Work Out What God has Worked in Us

We are going to continue our series this week in the book of Philippians and we are continuing on in chapter 2. This week we are going to be looking at chapter 2, verses 12 and 13. There’s bibles in your pews too, if you guys didn’t bring them I would welcome and encourage you to grab one and flip it open. Philippians 2:12-13,

“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”

Let’s pray. Father in heaven we come before you now in the name of Jesus, we come to hear from you, to hear from your word - to not only hear your word, but to receive it by faith. We pray that your Holy Spirit would help us, would minister to us, would give us understanding in things that we can only understand by your Spirit. I ask this morning as we consider this passage, in this letter that you have inspired, that you would help us to walk in obedience to you and to see that underneath all of our work, effort, and labor is your work, and your effort, and your labor, driven by your pure delight to do good to your children. So I ask that you would come, that you would satisfy us, that you would encourage us, bring refreshment to our hearts. We ask these things in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Some of you people may know or have heard of the name Charles Spurgeon, he was a famous preacher. I talk about him a lot, I guess you could say he’s a hero of mine in the faith and his conversion story is a pretty cool story. He showed up to his church, or a church rather, to hear a message that morning and it was a morning where there was lots of snow and I guess the minister wasn’t able to make it that morning, for whatever reason. And I think it was the… I guess the facilities manager, or whatever you would call it back then, the guy who would come in and start the stove and warm up the church. I believe it was him who had to get up and preach a message. You know, it would be the equivalent of just everyone looking around, and there were no elders around, and someone had to get up and give a word. So he walked up to the front and he read from the book of Isaiah, chapter 45. And he read verse 22, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.” (Isaiah 45:22) Only he would have read from a different version, he would have read, “Look unto me and be ye saved.” That’s what Spurgeon would have heard. And all of a sudden, this man who was not even a preacher, he was just there to unlock the door and start the furnace, all of a sudden God blessed this word and this little sermonette that this man gave and Spurgeon said that for the first time he understood the gospel. And it was in those words “Look unto me.” Three words, “Look unto me.”

See, the heart of the gospel is us looking to and depending upon, fully, the grace of God in our own works. The gospel stands in direct opposition of every other human endeavor to find our way to God, to make things right again, to find redemption, and forgiveness, and healing, and restoration, freedom from guilt and shame. All of this could be summed up as our attempts to look unto us, to look under what we have made, to what we have done, to look to anything else - but the gospel is the call of God to look to him alone for salvation, which he provided for in Jesus. And most of us would understand this, but I want to consider this week in Paul’s burden for the church is: what does this have to do with our ongoing salvation? What does this have to do with the Christian life that we live now? See, most of us would conceptualize and understand the salvation of God to be something that we have received, to be a work that God has done in our life, a work that we look to back then. But what I want you to see from the scriptures today is that God is presently at work, just as much, in the life of believers. And he will finish the work that he began in you and in me, in all of us.

We never, ever, ever outrun our need for God’s grace. We never outrun our need for God’s grace. Salvation is not a group project. It is not a group project where we kind of partner with God in this. Where he does his part and we do our part – salvation is from the Lord, fully and finally and completely. And so I want us to understand this morning if salvation is fully from the Lord, what is our own responsibility and how do these things relate together? It is not that God does his part and we do ours, this is misleading. Paul rejoiced at the work God had done and would continue to do in the Philippian church. Remember chapter 1, I am sure of this, that he who started a good work will… what? Hand it off to you to finish? That he will give you the spark you will need? No, “He who began a good work in you will carry it onto completion until the day of Christ Jesus,” Philippians 1: 6. Our salvation is a work of God, he began it, he is going to keep doing it, and he will bring it to completion. God is at work in us because he delights in being gracious to us, he loves to be the provider of everything we need. And because God is at work in us, because God is happy to be at work in us, we can work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Yes, we work. People might hear this and say, “Well what am I supposed to do? Don’t I do anything?” Yes, we do, we work, we labor very, very hard. Paul worked, he commanded the church to work, but it was a different kind of work. This is the mystery of the Christian life, as Ben just read, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain.” It didn’t end; it wasn’t without effect. On the contrary, what did God’s grace do in Paul? He says, “I worked harder than any of them,” (1 Corinthians 15:10). What is the product of God’s grace in Paul’s life? Working. Laboring. The greatest missionary in the history of the church, writing most of the New Testament that we have. Suffering so much, laboring that other Christians, like the Philippian church, would not only hear the gospel, but would mature in the gospel. No one could look at Paul’s life and say that he was a passive man. Paul labored, he says, harder than all of them. Harder than all the apostles. “There’s no one you could look at,” Paul’s saying, “that worked harder, that suffered more than I did. And yet, ‘it was not I, but the grace of God within me.’ (1 Corinthians 15:10)” So here we have this tension: “God’s grace to me was not in vain, it didn’t leave me hanging. In fact, it produced this great work ethic in me, this great effort and this responsibility that I feel for churches, and yet, if I look back at that, at the end of my life or where I am sitting right now, I cannot say that that was me. I can say that that is God’s grace working in me.” And this is a Biblical tension. And if we can’t hold these things together, the human responsibility and the work that we give with God’s sovereign grace at work, if we don’t understand these things, if we separate them we’re going to trip over a lot of the Bible. And we will fail to be grateful to God for what he’s done, and we will fail to have the motivation for the obedience that he requires from us.

