Living As People of the Bigger Story | Rusty Fletcher | Philippians 2:12-18

Thank you for joining us for a sermon from Sojourn North.

Thank you so much.

It's good to be with you here today.

I was sitting thinking as I uh pulled my reading glasses out of my shirt.

About 20 years ago, I had LASIK surgery, and it was wonderful.

I went from 2400 in this eye, 2450 in this eye, and I went to 2015 in both eyes, uh, basically within 48 hours.

Now the doctor told me, he said, now Rusty, what's gonna happen?

Over time, as you age, you're still gonna need reading glasses.

He said, or you can come in and get a touch-up.

And I was like, I didn't like the sound of getting a touch-up on my eye.

I said, Well, what is that?

He goes, we'll just do a tap-tap tap on each eye.

And I was like, yeah, I'll just wear my reading glasses.

Um, but it is a pain because I'm doing this all through the sermon.

So you all just bear with me where that is concerned.

It is good to be with you here today.

Um, it's always an honor and a pleasure when I get a chance to speak to the church.

Um, we are going to be in Philippians chapter 2, verses 12 through 18 is our passage for today.

Philippians 2:12–18

And we find ourselves in what I feel like is one of the most practical and also one of the most powerful passages within the book of uh the letter to the Philippians.

Just before this passage, as uh Chad preached last week, we had the Christ hymn.

We saw the the breathtaking portrait that Paul painted about Jesus Christ, about how he came and he didn't uh uh uh look at equality with God and see it as something that he could exploit.

Um he humbled himself to death on a cross.

And so we saw that beautiful picture of who Christ was.

He was the eternal son who humbled himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient to death, and beyond that, obedient to death on a cross, and then he was exalted by the Father.

And we know that our passage this week links directly back to that passage.

It's a comparison and a contrast.

Um you remember those questions in college where it's a compare and contrast, this.

I always hated those.

But this is a comparison, a contrast to what was the Christ hymn.

And we know that it refers back to that because of what our passage starts with today.

I had a pastor growing up, his name was Harold Cathy, and Brother Cathy would always say, if you ever see a passage that begins with the word therefore, you have to look and see what that's there for, right?

So it is looking back to the passage before, and it's bringing practical advice, practical instructions to Christians today based upon that hymn of uh the the Christ hymn, right?

And because what what Paul is saying is because Jesus lived this way, you are to live this way.

Right?

And and Paul is not coming along, and he's not giving some legalistic checklist, he's not saying, hey, here's the boxes, and you make sure you check all the boxes off.

He's giving a very practical, um, a very uh loving instruction to these people at the church at Philippi.

If I were to go around the room and ask everybody, what is one word that you think of when you think of Paul, I would say the number one word that people would think of was missionary, right?

Everybody thinks of Paul as one of the first missionaries.

One of the words that comes to my mind is he was a mentor.

Paul mentored young Christians.

You have to understand as he went out and as he talked to these churches and as he led them to Christ, he was leading them number one away from pagan worship.

He was leading them into worship of God.

But as he led them in, they were inexperienced in what it meant to worship God.

They were inexperienced in what it meant to have a Christian walk.

And so as he ministered to these Gentile churches, Paul would mentor them and give them practical steps on how to live their life as a Christian.

It's one of these things that we see today, one of those areas of instruction that Paul is giving today.

And he's telling us that this verse is showing us of how the gospel should transform our everyday life.

Right?

Now, I throw in the word should transform.

Some people would tell you, well, now if you're a Christian, the gospel's going to transform your life.

Right?

It's only going to transform your life if you allow it to transform your life.

It's only going to change your walk if you allow it to change your walk.

If you continue to choose to go along the same way, the same path that you've been on, that gospel is not going to change and transform your everyday life.

But following the path, I'm reminded back to Romans 12, verse 1, which is that's our reasonable service.

Romans 12:1

That's what's expected of us because of what Christ has done for us.

