1707. How to Grow Spiritually

I really liked the chapel session on brotherly love. I thought it was really good to be reminded of that and just to be showing Christ's love in my day to day interactions with people. Personally, I've been learning a lot about identity, a lot about the citizenship, how we're not really from here. So a lot of what we do becomes who we are because we're so busy constantly.

I'm a human being. I'm a child of the King and I've got somewhere I'm going and that's a great reminder for me. Those were Bob Jones University students who've been blessed by the chapel messages from the Philippians series called Live Worthy of the Gospel. Today's message is titled How to Grow Spiritually from Philippians 2, 12-13. Would you take your Bibles and turn with me please to the book of Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians chapter 2. It has been called the disease of kings and the king of diseases. It is a physical malady that has afflicted some very famous people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry VIII, Sir Isaac Newton, John Calvin, Beethoven, and even the famous Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. So what is it that these men all had in common in their suffering and that is they suffered from the physical malady of gout. Have you ever heard of gout? Have you ever experienced gout?

What is it? Well, it is the body's inability to get rid of uric acid and it's an acidic buildup in your body and it crystallizes and it floats through the bloodstream and it attaches itself to various joints like your wrists, your knees, your ankles, and in particular your big toe. Because that's sort of the dead end road as far as veins and blood goes and it lands in your big toe and it feels like first of all that your toe has a fever and at the same time it feels like it's broken. And anybody that touches them, you want to beat them to death with a baseball bat because it is so incredibly painful and the reason I speak with such feeling is for years I have struggled with gout. And so when you begin to suffer with it, you of course ask the question why and basically it comes back to an imbalance in your diet.

You know, like so what else is new? And it's the foods that you eat and when you're out of balance then that's what affects you and that's how you get gout. In the Christian life, it is undeniable that for us to be healthy, thriving, growing Christians we have to live in balance. And I think probably a great illustration is just being a student here at Bob Jones University because it's easy for your life to get out of balance. You sleep too much, you don't sleep enough. You study all the time and you don't have a break.

All you do is play and you never study. It's always about balance. Our founder, Dr. Bob Jones Sr., when he started Bob Jones University, he built the school on about five different key ideas or pillars. And one of those pillars is the idea of being balanced in your Christian faith because he was an evangelist and he traveled all over the place and he knew people from all kinds of different Christian denominations. And he saw people make an emphasis on one thing over another thing and he was always concerned about the isms of Christianity.

And he wanted the students of Bob Jones University to be very balanced in their Christian life. Now, this morning in Philippians chapter 2 verses 12 and 13, we have what I think, if you could almost capsuleize it, as probably the two key verses in the whole New Testament about how to live a balanced Christian life. We're not talking so much about how to be saved, but we're talking about how the Christian life works and how we live it out. Just a reminder, the Apostle Paul is commanding us to live worthy of the gospel.

That's what he tells us in chapter 1. He wants us to be unified as Christians. He wants us to be humble and he gives us the illustration of the greatest act of humility. That's the coming of Jesus into the world whose mindset was not just humble on earth, but it was humble in heaven because God has a humble mindset. He came into this world and he suffered and died on a cross in obedience to his Father's will and what do we find out about humility? God always exalts the humble.

He raises him up. And as we surrender to the lordship of Christ in our life, he lifts us up. Now, we come to verse 12 and notice how verse 12 begins. It begins with the phrase, wherefore.

When you see the word wherefore, you always ask the question, what's it there for? And that's where we back up with the whole idea of what Paul is saying and he brings us up to this point and he says wherefore and now he is urging us to do some things. And in verse 12 and verse 13, we find this balance in the Christian life between human responsibility, what do I do, and divine responsibility, what does God do?

So let's look at these two verses this morning, verse 12 and 13 of Philippians 2. Wherefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both the will and the do of his good pleasure. So he says, work out your own salvation.

Why? Because God is working in you both the will and the do of his good pleasure. One is what I do, human responsibility. The other is what God does, that's divine sovereignty or divine responsibility. But before we look at those two ideas, I want to just notice the way the apostle Paul motivated the church of Philippi and I believe we have here an outstanding illustration of what it means to be a good leader. Because Paul could have, if I could say this your way, he could have used the pulpit as a whipping post. And sometimes in preaching that happens where the preacher whips the people.

