03-10-13 TO WILL AND TO DO OF HIS GOOD PLEASURE

Phil. 2:12 So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling;

Phil. 2:13 for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

We began something last week

we are going to finish up today,

something that, quite honestly, I think you’re going to love!

The concepts we look at today

are going to help some of you understand some things

that have been going on in your life,

things that have made no sense to you,

things that may even have caused

a lot of confusion

in your understanding of God

and your efforts to follow His leadership in your life.

Before we get back into this passage

I need to prepare you mentally

for what we will

and will not do during the next few minutes.

We are going to be talking about

the will of God in our life -

a topic that every growing believer

faces and wrestles with

repeatedly throughout life.

Last week I suggested a number of questions

we never got around to answering,

questions such as:

Where are the dividing lines

between fleshing it out

and allowing God’s Spirit to live through me?

If I have truly given some problem

or issue over to the Lord,

does that mean I just sit back and do nothing?

If I cannot achieve true Godliness

and productivity through human effort

and determination,

then does human effort and determination

have no valid place in Christian living?

If it is truly no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me,

then what is my role in this whole thing?

Do I just hang out,

waiting for the King to return,

and hoping He catapults me into the battle at some strategic moment?

How can I know when I should charge ahead,

and when I should wait on the Lord?

Well, today we are going to deal with some of those questions,

but I need to let you know right off

what I will not give you.

I will not give you five steps

that if you follow them

are guaranteed to lead you into the will of God for your life.

I will not provide you with a neatly folded map

guaranteed to lead you into God’s will.

I won’t do that because I cannot -

and in fact no one can

because understanding and following

the will of God in your life

is not the result of following

a five-point system

that can be learned

and smeared on any situation at will.

Understanding and living out the will

or leadership of God in your life

is not the fulfillment of a system,

it is the result of certain things happening in your growing relationship

with God Himself.

Discovering and following God’s will in our life is not so much something we do

as it is something we embrace in our life.

Hopefully that will make more sense to you by the time we finish this morning.

Just to get our minds going, though,

let me share an illustration

that may help you understand

where I want us to go this morning.

Years ago my brother shared with me

an incident he had observed taking place

between a missionary friend of his

and his friend’s preschool son.

My brother, his friend, and the little boy

were all sitting in the living room.

The boy was playing with some of his toys,

and doing it with enthusiasm.

There were lots of noises

and yells

and sounds coming from the little guy.

My brother and his friend

were attempting to carry on a conversation,

but the boy’s noise was making it very difficult.

Finally the boy’s dad said,

“Son, want you to take your toys into your room and play with them there.”

The boy’s room was right off the living room,

and, in response to his dad’s request

the boy immediately picked up his toys

stepped six inches into his room

plopped down on the floor

and began to make the same racket.

Did the boy do the father’s will?

Well, actually, No he did not.

He followed a specific instruction,

but he did not do the will of the father.

To do the will of the father

he would have had to have been willing to listen

not just to the words of the father,

but to his heart intent.

The little guy would only have fulfilled the will of the father

if he would have said to himself,

‟My daddy wants a chance to talk with this other man for a while

so I’ll let him do that

by going in my room where my noise won’t bother them.”

By the way,

the father in that situation responded to his son’s plopping down just inside the doorway

with one of the best one-line statements of theology I’ve ever heard.

He said, “OK, son, you’ve obeyed the letter of the law,

now obey the spirit...”

You see, when we start talking about the will of God,

the very first thing we need to do

is to recognize that the will of God in our life

is not something we do,

so much as it is something we embrace.

It is not an action we perform

or a point we reach

so much as it is a heart response we offer to our Lord.

So, what I will offer you this morning

will not be a road map,

but rather it will be more like

trail markers to help you recognize

where you are

and why some things may be happening in your life,

some things that haven’t made a whole lot of sense to you up to this point.

Now, I want to take us back into

those amazing two verses we were in last week,

Philippians 2:12-13.

And actually I want us to focus in

on the last phrase of verse 13.

Last week we spent most of our time

talking about working out our own salvation,

but we didn’t do near as much as we need to

with that statement in which Paul says,

Phil. 2:13 for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

Now we have already talked about

what an awesome reality it is

for God to establish this kind of relationship with us,

a relationship in which He Himself

personally commits Himself to dwelling in us

and expressing Himself through us.

But now I want us to look more closely

at the two specific responsibilities

He has reserved for Himself

in this process of Him living through us,

and then at what our role is in that mix.

OK, God commits Himself to 2 things...

And let me just give a quick preface here to what we’re going to look at.

With everything I share with you this morning I am assuming we all realize

that everything God does in our lives

is done within the protective moral framework

He has revealed to us in His word.

