“Whatever happens”. That is where we’re starting in our dive into this passage from Philippians tonight. With these first two words. “Whatever happens.” In every circumstance. We might recall that for Paul this had included being harangued by a girl oppressed by an evil spirit, being denounced in a riot, being beaten and imprisoned, being caught in an earthquake. And that was just while he was in Philippi – never mind all the other things he endured elsewhere in the course of his ministry. When Paul says “Whatever happens…” he means it.
I wonder what “whatever happens” looks like to you right now. What is happening in your life that might be getting in the way, causing you pain, frustrating you? What would help you to look beyond it, above those things, and focus on God? Perhaps recounting the blessings that God has given you. Perhaps recalling the “Whatever happens…” that Jesus went through on our behalf? Perhaps sharing and praying with friends.
“Citizens of heaven” – In the Roman world citizenship was a big thing. If you were a citizen of Rome it was significant – you had different legal rights and protections.
Remember that Philippi was a Roman colony – set up as a place that retired legionaries could go and live, with special tax status and privileges. After all those things had happened to Paul in Philippi, all of which are described in Acts 16, the magistrates ordered that Paul and Silas should be released. Which you’d think would be good news, Paul would be out of there as quick as he could. But no. Listen to Acts 16:37-39
“But Paul said to the officers: “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”
The officers reported this to the magistrates, and when they heard that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, they were alarmed. They came to appease them and escorted them from the prison, requesting them to leave the city.”
In that time and place citizenship, especially citizenship of Rome, really meant something.
So, for Paul to remind the Philippian Christians of their citizenship of heaven he is saying something significant.
They knew what it meant to live lives worthy of Roman citizenship – many of them would have been Roman soldiers. But now they had a higher call on their loyalty, more important, more significant than what earthly city they were citizens of. Their primary loyalty was to their citizenship in heaven, to their heavenly Lord, and they were to live lives worthy of the good news that this was to the world. No longer agents of Pax Romana but of the true Prince of Peace.
I wonder where our loyalties lie? Is there anything in our lives which has a higher claim on our loyalty than Jesus? Do we see our true home as the Kingdom of heaven, as God’s kingdom? What difference does that make to the way we live?
“Live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ”
We’ve already touched on the culture of Philippi. People would have known what it meant to live a life worthy of Roman citizenship. But what does it mean to live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ?
It seems to me that this is what Paul is going to go on to talk about in the much of the rest of his letter. As we read through and explore this letter we will Paul writing about different ways in which to live a life worthy of the gospel of Christ.
I don’t want to steal the material from future weeks, so I’m not going to dive into those examples this evening.
I thought instead what we might do is have a look at where else this idea of “living a life worthy” comes up and see what threads we can draw together from them, along with the summary points that Paul makes in the verses that we’re looking at this evening from Philippians. And, as we’re already here we might as well start here.
“Stand firm in one Spirit”
A call to perseverance in the face of opposition, or things that might knock us off course, not depending on ourselves, but on the strength that the Holy Spirit gives. We might notice the description of the Spirit as the “one Spirit”
This leads into…
“Strive together with one accord”
Our perseverance, our standing, is to be united – in one accord, underpinned by the one Spirit. There is a call to mutual support, to unity here. The illustrations of this are countless – team sports around the world are littered with examples of teams that have failed because they have not been striving with one accord – either because they’ve fallen out with the manager or between themselves, or perhaps because there’s a prima donna on the team who doesn’t play well with others. If this principle is important in the world of sport, how much more in the life of God’s people.
“without being frightened”
This is an interesting one. Angels, God, Jesus, Paul, they’re forever telling people not to be afraid, do not fear, don’t be frightened. It seems to me that there might be a bit of a progression here.
At the bottom is the state in which we are frightened, and it stops us doing what is best. Jesus told a parable about a king who went on a journey, and before he went he gave three of his servants some money to invest whilst he was away. On his return he called them to account for the money. Two had invested it and earned a return and were praised. The third had been afraid, dug a hole and hidden the money, earning no return. He was condemned. Fear that stops us doing what we ought prevents us living lives worthy of God.
The next step up is to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. I hesitate to suggest this, but it seems to me that the accounts of Jesus’ pleading with the Father the night before he died provide some suggestion that this might be how Jesus felt going to the cross. He did not want to go, he feared the pain and the suffering. He went anyway.
The more that we do this, the more we experience God’s help in those situations, it seems to me that our faith builds, our trust in God is strengthened, and so the fear becomes less and we reach the point where we no longer fear at all, because we know that God has got us, however bad it gets. And this frees us to do the last thing on Paul’s list:
“not only to believe on him, but to suffer for him.”
Because the true test of the depth and strength of our belief is the extent to which we’re willing to act on it. One of the hallmarks of a life being lived in a manner worthy of God is one in which belief leads to action.
So, having looked at some attributes of a life worthy of God in Philippians, where else does this idea of living a worthy life come up?
Well it appears in a couple of places in the eyewitness accounts of the good news of Jesus’ life, and we can find examples of these in Jesus’ teaching recounted by Matthew.
