Protected by Joy

Jesus plus baptism. Jesus plus church membership. Jesus plus tithing. Jesus plus Sabbath worship. Jesus plus pilgrimages. Jesus plus penance.

Jesus plus prayers. Jesus plus whatever. Then maybe if you have the plus, God is satisfied. False teachers simply add a plus sign after the name Jesus. Have you ever heard teaching like what Stephen just described? The teacher gave lip service to Jesus but then added to the work Jesus did in securing our salvation. The predominant way that people try to please God is by trying to earn God's favor. They think that doing the right things and doing enough of them will make God like them. That's not the gospel and that's not how salvation works and that's our topic today. This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. With this broadcast, Stephen begins a series from Philippians 3 called Aiming Higher. God wants you to experience true joy.

It's possible if you rest in God's true salvation. Here's Stephen with today's lesson. Paul begins his next comments in the book of Philippians and I invite your attention to his letter where we arrive at chapter 3 today.

Evidently defensive strategies are on his mind. Philippians chapter 3, you'll notice he opens, Finally my brethren, I couldn't help but chuckle at first when I read that because Paul sounded like so many preachers. He says finally and then he goes on for two more chapters. What's wrong with that? Ken Hughes added in his commentary here the story of the little boy who whispered to his father in church one Sunday morning, Daddy, what does the pastor mean when he says finally? To which his father responded, absolutely nothing.

Well, actually I am following an apostolic precedent myself. When I say finally, I may have more to say. Obviously, Paul had two. It's important to understand the word he uses isn't that he's run out of things to say. It's a word that actually means in the original language furthermore or you could render it now then. And what it signals is that he's going to move on to other things. But before he moves on, it's interesting he repeats himself.

Notice finally my brethren rejoice in the Lord. He's already commanded that in chapter one or chapter two. And he's going to later on command that again in chapter four. By the way, he uses it again here as it repeats himself as an imperative, which means you could take your pencil or your pen and you could write after the word rejoice an exclamation point.

Do it. It's a command. Rejoicing is a command.

It's interesting. That would imply then that expressing joy is not the result of an emotion. Because you can't command someone to feel a certain way.

He's commanding it here. Joy, then, isn't rejoicing some temperamental characteristic because you can't rewire someone just by commanding it. Joy isn't related evidently to circumstances or health or banking accounts or anything else because you can't command that they change. Rejoicing is a command. Rejoicing in the Lord means that you're looking to him alone, as it were, your depository for joy. To rejoice in the Lord means that you find in him the source of joy. He is the highest object of your joy. He is the treasure of your joy, which he then commands us to find in Christ what we really seek. He goes on to add, notice, I want to write the same things again and it's no trouble to me and it is a safeguard to you. In other words, I've already commanded you to rejoice, but you need to understand that rejoicing is literally your safeguard.

Connect those two in your mind. It's a safety net. A joyful Christian actually has a defense system built around his mind and heart. Think about it.

There's one author commented, provoking my thinking on this command. A believer simply can't be complaining about life and at the same time rejoicing in the Lord. He can't do both at the same time.

It's impossible. Another reason to have a joyful spirit and understanding that it protects you is because it's impossible to be pursuing joy in him and at the same time pursuing joy in sin. You can't do both at the same time, which means that pursuing joy in him protects you. Paul calls it a safeguard. The word he uses is a word that literally means it will keep you from stumbling. It'll keep you from tripping up.

It will keep you from losing stability. Imagine rejoicing and the Lord can do all that and more. Matthew Henry, the Puritan expositor of the 1600s, commented on this text when he wrote this, The joy of the Lord is a divine armor against the assaults of our enemies. It puts our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.

I know this is a little tedious with his English, but follow this. It puts our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks. The taste of joy in our mouths makes the tempter's offerings bland by comparison.

An interesting thought. Joy then is our protector. Rejoicing in the Lord, pursuing in him our greatest satisfaction makes everything else seem bland. And this, he says, is an activity we choose to do. This is something we choose. This isn't something we're wired to do.

It's going to be a lot easier to complain about life than rejoice in the Lord about life, right? So Paul says, let me repeat myself. Obey this command. Choose to rejoice in the Lord. Now Paul moves on to tell us what to avoid.

