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Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the 'Ridiculous Joy' series looking at Philippians 3:17-21 teaching about Christians being an example of Christ or being an excuse for others to not follow Christ.

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Well, Abraham Lincoln is reported to once have said this and that is, "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Do you agree with that sentiment? Now, I realize that it's a little dangerous to ask you if you agree or disagree with Abraham Lincoln. Nobody wants to disagree with Abraham Lincoln. But I'm not sure that I agree with him entirely. I think the gist of what he's saying has merit, meaning a lot of us can choose to be happy, and a lot of people choose not to be happy, and I think what he was doing was just simply emphasizing the choice element to our happiness. But I'm not sure that people are as happy as they want to be. The reason I'm not sure about that is there are a lot of people who want to be happy, and they search for happiness in places that don't lead to happiness. 

The reason I say this is because what a lot of people do is they say, "What I need to do if I want to be happy is I need to find something that will bring me immediate joy." So, what we do is we find a show to binge-watch, and we watch it, and we assume that after we've had a few days of losing ourselves in a show that we’ll be happy but let me ask you. Have you ever binged-watched something and when you were done said, "I feel so joyful and full of having spent hours watching that.”? I mean, the chuckles tell you that's not how we go. Some of us will think, "Maybe I'll find it in my sports team," and so we cheer for men in tight yellow pants and black shirts to push a little ball across a line while other grown men try to push the ball across the other line. 

We think that "Maybe if my team wins, then I'll feel joyful," but it's been since the 2000’s since we had reason to be joyful in the ultimate way here locally. Some of us will think, "Well, maybe if I can get that vacation or I can get that promotion, or if I could have a baby or if my kids would leave home, then I could be really happy and joyful." But I think what's often missing is a desire that we have that's deeper than that, to live for something greater, to live for a greater adventure. Here's how you know that you long for a greater adventure. Do you know the movies and the stories that we like are often stories that pit the great battle of good versus evil against one another? 

Think about the Lord of the Rings, good versus evil. You read it or you watch it, and you say, "I want to see good triumph because I know intuitively that there's that kind of a battle that's going on." This is what happens in Star Wars. I mean, it's the light side and the dark and all of that, but it's the same story. It's what you see in a movie like Braveheart. As old as that story is, it's older than even that story because it is people sacrificing for something bigger than just their own life. That story is told over and over again where we are drawn into it and say, "I wish that I had a life that could count for something like that." So, when we try to feel happy by watching Netflix, indulging in a sports team, going on a better vacation, having a baby, or sending the kids away, whatever it is, it never quite brings the joy and the satisfaction that we want it to because there's something in us that longs to be a part of something bigger. 

But here's what Paul is driving at in Philippians 3 verse 17 through 21, and that is he's inviting us into something bigger. It may not seem like it at first, but he's saying in essence that your life, my life, is about something more than what we even tend to think that it is. Here's what he says, verse 17 of Philippians 3, "Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters." Some translations say, "Be fellow imitators with me." So, what he's doing is he's saying, "I'm imitating Jesus Christ. I want you to follow my example, to be a fellow imitator with me," and then he says this. "Just as you have us as a model, and that word means a type or a mold, "You have us as a model," he says this. He says, "Keep your eyes on those who live as we do, for as I have often told you before and now tell you again, even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross." 

So, what Paul does is he sets up this juxtaposition, where he says, "Some live following my example and the example of Christ, and some live as enemies of the cross." Now that is strong language. We tend to like to reduce language, to make it easier, softer today. I saw something this last week. I want to read this, so I get it right. This is from Australia's conservation and marine biologists, a group of them, and they are advocating that in the world we renamed shark attacks against humans as negative encounters with sharks. The reason that they cited for this is that by using the word shark attacks, we have promoted the assumption that sharks are ravenous, man-eating monsters instead of sharks. 