Paul’s burden for the church is that they would humble themselves before Christ in obedience, knowing that it was God himself, their delighted Father, working graciously in them to bring this about. The command is to work out their salvation with fear and trembling, the cause is God’s gracious work in them, and the reason for his work is that he delights to do this. It is his pleasure. It is the pleasure of the Father that is the reason for his work in us. Fatherhood is a delight. God the Father is unlike any of us. He is actually delighted to care for his children. He doesn’t find his children annoying, he doesn’t get impatient with them, he doesn’t get easily frustrated, he doesn’t see them as an inconvenience, as an obstacle to what he really want to do. God the Father is delighted to serve and to work in his kids. And I want us to grasp that today. And if your life has been void of obedience to Jesus and you think that, “I am not truly humble before him and when I look at the commands of scripture I don’t see that my life is fully lived with love for Jesus and for others,” I want you to consider this morning the work of God in your life and the delight that he has to do it. So that’s where we’re going.

So first, the command: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” The work that Paul commands is humble obedience to Jesus Christ. “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” He’s telling the Philippian church, “work out what God has worked in you. Work out what God has already worked out in you.” He is not saying, “save yourself.” He is not saying, “work, so that you can be saved.” He’s saying, “there is a great salvation that has happened in your life, is presently happening and will be brought to completion, work that out.” This is what we see elsewhere in scripture, there is a past, a present, and a future element to our salvation. I don’t know if you’ve thought of things this way. We often think of it in the past. Ephesians 2:8-9, we see this, “For by the grace of God you have been saved by faith.” We love that verse. We know that verse. We have been saved. I am saved; you are saved. If we put our faith in Jesus Christ, we’re saved. And yet there’s other verses about the present salvation of God, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Some people think the cross is foolishness, but people like us who are presently being saved, not those of us who have been saved, those who are being saved it is the power of God. And then there is a future aspect, Romans 5:9, “Since therefore we have been justified by his blood, much more shall we be (future) saved by him from the wrath of God.” We have been saved by God through faith in Christ, we are being saved by God from the presence of sin, and we will one day fully be saved from the wrath of God, from the presence of sin, from everything that we needed saving from and to Jesus, who we need saving to. It is a past reality, it is a present process, and it is a future promise. That is what the Bible talks about, that’s the way we understand salvation. It’s not just something that has happened at one time in our life. So he’s saying, “work out the salvation that is happening in your life, is presently happening, and one day will be completed.” And what he means by ‘working it out’, I believe, is obedience. “Therefore my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your salvation.” In other words, I think he’s saying, keep obeying. “As you have always obeyed, when I was with you, now that I’m not with you, keep obeying.”

