Work Out Your Salvation - [Philippians 2:12-13]

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Well, it's my joy to be with you again tonight and be sharing with you God's powerful
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Word and praise Him for His Word that is so penetrating, just like the writer of Hebrews says, it can divide joints in spirit and into the intentions and the thoughts of man and judge us.
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And that is what we need and that is the way in which our God works in our life. And I was convicted this morning even as I was preaching and just thinking about how important it is to be a disciple maker and to be someone that is reproducing
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Christ. And the fact that when Jesus says we need to make disciples,
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He says we need to teach people to observe, not just to know, but to observe all that I have commanded you.
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And it's not just showing them Christ just in terms of intellectual truths, but it's demonstrating
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Christ to them in the way in which we live, in the way in which we act. And that's where evangelism starts.
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It's by adorning the gospel of God. It's wearing it like a dress. And I was thinking how much more
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I need to do that in my own life. And my mind was drawn to a passage in Philippians 2, which again is a familiar passage.
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And I'm sure it has been preached here before. But by God's grace we're going to look at it and just see what
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He would give us from this passage in terms of being like Christ as the soul and the core of really being
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His disciple and then being able to make other disciples. How can we be like Christ?
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Philippians 2, verses 12 and 13. So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
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For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
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You know, this whole passage, the context of it is so awe -inspiring and frightening at the same time.
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Because when Paul starts off in Philippians 2, he talks about Christ and His attitude, which we need to demonstrate.
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And in verse 5 he says, have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who though He was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
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Himself. And have that same attitude of selflessness in your own lives.
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And as you're just choking at that and saying, how can I do that? How can I be like my
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Savior? He gets to verses 12 and 13 and answers the question in a very practical way.
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And so, that's what I'm just going to look at with you this evening. In verses 12 and 13, two necessary pursuits of a disciple of Jesus Christ, given to us by the
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Holy Spirit in this passage. And the first is this in verse 12, and these are real simple and real practical, and that is this fight to be habitually holy.
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The first necessary pursuit of being like Christ is to fight to be habitually holy.
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And the main imperative in this verse is, work out your salvation.
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And the idea there is literally to extract, like someone would extract honey from a honeycomb, or like someone would dig into a mine and draw gold or draw diamonds and pull them out through all the hard work that they would endeavor to exert to put something precious out of something.
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And so, Paul likens the Christian life that has been saved and redeemed, a soul that has been saved and redeemed, as that same kind of concept, a mind that needs to have the life of Christ drawn out of it, and it involves our effort.
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And it involves our effort not just on a once in a while basis, not just occasionally, not just when we're in church, but the idea here is all the time, habitually, every single moment of our being awake, we need to be working out our salvation, if it is truly precious to us.
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And I think the question that comes to our mind, which is going to be addressed through the rest of the text is, in what sense can we work out our salvation without being works -based, without being those that would ride on our own efforts, without being those that would try to endeavor to even replace maybe
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Jesus Christ and what He has done on the cross? In what sense can Paul say, work out your salvation?
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And I think, you know, the idea of even mining something that Christ has already placed in there brings up to me an illustration of flowers.
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You know, you take flowers and maybe you cut them off the tree that they're growing on, say roses, and you put them in a vase, and you stick them in your house, and you ask them to work out their beauty and their fragrance for you.
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Well, they'll do that for a little while, right? But what happens after one day, two days, three days?
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Well, not only do they stop emitting their beautiful fragrance, they actually start emitting a stench, they actually start becoming distasteful.
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And why? Because they aren't attached to the tree that gives them life, that gives them sap, that gives them what they need to be what they are.
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And Jesus used the same sort of illustration for us as His children, as His fruit. He said, if you want to really see fruit in your life, then what should you do?
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John 15, abide in me and my word in you, and you will bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.
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And so that's the idea. It's not works -based salvation, but it's just as you rest in Jesus Christ, and as you experience everything that Jesus Christ has done for you in your soul, you need to work out what's already there.
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You need to fight to be habitually holy. Is holiness a sporadic exercise for you?
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I know sometimes, you know, we can only be holy possibly when we're confronted, right? When somebody tells us we're not being holy.
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Or maybe just when you're around other holy men, it sort of is a motivating factor, because you see other holy men, and God can use that.
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But if that's the only thing that is making you holy, that's not enough. Are you content with your holiness?
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Are you saying, you know, I've arrived, maybe I have a few more areas that I need to work on, but I'm pretty good.
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As soon as you do that, 1 Corinthians 10, 12 says, take heed lest you fall.
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I know in my own life, I need to be more humble. I need to be more loving to my wife. I need to be more patient with my kids.
