Philippians 4:8-9 | The Path to God's Presence

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Please take your Bible with me to the book of Philippians.

Last week we were in the Psalms for Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday.

Before that, we were in Philippians chapter four, working through the beginning part of that chapter.

It starts with the correction of a couple of women in chapter four that were not agreeing, not thinking the same way in the Lord.

And then it went to rejoicing and being reasonable or gentle because the Lord is at hand.

And then we found last time in verses six and seven that our approach to anxiety and worry needs to be grounded also in the presence of the Lord.

This morning I want to pick up where we left off in verse eight.

We'll look at verses eight and nine this morning.

And in a little bit we will participate together in the Lord's table as well.

So if you have your Bible, I'd like to read verse 8 of Philippians chapter 4 and verse 9 if you'd like to follow along.

Philippians 4 · chapter mention

Maybe you have these memorized.

It says, Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Amen.

We're gonna stop there for it this morning.

You know, people expend a tremendous amount of energy to feel God's presence.

They want to feel that the God of peace will be with them or is with them.

Walk into any Christian bookstore, if you can still find one, and you'll see shelves lined with books and devotionals and journals promising you the opportunity to experience intimacy with God.

Spend any time browsing social media, and you'll come across stunning photos, landscapes, places in the world with Bible verses printed on them that promise you that God will be found beside the still waters or the gorgeous mountain peaks or the tree-lined hills.

Maybe you've attended a conference or a worship night with a band and fancy lighting, and you'll hear the same promise.

You will feel his presence there.

I know we've got we've got stumbling saints coming next week, and I may have just undermined all of that.

But the point is that we often look for experiences to experience God.

And then Monday comes, laundry piles up.

Maybe your commute feels even longer.

That strained relationship is still present.

The anxiety that you had coming into the weekend is still there and is still weighing you down.

And the feelings that you had in a worship experience or that you hoped to have felt are now disappearing rapidly.

Some churches even build their worship services around the experience.

Some even call it the experience.

However, it's contrary to Scripture to base our understanding of God's presence primarily on our feelings and our experience.

Feelings are unreliable guides, right?

Emotions are heavily influenced by what we eat, how well we sleep, what our physical health is like, on the morning's traffic, on if we're running late, or if somebody said something that just washes all over you.

Emotions and feelings do not accurately reflect God's presence.

That's why what Paul writes in Philippians 4, verses 8 and 9 is so important to hear.

Philippians 4:8

He tells us something that our feelings first culture doesn't really want to hear.

And it's this: the path to experiencing God's presence runs through the discipline of the mind.

We say that again.

There is a path to experiencing God's presence.

And that path is by developing and disciplining the mind.

Now, before we go further, we need to remember where we are in this letter.

The apostle Paul, as we found before, is writing from prison.

He's facing trial before Caesar for his faith.

And yet he instructs the church in Philippi to rejoice and to rejoice always.

We noted in verse 5 of chapter 4 that the command to rejoice is based on the closeness or the nearness of the Lord.

And that gentleness and reasonableness flow also from his presence.

We found that anxiety gives way to prayer because Christ is near.

And the result of that is God's unexplainable peace that guards our hearts and minds.

And now we arrive at verses 8 and 9.

The peace of God now is guarding our hearts and our minds.

That's good.

That's good.

But now there's a new concern.

What do you put into your mind?

Your heart and your mind are being guarded, so what do you put into them?

There's also another notable aspect to observe in these two verses.

Look at the bookends.

First, in verse seven.

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

The peace of God.

The other bookend is at the end of verse 9, and the God of peace will be with you.

It's flipped.

Do you see that reversal?

In verse 7, the peace that belongs to God is a gracious gift to us.

Now it's the opposite.

The God who is peace will be near.

First, the gift is given.

The second part is the giver is there.

Between them, verses eight and nine tell us how to move from the gift to the giver.

How to first experience the gift of peace.

And now, how do we experience the giver of peace?

The path from the peace of God to the presence of God of peace runs directly through a disciplined, Christ-shaped mind and onto a life that lives out what the mind has been set on.

Let's look a little bit closer at that through Paul's three steps to the presence of God.

Fill, follow, and receive.

That's it.

That's simple.

But it's more complex than that.

Verse 8 we need to fill our mind with what is genuinely excellent.

There we go.

We need to fill our minds with what is genuinely excellent.

Let's start with something small but significant.

That word translated as verse in verse 8 as think, think about these things at the end of the verse.

That refers to an ongoing, repetitive pattern of life.

The Apostle Paul is urging a persistent, active mental practice.

It's actively directing and focusing and maintaining that focus on specific things.

And this is the culmination of an entire book about thinking.

