Conduct Worthy of the Church B

Your agenda isn't important and my agenda isn't important. What is important is unity. And that's what Paul says. Look, the bottom line is your behavior. Church, behave yourself. Now what does that mean? That means you behave yourself in these ways. First of all, you stand firm.

You don't fall into error and sin. Secondly, you share in one Spirit. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Whether you're part of a large fellowship or a tiny congregation, your church faces challenges that Christians have faced in every age and every location. As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. Thankfully, the solutions to those challenges are also timeless, as you'll see today on Grace to You. John MacArthur is continuing his series, A Plea for Unity, with a look at how you and your church can overcome Satan's devices and exalt the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, with today's lesson, here's John. Philippians chapter 1. We'll look together at the last four verses, verses 27 through 30. This rich little section hits at the very heart of the need for the church to behave itself in the way God has designed. It's a section on the behavior of the church.

We could have entitled it, the church behaving itself. Verse 27, only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or remain absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one Spirit with one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel, in no way alarmed by your opponents, which is a sign of destruction for them, but of salvation for you, and that too from God. For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake, experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, and now here to be in me. He says, I want you to stand firm in one Spirit with one mind. Now, some have suggested one Spirit means the Holy Spirit, based on 1 Corinthians 12, 13, that we've all been made partakers of the same Holy Spirit, and so forth. And I would agree that the Holy Spirit is the source and power of our unity. Ephesians chapter 4 talks about the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. But it is best to see this not as the Holy Spirit, but small s, as it is in the New American Standard, our human spirits, or our attitude. It's simply a spirit of unity, or an attitude of unity in a godly congregation. One translator called it inner compactness.

It's a good phrase, inner compactness. Paul says, my prayer for you is that you would share, that you would have an attitude of unity, harmony. Your agenda isn't important, and my agenda isn't important. What is important is unity.

And that's what Paul says. Look, the bottom line is your behavior. Church, behave yourself. Now, what does that mean? That means you behave yourself in these ways.

First of all, you stand firm. You don't fall into error and sin. Secondly, you share in one spirit, with one mind. I don't think we need to dissect those two phrases as if they mean something different. Spirit, numati, mind, suke, could best be translated soul.

Spirit and soul are the same thing, the immaterial part. He's simply saying your inner part, your attitude, must be one of sharing and humility and oneness. I plead with you to work for unity, but it's unity with a purpose.

That brings us to the third word, striving. It's unity with a purpose. It's not just unity for unity's sake. Let me tell you something, folks. If you want to get in an exercise in futility, you just try to build great unity without some objective.

You can't do it. Let me show you what I mean. Paul introduces a magnificent term in verse 27. He says, striving together for the faith of the gospel. Great term he uses here, sunathleo. We get the word athletics from it, athlete. It means to struggle along with someone. It's talking about team sports.

Great word. Struggle along with someone as a team of athletes struggling against the opposition to win the victory. And now he moves from the metaphor of a military soldier standing at his post, which was bound up in the word standing firm, to a team of athletes struggling together against a common opponent to win the victory.

Now let me tell it to you simply. You will never maintain a real unity in a static situation. If a church just stands around and tries to have unity, it will never have unity. The only way to maintain unity, get it, the only way to keep an internal oneness to share common life is to be engaged in a common struggle.

Basic. Why is that true? When everyone's focus is on the common goal and the common objective and the common victory and there's a desperation about winning, nobody really cares about the internal issues. We have all read through the years about athletic teams like this that fought and quarreled and argued and even had fighting matches in the dugout or in the locker room, terrible discord, until the championship game was on the line and then they came out and they were like one well-oiled machine.

Why? Because all is forgotten in a common objective gained through a common struggle. Any general on the face of the earth knows that that which motivates unity among the troops is the sense of victory. Any coach knows that which makes unity a reality on a team is when you stop being concerned about the internal discord and you focus on the objective and the only thing that concerns you is how you're going to get there. Not who gets the credit.

Not whether you like the guy next to you. I remember when I was in college, we had a guy on our college basketball team the first year I played who was easily the finest basketball player we had and maybe one of the finest in the history of the school. I think it was the opening game of the season. He scored about 36 points. He carried about a 30 plus average for about 10 games into the season and then he was kicked off the team by the coach. The reason was we couldn't win with him. He scored a lot of points but we couldn't win because he didn't understand what it was to be on a team.

