Excellence

Excellence and praiseworthiness are reflections of the character of God, found ultimately in Christ.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.  If you would like to volunteer to review and edit our sermon transcripts before they are posted, contact Gail Peterson, gpeterson@calvaryefree.church.

[00:00:00] Well, this morning we are wrapping up our short series, looking at the contents of the Christian mind that we find listed for us in Philippians chapter four, verse eight, one last time. Here is that list. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. This. This catalogue of Christian virtues acts like a filter through which we can put our thoughts with anything that comes into our minds. We can ask, first of all, is it true? Do I have correct information, or am I dealing with lies and falsehoods that are designed to make me upset, or to get me to act in a way that dishonors the Lord? Is it honorable? Am I listening to respectable people? Are the people I allow to influence me, taking me closer to Jesus, or are they taking me further away from him? Is it just are people being treated fairly? Are lies allowing the guilty to go free? Is society properly caring for those who are vulnerable? Is it pure? Are my thoughts honorable before the Lord, or am I allowing myself to to dwell on on sinful things and worldly values? Is it lovely and commendable? Do I enjoy the things that I enjoy to the glory of God? Does the the beauty that I see in the world? Does it point my heart and my mind to Christ? We’ve had a lot of new people in the last few months, and that means that you might be new here this week if this is your first time being here.

[00:01:57] Welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us. Um, but just know that if you have missed the first five parts of the series, this last part might not make as much sense to you as it could. So we would encourage you to go back and look at the first on our website. You can go back and watch the first five sermons, because the last two words today that we’re looking at in this list are very much the capstone summary of everything that came before them. We’re going to talk about excellence. We’re going to talk about things that are worthy of praise. Now, before we get into studying these categories of thought, I want to make a quick note about how the word excellence is is used in the church. In recent years, the word excellence has come to mean something like professionalism. Uh, as as churches have become bigger, as technology has advanced, there’s a there’s been a trend among some churches to, to really lean into slick presentational style of ministry, especially in corporate worship services like, like the one we’re in right now. And as the world becomes more and more accustomed to thinking about experiences, and you’ve seen that trend, right? You’ve heard people.

[00:03:14] What kind of an experience, what sort of a customer experience are people having as we think more along the trend like this? Even in the church, we’ve been talking a lot about things like like guest experiences, worship experiences, online experiences. And let me say that all churches should be thinking about how people experience things. Every ministry we should ask how, how do people experience this? Here at Calvary? We do that a lot, and we we take hold of some things. We use software to check in children. That’s a really good thing. It makes it quicker. It makes it easier, clearer. It’s safe. It’s a good way to do it. We use online registration for classes. We have a welcome desk. That’s part of what we do. We want to welcome people. And so that’s a kind of a program that we use. We serve coffee and cinnamon rolls most weeks. Although today was some kind of a Polish bread or something. It was really good. That’s fantastic. Right. We know we care about the experience. Oh, by the way, we also know that how hard it is increasingly to get to that coffee and and bread. I would even call it maybe treacherous. Uh, to get to the to the treats. How people experience things matters. It matters. We know that it matters. It’s part of being friendly, hospitable.

[00:04:40] It’s even part of being God honoring. However, because of a trend toward creating great experiences, there’s there’s a trend in the churches to reserve ministry roles for only those people who do it the best. The best hosts, the best musicians, whatever it is. And the phrase that gives license to appointing only the best for every position is that we value excellence. You. Maybe you’ve heard that phrase before value excellence. The argument goes that since we serve an excellent God and we should only have the best people doing excellent work to create an excellent experience, and this has led churches to do things like hiring people from outside the church to come do things on Sunday mornings. I have a friend who plays the bass, and he is hired by various churches all over to come perform in their worship bands on Sunday mornings. I don’t believe he even knows the Lord, but he sees these opportunities like gigs and he goes and he works with churches. Now that’s an extreme example. Okay, that’s an extreme example of a principle and a trend that is more widely embraced. God’s excellence means that we should be very highly skilled and professional in everything we do, because the Lord is worthy of it. That’s how the argument goes. And because that use of excellence is so popular in the church, I’m taking a little extended time here to say that that’s not the sort of excellence that we’re talking about this morning, okay.

