I know, it’s a pretty gross picture, isn’t it? I have seen some ridiculous abuses of steroids before, but this one is the worst one of all. Remember when Popeye was just an over exaggerated cartoon? With the miracle of anabolic steroids I guess it’s possible to become a real life Popeye.

The picture does serve to illustrate our theme this morning: developing your spiritual muscles. I am afraid that too many believers don’t even think in terms of developing their spiritual muscles. The miracle of salvation takes you from death to life, but it leaves you as a milk-drinking baby Christian. Don’t get me wrong—milk-drinking baby Christians are beautiful! I wish we had a half a church of them. But adults wearing spiritual diapers and drinking spiritual milk out of a bottle is not a pretty sight.

Many Christians think they are spiritual popeyes with bulging muscles, but in reality they look more like this guy. Like most everything else in life, we want shortcuts to spiritual growth. We want the equivalent of steroids for our spiritual muscles. The titles of many Christian books sound like the author is recommending a type of spiritual steroid. The Miracle Parenting Cure. Your Best Life Now. Five Easy Steps to a Better Marriage. Do you want five easy steps to a better marriage? Step one: write a best-selling book called, Five Easy Steps to a Better Marriage, retire with your wife to the Bahamas and live off of the book royalties. The fact is there is no such thing as steroids for your spiritual muscles. Developing your spiritual muscles is a life long road paved with hard work, suffering and great joy.

While there may not be spiritual steroids, there are such things as spiritual anti-steroids—things which will shrink your spiritual muscles much faster than you can grow them. One of the most harmful anti-steroids is complaining and grumbling. Paul made an amazing statement in verse fourteen of chapter two. Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation. We began to study this passage last Sunday, but since more than half of us were absent, let me start with a little review.

1.The command not to complain is within the realm of possibility. At first it may seem that it is not possible to eliminate complaining from our lives, but God never commands anything that is impossible for us to accomplish in his strength.

2. The command not to complain is rooted in Israelite history. I won’t take the time to explain every piece, but last week I showed how Paul was alluding to the entire forty year history of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. From the moment God rescued them from 430 years of slavery in Egypt, they immediately began to grumble and complain. They grumbled about food and water and protection from their enemies—all of the things that God had planned to provide for them. And they did all of this complaining while the lived every day in the presence of God in the cloud and fire. At least the Israelites complained about important things. They complained about life and death kinds of issues—food and water and the sword of their enemy. But when you and I complain, is our complaining usually related to life and death issues? Hardly. Our complaints almost always have to do with small inconveniences in our abundant lifestyles. We complain over things like spilled milk, messy bedrooms, if Diet Coke is not on sale, when we get stuck behind a slow driver on the road, if we don’t like a certain song that was sung on Sunday morning.

Imagine if we could register a complaint with God at a service desk in a retail store. The representative Israelite would walk up to the desk, and God would ask, “OK, what seems to be the problem?” So the Israelite would say, “Well, I hate to bother you and all, but there are three million of us walking through this hot desert and we’ve got about four days before we all die of thirst.” Sure, it is a complaint and selfish grumble, but at least it is significant. Now if you or I approached God in the same way and he asked us about our trouble, we would be more likely to say, “Well, you see, I stopped at Kwik Trip today to buy a cup of coffee—and you won’t believe this—they were out of vanilla creamer! Can you imagine such a tragedy?” I have no doubt that the vast majority of our complaining would sound something like this. Actually, maybe that would help some with our grumbling, if we directed our complaining right to his throne. What if every complaint that passed over our lips was aimed directly at the Creator of the universe?

But this is what complaining is—all complaining against others is a direct complaint against God. God himself said so. All of the grumbling in the wilderness was aimed at Moses and Aaron, but in response, God said, “How long will these people treat me with contempt?” (Num. 14:11) The sad irony is that he wants our genuine burdens. But instead, we hold on to our burdens and give him our complaints. We keep our sorrows but give him our sulking. We keep our deep groans but give him our petty grumbles. We don’t trust him with the cares that burden our heart but we will gladly unload the complaints rolling around in our head. We treat God like a bandaid dispenser instead of the Great Physician. We tune him in like a lame episode of Dr. Phil but we tune him out as the Mighty Counselor.

The complaining and arguing in verse fourteen is in direct contrast to the fear and trembling in verse twelve. Instead of fearing God we complain to him and instead of trembling before him we argue with him. We don’t talk much about fear and trembling, so it is not something we understand very well nor do we practice it. How do you practice fear and trembling? What if the main application of this sermon was to practice fear and trembling this week? Every day this week I want each of you to walk in fear and trembling before the Lord. Now don’t misunderstand my point here. I believe that would be a good point of application and it is what we need to do. However, it is a somewhat difficult concept to grab hold of and start doing. But if I said to you, I want you to have seven straight days without any complaining, you would immediately understand what I meant. It may not be easy to do, but you immediately understand what I mean.

But we can begin to understand fear and trembling before the Lord when we see it as the direct opposite of complaining and arguing. These two opposite forces function like the basic physics principle which says that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. If I had an eight ounce bottle of oil and an eight ounce bottle of water, could I pour both of them into the same bottle at the same time? No, there is no way that eight ounces of both liquids could occupy the eight ounce bottle at the same time. Now what would happen if I poured the bottle of water into the bottle of oil? The water will push up on the oil and completely displace it.

