Truth Today Newsletter: Philippians 2:13

With God, nothing is impossible, including working on your desires and actions.

What we are being told in this passage is about a cooperative relationship with God. The previous verse says Continue working out your salvation with fear and awe. But now we are learning that it is not in your own strength and your own wisdom.

You can trust that your engagement in working out your salvation is enhanced by God being at work in you. He is generating both the desire to work out your salvation and the effort you are putting into it.

Some people do not know that it takes some effort to work out their salvation. To go from where you are to where you are supposed to be is not child’s play. Paul said, This one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and stretching forth to what is ahead in the upward call of God in Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:13-14).

Paul used himself as an example of the pursuit of God. Even in ministry, Paul, who said that he labors more than all the apostles, said it’s God working in him (1 Corinthians 15:10).

We need to put a sign over your life that says: “God at Work,” because God is truly at work. One thing God wants to build in us is unyielding obedience to Him. And we see that Paul began this passage with a call to obedience. And obedience in this case is not so much about something that you don’t want to do. It is rather God working in you the desire and then the steps to take in the direction of that desire.

It’s God forming Christ in you, since He is the one we are being shaped into (Ephesians 4:13), since we are the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27).

It may start a little, then it grows into a big thing, and you can trace the progression.

For example, it started with Jesus turning water into wine (John 2), and it ended with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit (spiritual wine) (Acts 2). It started with arguing with teachers of the law in the temple (Luke 2:41-52), and it ended with instructing the apostles to go into all the world and preach the gospel to all nations, commanding them to obey all he had taught them (Matthew 28:19-20). This is the way Paul puts it: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (how it started), and he has also given us the work of reconciliation (how it’s going) (2 Corinthians 5:19-20).

***

Christ learned obedience by the things he suffered (Hebrews 5:8). Like him, too, we have our motives purified. Jesus prayed: not my will but yours be done (Luke 22:42). He had the desire to do God’s will, and the effort to do God’s work was worked into Him: an angel came to strengthen Him even as His sweat of anguish grew thick in the garden of Eden (Luke 22:43-44).

The focus verse is supposed to make you rest in God. He wants you to do His will, and He works in you to that end. He does not leave you to try to figure it out. He guides you by His Spirit (Romans 8:14). So even as you inch forward in awe and trembling towards the will of God, know that you are not alone; God is at work in you. And the end is clear: God’s good pleasure. God wants you to please Him, and then work pleasing Him within you. This is so that all glory would be to him for both the desire to please him and the effort, or actions.

But what if we do not please God? Then God is not to be blamed. Paul said to be aware of the work of sin. He called us to walk in the Spirit so that we do not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). And James wrote that anyone tempted by sin should not say they are tempted by God.

❝

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires. Then when desire conceives, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is full grown, it gives birth to death. Do not be led astray, my dear brothers and sisters. (James 1:13-16)

So, there are our own desires which work towards sin, and then there are the desires of the Spirit.

❝

But I say, live by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh. For the flesh has desires that are opposed to the Spirit, and the Spirit has desires that are opposed to the flesh, for these are in opposition to each other, so that you cannot do what you want. (Galatians 5:16-17)

So, we should be aware that there is a thing called the desire of the flesh and that not every desire is necessarily God at work.

Because of Adam’s choice, all were born into sin (Romans 5:12). And the reason Christ was manifested is to destroy the works of the devil, which includes sin (1 John 3:8). He is the one that Jesus said was the original sinner, law breaker, the disobey-er from the beginning. And those who do not do the will of God are manifesting the seed of the original disobey-er - the devil (John 8:44). He is the original rebel. So we should live by what God has worked and is working in us, rather than the inherited sin nature.

James 4:1-3 expands on wrong-headed desires.

❝

Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask; you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions. (James 4:1-3)

And look at what Jesus said.

❝

You people are from your father the devil, and you want to do what your father desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not uphold the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he lies, he speaks according to his own nature because he is a liar and the father of lies. (John 8:44)

In conclusion, action and desire are linked. So God is not saying: just do. He also makes doing the right thing natural/pleasurable to us because he worked the desire within us by His spirit, and what seems natural for us is strange to some people (1 Peter 4:4).

❝

ANNOUNCEMENT 1 (of 4): Announcing the next class of a Christian school called the Spiritual Development School that would be from Nov. 3 to Jan 30. There are daily 30-minute classes on Zoom at 3 p.m. WAT (8 a.m. CST) from Monday to Friday. Register here: tinyurl.com/spiritualdevschool, and you will get a call giving you further information about the school. God Bless!- Kayode Crown (Coordinator)

ANNOUNCEMENT 2 (of 4): I am happy to announce the publication of the paperback edition of the ministry’s book of the year: The Sufficiency of Scripture. The ebook version would be available later this month. Cheers!

https://www.westbowpress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/865091-the-sufficiency-of-scripture

ANNOUNCEMENT 3 (of 4): Please check out the new segment below: From Addiction to Freedom by Favour Oyinloye.

ANNOUNCEMENT 4 (of 4): Going forward, beginning from Sept 1, I will add a segment to my thrice weekly newsletter. I call it weekly chant. The weekly chants are words and melodies I am hearing in my spirit.