Sermon Text: Philippians 3:17–4:1
Date: March 16, 2025
Event: The Second Sunday in Lent, Year C
Philippians 3:17–4:1 (EHV)
Brothers, join together in imitating me and in paying attention to those who are walking according to the pattern we gave you. 18To be sure, many walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. I told you about them often, and now I am saying it while weeping. 19Their end is destruction, their god is their appetite, and their glory is in their shame. They are thinking only about earthly things. 20But our citizenship is in heaven. We are eagerly waiting for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21By the power that enables him to subject all things to himself, he will transform our humble bodies to be like his glorious body.
4:1So then, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, in this way keep standing firm in the Lord, my dear friends.
Don’t Shrink Away from the Moment
The basketball player gets the ball. Down by one point, a single made shot wins the game. The defense has panicked, leaving him wide open. The final seconds are ticking down. He lines it up and gets ready to take the shot, but he hesitates. His teammates on the bench are screaming for him to shoot, but he doubts himself and shrinks away from the moment. He sees a teammate open and passes the ball to him, but what he didn’t see was the defender behind him. The defender swats away the pass, grabs the ball, and they lose the game. They would have won if he had just taken and made the wide-open shot, but his hesitation means they didn’t even get a chance to try. Game over.
Our walk through this life as Christians is of far greater importance than any basketball game that has ever been played, but the same kind of metrics and drama are present. We have a limited amount of time, we face pressures and opposition that sometimes are outside of us and sometimes are inside of us. When everything is on the line for us spiritually, do we shrink away from the moment, hesitating to or even refusing to live the life that God has called us to live? Or do we embrace the moment and seize the opportunities that God is putting in front of us?
In our Second Reading this morning, Paul is writing to beloved Christians in the city of Philippi. This brief letter is often called Paul’s letter of joy because, despite writing it while under house arrest, Paul is so positive and so thankful for these partners in gospel ministry that he just can’t keep it contained. Even in our brief snippet of the letter here, you get a sense of that joyful flavor. Consider how he addresses this congregation in the last verse of our reading: my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown… Is there any question about Paul’s feelings toward these fellow believers?
And what does he want for these beloved people? That they live their lives consistent with their faith in the crucified and risen Savior. And how would they learn what to do? In part, by looking at Paul and his coworkers in the ministry: Brothers, join together in imitating me and in paying attention to those who are walking according to the pattern we gave you. Now, to be clear, Paul is not implying that he, in some way, is the “gold standard” of living the Christian life; this is the same man who, when writing to pastor Timothy, was clear that he viewed himself as the worst sinner of all (see 1 Timothy 1:15-16). But he knows that while he was with the Philippians, he set a positive, if not perfect, example. And he urges them to follow suit.
You might have had the experience that heavy, big emotions in one area can lead to heavy, big emotions in another area at the same moment. And so it is the case here that in Paul’s overflowing joy for the Philippians, with the floodgates of his heart set wide open, he loses control of his emotions in another place. So, with tears in his eyes, tripping over his words and even interrupting himself, he puts forth the opposite side of the coin, the thing he doesn’t want in any way, shape, or form for the Philippians: To be sure, many walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. I told you about them often, and now I am saying it while weeping. Paul is absolutely destroyed that many are going about their lives as enemies of the cross of Christ.
What constitutes being an enemy of Christ’s cross? It’s not necessarily being vehemently opposed to the gospel message to the point of fighting against it. While that would certainly be included here, Paul’s description is not limited to that. How does he describe these enemies? Their end is destruction, their god is their appetite, and their glory is in their shame. They are thinking only about earthly things. It’s not only setting one’s heart and mind against Jesus but simply valuing other things over him.
There may be echoes here for you of our worship from Wednesday evening this past week where we focused on the First Commandment. In short, enemies of the cross of Christ are those who value things other than Christ’s cross, put other things ahead of God in their lives. Indeed, this would apply to unbelievers. But this is also a path believers can walk. Paul is determined to do everything he can not to let that happen to the Philippians and their faith.
But what would cause someone to take such a position? What would cause someone to value things other than God? What would that look like in practice? Well, looking at what Paul says here, we might be able to derive some thoughts:
Their god is their appetite. Now, a phrase like this perhaps conjures up a hedonistic view of someone who overindulges in every worldly thing. But it’s more basic than that. Perhaps this is someone who overindulges, but it might also be someone who is constantly on the hunt to make physical ends meet. They might rarely know where their next meal is coming from, so their growling, empty stomach becomes their god; they focus primarily on how to fill it next to preserve their life. This is an example of a lack of trust in God’s promise for daily bread. And even if it’s not too-much or too-little, prioritizing physical appetites over everything else in this life—especially God—is a tell-tale sign of an enemy of Christ’s cross.
Their glory is in their shame. So too, the enemies of Christ’s cross might find glory in shameful things. We might think of the person who brags about how they cheated someone in a transaction and came out financially ahead. Or perhaps someone who lives a sexually promiscuous lifestyle and boasts about his or her “conquests” in that realm. Perhaps it’s someone who brags about how much alcohol they consumed or how many drugs they took at a party over the weekend. It might be someone laughing about the filth that dominates their internet usage. All of these things should be shameful because they are sinful abuses of God’s blessings. But rather than approaching these things with repentance and sorrow, they boast in them, value them, identify with them, and might even find the meaning to their life in them. For the enemy of Christ’s cross, actions and attitudes that they ought to be ashamed of are worn as badges of honor.