When we talk about God placing desires within us

it is assumed that we recognize that

any desire within us

that takes us outside of God’s protective moral framework

is not from God.

It is a lie, a trap carefully designed

to rob us of the abundant life our King seeks to give us.

If the concept of that protective moral framework is confusing to you,

if you can find a copy of the Grace Exchange around

you’ll find it explained in chapters 8-14.

If not, let me just say that in Scripture

our God establishes for us

just a few basic, universal moral boundaries for our lives,

boundaries that are given to us for our protection,

boundaries that, if we choose to trust what He says to us,

will provide us with a life framework in which we can be absolutely free

from the destructive power of immorality,

free to be the unique people our God designed us to be.

For now you can just think of the last six of the Ten Commandments,

the ones that deal with our relationships with one another -

trusting God to work through the authority structures He’s placed over us,

trusting His design for sex in our relationships with one another,

not lying to or stealing from another person,

not allowing our lives to be driven by our lust for anything or anyone.

At times I’ve restated the heart of that moral framework

by saying that in God’s economy building and maintaining love relationships with the people God places int our lives is more important than our rights, our things, or our ideas.

But my point here is that

this very brief, very limited moral structure given to us by our God

is our great protection with which we can recognize

when some desire within us is coming from our flesh rather than from the life of God within us.

OK, now -

Paul tells us that God has committed Himself to fulfilling two crucial roles

in this process of His expressing Himself through us.

#1. He WILLS of his good pleasure.

Now, I’ve mentioned this several times

during the past few weeks,

but I want us to really focus on it this morning.

Paul is telling us that the first step God takes

in this process of leading us into His will

is for Him to place within us

the WILL, the DESIRES for the things

that He wants to do in and through us.

He begins with that new heart

that He has created within us,

and in His own perfect way

He gives us a heart desire

for the work He is wanting to do in us.

This process begins by Him placing within each of His children who are open to Him

a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.

Now that’s a Biblical phrase

that you may not identify with,

but its saying simply

He gives us an inner longing

to clean up our act,

to be a person of quality and integrity.

Frequently in the past I have told you

that one of the key differences in our lives

before and after we come to Christ

is that before we come to Christ

we think we should be good,

and after we come to Christ we wish we could be good.

That is a little bit of that “willing” process

that He accomplishes in our life.

But it in no way is limited

to just those house-cleaning issues.

The same principle applies

to virtually everything He is seeking to accomplish in and through us.

Remember I mentioned last week

the crucial importance of listening to

the inner desires God places within us.

What has He given you a heart for?

Where has He allowed you to see through His eyes,

and to feel with His heart?

How would you answer this question?

What this church needs more than anything else right now is...

Or this question?

What our world needs more than anything else right now is...

Or this question:

What my family needs more than anything else right now is...

Or this:

What my neighborhood needs more than anything else right now is...

Nearly 37 years ago I had an irrational desire

to move to Alaska for a year,

at least it seemed irrational to me at the time.

I certainly didn’t view it as some great revelation of God’s will for me,

it just seemed like something

I wanted to do.

Looking back on that decision

I realize that that move set in motion the entire direction for my life

and formed the foundation for everything He has done in me

and through me for the past 37 years.

And this is part of that trust process

we were talking about last week.

Don’t be afraid to trust His ability

to do just exactly what He said He would do - live in you

and build within you the desires He wants you to have

for the work He seeks to accomplish in your life.

OK, but this is where I want to prepare you for some things,

this is where I want to pound in some trail signs

so that you are prepared for some of what happens in the process.

You see, once God places within us

the desire for something in our life,

a fascinating response takes place in our flesh.

And you need to keep in mind here

that our entire mental system

was trained initially on the assumption

that we had both the right

and the ability to be the center of our world.

We entered this world with a spirit

that rejected God as God

and placed ourselves squarely

in the center of our little universe.

When we come to Christ

that issue is resolved in our spirit

as we bow before our Lord,

but there is a massive residue of our former life still active in our entire mental reasoning system

that was programmed under the old regime.

Simply put,

we have learned to think and feel

under the leadership of a spirit

that totally rejected the right of God

to be God in our lives.

The result is a thinking

and feeling process that corrupts

and deforms the truth God is sharing with us at the spirit level.

This flesh corruption

of what God has said to us in our spirit

may be a new concept to some of you,

so let me see if I can illustrate it

with an example in a different area.

What truths does God communicate to our spirit

at the time we enter His family?

• I have loved you with an everlasting love.

• Your sins are separated from you as far as the east is from the west.

• Nothing will ever again separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

• There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

• You are my child forever.

