Let This Mind Be in You
Champions for God
[Presentation 1 of 6] Set for the Defense of the Gospel (Philippians 1:7-17)

Larry Kirkpatrick, Weimar Institute Retreat, Thursday, October 16pm
Monterey Bay Academy, beachside.

Dished up and presented as role-models today, we have a troubled set of offerings. Whether the movie action hero, the professional athlete, the popular musician, or the photo-shopped female beauty-model, the popular persons fed to us today through the media but rarely show themselves to be an inspiring bunch. Some of them have been convicted, some are awaiting trial for scandal, and some still haven't been caught (but will be in a few months). And during these next few days we are going to hear what one person has to say who might not seem very different. You see, this person went to prison—repeatedly. But it wasn't for a sexual crime or a political scandal or for insider trading; it was because here was a man who was set for the defense of the gospel.

His name was Paul. He was a champion for God.

Philippians is called one of the prison epistles, because Paul wrote it while incarcerated in Rome. There is a saying popular among some Christians, namely, if you were put on trial for being one, could you be convicted? Nobody has to ask that question of Paul. We already know the answer.

Partakers of His Grace

Here he is, prisoner to the authority of the state. In just a few years he will be beheaded. That happens sometimes. On this somber note, let's open our Bibles to Philippians 1:7, where we read from part way through the verse. Paul said that “Both in my bonds, and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, ye all are partakers of my grace.”

We, with Paul in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, are partakers of his grace. We stand with him. When a true believer is locked away or persecuted for his faith, when his work is bound up by forces antagonistic to the truth of God, then we all share in that brother's or sister's bonds. They might be imprisoned as was Paul, or they might be hindered by some other means. If hindered, we are still partakers—participants—in the same grace, the same activated faith, that Paul experienced.

But Paul said that this grace was available for situations of bondage and also for situations of freedom: “And in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.” None here today is locked away in a prison for your faith. In all likelihood, but few, if any of us, have even faced that prospect. But we have to ask ourselves, if we are going to be Christian people, then are not we ourselves also called to defend and confirm the gospel?

How would you go about defending the gospel? The gospel is, at one level, meant to be a living reality in the life. The truth, after all, will set us free (John 8:32)—it makes a difference. But again, the gospel is also an idea. It is a theological idea—an idea about God. How do you become a defender of an idea?

Are we able to distinguish between the velveteen ideas of false, or simply misled teachers today, and the solid words of truth? Do we know the difference between being moved by an emotional appeal, something that sounds as if it is right, versus having a lucid comprehension of the ideas presented themselves?

What the Gospel Did for Paul

We all know what the gospel is, but really, how deep is our understanding? If we will be absolutely honest with ourselves, we may admit that, for many of us, our understanding of the plan of redemption is in some ways superficial.

Here is what the gospel did for Paul—verses 8-11:

For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

We should be growing in love and in our Christian sensibilities, in order to live without sinning from here on out. Our lives should be, in the present tense, filled with the fruits of righteousness.

Now just here we have to come to a screeching, grinding halt. Paul prayed, “that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ.” We've hit a theological speed-bump here. Paul has just prayed a heretical prayer.

Or has he?

You see, what he just asked for is out of the common grind. The culture within which we function is like a sickly moral smog. It seems to produce characters instead of character. The gospel to which some adhere is one that is more like a comfortable scratching behind the ears than a knocking on the heart's door. Yes, Paul wants the Philippians' love to abound more and more, and no one will have a problem with that, just as long as it is never put into some concrete requirement made of us by deity. As long as the gospel remains a vague concept disconnected from day-to-day reality, many will accept it.

We Should Be Growing

But in his prayer, Paul has gone further. He's asked not only that our love may abound more and more, but that it abound more and more “in knowledge and in all judgment.” He is insisting that we go beyond amorphous platitudes. He wants to see our love coming into contact with our experience and the world that experiences us. He insists that our behavior become more and more informed and thoughtful. It is this manner of behavior that He longs to deploy for His glory.

As we touch the darkness of our world for God, we should be becoming wiser and wiser in our recognition of not only how God and good work, but how Satan and evil work. Every day we should be steadily filling-in the blanks. Paul warned his readers, “I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil” (Romans 16:19), even as he warned of those who “by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple” (Romans 16:18). The “simple” here in verse 18 reads literally, the “innocent.“ The simple in verse 19 are those who Paul wishes to be, according to the Greek more precisely, “harmless” concerning evil.