[00:06:10] So if that’s what you hear when you hear the word excellence, that is not what we’re talking about. The trend I just described is one of those half truths that can send churches in the wrong direction. As we will see today, God is excellent and Christ is to be exalted because he is worthy of praise. And we and what we do in response to that truth, with the formal worship of our church and the the informal worship of our our lives should also be characterized by excellence. But this is not the same as professionalism or technical excellence or quality of production or execution. It has to do with virtue. Moral excellence. I’m going to show you this here in just a moment. I’m making special note of this to begin, because too often in churches, production value in the name of excellence is prized, while gospel fidelity, heartfelt worship, and working with new leaders is not. Now, don’t get me wrong, we try to do things really, really well here at Calvary. That’s a that’s an important part of who we are. But we measure excellence differently. Excellence and praiseworthiness are reflections of the character of God found ultimately in Christ. So let’s explore this as we have every week. First by defining the word as Paul uses it here. Then we’ll turn to Proverbs two that describes how to walk in biblical excellence.

[00:07:37] And then finally we’ll see a display of praise in response to the excellence of Christ. So once again, we’re going to look at two words that are very closely linked this morning. Pretty much in the same way that lovely and commendable were linked last week. That’s why we’re looking at them together. Something worthy of praise is virtually the same thing as something that’s commendable. Worthy of praise here means just saying the excellent thing out loud. That’s what, that’s what. That’s what it means. Worthy of praise means saying the excellent thing out loud. Mostly the Bible uses this to describe the praise of God. That’s that’s where you find this word the most. And it’s exactly how Paul uses it earlier in Philippians 111, when he refers to the glory and praise of God. And that makes a lot of sense to us here in the church, where we use the word praise almost exclusively to refer to worshiping God. I mean, how many of our songs have the word praise right in it? All of them, I think. Right? Praising is is it’s verbal exaltation. It’s announcing the greatness of something. So in Philippians four eight, it’s announcing the greatness of all the things that we find in the list. Notice how the phrasing for the last two words changes slightly for the first six categories. Paul kept repeating the phrase, whatever is, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, right? But the last two words he switches to if there is anything.

[00:09:17] If there is anything. And that’s most likely an indication that these last two words are meant to be broader, that they’re meant to be sort of summary words for everything else. He’s saying, look, I could go on with categories, okay? I could go on and on and on with categories. So let’s just summarize this by saying if there is anything that is excellent, if there is anything that is worthy of praise, those are the things that you should be thinking about. So excellence serves as a summary for true, honorable, just, pure, lovely and commendable. If it fits those categories, if something fits those categories, then it is excellent. Now, right away, it’s clear that the word excellent has more to do with moral excellence and moral virtue than it does with ability or with quality. Just the list alone tells us that. But as we do a little bit of digging, that definition becomes even more obvious. And there are two pieces of evidence that show us this. The first piece of evidence is that the Apostle Paul doesn’t use this word for excellence in any of his other writings, which I know at first sounds like bad news, doesn’t it? I thought, here we go again. One of these standout words, uh, once again, uh, I thought that was bad news, but it’s actually good news because the word arete, which is translated excellent here, was very popular among Greek philosophers.

