THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST
SPREADING THE SOUL-SAVING MESSAGE OF JESUs
(Chapter 4)
Introduction by narrator accompanied by a cappella singing:
THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST. Spreading the soul-saving message of Jesus. And now, Kevin Pendergrass.
Welcome to our last lesson on the Book of Philippians. In this lesson we will be looking at the subject of Christian thinking, and the importance of where a Christian’s mind should be. In Philippians 2:5 the Bible tells us that we are to have “the mind of Christ.” Our mind is to be that of Christ. In fact, in Romans 8:5-6 the Scriptures say,
“Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
Here we see an easy statement to understand. If your mind is concentrated on things of the world, that is how you will live your life, and vice versa. If we are living lives according to things of the flesh, our minds will be focused on things of the flesh. The exact opposite is that if we are living faithful Christian lives, then our minds will be clean and pure because we possess the mind of Christ. In Romans 15:5 the Bible also teaches that we are to be “likeminded” in our thinking. Romans 12:2 says that we are to “renew our minds.” I want us to look at Philippians 4:8, where Paul wrote, “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” These are things about which we need to be thinking and on which we need to meditate. Usually when people think of “meditation,” they think of a person with his legs crossed, humming, and looking down with his eyes closed. But here the idea of meditation indicates where our minds need to be focused. It does not mean that we have to be sitting in a corner with our legs crossed, our eyes closed, and the lights off. This is talking about where our minds should be focused. These are the things on which a Christian’s mind should be thinking about all the time.
The first category we notice is truth. The first thing on which we need to meditate is truth. How important is truth? In John 8:32 the Bible says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Truth is priceless. It is only by the truth that we can be set free. In fact, in Psalm 25:5 the Bible says, “Lead me in Your truth.” We should desire to be led in truth (that is, the Word of God). When we talk about love in 1 Corinthians 13, and all the characteristics that go along with love, notice what one of those is. In verse 6 we read that “love does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth.” This is where love rejoices—“in the truth.” What is truth? John 17:17 teaches us that it is God’s Word (the Scriptures). God’s Word is truth. Psalm 119:151 says, “Your commands are truth.” What is truth? God’s commands—the things He has given us—are truth. How do we show God that we love Him? How do we show God that we love His truth? In 1 John 5:3 we read, “This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.” If God’s commandments are truth, how do we show God that we love Him? We do that by keeping His truth and by keeping His commandments, just as we saw in Psalm 25:5. We are to be “led in truth,” which means that we are to be led by His commandments. In Proverbs 3:3 the Bible says, “Let not mercy or truth forsake you; bind them around your neck, and write them on the tablet of your heart.” When you have the truth, buy it and do not sell it. Truth is priceless. It is the only thing that will set us free. So when we think about something on which every Christian’s mind needs to be focused, we should think of truth. What is truth? It is us wanting to do the right thing, not just justify our emotions. Proverbs 18:2 tell us that “a fool has no reliance in understanding, but only in expressing his own heart.” Anybody can express his own heart. Everybody has emotions. Anybody can talk about his experiences. But that is not the thing on which we need to be meditating and concentrating. It is the truth that must be our focus if we want to be set free. So, the first thing about which we need to think is truth.
Then we continue on in Philippians 4:8, and the next word to which we come is “noble.” What does the word noble mean? It means something that is honorable, glorious, or splendid. What are some things on which we can meditate and think that the Bible teaches are noble? The Bible teaches that marriage is something that is honorable. It is glorious and splendid because it is a sacred union. In Genesis 2 we find that God’s plan for marriage from the very beginning was one man and one woman for life. That is what we see presented in the Garden of Eden. This was God’s plan, yet many people since then have trampled underfoot God’s plan. They have had the idea, “I know that’s what God said, but I’m going to do it my way. I want to make myself happy.” That is not what God’s plan stated. People have taken the union of marriage—which is supposed to be something that is honorable and noble—and have taken those traits away from it. We must get back to how honorable marriage truly is.