We saw from the text last week that we’ve been looking at that obedience is climaxed in Jesus Christ, or that the climax of obedience is Jesus Christ’s humility and obedience to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:8. What is obedience? Obedience is sacrificial love, is humble submission, is living for the glory of God and not ourselves. This is the obedience that God requires as we considered in past weeks, that he is not looking for just outward conformity to a list of rules. That is not Biblical obedience. He is looking for genuine love, for him and for others. At great cost to ourselves, not putting our own interests at the top of the list, but other people’s interests. This is the kind of obedience God requires and the Philippian church will see one of the contexts for this letter is fighting amongst the leaders. And he (Paul) is trying to encourage them, “you’ve always obeyed. You’ve always been this kind of obedient.” We see this in the church, they sent Epaphroditus to him. At great expense to himself, he ministered to Paul, it says, and it almost cost him his life. When the Philippian church was formed and Lydia believed and then the jailer believed, this church immediately entered into partnership with Paul and the gospel. It says, “When I left Macedonia, no other church parted with me in the gospel, except you did.” (Philippians 4:15) The Philippian church was an obedient church. That they loved Paul, they sacrificed for Christ, for the work of the gospel, they put aside their own interests, they sent someone – it almost cost him his life to simply bring some money and some help for Paul. “As you have always obeyed,” he says, “keep doing this.” The gospel produces a response. “Therefore, as you have always obeyed.” In light of what you have just heard from me, in light of the humility of Jesus, in light of his sacrificial death, in light of his humble obedience, his service, and his exultation by God as Lord over all, with all authority… Therefore, offer him your obedience. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess one day. The gospel calls us to obedience of Jesus Christ. And this is seen throughout the scriptures. 2 Corinthians 10:5, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,” 2 Corinthians 10:5. 1 Peter 1:2, “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood…” The gospel calls us to obedience to Jesus Christ; to humble service of the Lord.

So what does it mean by fear and trembling? “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” This is something that Christians tend to get wrong. On one side, a lot of people ignore the fear and trembling and paint a picture of Christian obedience in relating to God that doesn’t have a category for ‘fear and trembling’. But I think equally so, that other people paint a picture of ‘fear and trembling’ in our own categories, and not Biblical categories, that create this terrifying schizophrenic picture of God, where we try to take all these different aspects of God and instead of trying to understand them together, we build up this little tower of blocks – where we have his love over here, and his mercy here, and his wrath over here, and we should be happy and delight in him here, and other times we should be terrified over here - that is not a good way to put your Bible together. That’s not a good way to think about God, to just categorize different things in distinct categories. So let’s look at what this means. What does it mean to work out our salvation in fear and in trembling? If you have a Bible, turn to Psalm chapter 2, where this phrase is used. I think it will shed some light on this. Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us,’” (Psalm 2: 1-3). He’s saying that people hate the authority of the LORD. They see it as bondage, and this is what we feel like in our sinful state. We feel like the Lord is just this killjoy, we feel like he won’t let us do what we want to do and we hate it. Everything that he desires to be good for us, we actually see it as bondage. Cords, our hands are tied behind our backs. “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the LORD holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree: The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel,’” (Psalm 2: 4-9). So the kings set themselves against the LORD, but he promises another King, who is also a Son. And this King-Son will respond in judgment and in wrath against everyone who sets themself in wrath against him. He will smash them. And this Psalm is picked up all over the New Testament; this is picked up of Jesus in Revelation. “Now therefore, O Kings, be wise; Be warned, O rulers of the earth,” and here is the phrase, “Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled,” (Psalm 2:10-12). “Serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling.” Why would you need to fear? Well you need to fear because this King, and this Son, “shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Everyone who sets themselves up, which is us, against the LORD and against his Anointed, who rejects God’s authority, who hates God’s authority, who says, “Let’s be free of this, let’s get away from this, let’s run away from this, let’s take counsel against God,” That is human rebellion. That is a sinful state of all humans – we despise, we hate, we loathe God’s authority. And so there is a King and a Son, who is Jesus, who will one day pour out his wrath on those people who will not submit to him. This is what we read last week – everyone one day will confess that Jesus is LORD. It doesn’t mean that they will like it. So this is his Son, this is fear, this is trembling. We get this. But here’s where it takes a turn, “Blessed are all those who take refuge in him.” (Psalm 2:12). Blessed are all who take refuge in him. Happy are all who take refuge in him. So we have this King, and this Son, who everybody hates and one day he will rule over, and that is a terrifying thing if you are not on his side, that is a terrifying thing if you have put yourself against him. But it is not a terrifying thing if you have taken refuge in him. “Blessed are those who take refuge in him.”