[00:10:50] This is the word that Greek philosophy uses when they are going to refer to moral virtue, when they, when, when, when they wanted to teach about what a good person is, or if they wanted to teach how to have a good life balance or how to to live. Well, they would use this word. And Philippi is located in Greece. So the writings of these philosophers would have been accepted as the way to pursue the good life in that culture. What Paul has done is he’s reached out into the culture, and he’s grabbed hold of one of the words that everybody would have known. One example of of a philosopher using this was Aristotle, who wrote a book of ethics where he outlines 12 virtues that that every person should have, but have them in proper measure. So you couldn’t have too much or too little of the 12 virtues that he listed off one of them. I’ll give you an example. One of them was courage. Okay? He said, you want courage, but you don’t want too much courage because then you’ll be rash. But you don’t want too little courage because then you’ll be a coward, okay? And all 12 of them were like that. To live an excellent life, you needed to stay properly balanced in the middle of these 12 virtues, which required monitoring yourself and weighing out your thoughts and actions.

[00:12:14] Does this sound familiar? This sort of what Paul is telling us to do with this list. He wants us to to put our minds onto the proper things by reaching out into the culture and borrowing this concept of moral virtue. Paul is telling us that the remnants of truth that we find in the world can be redeemed by seeing them through the lens of God’s Word. Paul wants the Philippians to have their own list. He’s like, you got lists all around you. Let me give you a biblical list. Let me, let me, let me use what you see in the world around you. And let me, let me give you the same kind of list, but transformed by God’s word. So let’s stay, for instance, with courage. Aristotle discovered courage is an important virtue. But he was concerned with too much or too little. Proverbs 1810 says, the name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous man runs into it and is safe. Does that sound like courage? No, it sounds like retreat. Actually sounds like running away. Jesus said in John 1633, in the world you will have tribulation, but take heart. I have overcome the world. Where does courage come from? It comes from a firm trust in Christ who overcame. So yes, Aristotle rightly identified the virtue of courage.

[00:13:49] But without a knowledge of God’s Word, he focused on the amount Jesus would have us focus on the source. See the difference? It’s not how much courage we have, but the wellspring of our courage that matters. So, church, what this means is that that for you and me, is that we will definitely find some goodness and virtue in the world that matches up with God’s Word. There will be some kindness. There will be expressions of love. There will be feats of courage. You’ll even sometimes find self-sacrifice. And our job as the church is to do two things with that. First, we can think biblically about it, right? That’s the first thing we can do. We can think biblically about that virtue that we find, and we can use that those opportunities for evangelism, right. When we see that, we can use it as an opportunity. If a friend wants to talk about love, for instance, you can talk about true gospel shaped sacrificial love. If a friend is concerned about some unkind thing, some evil that he or she sees in the world, you can agree and explain that problem more accurately from a biblical perspective. Scripture takes all the remnants of virtue in the world and properly aligns them from a biblical perspective. Now, while Paul does not use the word again, Peter does. Right. We do have it. And it.

[00:15:26] Peter is the one that uses it. And this is the second piece of evidence that we have in the Bible. What we find in Peter’s writings reinforces our understanding of the word. This is second Peter one 3 to 7, and I have highlighted the word. I’m going to read this for you, and I’ve highlighted the word that we’re looking for because it’s the same word, but it’s translated two different ways in this passage. And that difference is important. So this is second Peter one, verses 3 to 7. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. By which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control, with steadfastness and steadfastness, with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. So Peter begins by saying that God has called us to his excellence, so divine power. God working in us gives us what we need to receive knowledge, to receive God’s wisdom, and then to act on it. And so, because God is at work in us, our moral excellence will be progressively conformed to his moral excellence, which is why Peter can command us in verse five to make every effort to supplement our faith with virtue.

[00:17:17] Virtue and excellence in this passage are the same Greek word. I kind of wish they would not change the English word, because it’s sort of obscures that connection a little bit. But you need to see that connection because you have been called to God in Christ. Your life can now strive for the excellence of God. The excellence of God. Your virtue can be conformed to his virtuous characteristics. Let’s work then, with this definition of excellence. Biblical excellence that is worthy of praise is anything that displays the virtues of God’s character. So if something leads you, if something leads us to become more like Christ, to exhibit godly virtues, to that we find in the character of God that is worthy to be praised, that’s a good thing. That’s something to grab a hold of. Any thought or ideas that cause you to be more worldly, to to be less Christ like. Those thoughts need to be rejected. They’re not even worthy of space in your mind. They need to be rejected. I spent some time at lifeguards this week. Lifeguards is our late night high school ministry on Wednesdays, where they address important topics. And so grab a hold of one topic and they’ll just discuss it for an hour or so.