Now I'm not saying there's not times that people need to have correction, they need to be rebuked. But often times the greatest need that we have is not that we don't want to follow God, it's just we need to be encouraged. We're living in a hard world where it's difficult to live for God and we want to be loved and lifted up. And so what does Paul do? He writes them and the first thing he does is he connects to them and he says my beloved.

What could be more tender than that? To say I love you. And then he says to them as you have always obeyed, he compliments them. He's not criticizing them, he's not writing to people that don't want to obey, he's writing to people who do want to obey. And then notice what he does, he gives them confidence, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence. In other words, he says to the Philippians, you guys are not people pleasers, you don't have a fake spirituality. You're not just obeying when the preacher shows up, you are trying to live out your Christian life. And he's writing these people and he motivates them with positive love, praise, and trust.

Because all of us in leadership responsibility knows that people want to be trusted and that's what he's doing. He's writing them and exhorting to them and he's speaking to us today. And he says look, you need to grow spiritually and here are the two key ideas. So let's notice first of all the human responsibility side and then secondly the divine responsibility side. So notice what he says in verse 12, he says work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Now this is a command. And I find it very interesting because the moment you read it, it appears to be a little different. Work out your own salvation. I mean how many sermons have you ever heard or phrases in sermons that have stated you can't work for your salvation? Salvation is not something you achieve, it is something you receive. The gift of God is eternal life.

You don't pay for a gift, you're given a gift. In Ephesians 2a, for by grace are you saved through faith, that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast. So is he telling us to work for our salvation?

That's not what he is saying. He's actually saying work out your own salvation. Or if I could put it this way, he's saying work, work out in your life what God has worked in through your faith. You see the moment you and I believe in Jesus Christ, new life is imparted to us. And the moment of our faith, and I believe the new life and the faith are simultaneous.

You say what is the order? Well if you wanted to put it in order it's one thing, but practically we believe and life comes at the exact same moment. And at that moment God implants his life into your soul and you become a new creation, a new person. You are born again. Now what Paul is here saying is, what God began in your heart, I want you to work it out in your life. I want you to like math where you're assigned a problem and you work that problem down to its conclusion. He's saying work it out in your life. It's like if you've ever done a to-do list, for years and years I made a to-do list.

What do I need to do today? And I would put that list up and then as I would go through I would check it off. The fact is if I did something that wasn't on the list, I would write it on the list and check it off so I could feel good about myself. I mean we're always working things out. Or it's like when you get married. When I got married somebody said to me if you want your marriage to work, you have to work at it. Marriages don't work naturally, you have to work at it.

Someone said you have to pay attention to your honey if you want her to be sweet. So like in marriage you have to work at it, so in the Christian life you have to work at it. When I say work out your own salvation, I'm talking about working it out in your life. So your salvation should touch your friendships.

The kind of friends I have, what do I do with my friends? It should touch my finances. The way I look at money should be through a biblical lens. We call that a biblical worldview. I should put the template of scripture over my future and my job and my gifts and my calling.

In marriage, I mean the greatest mistake you can make in dating is not work out your own salvation even in the area of dating and marriage and family. In other words, you want your salvation to practically touch every area of your life. So Paul is telling the Philippians, he says I want you to step up your game.

I want you to get with it. I want you to increase your efforts to live worthy of the gospel. I want you to be moving forward and let me just stop here and say this because for most of you, you have grown up in some kind of a Christian environment. Your parents are Christians, you went to a Christian school, perhaps you're homeschooled, you grew up going to church and I say this with all kindness.

That growing up in a Christian home is one of life's greatest blessings and it's also one of the most dangerous things to your spiritual life. Because most of you, and I don't say this to be mean, I just say it because it's true, most of you when it comes to spiritual growth, you're really super lazy. Most of you are really lazy. And what I mean by that is you have never really put out the intense effort to grow. So here you come to Bob Jones University and you find for the first time in your life you've had to really seriously study. I'm not saying that you didn't study before you came here, but you went to a new level here. And you've had to put out a lot more effort to get where you are today than you did two years ago. The same thing is true of sports.

You could have played high school sports, but if you're playing sports at a college level, it's a whole new level, it's a whole new speed, it's a whole new skill set and you have to step up your game. Well the same thing is true of your spiritual growth. And most people have developed in their life basically a very lazy approach to spiritual growth. And so what he is saying is work out your own salvation.

In other words, get to work. Sanctification is never automatic. Forward progress in the Christian life is not a permanent state.