In other words, there are teachers and busy-bodies out there who will come along with their own destructive theological agenda. They think it is the gospel. And if we are not cautious, we may bite onto their hook and be led astray to the place where we finally think that God does not mean what He says. And today when Seventh-day Adventist Christians should be coming into clearer and clearer views of truth, some among us are becoming less and less sure of our beliefs, more and more vague about whether God has been in this movement.

Where we should be gaining spiritual sight we seem to be losing it. Practices that a few short decades ago would immediately have been detected as dangerous are now multiplying in our midst even as it seems ever fewer are willing to rise to the emergency. Our capacity to discern should be sharpening. “By reason of use” our senses should be well exercised by now “to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). Jesus warned for us to be harmless as doves yet wise as serpents (Matthew 10:16). But sometimes it seems like we are following the mistake of Eve, going out of our way to place ourselves in the path of baskets full of agenda-laden ideas rising from persons who have not given us cause to trust them.

Paul was set for the defense of the gospel, the real one of course. But today we are hearing a new kind of theology. It highlights love and grace and acceptance—or should we say, supposed love, supposed grace, and supposed acceptance. Its taproot sinks down very deeply to an idea over 1000 years old. The main person to introduce this idea had a name: Augustine.

The Fall and its Psychological Aftermath

Do we know what the gospel is? If we would successfully defend it and extend it, we have to know. (We'll look into this more decidedly as we go deeper in Philippians these next few days.) Before we look at Augustine's error, we need to go back even further; we need to call to mind the truth about the fall of man.

We are broken beings. Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The result was catastrophic. The nature they had been created with—a positive, unselfish, outward-seeking, finely-tuned, well-balanced matrix of faculties, with no bias or predisposition toward evil—became scrambled. Now their nature began to function against them in a negative manner. It was rearranged. Damaged by going against the design parameters from their original creation (because humans were not designed to sin), now they experienced a continuous pull to selfishness; their immoral choice had incurred self-centering, misshapen psychological brain-damage, rearranging the relationship between their God-given faculties. Now the will, which had been subservient to intellect and reason, was far more readily subject to emotion. Human beings had been designed with a high emotional capacity, to worship a high and holy Being. But now the surging passions of a broken nature, of a no-longer well-balanced, finely-tuned mind, had become dominant. Henceforth our feelings would be supremely likely to mislead us. Without God's intervention, we could only become more and more broken until the image of God designed into us from the beginning has by constantly repeated sin been utterly wiped away to nothing. We are broken beings indeed.

Is Temptation Sin?

The upshot of this is that our adversary uses our warped faculties against us in the spiritual war. What is the gospel? If we would be successful in defending it we must know what it is. But the demonic mastermind of our foe sent us a bouquet of poisonous theological flowers more than 1000 years ago through a brilliant but misguided individual named Augustine. The seeds he cast into the Christian garden are thriving today. Among all the theological weeds, few are more noxious than those arising from his garden plot.

Join me and turn to James, chapter one. What is sin? The question has more than a few facets, but let's pose a simple one here: What is the difference between sin and temptation? The Bible helps us. Consider these lines at James 1:14, 15: “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

We can never understand what the gospel is when our minds are filled with confusion about the interrelationships between its inwrought concepts. It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy [GC 569]. Some demon from Satan's cohort sends an idea into your brain, one calculated to lead you to moral violation. The temptation is like some other temptation launched at you before, one you had deliciously consumed. With each attempt to lead us to sin, the subtlety of the temptation is yet more finely honed. The devils adapt. It is an art to them. So the wicked idea comes launched at you, and in a moment of time you choose. The choice is to peruse it, play with it, fondle it, let it linger, taste more of it; or to choose to decline the proffered tempting morsel. Those brief moments are all-important. In them you decide whether you experience temptation or sin.

First, we are drawn away, we are enticed by that which has pulling power, that acts in solidarity with our broken nature. Then when lust has conceived, it brings forth sin. It does not take nine months for lust to conceive. One or two seconds in time—if that—is more than enough. During that decision-time we either reject the demonic appeal (for such is what it is), or we accept it. We either choose to sin, or we choose to resist temptation. Those are the only outcomes.

The Satanic Ploy

Right here is where it becomes interesting. Even when the Christian resists temptation through God's power, the very temptation itself leaves behind it an emotional slime-trail, a realization that sin was at your doorstep and you almost took the bait, a suspicion that to be tempted itself is a sin. There is a sense of one having been tainted by it all, a feeling of uncleanness. Satan wishes us to consider this repelling feeling itself to be sin. He wants us, even in the moment of God-given victory, to sink downward into despair, to feel that we have condemned ourselves.