And so here's the question that I want you to keep in the forefront of your mind as we go through this passage today.

How do I insert your name here?

How do I live out the salvation that I have received in Christ Jesus when the world around me is so dark?

How do I live out the salvation I have received in Christ Jesus when the world around me is so dark?

I want us to look at three major movements in this text today.

We're going to look at the command and the comfort, working out what God has worked in.

We're going to look at the character and the contrast, how to shine without grumbling.

And then we're going to look at the cost and the joy, rejoicing in the sacrifice.

If you would stand with me for the reading of God's Word.

For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.

Do everything without grumbling and arguing, so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world, by holding firm to the word of life.

Then I can boast in the day of Christ that I didn't run or labor for nothing.

But even if I am poured out as a drink offering on the sacrificial service of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you.

In the same way you should also be glad and rejoice with me.

This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated.

So Paul begins here with showing his affection for the church at Philippi.

He calls them dear friends or his beloved.

These are people that meant something to him.

You have to understand Paul's model of ministry.

Paul would go into one of these cities.

He would have been what we would call today a bivocational minister.

So he would have a job, temp maker.

He would have a job that he would work and he would also preach and he would teach and he would help to form and plant that new church in whatever city he was in.

And so he got close to the people he was ministering to.

He didn't put up a wall between them.

He didn't have any type of professional distance that he put.

He got close to them.

And so he calls them, my dear friends, he actually cares what happens to them.

And so he says, he reminds them of their track record of obedience.

All right?

Now I want you to notice it because that's important.

He reminds them of that track record of obedience.

He comes at them by building them up.

He doesn't tear them down.

He doesn't come in and he says, let me list off where you're doing things wrong.

Let me tell you exactly what you're doing that's not the right thing.

You shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't be doing this.

He comes in and he says, Hey, I want to commend you because just like you've been obedient in the past, you've always been obedient.

And so he builds them up and then he gives them, he basically says, We're going to go deeper now.

You've been obedient in my instruction up to this point, in my mentoring up to this point, and now we're going to go even deeper.

So basically, Paul's saying, hey, guys, it's time to take off the training wheels.

Right?

It's time to take them off.

Paul is not always going to be there.

And he even says that here.

He says, You've been obedient in my presence, and now even more so in my absence, I want you to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

He says, I'm not going to be there.

I'm not going to be there to guide you.

I'm not going to be there to hold your hand.

But I want to encourage you because you've been obedient in the past, and you can be obedient in this.

Now, as we look at this passage, this is a passage that has been misquoted.

It's a passage that has been mistranslated.

It's a passage that has been misconstrued to come up with a lot of different, oh, you've got to do this or you've got to do this or this to be saved.

Because when we begin to look at it, it seems to some the same, well, you've got to go out and work out your own salvation.

Right?

You have to have those good works in order to have the salvation.

But that's not what Paul is saying here at all.

He says, continue to work out your salvation.

Continue to work because of your salvation.

So what we see here is not salvation as a result of works, but works as a result of salvation.

Right?

If we go and we say it's kind of like inspecting fruit.

Right?

We look for fruit in a person's life.

Those fruit are going to be there as a result of salvation, as a result of salvation being worked out in a person's life.

As a result of a person allowing God to work in their life in all the different areas of their life to bring about their complete harmonious walk within the kingdom of God.

And that's exactly what Paul is encouraging the people in this passage of Scripture to do.

This does not mean work for your salvation to earn it.

Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 tells us that salvation is by grace through faith alone.

Paul is saying here, take the gift of salvation that God has given you and work it out into all the different areas of your life.

And that means work it out into your thoughts.

Work it out into your words.

Work it out into your relationships, your family relationships, your friend relationships.

Work it out into your work, your daily work, and into your habits.

If we do, if we follow the example of Jesus Christ, the example that Paul gave us, we make it visible in our life.

I can remember somebody asking the question, you've probably heard people ask this before.

