“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. 9 The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”
During the time I was a police officer I worked with a man I do not mind naming here. His name was David Diaz and the last I knew he had left our department to work for the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). That is a good thing; I’m happy that God has people in organizations such as that.
In the course of a conversation I had with Dave one day I mentioned that one of my favorite passages of scripture was Philippians 4:6-7
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
His response shamed me, not because he was trying to shame me but because it exposed my spiritual immaturity to myself and caused me to go away in soul-searching contemplation.
You see, at the time I saw verses 6-7 shallowly as a promise to take care of my needs and keep me from worry and that is what attracted me to them.
Then Dave said to me, “Yes, that is a great passage but I like the verses that come next” and he went on from memory to cite verses 8 and 9.
My selfish focus was on having the promise of the peace of God, where his focus was on having and honoring the God of peace.
In a recent email exchange I had with one of the pastors in our association, Dan Preston, he referred to the parable of the Prodigal Son and verse 31 of that passage, where the father says to the older son, “…all that is mine is yours”. Dan went on to say, ‘For me, realizing that I am His and He is mine, includes everything that He has He has given to me. Believing this, how could I ever be concerned with what I deserve as His son?” He ended saying that what we sometimes fail to recognize is “…that all who become His children share this limitless inheritance – the reward is Him!”
This might call to mind verse 19 of the chapter we are studying, when Paul assures the Philippian readers and also us that “…my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus”. That is an assurance that God is well able to take care of His children in this life and the next, but Dan was right to indicate that if we have Him, in Him we have all we need.
MIND THESE THINGS
Going back to our text verses now, Paul is finishing his letter so he says ‘Finally, brethren”, and admonishes them, as we will see, concerning their thinking (verse 8) and their doing (verse 9).
First, I want to call something to your deliberate thought process in order to avoid any of us subconsciously receiving these next words of Paul as an encouragement to some sort of transcendental meditation; some ‘feel good’ philosophy, and then erroneously calling it Christianity.
Remember, this is the Apostle Paul. He was always thinking of Christ. His focus and his teaching was always of things pertaining to the cross and salvation.
We have also noted more than once in the past that there was nothing casual or accidental about his choice of wording. Paul was deliberate and chose his wording to say precisely what he needed to say. In addition to this we remind ourselves that this is the inspired Word of God.
So let’s go on to verse 8 with all of this fresh in our thoughts.
First, there is nothing unusual or mystical about any of these words. They are pretty straight up, and even though different translations may use slightly different words the meaning of them is simple enough.
So I went to the Lockman Foundation’s Amplified version in order to just get the fuller meaning of verses 8 and 9. Here is verse 8 in the Amplified.
“For the rest, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honorable and seemly, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and lovable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virtue and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things [fix your minds on them].”
Fix your minds on these things. Dwell on them. This is calling for much more than a passing notice. And this is not the only place Paul speaks of using our minds, is it?
If you were to look in a good concordance you would see that Paul said a great deal about the mind, about the condition of the mind of man in sin and admonitions for believers to be of the same mind and so forth.
In Colossians 3:2 he tells them to set their minds on things above, meaning that they are to think of Godly things and heavenly things, since God had placed them positionally in that place with Christ.
In Romans 12:3 he tells his readers to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. That would entail learning the scriptures. Studying about who God is and what He is like and letting the Holy Spirit continue His sanctifying work even in our minds, bringing us to thinking like Jesus thinks instead of the way the world thinks.
Now in just a moment you may be tempted to say to yourself, “Oh, here he goes again…,” but that’s ok, I have to say it anyway.
The world has stopped thinking! That’s an exaggeration but not an unfair one. Sometimes it seems as though every new product on the market is designed to save us from having to think. At the mere touch of a button or in some cases even a voice command, more information is available in an instant than we could ever absorb in a decade. Toys and entertainment are all about feeling and experience and instant gratification.
Is logic even taught in our colleges any more? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure there are no classes like that offered in High School.
It gets worse. This same trend has seeped into the church, as the things of the world so often do. I’m not alone in thinking this way. Listen to Bill Hull, from his book “Right Thinking”.