The fear of God is a real fear, and it is a real trembling. And the Christian feels this real fear and this real trembling, but we feel it in a different way. We feel it like this, we feel it like we are absolutely and totally safe taking refuge in Jesus Christ. We are not afraid of our Father because of the gospel, because of the work of Jesus. “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ” (Romans 8:1). Everything that we could and should be afraid of about God has been poured out on Jesus Christ, so that for those of us who have taken refuge in Jesus, we don’t fear that anymore. But we still see that that is who he is. Do you understand that? Or another way: the fear of God is that we would never, ever, ever leave him. That’s a more succinct way of saying it. And you see, we don’t, on one hand, ignore the reality of God’s righteousness and his judgment and that all those who set themselves up against him on a suicide mission – you cannot stand against the Lord of lords – and he will crush all opposition, and yet, he is pleased and he delights to save. And all those who take refuge in him are happy. So serving the Lord in fear and trembling is seeing God in all of his glory and all that he is and never, ever, ever wanting to leave him. One error is to approach God as if he is not God, as if he is not just and righteous, as if he simply overlooks sin, as if he is apathetic and impotent. But another error is to ignore the mercy and the grace of God. And the people who do this can look very, very serious, but we are commanded to rejoice - and you can’t rejoice around someone who you don’t trust. So we need a category in our head, in our hearts, where we can worship the Lord, and serve the Lord, and work out our salvation with fear and trembling – and rejoicing, and gratitude. This is the category we need to develop. Not a terrifying view on one hand and an ignorant view on another hand. A full view of the grace of God and the judgment of God that we find come together under the cross. We find our refuge in Jesus. So, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, Paul says, Jesus Christ is the Lord. He is the one who Paul says has been exulted to the place of God, that every single person one day will bow to him. He is the one from Psalm chapter 2, the King and the Son that everyone pits themselves against is on a suicide mission. Offer your obedience to him. Offer your humility to him. Bend the knee now, to him. And he will embrace you. Some of you may be discouraged by your lack of obedience. And this is where I want to take a turn. And I want you to take heart because there is good news. That God is at work within us, bringing about our obedience. So the command is to be obedient, offer our humble obedience to God, our humble submission to him. And the cause of this is God’s work in us, “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2: 13). I struggled for a long time to understand this personally. I struggled for a long time to understand this. I understood the past work of God in my life, I understood that Jesus died on the cross, that he died to save me from my sins and if I believe in him, I will have eternal life. I believed that, I think, early on in my life, and I would not dispute that. And I understood at that moment there was salvation in my life, but what I really struggled to understand is the ongoing grace of God in my life. I had no category for that – probably until I was 19 or 20 years old. None. And I never heard anyone explaining to me, not just God’s past grace, but his present grace and work in my life. This is how I understood the Christian life: God has forgiven me from my sins, and now I’m going to work really, really hard to make it up to him. I’m gonna work really, really hard to pay him back for what he’s done. I’m gonna work really, really hard to prove to everyone that I am a Christian. You see, I saw God essentially as someone who started the process, and I was going to finish it. And that led to complete disobedience - just a very sinful life; a very hypocritical, double life that I had lived until I had a crash and the Lord graciously showed me the gospel. And I realized that the cross was not just the power for past forgiveness but was the power for present living for God. We never outrun the grace of God, ever. Ever. There is never a point in our life, in our salvation, where we can say, “That was me. That was good. Check that out.” And if you think that way, you’re going to fluctuate like this: you’re going to fluctuate between pride, and you’ll look down on everybody else, or total despair, and you’ll just quit. Because you might have a moment of honesty where you’ll look in the mirror and realize, “I am not who I claim to be.” But if we have a full picture of the grace of God, of his delightful work underneath us, in us, through us, we will have the power for obedience. “For it is God who works in you.” For means the reason we can work out our salvation with fear and trembling because God is the one who works in us. We see this elsewhere in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” We are God’s workmanship, he made us. Like when you sit at a workbench and you carve something out, the wood can’t say, “Look what I am. Look what I made myself.” He didn’t make himself; that thing didn’t make itself. It was the person carving it. That’s what we are – God made us who we are. It says that he created us, and he created us for good works and he prepared them beforehand. And we need to walk in them. Do you see that again? We still have a responsibility to walk in them. It doesn’t make us go, “Okay, God is just the puppeteer up in the clouds controlling everything in some fatalistic way, I guess what’s the point in waking up?” That’s not how this works. We’re supposed to look at the work of God and the grace of God in our life and say, “Hey, I actually have power and strength and a reason to actually go out and do something today. There’s good works out here that God has prepared, let’s go find them. Let’s go do them.” “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). Both to will and to work. Your will is literally your desires. What you think, what you feel, what you plan. God is literally working in your thoughts, in your heart, and in your work – everything that you do. It’s another way of saying that God is working in every single part of you, in every thing you think, in every thing you do. That’s how sovereign God is. That’s how ‘at work’ God is in your life. So that you can say with Paul, “I worked harder than all of them, and yet it wasn’t I. It was the grace of God in me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). We are God’s workmanship. He gets the praise, and the glory, and the honour. And we can’t take ultimate credit.

