A Word in Season: Children of God (Philippians 2:15)

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Do you know who you are? If God the Father by his gracious spirit has called you to faith in Jesus Christ, has drawn you to himself, has declared you righteous in his sight and brought you into his family, then you are a son of God, a child of the

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Most High. That's what the Apostle John wonders at in 1 John chapter 3 when he says to his readers,

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Beloved, now we are sons of God. Yes, we don't yet know everything that we shall be, except that we shall be like the

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Lord Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead. But we do know that we are going to be like him.

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We are going to be like the incarnate son of God in his glory. And if we are sons of God, insists the

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Apostle, then we ought to act like our heavenly father and act like his only begotten son in the way that we relate both to him and to one another and to his truth and so on.

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The Apostle Paul insists upon precisely the same thing in Philippians chapter 2.

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Again, he refers to God's people as his beloved ones. And he says, I want you to obey not just when

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I'm there, but when I'm not. I want you to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God is already at work in you, both the will and to do for his good pleasure.

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And what will that look like and what will its effect be? Well, verse 14 of Philippians 2, do all things without complaining and disputing that you may become blameless and harmless.

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Children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain.

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And again, the very core of that is their identity. Children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.

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If we are God's sons, if we are his family, his children, by that holy and blessed adoption, then we ought to do all things without complaining or disputing.

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We ought not to be marked by that murmuring spirit that is found so often in the world, a basic discontent with what

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God has done with us, a resentment of our lot in life, or disputing, constantly at one another's throats, always nipping and biting at one another and dragging one another down.

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No, we ought to avoid such things that we might become blameless and harmless.

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No one, even the most pernickety and carping of critics, should be able to look at God's people and say,

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Is that Christianity? I mean, look at them. Who wants anything to do with that?

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Rather, by our contentment and by our peaceableness, blameless and harmless, we should prove children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom we shine as lights in the world.

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If we are sons of God, if we are children of God, then we ought to be reflecting something of the beauty and the glory of our

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God and King, of his Son, Jesus Christ, of the work of the

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Spirit in our hearts. It ought to be plain that we do not belong to this present evil world.

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You'll notice that we live in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. We live in an environment that is full of twistedness and spiritual ugliness, of moral perversion.

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It may not be on the most gross scale. It may not be always and everywhere the most scandalous.

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But there ought to be something of distinctive purity. There ought to be something that is clear and clean and straight and true about God's people in this world.

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And that makes us to shine as lights, reflecting the glory of God, manifesting the truth of the gospel to all who are around us, those who are holding fast the word of life.

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That is why we sit under the truth of God and hear it preached to us, Lord's Day by Lord's Day.

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It's why we drink it in when we can during the week. It's why we love to hear the voice of the

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Good Shepherd, so that taught and trained by him, guided and directed in his way, we may prove children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom we can and should and by his grace do shine as lights in the world, thus proving our identity and pointing always to him who loved us and saved us, our great