It was a sad thing and I'll never forget it because the kid had a tremendous amount of talent, but he was a total detriment to the accomplishment of the goals of the team. And the same thing is true in the spiritual arena. When everyone sees the common goal and moves to the common goal, the internal stuff becomes absolutely inconsequential. And if the church can get its focus on the fact that it's engaged in an incredible spiritual warfare and it doesn't matter all that petty stuff that is sucking up so much time and energy, what matters is to communicate the saving gospel to a lost world. What matters is to so impact this society for Christ that the elect receive the truth and are redeemed through the instrumentality of our fellowship.

That's what matters. With no opponent, with no conflict, with no contest, unity will be lost. That's why generals through the years and coaches have erected straw men to get people to fight an artificial enemy rather than no enemy. And when a church begins to see itself as an end in itself, it is a disaster. When you come here, that isn't the end, that's the beginning. You're here to be trained to go and reach the world. We face a hostile world. We face a world that rejects God and rejects Christ and it's time for us to stand up and fight that battle. And I'll tell you right now, the army that faces death doesn't have any internal quarrels.

It doesn't. It's only concerned about defeating death. Petty internal conflicts are lost in a battle for real issues. And what is our battle back to verse 27? For the faith of the gospel. For the faith of the gospel.

What does he mean? The Christian faith, the truth in Christ, the once for all delivered to the saints faith, Jude 3. We are in a conflict to preserve and protect the faith from those who attack and destroy. We are in a conflict to proclaim and preach the faith to those who reject it. Don't lose your perspective, folks. You have a two-fold striving. We are a team. We are athletes together and our common goal is to preserve the word against hostility and to proclaim the word to the very hostile people who attack it. Tough battle. Don't lose your perspective.

So many churches spend all their time fussing and fuming about piddly internal stuff that doesn't even matter when they need to be lost in the preservation of and proclamation of the word of God. So standing was a military analogy. Striving is an athletic analogy. It calls for teamwork against an opponent who threatens to defeat us all personal matters aside.

All personal matters aside. We must proclaim the truth. We talk about evangelism, proclamation. We've got to do that. We've got to strive as a team to win the victory. Get the message to this world.

It's going to be tough to reach this age. We're going to have to really go after it, folks. I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I want to share a little of it with you by Neil Postman, 170 pages of great insight. He writes, today we must look at the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration. Isn't that interesting?

Its symbol is a 30-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our religion, politics, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business.

The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death." He further writes, the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations. What he is saying is that we've been shaped by television. Writing, he says, freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist. As soon as you put something in writing, it has to be logical, it has to be something you can study with depth, it has to have evidence and proof and substantiation. And content is the issue and it produces thinking, intellectualizing, cognition. He makes the point that a typographic society that deals with print creates cognitive intellectual culture where you, for example, have massive people who go stand for seven hours and listen to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Three hours by Lincoln, three hours by Douglas, and a half an hour rebuttal by each. You show me a crowd in America that would stand and listen to a seven-hour debate between two men on political issues. Huh. How about Nehemiah 8?

They stood up and read the Scriptures all day long and the people stood from dawn till sunset and listened to the Bible being read. Try that. Try that. Now they want 30-minute sermonettes for Christianettes with histrionics and jokes from beginning to end.

Why? We've shifted to a telegraphic photographic society. It has shaped our culture with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. And you can listen to the typical TV preacher and maybe he says something profound once in 30 minutes and maybe he never says it in 30 weeks. There's no reasoned rhetoric, profound logic. Exposition is turned off in favor of explosions, sex, murders, crashing cars. It's wild. Compare, he says, modern preaching with George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles G. Finney if you want to know the difference between the mindset of people today, absolutely unbelievable. Jonathan Edwards wrote a treatise concerning religious affections in 1746 as one of the most profound works in American history. And he would stand and read off of a page his message with no intonation and people would cry to God for mercy.

Why? Because they had been trained to think. Now you stand up and give them a reasoned approach to Scripture. They're asleep in three minutes because nobody has been shot, nothing has blown up, nothing has exploded and nobody has said, now this and that cartoon character bounced through a McDonald's store.

They can't deal with it. Today's preaching is contentless and TV trivializes everything. Absolutely everything is trivialized by television. Even religion is trivialized. You have some guy up there trying to preach and as soon as he's done, on comes a commercial cartoon. Even the news is trivialized. Well today an airliner was shot out of the sky, 290 people perished. Now this, and on comes a beer ad. The trivialization of everything.