Too often we fall for his ploy, and even when we have resisted the temptation, when lust has not conceived and become sin, still we accuse ourselves of sinning. We help the devils to blur in our mind the difference between temptation and sin, and we feel guilty even when we have not sinned.

This flaw so commonly experienced by us in our fallen nature, leads us to begin to mis-think that we are always sinning. We loose sight of the reality that temptation is not sin, and begin to accept the illusion that temptation is sin. We look at our lives and recoil in horror at the spiritual disarray, and we begin to agree that probably, we have never experienced a moment of real victory. We feel we have lied when we exclaimed before heaven, “Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory!” (1 Corinthians 15:57). We begin to think that the problem the gospel is dealing with is our bad, broken equipment, our fallen nature.

The truth is, that much more fundamentally, the practical problem we are facing is learning how to use our will. We have no control over what nature we received at birth, but we have every control over our choices. We can never be overcome by Satan without our consent. The fallen angles have no power to control our will or force us to sin. They can distress with temptation, but they cannot contaminate or defile. And so we see that we need to understand the true force of the will. It is the governing power, even in our broken nature. Everything depends on how we use it—on the right action of the will.

Temptation is not sin, nor can we defend the gospel aright if we think that it is. If to be tempted is to sin, then in any given moment, all the fallen angels need do is launch a new temptation at us. Then the gospel we would defend becomes the drug-pusher's gospel. God is reduced to one who, rather than healing His children, is a sin-enabler, giving us the forgiveness pill over and over again, as we sin and live, sin and live, sin and live—

Sin and die.

But let us consider a better way. Consider the next lines in Philippians. The champion of God in 1:8 prayed that we “might approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.”

Just as he wants us to have an increasingly informed Christian mind, our senses exercised from use, able to discern between wickedness and righteousness, so also he wants to see us approving “the things that are excellent,” growing ever more like Jesus as we live a life patterned after our Lord, as we are gaining increasing spiritual maturity. The Christian walk is not an increasing acceptance of the idea that we are hopeless sinners who can never overcome, but a journey through this darkened world, a following of the lamp of God's Word, an illuminated, victorious passage toward exit from the maze into the waiting arms of Jesus.

The False Gospel Confronted

The next lines confront the false gospel in its tracks. Paul prayed that his fellow friends with God would experience being “sincere and without offence.” When? Right now! For we are told this is for the time “till the day of Jesus Christ.”

Mark this thought well. Paul was set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel. He was actively going about the work God had given him, and spending time in prison for it over and over again. From prison he writes to the congregation in Philippi, reminding them that the present is the time when they are to be sincere and without offence. But you say, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). That is true. We dare not trust our heart far, not at all. Even the Christian person is not rendered immune from the wayward tendencies of his broken nature. But we should choose to, with the power given us of God, ever do what is right rather than what we might feel is appealing to us. We must never consent to sin. We must choose the right because it is right [Ed 153]. This will help us immeasurably.

Our micro-waved, fast serve, society has misled us. We expect instant gratification, but instead we should choose to be persons of depth. Not only are we to choose sincerity, but by refusing to consent to temptation we are to live in this day “without offense.” There is no getting around it: God's plan for you, His plan for me, is victory now; not “victory later,” but “victory now.” Has your understanding of the gospel led you to be in harmony with this concept? Or has it been your goal to try to live a good life but if you fail, take out a large debt on your forgiveness credit card?

Have you, as you've studied the Scriptures for yourself, been led to realize that God's plan for you is higher than the highest human thought can reach? That He wants to make you a jewel with perfect reflective surface, so that through eternity your life can reflect His love in a unique manner no other soul can duplicate? He is not making cheap, plastic knock-offs; He is making champions. Not one or two or three or four; but many, many, many thousands! And we will never see that shining throng developed while we are teaching an indefensible gospel, or do not even know what it is.

The Infilling of Fruits

If we are experiencing the real gospel, then Philippians 1:11 will be true for us. We will be “filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.” Notice that it does not say “filled with the fruit of righteousness,” but “filled with the fruits of righteousness.” Some would have us think that sanctification is not part of the gospel but that it is merely a fruit of the gospel; that our “being saved” is God counting us right, and then as a big, warm, friendly bonus, after we have been saved, He goes on to make us right. After all, it is said that “sanctification is the work of a lifetime.”

