All right, just a couple of announcements. This is tomorrow's the last day to register for the Chafer Conference. And according to my most recent reports is they've had record registration this year. And also, I think we're having record number of students who are taking courses for credit, which is very important as we get more and more students who are pursuing a degree in order to go into some sort of teaching ministry. Jeff Phipps is teaching in Brazil, August 28th to September 3rd. So please keep him in prayer. And then the Fort Bend Evangelism sign-up sheet is out in the fellowship hall. And that would be good training if you just want to learn more. It's a great opportunity just to go and observe. Be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication. With thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. Before we get started, let's have a few moments of silent prayer so we can make sure we are in right relationship with the Lord. And that means to confess sin in silent prayer if necessary, and make sure you keep short accounts. So let's bow our heads together and go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we're thankful we have this time to get together, to be refreshed by Your Word, to be encouraged, to be motivated, to put our mental attitude into Your Word so that we think the way that You want us to think. We think how You want us to think and about the things You want us to think. That we can focus on the fact that we are just here in this life. 10,000 years from now we will not remember one thing about this just three seconds of time on our timeline. And Father we just need to think about that. So Father we thank You for Your word and we pray that we can focus and pay attention tonight in Christ's name, Amen. Alright we're looking at The final exhortation in this section on living as a citizen of heaven, which is just another way that Paul is using to challenge us to live in light of who we are now that we are a believer in Christ. And so he uses this metaphor of citizenship because Philippi was a Roman colony. It was colonized by a retired military with businessmen from Rome and that had their citizenship still in Rome. So they understood this metaphor that they were away from where they had their citizenship, but they still had all the rights, privileges, prerogatives of a Roman citizen. And so that is to be applied in many ways to the Christian life. Now the backdrop for much that we're talking about last week and this week, especially in relation to carnality and the carnal Christian, is to understand the sin nature. And I've always thought that this diagram, and the more I think about it, the more helpful it is. If you're an employer or an employee, You need to understand who you're working for, who works for you, and you can use this as a grid for just understanding the kind of people that work with you. You know, it beats Freud because it's biblical. It gives us a great tool for self-analysis. And the more we think about it, the more bad we really are. But thanks to the grace of God, we have been transformed into a new creature in Christ. So the sin nature is often referred to by the phrase the flesh in the Scripture. And it is referred to also in Romans 6 as the body of sin. And there are a number of other ways in which the sin nature is described in the Scripture. And I think that the sin nature just pervades every part of the human DNA. We are corrupted by sin, physically, spiritually, We're born spiritually dead, of course. So we have the sin nature, this black diamond represents the sin nature as a tool, the area of strength. We're all good at putting on a facade of being good, of being moral, being ethical. And there are a lot of people who have a good code of ethics. The question is, where'd they get their ethics? And they may have a lot of biblically correct concepts in their ethics, but they also have picked and chosen which ones they like and which ones they don't like. And so you can have people who are anywhere along the worldview spectrum and they're going to think that, yes, it's good to be honest, it's good to be ethical, it's good to be this, but you don't need to get too carried away. It's okay to have LGBTQ and all these other things. So they just have a patchwork quilt of different values. And so the issue is, are your values 100% biblical or not? Just three deviations, and you're just a pagan. Because lots of pagans have a lot of values that would line up with the scripture. But in their morality, it's good. I know when I was in seminary, I did some house sitting. They had a great list of people who could would call in and have a seminary student come and house sit while they were out of town. And one family I worked for, the lady made a comment one time about how when they were doing a lot of remodeling they always hired somebody who was a Jehovah's Witness. Because they were working their way to Heaven. And they had to be honest. So you could trust them and they had a better work ethic than Evangelical Christians. Grace-oriented Christians do not have the same quality of work ethic, which is a real embarrassment. That was a very interesting lesson for me as a young man. So we're strong in human good, we're also strong in sins. We're strong in overt sins, mental attitude sins. Mental attitude sins are the root of all other sins, especially arrogance. And we have sins of the tongue. Now at the very heart we have an ego. We have our, it's all about me. Everything about the sin nature is me centered because we are like, just like Satan who had the five I wills, I want to be like God. We want to be like God. Satan didn't realize how much competition he was creating when he attempted Eve to eat the fruit. But pretty soon he had two other creatures who wanted to be like God. That's what he offered them. You want to be like God? Eat the fruit. Well, Now we have six and a half billion people who want to be God on the planet. So he's got a lot of competition. The lust pattern is the core mover and shaker of your sin nature with all kinds of different lusts, everything from approbation lust. We want to get attention. We want the approval of people. We want people to validate our beliefs. We want people to give us an attaboy for what we do, whether it's good or bad. Approbation lust is a big one. Sex lust is a big lust. Power lust is a huge lust. You want to go see where the largest accumulation of people running on power lust is, just go to Chicago right now. And that's it. We all run on power lust at times. And on all of these, we shift in and out. So we have all these, but we trend in different directions. Now, I've modified my diagram a little bit. Because it is easy to assume, the way we've structured this typically, is that if we trend towards legalism and asceticism, we think about the Pharisees, we think about many other, many religious leaders in religious groups were very legalistic. They had their code of conduct. You can think about Muhammad. He was very legalistic. What he wanted done was what he was legalistic about. And when the Jews didn't come along and say, oh, yeah, you are a great prophet. You're in the same line as Isaiah and Jeremiah and Jesus. And they didn't