own honor, because
of my oath, my covenant, my promise, I will redeem you and I will
forgive you. And so we are reminded throughout
the old covenant and now in the new covenant that when God sets
his affection upon you. You can never lose his love. Oh, you may be wishy-washy. You
may not keep your word. You may fail and falter and worship
idols and break and shatter the tablet of the commandments as
we are wont to do, but God will keep his word. And Paul says,
I am sure of this. I am confident of this. Now we
all know that there are Very few people whose word we can
trust. Oh, we get promises, we get contracts. But our legal
system, our law courts are full of lawsuits and people chasing
after each other saying, you didn’t keep up your end of the
bargain. No, you didn’t keep up yours. And we’re back and forth
for years and years in litigation and dispute. But with God, when
he starts something, he finishes it. When he promises, he keeps
his word. And friends, the earth may give
way all around you. Your real estate deals may fall
apart. Your finances may be ripped from your control. Whatever you
hold dear and have even firm promises about may not come true,
but God will never leave you or forsake you. And that is something
you can take to the bank. The apostle Paul says, I am sure
of this. Now, what is he sure of? Well,
the second thing is, God is at work in you. Paul is sure that
if God is at work in you, he’ll be faithful to complete it. So
what does it mean that God is at work in you? Well, remember
the story of Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night.
He’s a big man on campus in Jerusalem and he comes to Jesus by night
because he does not want to have his friends see that he’s coming
to Jesus because he just might believe in him and they all hate
him. He comes to Jesus by night and Jesus tells him he must be
born again. You must be born again. And what
do we mean by that? Well, we speak of being born
again as the new birth. The Holy Spirit comes into our
life and wakes us from the dead and helps us to see Jesus and
embrace Jesus as he’s freely offered in the gospel. And it
means that God has begun a good work in us. The Holy Spirit is
applying the salvation, the redemption that is ours in Christ from the
cross and his payment for our sin. He’s applying that to us.
He’s applying that death and that resurrection to us. And
the Holy Spirit, by the power of the Word, through the ministry
of the church, and our faithful Christian living, He is going
to make us more like Jesus. And Paul is saying, this is the
good work that has begun in you. We speak in theology of the order
of salvation, or as Paul puts it in Romans chapter 8, We call
it the golden chain of salvation. God sets his affection upon us. God works in us, effectively
calling us to himself by the preaching of the gospel. He regenerates
us. He gives us new birth. He works
faith in us so that we believe. He justifies us or declares us
righteous in his sight. He adopts us into his family
as children. We have all the rights and privileges
as sons and daughters of God. He sanctifies us or makes us
holy by his word and spirit and suffering. He gives us the grace
to persevere to the end so that on our deathbeds we can’t wait
to see Jesus. Oh yes, we have ups and downs.
We have failures. We have triumphs. We have mountaintop
experiences. We have valleys. We have dark
times and light times and bright times. But God is at work in
us. And let me tell you, as if you
already don’t know, It is messy. It is ugly. It is painful. It is bloody. It is humiliating. But that is the Christian life.
God is at work in us to make us more like Jesus. We sing of
how firm a foundation you saints of the Lord. We sing of the dross
to consume, thy gold to refine. There is burning off of the unprecious
metals. so that only the precious remain.
We suffer in order that we might look again to God and call him
Lord and Savior. The Sunday school class, the
elective class, is about to embark on a study of Job. Old Job had
a rosy life until God put him to the test. And God messed with
him bad, but he blessed him. He blessed him even greater at
the end of his life. But Job called on the name of
the Lord. He was faithful to his God. Oh,
he had a hard time, a miserable time. But that is what God does
for us and to us and in us in the Christian life. He who began
a good work will be faithful to complete it. Now, there’s
two things that are said about Christians here in Philippians
that are interesting. If God is doing a good work in
us, it will do two things. We find it in verse 7, I believe. It will confirm the gospel. and
it will defend the gospel. And so we go out into the world
and we say, oh, we want to send missionaries to the far reaches
and proclaim Jesus. We speak of locally, we want
to have pregnancy care centers and other agencies that help
the hurting and proclaim the gospel of Jesus. But I think
one of the greatest witnesses to the power of the gospel of
Jesus is each one of us leaving this place every week filled
up again with God’s grace and we go out and we serve. We’re
moms and dads, we’re workers, we’re co-workers, we live in
neighborhoods, we go to swimming pools and health clubs, we go
in doctor’s offices, some of us multiple ones per week, but
we are in and out of all kinds of places and if we faithfully
live as God has called us to be and he’s called us to do,
people are gonna say, who are you and what planet have you
come from? And you’ll say, as Paul says to the Philippians,
I’m a citizen of heaven saved by the blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And my goal in life is to give him glory and to serve
you as my neighbor. And the apostle Paul says, our
lives, God being at work in us will defend the gospel and it
will affirm the gospel. And so there’s a real question
for us. I mean, we want to understand that God, when he begins a good
work in us, that we’re sure he will complete it. We want that.
