Working Out Our Salvation

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Philippians 2:1-13

I’ve told this story a few times before, but there is no hurt in redundancy.  It makes things stick.  There was an Old Order Mennonite man standing at a subway stop in New York City.  While he waited, a long-haired “Jesus freak” or one of the Jesus People came to him and asked, “Are you saved?”  Well, the Elderly Mennonite stood there a minute pondering the question and finally answered, “I suppose you should ask my neighbours.”  In the past I have explained this story from the perspective of individual eternal salvation because that is immediately where Christians in the evangelical world would go with it.  We assume that what the Jesus People fellow meant was had the Mennonite gentleman accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour so that he may go to heaven when he died.  Being more aware of the community aspect of the Christian faith, the Mennonite gentleman’s answer indicated that our eternal salvation, if valid, would be evidenced by our conduct towards our neighbours.  Faith cannot be separated from works.  As James writes, “Faith without works is dead” (Jm. 2:26).

Well, I would like to monkey about with that story a bit in an effort to explain what Paul means in Philippians 2:12-13, “…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.”  I hope that maybe we will gain an expanded definition of what salvation is and a greater awareness that God is working in us as the catalyst to salvation.

First, I want to tell you about the Jesus People movement.  My first exposure to them was from that old ‘70’s trucking song “Convoy”.  The Rubber Duck gets a convoy of trucks together to go speed across the USA thinking that the police can’t stop a massive line of tractor-trailers for speeding.  The convoy gets going and finally the police call out the National Guard to block the road and C.W. McCall sings: “There's armoured cars and tanks and jeeps, and rigs of every size.  Yeah, them chicken coops was full of bears and choppers filled the skies.  Well, we shot the line.  We went for broke with a thousand screamin' trucks and eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a Chartreuse microbus.”  

When I thought of those those long-haired friends of Jesus what I pictured was simply hippies on a drug induced Jesus-trip.  In reality, though the Jesus People were hippies, they were quite something more than strung out at Woodstock and all that.  The Jesus People were actually looking for an alternative lifestyle to that Hippie drug culture that was looking for an alternative to the Vietnam War and living the American Dream.  The Jesus People rather wanted to be like the early church.  So, they lived in communes and shared their possessions.  Healings and miracles were known to happen among them.  Though they looked like hippies, the Jesus People truly resembled the small, household churches of the early church.  They sprang up and became a movement that lasted only about ten years, but their legacy includes contemporary worship and contemporary Christian music.  

With Jesus People’s way of life in mind, maybe what that long-haired friend of Jesus gentleman meant when he asked the elder Mennonite, “Are you saved?” wasn’t “Are you going to go to Heaven when you die”, but rather “Do you know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour of all Creation and he has delivered you from all things in this world that oppress you and keep you from knowing and worshipping the true God.  Come with me and meet my friends for the Kingdom of God is here and you can truly live in it.”  Come with me and meet my friends and live in the Kingdom of God is a far cry from “Are you going to Heaven when you die?  Salvation as this friend of Jesus had experienced it in the Jesus People communities was a “this world” thing as much as it was a “coming world” thing.  Salvation could be lived out right now rather than something elusive to be waited for after death.  We really do the salvation that God wrought in, through, and as Jesus a disservice when we limit it to being simply about what happens after death. 

In the early church, salvation had as much if not more to do with present situations than with one’s eternal state.  The Jews who became the first church were waiting expectantly in great hope for God to act in their lives by sending his Messiah, the Anointed One, who would deliver his people from the evil oppression of the Romans, from their own corrupt monarchy, and from their crooked priesthood.  They also expected that God’s Messiah would then establish the reign of God, the Kingdom of God on Earth and that the Holy Spirit would be poured upon God’s people and that all nations would flock to the Messiah to be healed.  Throw in there also an open can of whoop on all evil spiritual powers as well.  The early Christians were not so much concerned about their after-life which to them was the expectation of being with Jesus when they died while they waited for the resurrection of the dead as much as they were that their hope for salvation to come about in their lives right now.  They wanted God to put things right in the world right now.  That was Salvation (capital S).

And so it is with us or should be.  Salvation is here in our present reality.  God is at work in us causing us, enabling us to will and work for his good pleasure.  Paul said, “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.”  That little word “for” there is a powerful little word.  It structures the sentence to mean that God is here working in us, prompting us and making us able to work out our salvation.  

At the beginning of chapter 2 Paul tells us how to work out our salvation.  He writes: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.  Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.  Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,…”.  Even though Paul uses the word “if” at the beginning and makes the whole thing sound iffy, according to the rules of Greek grammar Paul isn’t being iffy.  He’s actually stating what is true among the Philippians.  They did have encouragement among themselves, comfort in love, affection and sympathy.  They have all this because of their relationship with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit who dwells in and among them.  Therefore, they could share the same love in Christ.  They could be harmonious and single-minded in their pursuit of living a lifestyle worthy of the Gospel of Christ.  They had all this communion in love because of the free gift of God’s working in them…and so do we.  