He wants our defense radar systems to sort of pick up the signals and send out warning signs related to certain individuals. This is what we choose now. This is who we avoid. Notice verse two. Beware of the dogs. Beware of the evil workers. Beware of the false circumcision. Did you notice three times Paul used the word beware?

It's also an imperative, meaning you could put an exclamation point after that. Beware, beware, beware. Do it.

Do this. Be alert. It means to watch out. It means to continually be on the lookout.

Just because you have the armor on, you're going to face the day focusing on that which you can rejoice in the Lord. Now don't go to sleep. Stay alert. Beware. You need to watch out. There are dangerous enemies in this context that can steal your joy.

Who are they? Well, Paul describes them with three rather blunt, insulting, derisive terms. In fact, I encounter some who believe that Paul was way out of line here for being so unkind.

I think he was right on the money because you don't mess around when it comes to defense. And he wants us to know who they are that we should avoid. In fact, to the Greek reader, it was even more significant because he uses alliteration. Each of these three begins with the letter K, the kappa, in the Greek language. So he's saying beware of kunas, beware of kakus ergetas, beware of katatome.

So they would have caught that k, k, k. Beware of these. Rapid fire, blunt, offensive terms for the enemies of joy. He isn't just slinging mud, by the way, or calling names. He's gravely concerned and he isn't going to mince words, which seems to be the hobby of the church today.

He doesn't beat around the bush. Notice his first description again. Beware of the dogs. I know that sounds a little odd.

Because we're a little different than the first century. He's obviously not talking about your dog. Certainly not talking about mine. My daughter's dog, we babysit an awful lot, called Pixie.

Just the name lets you know there's nothing to beware of. And that dog, she howls a lot, whines an awful lot. Obviously unconverted. One day we kept her in the backyard, I don't know, about a year ago. She spent a couple hours, you know, whining and howling. And I had a neighbor come over and actually complain that our dog wasn't happy. He said, you need to do something because your dog isn't very happy. Well, I'll get right on that. So I did.

Went back there and had a conversation with her to get happy. When Paul writes, beware of the dogs, you need to understand that the first century didn't have pet dogs. They didn't have pets. They didn't have pet dogs. They didn't have less deserving creatures for pets.

Some come to mind, but I digress. In Paul's day, dogs were like coyotes. You need to think of them in your mind like these scavenging coyotes, which by the way are on the rise in cities now they've been spotted, even in this county. They were scavengers who roam in packs. They prowled around feeding on refuse.

They would run the streets at night. They were a danger, vicious. It's interesting that in the Old Testament, the term dog refers to somebody who's evil or wicked. Exodus 22 and 1 Kings 14.

In fact, the term dog would be used as a derogatory term for someone to be alert to and avoid. In fact, Isaiah 56 verse 10. Isaiah the prophet uses the phrase he calls false prophets, greedy, unsatisfied dogs.

They're evil. In fact, you go all the way to the end of the New Testament, the last chapter, and you find the term there, again, dog. It's used as a general term for the unrepentant, obstinate, evil, unbeliever who refuses to repent of his sin, unable to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Revelation 22, 15. These Jewish false teachers that Paul is referring to were fond of calling Gentiles what? Dogs. In other words, they're evil. They're unqualified to enter the kingdom of heaven. So here Paul reverses the innuendo so that it is the Jewish false teachers who are the dogs. They are the evil ones. They are the ones unable to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In Paul's dictionary, a dog then would be someone who will harm you spiritually. They're prowling around. They're looking for their next victim. They're going to use you to continue to feed their own unsatisfied greed and ambition and desire and evil intention.

Watch out for the dogs. Not only are there those who will spiritually harm you, there are those who will spiritually mislead you. Notice he calls them next here in verse 2, evil workers. This would have been terribly offensive to these Jewish leaders because they prided themselves in doing righteous deeds.

Not doing evil deeds, doing good deeds. By the time of Paul, you need to understand the nation was sort of in the spiritual grip of leaders, among them leaders called Pharisees. They were meticulous in their observance of the law. The only problem is they had codified the law by the time of Paul to include 365 negative commands sort of added on top of the law and 250 positive commands, 600, 700 additional commands. The problem is law never produces righteousness. Law simply reveals how unrighteous we are, right? Even today, we have thousands upon thousands of laws simply because people avoid keeping 10 commandments.