There are two important applications to this. One, it is to be motivation and power for obedience to Christ. To live a life worthy of the gospel. We can be truly obedient to Jesus, and loving, and humble, only because he is at work within us. It’s not like Jesus simply gave us a good push to start us off. Does anyone here not know how to ride a bike? Maybe you don’t want to answer that question. Judging by the smiles, there’s some people in here who can’t ride a bike. Okay, bad question. If you ride a bike, think about how you learned to ride a bike. When I was growing up, training wheels were very frowned upon. So we, to our shame, really had a lot of distaste for the neighbor kids who got training wheels. We saw them as second class people and children because this is how we learned to ride bikes: we had a big front yard, out in the country, we put someone on the bike, (give me an Amen if you remember this, Justin) and we would say, “hold on and pedal, and I’ll push you.” They’d be like, “What?” “Just keep pedaling.” And you would run as fast as you can and push them, and then you would at some point just let go. And inevitably, out of fear and curiosity, or a little bit of both, the person would eventually learn, “If I don’t keep pedaling, I’m going to crash.” And we had a nice ditch at the end of our driveway so that you couldn’t quite get on the road – you’d hurt yourself well before that. This is how most people think of their salvation: it’s something that God started, and he maybe gave us a really powerful push and gave us a really nice bike, but at some point he takes his hands off, and he says, “Pedal.” Pedal, pedal, pedal, pedal, fast as you can. And he might be up there clapping and saying “great” and “great for you” and “good for you” – that is not what happens. That is not what happens. God never pours out his grace in our life, and starts working in our life, and then stops. God keeps working, he keeps working, he keeps working, he keeps pushing, he keeps holding. He’s actually even pedaling. It’s not even a good analogy to say that God is even holding us the whole time, “Jesus take the wheel” – that’s bad. That’s not it. Jesus is actually driving. Jesus is pedaling. Jesus is working in our desires. Jesus is working in our thoughts. Jesus is working in our actions. And you say, “that’s very complicated, does that mean…?” Well, don’t complicate it. All you need to know is that God is at work in your life. Don’t run with human categories and make it very complicated. We’re not supposed to do that. It is to be motivation for us. He didn’t start the process simply to let go. We never put our work against God’s work, or diminish one or the other. We work as hard as we can to love God and to love others, and yet we give God thanks because we know it is him that is working in us. Work as hard as you can, give yourself as fully as you can. It is to be motivation. Secondly, it is to result in gratitude and praise to God for anything good we see in us. Salvation, from beginning to end, is the work of God. We are called to work, to exert our wills, and exercise action, but we recognize we owe God praise for all of it. That is why Ephesians 1 says, repeatedly, “to the praise of his glorious grace.” Here’s the wrong way to think about it: passivity. “If God does it, what am I supposed to do? If God’s the one working, I guess there’s nothing for me to do.” This is fatalism. This isn’t a biblical understanding of God’s grace. “If God does it, we can do it,” is the right attitude. “If God is working in me, then I can finally work. If God is pouring his love out into my heart, then I can finally give myself sacrificially to others.” That’s how we think. Speculation… I’ve thought all these things, by the way. The reason I came up with these is my own dark heart. That’s where I came up with this. Speculation: How do I know if God’s empowering me? How do I know if what I’m doing right now is actually God empowering me? Should I just do nothing and wait on God to empower me? How does all this fit together? Is God just a little puppet master in the sky controlling everything we do? We are not called to speculation. We are called to loving obedience, simple as that. Once your mind and your heart start wondering into speculations that leave you powerless and stop loving God and others – stop, and return. God’s sovereign grace shouldn’t lead to speculation but loving obedience to Jesus. He has made us his own. Third wrongful attitude that I’ve had is self-righteousness. “Look how far I’ve come. Look how godly I am. I wish others would get it together.” If we truly understood that it was all owing to God’s grace, then we would not lay claim and fail to give praise. And this is an insidious attitude to have. See, what