they didn't want to believe that he was a prophet. And so he in his what? Self-righteous arrogance. Decides that he's going to punish them. See, the people on this side of the sin nature that are legalistic, that have their excessive code of morality and ethics, are just as self-righteous about it. The liberals, in their antinomianism on the other extreme, the liberals just go up to Chicago, walk down any of those streets down near the Coliseum, and pull out your Israeli flag, and you'll find out how legalistic those pro-Palestinians are. Just because your self-righteousness is not in morality, you still have a code of conduct. And the liberals are just as self-righteous. That's what lies behind the cancel culture. Let's cancel everybody. Let's tear down the statues. Let's do all of these different things because if everybody doesn't conform to exactly what we like, they do not have the freedom to be different and we will cancel them or kill them. So it's very self-righteous, extremely arrogant, and it's all driven on arrogance. And believers still have a sin nature. That's why Paul continues to warn Christians about walking according to the flesh. And you have a whole theological systems that can't handle believers that are living according to the flesh. They immediately say that either they've lost their salvation or they never really had their salvation. They weren't really saved. They just had a profession of faith. And you'll get that from everybody, from Roman Catholics to Arminians who believe you can lose your salvation, to consistent Calvinists who emphasize the P in perseverance, that if you are truly saved you will persevere because God gave you the right kind of faith. And all of that ignores God's grace. God's grace is the most misunderstood aspect of Scripture. So as we've gone into this chapter, Paul is dealing, as I've introduced every week, with two kinds of errors. The first is the Judaizers who want to add human effort, human work, following the rituals of Judaism in order to be saved or in order to grow spiritually, that is, to be sanctified. They had a legalistic approach. Now there are a lot of commentators that you'll read that will say that That's the same problem that you have with those who are worshipping their belly when you get down to verses 18 and 19. That these who are enemies of the cross. But it's different. These are, the term there, worshipping your belly, this is all about worshipping your sensual appetites. That is not something that's characteristic of the Pharisaical type of mentality. of legalism. So you really have two different types here. The second type, the enemies of the cross, they follow their lustful desires, their physical appetites, is really the figure of speech that's being used there. And then the conclusion for the chapter, for this section, is on standing fast, which is what we find in Philippians 4.1. Stand fast in the Lord, beloved. So we, just by way of review, in 3.15 and 3.16, the contrast is between the right kind of walk and the wrong kind of walk. Reminding you that walk has everything to do with how we live our life, how we think, how we talk, how we act, how we perform all the different things that we do in life. And that we are to have the same mentality which derives from the Bible. Even Paul's mentality comes from Scripture. He's not imposing, you've got to think like I think. He said, we've got to think like Christ thinks, and I think like Christ thinks. So that's the pattern, that's why he can use himself as an example. So he says to brethren in verse 17, walk in this manner, walk thusly. You have us for a pattern, and he's not just talking about himself, he's talking about Peter, I mean he's talking about Timothy in Epaphroditus, and Silas and all of the others in the apostolic entourage. And then he contrasts that in verse 18, for many a walk of whom I have told you often. And so what you have is two different words. Up here you have the word down below, stoicheo, which has to do with walking, following somebody's footsteps, walking in a line, walking step by step behind somebody, it accepts the fact that there's a standard, there's a pattern, there's a path. And that path is what's laid out by the Holy Spirit, because this is the word that is used in Galatians chapter 5 later on, at first it's peripeteo, which is the word that's used in 3.18 and 3.19, which has to do with walking step by step, but stoicheo is following step by step. It's walking in a line, walking according to, it's a great word to use for walking according to a pattern, which is why he uses that in 3.17. And in 3.17 he talks about the fact that you should Note those who walk in this manner. Pay attention to them. Scope them out. That's the word in the Greek, skopeto, to examine them. Put their life under a microscope so you can understand how they live and pattern yourself after them because they're patterning themselves after me. verses 18 and 19, he says, for many walk, this is the contrast, for many walk of whom I have told you often and now tell you even weeping that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ. So he's talking about this group of unbelievers. But the reason he's warning them is because he is saying you unbelievers need to pay attention so you don't end up being influenced by those who are enemies of the cross. And when we lived in a culture in the United States that was primarily influenced by the Bible, the Word of God, and a Christian ethic, then it wasn't quite as, the contrast wasn't quite as harsh. But today we live in a world that outside of a few areas and a few subcultures, the way in which people live is patterned off of anything other than the Bible. And even in a lot of so-called churches, it's not really patterned after the Bible. And I have read some very interesting and fascinating descriptions of the way in which people look, dress, act, and talk in some of these megachurches in certain areas of the country. And it's not any different from the group of people that are hanging out down by the Coliseum in Chicago. You can't tell any difference between that group of people and any other group of people out at a nightclub on any night of the week. They all have multiple tattoos, they all have multiple piercings, they dress according to the trends of the world and the trends of the culture. Paul is saying that's not the pattern to follow. Don't let the world system be the standard. And he calls them the enemies of the cross of Christ. Three things he says about them, their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and their glory is in their shame. They set their mind on earthly things. We'll look at that in a minute. Now the big question that comes up in terms of interpretation that I addressed last time is are these believers or unbelievers? And I ask the question, is there such a thing as a carnal Christian? Because within the framework of a Reformed or Calvinistic view of the spiritual life, there is no such thing as a carnal Christian. If you are truly regenerated, your sin nature is not as nasty as it was before you were saved. That there is a, that when you're regenerated, there is something that happens and you are not quite as bad as you