Yes, sanctification is progressive, but it doesn't happen without putting out the effort. Peter says giving all diligence add to your faith. So what does it mean? It means you need to take your spiritual growth seriously. So what does that mean? It means like you need to take reading your Bible seriously.

I don't know if this is true, I can't throw out a percentage, I don't know if I can say 90% of our student body don't read their Bible on a daily basis, but you answer the question yourself. If you don't read your Bible on a daily basis, you're a lazy Christian. You say, well that offends me. Well get over it. Just get honest.

Just say, I'm lazy. It takes spiritual growth. It takes effort. It takes effort for you to pray.

Our minds don't naturally pray well. How many of you have ever prayed and the moment you started praying, your mind started wandering about all the other things you have to do. How many of you have ever done that? Yeah. How many of you have ever started praying and you fell asleep while you were praying? How many of you have ever done that?

Yeah. My wife said to me one day, she said, well I can tell you were praying. I said, how do you know?

She says, because there's a big drool spot where your head was. Spiritual growth takes effort. Memorizing scripture, prayer, reading your Bible, sharing the gospel. We don't naturally share the gospel. Faithfulness to church. Not just sitting but serving in the church and investing your time and investing your efforts. So Paul is writing and he says, God has worked this glorious salvation in you.

I want you to work it out. And notice what he says the attitude should be. He says, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. What does he mean by fear? It's not somebody who's over in the corner and they're paralyzed and afraid to obey God.

It actually is the idea of reverence or respect. Probably the best personal illustration I could share is my attitude towards my mother. We buried our mother a little over two weeks ago and when we did the funeral, you just had to know my mother. I had somebody say to me one day, they said, you're kind of intimidating. I said, oh, you've never met my mother.

And this is so true. We wanted the funeral as the children in our family. We wanted the funeral to be perfect. Everything about it. All the details.

And do you know what? My mother never told me how to run her funeral. But we wanted it to be perfect and everybody was that way.

You know why? Because we so respected my mother. We so revered her. We wanted to please her even though she was practically not there. Work out your own salvation with fear.

What does it mean? I respect God. I live in awe of who God is. I mean, even coming to a service like this, we allow you, for example, we allow you to have your cell phone here because we give you the opportunity to pull up the Bible in your cell phone. But if you sit through chapel really day in and day out and all you do is you're on your cell phone, I'm just going to be honest with you.

Number one, you are like super disrespectful. And secondly, there's a lack of reverence in your heart for the word of God. I mean, when I come to the Bible, one of the things that scares me is preaching because when I preach, I can't just stand up here and just sort of talk out of my life and out of myself. I'm preaching the Bible. I'm preaching God's word. It's scary to preach the Bible.

It's a matter of reverence. Work out your own salvation. Why? Because I fear God. And then notice he says trembling. And the idea of trembling in this, in this idea is it's a sense of your own weakness and vulnerability. In other words, it's the real potential that I could fail. I could fall into sin. That whenever I do well, evil is present with me. That I have a sin nature. That if I fed that sin nature and if I did not feed my new life nature, that inevitably I would fall into sin.

So trembling is the idea of a sense of weakness. So what Paul is telling us is that there is an attitude that we should have. We should work out our own salvation with reverence in a sense of weakness in my dependence on the Lord.

Now, he says that's what you bring to the table. But lest we think that it's all up to us, then we've really missed the next verse. And this next verse is so awesome. Look at what he says in verse 13. He says, why do you work out your own salvation with fear and trembling? For it is God which worketh in you both the will and the do of his good pleasure. The word worketh there is a very different word than what we find in verse 12. Verse 12 is clear. It's what you do.

In verse 13, it's very clear is what God does. And the word work here literally means to energize. For 29 years, my family and I traveled in the ministry of evangelism and we lived in fifth wheel trailers. And those fifth wheel trailers had a 50 amp plug that had to plug into a particular socket that would give us enough electricity to run our trailer for an entire week. And that includes air conditioning and washing and dryers and microwave and all the other uses that we had in our trailer. And if we didn't get 50 amps, we didn't get enough, as we would say, enough juice for the week. And so therefore it's always problematic because we were blowing breakers because we're running this, running that, running this.

And it didn't have enough electricity. So if we got 50 amps, you know, it was wonderful. Blessed is the evangelist's wife who has 50 amps because she'll be happy all week long. And so when we would plug into that 50 amp plug that had a 50 amp breaker, I would ask my wife, do you have juice in the trailer?

