Religion or Jesus?

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Well, before we got started this morning, I was talking with a group of people here in the auditorium, and I don’t remember how we got around to this topic, but we were talking about how the world seems awful, and don’t you wish you could live at a different time in history? And I said, some days that sounds good, but I’ve gotten really attached to being able to order my groceries online and go pick them up. So I’m not sure how well I would do.

I remember having to go buy my groceries at the store like Soviet Russia, and I don’t want to go back to that. I like being able to charlotte places and order usually every Wednesday night after we get home. And Thursday, on my way home from work, I go pick up groceries, and it’s like that.

I know some of you probably think that’s lazy. I just think it’s an efficient use of our time. But we’ve been using the Walmart pickup for years, really, since they started doing it.

And I love it. So I’m not here to complain today about Walmart, but we do play a fun game every time they pull our groceries called Why Would They Substitute That? Some of you have done the Walmart pickup, and you know how this works.

And usually they do a really good job. But there have been a few times that you get to review your substitutions, and you get to approve them or say, I know. And so we normally I’ll call Charles and say, Did you see what they wanted to substitute?

There have been some interesting ones. It’s not one of the worst, but they tried to substitute white sugar for brown sugar. And they taste the same, but they don’t bake the same.

Like, I don’t know why you wouldn’t just go. . .

If we ordered dark brown sugar and you were out, you could go get light brown sugar. That would be a better substitute, but they wanted to do white sugar. So I got sent into the store for another kind of brown sugar.

It kind of defeats the purpose. I think the worst was we were trying to remember exactly what spices they were. And I don’t know for sure that these, but it was something along these lines where I had ordered garlic salt and they tried to substitute it with onion powder.

And I said to Charla, why don’t we just go get some baby powder? Why didn’t they do that? And she said, why would they do that?

I said, well, apparently all powders are interchangeable. I don’t know. And don’t get me started on how Diet Coke and Coke Zero are not the same thing.

They’re just not. Don’t try to substitute Diet Coke for me. I know some of you like Diet Coke, and you are welcome to that opinion.

But Coke Zero, it is not a substitute. So we know if you’ve ever tried to order groceries and have somebody pick them out for you, I realize these are first world problems, right? That is the very definition of first world problems. But if you’ve ever tried to have somebody pick groceries out for you and order for you, you understand that not all powders are interchangeable.

Not all liquids are interchangeable. And that brings me to the purpose of this morning’s message that not all ways to approach God are interchangeable. Sometimes the world will try to substitute ways to God in place of what God has said, and they don’t work.

They don’t do the same thing. When God has made a way for us to be reconciled to Him, we can’t substitute our own way of being reconciled to Him in there and think that it’s just going to work. God looks at that substitution and says, decline, right?

Every time. There’s one way that God has made available and everything else is a poor substitute. It falls short.

Paul wrote about that in Philippians chapter 3. That’s what we’re going to look at this morning as we’re working our way through the book of Philippians. Paul, now he didn’t have Walmart grocery ordering, and he doesn’t use the word substitution, but he talks about some things that people have tried to use to substitute in place of Jesus Christ, in place of the way that God has established for us to be reconciled to Him.

He writes about some of these things that people have used, and that Paul himself at one point used. And he tells us that they don’t work. And so we’re going to be in Philippians chapter 3 this morning.

We’re going to start in verse 1. if you would turn with me there in your Bibles. And once you’ve found it, if you would stand with me, if you’re able to do so without too much difficulty, it’ll also be on the screen for you if you don’t have your Bible with you.

We’re going to read verses 1 through 11 this morning in Philippians 3. It says, Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe.

Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the mutilation. For we are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh, though I also might have confidence in the flesh. If anyone else thinks he may have confidence in the flesh, I more so.

By the way, just to clarify what he’s saying there, he says, we should have no confidence in the flesh, but I could have confidence in the flesh. He’s not contradicting himself because he explains in the next statement, if anybody could have confidence in the flesh, I could have even more. So what he says here is if there’s another way to work your way into a relationship with God, he said, first of all, that’s not possible.

But if anybody thinks they can work their way to God, I’ve worked harder and still didn’t get there. That’s the point he’s making when he talks about confidence in the flesh. So he describes himself starting in verse 5.

He says, circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, concerning the law, a Pharisee, concerning zeal, persecuting the church, concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. but what things were gained to me these I have counted loss for Christ yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having my own righteousness which is from the law but that which is through faith in Christ the righteousness which has come from God by faith that I may know him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings being conformed to His death, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. And you may be seated.

