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All right, we are here in Philippians chapter two. We are continuing in our series entitled Reasons to Rejoice. Because despite his circumstances, Paul writes about joy and rejoice 14 times in this book of only four chapters. Why do I say despite his circumstances? Because we know that when Paul writes this letter, he is writing to the Christians in the church in Philippi, Greece, while he is in in prison in Rome, Italy, awaiting trial before Emperor Caesar Nero, all because he was guilty of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So while he is in prison, he writes four different epistles. Among those four is this letter of Philippians. And as he writes here about joy and rejoicing these 14 different times, so far through the first chapter, we've seen four different reasons to rejoice. Paul writes, because God will finish what he started concerning us. That's chapter one, verse six. Also because God will use our chains for his purposes. He talked about his chains in prison. In other words, God uses our difficult circumstances for our good and his glory. And then Paul reminds us, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Heaven will only be much, much better than earth. We don't hasten our death, but we just look forward to our eternal reward in heaven. And then last week, number four, we talked about how unity comes through humility, and humility comes from the example of Jesus Christ. That was in the first part of chapter two. So we're going to see a fifth reason to rejoice this morning as we look further here in chapter two, Philippians, chapter two. I'm going to read verses 12 to 18, Philippians 2, starting at verse 12. Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure. Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless children of God without fault, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life so that I may rejoice. There's that word again in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain or labored in vain. Yes, and if I am being poured out as a drink offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, and he's talking there about his imminent death, he knows that he might lose his health. Literally, he will lose his head over his faith. Nero will have him executed. Not this time, but a second imprisonment. And he knows I'M being poured out. I'm being poured out like a drink offering of worship unto the Lord. And yet he says in verse 17, I am glad and rejoice. Here it is again with you all, verse 18. For the same reason you also be glad and rejoice with me. And so we'll stop there for the moment. Paul writes here about the importance of our witness, of our testimony, and how when we represent Jesus to others, it brings great joy to the world. And no doubt it brings great joy to the heart of God. And so reason number five, to rejoice here is when our witness impacts our world. When our witness impacts our world. Again, just reading verses 14 through 16 where he says, do all things without complaining and disputing that you may become blameless and harmless children of God without fault, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ. Let's pause there and pray. Lord, it is good to be in your house today and to open up your word. Now we pray, Lord, that you speak to us through the pages of this letter that Paul would write by inspiration of the Spirit, helping us to understand the importance of our own testimony, of our witness for you that many would come to know Christ even as most of us have come to know you already. Help us, Lord, to be good ambassadors. We want to represent you well in this world. The time is short, so help us to heed these things that Paul writes to us as we take personal exhortation from them. And it's in Jesus name we pray. And everyone said, amen. Well, Paul is going to build on the first part of chapter two that we talked about last week, where he exhorts us to, as Christians, to come together in unity. And unity comes through humility. And humility comes when we follow the example of Jesus. And he's building on this because he's saying, let me, let me tell you why. The church needs to get their act together and be humble like Christ was humble. He said, because the world needs your testimony. And the world isn't going to accept your testimony if you're not unified and humble and come and come presenting Jesus in that way. So he says now as he builds on this, he goes, this is why you needed to be unified. This is why you need to be humble, because the world needs the message of Jesus. And why? Well, because Paul points out what is consistently true about any and every culture. Look again in your bibles at verse 15. In the middle of verse 15, this is how he describes not just his culture, but every culture since the fall of man. Verse 15, that we live, quote, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. So just underline crooked, underline perverse. That describes the generation. And this was true in the first century when Paul wrote this, around the year 62 AD. That was certainly true of the Roman Empire. If you know anything about the Roman Empire, you know how hedonistic and immoral it was. So Paul says, this is true of my generation. But no doubt this is true of our generation. This has been true of every generation since Adam fell in the Garden of Eden, which is, we live in a crooked and perverse culture. Look at our own culture. How perverse is it? I mean the pornography, sex trafficking, crimes against children, boys going into girls locker rooms and girls going into boys locker rooms and same sex marriage and abortions. I mean, all this is perverse. Now, in the original language of the New Testament, the Greek word here for perverse is diastrefo. Diastrefo means to turn off the right path. That's so characteristic of our culture. We've just turned off the right path. We've veered off the straight and narrow path and we're just doing our own thing. We've chosen our own path against the path that God outlines for us. Isaiah tells us this in Isaiah 53:6. He says, we all, like sheep, have gone astray and we've turned everyone to his own way. Like we've decided we're going to make our own path. We don't really care what God thinks. And