But what about divorce? A lot of people in this generation are divorced. In fact, some people even mock the idea of remaining married to a spouse for many years. They say, “You need to keep up with the times and divorce your spouse so you can get with someone else. This is not how America runs today.” That is not what the Scriptures say. Matthew 19:9 says that there is only one scriptural reason for divorce—fornication (sexual unfaithfulness). Then and only then can a person divorce his or her spouse and remarry. But someone might be asking, “What if I didn’t do that? What if I entered into an unscriptural union? What if my wife and I were married, and we did not realize how honorable marriage was. We simply didn’t like each other any more, and thought that we didn’t love each other, so we divorced, and I have married someone else. What do I need to do?” Romans 6:1-2 says that you cannot continue in sin so that grace may about. Since it is an unscriptural marriage, every day that you continue in such an unscriptural union, you are continuing in sin. What must a person do in order to get out of that? Ezra 10 teaches what a person must do. The Israelites had married pagan wives, which was condemned because God had told them not to do that. So, God told them to divorce their mates and get out of those unscriptural marriages. If you are in an unscriptural marriage, you cannot continue in that unscriptural marriage. It is sinful, and you must get out of it. Some people like to say, “Well, I know it’s wrong, and I know that I need to get out of it. But we have children, and it will be really difficult. Wouldn’t God want me to be happy?” Yes, God wants you to be happy. He wants you to be eternally happy just like He wanted the Jews in Ezra 10 to be happy. The people in Ezra 10 had children in their unscriptural marriages. But they still had to get out of those unscriptural marriages. They could not continue in those marriages. We must get back to the noble, honorable union of marriage. What a wonderful thing it is (Heb. 13:4)! We need to be teaching or children and our grandchildren these things. We also need to teach those around us how wonderful and honorable marriage is. We should not allow television, the world, or society to influence us so that we say, “Marriage is no big deal. We can marry anyone we want, get divorced, and then marry anyone else we want to marry.” That is not what the Scriptures say.
Another subject that is honorable and glorious is the church. How glorious the church is! It is wonderful! Ephesians 5:27 says, “…that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.” The church is glorious. It should remain holy and without blemish. I’ve heard people say, “Isn’t the church just for a place for sinners? It’s not a place for saints.” That statement could not be farther from the truth. The Bible teaches that the church is not for sinners. The church is for the saints—those who have been sanctified (1 Cor. 14) and who have been set apart so that they no longer continue in sin (Gal. 3). We are not to be sinners if we are in the Lord’s church. We must understand the importance of not continuing in sin so that we do not fall from God’s grace (Gal. 5:4). But many people downplay the church or mock it—when the Bible says that it is a glorious thing. What happens if there are people in the church who continue in sin? Are there some congregations of the Lord’s people who are unfaithful? Absolutely! In Revelation 2 and 3 we see this very thing being addressed. Those people need to repent (1 Cor. 5). If they do not, they need to be purged. We no longer can fellowship them if we hope to keep the church (which was purchased by the blood of Jesus; Acts 20:28) glorious. We need to realize how noble, glorious, and splendid the church truly is. Marriage and the church are things on which we need to meditate and concentrate because they are noble and honorable.
The next word in Philippians 4 is the word “just”—which simply means those things that are correct and righteous. We serve a righteous God and a just God. He will not do something that is unfair. He weighs things on His scale. We look around and see people who are terrible because they rob banks or carry out all sorts of terrible crimes. But it seems like they keep doing it, and have not been caught. There will come a day when a righteous God will judge them based upon their actions. He will judge them righteously based upon His Word (Jn. 12:48). If they have not done the things that the Lord has commanded, they will be lost. In Psalm 11:7 the Bible says, “The Lord is righteous; He loves righteousness, and His countenance beholds the upright.” Notice, too, that we serve a righteous God. I’ve heard some people say, “Even though this person did not do what the Bible says, we can still hope that God will let him into Heaven anyway. I know that according to the Bible, He will not. But maybe He will, because I really loved that person. He could have been a good person, but just chose not to be.” Can a righteous God do that? No, He cannot. If He allowed sin into Heaven, and if He could allow someone into Heaven who had not been cleansed, He would not be a righteous God. Just as we can depend on His promises that we would consider positive, so we also can depend on those promises that we many times would consider to be negative (such as the fact that those who do not obey the Gospel will be lost). God is a righteous God. But the good news in Psalm 98:2 is that “His righteousness He has revealed in the sight of the nations.” Romans 3:10 says, “There is none righteous; no, not one.” When a person is born, grows, and matures, yet never obeys the Lord, can he be considered as righteous? No, because “there is none righteous; no, not one” without the Lord. However, when we obey the Lord, we become righteous. Through our obedience, we can become righteous. Look at Romans 5:19—“As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” Because the Lord came and was obedient to God’s plan by taking on Himself our sins, by dying on the cross, and by being resurrected, if we are obedient to Him, we, too, can become righteous. Only a righteous God can make unrighteous humans righteous through obedience to Him. What a wonderful thing that is on which to mediate and think. In fact, Romans 6:13 says that our bodies should be “instruments of righteousness.” When we are members of the Lord’s church, and we start to think of ourselves as being righteous, it will encourage us to be more righteous every day. We must grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2 Pet. 3:18). If we think to ourselves every single day that we are to be righteous because God has cleansed us of our sins and we are to be instruments of righteous, then the more we will want to please Him in our actions.