Now, I say that because there's a tendency to want to minimize calling something, what it is, but here's what Paul doesn't do. He doesn't say, "Follow my example, or just don't follow the example." He says, "You either are following the example of Jesus Christ or you're an enemy of the cross." In life, you and I will either be people's example or their excuse. You know this intuitively. If you had kids or if you were a kid and grew up in a family, what do parents often do to the older sibling? They tell them to be a good example to the younger kids, right? Because you know that an older sibling will either be an example or an excuse. You know this because we see it in sports. The teams always want veterans because they set the example or the tone in the locker room. 

It happens in business, school, or in a culture where people who've been around a long time are looked to, and they either serve as an example or an excuse. This is what Paul's saying, but he's saying, "I believe that your life, my life, wherever you are, whether you think you have broad influence or not, it counts in this big battle, and where you can find joy in saying, "I am not an enemy of the cross, but I am of pointing people to the God of the universe." So, with that, what I'd like to do is show you what he identifies as somebody who is an enemy of the cross, the qualities of an enemy of the cross. There are three of them. They're in verse nineteen, there are four marker statements here. By marker statements, I mean statements that all begin with the same word. 

It says, "Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, their glory is in their shame, their mind is set on earthly things." So, he says all of these. Three of them are qualities of somebody who's an enemy of the cross, the other's speaking about their destiny. "Their destiny is destruction," and we'll come back to that in a few moments. But here's what he says. The first that I'm going to say the quality of an enemy of the cross is somebody whose god is their stomach, or who is driven by their natural appetites. When he says their god is their stomach, what he's referring to is this idea that when you are driven by your food, that what you're doing is you're in essence saying, "Even though this is a good thing, even though this is something I need for nourishment and it's made for enjoyment, when it becomes too big of a thing for me, then it leads me to places that are destructive." 

We all know this about food, and he's saying this about really, I believe, not just food, but about any of our natural appetite. So, our appetite for money, sex, power, pleasure, or food, they're all good appetites given by God to be enjoyed within bounds. But when they become too big that they drive us, that they become our god, then they become destructive. Here's how you and I know if we have gotten to a point where our god is our belly, where what we're doing is we're being driven by natural appetites. I believe that the way we know is with this little word, if, that we sometimes use. "I'll follow you, God, if ..." Because it's a marker, it's a tell. Whenever we say, "God, I'll follow you if you don't demand too much from me. God, I'll follow you if you don't ask too much of my time. God, I'll follow you if I can keep and spend my money as I would like. 

God, I'll follow you if I can engage my sexual desires with whom I want, when I want, how I want, and not in any kind of way that seems restrictive from you. God, I'll follow you if you allow me to believe things that are never unpopular with people that are important to me. God, I'll follow you if my faith can be private. God, I'll follow you if everything that you say makes sense to me and I can reconcile it in my mind." Do you see how that happens? 

What Paul is doing here is he's saying when you, or when I, are being driven by our natural appetites, we become an enemy of the cross. Because at that point, what we're doing is we're making God very unreal in our own lives and as a means of other people seeing God in us. I could talk for a while today about Christian leaders, well-known Christian leaders over the last couple of years who were driven by their natural appetites, and I'm not saying that they're enemies of the cross or it discredits everything that went before, but where something happened late in their lives and their ministry that was a result of being driven by their natural appetites that discredited so much of what went before. This happens all the time in just routine life for any of us. So, Paul here is saying, "You live as an enemy of the cross when your god is your belly, or you're driven by natural appetites." 

But here's the second thing, and that is we can be an enemy of the cross whenever we celebrate what God despises. We see this in this little phrase, "Their glory is in their shame." So, to glory in shame means to glory in something in which you should not glory. And so what happens sometimes in Christianity is people will say, "Well, listen, I don't like maybe what the Bible says about something, and since there are a lot of interpretations, a lot of different ways that people see it, then I'm going to say that's not really something that anybody can know and so I believe this," and then you start to become a promoter of it and in time, I believe you become an enemy of the cross because what you're doing is you're glorying in something that God does not glory in, something that God calls sin. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, I don't believe that you can celebrate or call good what God calls sin and not end up being an enemy of the cross. 

