At Muscle Beach they've got this big platform area where guys have all these weights and they're working out. It's kind of entertaining because people who are good looking, you know, who really can lift weights and they're strong, and they do lift those weights, it’s fun to watch them lift the weights. It's just entertaining to do so.
Well Kenneth Leverich decided he would have some fun on Muscle Beach. He's a young guy, very strong, a weightlifter and could lift quite heavily the weights that he does. But he went and got himself decked out with Hollywood makeup, a whole mask that he put on, and decked himself out to be an eighty-four-year-old guy. Okay, so now he looks like an eighty-four-year-old guy, but he's really a really strong, young twenties guy. He goes on to Muscle Beach. He's joking with the guys and they're all laughing at this eighty-four-year-old guy because he's definitely out of place there on this pier area. And he says to one guy, “Oh what kind of supplements do you take? I take prune juice,” you know, it's kind of a fun and entertaining video. You can find it by just YouTubing or searching for “Muscle Beach old man.” You'll find it that way. Not right now. But maybe later on, you could do that.
But here's the fun thing. What he did was he went over and he saw these guys lifting weights and kind of competing with each other. And he said, “Hey, can I have a try there?” They're laughing at him say, “Oh sure, old man. Go ahead and give it a try.” He goes over there picks up these dead weights and throws them up over his head and lifts them up and then drops them. And everybody's going whoa. They're just so surprised that he could do this. He goes over to some other weights over there and he lifts those weights. Now a crowd is forming just because this is very entertaining to see this old guy doing all of these things, and they're laughing. Everybody's just amazed that he goes around, he's be able to do all this. At one point, he does a complete backflip. He's standing and he jumps up and does a backflip. Eighty-four-year-old guy, apparently, doing this backflip. Everybody's entertained by this. But for Kenneth Leverich this was just another workout. Another workout day.
Today I want to talk to you about a workout, a spiritual workout that we all need to be engaged in in our lives. The reason I use workout is because it comes directly from our passage in Philippians 2:12-13. If you look at those words there it says in the scriptures – Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. There you go. Work out.
The words work out are right there, so I think what we're going to see here in the passage is what a spiritual workout looks like. I'm going to tell you what this passage says, I'm going to tell you what it doesn't say, and I'm going to give you several principles that are embedded right in the passage itself that can apply to our spiritual workout. My goal is that you'll be more motivated this next year to engage in more spiritual exercise in your life. I think that's what Paul is telling us to do here. And that's why he uses the word work out in this passage.
Well, let me read the whole passage to you starting at the beginning there. It says – Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Well let's look at that. Go to right at the beginning there you see the word therefore. Now that's going to take us back in the passage. Now if you remember in the passage, back in verses 2, 3, and 4 he was saying don't be selfish, think about other people is more important than yourself, and then he says, have this same mind in you which is in Christ Jesus. That's verse 5. So if you look back in your scriptures to verse 5, that's where the therefore is going. Because after verse 5 it’s illustrating how Christ was sacrificing Himself, He was humble, He was obedient, all these things that exemplify Christ. But the key idea there is have the same mind in you, which is in Christ Jesus, therefore…. So the word therefore is our first word.
I'm going to suggest that the first principle that we want to engage in in our Christian workout is to find a good trainer. Because that's what the passage is saying. Go back and look at Christ. He's the example. He's the motivator. He's the one there. So if you're going to engage in a workout, you need to have a good trainer. A trainer is someone who comes along and helps you do your workout. Of course Jesus would be the greatest trainer that we could have.
I was thinking this week, why would someone want a trainer? Why do people get trainers anyway? So what I did was I went and interviewed Debora Wendte who is a professional trainer. That's her job. She trains people athletically, to deal with muscles and so on. I asked her this question: “Why would someone want to hire a trainer? Why would someone want to get a trainer?” She said there's two reasons. One is, first of all, because the work is uncomfortable that you have to do. It's difficult. And having somebody come alongside you and guide you and hold you accountable helps you to advance so that you can get stronger. That's the first reason. I'm thinking, wow, that's a lot like the Christian life. I mean, there's a lot of work we do in the Christian life that's uncomfortable. As we start working on ourselves and to get spiritually fit, we need a trainer who's going to help us deal with the discomfort that often takes place. The second reason she said is because the trainer comes with expertise to help you in your weakness, because sometimes you don't know which muscles are the weak ones that need to be trained. And so she helps people know this is how you train in this particular area. I would suggest in our Christian lives, we find ourselves perplexed sometimes. We find ourselves in difficult situations. We don't exactly know how to handle the situation and we need a trainer.
