Tag: salvation by works

Paul’s Favourite Church 5: The Wrong Passport (Philippians 3:1-14)

Philippians 3:1-14

When we go abroad, we have a problem at Passport Control. Many ports, airports, and train termini have automated electronic passport checking. No human being required. It makes things faster.

Or it should.

But not in our case. Because when our current passports were delivered by the postie, the dog collected them from the letterbox and added his own teeth-based signature to my wife’s passport. The teeth marks went through the electronic chip. Returning from her last foreign jaunt to see the ABBA Museum in Stockholm, the Swedish authorities were very sniffy about this, seeking additional ID, and telling her that she really needed a replacement passport.

The journey of our lives is meant to take us, in Paul’s word, ‘heavenwards’ (verse 14). What passport will get us in when we arrive?

What Paul talks about in our passage is how he knew he had had the wrong passport and how easy that is for religious people.

Look how he lists his religious qualifications to prove what an impeccable Jew he was:

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

You couldn’t be better than that. And that little word ‘zeal’ points us to what kind of Pharisee he was. In his day, there were two competing schools of Pharisees: those who followed Rabbi Hillel, and those who followed Rabbi Shammai. The Hillelites were lenient, and the Shammaites were strict. The Hillelites had a ‘live and let live’ approach to the political authorities, just so long as they could study God’s Law in peace, but the Shammaites said peace would only come when Israel was free from Gentile oppressors. Guess which one Paul was? A Shammaite.[1]

But whereas for the modern Christian ‘zeal’ is something you do on your knees, or in evangelism, or in works of charity, for the first century Jew ‘zeal’ was something you did with a knife.[2]

You wanted a pure, undiluted Jew? Paul thought he was pretty much there. But on the Damascus Road he had discovered it wasn’t putting him in God’s favour: it was putting him in opposition to God, even persecuting him.

I had a pretty good passport, too, or so I thought. Methodism was almost embedded in my DNA. When my sister took over the family ancestry work from our father, she concluded that she and I had been ‘fifth generation, same congregation.’ Our family’s involvement with our home church, Edmonton Methodist, had gone back five generations to a woman who joined the ladies’ meeting.

It did me no good. In fact, it led me astray. I thought that Christianity equalled believing in God plus doing good things. Salvation by works, as we call it. I thought I was close to God. In reality, I was a long way away.

As a minister, I have had people start attending one of my churches on a Sunday, having moved into the area and previously belonged to another church. They have asked to be considered for membership ‘if [they] were good enough.’ Those words are a sure sign of someone who holds the wrong passport.

And I still get people who, on their first meeting with me, want to tell me all about their Methodist heritage and what good Methodists they are. My heart sinks. If they are relying on their Methodist credentials, then they have the wrong passport.

What I need to hear about is their love for Jesus. Because that is the right passport.

And Paul tells his readers that our passport for our heavenly journey is – Christ:

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

That old passport based on his religious credentials? He considers it ‘loss’, in fact he calls it ‘garbage’ in our refined and delicate English translations. The word is actually a little less cultivated than that. It’s what we flush down the loo. I’m sorry if you’re shocked, but that’s what it is.

All that relying on our Christian heritage as our way to heaven needs to be flushed away. When we rely on that, it’s toxic. It needs to go.

The right passport is Christ, not us. Our heavenly destiny depends on our union with him and on his virtues, not ours.

Think of it like marriage vows. At the giving of the rings in the current Methodist Worship Book service, the words the bride and groom say to each other include these:

All that I am I give to you,
and all that I have I share with you[3]

In older generations, the words will have been, ‘All my worldly goods I thee endow.’

Coming into relationship with Christ is like this. We give him all we have. He gives us all he has. We give him our sin (which he disposes of at the Cross). He gives us his righteousness. And having the righteousness of Christ by repentance of those sins we have given him and by faith in him is what qualifies us for the passport for our heavenly journey.

The problem with the wrong passport, the one that lists our religious bona fides, is that it is about pride. Look at me. Look at how good I am. Look at what I’ve achieved. Me, me, me.

But the right passport is him, him, him. Christ has died for us. Christ has been raised to new life for us. Christ reigns on high.

When our daughter recently wanted to change jobs, she updated her CV and sent it off to various employers. But it is no good presenting our religious CV as our heavenly passport. It does not pass muster. It cannot reach the heights of the heavenly standards, because those have been set by Christ.

If we want the heavenly passport, we need to be relying entirely on Jesus.

Why say this to a group of people, most of whom have embraced the Christian faith for decades? Because Paul knew there was a danger of lapsing back into old ways of thinking. It had happened to the Galatians. He seems here to be wanting to put in preventative measures so it doesn’t happen to the Philippians.

Let’s examine ourselves and make sure we haven’t lapsed back into using the wrong passport. Let’s make certain that we are relying entirely on Christ as our passport to glory.