“What scares me is the anti-intellectual, anti-critical-thinking philosophy that has spilled over into the Church. This philosophy tends to romanticize the faith, making the local church into an experience center…
Their concept of ‘church’ is that they are spiritual consumers and that the church’s job is to meet their felt needs.” “Right Thinking”, Colorado Springs, CO, NavPress 1985
He’s right. Of course I think that or I wouldn’t have quoted him. But if you pay attention to church signs – and don’t let me get started on the idiocy on so many of these changeable church signs – but if you pay attention to the ones that announce upcoming services and studies, or if you browse the religion page of the newspapers or peruse the public billboards at restaurants and shopping places, you will see advertised, seminars on successful marriage relationships, series on financial planning and good stewardship, child rearing, dealing with difficult people, ‘Christian dating’, whatever that is…
and the list is seemingly endless.
What’s missing? Sound, biblical preaching and teaching from the pulpit. Teaching of the basic doctrines of the faith, beginning with the radical depravity of all mankind, not being afraid to use the s-i-n word, preaching about the need for repentance and the doctrines of God’s unfathomable grace. Justification. Sanctification. Glorification.
What’s missing is careful exegesis of a text, not just in the Pastor’s study so he can dumb it down and stir in a few cute and funny illustrations and spoon feed a restless congregation, but from the pulpit, making people think, making them do an occasional heart-check, making them see and comprehend the truth of a passage as they have perhaps never understood it before. Giving them something the Holy Spirit can use to lead them to Christ – higher up and deeper in.
These things Paul listed here… true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, excellence, worthy of praise… he had no intention of sending them out into the world with a lantern searching for those things. They are all found in Christ. They are Spirit-revealed. Dwell on those things, he says. Be mindful of them.
Proverb 23:7 says that “…as [a man] thinks within himself, so he is.” The things you let your mind dwell on are the things that are going to shape you, and eventually they are going to be coming out of you in your words and your actions.
Go about with your thoughts filled with Christ and these characteristics that mark Him and people are going to see you walking and hear you talking like Jesus.
PRACTICE THESE THINGS
Here is verse 9 in the Amplified version.
“Practice what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and model your way of living on it, and the God of peace (of untroubled, undisturbed well-being) will be with you.”
That word we translate ‘received’ pertains specifically to acceptance and acknowledgement of information taught. So rather than meaning they reached out and acquired some gift he was offering, it is talking about truths they received in their thinking as he taught them.
So when he says things you have learned and received he is talking about his teaching and when he says heard and seen he is talking about his lifestyle. And again, we marvel at the sincere humility of a man who is able to say what so few people in history have been able to say, ‘imitate me’, ‘do the things I do’.
Oh, I could say that and so could you, but for most of us, myself foremost, it would have to be said with qualifying restrictions… quite a list of qualifying restrictions.
In fact, forget the list. I’d have to come clean in giving a list, wouldn’t I? Let this suffice, in a particular instance, imitate me. If you see me doing good and Godly things, do the things I am doing. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
On second thought, just study your Bible, learn of Christ, and do the things He leads you to do; practice the things He taught and gave and spoke and did… insofar as your fallen humanity will allow you.
Paul is speaking here of holiness. He is exhorting us to holy living. Let your mind dwell on holy things and let them come out of your mouth and life in practice.
I used to think, when I heard this kind of teaching, that it was really unfair. When someone read Ephesians 5:10 in a bible study he said, ‘striving to learn what is pleasing to the Lord’. Now, I can’t find a translation that says ‘striving’. They all either say, ‘trying to learn’, or ‘proving what is’. So either he had a version I haven’t seen, or he substituted the word for effect. All I know is, that really bothered me. It sounded hard. I’m supposed to strive to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.
In my early days as a believer I didn’t know that God has been very clear in His Word about what is pleasing to him. Faith pleases Him. Loving Him and others with a sincere heart is pleasing to Him. Desiring His glory and whatever brings honor to His name pleases Him. There’s really a lot of things that please God. He is a very joyful God and I think many times we please him like our toddlers please us as they just go about trying new things and learning about their world.
But what pleases God? Walking in holiness, y’think? Yes, I think so. Furthermore, I think one reason it pleases Him is because of the great benefits that come to us as we dwell on holiness and walk in it.
Dr Lloyd-Jones in his commentary on these verses makes the point that the call to holiness is not like a dictator yelling, ‘do this’, but it comes as an invitation to enjoy the benefits of the gospel by doing certain things.
He says, “That is why we must realize that there is no need to denounce people who are not living the holy life. The New Testament seems to me to be sorry for them. There is no need to denounce Christians who are not doing their utmost to live the Christian life, because, poor things, they are suffering enough as it is. They are missing the greatest things the gospel has to give. The New Testament regards as pathetic these people who claim that they desire the blessings of the gospel and yet are not doing the one thing that is essential to receiving them.” “The Life of Peace” Lloyd-Jones, Baker Books, 1990
What are the benefits he is talking about? Well, I think common sense will tell us many of the benefits of walking according to holiness, since it is precisely the opposite of the way we once walked, as Paul said to the Ephesians, ‘according to the spirit who is now working in the sons of disobedience’.