In this case, the reference that Paul is making is back there to Jesus Christ being our trainer. Why do we need Jesus Christ to be our trainer? Because we don't know what to do sometimes in our lives. If you're having trouble with anxiety in your life, then you need the spiritual strength to deal with that. So back to the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:25-33 and it talks about dealing with anxiety in your life. So that when the anxiety situations come, you have worked out that in your life. You've done the workout that has to do with anxiety and it continues to work out in your life. If you're having trouble with anger, well, you can also look at the Sermon on the Mount. Of course the antidote for anger is love building up love in your life, and Jesus has a lot to say about that. Jesus’ whole commitment to us is that we can have joy, a joy that's complete. All of that requires that we understand how to do the workout and how to work that out into our lives. So having the spiritual trainer is very important.
In this passage, Paul is directing our attention back to verse 5 where Jesus is the one that we're focused on. He's the one we're thinking about. He's the one that we're concerned about. He is the one who helps us. So that in Hebrews 12, it says, when you run the race, keep your eyes fixed on Jesus. See, He's the trainer.
It's disheartening when we see people today trying to get spiritual training in their lives or trying to fortify their spirit by looking at self-help books or by other people who are alive now or people who are living in the past to find their ideas to help them get strong spiritually. That's sad. Because Jesus is the best trainer. He's the one who made us, He created us, He understands us, He knows us, and He's written the owner's manual to help us know how to move forward. So going to Jesus Christ as the trainer is the key element here. Find a good trainer. Point number one.
Notice it says – My beloved, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. Because he's writing to Christians. He says – as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence. You're obeying not just when I'm looking at you, but when I'm not looking at you. There takes quite a bit of motivation, internal motivation for a person to respond to life's challenges with that internal motivation.
So let's go to that next slide where it says I would suggest this principle number two – if you're going to have a good spiritual workout, check your motivation. Notice it says obey not just when someone's looking at you. If you're doing your spiritual workout so other people can see what you're doing, well that's one thing. But if you're doing your spiritual workout in private because you know it's the right thing to do, that's a whole different thing. It's when we do what we do when no one is watching that really determines our character, it's been said. Or integrity. Integrity is having the internal strength to do what's right even when no one's watching you. It's that integrity that we're looking for. We're building and we're strengthening ourselves because we know that we need this. It's not so that we can impress other people. It's not because we're getting a reward or someone's paying us to do it. We're doing this because there's something going on inside of our hearts. We know we need this and so we're working on it.
I often work with parents and as I do, there are some children who are sneaky or lie or they steal, and parents are trying to help them with this problem. The problem is that the child doesn't have the internal strength to match the challenges that are out there. That's not just when it comes to dishonesty, but some children have anger problems because they don't have the internal strength to match the challenges that are out there. So we engage in a lot of internal exercises with children to help them develop what they need inside to have that internal strength, so that they can be internally motivated to do what's right even when no one's watching.
I think we need to check our motivation here. I think we need to do exactly that. We need to ask ourselves, why am I doing what I do? Why do I come to church? Why do I read my Bible? Why do I join a small group? Why do I serve the Lord and pray and all these things that are part of the spiritual exercise or workout that we do? We do that because we know it's the right thing to do. Not because we're trying to impress someone. We're doing it because it's what we know God wants us to do and we're moving forward with that internal motivation. Not just when people are watching, but we're obeying (notice the word obey there), even when Paul's not around. Even when he can't see what they're doing in their absence. So check the motivation. That's number two.
The third one here is this word work out your salvation, which we already saw in the passage. Now this is the key verb in the whole passage. These are the words that you go away from. Work out your salvation. Katergazomai is the Greek word there. We're going to look at that word in just a moment. But the idea of working out your salvation becomes this activity that we do. I suggest this is where we do the work. It is hard work. It's challenging for us to do that.
Now, there are some who look at this passage, and they say, “Oh, you have to work for your salvation.” Most of the people that you know believe that's how you get to heaven is that you work for your salvation. If you ask someone, “When you die, are you going to go to heaven?” and a person responds to you and says, “Well I'm trying,” then what they're saying is, I'm relying on my work to try to earn my way to heaven. Or maybe you say to someone, “If you died today, would you go to heaven?” and someone says, “Well definitely not, considering all the things I've done.” That person is making the mistake of thinking that their works are the basis upon which God decides how one gets to heaven.
But God has made it very clear that that isn't what this verse means. He says work out your salvation. He doesn’t say work for your salvation. In Ephesians 2 it says that we're saved by grace (that's the grace of God) through faith (that's our trusting in the Lord). And not of ourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one can boast. It's very clear in Ephesians how one gets to be saved in the first place.
This is a passage not talking about how you get saved. If you're listening to this or you're here today and you have never accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior, then you want to do that. You want to trust in God's grace and you want to have faith in Him to become saved. But once you get saved, then you want to pay attention to this verse. Because once you get saved, then you work it out into the various areas of your life. You work it out into your finances, and into your private life, into your thought life, into your emotions. You work it out into your decision making and your relationships with people. You work your salvation into those things. And that is work. It's challenging to get all of that together and try to understand how do I take the salvation that God has given me and work it out into these various areas.
