Love Overflowing with Knowledge

Advent 2                                  Philippians 1:3-11

6 December 2009

I would like to think with you this morning for a while about the excerpt from the Letter of St Paul to the Philippians we just heard.  It is not a startling piece of writing and it sounds like things we have heard many times before.  In fact, it is from his salutation, his greeting, and we might expect simply a series of pleasantries before he gets to the real point of the letter.  But there are some things that have real importance in this passage and I want to call your attention to them. 

First of all, the Philippians have a special place in Paul’s heart.  They helped him and contributed to his ministry in ways that most of his other churches did not.  Paul rarely allowed his mission stations to support him, because he took such fastidious care to deny anyone the complaint that he was in this for the money he could make out of his converts.  Still, the Philippian congregation seems to have come very close to Paul.  As he said, they shared “in the gospel from the first day until now.”  “Now” seems to be a time that finds Paul in prison and even there they found him and were of some help to him.  Where or at what time Paul was in prison are good questions, much controverted, and we don’t need to spend time on them.  Note that Paul credits them with a deep fellowship in the Gospel with him and he has experienced their deep compassion and love for him and for each other.  So Paul has no complaints—at least not here and not yet.  Still, he cannot avoid opening his heart to his friends.  He explains a conviction he has with regard to them and tells them what he longs for them to receive from God in his prayers for them.

First, the conviction.  “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”  What is this good work that God has begun amongst them?  One way of saying it would be simply to call it the work of the Gospel.  It is the spread of the Gospel which is the good work of God and Paul’s confidence is that that work will continue to develop amongst the Philippians as elsewhere, so that when Christ returns, it shall have reached completion.  But I think we might look a little further and think of the whole Kingdom project of Jesus as being the good work God has begun.  What has begun amongst the Philippians is their entrance into the Kingdom of God through the preaching of Paul.  They have begun to live in that life of interactive fellowship with God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit and the evidence of such an entrance into the new life of God’s realm is their love for Paul and each other. 

The new life of the Kingdom has begun in Philippi and those to whom Paul wrote are active in it.  But this is not some static kind of religious decision they have made.  Paul is not referring simply to their baptism into Christ or their membership in the Church.  Now that they have entered into the fellowship of the Gospel, the Kingdom of God, they have a whole life-time of development and growth to undergo.  His vision for them is a vision of continual appropriation of the reality that has taken hold of them already.  This is a very dynamic vision of a very dynamic process.  God has begun his work in the Philippians and Paul is sure that He will complete it.  But this completion will not be without the cooperation of the Philippians themselves.  Which leads us to

Paul’s prayer.  “This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”  Knowledge and full insight, Paul prays for them, which lead to a harvest of righteousness.  He expresses this desire for growth in knowledge of God in other writings as well.  Compare these words from Colossians:  “We have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.”  The key words here are knowledge of God’s will, spiritual wisdom and understanding and experiencing his power.  These lead to lives worthy of the Lord, pleasing to Him, which is to say, producing good works, showing patience and thanksgiving.

So we have a picture coming into focus: the Gospel has been preached and responded to.  People have entered into an interactive life with God in the Kingdom.  It has resulted in real love amongst believers.  This, we might think, is already an incredible feat!  But, according to Paul, it is only the beginning.  In fact, unless there is a program of development along the lines that he indicates, it is likely that the life of the Kingdom will wither over time and not grow at all.  This reminds me of one of the first visions that St John had in the book of Revelation concerning the Church in Ephesus, which was just a stone’s throw from Colossae, not all that many years later.  This is what Jesus said about the Ephesian Church to John: “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”

Without a program of development and growth, the love that the Philippians were currently showing Paul would eventually die out.  What they needed was to ground their faith and love more deeply in knowledge so that they can attain to deep spiritual wisdom and insight, an ability to know what the times require and how to please God in the circumstances of their lives.  As they are more and more grounded in true knowledge of God they will experience his power in their lives to a greater degree and, with all patience and thanksgiving, produce those good works that God has prepared for them to walk in. 