But Paul names the greatest one right here in our text, and we will spend the remainder of our time and the remainder of our study in Philippians talking about that.
THE GOD OF PEACE
In our previous study we talked of the peace of God that surpasses all comprehension. Paul assures us that as we place all of our trust in God for every need and every circumstance His peace will be like a bulwark, guarding our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus against all attacks of the enemy and the temptations of the flesh to take matters into our own hands.
Nevertheless he says we cannot understand this peace. The reason should be obvious to us. It is for the same reason we cannot fathom God’s love. He is love, and He is peace. What comes down from God to us will always be infinitely beyond our scope of understanding.
That is a blessing, really, because for one, if I could fully understand God then He would not be a very big God. Secondly, when in a time of need and seeking after God for answers, we know when He has heard and responded when we suddenly sense a peace that is almost overwhelming. That sounds paradoxical, I know. It makes me think of the Seinfeld program when Jerry Seinfeld’s neighbor, Kramer, would get this crazed expression on his face and yell at the top of his lungs, ‘Serenity now!’ But that is how I have been affected in the past when God’s peace comes to my mind and heart and I know that what I am sensing did not come from within, and certainly not because of some thought I’ve just had or something someone has said to me. It is a peace that all will be well and I am in His will and He is in control, and as the Amplified version put it, I have a sense of untroubled, undisturbed well-being.
Not because I have meditated and found my own inner peace, but because God has heard and answered.
The world and those without God can never have this peace because man has never been at peace with God, and if there is not peace with God then there can be no peace in the soul. Man was made to worship his Creator and when he rejects his Creator and goes his way then he also rejects peace, and his path is one of turmoil from within that affects everything without.
But Paul says that for the believer who contemplates pure and true and honest and Godly things, and who, like an admiring child wanting to be like ‘daddy’, determines to order his steps in a way that his life will manifest Christ, the God of peace will be with him.
Now here is a truth worthy of repeating. As a believer in Christ, even with the Holy Spirit living within and God’s Word hidden in your heart, there will be times you will not sense the peace of God. The sin nature sometimes gets in the way and sometimes our circumstances in life can be dreadful enough to make us temporarily lose that sense of the peace of God with us.
It makes sense, really. If I always sensed the peace of God, then I would not ever feel it coming to me afresh. So I would not have a testimony to share with others that God has answered my cries and filled me with His peace.
On the other hand, if you are a believer in Christ and you have the indwelling Holy Spirit, you can never lose the God of peace. As His elect He has done in time what He determined in eternity. He has called whom He had predestinated, regenerated you, granted you repentance and faith, justified you, sanctified you, continues progressively to sanctify you, and there will be a day in time when for you time will no longer be a consideration as He glorifies you; something He already considers a finished work, as we know by the past tense He gives to the word in Romans 8:30
“…and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.”
You were, as we have seen in Romans chapter 5, a helpless, sinful, enemy of God in the flesh, and while you were in that state Christ died for you.
To the Ephesians, Paul wrote about the enmity between Jew and Gentile and also the enmity between both groups and God. He said,
“For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace” Eph 2:14-15
He Himself is our peace, establishing peace horizontally and vertically through the cross of Christ.
Mankind had absolutely nothing to do with that process, except to be spiritually dead in trespasses and sins so that he needed new life. Salvation was God’s plan, He chose those who He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, he called, He justified, He glorified. He made peace with us. That peace can never be broken because it is not a treaty that we signed with Him after laying down our arms.
It is an eternal peace that He established with us because He will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy and compassion upon whom He will have compassion, and nothing in Heaven, Hell or on earth can ever again break that peace.
This is what Paul was talking about at the end of Romans 8
38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
He is the God of peace. He made peace with you, believer, when He crushed His Son for your redemption. If He was willing to do that, if Christ was willing to give Himself to the Father’s will and suffer and die the death that He died, how could you ever think that He would ever allow anything or anyone to ever remove you from Him again?
The risen Jesus stood on the mountain with His astounded friends and made them a promise that is for you and me and all that God has chosen for Himself. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age”.
He is the God of love. He is the God of joy. He is the God of peace.
Let your mind dwell on Christ, let your feet walk as He walked. And know that He is with you always.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen
