Zachary Peters

We are in the last sections of Philippians 1, but to be honest, the division between the last part of this chapter and the beginning of the next chapter is a bit arbitrary. They are connected. The last two weeks we talked about prayer and the need for the Holy Spirit. Before that, we looked at Paul’s update on his condition and his confident attitude in the face of difficult circumstances. The Lord was going to be glorified. In life or death, the gospel would be proclaimed.

Today, we are going to look at how Paul shifts the focus from himself to the church.

Philippians 1:27–30

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.

Philippians 1:27–30 (ESV)

This section of scripture acts as a transition. Paul has given an update on his own activities, and now he is getting to the real reason he is writing. He wants to help the church address some of their issues, but the transition connects what Paul has already said about himself with what he is going to tell them.

This is also the first in a series of commands that Paul gives the church in the rest of the letter. The meat of this command is the encouragement for the church to keep doing the right thing, even under extreme pressure and persecution from outside the church. Yes, there are issues in the church, but Paul starts with the pressure from outsiders.

He begins this command with “Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ.” That is, for me, a convicting command. There is deep meaning in that. They had just read and listened to his testimony — how he was holding himself, how he was thinking, his confidence, his steadfastness, all the rest — which ended with this theological truth: that God could be glorified in any situation.

And now, he is saying to the church, “Your turn.” Let your life align with the gospel. Let your actions align seamlessly with the teachings of Jesus and the word of God.

Paul wants to hear about their unity rather than their disunity, which is causing problems and harm to their mission as a church. Paul keeps bringing up unity, by the way, because it is a real issue for them.

The word that the NIV translates as “conduct yourselves” (politeuesthe) has a deeper meaning than the English does a good job of showing. It could also read “only behave as citizens [Gk. politeuesthe] worthy [of the gospel].” It’s a civics word. There’s a national, citizenship connection to it.

This is important because it brings us back to information we discussed a month ago. The city of Philippi was a proper Roman colony with a Roman government and tax exemptions, and it was full of Roman citizens and likely many ex-Roman soldiers. This was a place that would understand the word “citizenship” deeply. Being a good citizen — they got that. Paul is speaking their language.

But what he is doing is drawing their attention to the fact that there is a citizenship that supersedes their Romanness. He is also drawing attention to the fact that their real citizenship is with Christ and the gospel. We will come back to this in a minute, but what is worthy of the gospel surpasses what might be worthy of a culture or society.

Because of the innate patriotism at work in this city and its citizens, the pressure from the outside might have been very strong on the people inside the church. There was overlap between what it meant to be a good Roman citizen and what it would mean to be a good Christian, but a lot of things from Rome had to be completely rejected in order to follow Christ.

And like Paul has shown in his own life, that’s okay. God can still be glorified if that happens. The Philippians should not fear those who oppose them because this very opposition is a “sign to them” that in the day of Christ (cf. 1:10) their opponents will be destroyed.

Paul says that the Philippians should remain unfrightened by the persecution they are experiencing because it is a sign of the church’s salvation. This connects right back to the Beatitudes — Jesus tells us that persecution is a sign of blessing. They persecuted me first, and they persecuted others before you. You’re doing the right thing. Keep going.

God can handle your enemies, and even as they seek to harm you, your lives, aligned with God, point to the power of the gospel.

Paul ties it all back to the purpose of the church. While moving the letter on to them, he draws them back to his example. It is brilliant writing — divine writing that speaks to us 2,000 years later.

With the time I have left, I would like to talk very briefly about three things. What is the “manner” we ought to have? How does that work in modern countries and societies? Who are our enemies and what is our persecution?

What is the manner?

What exactly is this manner that is appropriate for Christians to adopt and live by that supersedes cultural standards and norms that they may have grown up with? We forget that Christianity, while seemingly native and natural for us in the United States, was not the norm in the early church. It is not the norm in other parts of the world today. And even here in the south, Christian values seem to be fading in popularity. What we think of as normal might not always be normal. The Romans had virtues, some of which would be familiar in a Christian society, but many would not be.

For Paul, I think the manner — the actions aligned with a heart transformed by the gospel — can largely be found in the Old Testament, primarily in the giving of the Ten Commandments. They can be found in Proverbs. They can be found in Psalms. You can see the attitudes at work in Job and in David’s life, in his successes and his failures. You can see them at work in the book of Judges, where you learn from the failures in the seasons of pain, and you learn from the successes in the seasons of success.