In the Second Letter of Peter, the author makes a similar point:  “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”  Yet although we have everything we need, he goes on to say: “you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

What is going on here?  Simply this: in order for faith to be deep and constant, it must be based upon knowledge and stand up to serious thought.  We must be convinced on solid grounds that the things we believe are true.  If we do not, if they are simply “our” beliefs, they will lose the power they ought to have to shape the kind of life we should live.  For it is what we know to be true that is the most powerful element in determining what we do.  A person who doesn’t think much about what is true and simply lives from day to day, absorbs his values for living directly from wherever he lives without much awareness.  It is not surprising that he or she should often be confused and bewildered, for many of the values and desires proposed in the surrounding environment are contradictory and mutually exclusive.  Christians believe that certain things are true, that we can know them, that God has given us the resources to achieve considerable certainty about many of the most important things in our lives. 

Advent is a wonderful time to take stock of the state of our knowledge, for we are approaching huge mysteries in the festival of the Incarnation.  If we are not sure about what we believe because we are not convinced that our faith rests upon what is true and knowable, then the story of the manger shall become merely another version of the tale of Santa Claus, with about as much power to regulate and shape our lives.  In order for Christmas to escape from the grips of sentimentality, we must be able to give some account of why we think the Incarnation plausible and true.  We must understand its relationship to the Resurrection and Creation, the calling of Israel and the history of the Jews.  As Dallas Willard reminded a group of us who have just waded through his latest book, we can have true knowledge of many things that modern people think are only opinions or beliefs or fantasies.  We can know, for example, the reality of the creation and the Creator.  We can truly know the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead to have taken place—a matter of knowledge, not just belief.  The more of our beliefs that we can ground in our knowledge, in fact, the more our lives can be solidly rooted in the life of the Kingdom of God. 

A little later this morning in the Mass we shall say together, “We remember His death, We proclaim His resurrection, We await His coming in glory.”  This is a short summary of our faith.  But we can be certain about the reality of Christ’s death—it can be a matter of knowledge for us.  We can also attain true understanding and knowledge of his resurrection.  We believe in these things, that is, they are truths upon which we are prepared to act, but we also know them as true and are sure that our faith is not based on fantasy.  So, then, when we say that we await his coming in glory, which we cannot know because it has not happened, but has been promised, we can trust the promise because we know the premises on which it is based: the death and resurrection.  And more than that, trusting in the promise and believing in it, we can do those good works that flow from its truth.

But, of course, it is one thing to say this; it is another to do it.  I imagine that we all really would like to be the kind of people who could hope to offer to the Lord the “harvest of righteousness” as Paul put it; “to bear fruit in every good work.”  It is a doable thing for all of us, as we come to learn how to appropriate the resources that the Kingdom of God makes available to us in the present life.  The problem is that we cannot do this directly, nor can we immediately know the truths of our faith.  We cannot simply will ourselves to live into the new life of Christ and be the Christ-like people he has called us to be.  We have to do it indirectly, through the disciplines of the spiritual life.  The main issue is one that we can decide: we can take a chance on Jesus and sign on as his students in order to apprentice ourselves to him, allowing him to teach us to be as he was in this world.  But the process requires some planning and determination.  We have to do the things that allow Jesus to form our hearts and minds and make us true disciples. 

That is why we have used for years here at St Thomas the Christian Life Model as a way to look at our corporate and personal spiritual lives.  There are others, but this one is comprehensive and easily understood.  Worship, Doctrine, Action—a program for coming to clarity in ourselves about where we stand in prayer and worship, in the knowledge of the Bible and the writings of the spiritual masters, in our ability to love and serve others, to witness to Christ, and to live our whole lives as stewards of God’s gifts.  It is easy to look at this model, to look at our lives, to see where we are strong and weak, and to plan for growth—a little at a time, as we are able, but in seriousness and commitment.

Paul knew that our perseverance in the faith over the whole of a life time comes with the commitment to a life of continual growth and development—especially in knowledge and in love.  The life of good works, of the practical virtues, results from deep prayer, which accesses the power available in the Kingdom to live as Christ lived.  But the life of prayer depends on our convictions as to the reality of the whole way of understanding our world and our lives that we have been given as Christians.  If we do not really know God or the Kingdom, if we really are not convinced that what we hope for is true, if we cannot defend what we believe as somehow worthy of serious thought and intellectual power, then we shall drift and be driven about by all the cultural forces that blow around us.  As Paul put it, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” If we are going to hold on to the end and live lives worthy of the Gospel, then we have to know what we are doing.  And we can, if we want.