Now that might be a good place to conclude. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He has something else to say here, and it’s about living with the right passport:

10 I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

This union with Christ where we give him all we have and he gives us all he has leads to certain implications. Just as in a healthy marriage the couple get to know each other more deeply (even if men will never really understand women, and women will never really understand men) so we shall want to know Christ. And just as a couple will share one another’s sorrows and joys so we shall enter more deeply into both the suffering and the resurrection of Jesus.

But what does all that mean? Knowing Christ means we engage ever more deeply with his teaching. We read it in the Scripture. We ponder its meaning. We start putting it into practice.

Sharing in his sufferings and becoming like him in his death means that we too pay the cost of doing what is right and godly. And we also allow our hearts to be broken by the things that break his.

Attaining to the resurrection of the dead shows where we are heading, just as Jesus did, who was the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead, according to 1 Corinthians 15.

All in all, that union with Christ that provides our heavenly passport is like taking up all the marriage vows with him:

For better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
from this day forward[4]

We just delete the words ‘until we are parted by death’, because this is a union for eternity.

Therefore, union with Christ which provides our heavenly passport is not simply a ticket to heaven. It is a relationship that stretches into eternity. But it begins now.

Moreover, this is not just an individual thing. For we in the church in all our marital diversity – single, married, divorced, widowed – are together the Bride of Christ. And therefore this union with Christ that takes us to glory is something we work out together – not just united with Christ but united with one another. We cannot take the journey alone. As the church we are not just a bunch of snooker balls who bounce off each other every Sunday morning, we are a community that together works out the joys and sorrows of union with Christ.

And it’s OK to admit that we haven’t got our act together perfectly yet, that we are a project in the making, that – as Paul said in chapter 1 of Philippians, he who began a good work in us will complete it on the day of Christ Jesus. It’s OK to admit that – as long as we are committed to the relationship with Christ and each other and to its continual deepening. Paul himself knew he wasn’t the finished article, but he put his name to that development of the relationship. For as he said at the end of today’s passage:

12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, 14 I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.

I hope and pray that’s what we’ve all signed up for. Rejecting the wrong passport of boasting about our religious credentials; taking up the true passport of Christ; and living out that union with Christ together.

That is what church is.

[1] Tom Wright, What St Paul Really Said, p26.

[2] Op. cit., p27.

[3] Methodist Worship Book, p375.

[4] Op. cit., p374.

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Good Habits Versus Wrong Desires, John 6:24-35 (Ordinary 18 Year B)

John 6:24-35
Many of us remember fondly the Wallace and Gromit movies. The second one, The Wrong Trousers, finds Wallace taking in a penguin lodger to alleviate his debts.  

Unfortunately, the lodger is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw, and he spies the special techno-trousers Wallace has developed for taking Gromit on walks. Rewiring them for remote control and getting Wallace into them while he sleeps, he attempts to steal a diamond from the city museum.

The crowd in today’s reading don’t have a problem with the wrong trousers. They have a problem with asking the wrong questions. And their wrong questions betray their wrong desires.

As I said last week, the crowd has a choice between the grace Jesus offers them and their own mentality of grabbing. Ultimately, their wrong choices (which are also driven by wrong desires) will lead to them deserting Jesus.

Our desires are important – more so than we sometimes give them credit. Some Christians say we just need to get our thinking right and everything else will follow. It’s the religious version of the famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

But as the Christian thinker James K A Smith points out, that just makes us ‘brains on a stick.’ He urges us to remember the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who reminded us that what actually drive us are our desires and our loves. These are what form us, especially the habits they encourage in us. Smith puts it this way: ‘You Are What You Love.’

So it’s important to examine our desires. And hence today we’re going to look at the wrong desires in the crowd that are betrayed by their wrong questions so that we can nurture the right desires in our lives as Christian disciples.

The first wrong desire is to prefer physical satisfaction at the expense of the spiritual.

25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’
26 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 

They are glad to have had their bellies filled – and Jesus was happy to meet their needs. But after that, it all went downhill. Or perhaps it’s better to say that their real attitudes were exposed.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Jesus and his people meeting physical and material needs. In fact, it’s important, and it’s often the first step in Christian witness. As General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said: if you want to give a hungry man a tract, make sure it’s the wrapping on a sandwich.

The crowd is happy to receive the gift, but not the Giver. It’s me-centred, or perhaps we-centred, but not God-centred.

These attitudes still persist today. If God won’t give people what they want physically, then God must be rejected. It can be summed up in the T-shirt slogan, ‘He who has the most toys wins’ – to which the answer is, ‘He who has the most toys still dies.’ Paul’s teaching that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Timothy 6:6) is not popular teaching with our culture – and nor with our politicians and economists.

Nowhere is this more evident in our society than in the attitude to sex, where the typical time frame for a couple first to sleep together is now on just the third date. They would prefer to believe that God is a spoilsport and Christians are prudes to the truth that God actually has their well-being at heart when he prescribes a different and stricter approach.

