How Much Agreement Should We Have? Philippians 3:15-16 Series

One of the amazing things about modern technology is how all our various devices sync up with each other. You’ve got programs or settings or preferences on your phone, and you can put that down and pick up your tablet two seconds later and there they are, and it’s the same on your computer - everything is all synchronized. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sometimes things get out of sync. For some reason, the internal clock in my computer can’t seem to stay in sync with the real world. I get up in the morning and it still shows the time from last night when I went to bed, or sometimes it will show some date months in the future. And so all of my calendar reminders go off because my computer thinks the future has arrived. So every morning when I get up, I have to reset the time and date on that thing. Synchronization is a beautiful thing when it works.

We have been studying verse by verse through the book of Philippians, and we come this morning to 3:15-16, where Paul tells us to sync up.

16 Only let us live up to what we have already attained.

That word translated live up to (your Bible might say hold true to) means to fall in line or to conform to a pattern or a standard. In Galatians 5:25 that word is translated keep in step with. So Paul is calling us to line up with or be consistent with or sync up to something. To what? To what we have already attained. You have attained some level of understanding of God’s Word, and Paul is going to show us how to synchronize the way you live with what you know from the Bible so that they match. So this is a passage that is of great interest to anyone who wants to live an authentic, consistent Christian life and not be a hypocrite.

Review

Just to refresh your memory a bit, he started out the chapter warning us about legalism – trying to make yourself a good person in God’s eyes by following a list of rules. Don’t ever fall into that error because the only way that you can be a good person in God’s eyes is for Jesus’ righteousness to be credited to your account through faith. The Bible calls that justification, and it is effortless on your part.

And someday Jesus will return and you will be raised from the dead and will be made perfect by Christ. That’s glorification, and that too is effortless on your part. Being justified and being glorified are both effortless. But in between is what the Bible calls the process of sanctification, and that is not effortless. Paul says it’s like fighting in a war, it’s like a wrestling match, it’s like running a race in the Olympics – it requires the most extreme kind of effort. And so Paul says, “I haven’t attained the goal yet, so I’m running like there’s no tomorrow.” He was never content with his level of spiritual progress - he always had his eyes on the prize.

The Immaturity of the Mature

The Concept of Spiritual Maturity

So all of that takes you through verse 14. Then in verse 15 Paul says this:

15 All of us who are mature…

So he wants to take a moment to address mature believers. When you are first converted, you start out as a baby Christian, and then you grow and make progress. And over time, you become mature. You get to where you have a deep understanding of Scripture. You have made a lot of progress in fighting against sin in your life. If someone insults you, you respond in a godly way. You have a lot of wisdom. You are equipped to help others along spiritually.

Once in a while you hear about a person with a development problem that keeps him from maturing at the normal rate, so he might be in his 30s and has the intellect and maturity level of an eight-year-old. Whenever we see that, it’s so heartbreaking. But it’s even more heartbreaking when it happens in the spiritual realm - Christians who don’t grow and mature spiritually. They just stay the same year after year.

Hebrews 5:11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.