Joy in spite of our image or achievements

So tonight we're going to study chapter 3 of the book of Philippians in our Bible study, which is finding joy. And joy is really a precious gift from the Lord. It is a precious gift that he gives us because joy is one of his remedies for the hollowness and for the disconnectedness that might otherwise overshadow our days. In chapters 1 and 2 of Philippians, we have been finding joy as we have learned to rejoice simply because we belong to God, regardless of the difficult circumstances in our life, regardless of the difficult people and how they treat us in our life. I thought it was interesting, one of my friends from Washington had a Facebook post right after our lesson last week that said, it's not so hard being a servant until someone treats you like one. Isn't that the truth? As soon as someone treats us like we're a servant, all of a sudden it has stripped away some of that impetus of actually being one. So what we're going to do is read verses 1 through 7, then we're going to pray and see where this chapter takes us.

And Lord Jesus, we ask that you would really open our eyes to what you've presented here in the Scripture, what we are to learn, what we are to glean, how we are to be at rest. All the things that you would have us to know, would you just open up our spirits to be taught by you tonight. In Jesus' name we pray. Well, I appreciate the words in verse 1 for two reasons. First of all, it conveniently reminds us to rejoice in the Lord, which is the theme of our entire Bible study. And secondly, when Paul says, to write these same things to you is no trouble, and it provides a safety. I really, really like that. Because as it is right and natural as a group of believers, a church, a Bible study, whatever, for us to continue to go through the Word, go through the Bible over and over again. Because it's safe. There's no other book or writings that we would move on to after we've already done this. And Paul says, it's no trouble for me, which is the heart of a pastor. A pastor should say, hey, this is no trouble, this is what I do. A youth group leader, a Sunday school teacher, a women's ministry teacher, it's no trouble. We keep going through the Word. So I looked through the history for our Bible study. We did Philippians in 2003. We did Philippians again in 2010. And here we are going through this book again in 2017. But we change, we grow, we meet new seasons of life. It is no trouble for us to keep going over some of these same things, and it is safe. It's safe for us to do it. What I'm gonna do is break this chapter into four sections, and I'll tell you what the headings are, but you don't need to frantically take notes because I'll say it again when we get to them. But it's not going to perfectly correspond to your study guide, but by now you know I don't perfectly correspond to the study guide. So these sections are going to be beware of people leading you astray, put no confidence in the flesh, focus your confidence on knowing Jesus, and lastly, a look at our destination. So we'll start with topping number one, which is beware of people leading you astray. The second verse that we read here was a stern warning. Paul said, look out, look out. And we remember that it's been about a decade since he first went to Philippi, and he brought the message of salvation. He told them, hey, you guys, God has a son who was in the flesh who came, and even though he lived a sinless life, he paid the penalty for you, for sinners. And if you believe that and receive that, you can be made whole with God. And some people believed him. And so he stayed, and he taught those people. They were the very early church at Philippi, and he taught them, and he came back through again and he taught them. But now Paul doesn't have his freedom to come and teach them, and so it must be a heartbreak for him to hear that people have come in after him and have been influencing them with concepts that are actually in conflict with the gospel of grace. We've had influencers throughout the ages, but I think social media has turned influencing into an art form. People influence by developing an idea or a concept which becomes an image or a lifestyle, and it's packaged with certain guidelines, and they set out to convince other people that they should conform to this, they should conform to this image. And it's not bad to influence people. We want to be influencers. We want to be influencers for the gospel of Christ, the truth of the scripture. But there are still people today, just like in Philippi, that suggest to us that believing alone isn't quite enough, that there's something more that we need to do to really maybe unlock the spiritual principles in our life, and that maybe we need to conform to their brand or their image. And this appeals to our pride when someone tells us that there's these things that we should do. It appeals to our pride. So that's why this week's lesson is titled, Finding Joy in Spite of Image or Achievements. So let's talk about what was happening in this day. In this day, this letter was written. When this letter was written, these influential voices belonged to certain Jews who followed after the gospel of grace to convince people. It's like, yes, that's fine for you to believe in Jesus, but there's also these elements of the law and Judaism that you need to add into what you're doing. And so it was their brand that they were kind of teaching behind Paul as he left. And so Paul's warning in verse 2, he uses some words to describe these kind of people. Some of them are kind of word plays. He calls them dogs, like the village dogs that would come along sort of nipping at the heels of people as they went, coming along after them. I had a dog like that when I was a little girl on the farm. His name was Blackie or Brownie or something. We weren't very creative with dog names, you can see. But I would ride my bicycle and that dog would just be after me, just nipping at my heels. So I found it greatly annoying, which may be why I never turned into a significant dog person in my life. But Paul calls them evildoers because this additional doing that they required of people was really a great evil to the gospel of grace, and he called them mutilators as a reminder that the circumcision that they