What if your life was the only Christ that anyone ever saw?

Would that be a difference?

Can you say that when people view me, they see something different in my life?

They see that God is there, they see that Jesus is working through my life.

Make it visible.

Now, why with fear and trembling?

Work it out with fear and trembling.

This wasn't, this isn't talking about terror.

It's talking about a reverent awe.

Think about this, folks.

We stand before the holy God who has saved us.

And we tremble at the privilege and at the responsibility that we have to work out that salvation, to work through Him.

And then we find one of the greatest, in my opinion, one of the greatest verses of comfort in this passage.

When I think about Rusty, I need you to go out and I need you to work out your salvation.

It makes me a little nervous, to be quite honest, because I'm like, I can't do that.

Paul would have told you he couldn't do it.

Do you remember what Paul told us in Romans?

Here was the great apostle Paul, one of the first missionaries, a great mentor to these first churches, and he he told him, he said, Look, I know what I should do, but I don't do it.

I know what I shouldn't do, but I do it.

Paul's saying, look, God, I may be your mentor.

I may be the missionary that's coming and bringing you the word of God, but I am still, I still struggle and have to keep myself in submission on a daily, hourly basis.

Because I struggle with that.

So if we were left on our own and to our own devices, that's what Paul is asking the church at Philippi to do is a difficult task.

But look at what it says in verse 13.

For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.

God is in this every step of the way.

I have uh true 100% truly believe, and I've told people so many different times, if God calls you to do something, he will equip you to do it.

He's not calling you because of your abilities, he's calling you because of your availability and you making yourself available to him.

He will then prepare you and work through you to accomplish the purpose to which he has called you.

He doesn't leave it up to my ability.

He doesn't leave it up to what Rusty can do or to what anybody else here can do.

He empowers.

And so there's a beautiful balance that we see here.

We are privileged to participate in what God empowers.

We have the opportunity to respond to what God initiates.

And we have the privilege to obey, and God works within us.

I don't say this because I think it's true.

It's promised in God's Word.

He promises this.

That He's going to be, He's going to work that out.

Now, there's two different groups of Christians.

There's this group on the other on this side that say, I'm not talking about this group out here.

Group A, right?

That think I have got to do a lot of good works in order to earn my way into heaven.

I've just got to really go out and hit the good works.

And then you got this group over here that says, well, it's about grace and grace alone.

True.

But the grace is all I have.

And I use my grace as a cloak of unrighteousness.

I do whatever I want because it's all grace.

The Christian life is not self-effort.

Okay?

It's not how many works.

And we are saved by grace alone.

But it's not passive.

Christian work is not, the Christian walk, the Christian life is not passive.

I think I've told you before I had a member at my church in Catlitzburg, Kentucky.

And I asked him, I had only been there for a couple of weeks, and I asked him one time, I said, What do you do around the church?

And he looked at me, he goes, We were standing in the auditorium at this time.

And he looked pointed back about four rows back and he said, I sit right over there.

And I said, Well, well, no, I meant what not where you sit, what do you do?

He goes, I sit right over there.

He said, I believe that I am called to occupy that seat.

Okay, okay.

That was what he felt like God called him to do.

Does God call us to be a faithful attender and member of a church?

Absolutely.

Is that all God calls us to do?

No.

It's not to be passive.

It's not to come and simply be ministered to.

Ministered to, ministered to, minister to.

Do you know what as we come together as the family of God, do you know what this is all about?

We come, my opinion, we come to be filled up so that as we go out, we can minister to others around us.

We can reach out to others and draw them in, show them the love that Christ has shown us.

So it's not passive, it's cooper, it's cooperation with Holy Spirit, and we work because God is at work within us.

Let's move on to our second point.

The character and the contrast.

Paul gets very specific here.

He says, hey, do everything without grumbling and arguing.

When I was growing up, I I hated to cut the grass.

I hated to clean my room.

And I used to say, and it was uh actually, as I got older, it became kind of a joke between my mother and I.

