Sermon for CATM – September 14. 2008 - Philippians Series: “He Who Began a Good Work…” Philippians 1:1-11
Would you believe that this Scripture was written by a man who began his relationship with the church by being its enemy? Who once delighted over the murder of Christians. Who felt it was his duty to God to stamp out the Christian church. That is one reason why this book is so interesting, and so important.
Today we begin a journey through the book of Philippians. For those of you who intend to take the course “Theological Reflections on Philippians”, this is the first day of that course.
One of the reasons we’re doing this course in this fashion, this experimental way, is so that we can really spend a lot of time immersed in the Word of God together, and so that we perhaps be a little more mindful of what God is saying and doing among us, both individually and as a body.
Those taking the course will be submitting papers, as the course outline indicates. For those who are not taking the course, I encourage you to also spend these weeks reading and meditating upon the book of Philippians. It will be worth your while.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about this book in the New Testament, this epistle or letter is that there’s a warmth about it, an intimacy and friendship that’s deeply rooted in the faith that the Philippians shared, and their mutual commitment to the gospel, the same intensity of commitment that Paul the Apostle had.
Paul is, of course, the author of the book, and Timothy who he mentions in the first verse is his direct fellow labourer Timothy, like most of those who made up the Philippian church, was a gentile, or non-Jew.
Paul, on the other hand was as Jewish as they come. In the book of Acts Paul describes himself in this way: “"I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. Under Gamaliel. I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today”.
Later in Philipians Paul says that he was“circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee;6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless”.
So Paul was steeped in Jewish thought and Jewish experience. And yet Paul, a Jew among Jews, was called by God to live and preach the gospel among people who were mostly not Jewish. He was called to minister to a people group and an ethnicity that was not his own.
He was called to share faith and to reason among people who were steeped not in Jewish thought, but, if anything, Greek thought.
So in terms of credibility and in terms of crossing cultures to serve God and get the message of the gospel across, Paul was always walking up hill.
So Paul begins…
Phil 1:1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons: 2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We can see that the letter is addressed to “all the Saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons”. Notice Paul doesn’t just send this to the leaders or pastors at the church.
Now I’m going to ask an awkward question, but I want you to try to answer it not according to modern understanding but rather a biblical understanding.
Who here is a saint? [All believers] Sometimes, still, people get the idea that God speaks only to and through leaders, that there is some kind of spiritual food chain, some form of privileged access to God that pastors have.
You may recall though how last week we talked about the priesthood of believers, how each of us, as followers of Jesus, is part of this priesthood and how we each share the same blessing and access to God. Everyone here who confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour is, biblically, a saint.
Now the first thing Paul says after addressing this letter to the saints is a blessing. “Grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul says this as a blessing to the church. What is grace? [Unmerited favour]. What is peace or shalom? [Nothing missing, Nothing broken, Complete well-being].
Now of course GRACE was more than a word or a greeting to Paul. GRACE sums up Paul’s life and it sums up the message of his life. I think of the old hymn: “Grace, grace, God’s grace, Grace that will pardon and cleanse within; Grace, grace, God’s grace, Grace that is greater than all my sin”.
Grace that liberates us from vainly trying to earn God’s favour, as though anyone can by their own merit, please God. How the grace of God makes the promises of God ever near to us, and how the grace of God gives wings to God’s first priority: that we be a people who love others with our whole being, spurred on and motivated by the love, the grace that we’ve been freely given
[PPT] 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
1st Point: PPT:God is always at work in you
Let me ask you. How many projects do you have on the go at home right now?
A project can be anything from organizing your Interac receipts to fixing something that’s broken to making something… anything…you get the idea.
Something that starts as an idea and eventually finds its way into your schedule to work on? So how many? One to three? Four to six? Seven or more?
Now, certain things take priority, don’t they? For some it’s just a huge chore to keep the house not looking like a disaster area. Maybe that’s your only project…and it’s an uphill battle.
For others it’s organizing space. The one thing that never gets done in my house is my work room. A photograph is worth a thousand words [PPT of workshop].