Like these bottles, we are a vessel, and our vessel will contain either fear and trembling or it will contain complaining and arguing. We cannot contain full amounts of both. Therefore, the more fear and trembling that is within us, the more it will displace the complaining and arguing. Do you see—the reason that we have too much complaining and arguing is because we do not have enough fear and trembling! When we hear a message about how bad it is to complain, it is natural to make some kind of commitment to start to complain less. We might be genuinely convicted by the Holy Spirit. We may walk through that door this morning thinking we are turning over a new leaf. You have a rock solid commitment to complain less. But if that is all you have, you are headed for defeat and failure. You cannot decrease your complaining until you increase your fear and trembling. In order for your sin to decrease then God must increase.

But then we are right back to the question we raised earlier—how do we live a life of fear and trembling—how do we apply this? If we are not careful, we find ourselves looking for another spiritual steroid here. “OK, I know I should have more fear and trembling of the Lord, so tell me how to get it—and fast! Give me something for that—a pill—something, anything!” Like everything else, there are no shortcuts to gaining more fear and trembling of the Lord. It requites obedience at first sight, an ongoing meditation on and wonder in the gospel, a Christ-embracing, God-satisfying life.

But that is not all. Paul has more to say. There is a greater purpose for doing everything without complaining or arguing. It is not merely the absence of grumbling that God wants, but the presence of a Godly life. ^14 Do everything without complaining or arguing, ^15 so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe ^16 as you hold out^ the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing.

If you were here last week you saw that in verse fifteen Paul was alluding to Deut. 32:5, a passage summarizing the forty years of grumbling in the wilderness. To be theologically correct, that is what we should call it. It wasn’t just forty years of wandering, it was forty years of grumbling. Now we will see that the second half of verse fifteen and verse sixteen are an obvious allusion to another OT passage—Daniel 12:1-3.

At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. ^3 Those who are wise^ will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

From this chart you can see that the phrase from Daniel, “shining like the brightness of the heavens” equals Philippians phrase, “shine like stars in the universe.” Also, “those who lead many to righteousness” is equivalent to “as you hold out the word of life.

Tell me, what do you think the phrase, “shine like stars in the universe,” is referring to? The context of the Daniel passage is Armageddon and the Great White Throne judgment. These are the ones whose names are written in the Book of Life. In the Philippians passage it is a statement of a life that is being sanctified and purified. These people are becoming blameless and pure in a crooked generation. They are shining like stars in the universe in the midst of a crooked generation. And what is the main component of personal purity in this passage? “Do everything without complaining or arguing,” right? Do you want to become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe? If so, THEN do EVERYTHING without complaining or arguing. Our complaining kills our personal purity.

But there is one more part to this Daniel and Philippians link—holding out the word of life. What is the word of life? The word of life is Christ, therefore to hold forth the word of life is to hold Christ out for the world to see. We can see even more clearly how this matches the phrase in Daniel—those who lead many to righteousness. Obviously, you lead many to righteousness by holding forth Christ. This is your personal witness. Do you see the link between these two? It is not enough merely to possess personal purity, rather, our personal purity must lead to personal witness. But since complaining harms our personal purity then complaining also harms our personal witness. Complaining is not a “victimless crime”.  What evidence of gospel joy can you see in a complaining person? Does Christ-exalting joy pour forth from a complaining spirit? It’s not that a complaining person doesn’t look joyful, they really are not joyful. They are not at all content with their salvation. They want more of something and that something is not more of God. Why would an unbeliever want such a joyless faith as that?

There is another way to look at complaining. Complaining is anger given out in small doses. If I complain about you, ultimately it is because I have anger toward you about something and I don’t have the courage to confront you or kill you, so I let out my anger in the form of complaining. Complaining is also cowardly anger. Consider if you were Saddam Hussein and you had a certain subordinate who bothered you. Would Hussein have bothered to offer a complaint about such a person? No, why waste his time complaining when he can just kill the person. But you and I are in a position of “weakness” because we don’t have the courage to express our anger or maybe we have enough conviction, righteousness or common sense not to act on our anger, so we just complain. Complain is anger given out in small doses from a position of weakness.

Let me touch on one more thing that Paul says in verse sixteen—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing. This is a fascinating statement. When Paul meets Christ at the judgment, he plans to boast before him about how he helped these Christians in Philippi? This sounds a little strange to our ears because we have always been taught that boasting and bragging are always wrong, and Paul wants to boast in front of Christ?!

It is not stated explicitly here, but from the rest of Paul’s writing it is clear that he is not taking credit for the spiritual growth of the Philippians. He could not dream of standing before Christ and bragging, “Look what I did Jesus.” All such boasting would be a boasting about God. As he wrote in 1 Corinthians, “Let him who boast, boast in the Lord.” All credit and all glory will go to the Lord, but Paul wants to be the vessel through which God is magnified. If Paul can help the Philippians to strengthen their spiritual muscles, then God get more glory. This verse also reminds us that finishing the race is not only about crossing the finish line. Many people talk about Heaven like they can’t wait to get there, which is the way it should be. But getting to Heaven is never the final goal           . The question that Paul raises here is this: Who are you bringing with you? You plan to cross the finish line into glory, but who will walk with you?

Let me leave you with three action points.

1.      First, we need an awareness of our chronic complaining. Our complaining is so habitual that it is usually like breathing—we are not even aware we are doing it. We are all complainers. It is a matter of how much, not if we are doing it. Ask God to show you the true nature and depth of your complaining.

2.      The core of complaining is anger and discontentment. Confess this to the Lord and ask him about the source of your discontent. Why are you so dissatisfied with your life—or certain parts of your life—that complaining has to flow so freely?

3.      Begin to develop better habits which will increase your fear and trembling. Remember—there are no shortcuts or spiritual steroids to rush this process.

Rich Maurer

January 11, 2009