so we're going to do things our way. And thus we live in a perverse generation. We also live, he says here, in one that is described as crooked, a crooked generation. Now the original Greek word here is skolios, so we get our English word scoliosis. If you have a curvature of the spine, if your back is bent, that's the idea here. Our culture is bent. The world is, is curved. It is, it is. It has its own version now of morality and truth, of right and wrong. And that happens. A culture will lose its, its way when it starts to deny God and the truth and of God's objective moral standard. When a culture begins to adopt its own rules, its own laws, its own standard of right and wrong, of good and evil, and we make ourselves the standard instead of God, then we are crooked. We are not aligned with the straight way of God. In the book of Amos, in the Old Testament, Amos the prophet talked about how the Lord appeared to him. And he writes in Amos 7, 7, 8. I'll just read those two verses to you. You don't need to turn there. But this is what he said, Amos 7, 7. Thus the Lord showed me. Behold, the Lord stood on a wall made with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, amos, what do you see? And I said, a plumb line. And then the Lord said, behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people. Now hear what God was saying there through the prophet Amos. Most of us, I'm sure, are familiar with what a plumb line is. It's what builders and masons use to determine if they are building a wall vertically straight. Now, today they might use lasers as a more modern way of seeing what's straight or crooked. But back in the day, and to some extent still today, a plumb line is used by which is basically a string with a weighted plummet on the end. And as you would hold it, the weight would make the string straight, and you could align a wall to make sure it was vertically true as you were building it. And so when, when God talks here of having a plumb line in his hand, what he's saying is, I am the standard by which everything and everyone should be measured, that God is what is everything that is right and true and good and just. And he says, I hold this plumb line in the midst of my people because he is the standard. And against the plumb line, one would then be able to see if something is crooked or if it is bent or if it is off course. And so God is the objective moral standard by which everything and everyone is measured. And if people would surrender and align themselves to God and submit themselves to the lordship of Jesus Christ, then they would be able to call evil what God calls evil. They would see things that are good that God says is good. They would be able to determine what is right because of what God says is right. They would be able to define what is wrong because they God defines what is wrong. They would have a heart for things that break their heart because it breaks the heart of God. They would be able to celebrate what God celebrates and condemn what God condemns because they are vertically aligned with God, who is the plumb line. But unfortunately, our culture wants to persuade you that God is not the objective moral standard for right and wrong, for good and evil that you are. And so our culture says that man is the objective moral standard, not God. And that man determines what is right and wrong and man determines what is good and evil. And this is why now we have everything from gender identity confusion to a redefinition of marriage to laws that don't protect the unborn in the womb, all being rewritten or at the very least, redefined to suit the standard of man. God hasn't changed. Man has. And so thus we are not true to the plumb line. That was not always so in our culture, at least not in our recent American history. Our own founding document, the Declaration of Independence, stated that the very basis for common law in America was derived from, quote, the laws of nature and nature's God. Now what does that mean? Well, it's actually a legal term that was adopted from the Blackstone Commentaries on Law, which was the standard for law in England and later in America, and from this legal textbook in volume one, section two. It defines the laws of nature as the will of God for his creation as revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures. End quote. In other words, our founding fathers, when they adopted William Blackstone's commentary on law and his definition, they believed that God and the Bible served as the plumb line for our nation and our nation's laws. But of course, in recent years especially, we have seen a swift erosion from that principle. And thus our culture is not vertically true. Every generation from the beginning of time has tried to determine right and wrong apart from God, and it has not gone well for that culture. And our own generation is no different. That's why the Bible describes really every generation as perverse and crooked, because it's not vertically aligned with God as the plumb line. We know this is true about our own day, and it was certainly true of Paul's day when he wrote what he did almost 2000 years ago here in Philippians chapter two. And by the way, 1500 years before Paul, Moses said the same thing about his generation in Deuteronomy chapter 32, verse 5. Just listen, you don't need to turn. But when the Israelites rebelled against God, this is what Moses said of them in Deuteronomy 32. 5. They have corrupted themselves. They are not his children because of their blemish. A perverse and crooked generation. Moses uses the same words to describe his his generation. 