Tom Hilpert is known for his clear, compelling style, and his commitment to the importance of the Bible for anyone who wants to know Jesus Christ.He is also the bestselling author of the Lake Superior Mysteries, and Who Cares About The Bible
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Paul closes the letter to the Philippians by thanking them for their financial support. Through his thanks, he also reveals the secret to contentment: learning to rely on Christ's strength whether in scarcity or abundance, since both extremes can tempt us to put our trust in money rather than God.
The bad news is that our brain tends to re-use the thoughts we frequently think. So, if we are prone to worry, it’s hard to think differently. But, the good news is that, through Jesus, our minds can be renewed into different patterns of thinking.
Anxiety does not simply go away when we pray to God for our concerns. It goes when we worship God, thank him, and we allow him to be truly King of our lives, and of the Universe. When we worship and thank the Lord, we are undermining our reasons to be anxious. The bigger God is in our own hearts, the less room there is in our hearts for anxiety.
The cross of Christ calls us to humility, and to look beyond this world to our eternal joy in fellowship with Christ. This is just plain weird to most of the world. We need the examples of other Christians to help us live this way, and at the same time, we should be willing to be that example for someone else. Above all, we focus on the promises of God for eternal life in the New Creation.
God has taken hold of us. We are safe. We now have a righteousness that has nothing to do with us—with our good deeds, or our failures, or bad deeds. This is the righteousness of Jesus Christ. While holding that to be true, the apostle Paul tells us that it is also true that we should pursue Jesus Christ with all our being.
If you feel that you are a bad Christian because of your failures, you might be putting confidence in the flesh. If you feel that you are doing OK as a Christian (because, well, you are doing OK, at least right now), you might be putting confidence in the flesh. But the Holy Spirit calls us to put all our confidence in Christ, not our own performance.
This is the heart of the gospel: Jesus is surpassingly good. He, and he alone, is worth everything. Nothing else can compare to him, and when we have only him, then through him, we have everything we might need.
God’s chosen people are those who belong to his family through Jesus Christ. Through Christ, all the promises of the Old Testament are applicable to those who follow him. What an honor, what unearned favor, that we have been chosen by God!
If our joy is fully in the Lord, then our hearts will always be satisfied, because the one thing that Jesus gives us without limit is himself. If what we want is Jesus himself—not the stuff he can do for us, but his presence—then we can continually rejoice in the Lord. Even if Jesus is the desire of our heart, it may seem sometimes like we are not fully satisfied, but scripture tells us that the Lord is in us, and with us, even when the voices of the world, flesh and devil whisper that our experience says otherwise. We can count on the promises of God to be with us always.
Epaphroditus gives us another example of what it means to live a life surrendered to Jesus Christ.