were suggesting was a requirement for their salvation on the natural level. Circumcision is just an alteration of the flesh, a mutilation, if you will. And Paul says, we are the real circumcision, the real circumcision is the heart. It is conforming yourself to Christ, it is surrendering. So it's interesting that I found a verse in Galatians, I'll put it on the screen, Galatians 6, 12. It's interesting that Paul wrote to the Galatians first. That book was written first, and he kind of shared with us a little bit of the motivation behind these people. He said, those people want to make a good impression outwardly. They're trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. And that sums up some of these things that get added on to for us. It's a good impression outwardly, it might impress your neighbor, or it might get you off the hook for really lining up with the message of the gospel as you add in some of these other elements. But Paul, we read in verse 3, he said, but we worship by the Spirit of God, glorying in Christ Jesus, and putting no confidence in the flesh. That's our second topic for tonight, putting no confidence in the flesh. Paul himself said he had good reason to put confidence in the flesh, and we read about it. I actually think it's wise that he went through that, because adds quite a bit to his thesis. His thesis is, Jesus is all you need. That was Paul's message. Salvation by Christ is all you need. But it adds quite a bit for him to have told us that he actually fulfilled all of these Jewish sort of achievements. Here's what I mean. If you have somebody in your life that says to you, to lead a healthy lifestyle, all you need is to be active. To lead a healthy lifestyle, you just need to be active. Someone else says, okay, to lead a healthy lifestyle, you have to run two miles a day and lift three times a week. Now, the person who is telling you, you just need to be active. If they run two miles a day and lift three times a week, does that not put a little more weight into when they say, all you have to do is be active. If they didn't run or lift themselves, you may think, well, they're just lazy, or they can't, or whatever. Do you understand what I'm saying? And so by Paul saying here, hey, I have every single reason to be a voice just like those people, because I am Jewish, of the tribe of Benjamin. I was circumcised on the eighth day. I had zeal for the law of Moses and all of that. He did all of that, but he's saying to them, but no, no, no, no, no, you don't need to. So anyway, in our context in life, this is interesting from a historical context, in our context, we have few Judaizers who are coming to our doors telling us these things, right? We do, from time to time, have some Hebrew roots movements who kind of rise up and sort of point Christians toward the Jewish dietary laws and Sabbath keeping and different things like that, and they cause some damage, and they can bring confusion, especially to tender-hearted people. But what we see more in the context of our life is a couple things that I want to talk about here. One is what I just want to call good, old-fashioned Protestant works. In addition to believing in Christ, there are some groups in Christian context in our life that just seem to want to tell us that you still have to achieve certain things, like water baptism or infant baptism with confirmation or church attendance or church membership or tithing or taking communion or first communion or the frequency of your communion, things like this. This is in our context. This is things that are things that we run into. You know, I grew up in the Midwest where some of these things were just very deep-seated in terms of what it meant, your assurance of if you were really a Christian. I can remember a young man being killed in a car accident. It was very sad. He was a teenager, and he was killed in a car accident, and there was a few older women that one of the older women was saying, well, but his parents had him baptized when he was a baby. You know, not everybody gets their babies baptized anymore, but they did. They had him baptized as a baby, and I was at his confirmation. And the message in that conversation was, so there you go. He's with the Lord because of what his parents had done, right? Now, maybe that's something familiar from, you know, what you have experienced. We also, I think, really get twisted, and we can get slipped into American works. And what I mean by that is that there's this voice in us that says, if you really belong to God, if you're really in good standing with God, then you should be able to keep up the pace in your life. You should be an organized mom. You should be able to bake fresh bread. You should be able to fix your marriage. You should be able to, you know, on and on and on. This little voice says, these things should follow a Christian. And if they're not there, it strips us of our joy. If we can't achieve some of those things, who knows where those voices come from? But if we can't achieve some of those things, then it steals our joy because we never know if we've done it well enough, if we've done it right, and all that sort of thing. So Paul is saying, put no confidence in the flesh. Put no confidence in what you achieve. And that, now we're going to move on to the positive expression of that in our third point, which is focus your confidence truly on just knowing Jesus. Verse 8, Paul says, indeed, I count everything as loss, all the things that he did to be pleasing to the Lord, because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I've suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. And I want to stop on that phrase for just a minute, because it came to my mind, this phrase, be found in him. We've talked before about how we relate to Jesus. Are we in him, or is he in us? And that's a good question. Right here, Paul says, to be found in him. So the right answer to that question is that we are in Christ. All of us who have asked for our sins to be forgiven, we're all in Christ. Collectively, we make up his body, and he is the head. But he is also in us, because we know from scripture that when we become born again, the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, comes in us to mark us, to seal us as belonging to him. And so both of them