God’s grace working in us to do all these things does is it robs us of any claim that we have to our own credit. Which, sinfully, we hate because we love credit. It disarms us in our self-righteousness. Another wrongful attitude to have would be discouragement. “I’m not seeing fruit in my life, I guess God’s not working.” And this is one that al of us probably can relate to. If God is at work in me and my will and my acting are not obedient and are not demonstrating the fruit that I want to see, does that mean that God is not at work in my life? Well that’s why we need to think through things biblically and not speculate. “Therefore my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your salvation…” (Philippians 2: 12). Paul gives a command to these Christians, who he says, in chapter 1, “God is at work in you. And I am confident that he is going to complete his work in you.” And yet he doesn’t say , “Because God is at work in you, I’m never going to give you commands. I’m never going to say, ‘be obedient.’ I’m never going to say, ‘you have room to grow.’” That’s how God works in us. God doesn’t just work in us in some mystical, magical way apart from anything.God works in us like right now. You’re hearing his word, you’re listening to the scriptures, you’re meeting with the saints. We’re going to participate in the Lord’s Supper. You’re singing his praises. He is working in you. It’s not a contradiction for God to say, “I am always at work” and sometimes you are not at work. Him saying that is him working in you. Him bringing to your mind, “I need to grow in holiness, and I need to become more obedient to Jesus,” that is his work. That’s how this works. So don’t be discouraged. This is not meant to discourage you, this is meant to inspire and to motivate you. That God can do it – the last thing you need to do is look to a mirror. What does Isaiah say? “Look unto me” (Isaiah 45: 22). Not, “Look unto yourself.” Lastly and in closing, God gives a command to obedience, and God equips us and causes that in us. And this is the last, but most important point, I want to make: God’s work in us to enable our work is driven by his good pleasure. It flows out of his heart, that takes delight in helping us and being the source of our fruit. Our love for God and our obedience to him is not to earn his affection for us, or his delight in us, but is purely a response to his love. It is not to earn his pleasure or his delight, but it is a response to his pleasure and his delight. This is what we see in Jesus, beginning of the gospel of Matthew. Before Jesus began his ministry, at the very beginning, Matthew 3: 17, “And there came a voice from heaven, ‘This is my beloved Son and I take delight in him.’” Or, “I am well pleased in him.” You realize that Jesus’ entire ministry flowed out of the delight of his Father. See, this confession of his delight in his Son did not come at the end of his ministry. We read in Philippians that Jesus became obedient to the point of death on a cross (Philippians 2: 8). We read that the climax of Jesus’ obedience is on the cross. And yet, God says well before he reaches the climax of his obedience, well before he was perfected, Hebrews says, God says this, “This is my Son. Who has not yet ministered, who has not yet preached, who has not yet healed, who has not yet suffered, and who has not yet died. My pleasure is in him. My pleasure is in him. I’m already happy with him.” Jesus had this amazing view of God where he was always looking forward to the joy that was set before him, but he was always looking backwards, over his shoulder, at the delight of the Father. Not the waiting-to-judge-you, watching-you-stumble, see-how-you-mess-up…. See, the delight of the Father is what motivated and inspired and empowered his obedience. He had his Father’s delight and that’s how he could obey. And if you don’t have your Father’s delight, you can’t obey. You won’t obey. And I think so much of - I won’t go into this, I’ll take too much time if I do - but I think so much of our world’s problems is that we have this massive Father hunger, as Doug Wilson calls it. We have this massive Father hunger that all of us wants the pleasure and the delight of our Father. We don’t even want a Father to just say, “You didn’t screw up. You did it alright.” But we want our dad to be happy with us. We want our dad to just like us. Not somebody who just judges us, and we meet his standards and we do everything right, and he’s just like, “Good job.” We want someone who just loves us, who likes us, who delights in us, who enjoys us. And in Christ, this is what Christians have, adopted as his sons and daughters. This is what we have from God – all the affection he has toward Jesus, that’s what he has for us.