were before. Your sin nature is not quite as powerful. There's something that dilutes its power. That's not biblical, but that's the way their theological system works. And so we have to address those things. So I pointed out three things, or four things actually, Paul is addressing the Philippians as believers. So we have to understand that in terms of the context. He's talking to believers and he's saying, don't pattern your life after these who are enemies of the cross. And that means that it's possible for them to pattern their lives after those who are enemies of the cross. If it wasn't possible, according to Reformed and Lordship Salvation theology, where they teach that it's inevitable that you're going to grow if you're truly saved, then why is Paul constantly warning them against walking like unbelievers? Second, his commands to walk in a certain way would be unnecessary if obedience and spiritual growth are the inevitable consequence of being saved or justified. And you hear this in subtle ways. And I know nobody here ever said this, but I remember back At many times over the course of my life, I've heard people make comments about different, let's say celebrities, singers, entertainers, politicians, and they will do something. They get arrested for possession of marijuana like Willie Nelson did back in the early 60s. And he was teaching a Sunday school class at a Baptist church in Austin and they kicked him out of the church So he got rid of Christianity in his life. But he had been brought up in a Christian home. He was saved when he was a kid. But if the church was going to kick him out because he got arrested and put in jail overnight, then he wasn't going to have anything to do with that. And he was right in rejecting legalistic Christianity, but he threw biblical Christianity out as well. And he didn't understand the difference. But that's lordship salvation. Bill Clinton did X, Y, and Z. I can't believe Bill Clinton did that. How can he be a Christian? Well, he had a pastor in First Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas who said that Bill Clinton was clearly saved. He clearly understood the gospel. W.O. Vaught listened to a pastor at Baraka Church for about 30 years. And he came down one day to thank Pastor Thiem for his influence, said, I was about ready to resign from the pulpit because I didn't have anything left to say. And then I found your tapes. And he said, you know, I've got this guy in my church who he's got some really strange and bad ideas, but I believe he's a Christian. He also happens to be the governor of Arkansas. And you know, a lot of Christians will say, oh, look at what Bill Clinton did. How can he possibly? That's Lordship salvation type of thinking. That's not grace oriented thinking. And I could go through a number of other examples of people who have grown up in a Christian home and they trust Christ as their Savior. You notice you rarely ever hear me say they've made a profession. That's a way of saying, well, they went through the motions and they didn't really believe, because if they'd really believed, then they wouldn't have done what they did. And that's not what the Bible says. Look at what Peter did. He denied Christ three times. He was saved. Just earlier in the evening, Jesus said, you are all clean, but not all of you. And he was talking about Judas. He wasn't talking about Peter. Christians have such a shallow, superficial view of sin and grace. And it comes out of this legalistic mentality and this lordship type of thinking. So Paul is constantly warning us not to live like the unbeliever, like the Gentiles, unsaved Gentiles. Third, in other passages, Paul contrasts the two kinds of walking that characterize believers. And I pointed out in Ephesians 4, we're to walk worthy. And then in verse 17 of chapter 4, he says, no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. And so the question is, if believers are inevitably going to grow, why do you need these warnings? It doesn't make sense. Galatians, you have the same contrast, walk in the spirit or walk according to the flesh. Same thing in Romans 8, 5 through 8, we either live according to the flesh or the sin nature, or we live according to the spirit. But both are talking about believers. Fourth point was that contextually Paul is telling them to follow the examples of the apostles and their associates and their mature believers in the congregation and that they should not pattern their life after those who are bound for eternal punishment in the lake of fire. And that's what we see here. They're characterized by these four things. The last one is the one that's slippery. They set their minds on earthly things. That is such a loaded concept because I think that all of us, myself included, we are so influenced in subtle ways by the culture around us that we don't take enough time to really reflect on, well, what are these values that we have absorbed growing up from watching TV, movies, films, whatever? Have we absorbed those? And I'm not saying you can't enjoy the production of the world in terms of literature and music and art of all kinds, but we need to know that all of those things communicate a value system. And as long as we're aware of that, then we can enjoy something for what it is, the production, in many cases, a beautiful production of the unsaved mind, because it reflects the fact that they have creativity in the image of God, but we're not going to get sucked into the pagan values that may be present to one degree or another in whatever it is that we're looking at. James puts it this way, James 1.27, it's a verse to think about. He says, pure and undefiled religion, and what he means by religion is the relationship with God. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their trouble. That's an application as loving your neighbor as yourself. And to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Now that's a strong statement. How do we keep ourselves unspotted by the world? Because it's not like you go down to the mall and you walk through the mall and you come out and you've got these spots all over you and you've got to go take them home and put them in the washing machine. But we need to be careful because we're constantly in the world. And as I've taught in the Sunday morning worship, we're to be in the world, but not of the world. And that means we live in the world. We don't have to isolate ourselves, become an ascetic and become a monk, go live in some counterculture out in the desert somewhere. But we need to recognize that there's a conflict and where those values are, where the lines are, and not let the world get inside of our head. And that's the bottom line. And that's always been a problem for Christians and it's a problem for every Christian whether they realize it or not. And then James states it with three adjectives. It's earthly. It's a wisdom that did not come down from, it's earthly. It means it has its source in the earth dwellers. And that earth dweller term is a term for unbelievers during the tribulation period. It comes from those who are oriented to the finitude of earth living. And everything is about this life and what's going on right now and nothing is about