And she says, yes, we've got juice and we're all happy. Now here's what Paul is saying. When you got saved, you got plugged in. If I could say it this way, you have all the spiritual juice you need to live the Christian life. He says it is God that is energizing you. And here's a very important question, and that is this, do we obey God and then God works in our life or does God work in our life first and we obey God? Well let me ask you this question. What is the first cause of your spiritual life? What's the foundation of your spiritual life?

Think of it this way. We love Him because He first what? He loved us. Whatever love you have for God, it didn't start with you and then now God loves you. It's the reverse. God loves you and so what are you doing?

You're responding to that. That's what this verse means. Paul begins the verse with the word for. It's the Greek word means for this reason. We should work at our own salvation.

Why? Because God is working in us. God has energized you, therefore you need to respond. God energized you at the very moment of your salvation.

The fact is in Philippians chapter 1 and verse 29, Paul knew that the Philippians were very well schooled in how they got saved. Notice what he says, For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him but also to suffer. When he says it is given unto you not only to believe, the word given means grace and it means this. If you have believed in Jesus Christ, it didn't start with your faith, it started with God's grace. God worked in you. Even the faith that you have is a gift from God. God is at work in you.

So here's what he is saying. He is saying work out your own salvation because God is working in you in a very powerful way. God through His word and through His spirit is working in you and that working are very powerful promptings. The Holy Spirit is speaking to you. And do you know that the more the Spirit, the more you respond to the voice of God in your life, the more you grow. It's like this, the more you read your Bible, the more you read your Bible, the more you pray, the more you pray, the more you witness, the more you witness.

It's a kind of an energy that expands and grows as you respond. God speaks to your heart. For example, if God speaks to your heart about reading your Bible, what should you do?

Say it. Read your Bible. And the more you read your Bible, the more you read your Bible. It's the way God works in our life. God is working in you and that work according to Ephesians 1 19 is the same power that resurrected Jesus from the dead. Listen to what He says in verse 19 of Ephesians 1. And what is the immeasurable greatness of His power towards us who believe according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead. Think with me a moment. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power that's stirring in your heart.

That is like cool. God is working in my life and what is He doing? What is that work that He is working?

Look at what He says. For God is working in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure. The word will there means the desire.

It means something I want. You see God works in the framework of your desires. For example, do you ever feel the desire to grow spiritually? I want to grow. Do you know that one of the major reasons people come to Bob Jones University is because they want to grow. Why do they want to grow?

Because God is working in them. Let me ask you a question. Do you ever get sick and tired of a personal failure in your life? Do you think in your own life I want to be better in praying and I want to understand the Bible more and I want to see people get saved and I really want to serve the Lord and I want God to get glory. And I'm not there yet, but I want to get there.

Do you know what? That's a grace from God because spiritual discontentment is a grace from God. Nobody effectively changes without a strong change in your desires. God is working in you both the will and to do. And the word do and the word worketh is the same word. God is working in you both the desire and the divine enablement.

The energy. God is working in you to do His will. God's at work in your heart.

And notice what he says. God is working in you both the will and to do of His good pleasure. That word good pleasure simply means that God is so working in your heart that He's putting within you the desire to please Him and not to please yourself. If you have any desire to live your life to please God that's really not from you. That's from the Lord. Years ago I walked into the home of the camp director of the wilds and on his refrigerator he had a little bookshelf that was held there by a magnet and on the bookshelf there were two little books and one book said God and the other book said self and underneath was a little poem I never forgot. There are two choices on the shelf pleasing God or pleasing self.

I never forgot that. But I want to take that idea a little step further and that is within your heart if you're a Christian God is working in you to please Him. So what are you to do? You are to work out your own salvation. In other words be responsive to the Holy Spirit. You need to nurture and develop your relationship to the person of the Holy Spirit because He speaks to you. He convicts you. He empowers you. He challenges you. He comforts you and as you respond to Him that's when you begin to thrive and grow spiritually.

There's the balance. God's responsibility, my responsibility and as we grow in the Lord we grow in His grace. Father help us to grow spiritually and help us to live our lives for you in Jesus name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon from the book of Philippians by Dr. Steve Pettit. Join us again tomorrow as we continue the study in Philippians on The Daily Platform.