So we notice a shift here if you’ve been with us as we study through the book of Philippians. We come to a shift here. Last week he seemed at the end of chapter 2 to be tying up some loose ends, some personal business about his hopes to come and visit the people in Philippi.

And here he’s moved into a new section of his letter where he’s encouraging the Philippians to press on in the things that they’ve been doing right. In chapter 2, it’s really here are the things that we need to nail down and make sure we’re doing well. And here are some things that they’re doing well in chapter 3.

And he says you need to make sure you press on and you continue and you don’t let anybody lead you astray. Because that was a real danger in their day just like it is ours. We think of it as a golden age that everybody, it was just the apostles and all these godly people and everybody was teaching the truth.

And gradually we got off track. People have been off track since the beginning. There have been false teachers since the beginning.

It didn’t start with TBN. All right. It’s been around since day one.

And so he’s warning them. By the way, not everything on TBN is false teaching either. It’s just there’s a lot of it.

All right. You just have to use discernment wherever you go. And by the way, if I can go off on a tangent just a little bit here, but I think it applies.

Somebody, Linda’s laughing at me for going off on a tangent. A friend of mine asked me a couple days ago, she said, I’ve read this book, and I’m not sure what it says is right, but I see the name of the author and the publisher. Have they gone crazy?

And what I told her is, we’re at the point where nobody gets a free pass anymore. because we have seen so many institutions, so many publishers, so many seminaries, so many booksellers, it doesn’t matter, that used to be solid and we can look at them and almost kind of turn our brains off and say we can trust whatever they tell us that have gone off in left field in the things that they are teaching that I told her nobody should get a free pass anymore. And I tell you this about me all the time, but I’m going to say it again, that includes me.

Don’t just turn off your brains and blindly accept whatever I’m telling you. Compare it to what this book says. right?

And if what I say doesn’t match up with this book, then I’m wrong, okay? But we need to be paying attention to what we’re taking in, what we’re listening to, because not everybody who claims to be a teacher of God’s Word is actually teaching God’s Word. So it’s a tangent, but it’s in line with what we’re talking about.

So he’s warning them about the danger of getting sucked into these other teachings, and he instead tells them to keep their focus on Jesus Christ. And what we see here front and center in the text is that religion is not a substitute for Jesus Christ, and it is dangerous to try and make it one. If you take nothing else away from this this morning, this is what I want you to understand. Religion is not a substitute for Jesus Christ. So many people, even in Bible teaching churches, are trying to make it one.

As they’re trusting in their ability to be good, if I could just be better, if I could just try harder, if I could just get my life cleaned up a little bit, then God will love me. Then God will accept me. It’s like the man that I talked with for years at my first church.

He was a member there when I got there. But I get the impression nobody had ever asked him about his salvation. And I asked him one day, if you were to die today, do you know where you’d go?

And he said, well, I hope I’d go to heaven. I said, well, what do you mean you hope? Do you not know?

No, I don’t know. And I explained the gospel to him. He said, well, you never know.

What do you not know? And if I sound like I was being harsh in my response, I was not. I was more pleading with this man.

How do you not know? Well, you just never know if you’re good enough. No, you do know.

We’re not good enough. It says it in the book, right? I’m not good enough.

You’re not good enough. It has nothing to do with that. But through my whole time there, I never could break through that wall and he passed away a few years later.

My hope is that the guy who came after me or somebody, somebody got through and explained that to him, but it was tragic that he’d gone through 70 plus years of his life thinking that it had to do with his performance and his goodness and if he could just get his life a little cleaner, a little more straightened out, that then God would be pleased with him. That’s religion. That’s not a relationship with Jesus Christ. And we see this in the way Paul talks about his religious pedigree.

When he’s talking about his confidence in the flesh, he’s talking about all the stuff he’s done, all the characteristics he’s got, all the things that if you were going to be a religious person that you would try to do, and he lists what some of them are. He says that he was circumcised on the eighth day in verse 5. That means he was keeping the religious rituals of his faith from the very beginning, even before he had a say in it.

He came from a family line where his parents were keeping all the rituals and doing all the things that they were supposed to do. He says he was of the stock of Israel because there were some people that were Jewish at that time because they had converted. And that was a good thing for somebody.

The story of Cornelius in the book of Acts is a good thing for a Gentile to fear God, but at the same time you were still treated like a second-class person among God’s people. And so Paul’s saying, I wasn’t grafted in, I was born into the covenant. When he says he was of the stock of Israel.

He says he was of the tribe of Benjamin. He wasn’t just part of Israel. He knew what his background was.

