Sermon for MHBC (12 September 2021). You can listen on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or our website. Live at 11:00am on Sundays. Also available as a podcast here or by searching “Monument Heights Baptist Church” in your favorite podcast app.
Today we are starting the book of Philippians for our Fall series. The title of the series is “Gospel Gratitude.” That really is the whole point of the book. The whole book centers around this idea of rejoicing in what Christ has done. The letter to the Philippians emphasizes the joy of the gospel as it provides grounding and confidence for suffering and service. Christ’s action produces deep gratitude and confidence, which enables the believer to follow in the cruciform way of humility and self-denial. Now I’ve just used this word cruciform. I intend to use it throughout this morning, so let’s be clear on what I mean. All I mean by cruciform is being conformed by the cross, being shaped by the cross. I mean the denial of self in following Christ to the cross.
I had a couple of options with this sermon. We could have jumped straight into the first 11 verses this morning. But I decided instead to cover only the two introductory verses and try to sketch a broad view of Philippians, showing both the main message of the letter and how it fits with other parts of Scripture.
Let’s begin in v. 1: Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus. Here we have our authors—Paul and his disciple Timothy. Now notice how they are identified. They are servants of Christ Jesus. Servants is a tame translation. It’s not really an accurate translation. There are more common words for servants in Greek. But the word Paul uses here and in most of his letters is better translated slaves. You’ll see that in several modern translations.
This language of slavery to Christ runs throughout the NT. This is really the fundamental point of being a Christian. Just consider the teachings of Jesus. In Mark 8, Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (vv. 34–35).
This is what it means to follow Christ, to be a disciple, to be a Christian. It means a life of self-denial, being conformed to the cross of Christ. It is a cruciform life wherein we die. Bonhoeffer’s important reflection on this passage captures the seriousness of following Christ. He writes, “To endure the cross is not a tragedy, it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.” Then a few sentences later he adds this, “If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life.”[1] Bonhoeffer wrote these words in 1937 at the brink of WW2 while Hitler was garnering power in Germany. And yet, they are exceedingly applicable for us today.
Bonhoeffer goes on to explain that the first act of cruciformity “is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.” Paul had already experienced this. When we get to chapter three, he will tell his story and talk about his abandonment of the attachments of the world—all an act of being conformed to Christ. Remember Paul’s story? He was an up-and-coming Jewish leader. He had an incredible pedigree and reputation, but on the road to Damascus, he encounters the risen Christ, who calls him to a life of cruciformity (cf. Acts 9:15–16).
Paul speaks about this elsewhere. For example, in Gal 2:20, he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The implications of that statement are expounded in greater detail in Romans 6.
The question we have to put to ourselves is: Are we willing to abandon the attachments of this world? Is the value of Christ and what He has done on our behalf so looming in our minds and hearts that we would take up the call to cruciformity, that we might identify with Paul and Timothy as slaves of Christ Jesus? In our culture, it’s so easy to tack Christianity onto our lives. Other than some church attendance and maybe a personal belief, Christianity doesn’t show itself in our lives. We try to maintain a comfortable life and be conformed to the cross when the two often stand opposed to each other. And it’s not a matter of balance. It’s actually impossible. Recall what Jesus says in Matt 6:24: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money (stuff).” So this calls for us to consider our priorities. As individuals is our chief identifier our slavery to Christ? As a congregation are we committed to and encouraging one another to greater cruciformity?
All of this may sound like a drudgery, but the point is that it isn’t. Everything else in the world will let you down. All of those attachments will fail to hold you. They are like those gadgets rock climbers use to insert into rocks. They may feel strong, but eventually, they are going to pop out, and we will drop. Furthermore, slavery to sin, as Paul talks about in Romans 6 simply destroys our humanity. It makes us less human. I try to resist Lord of the Rings references because they are overdone, but if you’re familiar with the story, you know there is this creature known as Gollum. At one point, many years prior, he was something akin to a hobbit, but the destructive power of lust and desire stripped him of his humanity so much so that he is no longer recognizable as what he was made to be.
