Sunday Sermon: God Finishes Everything He Starts
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Text: Philippians 1:6
Series: Certain Truths for Uncertain Times
The law of inertia, as formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, tells us that a body in motion stays in motion, unless it is acted upon by an outside force. Not only is that principle true for objects, it’s also true for projects and assignments and duties and responsibilities. Whenever we are about something only to be interrupted by something else, we find it terribly hard to go back and pick up where we left off, which explains why finishing a task is one of the hardest things for us humans today. Think for a moment about all of those unfinished books and emails in your “draft” box and uncompleted items on your to-do list. We have managed to relegate them all to what someone has called a “purgatory of incompletion.”
There are a host of reasons as to why we find it so hard to finish so much of what we start, but the main reason is because of the disruptions and interruptions that normal everyday existence involves. And then multiply those interruptions and disruptions with a pandemic and what you’re left with is the perfect recipe for a generous helping of unfinished business, all of which makes so many of us feel like complete failures.
But what if in the course of our failed attempts to finish whatever we may have started, there comes to us another outside force, one that instead of stifling us or silencing us or stopping us actually empowers us to pick back up and accomplish the work we know we need to be about?
That’s a question that the Apostle Paul considers in his letter to the church at Philippi. And as Paul was praying over how to frame his answer to that question (and had plenty of time to do so, given how Paul wrote Philippians while in prison) Paul concludes that the outside force that spurns believers on in the matter of doing the work God has given us to do is nothing less than God’s gracious and merciful presence in our lives. Paul puts it this way: “You can be confident of this, that He who began a good work in your will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
Evidently, Paul knew that given how Philippi was a strategic and busy commercial city in the first century world, there would be plenty of distractions and plenty of interruptions people there would experience. There would be so much that might entice them to go down other paths instead of the one God had for them to travel. There would pursuits and challenges that would threaten to rob them of their spiritual vitality. And so Paul assured them that the God who had called them to new life in Jesus Christ would be ever present to nudge them forward in their path of discipleship so that along the way they might be fully formed for the good future He had for them to know, that He would be ever present to nudge them forward by means of His mercy and His grace.
Speaking of grace, no one can comprehend the essence of Christianity without an awareness of grace. Grace is the one variable in the equation of faith that lends promise to people who otherwise would find themselves facing challenges and difficulties beyond their ability to overcome, challenges and difficulties that would otherwise overwhelm them and make them want to quit.
Perhaps that’s where some of you are this morning. You have a heart to be about God’s work. You have a most earnest desire to join God in making this world more of what He created it to be. But every time you allow yourself to get excited about the possibilities of having such an impact, something takes place to distract you or discourage you so that your excitement wanes and your enthusiasm disappears.
So, how do you get it back? How do you find the secret to resuming something that life has halted and how do you recover a joy that difficulties have taken away? Might the answer be that you do so not by trying harder or resolving to be more diligent? Might it be instead what you allow God to do in you and through you by means of His grace? Might it be that you look to God to complete in you the work He began whenever your first confessed your faith in Jesus Christ?
No matter how much we talk about grace and sing about grace, I’m not sure we’ve fully come to depend upon it as the sole foundation for our everyday life. We prefer to traffic in an economy of merit instead of an economy of grace, one where we get what we deserve and we earn what we receive. That way we can divide our world into one of winners and losers whereas in a world that is governed by grace none of that applies and merit means absolutely nothing.
But what would it mean if instead of having to achieve your life, you instead lived openly and dependently and were able to receive your life instead? What would it mean if the air that you breathed and the ground you walked were all infused with grace? It would mean that like Zacchaeus, the one-time tax collector who came down from the sycamore tree to invite Jesus into his home, and like Bartimaeus, the blind beggar who sat each day outside the city gates and one day pleaded with Jesus to heal him, and the poor Syrophoenician woman who came seeking Jesus’ help with her demon-possessed daughter, you would find Jesus responding with a grace sufficient for your every need. You look at their stories and you see that while none of them had a leg to stand on, in each case they left changed people with a more promising future because of how, in the words of Jesus, their faith had made them whole. Their faith in what God had done for them through their experience with Jesus had set them on a course that would end with their completion. And God can do the same for you, if only you will draw near to Him through His grace, His amazing grace extended to you in Christ Jesus.
When we think of God’s amazing grace, we of course go immediately to what is high on the list of every American’s favorite hymn, if not at the top of the list, “Amazing Grace,” a song that has been recorded by all kinds of musical artists from all kinds of musical backgrounds because of how it so beautifully describes the arc of salvation, starting out with the sweetness of “the sound that saved a wretch like me,” continuing on to the help it provides us in the face of “many dangers, toils, and snares,” and culminating with the promise that “when we’ve been there ten thousand years bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”
You know the song, but what you may not know is its back story. The song was composed by John Newton, a Londoner, not an American, who was the son of English shipmaster, who spent the good part of his life running a slave ship from Africa to America, bringing captured slaves to markets in the New World. Through a series of experiences on the high seas, experiences very similar to the prophet Jonah in the Old Testament, Newton returned to Liverpool, where he became influenced by the preaching of George Whitefield and the Wesleys, John and Charles. A confession of faith Newton had made on the high seas now matured into one that possessed a social conscience as well. Newton began studying the Bible in its original languages, Hebrew and Greek, and was ordained an Anglican priest, dedicating the rest of his life to abolishing the trade that once had consumed his life. We might say the “wretch” that was once so “blind” had been made “to see” and was transformed by God’s incomprehensible and totally unfathomable acceptance of him. Newton knew that he could never do enough to make up for what he had done. He came to see that his only hope was in what God could do for him through God’s amazing grace in Christ Jesus.
Have you come to see that? Have you come to understand that we all are our own worst enemies and our greatest source of disruption, that left to our own devices we will never be able to finish anything of significance, simply because it’s impossible as sinners to get out of our own way?
But when we trust in God’s love, a love that accepts us just as we are and a love that does so to such an extent that it will never let us stay that way, we will come then come to see that the God who began such a good and amazing work in us will indeed carry it on to completion. He will carry it on to completion, until that day comes when every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.