He knew where his family was from. He knew his part of the covenant, where he fit in there. He could take you down through the genealogy and tell you where he had come from and trace his lineage back to Abraham.

He says a Hebrew of the Hebrews. Now this is pointing out the culture that he lived in. because even among those who were born into the Jewish faith, even among those who were born into the nation of Israel at that time, there were people who had adopted a more Greek and Roman culture.

They were called Hellenistic Jews. And they might not even speak Hebrew. They might not read Hebrew.

They might not keep all the rituals and all the religious requirements. But they were culturally, ancestrally somewhat Jewish. He’s saying, I’m a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

He’s saying, I and my family are part of that movement within the faith that has never strayed. We have stuck meticulously to what the Old Testament says. Concerning the law, he says in verse 5, a Pharisee.

If you know anything at all about the stories of Jesus and the Gospels, the Pharisees were the most devoutly religious people of their day. As a matter of fact, I believe Paul even calls himself at one point a Pharisee of the Pharisees. The Pharisees got hung up on the tiny little clauses and aspects of the law.

Every little detail. They were going to make sure that outwardly at least they followed every detail of what the law says. They weren’t going to neglect any of it.

Concerning zeal, verse 6, persecuting the church, that means he was passionate about his beliefs and convictions. He was willing to go out and do something about it. And we know there’s a difference sometimes between having a belief in conviction and actually being willing to live according to it, being willing to step up and do something about it.

Now, what he did about it was evil. He went and persecuted and killed people. Actually, he may not have killed them himself, but he delivered them over to be killed.

But he’s saying, I’m somebody who was such a believer, I was willing to act out those beliefs and convictions. And he finishes up in verse 6, concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. He said, if you’re looking for the righteousness of the law, meaning somebody who could say, outwardly, I have kept all the things that the law says to do.

He says, I was blameless. You could not find anything in the law that I was not outwardly following, that I was not outwardly doing. And the Pharisees were often that way, where outwardly they were keeping God’s law, outwardly they were doing the right things, but you see in their interactions with Jesus that inwardly their hearts were wicked and rotten.

And sometimes, unfortunately, that’s the case with religious people. that outwardly we can be doing the right things and inwardly our hearts are far from God. And so he recounts this pedigree.

He says, if there’s anybody that’s got anything to boast about in their religion, it’s me. But then he goes on in verse 7, starting in verse 7, to say that these things that allowed him to boast about his religion are actually worthless in comparison to Jesus. He says, what things were gained to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Now, when he says that they’re worthless, when he says he was willing to lose them, that doesn’t mean that it’s worthless to do right and to obey God.

But he’s saying if we look at it as something that’s going to get us right with God, if we look at the things we should do and think it’s ever going to be enough to make us right with God, it’s not going to. And so as something to put your trust in, it’s worthless. You know, I could look at my own life, and I don’t mean this braggy, but I mean, I was raised in church.

I trusted Christ at an early age, at the age of five. And I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’ve more or less followed Him and tried to do what He wanted me to since then. And there are a lot of people that have lived a life like that that could look at that and say, I’m a good person.

God must love me extra special. But let me tell you, God is not impressed with that pedigree. Because it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been at church. It doesn’t matter that I was baptized as a child.

It doesn’t matter that I’ve tried to do the right things and live the right way. It doesn’t matter that my parents were involved in church and took me to church. It doesn’t matter how many generations of my family have gone to church before.

None of that matters from a standpoint of salvation. Now, all of that’s good stuff. I mean, we’re trying to raise our children to love Jesus from an early age.

I’m not saying it’s worthless. But it’s something to trust in that’s going to get me a relationship with God. That’s worthless.

It doesn’t impress God because even with all those outward trappings of religion, I am still a sinner. and I have fallen short. I continue to fall short.

And that’s the point that Paul was making. Not that it’s worthless to try to obey God. Not that it’s worthless to try to do right.

Not that it’s worthless to try to glorify Him. But those things are worthless in terms of our salvation because they don’t address the root of the problem, which is the sin in our hearts. And we could look at it and say, well, all of these things that he’s talking about, most of them come from the Old Testament.

While they were rooted in the Old Testament, they were never intended as paths to salvation. As we can see even in the Old Testament, God knew and God told them they were never going to be able to keep the law. We know from the Old Testament, Abraham was justified not by any kind of law, but by faith.

And so it’s not our works and our religiousness that ever makes us right with God. And in addition to this, I mean, lest we think, well, it’s just another way of looking at things. It’s not a big deal. He warns us about the dangers of those who would try to substitute religion in the place of Jesus Christ. He says in verse 1 that he’s written this to keep the Philippians safe.