what happens afterward. There's no thought given to living for the future. We are as believers we're to live today in light of eternity which is what Paul emphasizes in when we get down to verse 20 that our citizenship is in heaven. And we need to let that influence our actions and not live as if we're citizens of this planet. And it's not some legalistic concept that, oh, I'm not going to have anything to do with what's going on in the culture around us. Because we can't ever escape that. I don't care what you do, you can't escape the culture around. So we can enjoy the things that are worthy of enjoyment. But we have to recognize that everything communicates a message and can influence, and we have to learn how to not let that influence us. So James calls it earthly. Now that I just found something out today. I found out that the, because you've seen me quote many times, use a translation, the Holman Christian Study Bible. published by Holman, so it was their Christian Standard Bible, not study Bible, but a standard Bible. So the Holman Christian Standard Bible was originally translated by a team of 100 scholars and editors, stylists, proofreaders, all of whom were committed to biblical inerrancy. And I know for a fact that one of my professors at Dallas Seminary was in the oversight committee, and I would trust him to a very large degree. They used the biblical Hebraica, they used the UBS text, and basically the critical text rather than the majority text. I would quibble with them on that. And so that was their foundation. And this came out in 2007, I believe, was when the Holman Christian Standard Bible first came out. According to this, it's a mediating translation with a balance between word-for-word and thought-for-thought translation. Now that's a good way to express it to non-scholars. We want a word for word translation, but if you really translate word for word, and you want to see what that looks like, go buy an interlinear and read the English line. Because it doesn't make sense. So in any language, when you go from one language to another, you make certain decisions. Languages are interesting creatures. Because a lot of our language is idiomatic. We use a lot of figures of speech. And you never become more aware of that than when you are teaching through a translator. And I've taught through African translators, I've taught through Russian translators, Ukrainian translators, Polish translators, Romanian translators, and you know the craziest time was when in 2000 Jim Meyer set up a I think was a three week three week or four week pastors conference in Almaty Kazakhstan and so we had a room that was about half the size of this room and we crammed in about a hundred and ten students and The room had one window unit To cool it down and the temperature outside was just like what you'd expect in Tucson in the middle of August and it was the first week of August, I think, or the second week of August. So the temperature outside was like 110 and the temperature inside had cooled down to about 98. And so it's tight, it's stifling, half the room speaks Russian, half the room speaks Kazakh. The Kazakhs, I didn't know this until I got there, the Kazakhs had a Bible that only had the New Testament. nobody had translated the Old Testament for them. And I don't even remember what I was teaching, but what I was teaching had to do with the Old Testament. And so they didn't even have it. I started talking about the fall of Satan and they didn't even know anything about it. They couldn't even go to Isaiah or Ezekiel because they'd never heard of it. The Kazakh Bible in fact was a Kazakh, the translator translated it not from the Greek but from the NIV. So you take a really bad English, loose translation at best, paraphrase at worst, and then you're going to translate that into Kazakh. So one day Zhanna, who was the Kazakh translator and the wife of the pastor, she was like quadricingual lingual. And she had to go with one of the Kazakh students down to deal with our Kazakh student, I think it was from Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan or one of the other Ikistans. She had to go down to get the visa place to straighten something out. So we didn't have anybody else who knew English and Kazakh. But we had one of the students knew Russian and Kazakh. So I would make a statement and it would be translated into Russian. And the Russian translator at that time was a guy we got rid of within a couple of days. because he was not a good, he didn't even know what terms like justification, and he had translated for lots of Christians, which was a real indictment on the kind of missionaries that were going over there. Because he didn't know words like justification and reconciliation and redemption and propitiation, which means they weren't teaching anything biblical. But anyway, so he's translating it into Russian, and then the Russian guy's translating it into Kazakh. I have no idea what they heard. It was nuts. So what you have is on the extreme end you have what they call formal equivalence which is a really strict word for word translation which often is just too hyper-literal. The other end you have a paraphrase which is translating the ideas of the verse rather than the word-for-word translation. Now the NIV is more towards that end, and last week we looked at 1 Corinthians 3, 1 through 3, and the word sarchikos, which is from sarx, meaning flesh, is translated worldly in the NIV. Kosmos is worldly, not sarchikos. That's fleshly. That has to do with the same nature. Those are two different concepts, and there are numerous places like that because the interpreters, I mean the translators, are translating according to their faulty theological systems. So what we have, what this paragraph is saying is that the Holman Christian Standard Bible was to stick in the middle and stick with an optimal equivalence where they weren't too much towards the dynamic equivalence end or too hyper-literal. So according to this, this philosophy, quote, starts with an exhaustive analysis of the text at every level. Word, phrase, clause, sentence, discourse in the original language to determine its original meaning and intention and purpose. All of that's good. Then relying on the latest and best language tools, et cetera, et cetera, they translate. So that came out In 2000, I think it was 2007, 2009 they had some minor revisions that came out and they used Yahweh more often for Lord when it was in the original. In 2017 they revised it again. They dropped the Holman out of it because that's just the name of the publisher and they just called it the Christian Standard Bible. And that's what I'm using here. I just discovered this this morning so I'm giving you a little information about this. And so the Christian Standard Bible, it was a later revision of the Holman Christian Standard Bible, updated the translation and word choices in order to optimize both fidelity to the original languages and clarity for a modern audience. The CSB Translation Committee made several improvements in the 2017 edition, later in 2020, I don't like the 2020. So the 2017 is much better. Notable changes that, notable things that were part of the 2017, they still capitalized