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Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me\u2014put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:9)

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We\u2019re doing the same text again today as we did on Friday, as there\u2019s more to it than just the list of virtues that I talked about Friday.\xa0 Paul offers two other tidbits as well.\xa0 We are to think about that which is excellent or praiseworthy to feed our mind with better things.\xa0 But Paul also offers us things to practice and an assurance that the God of peace will indeed be with us.\xa0 Today we\u2019ll dwell on these practices.

We need to practice this Christian life, because there are otherwise ways that we can flatten the whole thing into merely believing the right stuff about God in our heads.\xa0 For instance, in one of the overtures to our CRC Synod this year, a statement is made about the hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:6-11.\xa0 I have no commentary here on the overture itself, but this single statement seemed worth lifting up to think about.\xa0

This is what it says: \u201cThe hymn of Philippians 2 is not intended to show us how Christ, in use of his power, was \u2018humbling himself toward a life-sacrificing kind of obedience\u2019 so that we, in turn, will accept our calling and use our power for \u2018others to thrive.\u2019 Rather, the hymn of Philippians 2 is a beautiful statement of the eternal plan of God for his Son to pay the debt for our sins by his death on the cross.\u201d

According to this then, Philippians 2 is mere information, a statement of truth about God\u2019s plan to save the world via Penal Substitutionary Atonement.\xa0 It has no other application to our lives or anyone else\u2019s.\xa0 In fact, not even Christ\u2019s own submissive humbling of himself to death has anything to do with the text\u2014it is only about the plan of God, mechanically followed.

But to accept such a disembodied reading of the text, divorced from the wider context in which Paul offers the model of Christ, then of Timothy and Epaphroditus, and then of himself, all\xa0for the reason of pleading with Euodia and Syntyche (and the rest of the church) to \u201cbe of the same mind in the Lord\u201d\u2014well, it misses something important.\xa0 Namely: it misses the doctrine of the Incarnation.\xa0 If the Scriptures are only present to teach us right truths, right systematic theological beliefs, but not at the same time bear on the way we live our lives in imitation and response to that truth\u2014then we deny that the Word can or has become flesh and made its dwelling among us.\xa0

In 1 John 4:2-3, he offers us a simple way of \u201ctesting the spirits.\u201d\xa0 The smell test he gives is the incarnation.\xa0 \u201cEvery spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,\u201d he says.\xa0 The ones that don\u2019t are the spirit of anti-Christ.\xa0 That is: they deny that Christ, the eternal word\u2014came in the flesh, in our real world.\xa0 I am not suggesting that the writers of the cited overture above are guilty of this\u2014but there is an unhealthy tendency represented here that\u2019s worth noting.

Because \u201cthe Truth\u201d as we have come to know it as Christians is no longer a propositional statement about something as abstract as a theory of the atonement.\xa0 The truth is a person: Jesus Christ, come in the flesh to die and rise for us.\xa0 A truth who we are to imitate and model our own lives and behaviors upon.

This is what Paul is talking about here at the end of our passage.\xa0 \u201cWhatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me\u2014put it into practice.\xa0 And the God of peace will be with you.\u201d\xa0 Elsewhere, Paul says it even more plainly: \u201cfollow my example, as I follow the example of Christ\u201d (1 Cor. 11:1).

We human people learn just as much\u2014if not more\u2014by imitation and apprenticeship than we do by classroom lecture.\xa0 We are invited therefore, to model our lives on Jesus\u2019 life, on Paul\u2019s life, and on the lives of other faithful Christian who have grown and are continually growing up to maturity in Jesus Christ.\xa0 We need mentors and role models in the faith\u2014people we can ask questions of, learn from, and imitate\u2014trusting that in all of this\u2014the God of peace remains with us by the power of his Son and Spirit.

So: how are you practicing the Christian witness found in the lives of those like Paul or other Christian role models in your life or in the scriptures?\xa0 And, how are you being a Christian role model to others?\xa0 Whatever you do: continue to put the life of Christ into practice\u2014trusting always in God\u2019s presence, accomplishing it within you as you go.

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