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I need to be more focused on the glory of Christ in my ministry. I need to be more content in His goodness.
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I need to be more fixed in His purposes. I'm not holy enough. And I think the longer you move in the
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Christian life, the more you see that I've got to keep working out, because the gulf between me and my holy
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God just gets greater and greater the more closer I get to Him. It's interesting that Paul even says, work out your own salvation.
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You know, it refers to the fact that we have this tendency sometimes in the church to be thinking about everybody else's salvation, but our own.
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And you will never be a disciple maker. You will never be an effective witness for the
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Lord Jesus Christ if you don't shepherd your own soul first. First off, you won't have credibility.
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You won't have authenticity. People will spot that a mile away. You know, try to minister just for a little while and preach great sermons and not really apply those own sermons in your life.
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You will be like a hollow vessel. And that will be seen evidently in your ministry.
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And that's why the Lord says, work out your own salvation, take responsibility, everyone in the church, for your own soul.
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And that can be the best form of then fellowship when you get together and spur one another on towards love and good deeds as we just see each one taking responsibility for their own sin, for their own soul, for their own sanctification.
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The church can just explode when, I mean, if I start focusing on my own sin,
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I don't think I'll have time for anybody else's sin if I really started focusing on my own sin.
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The reason I'm so consumed with my wife's sin and everybody else's sin is because I'm not thinking enough about how much sin
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I have in my own life. But when I'm focusing on my own sin,
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I can have a greater platform to shepherd others. Now there's three areas of examination in this verse.
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Again, it's so practical that can help us grow to fight the fight of habitual holiness.
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And the first is this, love to obey Christ, love to obey
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Christ. And you can ask yourself, do you love to obey Christ? Look at the atmosphere of this verse.
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Paul is not looking at this verse as a burdensome baton that he would just crash on somebody and said, work out your salvation.
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But look at the way he starts this verse, he says, so then my beloved. And it reflects his attitude of care and concern in terms of our relationship to the
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Lord Jesus Christ. And as he gently shepherds them, he says even, just as you have always obeyed.
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If you are a Christian, I don't need to necessarily say that there is no obedience in your life, but just as you have, from the moment you met
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Jesus Christ, been gripped with a love to obey him, so continue to do the same thing.
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You know, whenever holiness becomes just a matter of gritting our teeth and saying, oh man,
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I've got to have my quiet time this morning. The Lord doesn't want that. The Lord doesn't care for that.
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Oh man, I've got to forgive. I've got to be patient. And you're just fighting.
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And you're just not even enjoying the process of being like Jesus Christ.
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That is a stale offering that he rejects from his altar. And one of the first things that Paul recognizes is the same truth as what
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Jesus said in John 14, verse 15. He said, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.
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And the two go hand in hand. And so, if you want to really be a disciple of the
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Lord Jesus Christ, I've got to ask you, do you love Jesus Christ? And loving Jesus Christ involves loving his commandments.
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You cannot separate the two. And it is your delight, not just your duty, to be a disciple of the
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Lord Jesus Christ in your family, in your job, in every area of your life.
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Do you love to obey Christ? Now Paul gets even deeper into this truth of fighting the fight of habitual holiness by saying, are you holy when alone?
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Here's the second area of examination. Are you holy when you're alone? Look at this verse.
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He says, just as you've always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence.
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And Paul is saying, you know, you need to have a consistency in your salvation that is such that you would be holy not just in the same way, but in a greater way if I wasn't present.
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Even as the Apostle Paul, looking over your shoulder, you would be much more holy, even when you have no accountability.
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Isn't that a shocking truth? I mean, we think the only way in which we can be holy is when we have people holding us accountable, right?
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And when we've got people asking us questions, and those things are helpful, but ultimately sometimes those things can just be a crutch for us to not necessarily realize that the only accountability we need is the
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Lord Jesus Christ. And if we're constantly going to be dependent on men, when men leave, we will fall.
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And men will leave. Men won't always stay with us. And you need to look at your life and say, are you failing, particularly in those times when there's nobody around, when there's nobody watching you?
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Well, then you're not mining out the treasure that God has really placed in your life through the
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Lord Jesus Christ in the way that He has meant you to mine it out. You're not fully experiencing the joys of the
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Christian life in the way that He has meant you to experience it so that you could be all alone in the dark and still not be tempted to sin as you depend on His grace.
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Paul said, you don't have to be dashed because I'm in prison. You don't have to be dashed because you don't have an apostle looking over your shoulder.
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You have the Lord Jesus Christ, and that's enough. And you can be much more holy even in my absence, even in those times when there's nobody looking over you because the eye of God is upon you, and do you have a sense of that?