are true. We are in him, he is in us. But the important thing is how we get there, and that's what Paul talks about in verse 9. He says, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. That's really clear. It hardly needs any explanation, but what I'm going to do in a minute is I'm going to read that again as we go on, and I want you to think about your own personal context, your own personal history, those voices that got into your head at some point, maybe from a, you know, from wherever they came from, that may have led you to believe that there's something more, something that you had to do. Now let's read this again. Paul says, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. He says that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I've already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. I really love that Paul put that in verse 4, or I'm sorry, verse 12, when he explains that he hasn't arrived. He himself hadn't arrived at some level of perfection as it related to his relationship with the Lord. He was still on the track, if you will. He was still pressing forward. And you know, all of us are in that same place. I love the progressive phases that he used. Paul used these phrases, be found in him, know him, and becoming like him. That right there talks about spiritual growth. First, just getting saved, be found in him. Know him talks about the intimacy of beginning to actually know about your Savior, and then becoming like him, talks about spiritual growth. And that's what we've talked about in this Bible study. We want to rejoice because we belong to God, and we want to grow like we belong to God. In the words that he said here, we want to press on like we belong to God. And Paul says in 13, brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus. How often we need to adopt the simplicity of those two things, forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies ahead. And obviously this, the actual word here is straining forward, which makes us think the illusion here is athletics, and it makes us think of a runner who strains forward to cross that tape. It is intentional and a leaning forward. So I want to talk about these two elements because they're so applicable to our lives. Each one of us is actually on the racetrack now. Some part of our life is behind us, some part of our life is ahead, and none of us know precisely where we're at. So by faith, we're continuing. doing on in this. But when Paul says forgetting, you know that we don't truly forget in terms of I can't remember my past. That's not what the word means here. The word forgetting means more like not allowing what actually has happened in the past to have influence over my life in the future. We might say phrases like letting go of baggage. We might borrow from Hebrews chapter 12, laying aside every weight, those weights that hinder us, that slow us down. We all have a past, every one of us in this room. If you did your study guide, we got to Isaiah chapter 43, and the message was do not dwell on the past. And that's the important part. That is the key right there. Do not dwell on the past. When we dwell on the past, we feed it. We give it power. You can think of the past as like a shadow, and if you fuel it and give it power, it grows larger and larger until it casts a shadow over tomorrow. But if you give it no fuel by not dwelling on it, it must contain itself and stay where it is. So the important thing, I think, to remember about the past is do not dwell on the past because few of us can literally forget it. But with the help of the mind of Christ, we can strip it of its power to affect us, right? And then Paul said this other one, straining forward, straining forward. It might sound exhausting to you tonight to think about straining forward, but it's good for us to contemplate it because you know what? Merely taking a step into tomorrow isn't going to yield the kind of spiritual growth and knowing the Lord that we want in our lives. There needs to be a purposeful focus on what's in front of us and a direction there, a desire like we're straining. Each new day requires the strength from the Lord, not the fuel from the past, but the strength from the Lord. In our house, we were talking about the U.S. Open this week, and 23-year-old Jordan Spieth won the U.S. Open. And I was just thinking about what a cool game golf is because you can play it at 20, you can play it at 80 if your back holds up. It's just one of those cool games. And so you have this young man like Jordan Spieth who won the U.S. Open. You have older golfers still playing like Jack Nicklaus at 77. And I was thinking about where they were on their tracks and of course the athletic business that goes along with this, the analogy and all that. And I thought to myself, you know what, both of those men at their seasons of life need to approach a golf tournament in the same way. They have to forget the last ones that they won, and they have to forget the ones that they lost. They have to forget their failures, they have to forget their successes, and they have to focus like a laser on the game that they're playing at the moment. And that's a good analogy for our life as well. We purposefully have to forget all the success that we've had and forget the failures that we've had and focus our energy on straining forward to what lies ahead. And Paul goes on to say, let those of us who are mature think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Love that. