God Will Finish What He Started Philippians 1.6 January 17, 2016

Transcription

1 God Will Finish What He Started Philippians 1.6 January 17, 2016 Introduction: Let me start off this morning with a question: How many of you have an unfinished project awaiting you at home? Maybe it s a home repair or a craft project or a book you started reading but for whatever reason it got put on the back-burner and the weeks and months have passed and it s still undone. There have been times when I have started reading a book but then got distracted by other more interesting books and didn t get back to it. My wife likes to crochet and makes some amazing afghans but every once in a while she will start one and either because she decides she really doesn t like the pattern or the color after all, it will be left unfinished for months. I suppose its human nature for us to procrastinate and not finish what we started. I would guess that most of us have books half-read, puzzles half-finished, remodeling projects still in process, or yard work that you started when it was warm but decided to put on hold for the winter. Truth be told, we re not always that great when it comes to finishing what we started. Our initial enthusiasm can evolve into apathy and neglect resulting in projects started but never completed. Thankfully God is not as fickle as we can sometimes be. God always finishes what he starts. He doesn t get too busy or distracted, he doesn t become bored or frustrated: he accomplishes all that he sets out to do. Nowhere is this more important than when it comes to our salvation. God sees to it that those whom he chooses to save in eternity past will be saved in eternity future. When God begins the work of salvation in a man he sees it through to the end. That s what our passage is about this morning: God s faithfulness to finish the salvific work he began in us. Today we re going to focus on just one verse in Philippians. Last week we covered the greater context that this verse is found in, but I glossed over it for the most part because I wanted to give it closer attention than I could last Sunday. It s a very wellknown verse that I imagine many of you know by heart already, but let s take a look at it together by opening your Bibles to Philippians 1:6. If you are using the pew Bible, you can find it on pg Again we are focusing on just v. 6 of the first chapter of Philippians. Let me read it for you, And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. Like I said, many of you here probably have this verse memorized and it s a great one to have memorized, no doubt about it. In fact, if you don t have this committed to memory, the first application from the sermon you can take home with you today is to memorize it! Now by way of a very quick review, this verse is in the middle of introductory comments the apostle Paul is making to the Philippians, as he expresses his joy and thankfulness for their support and friendship in the work of the gospel. He wants to encourage them in their faith by reminding them of God s faithfulness to him and to them and in doing so, he pens the sentence we have before us this morning. 1

2 As we examine at it more closely, we want to consider it in three parts which can be summarized as what God has done, what God will do, and how we should respond as a result. So let s begin by working though our first point of the message which is this 1. God began his work of salvation in us through his initiating grace I want us to first focus on the phrase, he who began a good work in you. Let s define a couple of words before we get too far. First, the antecedent of the pronoun he is referring to God, whom Paul mentions back in v. 3 when he says, I thank my God in all my remembrances of you Next, the good work that God began in the lives of the Philippians believers is that of salvation. As Paul states in the following verse, in v. 7, they are partakers with me of grace, referring to the gracious work of God in saving sinful men. So putting those who together, Paul is saying that God is the one who began the work of salvation in their lives. Now what does that mean? To unpack this, we can begin by reflecting on how God began a good work in Paul s life. Paul was a self-righteous Pharisees traveling down the road to the city of Damascus with the intent to arrest and murder Christians. He didn t love Jesus. He wasn t seeking after Jesus. He didn t have vaguely warm and charitable feelings about Jesus. And he certainly had no sympathy for those who claimed to follow Jesus. He had a single-minded goal as he marched along the road to Damascus: eradicate Christians. Exterminate them like roaches. Rid the city of all who claimed Christ Jesus is Lord. And yet in spite of the fact that Paul hated Jesus and those who followed him, despite the fact he wasn t in the slightest way seeking Christ or showing any inclination of being open to the gospel, what happens? Jesus shows up on the Damascus Road and says in effect, Your mine. In an instant, Paul s life is utterly transformed. His spiritual blindness is removed and he begins to see Jesus as Savior and Lord. He receives the Holy Spirit and he believes. Paul wasn t seeking Jesus if anything, he was grossly antagonistic to him but God sought him out and in a moment of grace, took this selfrighteous persecutor of Christians and made him into a child of God. God doesn t gently knock on the door of Paul s heart desperately hoping he ll let him in; King Jesus kicks down the door of Paul s resistance, storms in, and claims his heart for his own. Later on in his life, Paul writes about this grace that was shown to him and to all who come to believe in Christ in a glorious passage in Ephesians 2. Turn back in your Bibles just a couple of pages and look at Ephesians 2 for a moment. What he says there is the theological truth about all of us when it comes to salvation. Look first at what he says about our condition in v. 1-3, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all 2