If you judged my life by how organized my work space is…my tools and paints and random what-have-yous, you would think that I was an utter slob, to be honest.
I make plans to do it…to organize the space, but it seems that a lot of things can distract me from spending that time to create a really workable work space down there. It is, I admit, a low priority. In the light of every else I’ve got to do, it’s way, way down on the list. [Workshop PPT off]
And I’ll admit that even after I came to faith in Christ, for years, my belief was that I was low priority for God. That God has a whole lot more going on that mattered more than me. I felt like I was a lot of work.
I had so many raw edges, so much pressing down on me that, I imagined sometimes, God should spend His time working with people who would rise quicker to the challenges of the Christian life, who wouldn’t sin as much, who wouldn’t always be taking three steps forward and four steps back.
And over the years I’ve learned that a lot of Christians have a similar idea about themselves.
It gets complicated too when we hear Jesus talk about God as Abba Father, and we start to gather that God is like a parent to us.
But when our own parents demonstrated a pretty conditional love or acceptance of us, we can confuse the fact that God is our Heavenly Father in a way totally distinct from the failings of our own parents.
Now it’s important to understand that I’m not suggesting that we are God’s projects.
But I am suggesting that we are God’s creation, and that as people who respond to God’s grace first by receiving Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and then by being willing to let God fulfill His work in us, we are his masterpieces actually.
Ephesians 2:10 says this PPT – “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to”.
Now as God’s workmanship, as someone He has created in Jesus to do good works …you matter profoundly to the Creator of the universe. He had something in mind when He created you, He had something in mind when He rescued you from your sin and brought you to faith in Christ.
You are God’s ongoing work of art. He is forever adjusting the hues and contrasts of your life, forever refining, forever perfecting. Even His discipline, his correction is His ongoing work in your life.
PPT: Hebrews 12: 5--11: “My child, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his child… Our parents disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it”.
Do you ever feel disciplined by God in your spirit? Has anyone here ever felt disciplined in their spirit? Good…then you know, it’s because God loves you that He corrects you. And you know that you are His daughter, you are his son.
God will finish what He starts in Your life
V. 6 “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus”.
Of all the projects that you want to get to, which one is your priority? Now my most important projects end up getting done. For the past year and a half or more I’ve been working on a huge project…a film of my late brother’s life made up of interviews with him and including a lot of his photographic work and just things about his life that really express a bit of who he was.
It took a long time to get down to it because every time I would look at the footage I would be overwhelmed with sadness…I was too early on in mourning him to concentrate. But as of this summer, I was able to put in the hundreds of hours it took to learn the software, to design the project and to execute it in a way that Craig would have been pleased with.
Things that matter get done. This [PPT of workshop] stayed like this because all my time went into finishing the project. Nothing was going to stop me. I’m grateful to my family because they understood how important the project was to me, my birth family and Craig’s family. [PPT off]
So they were ok with me hogging the computer for days on end when it mattered.
Now what I want to say next about this passage and how it relates to us might be tough to hear for some of us. That is: You are God’s priority. God has started something in your life…He has stirred something in you.
Perhaps you’re here today and you don’t consider yourself a person of faith. This environment might be quite odd to you. The notion of their being a God in the first place may well be a real problem for you.
But all of us were drawn here today…for some of us perhaps it’s a habit, a good habit that we’ve built into our lives because gathering together makes a positive difference in our lives. Others may have walked in, seemingly randomly off the street.
You are God’s priority. The God who draws us here and who motivates us to consider or to continue in a life of faith is the same God who brought creation into being in the first place.
Maryellen gave me a collection of sermons by Rob Bell on Philippians and he points out, related to this passage, that this verse, written by Paul who was steeped in the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament, is in itself is a huge, wink-wink, nod-nod to the creation story itself.
Play Movie: “Cosmos 1” [1 1/2 minute silent film of star clusters; see http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrintsIndex/GP0053.html
Think of the book of Genesis chapter 1. v.3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, 9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place…and God saw that it was good”. 11
Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation...the land produced vegetation…and God saw that it was good. 14-18 And God said, "Let there be lights… God made two great lights…to govern the day and…to govern the night… And God saw that it was good.