The next word we see in Philippians 4 is “purity.” In 1 Timothy 5:22 Paul said, “Keep yourselves pure.” This is something that America and the rest of the world needs to hear. We must have a pure mind. So many people’s minds are “in the gutter” because they do not have a pure mind. We’ve all heard the saying, “Whatever you put in your mind is what will come out.” How true that is. Whatever we look at, listen to, or are involved with is how our hearts will be, how we will think, and how we will act. In Matthew 5:28 Jesus said, “But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Why? Because such a man does not have a pure mind. He is looking at women to lust after them. He is not someone who has a pure mind. I’ve heard some Christian men say, “It’s OK to look as long as you don’t act upon it.” No, it’s not OK to look in order to lust. The Bible says that if a person does that, he already has committed adultery with that woman in his heart because of his evil thoughts. Not only is it wrong to act upon it, but it also is wrong to think about it. We must have pure minds.
Is it possible to have a pure mind? Some will tell us that it is impossible because “we were born that way, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If we’re not pure, it’s not our fault.” The Bible teaches that we can control our minds, and that we are the ones who must have self-control. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10:5 that we must “bring every thought into captivity.” What does that mean? It means that we have the capability to put our thoughts into captivity so that we can control what and how we think. Does that mean that at times we may struggle with this? Does it mean that it might be harder for some people to do because of the way they were raised or the things they’ve always been taught? Absolutely. But that does not change the fact that we still can do it. We have the power to bring every thought into captivity. What are some ways by which we can do this? First, we must quit doing the things in which we have been involved. Consider entertainment, movies, and music. We cannot continue to watch dirty movies or movies that profane God’s name (even if they are only PG-13, which does not mean that they are OK or that God approves of them). Why would any faithful child of God want to pay $8 or $9 to go see a movie that involves immodesty, nudity, or blaspheming God’s name? Why would we want to pay to be entertained by that kind of garbage? Yet we then wonder why it is hard for us to control our thoughts—when those kinds of things are the types of things we are putting into our minds. Look at the mentality that the Bible teaches that Lot had toward sin. In 2 Peter 2:7-8 we read of Lot, who was righteous before God, Who “delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds).” Lot never came to a point in his life where he could say, “That doesn’t bother me. I don’t have a problem with it.” Many times we use that an excuse. We say, “I can go see this and be entertained because it just doesn’t bother me.” Sin should bother us. That is the problem here. We start saying, “Sin doesn’t bother us,” and that is a problem. If we are of pure mind, sin should bother us. What happens when a little 4- or 5-year-old child is watching television and hears a dirty word? What does that child do? Does the child say, “That doesn’t bother me?” No. It bothers the child. Why? Because he or she has a pure mind, and realizes that something wrong has been said. Psalm 119:140 speaks of the purity of God’s Word. We need to be involved in studying the Word of God. We must engage not only in self-study, but also studying the Scriptures so we can show them what they need to do in order to go to Heaven. The more we study the Word of God, and the more we put into that study, the easier it will be to have a pure mind. The Bible says in Proverbs 16:2, “All the ways of man are pure in his own eyes.” Just because we think we are pure does not mean that we are. So many people think that they are pure, but that is exactly what every person thinks. Yet it is God’s standard by which we are to be measured. When talking about the idea of being pure, we also can discuss “pure and undefiled religion” (Jas. 1:27). What is pure and undefiled religion? It is helping widows and orphans in their times of need. We are to concentrate on helping those who are less fortunate. These are the kinds of things in which we need to be involved so that we can have pure minds. The more we do this, the easier it will become.
The next word in Philippians 4 has to do with things that are lovely, or things that are of good report. What does that mean? We need to be sharing good news with others. We need to be telling them about good things that are happening so that they can be encouraged. When we hear of something good happening to a brother or sister in Christ, do you get jealous? Do you say, “I can’t believe that happened to them; I wish it had happened to me”? Or, are you glad that it happened to them so that there is “a good report”? In Philippians 3:17 Paul said, “You have us as a pattern.” He was letting them know that they had him as a pattern or good report. Paul boasted about congregations because he wanted to let them know how wonderful they were. In 2 Corinthians 8:1-2 we read,
“Moreover, brethren, we make known to you the grace of God bestowed on the churches of Macedonia: that in a great trial of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded in the riches of their liberality.”
