It’s Time For Your Workout – Philippians 2:12-13 Series

There's a much bigger cancer in our world today than the cancer I'm talking about. It's this sin that exists. I'm not sure we understand or realize the power that sin has to damage us. That it corrupts us. That we have a struggle with sin in our lives. It's terrible. And that's why we do the spiritual workouts that we do. Because as we're doing that workout, then we're able to prepare ourselves to face the battles or the challenges. The scriptures talk about our Christian life as a battle. That we're fighting the good fight. That we're running the race. It's not just passive thing, we're sitting back there and drinking our Coke, you know. This is something we're actually doing. It's a battle. It's a fight.

The scriptures talk about three enemies (the world, the flesh, and the devil) that we need to be prepared to address. The world is this worldliness that's out there that we have to be thinking about because it fills all the entertainment, it fills all the conversations, it fills the advertising, and it's bombarding us. We need to have a spiritual plan to address that. That's why we're working out. The flesh has to do with this stuff inside of us where we often desire to do the wrong thing. And so the spiritual workouts we do help us to deal with that. The devil – there are spiritual battles that exists with Satan and his demons that we need to be ready to fight. This is serious business, folks. That's what Paul is saying. He said I want you to work out your salvation, but I want you to do it with all of the seriousness that you can imagine.

In the Bible, we have the term the fear of the Lord. Sometimes we don't exactly know what to do with that term because, well, we don't want to think about God as someone we're afraid of. We want to think about Him as our heavenly Father that we can have a close relationship with. Which I think that's what Jesus introduced us to so we can come to Jesus as our Father. But there is a sense of His awesomeness. This awesome respect that we have. His Holiness that makes us see how serious this relationship with God really is.

This idea with fear and trembling has to do with let's take this seriously, let's not take this casually. Let's dig in and do what we need to do in order to be spiritually healthy, to be spiritually fit. Let's do the workout that's necessary.

Well, this last one here, for it is God who works in you, in verse 13. Notice I said take your power supplements. Maybe that's a stretch. But the idea here is that if you're working out and you're trying to exercise and build bulk in your body, then you're probably taking some supplements, like some extra protein and so on, when you're working out. In the same way, this passage is a shift. Between verse 12 and verse 13 there's a big shift. Because up to verse 13, you might be saying, wow, this sounds pretty humanistic to me. I'm going to work out my own salvation. This is all about me doing what I need to do. This is about me exercising so that I can have the wealth that God wants me to have. Isn't this pretty humanistic just think that I can do all this on my own? Well that's why verse 13 is there. Because it says – Therefore it is God who works in you.