God works in us. Why? “Both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Good pleasure means his delight in and his fixed determination to show benevolent favor. I know that sounded technical. But it’s very important. God’s good pleasure is his delight in, which means it makes him happy to do it, and his fixed determination, meaning, there’s no way he’s not going to do it. “I want to do this, I’m happy to do this, and nothing is stopping me from doing this.” To show grace – that is the good will of the Father; that is the good pleasure of the Father. Jesus says this explicitly, Matthew 11: 25-26, “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. Yes Father, for such was your gracious will.” Exact same thing. See, we picture God’s will in terms like robotic terms. Like God’s will is just some fatalistic plan of the universe, that ‘who can stand against?’ and ‘it’s just gonna happen.’ But what this verse is telling us is that God’s work in our life, we’re not just on strings like marionettes, his work in our life is driven by his desire to be gracious. That is what drives God’s will! That is what drives why God does what he does – because he loves being happy and delighting and providing for his kids. That’s what God’s like! “I take no delight in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 18:23). God does not delight in his wrath in the same way that he delights in pouring out grace. And some people get that really wrong. Like, “God has a wrathful side and gracious side, so he sent Jesus so he could kinda do this thing over here.” God delights in being gracious. He wills that all men would be saved and come to repentance – that is the will of God.

God shows good pleasure and good will and grace toward us, that we would praise his grace. It says that “In love, he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:5). But not the purpose of his cold will, not the purpose of his fatalistic will, not the purpose of his robotic will… the purpose of his gracious will. His good pleasure. That’s what that means. Why? Next verse: “to the praise of his glorious grace.” That’s why he does it. God’s will in the universe is to send his Son to suffer and to die on the behalf of sinners, so that they would respond and praise him for his grace. That’s what he loves to do. That’s what he is happy to do. In Jesus, we see God’s will most fully. Ephesians 3:9, “He revealed to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ.” The Christian view of the will of God is not like this secret code. It’s not like this cold, impersonal plan. The will of God, he says, we see most clearly in Jesus, who said what? “I came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). That is the will of God. What is God like? What is his plan? To be gracious and to be benevolent; to save. To be the one working behind all our work, to receive praise for his grace. That is why he begins his command to the Philippians with “my beloved.” The Philippian church is already beloved. Ephesians 5:1, “Be imitators of God as dearly loved children.”

So, in closing, he’s not telling them to work out there salvation like, “make something happen that’s not happening. Save yourself.” He is saying, “God has been so gracious to you, God loves you so deeply, God’s pleasure is to do good for you. God’s pleasure is to pour out his love on you. And so, give your obedience to him. Submit your wills to him.” That is entirely different. Ephesians 5, “Be imitator of God.” What? “So you may be dearly loved children?” No. “As.” You are a dearly loved child! So imitate God like that. Be who you are. See, if you read these verses and think it’s something like, “I gotta work out my salvation, for something that hasn’t happened, to be someone I’m not,” that’s a major problem. True obedience to Jesus Christ and humble submission to him, joyful service for him, sacrificial love can only be produced and motivated by the pleasure of our Father. God is not disappointed that we need his help – he is pleased to work in us. Failure to have our Father’s approval leaves devastating consequences, feelings of inadequacy, of shame, of depression, constant fear of failure, letting people down, fear of disappointing to others.” These lead all from not having the pleasure of the Father, which we can only have in Jesus. And God’s good pleasure is doing us good, working in us. And this is the deepest motivation for our loving obedience to him, for true obedience from the heart. Not from a fear of failure, not from earning his pleasure or approval, not from a fear that he won’t be happy with us, but obedience stemming from the joy of the pleasure of our happy Dad. The good pleasure of God precedes and motivates all of our obedience. So I hope you see these things today. What Paul was calling the Philippian church to do is he’s actually reminding them of the great work of God that is going in underneath their life. And behind God’s work in their life is his happiness and his pleasure in doing them good. And all of this is only possible in Jesus Christ. Let’s pray.