But I would, when I was younger, I'd say, Well, I've got to go cut the grass.

And she'd look at me, she'd say, Now, Rusty, you don't have to cut the grass.

You get to cut the grass.

I gotta go clean my room.

No, you don't have to clean your room.

You get to clean your room.

We don't have to do what God wants us to do.

We get to do.

We have a privilege to do what God wants us to do.

And so therefore, we should do it without grumbling.

And you may look at me and say, No, brother, I say, I would never grumble.

Well, sometimes we grumble, don't we?

Sometimes we grumble.

Sometimes on Sunday, it's we're driving to church, and you think to yourself, boy, I could have kept sleeping this morning.

None of you would ever do that.

I understand.

It's it that's just me, right?

Um, but it and if we look back.

God's people, all the way from the Old Testament on.

The children of Israel, if you read through the Old Testament, the history of the children of Israel, they were professional grumblers.

They were professional complainers.

God, you brought us out from Egypt, and now we don't have any water to drink.

So he gives them water to drink.

Well, you gave us water to drink, but we don't have any food.

I can remember the food back in Egypt.

We might have been slaves, but we had food.

So he gives them manna, and then what do they complain about?

Well, we don't have any meat.

Professional complainers, constant.

And Paul is telling us here that we have to be different.

We have to be different.

Why?

So that you may become blameless and pure children of God without fault in a crooked and perverted generation.

Folks, we live in a dark world.

Our world is still crooked and perverted.

Think about the world in which we live.

You know, we all celebrated 250 yesterday, and that was fantastic.

I started thinking when I was thinking about this country being 250 years old.

By the way, I remember I was eight years old when we had the bicentennial.

And we had a big pageant at our elementary school, Belfont Elementary School.

And I was a minute man.

I had my little tri-corner hat and all the little trousers that came up to here.

I guess I was wearing culottes, I don't know.

But I can remember, I started remembering that, and then I remembered back when this country began, and I started thinking, how does it compare to 250 years ago?

How does our country today compare to our country then?

Have we grown closer to God or have we grown farther away from God?

We live in a dark world.

We live in a world that is full of moral confusion.

We live in a world that is full of selfishness.

It's full of division.

It's full of darkness.

Yet in the midst of it, Paul is telling us that we should shine.

That we should shine.

And it says here, among whom you shine like stars in the world, by holding firm to the word of life.

By holding firm to God's word.

We shine.

By following what he tells us to do within his word, we shine.

We don't just hold our faith privately.

We hold it forth.

We show it forth, living it out and speaking it out.

I think there's two different ways that we can shine.

Number one, we shine outwardly.

One of the things about stars, if you go out and you look at a starry night, the darker the sky, the better you can see the stars, right?

The darker the world, the more that God's radiance reflects off of a faithful Christian.

So we shine outwardly.

We let people see who and whose we are.

But I think we can also shine inwardly.

One of the greatest burdens and difficulties that I have seen in Christian lives in my years in the ministry has been assurance of salvation.

You know, I'm going along good and then I hit a dry patch.

It doesn't seem like it, boy, God, when I get on my knees and I try to pray, it seems like my prayers go up and bounce off the ceiling and come back down.

I don't feel like I'm really talking.

Well, maybe I'm just not a Christian.

And we struggle with it.

We struggle with it.

And so we can shine inwardly as we begin to.

I've talked before about anchor points in our life, those times when we know God was working, when we saw God working in our lives and working through us, we look back at those and those shine inwardly into our life, giving that assurance that God is with us, that God wants to use us and wants to bless us.

Finally, I want us to look at the cost and the joy.

Paul shifts now to his own situation.

He's in prison.

He's possibly facing death at this point.

And he describes his life as a drink offering.

Now, the drink sacrifice in Old Testament worship accompanied an animal sacrifice.

And so as I look at this, I seem to see this as Paul sees the Philippi's faith and obedience as a pleasing sacrifice to God.