When he says, for me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe. What he’s saying there is, I know I’ve told you this before, but I’m going to say it’s not a big deal for me to have to write this over and over because it keeps you safe. It’s a safeguard to remind you.

You know, I don’t just tell my kids the one time, stay out of the street and now you’re on your own because I’ve told you, right? Even if I get tired of hearing myself say it, get out of the street, because it’s safer for them to be on the sidewalk. The way people drive nowadays, it may not be that much safer, but it’s at least a little bit safer.

So he’s writing this as a warning to keep the Philippians safe, and he says in here in verse 2, beware of dogs. Now I don’t think name-calling is always the right well to go to, but sometimes in Christianity there was some name-calling when it fit. Beware of dogs.

Now he’s not just throwing out insults insulting, he’s using an insult that they would have used and understood. To call somebody a dog was an insult that was routinely used by the Jews toward Gentiles. And the reason for that is because they were unclean according to the law.

You know, a lot of us have dogs and we love them and they’re cute, but they’re also nasty, right? So that’s why they. .

. Some of you just got offended and shut off everything I say after this. Okay, we’ll just say my dog is then, right?

And so because of that, they looked at the Gentiles who were unclean according to the Old Testament law, and they said, okay, you bunch of dogs. That was an insult. The Gentile dogs, the Greek dogs, that’s what they’d call them.

Paul turns it around on those who thought they were pure. And this is not an insult that he’s using toward the Jews, because he is one. It’s one that he’s using toward a group of people called the Judaizers.

The Judaizers were people who came along and insisted, yes, we believe in Christ, but if you want to get to heaven, if you want a relationship with God, you need Christ plus all these other things. And they would take you back to the Old Testament law and say that your salvation depended on how, whether you were circumcised, it depended on whether you kept the covenants, whether you kept the rituals and the feasts and all the rules, whether you did all those things. And then Jesus could save you.

And it’s to those people, to these false teachers, Paul said they’re dogs. And again, he’s not saying that just to be insulting. He’s saying that to make a point that here they run around talking about the uncleanness of all these other groups of people under the law and they talk about how they need to do what they say and follow their religious rules in order to be made clean, but they are keeping people separated from God.

They are still separated from God because they have not come the right way. They’re trying to come through the law. And so he’s saying they are actually the ones who are unclean.

So it’s given as a warning. By promoting their own self-righteousness, they were preaching uncleanness. Because I don’t care how good you are.

I don’t care how good I am. Compared to God, I’m filthy. Compared to God, I have nothing to boast about by His standards.

And so He says, beware of dogs, beware of evil workers. What He’s talking about there is deceptive teachers. People who would twist the truth.

People who would lie to them. That’s been going on since the very beginning. You go back to Genesis 3.

all of that with Adam and Eve and the fruit, all of that started with Satan questioning the authority of God’s Word and twisting God’s words as he was talking to Eve. So he says, beware of those who would deceive you. Beware of the mutilation.

By teaching circumcision as a requirement for salvation, these people were preaching a false gospel. Now Paul talks about elsewhere being circumcised or not being circumcised doesn’t get you to heaven or a relationship with God and it doesn’t keep you from those things. It’s really irrelevant is the point that he’s trying to make.

But they were preaching that in order to be saved, you had to go through all these rituals including circumcision. And when Paul says mutilation, what he’s talking about is they weren’t entering the covenant. They weren’t following Abraham’s footsteps.

They were mutilating themselves and preaching that others ought to mutilate themselves and leading nobody any closer to a relationship with God. They were doing something that was unnecessary and irrelevant at that point. Instead, in verse 3, he says, for we are the circumcision who worship God in the Spirit.

And again, this is another word that they would have used to describe those who were clean, those who were part of a covenant with God. He says, we are part of the covenant. Paul, as a Jew and his fellow Jews who trusted in Christ and his fellow Gentiles who trusted in Christ, he says, we are the circumcision.

We are part of the covenant. Who? Those who worship God in Spirit, rejoice in Jesus Christ and have no confidence in the flesh.

So here Paul illustrates what is it that makes somebody clean in the sight of God? What is it that makes us right with God? Giving up that confidence in the flesh, giving up the idea that I can ever be good enough for God, and coming to Him through faith in Jesus Christ. Instead of taking our confidence and putting it in ourselves and our abilities to do whatever, to fulfill all the religious rituals, to check all the right boxes, we instead take that confidence and we put it in Jesus Christ. And he says, that’s how you are right with God.