That's the heart of man. Paul writes to the Galatian believer that the law is actually intended by God as a tutor, an educator who leads you to understand your total inability to work your way into heaven and your total need for salvation in Christ alone. Galatians 3, 24, and 25. So these false teachers are diminishing, even denying, the sufficiency of Christ's crosswork, elevating human piety, elevating human effort, pointing with pride to themselves, which led to evil.

Pride, not good. Jesus himself minced no words at all when he dealt with this group of men. In Matthew 23, he says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, because you travel around on sea and land to make one convert, and when he becomes your convert, you have made him twice as much a son of hell as you are. Wow.

Why? Because instead of leading people closer to God in trusting the work of God, they're leading people to trust in themselves, which takes them to hell. So they aren't workers of righteousness, they are workers of evil.

And ultimately, they do steal your joy because they just add more and more and more and more and more and more that you got to do in order to appease God, and you can never do enough, right? Warren Wiersbe wrote of a woman who was arguing with her pastor about the matter of faith and works. Certainly both exist, but one follows the other, correct? She was saying, no, they're both equally important. She said to him, I think that getting to heaven is like rowing a boat. One or is faith, and the other or is your works. And if you use both, you'll get into heaven.

If you use only one or, you'll only go around in circles. The pastor wisely responded, there's one major problem with your illustration. Nobody is going to heaven in a rowboat. Yes, the believer does good things. Not so he can go to heaven, but in evidence that he is on his way there, because he wants to glorify his father through his good works, Matthew chapter 5 verse 16. But let's not redefine salvation.

This is what these Jewish leaders were doing. They're redefining entrance into heaven. Beware, Paul says, of anyone misleading you into believing that the gospel of grace is actually a gospel of works. If it is, it becomes a gospel, and to this day it would be a gospel that would include, well, witnessing longer, sinning less often, praying more often, doing better, working harder, more and more and more, and then maybe you will please God and he'll love you and he'll accept you. Can I tell you something, beloved? God cannot love you more than he loves you right now. There isn't anything you can do where God will say, well, that does it, I really love you now. Or, well, that does it, I don't love you anymore.

No, we humans do that. Those who have trusted in Christ alone and his perfection have found acceptance in the beloved Ephesians 1. It is impossible for God to love you any more than he loves you now. Beware the dogs, they will spiritually harm you.

Beware of the evil workers, they will spiritually mislead you. One more, Paul writes in verse 2, beware of the false circumcision. Now let me add here that Paul isn't talking about three different groups of people.

He's simply describing in three ways the same group of people, these false teachers. And in this last description, by calling them the false circumcision, Paul is literally destroying the very core of their pride and their own belief in their relationship with God. If you track back to the Old Testament, circumcision was the essential mark of the Jewish people. Beginning with Abraham, it was the distinguishing mark of God's covenant with him. Over time, the Jews would refer to one another simply as the circumcised, or the circumcision. Every Jewish boy would be circumcised on the eighth day.

The problem is they forgot the meaning behind the mark. Circumcision was intended by God to graphically illustrate man's depravity. For man passes along his fallen sinful nature seminally through the act of procreation.

He passes along the fallen nature of man through to the next generation. Circumcision then was primarily a symbol picturing man's need to be cleansed at the core of his being, the root of his being. But over the centuries, the Jewish people lost the meaning of this mark, which pointed to the need, which would point to the cross of ultimate cleansing at the very core of your being, but they would keep the ceremony alive. And of course, the mark is set aside in this dispensation of grace. Now in this church age, the seal of the gospel for both Jew and Gentile is the indwelling Holy Spirit.

In fact, there isn't anything you can do outwardly to deal inwardly with the core of who you are. That's why it takes the cross of Christ and his sacrifice. These early Jewish teachers were attempting effectively to make every Gentile a Jew and then saying, well, now you have a guaranteed covenant with God because you have that outward display or mark of the covenant.