And some might say, “Well, that’s the Old Testament. Don’t we really focus on the New Testament?” And the answer is no. Paul says in Timothy that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for a plethora of things. (“Plethora of things” is my translation.) What’s interesting is that he’s talking about only the Old Testament. He’s not talking about the New Testament because it didn’t exist. We can look to the Old Testament to figure out how God wants us to live in practice.

We know we can’t do it perfectly. No one can. No one has, except for one man whose name was Jesus. And with Jesus on the scene, you might think that he showed up to let us know that we couldn’t live a perfect life, and so we can sort of do whatever we want. But that’s not what he does. Jesus himself gives us moral teachings and moral standards based on the Old Testament. A great example is the Sermon on the Mount, which you find in Matthew and Luke. He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. It still matters. It is still applicable to our life.

In multiple places in the New Testament, Peter, James, John, and Paul all give instructions at various times on how we are to live together as a church, and how we are supposed to be Christian husbands, Christian parents, and Christian citizens in places that don’t recognize Jesus.

Anyone who looks at Christianity and thinks it’s only about the salvation experience is missing the point. That salvation experience is an invitation to a certain type of life. But get the order right. That life, lived without Jesus, is useful in pragmatic terms — it’s easier to live with people like that. But spiritually, it does no good for that person to be a good moral person. Jesus’ grace and mercy, and the power of what he has done, cover our sins and failures, but they also enable the living presence of the Holy Spirit to come in and make us more and more like Christ every day.

So to live in the proper manner is to live with clear standards laid out in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And here is where I want to push us a little: don’t be a lazy Christian. I have been a lazy Christian in my life. I relied entirely on the opinion of other people around me to dictate how I did things and how I believed. Part of that is okay. If you’ve got some trusted people in your life and you don’t know what to do, it’s okay to mimic them until you figure it out. But at some point, you have to stop drinking milk. You have to wean yourself off the milk, as Paul talks about, and start eating meat. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to find some deeper hidden meaning in scripture. It just means you’re actually going to read your scripture instead of only engaging with it when the pastor opens it on a Sunday. We’ve got to grow up — gain a level of maturity, a level of discernment, a level of wisdom that will help us live in a manner worthy of the gospel.

How does this work in a society?

I already mentioned how we are relatively blessed in the United States, where many of the foundational pieces of our society are grounded in Christian thought, processes, and thinking. Some people say it’s liberalism and the Enlightenment that produced the foundational elements of the United States, but that’s not really true. The Enlightenment itself only exists because of Christianity, first and foremost. But then the Enlightenment, divorced from Christianity, produced the French Revolution, which resulted in rivers of blood flowing from the guillotine. That political science lesson out of the way—

We just have to get used to thinking through our behaviors, our attitudes, and our actions in comparison with the norms of any given country, society, or culture.

Sometimes, as Christians, we have to look at something happening in society and say, “That’s not for us,” and reject it. We have to fight it. It’s our civic and spiritual duty, for the love of our neighbor, to try to get rid of certain things in a society.

Sometimes there are things in a culture that are neither inherently good nor evil. They are neutral, and it is up to Christians in that society, with the power and the leading of the Holy Spirit, to work through that in a way that pushes the neutral to good.

And sometimes there are things in society that are good but need to be redeemed by people empowered by the Holy Spirit — like art, literature, family, relationships. These are good things God put inside of us, and it’s up to Christians to make sure those good things in a culture stay aligned with what God designed them to be.

There are ways to live up to the standard of the gospel, and how that plays out varies depending on the context we might experience in human history. It was different for the Philippians. It was different for the Thessalonians. It was different for the Coptic Christians in Egypt. It is different for the few Christian groups left in Syria. It’s different for us in the United States — and even within the United States, it looks different in Alpharetta and Dawsonville, Georgia, than it does in California or New York.

And I think part of the problem is that so many times patriotism — which I think is a relatively good and stabilizing force in any society — can start dictating right and wrong in a way that is divorced from the standards, manners, and attitudes expressed in Holy Scripture. A great example of this is the patriotism you would have seen in Germany during World War II, where what the government said became the word of God, and what the popular political party said became the word of God instead of the other way around. And no one challenged it.