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And do you have a delight in that? Fight to be habitually holy by delighting and loving the
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Lord Jesus Christ, by concentrating on being holy when you're alone. And thirdly, by recognizing the seriousness of this battle.
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Here's a third area of examination. Do you recognize the seriousness of this battle that we fight against sin?
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You know, there's two ways to recognize the seriousness of this battle, and Paul talks about it.
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He says, work out your salvation with what? Fear and trembling. Fear and trembling.
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And fear really refers to alarm or reverence, and I think that could possibly indicate an attitude of knowing
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God being at work in your life. And trembling, I think, just refers to a sense of great dread and shock over your own sin.
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You know, there's two truths that we need to recognize when we fight the battle against sin, and that is
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God is holy and we are utterly sinful. And those two truths need to really motivate us to be serious about the battle that we fight against sin.
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Sin that is not reigning, but remains, and that we still need to war against, that resides in our heart, and that James says can easily drag us away and entice us and trap us before we even know it, and keep us in these traps that can be these strong habits that take a lot of work to break.
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You know, I think about Eskimos as an illustration on how sin works and how they capture wolves.
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And what they do is they take a knife and they stick a little blood on it, animal blood, and they stick it into the surface of the snow.
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And the wolf comes out because of his great sense of smell and smells that blood, and he moves towards that knife and he starts licking at the blood.
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And as he licks at that blood, he begins to ultimately lacerate his own tongue.
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But he doesn't begin to realize when he has begun to drink his own blood rather than just the blood on the knife, but the thirst, the lust, the intense desire that he has for blood causes him to just keep drinking until ultimately he just falls down dead on the snow.
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And the Eskimo just has to come out and grab that carcass and take it home. You know, that's how sin is.
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That's how our desires are. And do you recognize that's how your desires are? Where unless you kill sin in your life, it's going to kill you.
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And unless you have a sense of the great gulf that exists between you and your holy
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God, and unless you have a great sense of trembling over your own sin and fear over the holiness of God and how little you have of it, you won't take the battle seriously.
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And so Paul says, fight sin habitually. Fight sin habitually and fight for holiness habitually.
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How? By loving Christ, by concentrating on being holy even when you're alone, and by recognizing the seriousness of this battle.
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Now it's great that he doesn't stop there and he moves very quickly into verse 13, because the second practical method that can help us to be a disciple of the
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Lord Jesus Christ is this, feed completely on divine grace.
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Feed completely on divine grace. The ground of our work is not our own work.
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We are only working out what God is working in our hearts. And these two verses are so tied together.
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You know, verse 12 is the command and verse 13 is the reality that the command is based on. For it is
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God who is at work in you. And we cannot change our own hearts.
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What a humbling thought. We can only, and that's the idea, work out what
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God places in our souls. We can only begin to manifest in our actions and in our deeds and in our attitudes what
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God would do in penetrating the hardness of our souls and our hearts. And so to fight sin habitually and to fight for holiness habitually, we need to feed completely on divine grace.
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And there are two truths about the grace of God in our sanctification that can help us in this verse feed on him more and be more driven to that stream of grace and say,
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Lord, I never want to depart from your grace because it's the only way I can be like you.
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And the first is this. God is powerfully changing our souls.
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God is powerfully changing our souls. And the key to sanctification is to realize that we can never win until we can get a grip on our hearts.
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Proverbs 4 .23 says, Watch over your hearts with all diligence for out of them flow the springs of life.
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You know, in India we have men that we call watchmen. I don't know if you call them that here.
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And they're supposed to watch over your apartment or your house or your building and make sure that you don't have thieves coming in and stealing your place.
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And I've remembered so many times when I've come home late from work and I drive towards my apartment and I see these watchmen sitting at the gate and they're sleeping.
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And I think, oh, wow, that's really useful. You know, and then I have to honk my horn a couple of times and the guy gets up and pretends like he's been awake the whole time.
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But that's sometimes how we act as Christians, right? And it's because we don't see the seriousness of the battle and we don't necessarily see the need to be constantly working on it that we just fall asleep.
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And the area that we need to be focusing on and that God works His grace in by His great mercy is our hearts, where it really matters.
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Not just in our actions, but in our hearts first. In the mission control center.
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In our thinking, in our attitudes, in our desires, in our lusts, in our will.
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And that's one area that we can never change. We can never change. It's so easy to change actions.
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But it's impossible to change the heart. And that's why it's so great that we can feed on His grace and see
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Him change our heart in precious ways. You know, it's tremendous that the grace of God is so rich that He not only makes us positionally righteous in Christ, but He also makes us actually righteous on a day -by -day basis in the area of our hearts.
