Your Work, His Power - Sermon On Philippians 2:12-13 Series

Or maybe you’re trying the whole “Let go and let God, stop trying and let God do it” approach, but – that mountain is still towering over you. You need the other part of that principle. Yes, it’s God’s power, but it’s YOUR work. Get off the lawn chair.

But what if you understand both sides, and you’re trying to do it right? You are trying to draw near to God. You are trying to learn what the Bible says about how to tap in to God’s power. You are trying to walk by the Spirit. But you keep getting discouraged. It just seems too hard. Then what do you do?

I wanted to spend one more week on this passage, because I think there are some things here that can really help with that. Whenever I preach a passage of Scripture that has a lot of imperatives, a lot of commands, heavy on duty – inevitably I’ll get pushback from people. And when I ask, “Are you saying the commands aren’t there in the passage?” they say, “No, I can see that they are there. But it just feels like too much.” Why do people have that kind of response? Is it just laziness? I don’t think so. In most cases, I don’t think that’s the issue. In my experience, the biggest reason why people resist what the Bible says about our responsibility to labor and strive and work is guilt feelings. Christians are people who long to feel loved by God. We long to be accepted by him, and for him to be pleased with us. And when we read about God requiring high standards of effort, and we see all our failures, we conclude, “God must be mostly unhappy with me.

“How could God have anything other than anger towards me given how often I fall short of the standard?”

And they can’t stand the thought that God is always upset with them, so the only way they can get around that is by imagining that God’s grace means a lowering of the standard.

How should we think about God’s attitude towards us in the face of our failures? God wants us to abstain from sin. And what do we do? We commit sins every day. He wants us to obey him, and we disobey him every day. He wants us to walk in wisdom, and we do foolish things. He wants us to persevere and we give up, he wants us to be selfless and we are selfish, he wants us to be thankful and we complain, he wants us to be diligent and we are lazy - so much failure. So where does that leave us in our relationship with him? What is God’s attitude towards us? Let me show you four observations about that from verses 12-13. First, let’s think for a minute about the implications of verse 13.

1) God is On Your Side

2)

13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good pleasure.

The biggest mountain you will ever have to move is your will. What do you do when you don’t want to read your Bible? Or you don’t want to pray, or go to church, or obey something God has commanded? You can try to force yourself to do it, but how do you change your desires? How do you go from being unwilling to willing? That’s a huge mountain. Try to chip away at that with your little shovel and you’ll get absolutely nowhere.