We in the community of faith are not immune to these pressures to prioritise physical satisfaction and diminish or exclude our need to feed on Christ and his word. How easily we forget the way Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the tempter in the wilderness, that we do not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And that’s why we need to develop regular sustainable habits for our devotional lives. We have our regular habits for eating, and we know why we need them. So why do we shy away from doing the same for our spiritual sustenance? You cannot tell me that the average person cannot put aside at least ten or fifteen minutes a day for Bible reading and prayer.

And furthermore, we are spoilt for choice these days in the availability of resources to help us – from traditional daily Bible reading notes to apps for our smartphones.

Do we give an appropriate priority to our spiritual feeding as we do to the meeting of our physical needs? Or are we numbered among those the late AW Tozer had in mind when he said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

The second wrong desire is to prefer human works at the expense of divine grace.

Continuing the conversation with the crowd, Jesus says,

27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’
28 Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
The crowd falls into the trap of Jesus mentioning working for food that endures to eternal life. They want to work in order to receive approval from God. Did Jesus know their hearts and minds? I rather suspect he did.
For Jesus’ response is to tell them to do something that isn’t really work:
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
There are no works you can do to win the approval of God, he says. What God requires is that you put your faith in me.

The crowd makes a common mistake. People use the following of God’s laws either as good works that they hope will win favour from God, or as boundary markers to show who’s in and who’s out – hopefully proving that they are ‘in’.

And it’s a mistake to say this is just a fault seen in Jewish opponents of Jesus. The idea that we are not fundamentally sinners and can be good enough on our own to be accepted by God has been called by some ‘The English heresy.’ It has a long and tawdry history in our culture.

It is seen in the relegation of the word ‘sin’ to the salacious stories that were always so beloved of Sunday tabloids, usually of a sexual nature. Even in our day as newspapers are replaced by the Internet, there are plenty of these tales around.

But Jesus says we just need to believe in him, and that isn’t a good work that merits us the love of God. Faith is to hold out empty hands to God and believe that he is going to fill them with his good things.
Sadly, the good works heresy still squirms its way into the church. I have had people ask me if they were good enough for church membership. To which the proper reply is no, but neither am I. We are here by the grace of God alone, and we receive that by holding out the empty hands of faith.

It’s why whatever we say about right and wrong in society and in other people, we must be careful not to become judgmental. We are only in the family of God by his grace, received by faith in Jesus and his death for our sins.

I once met a Christian who had a particular way of reminding himself of this. I met him when we were both patients on a hospital ward, and he gave me his business card. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’, and I was puzzled. What degree or professional qualification was that, I asked him?

‘It stands for Sinner Saved By Grace,’ he replied.

‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

The third and final wrong desire is to prefer signs at the expense of the Saviour.

30 So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’

When I hear this, I’m inclined to think: what a cheek! You want a sign to prove that this is the One you should believe in? Well, what do you think you saw when he fed all five thousand of you?

It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul said in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians on this subject:

22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Some people have a lust for the spectacular and the dramatic. If there is a God, they expect a firework show with drones like the New Year extravaganza in London.

But Jesus points the crowd to the Father who gave bread from heaven in the wilderness, and ultimately to himself as ‘The Bread of Life’, because signs aren’t meant to be an alternative to faith in him and allegiance to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus did miracles. I believe he did. I also believe that miracles are not extinct. I do believe in a God who shows up in history and is not remote from us. And therefore, I believe in things like intercessory prayer.

But the signs are not an end in themselves. They are meant to point to Jesus. And that’s what we’re meant to focus on. That’s what matters.

Miracles are real, but rare, as CS Lewis said in his book on the subject. Why? Because the scientific laws by which our universe lives are a description of God’s habits – they must be, if it is true that Jesus ‘sustain[s] all things by his powerful word’, as Hebrews 1:3 says. The universe relies on God’s habits. Miracles are when God breaks his habits, but of necessity can only be rare, or the upholding of the universe will be disturbed.

Next time we want church or faith to be some kind of whizz-bang show, we need to ask ourselves whether we are putting our thirst for a religious performance ahead of our relationship with Jesus.
To be sure, I am not for one moment suggesting that church and faith should be boring. We believe in Jesus, and when we read about him we can be sure that he was many things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was boring.

But the life of faith is not the explosive adrenaline rush of the hundred metres sprint, it is the marathon. We keep Jesus and the finish line before us in what Eugene Peterson called ‘A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.’

Conclusion

So what if we are to make the right choices, not the wrong ones? At the beginning, I linked this with the need to establish habits.

If we are not to prefer physical satisfaction over the spiritual, then I talked about the habit of regular Bible reading.

If we are not to prefer human works over grace, then we need the regular discipline of both confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of forgiveness. So yes, let us notice this as a rhythm in Sunday worship every week. But we might also consider a daily review of our lives. There is an old Christian practice called the Examen, where we review the day before going to bed. We rejoice in the good of the day and where we have seen God at work. We also repent of those times we have failed him and are assured we are forgiven.

If we are not to prefer signs over the Saviour, then these first two disciplines, along with our other commitments of worship, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship will all be tools of the Holy Spirit to form us in the marathon race of God’s kingdom. Just so long as we keep doing them and they become regular habits.  
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