Things to Think About

It is an essential part of our Christian faithfulness to glorify God by using the mind he has given us.

Well, our passage this morning begins with the word ‘Finally’, which means that we are soon coming to the close of our time in the letter to the Philippians. We have just this week and next week in this letter, and I hope you have been encouraged and challenged by this letter the way that I have. I think what’s challenged me the most is the way that I am called to emulate Christ by considering the needs of others as more important than my own needs. That picture of Jesus not grasping his glory, but instead emptying himself to become a man and to go to the cross and to sacrifice himself for the glory of God: that has left a lasting impression on me, as I’ve looked this over. And I hope that you’ve had lasting impressions left on you by Paul’s letter. I hope you’ve been built up in your resolve to follow Jesus more carefully and more closely and more joyously than before. In November, we’re going to embark on an even longer journey through the Gospel of Luke. So that’s what’s beginning in November, and I have timed it up so that the Christmas passages line up directly with Christmas. So the angels and the shepherds will be all placed correctly in your minds.

Our passage this morning is unique today because it’s going to give us some instructions that go beyond the way that we act and the way that we present ourselves, which we talked about last week. Paul is going to talk about the way we think. Specifically, he’s going to talk about the sorts of ideas we should allow to be resting and sort of wrestle about in our heads. A lot of times when we picture the Christian life, we picture the things that we do. So what we do is we contrast the works of the glory of God, the works of righteousness, with sinful acts. And that’s how we think about how are we going to navigate the Christian life. And Paul is going to mention that in part of our passage today. Our physical obedience is actually very important to our faithfulness to Jesus, and he’s going to talk about the importance of role models again, he’s going to mention that. And so we’re going to talk briefly about that as well. But our passage today starts one step prior to our actions. You think about what you do. We’re going to start one step prior to that and look at our thought life. Paul’s going to bring us to an understanding of what it means to develop a Christian mind. The great preacher, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote: “The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking.” And he’s right. The Apostle Paul tells us this in Romans 12, that the transformation that we need, starts with the renewing of our minds. And that makes sense when you think about what sin is. It began as a decision of the mind, didn’t it? It wasn’t simply an action. It started with thinking. It began with a decision to disobey God’s Word, and it ended with a physical act of sinfulness. But that act was conceived first with internal reasoning. Sin is rebellion that starts in the mind, and it starts in the heart and it results in action. So any real renewal in Christ would have to begin with a with a transformation of our minds. But if you take a look, just take a look, at the landscape of Christianity, you might not guess that that’s where faith in Christ starts. You would find that there’s very little mental energy expended on Christian faith at all. The late R.C. Sproul wrote, ‘We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.’ He wrote that in 1982. So you judge whether it’s gotten better. What he means is, there is no lack of passion for Jesus and fire in the hearts of people who love Jesus. He’s not questioning that. But there’s very little serious pursuit of the depths of the knowledge of Christ and his word among the vast majority of Christians. And along with that, there’s very little engagement with the philosophies of the world and how they interact with the Christian worldview. And there’s very little deep thinking about the sciences and how they fit into to a biblical worldview. And there’s an historical reason for that. There’s a reason why we’ve got to this place. I don’t have the time this morning to go too deep into the history, but about 200 years ago, there was a shift in the church. Ministries began emphasizing emotions and experience over engaging the mind and the teachings of scripture. The so-called Great Awakening in the United States was very focused on emotional appeals and experiences rather than a solid preaching and well-reasoned evangelism and apologetics that took place sort of in the mid-1800s back, in the 19th century. And so when German theologians started undermining the history and the grammar of the scriptures, and when scientists started suggesting origins of the universe and the development of nature without a creator, what happened was sort of two fold, two things happened at that time. Half the church went in the direction of embracing everything secular in society and everything that they had to say about Christianity, and they ended up with a very compromised and secular church. It’s what we call the mainline church or the liberal church. And half the church went the other route, but they went into anti-intellectualism. They stopped up their ears. They went into little bubbles of Christian faith. They made Christian faith all about my personal relationship with Jesus.

