The Regenerate's Duty to Do Good
Belgic Confession • Sermon • Submitted
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Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
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.
Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.
Scripture Lesson: Philippians 2:5-18
Belgic Confession: Article 24
Sermon Title: The Regenerate’s Duty to Do Good
In the last few morning services in Corsica, we’ve been working through the account of Samson. If you haven’t been there and it’s been a while since you’ve read Judges 13 to 16, I’ll summarize it for you: Samson was a flawed judge. He told lies. He was promiscuous and married women that were not Israelites. He likely broke all the restrictions placed on Nazirites which he was called to be. I bring that up here, because I meant to say this morning that if you feel like all we’ve focused on lately is what you should not be doing and how bad we are, tonight hopefully will be more about what we should be doing, a little more positive encouragement for application.
It’s been a little while since we last looked at the Belgic Confession, but if you think back earlier in the summer, we were on this track of looking at how salvation comes to us. That has taken us through topics like election, the incarnation, the atonement of Jesus, his justice and mercy, righteousness, and most recently justification. Without that framework, Article 24 which we read and found to focus on our sanctification has no standing. In order for us to consider the Christian life as needing to look different from the life of a non-believer, or even wondering if it should, we need to understand what Jesus has done for us, how we have been forgiven and saved.
We come into our message tonight assuming and believing what we’ll hear in verses 6 through 11. Because Jesus came to this world and because of what he did, we are changed—so what does that look like for us now? That’s essentially what sanctification gets at, and I recognize that might not be a popular topic for many today. We find ourselves saying we don’t want to appear judge-y or hypocritical or “holier than thou.” Yet, what we professed earlier and what we’ll explore tonight is that we can’t help but look different if we are regenerate or reborn in Christ.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, if I may summarize the thread that our confession gave us, that we want to hold onto and study with God’s word, here it is. We believe that true faith, a work of God, regenerates us and makes us new creatures, causing us to live a new life, freed from sin’s slavery. This faith is worked through love, doing the works God commands, works that he sanctifies and makes good. For us they are our duty, for him they are glory.
That is the core message of sanctification. With salvation, we have been changed. We have been freed from sin, freed for God’s pleasure. God doesn’t just save us but he continues to work in us that we might do and commit ourselves to doing what we ought to have been doing all along, and God gets the glory. It’s really that simple.
Yet it seems that pastors, and I do include myself in this, we don’t always or even necessarily often preach in detail about doing good. We struggle with that. We often find it easier to go through sins and explore all the nooks and crannies of things of we shouldn’t be doing. In Calvinist Reformed circles, we like to hammer away at how depraved human beings truly are. But then when it comes to what we should be doing, I at least find myself boiling it down to love God and love your neighbors. If a thought or action does not fit into those categories than should you really be doing it? That’s not wrong, it’s not leading people astray from truth, but could I and other pastors develop more what good actions and sanctified goodness looks like?
That’s the approach that we’re taking to Philippians 2 tonight. In Paul’s day and our day, we continue to live in a crooked and depraved generation. I don’t think we would disagree—we are in a generation of name-calling, of confusion over sexual orientation and gender, of people saying nice things about Hugh Hefner who figured out how to make money by publishing pictures of women without their clothes on—which has added to the destruction of healthy human relationships. Yet in all the depravity, how might we “shine like stars in the universe?” I want to offer three sanctified actions or three sanctified commitments tonight.
First of all, having been saved by God’s mercy and grace, we ought to humble ourselves following the example of Jesus. Verses 6 through 8 make it clear, “your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” What part of Christ’s attitude? That which we see in his coming to earth and everything that followed. He was God, but on earth did not consider himself equal to God, he humbled himself in his humanity—being fully obedient to God.
How do we take up that attitude? We recognize first that we are not God. In recognizing what we are not, we also remind ourselves of what we are—that is, we are created by God. That’s easy to say, but it takes work to stay committed to. To recognize that we do not control our destiny in life. To comprehend and make peace with the fact that we don’t get to determine what is best for every single person on the planet. We might even admit that we don’t always know what’s best for ourselves.
But it also means that we grow in a right relationship with the true God. Most of us are probably okay with saying, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” But in saying that, we have to be clear about who God is and isn’t. God is not us, God is not whatever we have generically chosen to worship, but God is the Lord—the one who has revealed himself to us. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
To be sanctified and to exhibit humility also means maintaining our part by way of obedience. Using this passage as our guide, obedience can be summarized fairly simply. Look at verses 9 through 11. To be obedient involves bowing to the Savior, it means worshiping him. Maybe to this group gathered here that doesn’t seem such a big deal, and yet worship has gotten mixed up in our world. People worship athletes and teams at stadiums. We worship with money and credit cards at malls. We worship our stomachs at buffets. We name singing competitions with the word “idol” in them, and are okay with that. Worship is not missing in our world, but it is not always properly designated. That is what sanctified believers need to commit to.