By the way, it's clear that he's not talking about becoming saved because in the passage, notice, he says my beloved. Therefore, my beloved. He's talking to believers. And in Philippians 1:2 he says this book is all written to the saints, people who are already Christians. So he's not telling people how to get saved, as he does in the book of Romans, for example. He's talking here about how a person works out their salvation into every area of their life. And it is work. It's a lot of work to do the workout necessary in order to accomplish that task.
The Greek word katergazomai is a word that means to mine something out. You can imagine the work required to dig something out of a mine in order to have that for yourself.
I was working with a contractor last year. Earlier in the year he was going to do some work for me. He did some of the prep work and drawing up some plans. And then he says, “Oh and by the way, I won't be here for the summer.”
I’m saying, “What do you mean, you won't be here for the summer? That's when contractors work! Where are you going for the summer?”
He says, “I'm going to Alaska because I mine for gold in Alaska.”
I was intrigued. I've heard about that kind of thing, but I never knew anybody who actually did it. So I said to him, “Okay, how do you mine for gold in Alaska? You got to tell me about this. You know, do you have a pickaxe? What do you do?”
He says, “No, it's all done underwater. We can't go there until it thaws. And then we can go with our wetsuits underwater.” He spends hours underwater with this vacuum cleaner thing that he vacuums all the silt or whatever you call that dirt underwater. It comes up, goes, and it's sifted, and then the remainder is put out into the water again.
So my question to him was, “Do you make any money at this? I mean, you’re gone the whole summer. Are you going to make any money?”
He says, “Well, it goes like this. Most days we don't make any money at all. We're just vacuuming and that's what we do. And then every once in a while, we hit a vein. And when we hit this vein of gold, then we make a lot of money.” I'm thinking that is so much like the Christian life, because a lot of times we're going along, doing what we know we need to do. We're memorizing scripture, we're working on our hearts, we're doing what we know is right, and we just don't feel like we're getting anywhere. But every once in a while, we see all the benefit of that. We go, whoa, this is like gold that I'm getting in my life. Because then we say, yes, I really need that. This is just what I needed to face the challenge that we didn't know is coming. But now we face the challenge and we go, whoa, I have the spiritual resources to do that. That's why the workout is so important. We never know what we're going to face. This workout that we do is very important, because it mines out the riches that God wants us to experience in our own lives.
Now some of you young people, you have a mine. Your parents have this kind of spiritual legacy that they're passing on to you. And so you inherit a mine, so to speak. You don't inherit salvation. But if you had a mine and you inherited it, you'd have to receive it number one, but then you'd have to go and dig in it. Someone else isn't going to do that for you spiritually. You have to do it for yourself.
I would really wish that I could pay someone to exercise for me. If I could pay someone to exercise for me, I’d do that. And boy, it would save me a lot of time. Because I don't like exercising. I like the benefits I get from exercising. But I do not like it. If I could pay someone to do it, I would do that. No, I have to do it myself physically and have to do it myself spiritually. Because God wants to do that extra work. We’re mining out the resources, the riches that God wants us to experience in our lives.
Work out your salvation. That's what he's saying. Do the work. It’s not going to be easy. I like the statement that God doesn't always hide his cookies on the bottom shelf. Sometimes we have to reach for them. There's sometimes you have to do a little work in your Christian life in order to experience the great and vast blessings that God has for us.
Well don't miss in the phrase there, work out, it says your own. So my next point there that I wanted to bring out in this passage is that it's personal. Your own salvation. Work out your own salvation because what God is doing in your life may be different than what God is doing in your spouse or your child's life. That's why it's so fun in a family to ask a child, “Hey, what's God teaching you? What are you learning?” Because as they speak, they go, “Oh wow, that's great. That inspires me to work on the things I need to work on in my life.” Each one of us are in our own pilgrimage before the Lord.
I go to the gym and workout. I'll never have the muscles as some of those people that work out there. But if I say, “Oh I'd really like to have those muscles that guy has, I'm therefore going to lift those weights that he's lifting.” Yeah, that'd last for about five minutes on the on the floor, and about ten minutes under the defibrillator, and about two weeks in hospital. Okay, I have to do my own work. It's the work that God wants to do in my heart is my spiritual exercise. I can't compare myself to someone else. It's about something that God wants to do in my life.