If you wonder why young people often leave home and then leave Christianity, one of the reasons is that they were taught what to believe but not how to believe. They were given content but not ability to reason. They encounter different world views for the first time and they have no tools in their mental toolbox to process those ideas within the Christian Worldview. Church, the mental life, the thought life, of a Christian is of great importance. What you think, what you dwell on, where your thoughts go, how you process information around you is of great importance. J.P. Moreland says the development of the Christian mind is perhaps the most integral component of the believer’s sanctification. And I believe he’s right. I’m inclined to agree to that. Our scripture this morning is a poetic plea to think about what we think; to consider those things that we allow our minds to dwell on. What we do with our thought life affects everything about us, including our Christian growth, our worship, and our effectiveness in God’s mission. It is an essential part of our Christian faithfulness to glorify God by using the mind that He has given us. Now. I know that God has created people differently. He’s not created us all the same. And the effects of the fall on the human mind have left us with different levels of capacity to even use our minds. I’m going to talk a little about this later, but for now, let me say that what Paul writes here today, when we look at this passage, where he tells us to think over and over again, it has nothing to do with capacity. There’s nothing to do with how well you can think. When Paul tells us to think, he means take whatever capacity and ability God has given you with your mind and set that mind on these things. Not every one of us is going to be a theologian or an intellectual. Not not everybody is able to be that. And that’s fine because God made you. God knows exactly how he made you. He made you fearfully. He made you wonderfully. You are exactly how God wants you to be. With what we’re about to read, I want you to remember God made you with the capacity that He has designed for you. And what he’s calling you to do is to take that mind, the mind he’s given you, and to cultivate it for his glory. Paul lists eight virtues that we are to think about, and they overlap. They’re not they’re not complete eight completely different ideas, but they are separate enough that we’re going to look at these individually, like he lists them here, and then he moves to thinking about how we practice these things. And so we’re going to look at that as well.

Let’s start with our thought life. “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.” Hmm. Now, the list itself is interesting because it contains virtues that were the popular Greek virtues of the day. These were the values of the city. This is not a list of uniquely Christian things to think about. This is not ‘hey, Christians have captured all these virtues and nobody else has them’. He’s saying no, think about the very virtues that all of society recognizes as good. He’s pointing to the church to engage with all of the virtues in their culture that line up with God’s character. And of course, some virtues in society do line up with God’s character because God is the creator of all of this. God’s character can be seen in all that he’s created, and he’s written his law on the hearts of all people. So even those who reject and rebel against him are actually inextricably linked to his law. That’s why atheists argue for morality, even though they don’t have any basis for it, even though there’s no logical basis for morality. It’s why everyone has a keen sense for justice, even if they don’t have a biblical understanding of justice, everybody seems to have a very keen sense of justice and wants to see justice done. It’s why your cousin who refuses to believe in God and hates Christianity and thinks humans are just highly developed animals, still thinks we have some kind of responsibility to care for the earth. Have you thought about that? Where does that responsibility come from? Is he right? Well, why don’t all the other animals have responsibility too, then, in his worldview? I’m all for these discussions. I want these discussions. These are great conversations to be in. Let’s talk about this.

This is a list here of the virtuous things left in the world that should command the attention of the thoughts of Christians, because they come from the DNA of our Creator. To start, think about whatever is true. Christianity is a worldview that is based on truth. The bedrock of Christian faith is on the historical accuracy of the death and the resurrection of Jesus. If you take away true facts from Christianity, there’s nothing left of it. There’s no Christianity left at all. And what that means is then, is that a person growing in Christ will always be pursuing what is true in the world. We want to know what is true. We care about what is factually right. We reject those things that are factually wrong. We should care about and embrace true scientific data. I’m talking to a bunch of doctors and engineers, so this shouldn’t be a stretch, right? We should care about data and facts and things that are true. When scientists overreach and become philosophers and theologians and they interpret their findings and going beyond the tools of scientific discovery, well, we can talk about that then, right? We can talk and we can see that. But if we’re rigorously pursuing truth, we ought to be able to discern when we’ve moved from facts to theories. By the way, this pursuit of truth also means that we as Christians care very much about understanding the arguments of other people. What are they saying? What are they actually putting forward? We don’t make strawman arguments. We don’t put words in the mouths of other people that we don’t agree with just so we can win the argument. We don’t do that because we care about truth. We’re supposed to care about other people enough to truly understand what they’re saying. It’s actually part of the reasonableness that we talked about last week. The pursuit of truth in God’s revealed word and in God’s created realm is a major cornerstone of Christian growth. So we as Christians, we do not deal in falsehood. We don’t care for it. We don’t pass along lies. When things come along, we verify to see if something is true before we pass it along. We don’t close our eyes to hard true realities, even if they require us to change our minds. We don’t run away from them. There’s a place for feelings and there’s a place for emotions in Christianity. But those things should flow from what is true.