And Paul's drink sacrifice, his own suffering, is that drink sacrifice that accompanies that.

And is Paul bitter about his suffering?

Is he upset about it?

Does he blame the Philippians or the Ephesians or the Galatians?

Does he blame any of those people because he's in prison?

No.

Even in that costly place, Paul says, I am glad and I rejoice with all of you.

He's saying, look, if I'm going to be poured out as a drink offering, that's fine.

Because of your obedience, because you're following after Christ, because of your salvation, because you're going to continue to shine out.

You're going to continue the ministry of God that He is inviting you to be a part of.

Paul has realized and is living out the truth that the Christian life is not ultimately about self-preservation.

It's not about self-preservation.

That's a sharp contrast to the worldly life, isn't it?

The Christian life is about participation.

Participating in, pouring yourself into the lives of others.

Not thinking about me.

But thinking about how can I how can I worship to somebody?

Worship with somebody.

How can I be a blessing to someone?

Right?

Where is there a person that needs prayer today?

Where is there a person that just needs a word of encouragement today?

Reaching out, pouring yourself into them.

As we learn the way of Christ, we discover the joys of lives offered back to God.

You're not going to do it perfectly.

I can guarantee you that.

I think everyone here is a great person, but you're not going to do it perfectly.

It's not going to be dramatic.

You're probably not going to have a time like Paul where a bright shining light blinds you.

But it's going to be faithful.

We're going to offer our lives to God, back to God, faithfully.

Our sentence to carry today.

There it is.

God is always at work, and you have an invitation to join him.

One of the things that I've taught my class multiple times is that overall God works all the time, constantly.

His work doesn't rely on me.

What he does do for me as a blessing to me is he invites me to be a part of his work.

He invites me to come alongside him and work with him.

What do we have to do?

We have to look and we have to see and observe where is God at work.

And I need to go join myself to that work.

Because when I see it, that's God's invitation.

Rusty, I want you over here.

I want you to do this.

And so there's a simple practice, it's in your bulletin.

And I want you to look through it, and I want you to try this once each day this week.

Number one, slow.

Pause for a moment.

Pause for a moment.

Folks, I don't know about your life, but my life gets too fast sometimes.

It's just constant.

Go, go, go, go, go, go.

Do, do, do, do, do.

So pause for a moment and notice where do I see God at work around me?

What is God doing?

And then turn, accept that invitation.

Lord, help me cooperate with what you are doing and entrust something to him.

Give a difficult situation, a relationship that you're struggling with, some responsibility that's particularly burdensome right now.

Give that back to him.

And then remember the Christian life is not carrying God's work, it's joining God's work.

As we come to the Lord's table, I want us to remember that before Paul ever spoke about a life poured out, Jesus lived one.

Before we were called to participate in God's work, Christ completed the work of our salvation.

Before we were called to shine as lights, Christ entered the darkness for us.

Before we were called to offer our lives, Christ offered his.

The bread and the cup remind us that the Christian life always begins with receiving before it moves on to responding.

Today we come not as a people trying to earn God's favor, but as people remembering the grace that has already been given to us through Christ Jesus.

And so today, those who are Christians here, we're going to have a prayer in just a moment.

And I would ask those that are Christians here to come, join with us in this communion.

Here at Sojourn North, we get the bread and the juice, we take it back to our seat, and we all participate and partake at the same time.

And so I want you to come with gratitude.

I want you to come with confidence and come remembering that the God who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it.

Let's pray together.

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you so much that you give us the opportunity to shine for you.

You give us the opportunity to be reflections of you.

That's what's shining.

Lord, I thank you so much for each person here, for the work that you're doing in their lives, for the opportunities that you're giving them to step out, to do, to be a part of your work, to be a part of your ministry.

Dear Heavenly Father, as we come to this table, may we never forget what empowers and makes possible our salvation.

We love you and praise you.

For it's in your name we pray.

Amen.