Sometimes it is good as a church to look up and see how what you are doing is connected to the church as a whole. Here in this passage, Paul is looking ahead to a difficult future. He is nearing the end.
Paul makes an initial plea that the Philippians follow him, to the extent that he follows Christ. Conversely, the are many who turn aside from Christ. This means they are rejecting the very purpose of the universe.
It is not that they aren’t good people. Many of them are better people than you are. But it is their end that Paul is concerned with: their destiny, their god and their glory. Ecclesiastes gives us a clear picture of the futility of life when your destiny is nothing but the grave, and when the highest thing in your life is mere consumption and personal glory.
Most important, though, they become enemies of God, doomed to ultimate destruction. In contrast, we who follow Christ are redeemed from all those same situations that we still live in and given an eternal purpose. We are citizens of heaven, which means our destiny, God and glory go far beyond the things of earth and self.
This also means we have hope in Christ’s second coming. The resurrection was a down payment. His walking out of the grave was proof and promise that our citizenship is based in something real, and that His second coming will come with that same sort of power.
Not only that great cosmic promise, but Paul also points to something very specific: transformed bodies. This is more than just improvement in our physical selves, but a healing of the relationships broken at the fall: with God, with ourselves, with each other and with our world.
Being a citizen of heaven means that we can grab onto these future promises and pull them back into the present. The values of heaven can become our values here. This will not make everything work out ok, but it will mean we are used by God to accomplish His great purposes. We must believe that He has our best in mind, though in ways we cannot comprehend.
If you are an achiever who thinks about the world in terms of your abilities and what you can accomplish, this is a challenge to your worldview. We are not called to achieve but to die. Witness the story of the rich young ruler.
If you are the reverse of that, if you see yourself as a victim or a failure, the difficulty comes in accepting your worthiness. As Jesus said when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in the temple, His favor is extended to the poor, the weak and the captives.
Paul then shifts seemingly abruptly from the cosmic and eternal to something that seems much smaller, and addresses a fissure within the church. But he did not really shift all that far. Because these two women are citizens of heaven, their dispute matters in eternal ways, and their ultimate reconciliation is one of the great eternal purposes of God.
What are the ways that you can participate in God’s great purposes this week?
– Sermon Notes, Jim Fikkert, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, October 7, 2018
Philippians 3:17-4:3
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