[00:18:41] And this week the topic was stump Pastor Kyle. So the students just blasted me with the hardest questions they could they could throw at me for an hour. And and what they wanted to do was try to stump me so that they could win French fries. Um, I wanted to toss the French fries to him like seals that did a good job or something, but it’s probably not appropriate. So they’re blasting me with these questions. And in the midst of discussing the nature of communion, Roman Catholicism, predestination and free will, the history of Calvinism, euthanasia, and one noble attempt even to explain why manslaughter is not a sin. That’s a true story. Uh, I got this question. I got this this question. I was asked why so many Christians normalize and explain sin away. Huh? It’s a pretty good question. Why do why do so many Christians normalize and explain away sin? It’s a great question. A lot of good questions. That was that was an especially good one. Now this is my opinion, but it seems to me that the reason why so many profess Christ are normalizing, relativizing, and embracing sinful values is that they don’t know the Bible well enough to be discerning. They just don’t have it. So they look to friends. They look to family. They look to the internet to tell them what they should value and how they should think, but they don’t know what God has said to challenge what they’ve heard.

[00:20:14] You can’t conform to the moral virtue of the character of God. If most of your time is spent observing and the compromised virtues of the world. You can’t. It’s impossible. You can’t discern biblically if you don’t know the Bible. You can’t. You can’t weigh things against God’s wisdom if you’re not regularly hearing God’s wisdom. Moral excellence is a product of steeping your mind and heart in God’s Word regularly. Let’s look at Proverbs two. Listen to the active words here. Listen as we look at this passage. Listen to the active words here in the pursuit of God’s wisdom, I’ve highlighted them for you. My son. If you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it. As for hidden treasures. How do we get the knowledge of God that leads to his moral excellence? We go after it with everything that we are. That’s how we do it. I love how we describes this. Like you’re shouting after this. God, we need your guidance. God, we’re not going to make it through this day. We are not going to be able to navigate through all the things that are going to happen in this day, unless you open up a path and show us how to get there.

[00:21:44] Show us, by your word, the right way forward. The pursuit of God’s excellence is not for the passive. You are not going to ride down the lazy river to godliness, okay? You could get a big inner tube and just float your way down to godliness, because the current doesn’t flow that way. It flows the other direction. Christ like excellence lived out today is a hard fought adventure. Upstream, you have to pull against the current. You have to cut through the jungle of worldly false virtue, using the truth that God’s Word to correct the broken values around you. You’re not going to just wake up tomorrow and automatically think more biblically than you do today. You’re not. Unless you were steeping yourself in God’s Word today so that it affects your tomorrow. And if you do that, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. Skipping down to verse nine. Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity. Every good path for wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Every good path. Every good path. Friends. God’s promise to us is that if we seek him with wisdom, we will find the right path forward. We don’t suffer from a lack of knowing the right way forward.

[00:23:15] We suffer from our unwillingness to take the path that God has opened up to us. The morally virtuous life, the the good and pleasant life that leads to flourishing, has been opened up to us through the Word of God. And we see this displayed clearly in Christ. The Apostle John opens his gospel in this way. So this is the Gospel of John. This is right at the very beginning. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And this word, this word that, that, that was with God and was at the same time God himself. What did he do? And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory, glory as the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. See, Jesus in himself is the embodiment of God’s grace and truth. He negated and overcame every sinful temptation, every sinful thing that came his way he was able to overcome. He diffused the heretical ideas and empty philosophies that were mentioned by his opponents. See, he saw past the lies of that emptiness, and he got to the truth as God in the flesh he embodied.