All throughout the book of Philippians, we've seen elements of set your mind on this, be of the same mind, have the same thinking.

In fact, it appears about 10 times in these four chapters.

In chapter 2, verse 5, the Apostle Paul encourages believers to adopt the mindset of Christ.

In chapter 3, verse 19, he describes the enemies of the cross who think about earthly things, not Christ-like things.

Chapter 4, verse 2, he urges Yodia and Syntiki to think together in the Lord.

So following discussions on rejoicing and gentleness and anxiety and prayer in verse 8, he now emphasizes the core issue.

What do you constantly think about?

What is continually in your mind?

Because that influences everything.

Now he highlights eight qualities that he wants us to put in our minds.

They're not merely good qualities for Christians to consider.

They're not simply moral virtues to have as patterns of life.

But at their core, these eight qualities reflect the character of God Himself.

This is the outworking of chapter two, verse five.

Let's think about them briefly.

First one, whatever is true.

Whatever is true.

Pilate famously asked, What is truth?

Right?

Well, scripture tells us God is truth.

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

The Psalms echo the refrain that God's word is truth.

Filling your mind with what is true means filling it with what aligns with who God is.

Mainly that He is trustworthy, He is honest, He is real.

God is the true truth, if you will, in the universe.

He is the most true thing.

So it elevates our thinking about truth to compare it to who God is.

Think about those kinds of things.

That contrasts with the fantasies, the distortions, the half-truths, and the outright lies that flood our world, that are on our screens on a daily basis, that are in our conversations every day.

Much of what both traditional and social media put out there is meant to provoke, not to inform.

It's meant to stir you up, not to guide you into all truth.

Much of what we hear about ourselves, much of what we say to ourselves, comes from voices of inadequacy or shame in our inner being, or voices from pride and self-sufficiency.

Those things are simply not true.

The path to God's presence begins here.

Think about what is actually true.

To do that, you need to start with the author of truth.

Think about what is true.

Whatever is true.

Then he says, whatever is honorable.

This word comes from a term meaning to worship or to revere something.

It describes the kind of dignity that rests in something worthy of reverence or someone worthy of reverence.

It describes people sometimes.

It appears in 1 Timothy and Titus to describe the character of deacons, to describe the character of older men and older women who are called to be an example for younger generations.

We're called to focus on what is genuinely dignified and weighty and worth considering.

That means not filling our minds with what is trivial or salacious or shallow, the things of this world.

In a culture that celebrates the frivolous and gives continuous platform to the scandalous, Paul urges us to fill our minds with what is truly worthy of thinking about.

And that means things of reverence, of weight, of substance.

And of course, God Himself is worthy of the ultimate reverence, isn't he?

He is the ultimate in honorability.

He is the defining element of what is honorable.

Then we go to what is just.

That word belongs to the same family of words that give us right and righteous and righteousness throughout the New Testament.

God is just.

And therefore, because he's right, he will do what is right.

His character, then, is the standard for what is right.

To think about what is just is to consider what conforms to the character, the righteous character of God.

Fill your minds with that.

That means you're going to be thinking about whatever is pure.

That same term is used for God's holiness and purity throughout the Old Testament.

It gives us images of moral cleanliness.

That is, we have purity in thought, purity in motive, purity in our actions.

It extends to all aspects of who we are.

It's a purity of thought and heart and mind when no one is watching, and our motives when no one cares.

But our culture has become so saturated with content that promotes the crude, the violent, and the generally impure that we can become so numb to what we're taking in.

We don't realize the mental pollution it causes.

God wants us to fill our minds with pure things.

And if pure is a synonym for holy, who is the holiest being?

Isaiah tells us, right?

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.

We are to think about holiness and pure things that reflect who God is.

Whatever is lovely.

This word appears only here in the New Testament.

It means something attractive or pleasing, not in a shallow kind of sense, but in the sense of what draws us toward the pure, right, and beautiful as God sees it.

Think about the Garden of Eden.

It was beautiful, it was perfect.

It's lovely because God made it to reflect him.

So focusing and thinking on what is lovely means to consider what reflects the loveliness of God.

Whatever is commendable, literally, whatever's well spoken of, means to have a good reputation.

It's conduct and content that others speak well of.

And the further that we get from God's perfections, the more we get to thinking like the world.

Then he says, if there's anything praiseworthy or worthy of praise, that ultimately points to divine commendation.

If there's anything that God would give a hearty approval to, think about those things.

The Apostle Paul uses this word in Romans chapter 2, verse 29, to describe praise that comes from God.

Romans 2:29

If God would say that is worthy of praise, think about that.

Fill your mind with that.

So do you see now what the Apostle Paul is doing?

He's not giving the Philippians a checklist for self-improvement.