So Jesus tells us this is no drudgery. In fact, he tells a parable about this. Listen to what he says in Matt 13:44: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Pay close attention to the text. In his joy he goes and sells all that he has so he can buy the field.[2] Abandoning our attachments to this world in order to be in Christ, to be united to Him, to be conformed to His image, these are the greatest joys we as humans can experience. Can you imagine if this man who discovered the treasure in the field left the treasure and kept all of his stuff. We would all say he’s crazy. But our resistance to Christ is just as foolish. C. S. Lewis has this famous quote in “The Weight of Glory.” He says, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”[3] There is joy ahead of us. When Lewis talks about our desires being too weak, he means something similar to what I mean when I talk about affections. The Christian life is a daily stirring of our affections unto the joy of serving Christ. We will see that joy throughout the book of Philippians. It’s one of the key terms in spite of the fact that Paul finds himself in prison upon writing this letter. One of my NT profs gave Philippians the title “Joy in the Jailhouse.” That’s not an inaccurate title. Paul rejoices in his cruciformity.
Let’s finish v. 1: To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons. Paul has a close relationship with the believers in Philippi. By all indication, he had some role in starting the church there (cf. Acts 16). Notice how he refers to them. They are saints in Christ Jesus—literally holy ones in Christ Jesus. Why does he call them holy? Because they are united to Christ Jesus. And the path of sainthood is continued union with Christ so that we are conformed to His image.
Servants and saints: that is what it means to be a Christian—or, again, perhaps more properly, slaves and saints. The life of the Christian is the life of cruciformity. That is the pathway to holiness, to sanctification. The more united to Christ we are, the greater we will be transformed. Think of it this way: the more we release other attachments and are attached to Christ, the more we conformed to Christ. A. W. Tozer wrote, “The purity and holiness we desperately need is by the presence of God; it comes from an encounter with God, it comes by the fire of God in the human heart. Cleansing and purity come by the indwelling Christ.”[4] Hence, Paul says they are saints in Christ Jesus.
Then he adds an appropriate greeting in v. 2: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a standard greeting for Paul, but I’ve always found it deeply meaningful because of the two words grace and peace. These are the gifts of Christ to us. When we shudder at the thought of letting go of our attachments, we look and see that here is what is offered grace and peace.
These two words effectively sum up the Christian life. There is this boundless grace offered to us in Christ. It’s a gift we don’t deserve. It’s a gift that changes our entire life like a treasure discovered in a field. We don’t earn it. It is provided through Christ’s own humility and sacrifice. We will see this is chapter two, which may well be the heart of the letter. Christ, who though he was in the form of God, willingly became human to suffer for our sake. And that suffering breaks the chains of those forces that enslave us—namely, sin, Satan, and death. Through His suffering, we are healed. That is grace.
And this grace leads to peace. We have a tendency to trivialize this word as some sort of feeling we have inside. But peace in the Bible goes all the way back to that rich Hebrew word shalom, which carries a sense of completeness and wholeness. Remember what we said about becoming fully human? The peace of God is that wholeness that enables us to what we were created to be. In a famous passage in chapter four of this letter, Paul talks about the peace of God guarding our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. What he appears to mean there is that there is an incredible ability to let go of attachments when we are united to Christ. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, we can rest in Christ. That is a perfect and complete wholeness. What we in our day refer to as fulfillment.
So in this opening greeting in vv. 1–2, we hear so many of the notes that we will be listening to over the next 10 weeks during our time in this beautiful letter. For now, we are left with this calling to servitude and sainthood. We are shown the way of the cross.
[1] The Cost of Discipleship, pp. 88–89
[2] I credit John Piper for this observation, though I do not know where I first read it or heard it.
[3] “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory, p. 26.
[4] Voice of the Prophet cited in The Quotable Tozer, p. 156.