pronouns that related to the divine person. So if it was talking about God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, you have capitalized pronouns which I think are very helpful. I've looked at some translations, some modern ones, where they're not capitalizing the pronouns and you don't have a clue to whom the pronouns are referring. So the 2017 still capitalized the pronouns related to the divine person. They were They had a few gender equivalent shifts which I think are okay when it talks about the man and it's really talking about person. Men should do this. It said people should do this. Christians should do this. Men and women should do this. I think that's fine because it's emphasizing that it is talking about all human beings and not just the males. But in their 2020 they made all pronouns lowercase. That's English style by the way. I remember when I was working in publishing 20, 30 years ago, and one of the people there that was being consulted on style was brought in to solve some questions. And when we got off the phone, I said, that person has bought into every liberal idea related to grammar and reference and gender to this. We can't ever use that person again. they have compromised with the world in terms of publishing. And that was it. That person was never consulted again. And that's what's happening. So you start shifting your pronouns. Pretty soon you start referring to God as something other than him or he. And that's what's happened in the gender-sensitive version of the NIV, if you don't know about that. I wouldn't buy anything, any version of the NIV after 1985. The further you get from the original translation in the 70s which was done mostly by Dallas Seminary professors and many of them I studied under, anything after about 1985, just forget it. It's terrible. So that's what I mean by CSB up here. The CSB does a better job. Translates it, such wisdom does not come down from above but is earthly, unspiritual. That's the word we looked at last time talking about pneumatikos. versus Sarkicos. This was Sarkicos, soulish. So they translate it as unspiritual. That's better than natural and that's better than worldly and that's better than some of the other ways in which Sarkicos is translated. So at least it's a little better. So James 3.15 says, the source of human viewpoint thinking is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. And that describes what goes on in many cultures. To the degree a culture is influenced by the Bible, it gets rid of those things. But the more you turn away from the Bible and your Judeo-Christian heritage, the more you just absorb the postmodern values and customs of a culture. James 4.4, James says adulterers and adulteresses. Now what he means by that is not literal adultery, this is the only true spiritual adultery there is in the Bible. Spiritual adultery is not listening to another pastor. Spiritual adultery is when you are, you have absorbed the values of the world and that is shaping your thinking. That's what they said back in the Old Testament, if you worshiped another god, you were a spiritual adulterer. And that's what James is saying here. He calls them unfaithful, they're unfaithful to God. Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility to God? That's how I would translate that. Enmity is not a very common word. Friendship with the world is hostility to God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. That's a harsh statement in our world today. because it's basically staying in the way you think, how you think, what you think, how you live your life, how you conduct your business, your values, the level of integrity you have, all of these things. You're either hostile to God or you're a friend of God. There's no in-between. There's no neutrality. You can't be a little bit of one, little bit of the other. You're either one or the other. We then looked at the gospel. The gospel is based on faith in Christ, trust in Christ. So we end up with two types of people. You're either those who believe in Christ who are not condemned and those who do not believe. Those who have believed and are not condemned can still live like unsaved people. And they have to grow, they have to take in the Word, they have to make right choices And this is what Paul's warning against in Philippians 3.18. For many walk of whom I've told you often indicates that they're probably not present in Philippi, but they're not far away. And now I tell you weeping that they're enemies of the cross of Christ. So they're not supposed to pattern their lives after these kinds of people, but they're to pattern their lives after maturing Christians. And then he's going to say the contrast, for our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Do y'all understand that phrase, from which we also eagerly wait? That's a new King James, and the King James was like that. From which is heaven. But we don't eagerly wait from heaven. We eagerly wait here. That is the most screwed up translation and confusing. So we're going to look at this. We'll look at that in just a minute. So first of all, we had to answer the cross of Christ. These are people who are the enemies of the gospel. And we looked at 1 Corinthians 1, 18 to 23, and 2, 1 to 2. And they're described by three things. Their end is destruction. Their God is their belly and they glory about something that should be shameful. The mind is set on earthly things. The things of the earth, the trends of the earth, shape their values. Now we get to Philippians 3.19. Their end is destruction. We looked at that and I've gone back and looked at this again and again. And apoleia is used in a majority of cases to refer to eternal condemnation. But it is described in some places where it's not eternal condemnation. And I think that it's eternal condemnation here because he's describing, he's not describing the believers who are following the unbelievers. He's referring to the unbelievers they're patterning their life after. You're patterning your life after people who are spiritually dead and they're gonna spend eternity in the lake of fire. Now why would you as a believer do that? Now believers can do that. And they do do that. But when Paul is talking about the who's here is referring to those who are enemies of the cross of Christ who are not believers. So we have to we have to understand that. So this word though can mean different things. But in Romans 9 22 talks about vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. That's eternal condemnation in the context Philippians 128 earlier talking about our adversaries, which is to them a proof of perdition. That's talking about eternal condemnation. But in 1 Timothy 6, 9, it's not. It's talking about the problem of those who succumb to materialism lust and money lust. And the previous verse talks about the love of money being the root of all evil. Not that the love of money is evil, but the love of money is the root of all evil because of materialism lust. And so it's not that money is the root of all evil. And there are a lot of people, and I know some, where God has given them the gift of giving and He's also given them the gift of making money so that they can give. And you go back