3 once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Paul paints a pretty bleak picture and rightly so. He says we were dead in sin, that we followed Satan, lived according to the passions of our flesh, and were in our very nature children of wrath. This isn t a portrait of a person seeking God. They have neither the desire not the ability because they re dead in their sins. It means they lack any self-motivated power to change their condition. A dead person cannot choose to make himself alive. His help has to come from outside of himself and that is thankfully what God does. Look at v. 4-5, But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved So help me out here: who made us alive? God did. Unbelievers who are dead in their sins don t made themselves alive. They don t by force or desire or willpower bring themselves to believe. They can t. It s impossible. God must do it. God is the one who begins the good work of salvation by causing a person to be born again and when he does so, such a person will believe. If God doesn t, such a person never will. Rob Ely sent me a link this week from a devotional by John Piper that I thought really helped to illustrate how God makes us alive. Piper writes this, In Ephesians 5:14, [the apostle] Paul says, Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. How do you obey a command to wake up from sleep? If your house has carbon monoxide in it and someone cries out, Wake up! Save yourself! Get out! you don t obey by waking yourself up. The loud, powerful command itself wakes you up. You obey by doing what wakeful people do in the face of danger. You get up and leave the house. The call creates the waking. You respond in the power of what the call created. 1 So it is with salvation. The call of God wakes us up from our spiritual slumber, that is, from spiritual death. We don t make ourselves alive in Christ; the call of God through the proclamation of the gospel creates in us the new birth and makes us spiritually alive so that we see and believe in Christ as our Savior. Thus we are not in any way responsible for our own salvation and hence Paul goes on to say this in v. 8-9, For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. This passage is saying essentially the same thing as Philippians 1:6, only in more detail. God is the sole initiator of our salvation. We didn t choose Christ because we couldn t and we wouldn t. Christ chose us. Jesus says it explicitly in John 15:16, You did not choose me, but I chose you He had to otherwise none of us would ve been saved because none of us could wake ourselves up as it were. So salvation is by grace 3

4 alone. It s only by God s grace that the process of salvation is initiated. He doesn t wait for us to get our act together or make a decision: God takes spiritually dead, unresponsive people and makes them his own solely by his sovereign grace. This was true in Paul s life, it was true for the believers in Philippi and Ephesians, and it was true for me. While I can thankfully say I wasn t going around looking for people to kill before I became a Christian, like Paul I wasn t seeking after God. I was content in my sin, thank you. I didn t choose any of this for myself: to be a Christian or to be a pastor God called me to himself quite apart from any desire or choosing on my part. I attended the retreat where I became a Christian not because I wanted to know Jesus more but rather because my girlfriend wanted me to go and attending a Jesus-freak retreat was the lesser of two evils between being with her or being stuck back in my dorm dealing with my evil roommate. Like Paul on the Damascus Road, I didn t start off the journey seeking God but somewhere along the way God found me. God began a good work in me by grace. He initiated it by electing me, calling me, causing me to be born again, and giving me faith to believe. God did in me what I never in my spiritual deadness would have chosen for myself, thus he did so all by grace, not by works, so there is nothing in me in which I can boast. So then, God begins his work of salvation is us through his initiating grace that takes sinful spiritually dead people and makes them alive in Christ. We don t do anything to earn it, cause it, or choose it: God saves people solely by grace. But as I said at the beginning, God doesn t start something only to fail to finish it. God will finish what he starts and so that bring us to the second point of our message this morning, which is 2. God will complete his work of salvation in us through his persevering grace Look again at v. 6, focusing specifically at the end of the verse. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. So the flip side of the coin is that not only does God begin the work of salvation in us but he also finishes it as well. Now what exactly does Paul mean by saying he will bring it to completion? In short, it means those God has called to himself through faith in Christ will persevere in the faith and after death will be given glorified resurrected bodies that will dwell with God in heaven for all eternity. This is what is referred to by theologians as the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. It means that for everyone who God initiates the process of salvation for at justification will grow throughout their lives in sanctification and will at the second coming of our Lord be with him in glorification. Jesus taught his disciples about God s persevering grace in John 10: You don t need to turn there, just listen to what Jesus says for a moment. He says, I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand." 4