Since this is the case, the way we are to work out our salvation is by not doing things from selfish motives.  But rather, do all things in humility.  This is a difficult task for it means before we do or say or not do or say anything, we should do an inventory of our motives.  Is it for selfish motives that I do this or is it according to humility?  We must look after the interests of each other as if those interests were our own.  We must regard even those who are the most obnoxious among us as being more significant than ourselves.  God has enabled us to be this way – humble – by giving us the Holy Spirit – the mind or mindedness that Jesus has – and we must do our best to follow through on it because this life-changing, deep love expressed in serving each other is what salvation is and looks like.  It is what God looks like.  So, let us live from the mindedness of Christ that is in us, not trying to be gods.  Rather, let us in love be each other’s servant.  Amen.

The Beautiful Mind of Christ

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:9-31; Philippians 2:1-13 
          The movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, told the story of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. of Bluefield, WV and his struggle with schizophrenia.  It begins with his college struggle of being a genius but unable to come up with anything unique until the day when in a flash of insight he revolutionizes economic theory.  He went on to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.  Sadly, at age 31 he became delusional with paranoid schizophrenia and spent the next 20 or so years in and out of hospitals, but still functioning as a brilliant mathematician.  Nash's story is remarkable because he was able to use his rationality to work his way around his schizophrenia without medication.  He came to see that his politically oriented delusions were hopeless wastes of intellectual effort and so he chose to came back to the rational world of scientific thinking.  The return to rationality was not a joyous thing for him for he understood first hand that rationality was a limitation he placed upon himself, a limitation that kept him from experiencing the fullness of his reality as he knew it.  Nash's case is an exception and his story is by no means meant to encourage people with mental illness to stop taking medications.

         "A Beautiful Mind" did a lot to raise public awareness as to what paranoid schizophrenia is like from the viewpoint of the person suffering with it.  It disorders the mind with a disorientation that affects the entirety of a person’s life.  Due to chemical imbalances in the brain schizophrenic’s become delusional, meaning they follow a wrong mind - a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality and they stick to it despite what almost everybody else believes and the incontrovertible and obvious evidence to the contrary. A paranoid schizophrenic’s mind will function like: “I saw a red car, therefore my food is being poisoned.”  They cannot help but believe the delusion is true reality because the chemical make up of their brain is saying its real as a "normally" functioning saying "I saw a red car, therefore there are red cars in the world."  In response to this delusion the schizophrenic will enter into an unquestionable world of diet control and trying to determine who is doing the poisoning.

          We tend to want to think of the mind as being that part of us that thinks.  We go to school to train our minds to function in a world where everybody thinks alike.  Yet, the mind is much more than just our ciphering mechanism, our reason.  The mind is that part of us by which we understand and order our existence and it involves particularly what we believe about reality.  Dr. Nash in his autobiography states that the way he keeps his existence orderly is to keep his delusions, his false beliefs, at bay by consciously choosing to live in a world that operates according to the beliefs of scientific rationality.  He complains that rationality is a limitation placed upon the human mind, which in his case limits his relationship to reality as he knows it.  His delusional world is apparently quite brilliant.  When we say we have a sound mind we mean that we function according to acceptable beliefs about reality.  People who live functionally with schizophrenia must choose which mind they are going to live in if the can.  Indeed, that is what the medication is help with and again Dr. Nash's case is an exception if not an anomaly.  Unfortunately, the reality that they truly believe to be the real world is not what jives with the reality of nearly everybody else.  Summing up, the mind is not just that part of us that thinks.  
          In the biblical worldview, the mind is that part of the person by which we understand and order our existence.  It deals with truth and how one lives accordingly.  What the mind believes to be “the truth” is what we will order our lives around.  Indeed, biblically speaking sin is primarily a problem of the mind not of behaviour and morals.  Alcoholics Anonymous has the saying, "It's not the drinking.  It's the stinking thinking."  With addiction, it is the mind that needs to be dealt with, the spiritual mind, the relationship with God and others if there is to be any reprieve from the disease.

          The topic of the mind comes up quite often in the New Testament.  Actually, the New Testament Greek word for repentance is metanoia.  Meta means with and noia means mind.  Therefore, the root meaning of repentance in the Bible is “with mindedness”.  The call to repentance is for us to have in us the same mind that was in Christ Jesus – a sincere love for God that affects our lives to the point of wanting nothing more than his will for our lives and to live accordingly.  Indeed, our repentance is a gift from him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who brings into us a new mindedness which our sin driven mind struggles against.  He puts his mindedness in us, his understanding of reality and drive to serve his
Father, that we might choose to understand and order our lives according to it and together become with minded in Christ as new humanity reconciled to God and in unity with one another.