Of course, it is. But to be growing does not mean one continues helplessly to roll in the mud and mire of sin. When God gives you His salvation He does not give it in tiny increments. He gives us large drafts from His cup because we are impoverished and need them. He wants to heal us. In the moment that we choose Him, we are also changed. He makes us righteous. It is not a righteousness that is independent of Him, or that we achieve on our own somehow. He makes us righteous, and even one step away from Him cuts the circuit, and our scruffy, filthy rags must be dug out of the dumpster again so that we at least are wearing something. No; God is not a lawyer but a Physician. He is preparing us to live in the presence of holy beings. He brings us into a right relation with Himself. Even in this life we are enabled through His strength granted us in mercy, to stand before His law without shame or remorse [GC 477]. How could that be? It can be because He not only accounts us as being right with Him, He actively works in us to make us right with Him.

So when we read that we are to be filled with the fruits of righteousness, we realize that Paul is speaking of that which flows out of righteousness into real life: the fruits of righteousness. Being right with God inside will cause us to behave right with the world outside. Our lives will be a decisive witness to those in bondage to themselves because of how we live and what we actually do, under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Sin Not Inevitable

Augustine's error was a wrong view of what sin is. He thought sin was inescapable, failure inevitable, that God's plan for saving us meant that a legal solution was the only way to get us off the hook, and that man was so badly damaged that even the power of God was insufficient to give people of fallen flesh victory. He let feelings of temptation he felt inside be viewed as sin. Victory of any kind became an impossibility. Sinning became an inevitability. A mistaken idea turned Christianity for 1000 years and longer onto a wobbly pathway riddled with theological problems. Today in Adventism we must be wary. We need not travel that erroneous road. We can be set for the defense of the true gospel. But we need to understand the gospel we are called to defend. Satan's first line of defense is to build a refuge of lies. He'd much prefer us to defend with all our earnestness a sorted-set of propositions about God that are faulty. In the last moment of time, we cannot settle for that. We must go deeper. We must careful investigate and leave no stone unturned, and defend the gospel entrusted of Heaven to the remnant church.

Is there after all, a truth for these last days? Are there those who stand and truly defend it? We close by returning to Philippians 1:12. Paul continues. He says that what has happened to him has been a help to the gospel; that people are talking about the truth as a result of his imprisonment, even if some are laughing it off. They wish to make fun of him, to add affliction to him, to increase his mental agony. But he realizes something else. Those who mock and deride and laugh at truth—that is not everyone. There were others. They were watching, observing. They knew the reality of what Paul was by Christ.

He had been in their homes, teaching, counseling, answering questions about God, gently leading. Paul had shown what he was made of. Although kept in isolation, the Holy Spirit had already made Its mark through him. Paul, kept out of circulation takes courage from this, and pointing to these faithful believers, reminds his friends in Philippi that there are other people operating out of the supernatural motivation of love: “But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defense of the gospel.”

Some “preach” the gospel to mock it. They do this on purpose. Still others, perhaps unwittingly, live-out a version of Christianity that mocks itself. These God can help if they will be honest with themselves. But take heart you listeners from this thought: There are those who preach the gospel out of love. Others saw Paul bound away, unable to move about as he wished to aggressively proclaim the truth of God to hungry souls. But some know; they themselves have experienced the gospel. They realize that they are partakers of the very same grace as Paul. He may be chained, but they are free. He may be bound, but they are loose. He may be mocked, but they can tell truly what Jesus has done and is doing for them.

You see—They are champions for God.

They know Him in whom they have believed. They are growing Christians. They are telling what God has done. They are living with an attitude of thankfulness toward Him, and they are not about to settle for anything less than gaining a sound understanding of what the gospel is and sharing that with all whom are willing to hear it. They are, with Paul, “set for the defense of the gospel.”

Conclusion

These next few days the same choice is our own. Will you be a champion for God? Will you, through the strength He gives rise up and lay hold of your privileges as a child of the King? Will you get a grip on spiritual realities and let God show you what He wants you to do to become armed and dangerous for Jesus? Seventh-day Adventists are today set in this world for a purpose. We are set for the defense of the gospel. Let's go to the Bible and get that gospel. Let's bypass the cheap, frilly, unstable, sugary substitutes offered us in the place of truth and let the truth make us free. Then others will be made free as we preach the gospel out of love.

Because we are growing more like Jesus, the life He has given us can be more persuasive, more comely, more powerful for the kingdom. You are to be a weapon for God, a change agent. Jesus can do this for you. But you have to follow where the Savior leads. May we permit Him to lead us day by day, and watch for His leading. Now is the time for planet earth to see what it never yet has seen in the lives of God's people. Each one of us will choose what they see. Let each one of us take hold of the weaponry provided by heaven and be set for the defense and confirmation of the gospel.