He's not giving them a more morality checklist to say, hey, if you do this one and this one and this one, you're all good.

No, he's describing God's moral being and telling them to focus on the things that reflect God.

He's urging them to adopt the mind of Christ when he walked this earth.

Why would he do that?

It's very simple, I think.

He guides us to think about these things because you become what you behold.

You become what you behold.

This is a biblical truth.

2 Corinthians chapter 3.

2 Corinthians 3 · chapter mention

We behold the glory of the Lord, and by doing so, we are being transformed into that same image.

So as we think about the qualities of God and how we see those qualities demonstrated or at work in our world, and we fill our minds with those things, those qualities of God begin to transform who we are because we are beholding the right things.

We are shaped by what we put into our minds.

And who you are becoming either draws you closer to the God of peace or shuts you off from the God of peace.

Now in practice, this means taking seriously the question of how we feed our minds.

What are you taking in?

What are you looking at?

What are you watching?

What are you reading?

What conversations are you listening to?

What thoughts are you allowing to linger in your mind and to take root?

Because, friends, the mind does not stay neutral.

It is always being shaped by something.

And Paul's command here is to be intentional.

Fill your mind with what reflects the glory of Christ.

Be purposeful about that.

But he doesn't just stay there.

Because if we fill our minds with what reflects Christ, that means it's going to change who we are.

And we ought to be people that others can follow.

That's our second element here.

He says to follow the pattern of those who live what they teach or who live what they think.

As long as their thinking is right.

Here's a second step toward God's presence.

The first step is to fill your mind.

The second step is to follow those who are thinking right.

What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me.

Practice, do these kinds of things.

These four verbs, learned, received, heard, seen, represent what is taught in speech and what is taught in action.

And the Philippian Christians had received both from Paul.

He had taught them verbally, and they had watched him live his life.

And for the Apostle Paul, that wasn't any different.

What he said was what he taught, and what he taught was what he lived.

It was consistent.

He didn't separate the life of the mind and the life of his teaching from how he lived his life, and neither should any of us.

The Christian life is meant to be lived out.

The apostles, all of them, understood that Christians need both doctrine, they need truth, and they need models to imitate.

That's why he said back in chapter 3, verse 17, I believe it is.

Yes, join in imitating me.

Keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example that you have in us.

Do these things.

Look for people who are thinking the right way, and so they're living the right way, and watch them and follow them and do what they do.

Again, the word practice here is a pattern of behavior.

It emphasizes a consistent way of life.

So he's not urging the Philippians to make a one-time decision.

He's urging them to adopt a continuous way of life that is the outflow of right thinking because the Lord is near.

And if we're willing to admit it, I think we should say that Western Christianity struggles here.

We have a strong desire, a righteous desire, I think, to learn.

We take in sermons, podcasts, we read books.

But sometimes we do that to the neglect of becoming like Christ in character and action.

We can mistake accumulating biblical information, biblical knowledge, for true discipleship and transformation.

So you can memorize the eight qualities in verse eight and define each Greek word and still have a mind and life that are shaped more like the world than like Christ.

That's why James, the brother of the Lord Jesus, said, be doers of the word and not hearers only.

So be hearers.

Take it all in.

But make sure that that then works its way out, because otherwise James says you end up deceiving yourself.

And so we have the emphasis here in verse 9 again on the importance of models.

Disciples are shaped as much by watching as by listening.

This is a key reason why fellowship and participation consistently in a local church is essential for a follower of Christ.

You need to see faith lived out in others, not just hear about it in words on a Sunday morning.

You need pause in your life.

You need people in your life of whom you can say, I've seen this in them.

But that can also be flipped.

Are you living out what you think so that you could invite someone to watch and imitate you?

That's the natural outflow of this passage.

Is that as we come to know that the Lord is near and we are rejoicing always, and we are full of gentleness and reasonableness, and we we trust God, we entrust all of our anxieties to Christ because He cares for us and we live that out, understanding that Christ is near and our citizenship is in heaven, and we fill our minds with everything that is true and honorable and just and pure and noble and lovely and commendable and all that is excellent.

We begin to live that out so that others look at us and say, I've seen that in you.

Paul's confidence in saying, What you've seen in me, practice these things, it's not arrogance, it's integrity.

Paul says, I am laboring to live out what I'm preaching.

Follow that.

What you've heard and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Here's our third step to the presence of God.

Receive the promise.

Receive the promise.

Filling your mind and following others' lead and living it out leads us to God's promise.

And the God of peace will be with us.

So I noted earlier the reversal between verse 7 and verse 9.

Verse 7 is the peace of God.

Verse 9 is the God of peace.