That’s the danger, and that’s partially what Paul is speaking to in the Philippian church, this patriotic place. Citizens of the Roman Empire — and that meant something. But to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven meant something more, and the two clashed. And Paul says, “You’ve got to know where your true allegiance is.”

We have to know where our true allegiance is this morning. I love the United States. I love that I live here. What a blessing. What a privilege. But it is only inasmuch as it is connected to Christian standards.

Who is the enemy?

Paul spends most of these verses on persecution and conflict. There is outside pressure on the Philippian church, and it was very different than what we experience as persecution in the United States — which I’m thankful for. But that does mean that sometimes we can be confused about who is actually the enemy, who is actually persecuting us, who is actually standing in our way. Living in relative comfort, it can almost feel like we don’t have an enemy to fight, and so we start turning ordinary things into enemies just to have something to struggle against.

The enemy is not someone in the church who happens to sit in the seat that you like. The enemy is not someone with a different idea about who should be bringing what to the bake sale. The enemy is not someone who has small theological differences that ultimately amount to nothing in the scheme of eternity. The enemy is not someone of a different denomination — and even denominations I think are apostate and leading people away, the people are not the enemy. The powers and principalities of the air are the enemy. We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, scripture tells us. None of that small church-floor conflict is persecution. Conflict from those things is not what scripture is about.

We know there is a real enemy. We know there are places in the world right now where there are actual pressures and forces and violence directed at the church. I want to help us realize that this scripture is not an encouragement to wage war on someone you simply disagree with over a small piece of theology or some minor dispute inside the church. There are real pressures above and beyond that, and those represent the actual danger to us, to our walk with Christ, and to the organization of the church.

Let’s do a better job of distinguishing between a simple disagreement and the real pressure and persecution we might face as a church.

We might not face violent oppression, but there is societal and sometimes economic oppression. How we walk through that matters just as much. How we walk through the cultural pressure of a society — the manner in which we do it — matters.

The closing word

God will give us victory, but it might not look like the victory that you would want to see on a battlefield. It might look like the victory of a Savior dying on a cross. The gospel redefines what victory is. And when we live up to the standard of the gospel — worthy of a crucified and risen Savior — it changes how we face every persecution and problem we might have.

I am not worried about the future. I am not worried about secularization. I am not worried about atheists or New Ageism or any of it. The church has survived all of it before, and we will thrive again. The church will not die. The gates of hell will not prevail. Victory — not because we are strong, but because in our weakness we rely on someone who is strong. It’s not about our wisdom or our anointing or our spiritual gifts or how much money is in the bank. It’s about our submission to a Savior who is perfect, all-powerful, sovereign, mighty — who knows everything, who sees everything, who is not surprised, and who is not overwhelmed by anything we face.

Think about the deathbed conversion. Someone who has lived an entire life away from God, and at the very end confesses their sins and believes in Jesus Christ. The devil has won every percentage point of that person’s life — but it’s the one percent at the end that matters. God wins.

Live in a manner worthy of the gospel. And walk into every battle, every piece of persecution, in unity together, and with the confidence that in living or in dying, in material success or in material failure, God wins. The church wins. The gospel wins. The gospel moves forward. It is lit up for all to see, when our lives are aligned with the gospel.

Let us pray.

Lord, thank you for your victory. Thank you for your mercy and your grace. Thank you that you allow transformation through your Holy Spirit to make us more like you every day.

Father, I pray that we would walk through life in a manner worthy of the gospel — citizens of heaven first. And as citizens of heaven, I pray that we would elevate society, elevate culture, elevate the towns and communities and the nation we are in. The richness and the promise of this nation is built on the fact that Christians have decided to live in a manner worthy of the gospel. I pray we would not grow weary in well-doing. This is not Christian nationalism — this is sharing the gospel.

In good times and in bad, in struggles and persecutions, in pains and problems, I pray that we would hold on to you and walk through it knowing that you are going to be victorious. In life or in death, in answered prayers or unanswered prayers, in healings and in not-healings, in miracles and in not-miracles, you will be glorified and magnified because you are faithful and good, and we love you.

In Jesus’ mighty name we pray. Amen.