through church history that many things were founded well by men who made a lot of money. But they were not changed by it. They remained humble and they remained focused on their walk with the Lord. It was not a snare and a trap. But those who don't pass the test and desire to be rich as the end game for life fall into temptation and a snare and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. And that's just talking generally, and that is talking about either a believer or an unbeliever can succumb to that and basically wipe out and destroy their life. We looked at 1 Corinthians 3, 1, talking about the contrast between spiritual men and fleshly, and saw the problem with a natural man, which is this word, psychikos, on the left. and it's clearly defined in Jude 19 as those who not having spirit literally in the Greek is the word for not may and it is the participle for having and then pneuma not having spirits clear definition the Hebrews 4.12 tells us that the Bible distinguishes between soul and spirit and in first Thessalonians 5.23 he defines the human full regenerate person as body, soul, and spirit. And so God created the body, He breathed into Adam the soul and spirit together that makes His immaterial part is able to have a relationship with God. But when He sinned He lost the human spirit so His soul could not have a relationship with God or understand the things of the Spirit of God. So James talks about this as sensual in the New King James Version or Christian Center Bible, unspiritual. It's soulish. They're an unsaved person. So we have these three kinds of people here, spiritual, are growing mature believers. Babes are those who've had little to no teaching. They're not growing. They're living like they always did, which is like an unbeliever. Our carnal, which is believers who have matured some, But then they go back, like the prodigal son, and they live in the pigsty of the sin nature. So their end is destruction, their God is their belly. And what does that mean? That means that they're not focusing on the things of God. You can still be saved and not focus on the things of God. I was hurrying at the end last time. Matthew 5, 19. Jesus says that whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and then teaches others to do it, it's really okay to do that. It's really okay. You don't have to follow the Sabbath laws. Whoever breaks the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so as well, he will be, he won't be in the kingdom. Is that what it says? He'll be least in the kingdom. which means he's still there, he still gets saved. And that's important to understand that there are going to be people who live wrongly and sinfully but they're still going to be in Heaven, they may not have rewards. So I concluded there are two types of believers, those who are walking by the Spirit and those who are walking according to the sin nature. The term carnal Christian refers to a believer who is generally living on the basis of the sin nature and not confessing, moving on, and growing spiritually. It's not referring to somebody who's just out of fellowship for a few hours. Although technically he's carnal because during those few hours he's living according to the flesh. Usually it refers to somebody who's just in rebelliousness and not following everybody. But we're all up here before the judgment seat of Christ, and those who Don't live according to the word. Those who are following the pattern of the enemies of the cross of Christ, letting the world set their values, their standards, their trends, those are not going to have a reward. They will suffer loss. So their God is their belly. The word koilea is used, but it's a figurative term for their lustful appetites. And this is seen in Romans 16, 18. For those who are such, Do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly. See, the Bible's real clear. You're either doing what you want to do or what God wants to do. There's no middle ground. What we have to learn is that what we want to do is what God wants us to do. That we're there to serve the Lord. So they are serving their own belly. They're worshiping their own belly. They've made an idol out of their own lustful appetites. And in Romans 16, 18, by smooth words and flattering speech, they deceived the hearts of the simple. We have a lot of simple believers in this country who are following a lot of deception. James 3, 15, again, this is earthly, it's worldly. 1 John 2, 28 talks about shame because the last part of that verse, verse 19, says their glory is their shame. This is what will happen at the judgment seat of Christ. What they were proud of, the accomplishments, all of the physical activities, all of the things they did that made them somebody in the culture in which they lived is going to be shame at the judgment seat of Christ because they didn't do it for the Lord. They didn't live for the Lord. And now little children abide in Him. That's a term for fellowship. Abide in Him, walk by the Spirit, walk in the light. Those are all synonymous terms. that when He appears we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. Hosea 4-7 is maybe an Old Testament reference to what we see in this idea of turning their glory into shame because as God is indicting Israel, He says the more they increased, and in the context it's increasing in their idolatry and their rebelliousness, the more they sinned against Me, I will change their glory into shame. So the conclusion for that is that at one point carnal Christians are saved. Perhaps they were growing. And then they became disobedient, they became distracted by the attractions of this life, they reversed course and set their sights on the philosophies and the attractions of the world and they no longer pursued what? Go back to verse 14. they no longer pursued the goal for the prize of the upward call of Christ Jesus. So that we either pursue the upward call for the prize of the upward call of Christ Jesus, or we're just pursuing personal fame and personal glory. So this whole section is contrasting the sin nature worshiper versus the growing believer. So the growing believer citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly wait for a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject himself to subject everything to himself. Now, what's interesting when we when we look at this, because this is talking about the believer that's growing. But look, I want to make a couple of points about the structure here. Now this is the Christian Standard Bible and I don't like what they did. They split a sentence into two and they left out the connecting conjunction. Connecting conjunctions are very important in Bible study. And the connecting conjunction, I put it in here, this is the Christian Standard Bible down here, is four. It's continuing to explain something that goes, excuse me, that goes before verse 20. It's going back to the statement that he makes at the beginning which is you are to be fellow imitators of us. Why? Because our citizenship for is used as a causal word here to explain why he is making the command that we are to follow that example. for our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there. I think that they have