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. So that's the little piece of the past that we want to hold to. Hold true to what we have attained. Hold tightly to what God's already taught us. Brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example that you have in us. We have a lot of scriptures that exhort us that way, and we put them in your study guide. There's 1 Corinthians 11, says be imitators of me as I imitate Christ. There's Hebrews 13, remember your leaders, consider their way of life and imitate their faith. And then there's this passage that says, walk according to the example that you have in us. So I thought what I'd do is list five points from our study, from Philippians chapter 3, that help us know what is the example that we've learned. Who should we be looking at? What should their lives look like? And so these are phrases from, that you studied this week in this chapter. From verse 3, and I'm going to put them on the screen here. From verse 3, first of all, those who worship by the Spirit of God. That's what Paul said. Their daily lives are submitted to and directed by the Spirit, allowing the mind of Christ to take center stage, telling their natural mind to go backstage. That's what we talked about in chapter 2. Pushing the mind of Christ forward and telling what comes naturally to you to go backstage. Also from verse 3, put no confidence in the flesh. Always tightening their grip on grace, never resting on accomplishments or achievements that they've done, but only resting on what Jesus has done. From verse 10, know him, become like him. People who are growing spiritually. That they're being made into the image of Christ. From verse 13, people who forget the past. They break the power that the past has over their lives by not dwelling on it. And then lastly, also from verse 13, they strain ahead. They actively pursue knowing Christ better. They actively pursue spiritual growth, pressing on to the finish line. These are the people that are examples for us. And it's something for us to think about in terms of like, who inspires you? What Christians inspire you in our life? From this chapter, these are some elements, some characteristics that people should have as we make them examples for us. Well, our very last section is going to be called a look at our destination, but it also shows us bad examples. Paul tells us who not to look to. In verse 18, he says for many, and these are the bad examples, many of whom I've told you and now I tell you even with tears, they walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. We'll finish the next verse in just a minute, but this business of enemies of the cross I think is really compelling and I really had to think about it for a while. So the cross of Christ was a defining moment where Jesus, without sin, accomplished our salvation. He was the one that accomplished something, okay, at the cross. He also fulfilled at that time the law of Moses. He fulfilled everything in the Old Testament, the sacrificial system and the law of Moses. He said that on the Sermon Mount. I have come to fulfill the law because everything in the law was pointing our direction toward the cross. Now think about this for a minute. If we've got people now under a new covenant and the Judaizers are coming and saying to them, you need to look back, just look past that cross, just pretend like it's not there and look back to the dietary laws, look back to the Sabbath keeping, look back to those things, they become enemies of the cross. Because the cross is a dividing line. The cross separates the old covenant from the new covenant. And so in the context of this letter, these people were enemies of the cross. I never want to be found to be an enemy of the cross. It was something definitive that God did. So I just worked that through my mind and I wanted to share that with you. In verse 19 he says, their end is destruction, their God is their belly and their glory is their shame with minds set on earthly things. And that right there, minds set on earthly things, describes the kind of people that should not be examples for us in our spiritual life. People with minds set on earthly things. I love that little phrase though how Paul says their God is their belly. Have any of you ever been on a diet in this room? When you restrict the intake of food for whatever reason, your God becomes your belly. I mean it is the one that says pass fail, right? And diets can be good, diets can be needful, diets can be necessary and every one of us has been on a diet for one reason or another. Medical reasons, figure reasons, allergy reasons, what have you. But the thing of it is, is that it's a temporary thing. It's something we live with just on this earth for this body and the belly becomes the God. He becomes the master. If you are lactose intolerant and you choose to make a nice grilled cheese sandwich and wash it down with a cup of milk, your God will tell you you've failed, right? I suppose Paul used that phrase to reveal that the Judaizers who undoubtedly wanted to add Jewish dietary laws to these Christians' lives that they were effectively exalting the natural body. By doing that, their minds were set on earthly things. But the summary is that there's always going to be people that want to focus our attention on what we do, on what we don't do. What we eat, what we don't eat. What day we rest, what days we don't rest. When and where and whose name we were baptized, how old we are, all those kinds of things. That's mindset on earthly things. But we finish off here by Paul describing the opposite, which is our citizenship is in heaven. And from it, we await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that we had to die for to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. So our minds are set on things that are above. Our minds, we are citizens of heaven living on this earth. But while we are in this place, we're waiting, aren't we? Our minds are set on things above, but we are waiting. We're waiting for Christ to come. We are waiting for Christ to come and transform these lowly bodies. We are waiting for Christ to rule and reign and for us to rule and reign with him. That's part of what it means to have our minds set on things above. So I'm going to give you some time for our discussion now, Lord. Thank you that you make clear to us that we can completely rest in you. You've given us what we need to have full assurance that we belong to you regardless of the things that we have achieved, regardless of what our image is. Lord, we don't have to keep worrying about what someone else might think of us if we haven't done enough or if we need to do more or whatever. Lord, we just want to rejoice in that and know that we are fully content, fully just brought into your kingdom, Lord God, merely because we've believed the message of salvation, we've asked you to forgive our sins, and now we belong to you. So Lord, I pray that you would help us as we have some time for discussion. Lord, help us to just keep bringing maybe more layers of clarity to this. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.