Then he tells us to think about what is honorable. Something that’s honorable is something that we should elevate, and that we should see as noble; to elevate it and to see it as noble. It’s the same word that Paul uses in First Timothy and Titus to describe the dignity of men and women who serve in the church. That’s the same word. They’re honorable. And of course, these leaders are supposed to be honorable people because they’re going to point us to Jesus. They’re going to be an example of Jesus for us. Our Christian thought life should include thinking about those things in God’s creation that are worthy of honor, that are worthy of us raising them up. That means we can really get behind something and uphold it in our society if it matches up well with what the Bible says is honorable. We look out into our society and we see something that aligns with God’s word. We can hold that up. Marriage is one of those things. Marriage is one of those things we can hold up as honorable. And marriage is considered honorable in our society, just sort of at large. And divorce is seen as a problem or even as a failure, even by those who don’t know Jesus.

Thanksgiving. That’s coming up. Right? Thanksgiving is a holiday almost everybody in our culture celebrates. Not everybody knows who to thank. We’ve learned that, right. Not everybody knows who to thank. So they bend over backwards trying to redefine thankfulness as some vague, warm feeling. But Christians see the honor in a holiday that gives thanks because it’s an opportunity for us to thank the Lord and to do so in a public way. That’s an honorable thing. There are lots of things like this in our culture, and part of our Christian walk is to show honor to these things. In fact, Paul instructs us to show honor to whom honor is due. That’s Paul’s instruction in Romans 13. He’s talking about the government there. There is honor due. Paul said even to a Roman secular, pagan, even anti-Christian government, he says, there’s something that we have to uphold that is honorable. Our growth in Christ includes identifying and thinking deeply about the things in the culture that are honorable because they align with the virtues of Christ and His gospel.

Think about whatever is just. So justice here. There may not be a more controversial concept in our society right now than the issue of justice, and what constitutes justice, right? Even as I say the word justice, you’re probably leaning in like, oh, tell me more. What’s he what’s he going to say? Biblical justice and its intersection with social justice could be its own sermon series. And I cannot say everything this morning. I’m only on three of eight, so we’ve got to keep it moving along here. But I can summarize by saying that we as Christian believers, who trust in a God who is perfectly just, we have to care about justice in our world. We are called to care about justice. We cannot right all of the wrongs of society. That’s not what I’m suggesting. But we have to care deeply about justice being done in every situation. In a way that is informed by the truth, which is what we’re also supposed to be thinking deeply about. Justice is the right decision when the truth of the evidence is made known. That’s my definition. Justice is the right decision when the truth of the evidence is made known. When we know what the facts are, when we see everything that we can see, that there is to see, a right choice needs to be made. At that point, I call that justice. In a court of law, justice means the guilty are punished and the innocent are free. That’s probably the easiest form of justice for us to see, is sort of that courtroom. Justice is often what we think of when we think of what is just. But scripture is clear that justice is also protecting the vulnerable from abuse. So laws are set up in the Old Testament, among God’s people even. But in our culture as well. Laws are set up to make sure that there is protection for women and for children and for the poor and for the immigrant. The early church had to put rules in place to make sure that the widows who were truly vulnerable widows, were taken care of, had to make sure that they were cared for properly because they saw that injustice could easily be done to them. And they said, we have to make sure that this doesn’t happen. There was some ethnic bias in the early church between the Jews and the Gentiles, and they had to sort that out so that people were being treated equally in the serving of the widows. Actually, if you go to Acts 6, you can read about that. They were thinking about justice. They were thinking about the fairness and making sure that there wasn’t control in the process that was unjust toward people. See, with sin rampant throughout our culture, we know that opportunities for injustice are everywhere, and you experience them all week long, although you probably move past them very quickly. But there’s opportunities for injustice all over the place. And what happens is those who do not love Jesus, who are not who are not controlled by the Spirit, they see these opportunities and they use them as a prey, a way to prey on the vulnerable and the weak. I got a text this week and it said, ‘Congratulation! You have won iPad!!’ I do not think, I do not think I won iPad. Something tells me. But I know what they’re trying to do. I know what they’re trying to do here. People everywhere are scheming and scamming and they’re ruining people’s lives. This is going to work on somebody, and they know it. They only need one. Unjust laws work their way into a society and then they become normalized. They just become the way things are. So bias and preferential treatment, racism, all of these things can be factors in creating injustice in our society. And it’s part of our Christian calling to think deeply about the issues of justice, real justice, biblical justice, so that we can not only act in a way that honors God, but in ways that will help to redeem society.