They are thinking only about earthly things. Oh, and now this is where it starts to get really uncomfortable, because this statement seems wildly broad. I wonder, how many of us here today have thought, just since the sermon started, primarily about that work that needs to be done at home or that bill that needs to be paid, or that meal that will need to be prepared, or that bit of fun we’re planning for the afternoon, or anything along those lines rather than focusing on God’s Word. Are the earthly things dominating your thoughts, pushing spiritual matters and the joy of Jesus’ cross out?
Well-meaning Christians can become enemies of the cross of Christ. Consider for just a moment the suffering that you might undergo for being a Christian. What trouble has or might your faith cause among the members of your family? What about among your friends? Coworkers? Neighbors? Even strangers at the coffee shop or driving down the road? What is our gut reaction most of the time? We might not want to face the consequences of having a faith that is looked down on, so we hide it. We perhaps have a moment for confession, a time to make our faith known, but we sit quietly; we don’t take the shot.
In our nation, an ugly side-effect can come along with our secular principle of the freedom of religion—we, as Christians, long for “comfortable” or “consequence-free” Christianity. We want to be Christians, but not endure any hardship for that. We want to cherish our Savior while keeping him a secret or relatively unknown. We want the blessings of being the child of God while at the same time indulging in the infatuations that come with being a child of this world.
So this “enemies of the cross of Christ” category is not just those people who seem especially opposed to the gospel. Again, it’s anyone that is valuing these earthly things more than spiritual things. It might be true of the hedonistic unbeliever, but it is also just as likely that you and I here today are, in part, going through our lives like this. However, whether in ourselves or others, Paul gives us the proper response to these things. He isn’t furious about this; his tears say it all. We need to see the spiritual and eternal danger these attitudes pose for us.
Is it any wonder that Paul is weeping when he thinks of people living like this and that such a fall could even come upon his beloved Philippians? This path ends nowhere good. It only ends with the rejection of faith, the rejection of everything won at the cross of Christ, and ultimately, as eternal punishment in hell for our sins.
So, if our thoughts are misguided if they’re focused exclusively or even primarily on earthly, physical things, what is the solution? Paul directs us in the next verse: But our citizenship is in heaven. Our closing hymn this morning will underscore the fact that, really, we are foreigners here in this world. Our true homeland is heaven, the dwelling place of God. That’s easy to forget, though, because we don’t see a lot to remind us of that and redirect our thinking that way. It’s like we’re traveling abroad and find ourselves swept up in another nation’s civil war. If we can only focus on what is right in front of us, we might be terrified of the injury or even death that could face us. But if we remember our true citizenship and seek help from our homeland, ideally, we will be rescued from that conflict and returned home safely.
This citizenship idea would have been powerful in the city of Philippi. As a leading Roman city in the area, many of the residents would have been Roman citizens, aware of the privileges they held there and throughout the empire because of their citizenship. Likewise, the people who didn’t have citizenship in the empire would have been accurately aware of what they were missing.
But Paul stresses that our citizenship in heaven supersedes that of any earthly nation. And don’t miss a really small, yet really important detail. Paul says that our citizenship is in heaven, not that it will be in heaven. This is something that is true right here, right now. How? He goes on: We are eagerly waiting for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are looking forward to our Savior Jesus’ victorious return at the last day. But this stresses once again that this forgiveness, this citizenship, is something given, not earned. You don’t get this citizenship because you paid a lot of money, as you might in the Roman empire. You don’t get it because you jump through all sort of legal hoops and red tape, complete with lawyer’s fees, as you might in our nation. No, this citizenship is a gift of God’s love.
But this gift was not free. Like us, Jesus had a choice in front of him: easy path or difficult path. The easy path would have meant no cross, no suffering, no death, but that also would have meant eternal damnation for us all. Jesus was not willing to take the easy path, to save his own skin, and leave us to rot. So he took the difficult path, the path of the cross, the path that led him to taking our sins on himself and being punished for them at his cross so that we would be free from sin. This is why we are citizens of heaven, because of Jesus’ love for us that sacrificed himself to save us.
We hold dear, cherish, and value that citizenship-gift above everything else. We walk about our lives not as enemies of the cross of Christ but so thankful for all the eternal blessings we have now and will fully experience later for Jesus’ sake. We recognize that this path will be difficult; we will have crosses of our own, suffering of our own, placed on us as we go through this life. But let’s not take the shortcuts. Let’s not prioritize short-term comfort, which will forfeit eternal-term comfort and peace. Let us look forward to that final transformation that Jesus will bring about, when he brings us back to our homeland, to heaven, and purges even that sinful nature from us so that our bodies will be more akin to his glorious body than the decay we feel now.
Lord, give us the drive to walk the path in front of us, no matter how difficult or painful. Help us always be your positive representatives in the world, no matter the cost. Strengthen us as you forgive us for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