[00:24:52] Perfect moral excellence. He was he was kind and gentle and merciful to people who came to him for healing. He was patient with his disciples, even when his disciples were slow to learn. He was patient with them. He taught that there was no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends. And then he did that. Then he went to the cross and laid down his life for his friends. He bore the wrath of God the Father to shield his people from that, that righteous anger and from eternal punishment. And then he was raised from the dead. He was restored to life because because death, being the ultimate consequence for sin, could not hold a perfectly holy God. And the same apostle John who wrote this gospel gives us a glimpse into the throne room of heaven when he received a vision. And that vision is recorded for us in the book of Revelation. And part of this vision, he saw these hard to describe living creatures that that would bow down before the Lord. And when the Lord was sitting on his throne. And these creatures would say, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come. And whenever these creatures started saying this, 24 elders, which represented the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles. So the God’s people, Old Testament and New Testament, all of God’s people represented there together, would fall down before the Lord, and they would cast their crowns at his feet and they would say, worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.

[00:26:41] In other words, the Lord Jesus excellence makes him worthy of praise. Church. A pursuit of those things that are virtuous, that are morally excellent and worthy of praise, is a pursuit of Christ. That’s how we pursue it. Do you want to know what’s true and honorable? Pursue Christ. Do you want to know what’s just and pure? Pursue Christ. Do you want? What is lovely and commendable? Do you want to know what is truly beautiful in this world? Pursue Christ. Jesus Christ is the pinnacle embodiment of godly excellence. He is worthy of our praise. I want to close this short series on the life of the mind, with just a few words about the relationship between our thought, life, and God’s grace. We’ve talked a lot in this series. If you’ve been with us for for six weeks, you know we’ve been talking a lot in this series about the the battle for our minds, the discerning ideas, separating out sin, taking every thought captive. And and that’s a very biblical way to talk. Uh, but although I’ve tried hard to show how this is an outworking of the gospel of grace, there’s always a chance when we’re using battle and fight language, to think that we can start to do these things in our own power.

[00:28:12] And once we once you’re, you separate your effort from God’s power at work within you. Pretty soon you start to think your whole relationship with God might be contingent on whether you can get your life right, whether you are doing it well enough. Can I get my life right? And therefore God will accept me? And in this case, we’re talking about our thought lives, which is a very contentious battleground. You know, I can stop myself from murder most for the most part. But not to hate. Not to hold a grudge. Not to carry bitterness. Those fights are waged in my mind. And those are much harder battles to fight. If my theology wanders too far from resting in God’s grace, I can find myself feeling very defeated by that. I’m sure you know what I mean. Some may even find themselves questioning whether they still have God’s grace at all. I want to close our series on Philippians four eight by jumping back earlier in Philippians to where Paul tells us where spiritual effort comes from. 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. Why do we strive to think the way God wants us to think? Is it because of our need to show him that we’re worthy? That we’re that we’re strong enough, that we can do it on our on our own? Is that why we strive to take every thought captive, to show God? See we’re good enough? No.

[00:29:55] It’s because God is at work in you, changing the way you will and you work. He’s both giving you the power to change, and he’s making you want to change. He gives you the strength to cast out those sinful thoughts. He gives you the ability to do that. And he also changes your heart to want to do that. When your thought life is a mess, God is still at work. He is not. He’s not left you. When you fail him. He doesn’t. He doesn’t leave you. The very fact. Get this. The very fact that you feel the conviction of your thought, your sinful thoughts, is a sure sign that God is still at work in your heart and mind. The fact that you feel bad is a gift. It’s the spirit bringing conviction so that you can repent and change and day by day become more like Christ. And I can tell you this, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. Rest in that grace church. Keep up the fight for your thoughts. But rest in that grace. Let’s pray.