We’re supposed to think on things that are pure, Paul says. Unfortunately, words like purity are usually laughed off in our culture as old fashioned, right? And so I’ve even heard Christians describe themselves as not being a prude, trying to avoid appearing too focused on being morally pure. But understand, being pure is sinlessness. It’s the battle that Christ himself fought in the wilderness, overcoming the temptations of the devil with the Word of God. See, our minds can be filled with images and ideas that tempt us and lead us in a direction that is away from Christ. If you’ve trusted in Christ, you have a new heart. You have a new spirit that wants to be faithful to Jesus. But it takes discipline. It takes the discipline of reading and thinking and meditating and praying through God’s Word to train your new mind and heart to long for purity. And then we’re called to think on the things in the world that align with the word of God. So we’re training our minds in purity, understanding what is evil, what isn’t. And then we’re called to focus our minds. The battle for purity is waged primarily in our minds. And so Paul tells us we need to look into the world at those things that align with the purity of Christ. And we need to meditate on those things. Avoiding impurity is an important strategy for the Christian mind. But the flip side of that is to think about pure things. Our strategy is usually avoidance. We’re usually trying to avoid things, but that’s only half the battle. That’s only half of what we’re called to do. The other half is finding those times and actions and those pieces of art that are morally pure and that are joyous. Those things that that we can celebrate as examples of God’s goodness to us.

This is where the list really starts to overlap. So let me go quickly through these remaining virtues. He says, Think about lovely things. Think about lovely things. These are things that are aesthetically beautiful while at the same time causing us to ponder the beauty of God. So what naturally fits into this category are natural things, things like oceans and mountains and forests. This time of year you can really see it, right? I was walking in through the parking lot today. I glanced over, I saw this huge what I think is a maple tree. It’s just big, beautiful red colors on my walk in. It’s easy to see the beauty of God’s creation today. But things that are lovely can also be manmade creations. Taking God’s creation and making something with the creative ideas that he’s given us and the gifts that he’s given us. So things like paintings, sculpture, music, theatre, literature, architecture, building a business, engineering, hard work, efficiency, software design, gardening, all of these things, the list is nearly endless of the ways that we can take things in God’s world and create beautiful things. Remember, Adam and Eve were placed in a garden. That’s true. It was already done. But then they were given a whole wilderness of a world that their descendants were to subdue and to rule over and to tame and to create. Human creativity and ingenuity are part of the plan of God’s design for us to worship our creator. And so anything that we create that draws our minds to the beauty of God is worthy of our thought life. We should think on these things because it’s a way that we can worship God.

Think about what is commendable, what is excellent and worthy of praise. Now these mean nearly the same thing, but from slightly different angles. Commendable things are things that we can recommend to other people. Excellence means the thing itself is a very high quality and worthy of praise means you just can’t stop gushing about this thing. It’s actually very close to the word commendable. These all combined to mean that when you you find something in the world that’s pure and beautiful and well done, and it points to the greatness of God, we should tell other people about them. We should commend them to other people so that they can join in that joy too, so they can be part of that worshipping God together. There’s tension in the world between the excellence of God’s creation, and the effects of sin that have tarnished God’s creation. There’s a tension there. A lot of times people will see that tension and they’ll just say, Well, so we should just stay out of the world completely. That’s not our call too. Others will say, Well, let’s indulge in everything in the world because God created all that. Well, it’s not true. It’s been tainted by sin in many ways. One of the most important functions of the church is to think really deeply about that tension and discern what to commend and what to reject. Some things we can accept and celebrate just as they are. We don’t have to do anything with them. A birth of a new baby. A little baby. Right. Beautiful. The accomplishment of of graduating. Fantastic. Good friends, good food. These are good things that we don’t have to think a lot about when it comes to discernment. Other things we have to reject, and it doesn’t take much discernment there either because they we just got to call them what they are. They’re sinful and impure and they lead us away from honoring Christ.