Paul was boasting on them. But not only are we to tell of good things that are happening, but we also can use certain things that might be considered as negative, yet use them in a positive way. Look at Philippians 1:12-14.
“But I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the gospel, so that it has become evident to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my chains are in Christ; and most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.”
If you heard of someone being put in prison for having preached the truth, would that be considered a “good report”? It should be, because that type of thing should strengthen us. Paul said that his being put in prison actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel. Plus, it strengthened Christians who heard about it. They then wanted to do more as a result of having heard about what had happened. It was not scaring them away. They did not think, “Oh no. What happens if we get put in prison?” They were saying, “If Paul is willing to do this, we need to be willing to do it. We need to follow his example of hearing such good reports so that we can spread the good news to others.” In Colossians 1:7 Paul spoke of Tychicus, Onesiumus, and other faithful brethren in order to let people know of their good testimony. In 2 John 12, John mentioned Demetrius for his good testimony. Romans 16:17 says that we are not only to mark those who cause divisions (so that we can warn people), but that we also are to mark those who are doing good things so that people will know who they should be following, and who is teaching the truth. That way, they can mediate and concentrate on those things that are lovely and of good report.
The last word in Philippians 4 sums up Paul’s point by referring to “any virtue” or “anything that is praiseworthy.” Anything that is scripturally authorized is where our concentration needs to be and where our minds need to be focused. Notice what Paul said in Philippians 4:9—“The things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you.” What will happen if we do what Paul has told us to do in Philippians 4? We can know that the God of peace will be with us in these things. In Philippians 4:11 we read that Paul had learned “to be content in any state.” If Paul was in prison, he could be content, knowing that he could teach others the Gospel, pray to God, and sing praises unto Him (Acts 16:25). Perhaps Paul was content when he was enjoying a meal and fellowship with other Christians. Perhaps he was content even though he was in a shipwreck. Paul was content in whatever state he found himself because he was able to bring his mind into submission. He was focused on God and on doing God’s will. In Philippians 2:14 Paul said that we need to do all things “without complaining.” We need to be careful where we place our focus. The more we focus on others, the less we will worry about our own problems. If we put Christ first, we will be too busy helping others to worry about what we do not have. If we are helping those who are less fortunate, and if we are thinking on positive things, we will not have to worry about complaining because we will see great blessings from the Lord all around us. This is what the Scriptures teach about where our minds must be. We must have “the mind of Christ.” In doing that, we must have our focus where it needs to be—on the Word of God. If we do that, the God peace will be with us.
Are you a Christian? Can you say that your mind is focused on the things of the Lord that concern the Word of God? If not, you need to obey God’s plan of salvation. In Acts 2:37, after Peter had just finished his first Gospel sermon, the Jews asked, “What must we do to be saved?” Peter told them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (vs. 38). If you have yet to obey the truth, we pray that you will obey the Gospel of Christ.
Narrator accompanied by a cappella singing:
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1. What does Philippians 2:5 admonish Christians to have?
2. According to Romans 8:5-6, what is the result of being “carnally minded?”
3. According to Romans 8:5-6, what is the result of being “spiritually minded”?
4. What command did Paul issue in Romans 12:2?
5. In Psalm 25:5, what request did the psalmist make of God?
6. According to Jesus’ statements in John 17:17, what is “truth”?
7. According to Psalm 119:151, what is “truth”?
8. According to 1 John 5:3, how does God know that we love Him?
9. In Proverbs 18:2, what is the definition of “a fool”?
11. Philippians 4:8 urges us to think on things that are just. According to the information contained in this lesson, what does the word “just” mean?
12. According to Psalm 11:7, what does the Lord love?
13. According to Psalm 98:2, what has God done?
14. Among accountable people, who, according to Romans 3:10, is righteous outside of Christ?
15. What does 2 Corinthians 10:5 admonish us to do?
16. What does 2 Peter 3:18 admonish us to do?
17. What did the apostle Paul mean in Philippians 3:17 when he said, “You have us as a pattern”?
18. What does Psalm 119:140 say about purity?
19. What does 2 Peter 2:7 tell us about Lot’s attitude toward sin?
20. What does Proverbs 16:2 tell us about how people generally look at their own righteousness?
21. In Philippians 4:9, what promise did Paul offer to Christians who would follow the steps he had laid out in Philippians 4:8?
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