The problem for some of us is what we'll do is we'll say, "Well, I just don't like the word sin." I was listening to something the other day. It was about the church growth movement that was big in the '80s and '90s, and they were talking about some of the formational thinkers in it and how some of them advocated this idea that a church should never talk about sin because sin is negative, and people need positive reinforcement. When they get positive reinforcement, then what will happen is they will minimize sin in their own lives, but I don't think anything could be further from the truth. What we need is to be confronted with the standard of God, understand our sinfulness, and celebrate what God has done through Jesus Christ on our behalf, not simply say it's no big deal. But sometimes what happens for some of us is we will get in a place where we'll say, "Since I think that I understand things, that therefore I have it down, and since there's a lot of disagreement among other Christians, I guess I'll just pick the view that I like." 

But let me just challenge you on something for a moment. We are living at a particular time and a particular place. So, we have a history of interpretation of the Bible to look at and a global community, and if you think that you, living in America in the era in which you live, understand the Bible better than anybody who's ever gone before you in history and better than the global interpretation throughout the world, it is the height of arrogance. Because what you're doing is you're saying, "All those people who went for the last 2,000 years before us, they had it wrong. I have it right. All the Christians all over the world, have it wrong. I have it right." Do you think you may have some cultural blinders on? 

But what we do instead is we say, "No, no, no, God is ..." and then we produce a definition of God that isn't necessarily biblical. What Paul is doing when he says your glory is in your shame is he's saying, some of us will end up minimizing the standards or the law of God in people's lives. Now, you understand this intuitively. I mean, one of the things we read in the pages of the Bible over and over is God's heart for the poor, and if you just took some pictures of some kids who are starving in another part of the world, and you were like, "Stinks for them, I got a lot of food. I'm good." And you took a picture of a kid starving and put it on your dashboard so every time you went through the drive-through, you were able to go, "Stinks for them." 

But you would go, "That's crazy." You understand that and yet there are other things that the Bible says that because we may think that we like them because of our cultural moment, we end up saying, "I don't want to say anything about this. Or I want to go on the other side." In first Timothy chapter one, we read this. This is verse eight and following, and speaking about the law of God, God's standard. Here's what he says. He says, "We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous, but for lawbreakers and rebels." The reason God gives standards is to convince people of their need for God. So, whenever we lower the law, we're hurting the work of God, even though what we think we're doing is doing God a solid by making him more appealing to people. That's what he's talking about here. 

"We know that the law is not made for the righteous, but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful. The unholy, the irreligious, those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those who practice homosexuality, for slave traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which is entrusted to me." Do you hear what he says? He says that the God of the universe has glory, and his glory is in his law and when you uphold the law, it helps people understand their need for a savior, their need for a God, rather than simply making it more appealing when you say, "No big deal." So, every time we lower the standard of God, what we're doing is serving as an enemy across. 

David Wells put it like this, an author. He said, "Worldliness is what any particular culture does to make sin feel normal, and righteousness seem strange." Worldliness is what any culture does to make sin, the things that are against human flourishing, the things that are against God's law, feel normal and to make righteousness seem strange, to make it seem strange when somebody says, "I'm going to do this in a way that I think is following God." There's a movement among some Christians to have a movement that they call being a red-letter Christian, and the impulse behind this is to say, "Let's focus on Jesus and the gospels, not on Paul and all the New Testament stuff that's harder and more controversial." 

Although I'm sympathetic in some ways because I understand the impulse to say, "Let's focus on Jesus," I mean, who would argue with that? It's good to focus on Jesus, but you can't simply say as a result, and I'm not saying that everyone in this says this, but it is the implication some get, that we don't have to take Paul's word seriously. We don't have to take the rest of the Bible seriously. We'll just take Jesus' words and take the rest of it out. At that point, you are serving as an enemy of the cross. That's Paul's point. Now, I realize those who focus on the words of Jesus would say, "Well, it's Paul. That's why we don't want to read Paul." But it is the argument that he's making here. 

Here's the third characteristic of an enemy of the cross, and it's this, and that is they set their minds on earthly things. Verse 19 again. Their god is their belly, their glory is in their shame, their mind is set on earthly things. This was more mundane than the other statements here because this is simply a statement that says they're consumed with ... In fact, the word for set is used two other times in Philippians differently, translated differently. Verse 10 of chapter 4, "I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me." Concern, the same word as set. Then it shows up in chapter 1, verse 7, where he says, "It's right for me to feel this way about you." It's the word feel. 

So, it's translated in chapter 1, feel, and chapter 3, set, and in chapter 4, concern. To gather what it's saying is these are the things that you are concerned about, that you're focused on, that you feel on a day-to-day basis. What could be more natural for you or me than simply to have our minds set on earthly things all the time, just our routine of life? So, what he's saying here is that you can become an enemy of the cross by simply blending into this world so much that you are just living out your day-to-day life with little thought about the things of God. That becomes an enemy of the cross. 

There's a game that we play in my family sometimes and it's a game that requires at least five people. So, when all four of my boys are around, we can play. Four of us and me, four of them and me can play it together. My wife hates it, so she doesn't ever play it. The game is called Resistance. So normally it's a game that we play when we have other people over, friends, and stuff like this. I think it's a fun game because it's this game where there's deception, misdirection, persuasion, and logic and figuring all this stuff out. It's like the human interaction game. The premise of the game is this. You get a blue card if you start the game as a good person, a good person who's trying to pass these missions, and you get a red card if you're trying to fail the missions, and the idea is the people on the blue team have to figure out who's on the red team and the red team's deceiving the blue team the whole time in the way that they're interacting. 

It usually ends with yelling, screaming, and people being upset that they're kind of being betrayed, misled. The last time I played with some of my kids' friends over the July 4th weekend, there was one sweet young man who just took me to the cleaner on this. Anyway, it's a good game, but here's why I mentioned this here. That is a moment when you have no idea what side anybody's on when the game goes a certain way. Here's what Paul is saying. When you live in such a way that nobody knows what side you're on, when your mind is set on earthly things, when you blend into the cultural narratives that say this is good, even though the Bible calls it sin, when you are driven by your natural appetites, you are not distinct from the culture. You are not an example of the cross. You are an excuse. You are an enemy of the cross. 

Now, let me come to this. Their destiny is destruction-like. I think what this is pointing to is that when you live as an enemy of the cross, that is the direction of your life. What I think he's indicating here is that there's a contrast, but somebody who has come to faith in Jesus Christ will not live as an enemy of the cross. There may be elements of our lives that go there, but eventually, we'll say, "My life is not about my natural appetites. It's not about the here and now, and there is a higher authority to which I bend my knee." Here's how he contrasts. In verse twenty, here's what he says. He says, "But our citizenship is in heaven." Now, who's our? It's those who've come to believe the gospel. It's a word that he's used over and over, the good news of what Jesus Christ has done on our behalf. 

He uses the word citizen here. It's a word that he used in chapter 1, verse 27, the same concept. It doesn't come off as cleanly in our English translations. But if you were here that weekend, we talked about citizenship where he says, "Conduct yourself as citizens worthy of the gospel." Here he says our citizenship, our allegiance, our loyalty is to heaven. It's not to earth. What that means is the Christian experience is about looking back to what Jesus Christ has done, but it's also about looking ahead and saying, "My truest citizenship is not here. My truest allegiance isn't here. It's in heaven. It's with God." 

C.S. Lewis once wrote about this, and here's what he said. He said, "If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought the most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they've become so effective in this world." The reason so many Christians, according to C.S. Lewis, have become not examples of Christ but enemies of the cross is because they've stopped thinking about the next world and about their citizenship being somewhere other than here because we just get drawn into the vortex of life and things. Then he says this. He says that "This God," in verse twenty, "Will bring everything under his control and will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body." 