In our obedience before God, we must confess him and him alone as “Lord.” This certainly connects with worship, you worship your lord or lords, but do we locate our ourselves, your whole self, your thoughts and actions, your obligations, all under Christ? There’s nothing wrong with enjoy the creation, with enjoying sports, with enjoying good fashion or good food, but who has control, who has influence? We grow in our sanctification by being reminded that if we wrongly assign or practice worship or submission, then we are not practicing true humility.
The second sanctified action that this passage teaches us comes in verse 12, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” The Belgic Confession pointed to Galatians 5 verse 6. Sanctification is not a cold, holy, and pious life, but it’s a fruitful life, a life of “faith working through love.” If you got to Galatians 5, Paul is writing about faith expressed in love as “the only thing that counts.” To be circumcised or not, that’s not where salvation rests, it’s about faith worked through love. In that same chapter, we read about the fruits of the Spirit which will be evident if the Holy Spirit is in us. The chapter concludes with these words, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.”
Back to Philippians 2 again we’re looking at this concept of working out salvation with fear and trembling. Dr. Robert Lightner proposes that this means, “to put into practice in their daily living, what God had worked in them by His Spirit. They were not told to work for their salvation but to work out the salvation God had already given them.” Working out one’s salvation is to say, what did Jesus do for you and what has he taught? Do those things.
If your salvation includes forgiveness, mercy, and grace, then you having been saved should become more and more consistent in your practice of those virtues. If Jesus taught about bringing freedom for the prisoner and oppressed, of feeding the hungry, of clothing the naked—if the gospel goes beyond just eternal life to a more flourishing creation as well—are you involved in those things? Do we take opportunities to worship and visit at prisons? Do we provide food either to a pantry or taking someone to a meal or working at a soup kitchen? Do we give during clothing drives, or ask people what they need? How can we help?
These things are good, but it may be difficult, it may hurt to do what we ought to be doing. So Lightner adds, “This outworking was to be done ‘with fear and trembling,’ with a complete trust in God and not in themselves.” In turning to the Almighty God to aid you in the process of doing good is not something we should take lightly, but our prayer is God we are insignificant and yet we believe you care about these things. Will you show yourself and help us? This is how we might work out of the salvation we have and hold dear.
If you have a Bible open, you might recognize, I haven’t finished the sentence that starts in verse 12 and ends in 13, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” That part makes it clear, we as creation and not God, we as obedient to God, do not determine what is ultimately good. We must look to God himself and what he has revealed in his Word that is good. We don’t get to label every single cause and organization as Christian just because we like it. No, we must test them against God’s word, is God glorified through this? Is his redemption being brought about and furthered through this group or this action? This is how we do what is good.
This leads us to our final point tonight. A third commitment of sanctified goodness is, verse 16, “to hold out the word of life.” How do you follow through on your “duty to do good?” We make sure that the truth of Jesus Christ, the only word of life, has been shared in the world, in the crooked and depraved world. That people might know the hope and the reasoning behind who you and I are and why we do the things we do—they must be given the message that we hold. This doesn’t guarantee widespread conversions, numbers of new believers soaring through the roof, but will we give the answer to the hope that we have, that the Spirit might nurture that seed?
This is why it’s so important that we understand the gospel and understand what Jesus has done. That we, not just our congregations but Christians, can tell the same story of Jesus and lead to the same accounting of creation and the fall, of sin and salvation. Paul says, “Do all this without complaining or arguing.” God’s purpose, what we hear at the end of verse 13, is furthered when our arguments against each other can fall away. People that are wondering about the faith wouldn’t have to say, “Well, that’s not what I heard from that church down the street, why’s that?” If the body of Christ could be united around the truth, the witness for salvation could be so much greater.
I’m not going to solve how we bring 10s of thousands of denominations with all sorts of theological differences back together tonight, I know that. But that’s why it is so important that we as local churches and believers can agree as much as possible. That it wouldn’t be my word of life versus your word of life, but that our testimony about Jesus Christ and salvation in him alone, that would be our word of life, a word which we study and point to in God’s word.
To get to that point involves humility, humility in personality as well as obedience to God. It involves being willing to act on our commitments, and to know what Jesus has given us. But it also means trusting that God wills and acts according to his good purpose, not always our personal preferences. Will we, will you and I, shine like stars in the universe, honoring our God-given duty to do good? Amen.