captured well the sense of that construction. I think the New King James is just confusing. That Jesus is in heaven, that's where He is right now, the right hand of God the Father. And we're waiting for Him to come from heaven, to come from there, to come back and to take us to be with Himself. So the focus here is really on this word for citizenship. It's the word polytouma. It is the root word is P-O-L-I, polis, the Greek word for city. And it relates to being a citizen of a city state and all the responsibilities inherent on a citizen. So polytouma has to do with our citizenship in heaven. And it involves the fact that every citizen has certain inherent responsibility. You're expected, if you're a good citizen, you're expected to do certain things. You're expected to vote. You're expected to contribute to the society, to the culture. And so he's saying our citizenship is, and he's communicating to these Philippians, is a life like your citizenship. Your citizenship is in Rome. You're not living there. You're living someplace else. Our citizenship is in Heaven, we're not living there, we're living in another culture. And we are waiting for our Savior to take us where we belong, to take us home. And what does citizenship then relate to? It relates to our identity in Christ. How do we get this citizenship in Heaven? Were the Old Testament believers citizens of Heaven? No. They're citizens of Israel. There's a distinction between Israel in the Old Testament and their identity under the Mosaic Law and their identity because they were baptized into Moses when they went through the Red Sea. 1 Corinthians chapter 10 verses 1 through 4. But our citizenship is in Heaven and it's a result of our baptism by the Spirit which identified us with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection. This is what we studied a couple of years back in Ephesians chapter 2 where Paul is talking about the fact that you Gentiles were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel. You were excluded from the covenants. You were excluded from the promises. But now you were brought near. And he says, starts to describe how that happened. For he himself, meaning Christ, is our peace, who has made the both, who are the both, Jew and Gentile. He's taken them, that in Christ, their Jewishness isn't the issue, their Gentileness isn't the issue, because now you are a new creature, new creation in Christ. Who has made us both one, he's broken down the middle wall of separation, which was a reference to the law, which said that the Jews basically couldn't do certain things with the Gentiles or they would be spiritually unclean. So he broke down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that enmity, that hostility between Jew and Gentile was grounded in the law, that's what it says. Having abolished in his flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances. So as to create in Himself one new man. So we're a new entity. No Old Testament believer is part of this new entity. They are not part of the body of Christ. This is what happens when we're baptized by the Holy Spirit, we are entered into the body of Christ. The church, what happens when Jesus returns in the air? The church is raptured. Those who trust in Christ as Messiah one second after the rapture are not in the church. They are not baptized by the Holy Spirit. They do not become one in the church. They do not become one new man. All those terms relate to what we are in terms of believers in Christ in the church age. And that's one of the reasons we say there's a distinction between God's plan for the church and God's plan for Israel, and we can't mix them up, although some people do. So God creates in Christ one new man from the two, thus making peace, that he might reconcile them both to God in one body. So it's a new man and a new body. It's done through the cross. by putting to death the enmity that is, that was the result of the law of commandments and ordinances. Then we go to verse 19 of Ephesians 2. Now therefore you are no longer, you being Gentiles, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens. There's a form of our word. We're fellow citizens, Jew and Gentile together in one new man, one new body. fellow citizens with the saints, and members of the household of God. Now it's real easy to think, well the household of God just is all believers, Old Testament believers and New Testament believers. But what does the next line say? Read it. Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Now if it was prophets and apostles it would be Old Testament and New Testament, but it's apostles and prophets so they're both New Testament. What's built on the apostles and prophets? Nothing before the cross. Nothing before the day of Pentecost. So there's nothing that happens to any believer prior to the day of Pentecost that is related to this. This is something unique. It's a new man. It's a new body. We are now fellow citizens with the saints in this household of God. So it's a new household. we have a new man, a new body, a new household, and then you look down to 221 it says, in whom, that is in Christ, the whole building is being fitted together grows into a holy temple in the Lord in whom also you are being built together for a new dwelling place of God in the Spirit. So because of the baptism by the Spirit because of Christ's death on the cross and the removal of that wall of separation and the enmity of the law and commandments. God reconciles Jew and Gentile together in one new body, one new man, one new household, and a new temple. We have a totally new identity. It's as if somebody went into North Korea and grabbed some citizen of North Korea and instantly transferred them to Texas. They have a new passport, they have a new name, they have a new identity, they have a new language. What happens? Total culture shock. Because the culture that shaped him is no longer there. He's no longer got to worry about it, not to think about it. It's not the issue. The issue is he's got to learn to adapt to a total new way of living, a total new way of life, a total new way of thinking. That's what happens with the believer at the instant of salvation. You just didn't know it. And the Bible is our instruction book so that it transforms our thinking so that we are not conformed to the cosmic system, to the world system, to the culture and the pop culture and everything around us, but so that we are to be transformed to think act differently. That's what Paul's saying, the same thing here. Our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. And what's He going to do? He will transform our physical body that's in a humble condition into something so glorious you can't imagine it. And we all have corrupt bodies with all kinds of problems. We don't like the way we look, we don't like the way we act, we don't like the fact that we don't walk a certain way or we're not athletic enough or we're too athletic, whatever it may be. There are problems with our physical body. But Paul is saying here We've got to focus not on the thinking of the enemies of Christ and the world, let that be our format to shape our value system. We've got to shape our value system on the fact that when all