5 Same thing Paul is saying here. Those who receive the gift of eternal life by faith will never perish. God the Father guards them and since he is greater than all, there is no one who can snatch them from his hand. The devil can t disrupt God s work of salvation in the life of a believer. Satan may put up obstacles and occasionally cause us to stumble, but no one who has been truly born again can lose their salvation. God sees to it that the work of salvation he begins in us will be completed. This idea of God finishing what he stated is perhaps nowhere more clearly expressed than in Romans 8. Turn back a few pages in your Bible to Romans 8. You can find it in the pew Bibles on pg I want you to look in particular at v of Romans 8. These verses are sometimes referred to as the golden chain of salvation and are well worth memorizing if you haven t already. They describe the unbroken link that exists between each and every aspect of our salvation. Let me read it, starting at v. 29, For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. What I want to call your attention to is the fact that all those whom God foreknew and predestined are justified and glorified. Everyone makes it to the finish line. It s not that God foreknew everyone and then predestined some of them and then only a select few of those who were predestined were justified and then even a smaller group from that bunch was glorified. That s not what these two verses in Romans 8 teach. Instead he says everyone God foreknew he predestined. Everyone he predestined to salvation he justified. Everyone he justified by faith he will glorify. There are no missing links in the chain. Nobody drops out. There are none whom God foreknows in the beginning who aren t in the end glorified. This, by the way, is why the term foreknew cannot mean God sees everything we re going to do and predestines us accordingly. Aside from the fact that it would make our salvation not on the basis of grace but by works, it would mean everyone therefore must be justified and gloried because if used to mean God foresees our future choices it would necessarily include every single person because God has that knowledge of everyone and everything. But since God doesn t justify or glorify everyone, God s foreknowledge must mean more than just a passive awareness of all future events. To say God foreknew us is to say he actively and intentionally set his saving love on us in eternity past, not on the basis on anything in us but purely out of his good and gracious pleasure, and while he doesn t do that for every individual, for those whom he chooses, such individuals will be saved, fully and finally, to the very end. Now look at v. 31 and the following for moment. Paul goes on to say this, What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus 5

6 is the one who died - more than that, who was raised - who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you see what Paul is saying here? He s assuring the Roman believers that nothing can separate them from Christ and the salvation he purchased for them and initiated in them. This is the long-form version of what Paul is saying in Philippians 1:6. What God has started in eternity past by foreknowing and predestining you will result in your final glorification and nothing can prevent it from happening. Nothing. No one is going to trip you up so that you fall beyond hope. Nothing is going to stop God s power from operating in you to keep you in his loving care. There is not one aspect in all creation that will cause God to disown you or cast you out once he has chosen you to be his adopted son or daughter by faith. So God has you from beginning to end if you re a Christian. What he began in you even before you existed by foreknowing you and predestining you in eternity past, and what he made a reality in your life by calling you and justifying you through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, he will see it to completion so that you will without fail reach the end goal of God s grace: your glorification. So then, what should be our response to such a glorious truth? That then brings us to our third and final point: since God began his work of salvation in us through his initiating grace and since God will complete his work of salvation in us through his persevering grace, we come to point three 3. Therefore we can have assurance because our salvation rests upon God s power and not our own. Let s go back to Philippians 1:6 once again. I skipped over the very first part of the verse at the start of the message but I want to return to it now. Paul says that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ but notice how he prefaces it. What does he say? And I am sure of this The apostle Paul is sure of this truth, that the same God who opened up their eyes to repent of sin and believe in Jesus will guard and protect them until their faith becomes sight. And because he is sure of it, he wants us to be sure of it as well. He wants us to have rock-solid assurance that God will finish what he started in us. It is a tragic thing to know there are many Christian traditions that deny this joyfully hopeful promise. In an effort to elevate human free will to a place of paramount 6