He asked the question, does Postman in the book, when's the last time you heard something on the news that changed anything in your life? The answer is never. What do we do with all that trivia that we can't use? We invent games like Trivial Pursuit so we can use it. We got it, we might as well use it. It has no relation to life. Devastating to gospel presentation.

Where is the Jonathan Edwards of our day? People are into emotional gratification. They're into popularity. They want to feel.

They don't want to think. Christian church platforms look like Las Vegas stages. Vaudeville has replaced the scripture. No context, no content. I don't think Christianity can work on television because the medium of TV trivializes it.

I mean how serious can you get when you're watching it and some guy starts to talk about Christ and if you want you can flip to something else and see somebody shot or kissed or thrown over a cliff and then you flip back. Trivializes everything. You say, why are you telling us? Because this challenges us, folks.

We have a tremendous task. This is the mindset of our day. It isn't like it was 20 years ago. People don't want to read books.

They don't want to think. We're going to have a tough time in this culture. Struggling together to preserve the sacred, serious truth of God may not be a battle against outsiders only. It may be a battle against insiders. Struggle against the shallow churches that want to trivialize the truth and reduce it to amusement. Struggle to proclaim may not just be a contest for men's hearts. It may be a contest for men's minds. And we're going to have a mindless generation. We've already got one.

They just want entertainment, nothing more. And each new one will be worse. And then you stand up like I do for 50 minutes and try to communicate the Word of God to these people.

And except for the Holy Spirit, somehow allowing it to sink in, it just does not compute. What a challenge. We better be aggressive.

Listen, we better be aggressive. We're in a dangerous time in our church history. I received in the mail an interesting letter laying out a course that is being taught. I want to explain it to you very briefly. It charted the history of churches, great churches. Their peak period of growth in a great ministry was 20 to 25 years, right where we are since I've come. That was the apex.

From then on, everything went downhill. When a church is born, they said it takes one person to reach one. So the ratio is one to one. They're excited. They're enthused. They're thrilled.

They're blessed. And we saw this church double every two years, the first almost 10 years, one to one to one to one. We were doubling. It took one to reach one. They said usually by the third year, it takes three people to reach one, and the process of outreach is slowing down as the church gets more internally complex. By 10 years, it takes eight persons to reach one, 15 to 20 years, somewhere between 8 and 15 perhaps. By the time a church is 50 years old, it takes 89 people to reach one.

Why? The early years concentrate on evangelism. That evangelism takes the church to a peak. Then the church becomes preoccupied with pastoral care, preoccupied with shepherding, preoccupied with budget, preoccupied with internal systems, and it eats itself up. It can't maintain its unity anymore because it doesn't have a common enemy that it's fighting. It's narcissistic. Evangelism isn't the reason to exist.

Fellowship, teaching, caring, socializing, interacting, counseling. It stops confronting the world. It shrivels. We have a great challenge. We've got a great struggle. Verse 28, he says, in the struggle, don't be alarmed by your opponents. That's good news, isn't it? That's the word used, that word alarm, used never other place in the Bible.

It's the only place ever used, but it's used in classical Greek to refer to startling horses. Don't be startled. Don't be bolted or jolted by your adversaries, your enemies. Why? Because it's a sign of destruction for them, but of salvation for you, and that too from God.

What does he mean? Their hostility toward you is a sign that they're going to be destroyed, and it's a sign that you're going to be saved in the end. I mean, if they're attacking you, that proves who's side they're on, and that proves who's side you're on, right? So don't be worried about your opponents.

Just do it. Be bold and courageous, and their hostility is a sign of destruction on them and of ultimate salvation for you. You're going to win, and both of those things are the work of God. That's what he says at the end of verse 28.

They're both the work of God. The last word, and I'll just mention it. Time's gone. Suffering. Suffering.

What does he say? Expect it. If a church is what it ought to be, it won't be easy. You will suffer for you. It has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake. It is a gift of grace. He uses the word here related to Charis' grace. God has chosen you not only for salvation, He's chosen you for suffering, and He's chosen you to experience, Paul says, the very same conflict which you saw in me. You saw it when I was at Philippi, Acts 16, and you now hear about it in me here in Rome.

It goes with the territory. Suffering. Suffering. I love that, verse 29. He has granted you, echaristae, from Charis' grace. He has graciously gifted you, not only with faith, but with suffering. Did you know suffering is a gift from God? You say, He gave me a gift of suffering? It's a gracious gift.