And this isn’t some new teaching that Paul came up with. Because in Deuteronomy chapter 10, way back in the Old Testament law, and again in Deuteronomy chapter 30, God and Moses have a conversation about how it’s the heart that needs to be circumcised. The circumcision operation that they went through was just a symbol of the cutting away of uncleanness.

He said it’s the heart that needs that operation. Only Jesus Christ can remove what is unclean from our hearts. And so what Paul said here is not some wacky new idea that Paul came up with.

Paul is writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and he’s leaning on what God said way back in Deuteronomy, that it’s not about what we do outwardly. It’s about the change of heart that’s needed that can only come about through Jesus Christ. Jesus reconciles sinners to God. Only Jesus reconciles sinners to God.

Religion makes sinners well behaved and leaves them separated from God. So if this morning you think God feels distant, I wish I had a relationship with Him, I wish things were right with Him. Maybe you have that feeling of guilt that you know God is not happy with you because it’s just like a parent.

If we do something wrong and we know they know and we haven’t worked things out, we carry that guilt around. If you remember back to being a child or sometimes an adult, we know something’s wrong with the relationship. If you know that that’s there between you and God, folks, the answer today is not religion.

Religion will clean you up outwardly and make you behave well, but leave you separated from God. If you want to be right with God, if you want to be reconciled to Him, it’s only going to come about through Jesus Christ. Nothing. No religious ritual, no church experience, none of it compares to Jesus Christ. Paul says that Jesus, he talks about it in verse 7, these things I have counted loss for Christ. He says that Jesus is worth giving up everything else for.

Because Jesus can do things that no religion can do. And by the way, again, I want to be very clear. I’m not telling you that it’s worthless to try to do right and try to be obedient to the Lord.

I’m saying that’s something that comes as a result of what Jesus does in us. That is not how we get a relationship with God. But as far as what’s going to save you and get you a relationship with God, all that religious stuff is worthless.

Jesus can do things that no religion ever can do. Verse 9 tells us that He makes us righteous and acceptable before God. Paul wants to be found in Him not having His own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.

If you have an option of standing before God one day when He’s in judgment over you, and you have to give an account for your life, and you have the option of standing there presenting Him what little righteousness you can muster from your own life, and clothed in all the sin that you’ve ever committed. If you have an option of doing that versus standing there clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ and offering good works that He’s given you, which one would you rather do? I think it was Adrian Rogers who said, I don’t trust my best five minutes at the judgment day.

Folks, if it comes down to a choice between standing before God with what I have to offer and what Jesus has done in me, I would much rather take Jesus any day of the week and twice on Sundays, all right? And that’s what Paul said. He was looking for the righteousness that came by faith in Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches that because He bore our sins, He took responsibility for our sins on the cross, and He died in our place.

Our slate was wiped clean, and it says we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. When you come to God by faith in Christ, He does not see your sin. It’s not that He’s confused. It’s not that He’s forgetful or that He’s deceived.

God chooses not to see our sin anymore. He chooses to see the righteousness of Christ that’s been put over us. Jesus can do that.

religion can’t. Verse 10, he says that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death. Here he talks about his death and the fact that Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins.

No religious leader ever died to pay for your sins. I didn’t do it. No other pastor in this city did it.

Muhammad didn’t do it. Buddha didn’t do it. Joseph Smith didn’t do it.

None of them did it. Jesus Christ said he came to seek and to save that which was lost and told us that he died on the cross as the payment for our sins. Only Jesus can do that.

It also talks in that verse about knowing the power of his resurrection. Jesus rose again in power to give us hope. Only Jesus can do that.

And then verse 11 says, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. There’s the promise of new life that Jesus creates in us. Religion can clean up your behavior, but only Jesus Christ can create a whole new life in you.

Only Jesus can renovate you from the inside out. And so Paul, looking at all this, says that compared to Jesus Christ, all of His goodness and all of His religiousness, and I don’t know if that’s a word or not, but I made it one, he says that all of those things that he formerly used to boast about, he said it’s all rubbish. Compared to Jesus, all of that is garbage.

Folks, genuine joy comes only through a relationship with Jesus. Not just joy in the sense of being happy, but joy in the sense of fulfillment and a relationship with God. And it’s not just about heaven.

I was talking with somebody about this this week. It’s not just about heaven. And I think we’ve done people a disservice to make them think salvation is just about going to heaven.

And maybe that’s a wrong way to say it, just going to heaven. I mean, that’s a pretty good outcome. But when I talk to people about the gospel, I really don’t even mention heaven all that much because there’s a part of salvation that we tend to overlook, look, and that’s the fact that we are reconciled to God right here and now.

We can have a relationship with Him now. We can no l