1500 B.C. paul says the same thing in 62 A.D. we can clearly say the same thing today in 2026. And so Paul is saying to us here in Philippians chapter two. I just wanted to emphasize all that from from verse 15, where he talks about a crooked and perverse generation, because he's saying that this crooked and perverse generation needs your witness, needs your testimony of Jesus. But in order for us to have a true witness and a right testimony of Jesus in this crooked and perverse generation, we have to be vertically aligned with God and our lives have to be true. This is why Paul puts such emphasis on how we should conduct ourselves in this passage, because our lives are on display as representatives of Christ in this perverse and crooked generation. And so we must live up to the high calling. Look here again in your bibles at chapter two, verse 12. Look at verse 12. He just starts to talk here about, okay, now look, because we live in a perverse and crooked generation, he says, christians, get your act together. That's the first part of chapter two. And he says, now I want you to be good witnesses and have a good testimony in this crooked and perverse generation, because they need Jesus just like you've needed Jesus. So in verse 12, the first thing he says here is, therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence. He says, look, I just want to commend you, he says, to the church at Philippi. But he's by extension, he's saying to us, he's saying, look, when I was with you, he said, you were obeying God. You were a faithful church. I commend you for that. In fact, he starts out there in verse 12, calling them my beloved. You can tell how much he loves them. He's proud of them. You guys have been faithful to God. You've been obeying God. I've seen it with my own eyes. But now it's 10 years later, he's writing Philippians back to this church that he planted. And he says, now how much more you should still continue to obey the Lord even when I'm not with you, even in my absence, he says, because when nobody's looking, you got to obey God. You got to be true to him, because the world needs your witness. And it's not going to get a good witness unless you are faithful to God. So you have been faithful. I praise God for you, my beloved, stay faithful. And even more so, even though your spiritual leader is not around you, God sees, God knows, and he wants you to be a good example of him in this crooked and perverse generation. And then he says there in the rest of verse 12, and this is a verse that has caused some people to get all in a knot. So let me unpack it a little bit, because there in verse 12 he says, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure. I want you to notice there he says, work out your own salvation in verse 12. And in verse 13 he says, for it is God who works in you. So he's talking about working out and working in. We're to work out our salvation. God works in us, his salvation. Let me tell you first what this does not mean, okay? When, when he says, here, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. He's not saying you have to earn your salvation by working really hard. He's writing to believers who are already saved. He's not writing to unbelievers to try to tell people, you got to work out your salvation, you got to work hard in order for God to love you and then you can work your way to heaven. This is not a works oriented religion. This is a faith based, grace laced relationship with Jesus. So he's not saying here, work out, like work your way to heaven. He's writing to believers. He's saying, I want you to work outwardly what God has worked inwardly. So as God has worked in you to save you, put feet to your faith and work it out loud. Let other people see that you really belong to Him. And you do it with fear and trembling because you should have a holy reverence for God to live out your life in such a way that it is tangible, it's palpable. People see it. They can realize that you're a Christian because of the way you're living it. Work outward your salvation, what God has worked inward in you. Be on full display for God. Listen, sometimes I hear people once in a while go, well, my faith is private. It's personal, it's just private, just between me and the Lord. Like I want to barf when people say that. I want to throw up a little bit in my mouth because when I'm hearing people say, well, it's just private, just, you know, I don't want to talk about it. Just private. What you're saying is you're either embarrassed or ashamed. That's what you're saying. You're. Well, I'm just, I'm shy. Get over it. Like seriously, get over embarrassment, get over your shyness. Get over any kind of awkwardness because the world needs to hear about Jesus and it will only hear about it from those who know Him. We have to tell people we are his ambassadors on full display. So work it outwardly, work out Your salvation with fear and trembling. Honor God, revere him as a holy, awesome, majestic creator of the universe, and live your faith out loud is what he's saying here to us. Remember John the Baptist in Matthew 3. 8. He said, Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Produce fruit. Jesus said the same thing in John 15:8. He says, by this my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit, so you will be my disciples. We should be putting God on display at all times. And then Paul adds here in verse 14. Glance down at verse 14. He says, But I want you to do it all things. Do all things without complaining and disputing. Do all things without complaining or disputing. Do you understand that we blow our witness when we walk around complaining and arguing, Complaining and arguing. There's an old. My wife's family is Pennsylvania Dutch. There's an old term gretzing. You don't. You don't grets like, stop your complaining. It means complaining or whining. Just stop gretzing about stuff. As Christians, it's going to turn people off because they're going to look at us and go, you're a big whiner, a big complainer. You argue about everything. Why should I want what you have? I don't want to become like that. So he says, put away all this complaining and disputing and arguing, verse 15, that you may become blameless and harmless children of God without fault. Blameless and harmless. Notice the contrast here. Paul says the two words that describe the generation are crooked and perverse. He says, let me tell you what should describe us. Blameless and harmless. Now, he doesn't mean sinless when he says blameless. It means without accusation. It means our lives should be lived in such a way that we don't give people reason to level accusations against us. We're leading a blameless life, not a perfect life. We are all in need of grace every single day, every minute of every day. I need God's grace. But we have to have this conscious awareness that. That we're constantly representing Jesus. So we