And so the movement is from the gift to the giver, right?

It's one thing to receive the peace that God provides.

That's an unexplainable gift.

It's beyond human words to experience the insurpassable peace of God.

But it's something entirely different to have the God of peace himself draw near to us in his presence.

So he's not, we need to make sure we understand here.

Paul is not referring to some sort of vague spiritual feeling.

He's speaking of the covenant promise that the God who is near will be with his people as they live out the mind and life of Christ.

This isn't a reward for moral performance.

It's not a reward for fulfilling your checklist.

He's not describing a merit system where you get to earn closeness with Christ through acts of kindness.

If anybody, the Apostle Paul understood better than anyone else that we are brought near to God by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

But once that relationship with Christ is established, there are ways to experience the closeness to God, to the God who is already near.

Did you catch that we really need to connect three parts and not just two?

We don't need to just connect the peace of God with the God of peace.

We need to take it all the way back to the end of verse 5 with the Lord is near.

As we live life under the scope, under the perspective of Christ is near, we then begin to understand his peace and to sense that peace as we entrust our lives because he's there, he's present with us.

And at the end of verse 9, then we get to this point where that God Himself is near.

Paul describes, for lack of a better way of saying it, a pathway to experience the closeness of the God who is already near.

He's near.

But if he's near, you may not experience his closeness.

You get that?

God is near.

So you may not know it.

But there is a path to experience his nearness.

Now you don't you don't create his presence.

He's already there.

You don't manufacture an atmosphere to invite him to be near.

You don't foster the right conditions that help you recognize his presence.

Think of it this way.

We all love the sun in North Dakota because it doesn't show up very often.

Right?

On a bright sunshiny day, the sun keeps shining even if you close the blinds in your windows.

The light is still there, you've just shut it out.

So you're not pushing God away when you fill your mind with what is false, dishonorable, unjust, impure, unholy thoughts, or when your thought life becomes a rehearsal of grievances, anxieties, and lusts and bitterness.

Instead, you're shutting the blinds.

God's still there.

But the things that you're filling your life with cause you to not be able to experience his nearness.

And so as you shut the blinds to who God is and what he is, by filling your life and your mind with the things of the world, you cease to experience his grace, his mercy, his peace, and his nearness.

Scripture tells us that the God of peace draws near to us in experiential ways when we set our minds on what is true, noble, just, pure, and when we deliberately turn our thinking to the excellencies of God.

We experience his very near presence when we not only know these things, but we practice them in ways that others can see and that we mutually follow.

This is why, this is why some of the wisest Christians throughout history have always focused on the renewal of the mind as the cornerstone of spiritual formation.

Paul himself said it, he was the first one to say it, I think, in Romans chapter 12.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

Don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed.

How?

By the renewal of your mind, so that by testing and discernment, you can know what God is like, who God is, how He wants you to work and live in this world so that you will know what is good and acceptable and perfect.

But remember, the renewed mind isn't an end in itself.

We don't fill our minds with truth merely to accumulate that knowledge.

Instead, we renew our minds to know God's will and to walk in it.

When we walk in it, when we've renewed our minds and we're walking in it, it leads to experiencing the presence of the God who is already near.

So there is a path to God's presence.

It doesn't primarily go through podcasts and news channels or playlists or emotional atmospheres.

It's not the feeling of worship.

It's found in the ordinary, intentional shaping of the mind toward what is truly excellent.

What God considers true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, virtuous, and worthy of praise.

Because that reflects your God.

They're the qualities of the mind of Christ.

They are what the Spirit produces in those who are being conformed, molded to the image of Jesus.

And when what we're thinking takes root in us, it begins to shape a life that others can observe.

You're being watched.

And we're either examples of Christ to those around us or we're warnings.

Paul believed that what others saw in him was consistent with what they heard from him.

May that be our reality, our testimony as well.

When the mind reflects God's character and your life embodies what you've learned from those who have gone before you in the faith, the God of peace will be with you.

Say that again, but flip it around.

The God of peace will be with you when your mind reflects God's character and your life embodies what you've learned from those who've gone before you.

Not feeling your way to him, but thinking and living your way toward what he is like.

And when you pursue that path, you will discover that he is already there, ready to be known as the God of peace.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, thank you for this promise.

Thank you that you have promised to be near.

That you are near.

Even when we do not feel your presence, you are near.

Lord, it's probably appropriate for us to confess that too often we fill our minds with what is not holy and excellent.

Forgive us for not reflecting your character in the life of our minds.

Give us a new, fresh desire to know you, to behold your glory, and to think about these things.

So that you by your spirit would take what is true and right and just and holy and lovely and transform us to reflect Christ.

Do this in us, Lord, for your glory.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.