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And that's why Paul talks about the fact that it is
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God who is at work in you, both to will and to work.
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And you can see this wonderful order here. He works first in our will. He gives us holy desires.
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Not just emotions, not just passions, but intents and inclinations, a desire of dissatisfaction with sin and a longing to be holier, more righteous, and more genuine.
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And unless you have those, you can't have anything. And one of the first things you've got to ask
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God is, Lord, I don't just want to be reading Your Word in the morning just because I have to or just because someone's holding me accountable on it.
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I want to really love to do this. Lord, I just don't want to be doing nice things for my wife.
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I want to really love to do that. I want to really love to lay down my life for her.
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Give me a desire to do it. Because until I have that, I am not holy as You are holy in the area of my heart.
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Lord, by Your grace and through Your Word penetrating my mind, help me to change in my thinking, in what
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I love and in what I hate for Your sake. And then the
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Lord, after He works in that area, and you can see the order even, after He works in our will, He then produces good works.
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After He cleans the, as Christ was even rebuking the Pharisees, they only cleaned the outside of the cup, but Christ is able to work and help us to clean the inside of the cup and then the outside of the cup is cleaned too.
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And as He works in our will, He also works in helping us to work outside, in external actions, those deeds that are pleasing and precious to Him.
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So not just holy desires, but even holy actions. You know, the same word that is used for God's supernatural workings, when
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He created the pizza, a new heart in men is used here, both to will and to work.
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Because this is a supernatural thing, when we see deeds of righteousness that don't just stem from duty, but stem from the very core of our being, that's supernatural.
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We produce what God enables. So the first truth that can help us to feed constantly on divine grace is the fact that God is powerfully changing our souls.
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And every time you approach the Word of God, you're going to be impacted, you're going to be stunned, you're going to be transformed.
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If you truly approach Him with a sense of, Lord feed me, Lord mold me,
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Lord break me, Lord shape me, He always answers according to His will.
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And His will is the holiness of men. And that leads us into the second truth that helps us to really feed on divine grace and that is this,
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God is passionate for us to be like Christ. God is passionate for us to be like Christ.
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See how the verse ends, for it's God who is at work in you, both to will and to work, for His good pleasure.
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You know, it is the delight of God, it is the passion of God, His will and His gracious resolve is to complete our salvation.
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To not just leave us as unfinished works but to complete our salvation and all we got to do is just keep going to His throne room, keep going to His Word and He is going to be delighted to break through into your life and complete that salvation for you.
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Isn't that so comforting? God is more passionate than I am, for sure, for my own sanctification.
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And I don't work at this alone. And that's why holiness is really for me to love what
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God loves and to be passionate about His passion and to just follow in His footsteps. What an amazing, amazing balance this text has.
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You know, one of the two problems that Christians face in trying to be disciples of Jesus Christ is to either be lazy or to be legalistic.
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And both those problems are refuted in this passage. We either just sit back and say, you know, let go and let
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God and He is going to do everything and I believe in the sovereignty of God and I am maybe a ten point
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Calvinist and I am not going to do anything. And what does
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God say? He says, you are in sin, work out your salvation, fight to be habitually holy.
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And on the other hand, you have these groups of Christians that just say, you know, it's all duty. I've just got to be doing this, this and this or else
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I've lost my justification. God may not accept me into heaven anymore if I don't, you know, share the gospel with five people today.
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Praise God, it's not based on that. And in the end, He's not looking for just external duty and external actions but He's looking for actions and a beauty that would stem from us abiding in Him and abiding in His work and abiding in His sanctifying power and recognizing that it's only by God's grace that we can produce any growth in the
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Christian life. You know, Alexander McLaren once wrote, and he ends with these words that I would end with, we may have as much of God as we will.
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Christ puts the keys of the treasure chamber into our hands and bids us take all that we want.
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If a man is admitted into the bullion vault of a bank and told to help himself and comes out with one cent, whose fault is it that he is poor?
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God has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies and it is but our joy to work it out.
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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, You have done an amazing work in our life because You are an amazing
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God. We just stand in awe of You and we stand in awe of Your power and we thank
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You that we can even be called Your disciples, Lord, unworthy wretches such as us. That we can even seek to say we want to be like Jesus Christ.
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That is amazing grace that could turn us around to even have those attitudes.
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Lord help us to be those that would walk into the vault of heaven that You have opened for us and be rich.
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Be rich not just with silver and gold but be rich with riches in our soul that can never fade away, that this world needs to see so that they would be drawn to You.
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We pray that You would be pleased to magnify Yourself in our lives and we pray that for Your sake.