I don't know what God wants to do in your life, but I know that we come here together because we share the same values. And even though God is working in your life different than his life or my life, we come together and we enjoy that together. It's like we can call this the Calvary Chapel gym. Because we're getting exercise spiritually. And we're enjoying that. And we're all applying it in different ways. So when you come here and you share your story, I'm encouraged by what God is doing in your life. And when I share my story, you're encouraged by my story. It's that mutual sharing that we do that makes our personal experience your own salvation. It makes it something that we can pass on and enjoy with other people. But don't lose the fact that God is doing a special work in your heart. That means you don't compare yourself to anybody else. You're not competing with anybody else. You're focusing in on your relationship with the Lord and allowing God to build you up and strengthen you in this particular area.
Well, are you ready for the next few verses here? The next verses say – with fear and trembling. You go, “What in the world do those words mean?” I would suggest that what Paul is saying is here, take it seriously. Take it seriously. This is really important. With fear and trembling.
I know that some of you have had cancer. And when you do have cancer, it changes you. You live life differently. You don't live the same way. You change the way you eat, you change the activities that you are engaged in sometimes. You just handle life differently because this is serious. You recognize the seriousness of cancer and you say, “I don't want to do that again.” And so you make certain choices about your life to not to have to go through all of that work. The chemotherapy, the surgery, or whatever had to be done. I don't want to do that again, you say, and so I'm taking life seriously. It does something to you. You start thinking about life. It's not so casual anymore. Now I'm being very careful about what I do.
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.
You see, it's not just about us doing what we want to do to be spiritually healthy. But it's a recognition that God has worked in us. When we realize God has worked in us, then we can work it out into our lives. That's what the passage is about. It's not working for your salvation. It's recognizing that God has already done a work in you. And our job is then to take that work and move it out into the rest of our lives, into every area of our lives. So God is at work in us.
The word work there used later in the same verse, is the word energeo. In Greek, it's where we get our word ‘energy’ from. That's why I was thinking take your power supplements here. In other words, just take your energy pill or whatever you're going to do. It's going to help you do the work. You're working hard, but you're relying on something outside of yourself in order to do that. It's the energy that God provides that allows you to be able to accelerate your spiritual growth is the point that he's making here.
Occasionally I find myself landing in an airport and having to run from one terminal to another terminal to catch a plane. I hate running through airports to get from one terminal to the other terminal, but I also hate missing my plane. So I do it. I run to get from one terminal to the other terminal. As I'm running through the airport, when I get to that moving walkway, I'm really grateful. I don't stop and sit there on the moving walkway, I keep running. And now I'm going really fast while I'm going through the airport because I've got this moving walkway. That's the picture I have in my mind when I think about what God wants to do in my life. That He's doing the work, He's doing the energy. I'm doing everything I can, but I'm also relying on the power of God to accelerate my development in my Christian life. I think that's what God wants us to do. He wants us to move forward in a powerful way.
Another picture I saw was that it's like running sprint-like in your Christian life, but breathing through your nose. As if you're relying on the power of God, but you're moving as fast as you can. There's this idea of doing the workout under God's direction, His energy that empowers us, that gives us great peace. It gives us the ability to not feel like we're just being so busy all the time. It is this recognition that it's God's grace that allows us to do what we're doing so I don't have to have that pressure on me. I got to do this, I got to do this. I want to feel the obligation to work out, but I don't have to be so concerned about the results. It's God who's doing this work in me that's so powerful.
And lastly it says – both to will and to work for his good pleasure. The goal here is the pleasure of God. That's what I'm doing. I'm working hard. And as we're doing our spiritual workout, we're doing it for the pleasure of God. The idea here is that when we work for the pleasure of God, there's a spiritual vitality that we enjoy in our lives. Vitality is that ability to enjoy life, instead of being overwhelmed with stress in our lives. Vitality is the ability to have the peace that we need, even in the midst of the struggle of chaos of life. This is a beautiful idea to understand that God wants us to have vitality in our lives. And it comes through our working out things. It just doesn't pop into our lives. Sometimes we have to work a little bit harder. We have to do the extra work of digging into a particular area of our hearts in order to experience the vitality God wants us to enjoy.
So let me read the whole passage again and see if all of this makes sense and you can take away from it what God is saying to you. It says – Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Six ideas that I put down there for in this passage that I think we take away. The key to spiritual vitality from Philippians 2:12-13 are these. One, find a good trainer. Of course Jesus Christ Himself. Number two, check your motivation. So you're not doing it just to please others when they're watching you, but you're doing it internally because you know it’s the right thing to do. Number three, do the work. It's going to be hard work. You just need to realize that. That's what it means to exercise spiritually. Fourthly, make it personal. Don't compare or compete with anybody else. God is doing the work in you. It's your salvation that He's working on. Number five, take it seriously with fear and trembling. And lastly, take your power supplements or rely on the energy that God provides in order to move you forward in your life. I'm eager to see what God's going to do in your life and my life this year. I'm grateful to be part of the fitness club here with you folks because I get to see what you're doing and I get to hear about God's grace in your life and what God's doing. Let's continue on. See what God can do in our lives this year. Amen.