So, in Matthew 10:37 we hear Jesus say:
“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
This seems to me to add an aspect of the primacy of our love for Jesus in our hearts to the idea of a life worthy of him. At first glance this teaching can appear challenging or even harsh – especially if we read it as saying that we need to love our families less so that we can love Jesus more. However, it seems to me that this would be to misunderstand how love for Jesus works. It is not like a cake, where if we give Jesus a bigger slice then everyone else gets a smaller slice. Loving Jesus actually makes the cake grow.
The more love we have for Jesus the greater our capacity to love others becomes. In the economy of God, the more we love Jesus, the more we love our families – so our love for our families is actually deeper and stronger than it would be if we didn’t love Jesus. A life worthy of Jesus is one that is lived in obedience to his great commandments- love God and love others – and these loves aren’t in competition they reinforce and build each other up.
In the very next verse, in Matthew 10:38, we hear Jesus continue on, saying:
“Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
This teaching is at the root of what we read Paul write in our reading from Philippians,
“not only to believe on him, but to suffer for him.”
At the heart of living a life worthy of Jesus is a willingness to follow him, even in his suffering. Of course, this isn’t about us replicating Jesus’ work on the cross- we can’t do that, it was full, sufficient, complete in itself. It is about following his example, his way, of dying to ourselves, of accepting suffering for his sake, as he accepted it for ours. It might help us to get our heads round this to reflect on what the alternative would be. Knowing what Jesus went through for us, for our sake, on our behalf, for love of us, would it be worthy of him for us to give up when things get hard, when people attack or mock us for our faith, to compromise?
Moving on from Jesus’ teaching, into Paul’s letters we find that this theme of living a life worthy is one that he returns to in a number of his letters. In his letter to the Christians based in Ephesus, in Ephesians chapter 4:1-6 which, to remind us goes:
“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
Notice the basis on which Paul makes this appeal – “as a prisoner for the Lord.” This reinforces the theme we’ve just been talking about – implying that suffering for faith is part of living a life worthy of Jesus, of the calling that God has put on our lives.
However this isn’t the main thrust of Paul’s appeal here. It seems to me that all he says here is concentrated on the theme of unity. The word “one” appears eight times:
one another
one body
one Spirit
one hope
one Lord
one faith
one baptism
one God and Father
This is not Paul at his most subtle, making complicated doctrinal arguments. This is Paul hitting the same nail on the head again and again until it is hammered home. Unity in the church is absolutely fundamental to living a life worthy of God’s call on us.
This shouldn’t surprise us, it echoes what Jesus prayed for us on the night before he died, in the garden of Gethsemane, recorded in John 17:
“20 “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
and resonates with the focus on love for each other that is emphasised by Jesus in John 13:
“34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
When we get to Paul’s letter to the Christians in Colossae we find a wider spread of aspects of a life worthy of the Lord. In his introduction to the letter he writes about what he is praying for the people he is writing to, in Colossians 1: 9-14
9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, 12 and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. 13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
What aspects of a worthy life can we pull out here?
“Bearing fruit in good works”
With a different emphasis this builds on the ideas of belief in action that we’ve already talked about, and which finds one of its strongest advocates in James, “faith without deeds is useless.”
“Growing in the knowledge of God”
This is a new one that we haven’t come across in the other passages we’ve looked at. We are called to grow up as followers of Jesus, to mature, to explore our relationship with God, to get to know God better, through reading God’s word, reflecting on it, putting it into practice, spending time with God in listening prayer. Notice that this isn’t knowledge about God, it is knowledge of God. “Knowledge about” collects facts and is the kind of knowledge that Paul warns can “puff up”. In contrast “knowledge of” is about getting to know someone, of deepening relationship, that leads to love that builds up.
“Great endurance and patience”
This sounds a lot like the “standing firm” commended in Philippians.
“Giving joyful thanks”
This also is new, but only in respect to these passages on worthy lives. This theme of joy and gratitude to God runs through all of Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching. Again, we might think of the opposite. How would a life that shows no evidence of our gratitude to God for his love for us, to Jesus for his death for us, to the Spirit for his guiding us, how would that life be in anyway worthy of Jesus?
So now we have a pretty good idea of what a life worthy of Jesus looks like, it seems pretty challenging to me. How are we meant to do this? How can we live like this? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can do this in my own strength, on my own.
Some of the answer to this is found, perhaps in the beginning of Paul’s prayer for his friends in Colossae:. He prays that God will fill them with the knowledge of his will, wisdom and understanding from the Spirit so that they can live a life worthy…
There is also an element of virtuous, self-reinforcing spiral. The more that we do this, the more we discover how to do it well. It’s like practising or training anything. The only way to get better at it, for it to become natural, for it to be engrained in our lives is to do it. The more we choose to love, to decide to love, the more we will love. The more that we choose to be patient with each other, to reject divisions, to work for unity, the more united we will be. The more that we decide to stand up for our faith, even when it costs us, the more we will get used to doing so, and our courage will grow.
And so, it feels like we have come full circle, as Paul has, as we reach the last verse of our reading for tonight. “you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I sill have.” which echoes back to where he and we started tonight…. “Whatever happens.”
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