7 importance, they insist that our choices are both what initiate our salvation and what allow us to remain in the faith. They ll insist that God will not under any circumstances violate our free will, thus he neither compels us to repent and believe to start off our salvation and furthermore he will neither force us to remain in the faith if we chose not to. Thus, they would claim that the same free will that enables a man to receive Christ also allows him to deny Christ and abandon their faith, while God passively watches and does nothing. While I give them credit them for at least being consistent which is more than can be said for the theologically bi-polar position that insists our free will must be unmolested by God before we are saved and yet believes God then forces us to preserve in the faith once we do believe their consistency comes at a heavy price. They have to reject one of the most comforting doctrines in all of Scripture: that God the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. The beauty of this passage and what the rest of Scripture teaches is that God is the absolute sovereign over our salvation. Before we were born, in fact, before the earth was created, God chose to save us, apart from anything in ourselves that would oblige him to do so but rather purely by his good pleasure. Then he caused us to be born again when we were dead in our sins, allowing us to see and believe in Christ, even though we would never have responded to him in faith by own volition. God began the good work of salvation is us entirely apart from us because we could never have come to him on our own. But then his power upholds us and keeps our feet planted on the narrow road. Though we are prone to wander, Lord we feel it, prone to leave the God we love, he takes our hearts, takes and seals it, seals for his courts above. Do you find joy in this? Does this truth bring to you assurance and security in knowing that God will see to it that what he began he will most assuredly complete? It does for me. I know how weak and sinful I am. If God didn t save me to begin with, I never would have come. And as a Christian, I know if it wasn t for God s persevering power in me, I d have no guarantee that I d wake up a believer tomorrow morning. There are so many things that can draw me away from God. Sinful pursuits that glisten like gold. Doubt and unbelief that threaten to overwhelm me. Weariness from fighting the good fight of faith. If it was purely up to me to muster up the strength of faith to go on, what real certainty would I have in my future faith? My moods are like shifting sand. If God is depending on me to keep up my end of the bargain, I m doubtful my odds of finishing well are very good. But thankfully it s not up to me. The power of God that saved me will guard and keep me until I make it to my heavenly home. He will bring it to completion. Not might, not maybe, not hopefully. It will happen. Everyone God predestines, he also calls, he also justifies, he also sanctifies, and he also glorifies. No exceptions. No drop-out rates. No slipping through the cracks. Every person God choses to save will be saved, ultimately and completely. God has a 100% success rate in redeeming those whom he has predestined to redeem. God will finish what he started. 7

8 Conclusion So as we close, I can only encourage you to let your soul find joy and peace in this precious passage of Scripture. Find peace because you don t have to fear that someone you will fall away from God or do something that will cause God to reject you. Are you a Christian? Then God has you. What he began in you when he first called you to himself he will bring to completion when you see him face-to-face in heaven in a glorified, resurrected body. No fear, no anxiety, no worry just peace knowing God has even your moments of weakness and failure covered. You can never, for any reason, slip from his loving sovereign grip. And finally find joy because God has saved you, is saving you, and will save you. You haven t reached the end of the road yet, but rest assured you will. God will finish what he started. Rejoice in the sovereign power of God that saves you from first to last, from beginning to end. There is joy in knowing that the grace of God didn t cease its work the moment you first believed; it continues still today, tomorrow, and every day of your life until you reach the goal of your salvation, your heavenly home in the presence of Jesus Christ your God, for all eternity. Let s pray. Endnotes 1. This sermon was addressed originally to the people at Grace Fellowship of Waterloo, IA by Pastor Rob Borkowitz. Copyright