But then there’s a whole world of gray. There’s this whole gray area of the world that requires a lot of discernment. We have to really consider, does this art honor the Lord? Is this business run justly? Is this law fair? Is it fair for everyone? Is it taking care of people? Is this relationship that I have with this other person, is it faithful to God’s design for humanity? It might be a great relationship. It might treating it with the greatness and excellence of God. Some things can be redeemed. We can change them, we can mold them and shape them. We can redeem them out of culture. Other things will ultimately have to be rejected. It’s a tension that requires a lot of careful thinking and a lot of careful handling of God’s word. Church, I believe what Paul is telling us to do here is one of the most neglected areas of Christian growth. We need to return to a Christian faith that values deep, careful, critical thinking.

And then Paul turns to our actions. He says this (Philippians 4:9): “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me – practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” Now, we’ve already talked a lot about in this series about the need for imitating what we see in other Christians and being role models for one another. And so I won’t say too much about that here, but notice how comprehensive Paul is about what the Philippians should see in him. Look, look, look at all these words that he uses. He says what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. It’s not – he didn’t just say, remember all the things you heard me teach you? Remember all the stuff I said to you? Get it in your mind so that you will do it. It doesn’t say that. It’s not just what he said. it’s everything about him. Everything about Paul. See, he preaches what he practices, and he practices what he preaches. This is why you’ll never grow in Christ simply by learning information in a classroom. You won’t. Or simply by hearing sermons like this, you won’t grow to everything you’re called to be. You have to be involved in a community where you are living visibly, so you can see and experience and walk with brothers and sisters and Christ. Since this verse follows the explanation of the thought life, it’s clear that Paul has in mind a kind of church community where people are thinking deeply and critically about the world, through the lens of the gospel. That’s this community, is communities thinking deeply about the gospel and all of the things in the world through the lens of the gospel. And then they are in community with each other where they can model the choices and the discernment that comes from that deep thinking. So they’re thinking deeply, individually and collectively, and then everybody else can see how that is creating discernment for the community. See, as a Christian, I can’t read everything. Do you read everything? I can’t read everything. I don’t know all that’s out there. I can’t read everything. I can’t see everything. I haven’t taken the time to think about and consider everything. But if I’m in a community of fellow Christian thinkers who are making solidly discerning choices, and who are reading more widely than I am in areas that I don’t understand, and are walking with people that I don’t walk with, and they are seeing and discerning in ways that I am not seeing and discerning, then my ability to know expands well beyond my own ability to see and experience. Being part of a church with role models and fellow travelers in Christ is like being surrounded with a living library that’s discerning information. And helping to guide us. It’s like being inside of a living library. Written on the hearts of God’s people. The community of the church is so much more important to Christian growth than people generally think that it is. We need each other. We need each other to navigate our world in a way that glorifies Christ in all that we do and in all that we think.

Now. I know that I’ve spent a lot of time this morning talking about intellect and the pushback from you and from others might be that not everybody can do this. Not everybody can do this. God has created us with varying capacity to think and to comprehend. Because of the effects of the fall on creation. some are born with very little capacity. People with learning disabilities or other cognitive issues. I don’t in any way this morning want to give the impression that a person can’t be faithful as a Christian unless he has certain intellectual abilities. I want to end by pointing out that what Paul says here has nothing to do with your capacity to think. It has everything to do with the object of your thoughts, no matter how deeply you think. It’s the object of our thoughts. It’s the place that we look. I am so honored and so full of joy that in this church we welcome and worship together side by side with people of every ability. God knows how he made us. He knows our limitations and he tells us all to take whatever capacity God has given us, whatever God has given to us, and focus it on the truth and justice and purity and beauty that we find in Christ. And even those who don’t have a deep capacity to think can use what God has given to them, to express excitement, to clap with joy, to sing his praises and to radiate the goodness and the excellence of Jesus. Would you pray with me?