All the health, wealth, prosperity teachers need to look at this again. Suffering is a gracious gift. When you suffer for hostility for the faith, persecution, animosity, rejection. You say, why is it a gift? What's so good about it? It assures you of your salvation, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

When they attack you, it tells you whose side you're on. It produces hope of heaven. It perfects you for usefulness. It provides union with Christ, the fellowship of His sufferings. It brings joy due to the privilege, like the early church said, they counted it out, joy to suffer for His sake. It leads to eternal reward. It strengthens the church. It wins the loss. Paul's suffering did. He said that in Philippians 1, 12 to 14. Ultimately, it glorifies the Lord. Expected.

Expected. And don't feel alone, verse 30 says. You're not alone. All the faithful servants of the Lord have suffered. I just want to say it in conclusion. It doesn't matter whether I'm here or gone.

I want to hear that your behaving yourself and that you're living in a manner that is worthy of the gospel that we know and believe and preach and proclaim. And that means you're standing firm. That means you have one spirit, one mind. That means you're struggling like a team to win the victory. And that means you're suffering the hostility of the world.

That's what I want to hear. Because that is what happens in a church that's behaving itself. Let's pray together. Father, thank you for this straightforward word from Paul to our hearts. We praise you for it. Apply it in Christ's name. Amen. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, continuing his series on how your church can know true spiritual unity and glorify Christ.

The series is titled A Plea for Unity, here on Grace to You. Now, John, you made the point today that the church should expect to suffer for the sake of Christ. And also, that's a gift of God's grace. It's a blessing to suffer. Jesus said you're blessed when people speak evil of you. But still, that doesn't mean that suffering and persecution are easy for Christians, even when we understand that there is a spiritual benefit to those trials.

Yeah, and the spiritual benefit comes because they're not easy. When we don't have trials, we don't have struggles, we don't have conflicts, we don't have persecutions, we tend to take things for granted. We tend to take God for granted.

We don't have the desperation that cries out to him. So what draws us to God, what refines us, what reorders our priorities is what makes us suffer. I would go so far as to say, in the life of a believer, suffering is the most powerful tool God uses.

He uses a lot of tools. But the most dramatic transformations that happen in the life of a believer—and this is not only from Scripture, but I can tell you my own personal experience—the most powerful things that ever come into my life come through the means of suffering. I have learned more, developed more faith, deepened more of my prayer life, trusted more, been more confident of the truthfulness of my salvation because it stood the test of time under suffering than any good thing or combination of good things that have happened to me. I have said this for years, you need to embrace suffering because it's where God does his greatest work in your life. Now along that line, I've got a book that I wrote some years ago called The Power of Suffering. I mean, that sounds a little bit contradictory, maybe like an oxymoron, The Power of Suffering, because you feel so weak in the midst of it. But look, the apostle Paul said that even though he had prayed three times that the Lord removed suffering from his life, he said, my weakness becomes the very reason for God's power. God's strength is manifest in my weakness, 2 Corinthians 12. So we need to know not only how to survive suffering, but how to see in suffering the purifying, strengthening purpose of God unfolding before us.

If you accept suffering with the right attitude, God does his greatest work there. So I want to let you know about the book, The Power of Suffering. We want to make it available to you, affordably priced from Grace to You.

You can get a copy today. Yes, and friend, this is a great book to turn to during trials. It explains the gracious, good and loving purposes God has for all the pain and hardships in your life.

It also looks at the way Jesus handled suffering and how you can follow His example. To order The Power of Suffering, contact us today. You can pick up your copy when you call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to GTY.org. Again, to order a copy of The Power of Suffering, or to order a few copies to give away to friends, call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to our website GTY.org. And friend, if you are benefitting from broadcasts like today's, know that we are able to produce these programs and take verse-by-verse Bible teaching to the spiritually hungry all over the world because people like you support us.

So if you're benefitting and if you're able to help, I'd encourage you to express your support today. You can make a tax-deductible donation by mail. Write to Grace To You, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412, or call us at 800-55-GRACE.

Or make a donation at our website GTY.org. And thank you especially for your prayers. We are grateful for every time you bring us before the throne of grace. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for tuning in today, and join us tomorrow when John looks at God's amazing compassion and how that leads to true spiritual unity in the Church. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.