          Paul tells us, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose (1 Cor. 1:10).”  “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind (Phil 2:1-2).”  Most importantly, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8).”  Is Paul here inviting us to enter into a world of delusional thinking, a world that does not jive with the reality to which most people seem to subscribe?  We could handle a reality that says the virtue of humility is a good thing.  But, Paul here seems to be inviting us into a world of poor mental health.  In a world where self-realization and being all you can be is considered the definitive healthy mindset, it would seem wrong to invite people to a world of dying to the self, a world marked by the wisdom of the cross and Jesus' power to save by it. 

          Christ Jesus’ mind apparently operated according to the unquestionable love of God, a love that led to a life lived in perfect obedience to the will of God the Father.  He did not question his love for the Father nor his Father’s love for him despite the incontrovertible evidence against it…the way he was publicly scorned and his death on the cross.  As he is the Beloved Son with whom the Father is well pleased, displeasing the Father was something he would not do because of love.  In adoration of his Father he continually offered his life a living sacrifice to do his Father’s will, an act of offering that led to the cross.  In the Holy Spirit Christ Jesus gives us to know and understand his mindedness that we might also love God the Father by offering ourselves to do his will as living sacrifices in thanks and in praise.  This leads to our dying to ourselves.   If we choose to live in his mind, we will have to let go of our old one.

          One final delusional thought, the mind of Christ is not simply the property of us as individuals.  It is our, this congregation’s, every congregation’s, way of life.  Having the mind of Christ means the church is fundamentally about being a group of people who relate to one another according to Christ’s mind.  We love God because he first loved us.  Because we love him we offer ourselves as living sacrifices in thanks and praise as Jesus did.  In this self-sacrifice God teaches and empowers us to love others as he loves all, unconditionally.  This is the word of the cross which is the power of God for us who are being saved.  It is the same power by which he raised Jesus from death.  The same power by which he creates and sustains the entire creation.  Sound delusional? Amen.

God Is Working in You All…So Work Out Your Salvation

Text: Philippians 2:1-13
There was an Old Order Mennonite man standing at a subway stop in New York City. If you can imagine him – black plainclothes, long beard, wide-brimmed hat. While he waits, a long-haired “Jesus freak” or one of the Jesus People came to him and asked, “Are you saved?” Well, the Elderly Mennonite stood there a minute pondering the question and finally answered, “I suppose you should ask my neighbours.”

In the past I have explained this story from the perspective of individual eternal salvation because that is immediately where Christians in the evangelical world would go with it. We assume that the Jesus People fellow was wanting to know if the Mennonite gentleman had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour so that he may go to heaven when he dies. Yet, the Mennonite gentleman, being more aware of the community aspect of the Christian faith, answers indicating that our eternal salvation, if valid, would be evidenced now by our conduct towards our neighbours. Faith cannot be separated from works of love. As James writes, “Faith without works is dead” (Jm. 2:26).

Well, this morning I would like to monkey about with that story a bit in an effort to explain what Paul means in Philippians 2:12-13, “…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.” The end result is that I hope we will have an expanded definition of what salvation is and a greater awareness that the Trinity is working in us as the catalyst to salvation.

I must note that the possessive pronoun “his” is not in the Greek text though nearly all English translations throw it in there. Philippians 2:13 is best translated “For God is the one effecting in you both to will and to work for the furtherance of the well pleasing.” The Greek word for “well pleasing”, eudokia, is literally “good thinking” which is being minded upon the things of the Trinity rather than the things of humanity. In the Biblical world one's thinking, the things one is minded towards drives the conduct of life. Jesus set his mind towards Jerusalem and the cross. We should therefore set our minds on being conformed to his mindedness as Paul says in verse five “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” which he follows up with the Christ-hymn. This way of life, the Jesus way of life could be called Cruciformity.  The self-emptying, community building way of love which leads to the cross is the well-pleasing mindset we have in Christ.

First, I want to tell you about the Jesus People movement. My first exposure to them was from that old ‘70’s trucking song “Convoy”. The truck driver known as the Rubber Duck on the CB radio gets a convoy of trucks together to go speed across the USA thinking that the police can’t stop a massive line of tractor-trailers for speeding. The convoy gets going and finally the police call out the National Guard to block the road and C.W. McCall sings: “There's armoured cars and tanks and jeeps, and rigs of every size. Yeah, them chicken coops was full of bears and choppers filled the skies. Well, we shot the line. We went for broke with a thousand screamin' trucks and eleven long-haired Fiends of Jesus in a Chartreuse microbus.” For me, those long-haired Friends of Jesus were simply hippies on a drug induced Jesus-trip. In reality, yes, the Jesus People movement were hippies, but they were looking for an alternative lifestyle to the drug culture, the Vietnam War, and the American Dream. They wanted to be like the early church. So, they lived in communes and shared their possessions. Healings and “miracles” were known to happen among them. Though they looked like hippies, the Jesus People movement truly resembled the early church. They lasted only ten years, but their legacy includes what we call contemporary worship and contemporary Christian music.