And Paul graphically sets the record straight here. In fact, he refers to them now with the normal word for circumcision, a little misleading in the English language. It's translated false circumcision, but the word he uses is a slightly different word that actually means physical mutilation, which would have been highly offensive to them. He effectively calls these false teachers mutilators. Beware of those who mutilate the flesh. And what he's doing is taking you all the way back into the Old Testament where that same concept is used of pagan ceremony and ritual. In fact, you remember the false prophets of Baal? They believed that they would get the attention of their God by doing what to their bodies?

Cutting themselves. If we can just cut ourselves enough and shed enough of our own blood, Baal will be impressed and send fire to our sacrifice. 1 Kings 18.

Now Paul uses that same word here shockingly. He's effectively saying that the physical circumcision that they're attempting to get every Gentile to perform is as spiritually meaningless as the ritual mutilation of pagan religions. Because of the sacrifice of Christ and his finished work, it now comes through faith alone and there is no physical mark. There is no outward ceremony. There is no outward symbol that gains you acceptance. There's no work. There's no ritual. There's no penance.

There's no act. Because salvation deals with the core of who you are, which then we have the analogy of having a circumcised heart. Our hearts are changed. Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind.

The dogs will harm you. The evil workers mislead you. These, and I would just call them ceremonialists, will burden you.

There's something you've got to do. If I could boil down the core of these false teachers and their teaching into one statement for you today, it would be this. False religion and false teachers simply add a plus sign after the name Jesus. Jesus plus baptism. Jesus plus church membership. Jesus plus tithing. Jesus plus Sabbatarianism or Sabbath worship. Jesus plus pilgrimages. Jesus plus penance. Jesus plus prayers.

Jesus plus whatever. Then maybe if you have the plus, God is satisfied. Do you realize that implies that God is not satisfied with the sacrifice of his Son on your behalf? And we puny humans must do something in order to earn it. Ceremonialists burden you.

And they take no pity on you either. This is the core of legalism. Legalism makes someone's opinion your obligation. Legalism makes someone's traditionalism your burden.

And the list just seems to grow. Paul says to us as true believers, verse 3, we are the true circumcision. Now he uses the word for circumcision. Speaking metaphorically, he's saying we have been cleansed to the very core of our being through the sacrifice of the Savior, not by some surgery, but the Savior. So this is, if you're following along, this is what we do. We rejoice in the Lord. We find in him our satisfaction. This is who we avoid. Those who deny that Jesus Christ is enough. We sang about it earlier.

He is enough. He is our entrance into heaven. Now Paul reminds them and us, this is who we are. Look at verse 3 again. We worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Three characteristics of true religion or the gospel. First, we are those who worship God first. That is, by worshiping in the Spirit of God, we don't make it up. We aren't focusing on us, we're focusing on God.

We're focusing on the living God, the living Word, and the written Word. We aren't the focus of our worship. We have to be careful that when we leave here today, we don't say to somebody, I really enjoyed worship today.

Why? Well, because I like that song. Well, then it was all about you and me. And that somehow we were the audience, forgetting that God is the audience. We simply participated in offering to Him through singing and music and praying, fellowshipping, these offerings of worship.

It's a heart devoted to the Spirit of God who then energizes our worship and directs and enhances and creates genuine worship, which is fellowship in the adoration of God. This is who we are. We worship God first. Secondly, we are those who brag about Jesus Christ most.

Look again. We glory in Christ Jesus. The word for glory is a word that describes boasting with joy about something someone is most proud of.

And you get around all of us, we're all the same way. Eventually we're going to tell you what we're proud of. We're going to want to show you.

We're going to want to talk about it. There's nothing wrong with sharing accomplishments with one another. But what is that with which we find most the glory of or in? We glory in Christ Jesus.

Why? Because we as believers, more than anybody else on the planet, understand that we, if you strip everything away, if you pull everything away, the only thing we really have to boast about is our salvation. And the only one we really have to boast in is Christ. I hope today's lesson has been an encouragement to you. Today and every day, let's glory in the work of Christ on our behalf.

You're listening to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. Stephen pastors a church in Cary, North Carolina, and is our daily Bible teacher here on this program. You can learn more about our ministry by visiting us online at wisdomonline.org. Be sure and explore our resources. We provide free access to the archive of Stephen's teaching ministry. You can listen to each lesson or read Stephen's manuscript. You can also do that from the Wisdom International app. So install that app right away. That's all for today. Join us tomorrow right here on Wisdom for the Heart. .