Smart Love - Philippians 1:9-11 Series

Philippians 1:9 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.

The Goal: Readiness for that Day

Imagine yourself getting ready for some really important person to come to your house. They’re coming in the morning, so you make sure to set your alarm because you don’t want them to ring the doorbell and you’re just waking up and you drag out of bed and answer the door in your pajamas. So you make sure you get up, get dressed, brush your hair, and get ready. Or imagine a girl who has a huge crush on a guy who is on his way over to her house to pick her up for a first date. And she is getting herself ready. Or to use a biblical example, imagine a bride getting herself ready for the wedding. That is the analogy that Scripture uses to describe us getting ready for Jesus’ return. We are like a bride getting herself ready, and she wants her dress to be perfect and her hair to be perfect and her makeup to be perfect – everything she could possibly do to make herself as beautiful as possible in the eyes of the groom. The Bible says that is what we are doing right now. If you are working on an anger problem in your life, that’s not just so that you can have a little more peace in your household. Atheists work on their anger for that reason. The reason you are working on your anger problem, or your lust problem, or selfishness problem, or laziness problem, or greed problem, or whatever problems you are working on, is because you are a bride getting herself ready for the bridegroom.

2 Corinthians 11:2 I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him.

Everything we do in the church and in our Christian lives is because we are getting ready for something.

We are studying through the book of Philippians, and we come this morning to Paul’s prayer for the Philippians in 1:9-11. And the crux of that prayer is that last phrase in verse 10. In verse 9 Paul says what he is praying for, and then halfway through verse 10 he gives the reason why he is praying for that. What’s the reason?

Philippians 1:10 …so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ

The NIV says until the day of Christ, ESV says for and I think that’s a little clearer because the point has to do with preparation. The idea is we must become pure and blameless now so that we will be ready when he returns

Paul’s Focus on the Day of Christ

This is already the second time in the book that Paul has mentioned the Day of Christ. Remember in verse 6 he was confident that God would carry on the fruitfulness of the Philippians’ gospel partnership all the way until the day of Christ. And you will see that come up again and again throughout this book just like it does in all of Paul’s writings and the rest of the New Testament. The writers of the New Testament saw everything through the lens of the last Day.

But if that is the dominant focus of the whole New Testament, and we are a people of the Book, why don’t we think about it and talk about it more than we do? We come here on Sunday mornings and talk about spiritual things the whole time we’re here. And yet, how many references do you think there are to the Day of Christ in the several hundred conversations that take place on a given Sunday morning? In the prayer groups we ask, “How can we pray for you?” How often does the prayer request have anything to do with getting ready for the second coming? I can’t speak for all of you, but I’m ashamed to confess that it doesn’t find its way into my conversations or prayer requests very often. And I don’t hear it much from others either. Why is that?

Part of it is just the obvious fact that it’s always going to be hard for us to keep something in focus that is outside of our daily experience. Out of sight, out of mind. But I think there is another reason that has made the problem even worse in our particular culture. In most Bible teaching, the second coming of Christ is seen as the time when everything finally gets better. That’s when your struggle ends. But we have lost sight of the preparation aspect.