things are considered, this is less than one second in eternity. And we've got to get off of making a big issue out of whatever's going on now, because as soon as this is over with, we're going to get this glorious body that is beyond anything that we can possibly imagine. It's going to be a body that is not restricted in any way to any of the material, physical laws that we see around us. It is a body that is going to allow us to move around the universe at the speed of thought, that we can pass through walls just like Jesus did. He had a resurrection body that had, it's described as flesh and bone. He's new though. It's not the same kind of body. It is a new resurrection body that was transformed from what was his previous body. Now people always get wrapped up around the axle like that. I used to laugh and ask the question, I'd say, so if I die and I donate my body parts to science and my eye goes to this And my heart goes to this unbeliever and my liver goes to this unbeliever. My kidney goes to that unbeliever. My cornea goes to this unbeliever. And then the rapture occurs. Do I get those body parts back? Well, think about it. When Jesus was resurrected, there was nothing left of his physical mortal body in the tomb. And people say, well, what about cremation? Well, what about the hundreds Hundreds, thousands of Christian martyrs who died somewhere where they're on a ship to some faraway place and the ship sinks and they drown and they're the shark's meal for the night. Or they're martyred on the fields of Smithfield in London and burned at the stake and their body just goes up in ashes. What about the Christian soldiers who step on a landmine and they are completely incinerated. There's nothing left or a 500 pound bomb drops right on their head. Nothing left. They just they're just gone. You think that on omniscient God knows where every molecule and every cell is located and he can pull it back together in a second. He can. God can do that. He created it out of nothing to begin with. And He knows where every cell, every bit of that body ends up. And He's going to be able to put it all back together. And we're going to have a glorious body. It's done by the power that enables Him to do this. This is the word dunamai many many places and it has to do with God's omnipotence. By the power that enables him, that's dunamai, enables him, he has omnipotence and to subject everything to himself. That is what is going to happen. And I want to read to you from 1 Corinthians 15, 22-26. There Paul writes For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. He's talking about resurrection. The whole chapter is about resurrection. But each one is going to be in his own order. Christ was the first fruits. Afterward, those who are Christ's, it is coming. So the first resurrection involves several different groups. The first is Christ, the first fruit. The second is going to be the church age believers when Christ returns in the clouds. And then there's going to be another resurrection that occurs at the end for all unbelievers. I think there'll be a resurrection of martyred tribulation saints at the end of the tribulation as well. So there's all of these, these make up the first contingent who are resurrected. And then when you get to the great white throne judgment Everybody else has been resurrected and in glorious bodies in heaven and the only ones left are all of the unbelievers. And Paul says, then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father and he puts an end to all rule and all authority and power for he must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet. And those pronouns should be he, for Christ must reign until he has, until God the Father has put all enemies under Christ's feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. So Paul concludes the section then by saying, So then my dearly loved and longed for brothers and sisters talking to the body of Christ, my joy and crown in this manner stand firm in the Lord, dear friends. This is how we are to do it. So we have to focus on the Lord and not get our eyes on on the people and the events. It's a political year. And so I've already had one or two people tell me that they've listened to me. Nobody ever listens to me. It's ridiculous. Spend 10 times more time reading your Bible, thinking about the Lord, listening to Bible class than anything you do with anything related to what's going on in the culture right now. Wake up in the morning. You can watch the weather. That's the only thing. Read your Bible. Pray. Read more of your Bible. Read a book about the life of Christ. Read a book on prophecy, whatever you want to look at, but get your minds off of the current events because you're like Peter. You've come off the boat. You want to walk on top of the waves. And all of a sudden, out of the corner of your eye, you see this big wave coming. And you turn your head. And you're looking at CNN or Fox News or you're listening to one of a hundred different people on talk radio or you watch a YouTube video and all of a sudden your whole emotion has just tanked. You crashed. What's going to happen? I am so afraid. I have friends that are unbelievers. And they are scared to death. Jewish unbelievers about what is happening in this country and what is happening in the Middle East. They don't have the word. And I give them promises. I try to, you know, just get something under the door to get them thinking about a few things. But that's the problem. They're scared to death. And that's what happens to believers. All of a sudden, you know, and I've got Christian friends and It's hard for them to pull away from watching what's going on. We don't want to be uninformed, trust me. You can't be uninformed. I try to avoid it all as much as I can, and I know more about what's going on than the average person, just because it's everywhere. You can't avoid it. But I'm not going to swim in it. Get out of the cesspool of the world and get into the mind of Christ in the Word of God. And the next two months are going to be so much better. And if your favorite candidate doesn't make it, and the world circles the drain, you're going to be much happier than anybody else, because your focus is on God's plan. Daniel 2.21, he raises up kings and he takes down kings. God's in control, not you, not me. And just relax, trust the Lord and enjoy the ride. Father, thank you for this opportunity to focus upon you and to trust in you and to recognize that so often we just let ourselves get so waylaid by all of the things that are going on in the world around us, all of the trends, all of the fashions, all of the values. that have so infected every one of us and we can't fully escape all of that. But we need to learn to not let it shape our thinking and our mental attitude. We need to focus on You. We need to focus on the Word and what You've taught us and not worry about things. We are to be anxious for nothing. That doesn't leave anything out. And we're to trust in You and pray. So Father, we pray that you would strengthen us, just as Paul exhorts the Philippians in this last verse of this first verse of chapter four, to stand fast in your word. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.