With that way of life in mind, maybe what that long-haired friend of Jesus gentleman meant by asking, “Are you saved?” was “Do you know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour of all Creation and he has delivered you from all things in this world that oppress you and keep you from knowing and worshipping the true God. Come with me and meet my friends for the Kingdom of God is here and you can truly live in it.” Salvation as he had experienced it in the Jesus People communities was a “this world” thing as much as it was a “coming world” thing. We really do a disservice to the salvation God wrought in, through, and as Jesus the Christ when we limit it to being simply about what happens after death. Salvation as far as the Bible is concerned is the Trinity's acting to deliver not only his people but more so the entirety of his Creation from evil powers that oppress.

In the early church, salvation had more to do with present situations than one's eternal state. The Jews who became the first church were waiting expectantly in great hope for God to act in their lives by sending his Messiah, the Anointed One, who would deliver his people from the evil oppression of the Romans, from their own corrupt monarchy, and from their crooked priesthood. They also expected that God’s Messiah would then establish the reign of God, that the Holy Spirit would be poured upon God’s people, and that all nations would flock to the Messiah to be healed. Throw in there also an open can of whoop on all evil spiritual powers which worked through idolatry. The early Christians were not really concerned about their after life other than the expectation of the resurrection of the dead. Their hope was for salvation to come about in the now of their lives, their hope was for Jesus' eminent return and his establishing his kingdom here on earth. All definitions of salvation must find its roots in this coming event.

The Song of Zechariah at Luke 1:68-79 reflects this well: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” This song truly portrays that the first Christians expected the Trinity to act to save them in their present lives from all oppressive powers and the God of Israel did exactly that in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth who by his life, death, resurrection, and ascension and the free gift of the Holy Spirit has reconciled the world to the Trinity’s very self.

And so it is with us, salvation is here in our present reality. The Trinity is at work in us causing us, enabling us to will and work for the well-pleasing, for Cruciformity – the self-emptying way of love which leads to the cross. Did you know that repentance begins with the Trinity working in us to bring about the desire to turn to him and not the other way around? Because of sin we are truly unable to “repent” apart from a work of the Trinity’s grace upon us. The Greek word we translate as repentance in Greek is “metanoia” which quite literally means “with-minded”, to be with-minded with Jesus. Paul tells us to work out our salvation fearfully for the Trinity is working in us. That little word “for” there is a powerful little word. It structures the sentence to mean that God’s working in us comes before our ability to work for him. The Triune God of Grace first saves us and then we must live in that salvation. It’s like the emancipation of the slaves in the States. When freedom was decreed, they had to go live as free people and that was scary and difficult for them for they had only known slavery. So the truth today is that our faithfulness, our working out of our salvation is preceded by, established by, and enabled by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working grace in us.

At the beginning of chapter 2 Paul tells us how to work out our salvation. He writes: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,…”. Even though Paul uses the word “if” at the beginning and makes the whole thing sound “iffy”, according to the rules of Greek grammar Paul isn’t being iffy here. He’s actually using a rhetorical device to state what is certainly true among the Philippians. There is encouragement among them. There is comfort in love. There is affection and sympathy. These well-pleasing things are in their midst because of their relationship with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit who dwells in and among them. Therefore, they are able to share the same love in Christ. They can now be harmonious and single-minded in their pursuit of living a lifestyle worthy of the Gospel of Christ – the life of Cruciformity. The Philippians had this communion in love because of the free gift of the Trinity’s working in them…and so do we.

Since this is the case, the way we are to work out our salvation is as Paul instructs us by not doing anything from selfish motives. But rather, doing all things in humility. This is a difficult task for it means before we do or not do anything and before we say or not say anything we have to do an inventory of our motives. Is our mindset self-thinking or Trinity-thinking. Is it for selfish motives or in humility? We must look after the interests of each other as if those interests are our own. We must regard even those who are the most obnoxious among us as being more significant than ourselves. The Trinity has enabled us to be this way, the way of Jesus and we must do our best to follow through on it for it is what salvation is and looks like. Salvation in practice looks like the way of the cross for the way of the cross is is what the Trinity looks like in practice. The Trinity is as he does therefore let us be as he has done. Let us live from the cruciform mindedness of Christ Jesus that is in us by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us in love die to ourselves and be each others slave. Amen.