better live our lives in a blameless way that is without reason for accusation and harmless. ESV uses the word innocent. NIV uses the word pure. The idea is that, again, don't give people reason to point a finger. Like, live your life in such a way that it is pleasing and honorable to the Lord in a pure way, in an honorable way. And then he continues in verse 15, as we shine as lights in the world. As we shine as lights in the world. Now he's making another inference as to the condition of the world, isn't he? Because the word lights here, some translations say stars. The original Greek can translate luminaries. So it can mean stars, it can mean other kinds of light. But look, stars are always shining. But when are they visible? At night, when things are dark. So Paul is saying to us, look, in addition to being in a crooked and perverse generation, we live in a dark world. And so we need to shine the light of Jesus into this dark world. Remember Jesus said in Matthew 5:16, Let your light so shine before men that they might see your good deeds and glorify your Father which is in heaven. We should be constantly reflecting the light of Jesus wherever we go. And Jesus himself said in John 3:19, he says, this is the verdict. Light has come into the world. But men loved darkness instead of the light because their deeds were evil. And so they would not come into the light for fear that their evil deeds would be exposed. A lot of people are reluctant to draw near to Jesus because they're like, ah, it's so vulnerable for me to feel so exposed with my sin. Yeah, well, once you get over that little hurdle, it is the most liberating and joyful thing to know that you are forgiven and free to be forgiven and free. Jesus says, but unfortunately, too many people don't want to step into the light because they don't want to be exposed. Well, when we step into the light, when we come into relationship with Jesus, then he says, now I want you to reflect my light and let it so shine before men that people might see your good deeds and it'll point them to Jesus. Peter would also write this. In 1st Peter 2:11 and 12, he said, Dear friends, I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world, that's how we should feel from time to time, like we don't belong here. To abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans, that's the unbelievers, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. Our testimony needs to be visible, needs to be evident. He's to be seen as we reflect the light of the Lord Jesus wherever we go. So all that he writes here in this passage, all that Paul writes here is really both a a warning and a calling. The warning is, we live in a crooked and perverse generation. That's just a fact. Make sure that you don't become a part of this perverse and Crooked generation that you've been rescued from. That's the warning. And then the calling is, shine the light of Christ wherever you go, and be vertically true to God as the ultimate plumb line. Be vertically true to the Lord and let the light of Christ shine wherever you you go. This is our calling Church. Do not give in to the philosophy of this age. Do not give in to the customs of this culture wherever it conflicts with the plumb line of God. Paul would Write in Colossians 2, verse 8. He said, See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy with which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world, rather than on Christ. Don't let anybody take you captive to the philosophies and principles of this world. And then he would write this also in Romans 12:2. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is. His good, pleasing and perfect will. Now, in that single verse there, Romans 12:2, Paul uses two words that describe the two missions. There's a mission of the world and there's a mission of the Church. The mission of the world is to conform you to its image. That's why he starts out there in Romans 12:2, and he says, be not conformed any longer to the pattern of this world. The mission of the world is a relentless pursuit of you and your children to conform to its values, its philosophies, its way of thinking, its standard, its objectives. And Paul is warning us here, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. But, and here's the Church's mission. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Okay, so the world's mission is, be conformed to our pattern, our philosophy, our principles. The Church's mission is we go into the world and we say to them as we've experienced ourselves, be transformed. Be transformed by the wonderful, amazing power of Jesus Christ. A relationship with him who will change your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus as you follow him. So that's the choice. It's either we're conformed to the world or we are transformed as new creatures in Christ. And we help as many people to understand that transformative power in a relationship with Jesus as possible. That's our mission. It's outside the four walls of this church. It's going forth being blameless and harmless as we shine like lights in a dark world, presenting, holding out the word of life. So that as many people as possible might know the saving grace of Jesus that you do. Amen. That's our mission. Let your witness impact world and one day. One day. Isaiah the prophet tells us when the Lord returns. Isaiah 44:5 Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low. The crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Amen. Father, thank you for your word today. Thank you that you used Paul to remind us the world's mission is to try to conform us to its pattern. But thank you Lord that you transform us to be like Jesus. Help us to be ambassadors, to represent Jesus well in our world. To live our lives working out our salvation with fear and trembling. That in all ways you might be glorified. That people would look upon us and see you. That they would be drawn to you through our witness and through our testimony in this crooked and perverse generation. Thank you Lord for rescuing us. May we do all we can to help rescue others for the glory of God. And we give you the praise and the thanks in Jesus name. And everybody said Amen and Amen. God bless you church. Love you all. Have a great day.