God, who has always been, creates a ‘beginning’ for the universe. God begins, God commands, God creates, and then like an artist deeply pleased with his work, an artist who says to himself: “That’s exactly what I had in my heart to create”; like an artist, God stands back and says: “It’s good!”.
V. 6 “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus”.
And so we have in this passage an appeal to remembering the creative will and the creative power of God. He who with all the might and power in the universe created the universe as it is…He uses that same power…that same power is at work in us.
[Film Ends]
Ephesians chapter 3 has this great little benediction right in the middle of it: “20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
So perhaps it’s a little easier to grasp and maybe a little easier to accept…that God, the One who has started a good work in your life…who has saved you from your sins and who is saving you right now from the darkness in our world and who’s promise is that we will see, as 1 Peter 1:3 says “the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time”.
Now, as we always find with the Word of God, the work that God does in us does not end with us. I suggested last week that we need to steer far away from ever thinking that we…us and our own salvation and relationship with God is God’s final purpose and goal.
The rest of our passage today suggests just how it is that God will carry on that good work He has started in us to completion until the day of Christ, or the coming of Christ.
PPT: 9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ--to the glory and praise of God.
Abounding Love
Here is Paul’s prayer, a prayer that’s at the very centre of his intentions and his desire for the Philippians. And of course we understand that this represents God’s heart for us. He speaks of an abounding love. A love that is filled, rich, well-supplied. A love that is not sentiment, but rather a love that is actually intelligent. He speaks here of a love that abounds in knowledge and depth of insight. A love that considers and weighs its actions.
And Paul prays that this love will lead to the ability to discern what is best. Not just to avoid things that are bad, but to be able to chose the best things among those that are good; the things of more advanced excellence.
Don’t let the question be: Is it really so bad? But rather ask “Is there any good, and which is the best?”
And, choosing the best, making the best choices…leads to a kind of purity and blamelessness. An uncluttered life. A life unpre-occupied with unimportant distractions.
A life unhindered by gnawing guilt and a feeling of unworthiness that is the result of unwise choices and sinful actions.
A life, in other words, wholly available to God and wholly committed to His glory. That’s the kind of freedom God wants for us and makes available to us in Christ Jesus.
So, God is always, always at work in your life. There is never a second where God is dormant, distracted or uninterested or uninvested in your life. And God is faithful to complete the good work that He has begun.
Did He save you from your sins? He will preserve you and continually call you to a holy life…not so you can stay saved, of course, as though that was our doing and not his, but so that His life and His glory is more and more evident in your life and on your countenance.
Has he called you to a particular way of loving? Has God equipped you with gifts and passion for blessing others?
He will never stop working in you to see that calling fulfilled in your life.
And God opens the door to you and I living a life that abounds with love. Intelligent, deep, discerning love that spreads and spreads to those around us. Practical love. Love that expresses itself in service to God and service to humanity.
Pause
This is where we begin. This is our first look into Philippians, and perhaps it’s evident that our exploration of this book is going to be pretty challenging. Pretty fascinating.
And if we really pay attention over these next weeks, and if we meditate on the Word of God and discuss it among ourselves so that we really feed on it as a church, perhaps we will sense a change. A lifting up of our spirits.
A refocusing on the things that really matter, and a recommitment, even, to living AS THOUGH WE BELIEVE that God who has begun a good work in us will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
Let’s pray. Holy God, You are beautiful. You’re creative power and authority in our lives is overwhelming. May we each catch a vision of the work you want to do in and through us. Of how you choose to love the world through Your church, through each Christian here today.
You are faithful, and so we don’t need to worry if you will come through. Give us wise and discerning hearts, O Lord. Give us love that abounds toward You, toward each other and toward our neighbour. And may Your glory be revealed in each of us. In the matchless name of Christ Jesus our Lord and Saviour we pray. Amen.