But is your life denying the gospel or affirming it? Oh, yes,
you sin. You have your ups and downs.
But for the most part, the people see that you are living a faithful
life and you’ve got to be a citizen from another place besides here,
because you don’t live like you’re an American in the 21st century. You live like you’re a citizen
of heaven, like a stranger and sojourner in a foreign and dark
and weary land. Something else this ought to
remind us of too, though, is we need to remember that each
of us are in process. God is at work in each of us.
And we are all at different levels of growth and grace. I mean,
I think of this often with my family and my children, but we
ought to also think of that in the church. Every single one
of us is at a different place in God’s work of grace in us. And so that ought to lead us
to be charitable. And remember that construction
is in progress. Remodeling is dusty and dirty. Remodeling is loud and noisy. And so if we’re going to live
in community with other people, whether it’s in a home with a
family or in a church with other brothers and sisters, we’re all
under construction and it is loud and noisy and messy and
dirty. And it is not until we land safely
on heaven’s shore that that work is finished. Some of you know
that at the Billy Graham Center, Mrs. Graham’s grave is there. And at the end on her tombstone,
it says end of construction. Thanks for your patience. And
that is exactly how we ought to see living the Christian life
with each other. It’s messy and dirty and noisy
and loud and often uncomfortable. And sometimes we hit our thumbs
and we get whacked in the back of the head with a board. But
that’s what it’s like on a construction site. That’s what it’s like.
in Christian community, but God is at work in us, and we are
grateful. The third thing Paul mentions,
he uses the word completion. I am sure of this, that he who
began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the
day of Jesus. What does a complete you in Christ
look like? What does a complete you look
like at the end of construction? We might understand it this way.
Jesus is putting his finishing touches on each of us. I don’t
know about y’all, but I have a lot of projects lying around
the house. My wife will bear witness and
say amen to this. A lot of projects that are undone.
There’s a set of beds out in the storeroom that I’m supposed
to be painting. There’s boards in the basement that I’m meaning
to build something out of. There’s a pile of papers at my
desk here, and there’s a pile of papers at my desk at home,
and they are well-intended projects that need to get done. But they’re
just lying there. There’s project after project
that needs to get undone. And you know, I may die someday,
and those stacks of paper will just be there. Not so with God. He brings to completion what
he starts. And think of yourselves as a
piece of artwork. God’s goal for you is to conform
you to the image of Jesus Christ. That is your finished portrait.
And he still has brush strokes. He still has some touching up
to do. For some of you, he’s just gotten started. Others of
you are near the end of what that portrait will be. But God
is at work on you. And the divine artist will complete
what he has begun in you. It’s his goal, it’s his desire,
and he will do it. If you read many of the benedictions
in the New Testament, they speak to this. The benediction, the
blessing we have at the end of every service, may God work in
you some way to bless you and bless others. At the end of Jude,
Jude who’s one of the brothers of Jesus says, now to him who
is able to keep you from falling, stumbling, quitting, He’s also
able to present you faultless before the throne of God. And
there’s again a promise that you can take to the bank that
what God starts, he finishes. God will lead you all the way
home. You will get there whole, safe and fully complete in him. Think of each of us as a stone. The Old Testament speaks of this.
The apostle Peter confirms it. He says, we are living stones
and we have been carefully selected and cut and chiseled and chosen
and worked on. And God is taking all those stones
and building his church. And at the day of the Lord Jesus,
it won’t be bricks and mortars that we will see, but we will
see a complete church of people of God who’ve been selected and
cut and chiseled and placed in the right place to build this
great edifice, which is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ and
God’s building will be complete. Some of you wonder why Jesus
hasn’t returned yet. It’s because the full number
of stones have not yet been selected and chosen and cut and placed. We need to be reminded of this
over and over. God has a lot of unfinished business, but he
is finishing it. And he is conforming us into
the image of Jesus Christ. And so you say, what do I do
until then? Well, you’d be like that person
in Psalm chapter one. The righteous person is like
a tree planted by streams of living water. Plant yourself
in the church, plant yourself in worship, plant yourself in
fellowship with other Christians, plant yourself in the prayer
life of the church, plant yourself in the service of the church,
plant yourself in the midst of the suffering of the church,
your own and others we share. And you do that year after year,
Sunday after Sunday, decade after decade, and God will get you
safely home to heaven. Let’s pray together. Our great
God, we thank you for these promises that are ours in Christ Jesus
and how they are yes and amen in him. Oh, we live in a world
that breaks its promises. We live in a world that oversells
Promises too much, but these are your words. These are your
promises and we know there have been saints who have gone before
us and they are Living in the midst of these promises fulfilled
bring us there to bring us safely home Bring us safely home to
heaven’s shores where Jesus is and where we will behold your
face forever and ever help us to believe this help us to worship
you because of this and help us day after day, never to forget
your promises. And this we ask in the name of
Jesus, our Savior. Amen.