• He tells us in our spirit that we have been reconciled totally, eternally, irreversibly to God through our faith in the finished work of Christ, and now we truly have peace with God our perfect heavenly Father.

Now, that’s what He says to us in our spirit.

But when our mind gets a hold of that communication

and reworks it,

what kind of things do we end up saying to ourselves?

• God loves me IF I stay faithful to Him and obedient to Him.

• God has saved me so that He can use me.

• My past sins are forgiven, but my future standing with God depends upon my ability to generate a certain level of performance.

I’m getting a bit off track here,

but would you like a little test

for recognizing truth and error

in our Christian lives?

When what we are hearing with our minds

is consistent with

what God has already told us in our heart,

it causes our spirit to soar.

If, however, what we are hearing

sounds reasonable and logical and correct,

but it does not align with what

God has already told us in our heart,

if it brings a heaviness within us,

or blinds us to the truth about our God’s deep love for us

we should step back and ask why.

So, God places a desire in our heart

and our little fleshly mind latches onto it

and begins trying to figure out

how this desire can be bent

to our own fleshly ends.

Can we get some ego gratification from it?

Can we make a buck off it?

Can we use it to make us look good to those around us?

Can we use it to meet some need

we have been wrestling with?

So, step #2 in the process

involves God not only placing the desire within us,

but then also helping to purify our motives

for pursuing that desire.

NOTE: This does not mean we then end up with perfectly pure motives

in the life our Lord lives through us.

The truth is

we never do no right things for entirely

right and pure motives.

But there is an essential process we must often go through,

a process in which, after placing within us a desire for something

that He is seeking to do in or through us,

He then helps us sift through

our underlying motives for doing it.

#3. The third step in this process, then,

after God has given us the desire

and helped to purify our motives,

is for Him to develop within us

a deep dependance upon the working of His Spirit

in order to bring about the results we long for.

That’s the second part of His agreement, of course -

He is committed to both will

and to do of His good pleasure.

You see, even when our motives

have been carefully reworked by our Lord,

our initial response even then

is to jump in and try to do it for Him.

We know the goal is of Him,

we know the inner motivation is of Him,

so we summon up all our energy

and try to pull it off for Him.

And I’m aware of two powerful tools

our Lord uses to free us from this disastrous approach.

#1. He will often allow us to plunge in

and try to do it for Him

and experience the results it brings in our life -

the way it becomes such a heavy burden to us,

crushing us under its weight,

or the way our best laid plans

fail miserably.

Most of us are familiar with Moses’ leadership of the people of Israel

from slavery in Egypt into freedom in the promised land.

But some of you may not be aware

that, 40 years before Moses stepped into the leadership role,

he saw the need to free God’s people

and tried to do it with his own abilities.

He’d been raised in Pharaoh’s house,

educated in the ways of Egypt,

and he just knew he could do it.

• He knew the goal was right.

• He even knew his motives were right.

• But his means were purely of the flesh.

And the result was disastrous to the extreme,

forcing Moses to run for his life,

and live in utter obscurity for the next 40 years.

I remember my first few years here at PBF.

I remember the longing I had

for us to discover the life God wanted us to know as church.

But I also remember the mental system I brought with me,

the system I just knew would produce those goals.

And I remember the agonizing burden it became

when I tried to impose those goals on us as a church.

It is the nature of our flesh

to take the goals God has given us

and then try to accomplish them through our own flesh efforts.

#2. The second powerful tool God has

for freeing us from flesh-powered pursuit of His goals

is His forcing us to wait...and wait...and wait...

To wait upon Him until we finally give up all hope

of ever seeing the goal achieved.

That’s what He did with Abraham, of course,

after promising Abraham that He would one day give him a son.

After the promise was given

Abraham then waited and waited and waited

until all reasonable hope was gone forever.

Our flesh-powered base dies very hard,

and there is nothing more effective

than God placing within us a desire

and then allowing it to go unfulfilled

until we finally give up,

knowing that nothing will ever be done

unless He steps into our life

and does it for us,

and in us,

and through us.

The kind of crucial discernment

that allows us to see the difference between

what we are trying to do for Him

and what His Spirit is doing through us

cannot come quickly

or painlessly,

but it is our only hope of true productivity.

Some of you right now

have seen God place a desire in your heart,

and you can’t understand

why all your best efforts are failing so miserably

to bring it into reality.

Perhaps it is because He is helping you

to let go,

not to let go of the desire

but to let go of your determination

to bring it into reality.

He is the one who has pledged Himself

both to will and to work for His good pleasure,

and sometimes the greatest part of the process

is helping us let go of our determination

to do it for Him.