So, what he does is he says your citizenship is in heaven and there is a God who is winning the battle of good versus evil and one day will eliminate sin from our experience. Yes, sin was defeated at the cross, but God still allows sin and glory to exist together and one day there will come a day when everything will be under his control when there will be the ultimate winning of good versus evil. He says, "Your body will be transformed. You can be a part of what God is doing in that way." 

Author Barbara Boyd writes about this, and here's what she says. She says, "Imagine that the distance from the Earth to the sun," which is 92 million miles, "is represented by the thickness of a single sheet of paper. Then the distance from the Earth to the nearest star would be a stack of paper, 70 feet high." So just to put that in perspective, a piece of paper, B1, distance from here to the sun, 70 feet high through our roof would get us to the nearest star. Then she says this, "The diameter of our galaxy would be a stack of paper 310 miles high, and our galaxy is only a single speck, one of an infinite number of galaxies just in a part of the universe that we can see. If, as the Bible says, Jesus Christ holds all of this together with just the word of his power," Hebrews 1:3, and this is what is being alluded to in Philippians 3:20-21. 

"If, as the Bible says, Jesus Christ holds all of this together with just the word of his power, is that the kind of a person you ask into your life to be your assistant or your consultant? Of course not. If you are to relate to such a person, he will either be the absolute lord of your life or nothing at all." Nothing at all. 

So, when you understand who God is and that you're a citizen of heaven, you are part of something much bigger than, "Can I enjoy a few hours of Netflix?" Now, don't get me wrong, enjoying a few hours of Netflix, cheering for a football team, all good, normal. But what happens for some of us is we want our joy to come from those things rather than saying, "I'm part of something much greater." This is an invitation to say align your life for something greater because this life, as big as it seems, is temporary. Here's a paraphrase that I wrote of 2 Peter chapter 3, verses 10 through 11. So, this is my own attempt to expand on and capture the meaning of this. 2 Peter 3: 10-11. "One day everything you see, everything you work at, everything you value in the here and now will face intense dissolving fire and will cease to be. Since this is certain, invest your only life in the lasting and enduring practices of being set apart from this present world and chasing godliness as the primary means of your life." 

That's very close to what Paul's saying here. He says, "Join with me in following my example because some people, as a way of life, are following after the type, the way, and some people are following after it as a means to say, "This is something that I do to kind of be an enemy of the cross." Not intentionally. So, which one will you choose? Let me just end with this, and that is some of us are here and maybe today you've recognized that you don't keep God's law, that you've been more of an enemy of the cross. Your end, your destiny, doesn't have to be destruction. The beautiful story that's told in Philippians and the whole Bible is that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners and at one point, Paul says, "Of whom I'm the worst." 

What that means is that you can acknowledge your sin before God and enter into this relationship where you are a citizen of heaven who says, "I know what I have in the future," by acknowledging your need for Jesus Christ. If you've already trusted Jesus Christ, what that means is you are a citizen of heaven. Are you living as a citizen of heaven or an enemy of the cross? So today, to end our time in prayer, Mark Lunsford serves as our Executive Pastor here, he's going to come and pray, and I think a few of our board members are going to join him here as well. 

This morning, since this is Kurt's last weekend before his sabbatical, we thought it would be appropriate to take a few moments here at the beginning of the service and pray for him before he leaves. So, I've asked a couple of members of our governing board to join me as well, and so will you also join me in praying for Kurt as he begins his sabbatical? God, we just thank you for Kurt. We thank you for everything that he means to us, and he means to Orchard Hill. God, we just pray that as he goes on sabbatical, that you will just restore and rejuvenate and replenish him in every way. God, that he will be able to find rest and just become closer and closer to you through this time, and God, when he comes back, that he will just have a new vision, energy, and be refreshed as well. God, we just pray for his family who will be on this journey with him as well. We thank you for all that you're going to do for them and through them in this time. We ask you this in Jesus's name. Amen.

Thank you. Have a great day.