Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:9)   We're doing the same text again today as we did on Friday, as there's more to it than just the list of virtues that I talked about Friday.  Paul offers two other tidbits as well.  We are to think about that which is excellent or praiseworthy to feed our mind with better things.  But Paul also offers us things to practice and an assurance that the God of peace will indeed be with us.  Today we'll dwell on these practices. We need to practice this Christian life, because there are otherwise ways that we can flatten the whole thing into merely believing the right stuff about God in our heads.  For instance, in one of the overtures to our CRC Synod this year, a statement is made about the hymn to Christ in Philippians 2:6-11.  I have no commentary here on the overture itself, but this single statement seemed worth lifting up to think about.  This is what it says: "The hymn of Philippians 2 is not intended to show us how Christ, in use of his power, was 'humbling himself toward a life-sacrificing kind of obedience' so that we, in turn, will accept our calling and use our power for 'others to thrive.' Rather, the hymn of Philippians 2 is a beautiful statement of the eternal plan of God for his Son to pay the debt for our sins by his death on the cross." According to this then, Philippians 2 is mere information, a statement of truth about God's plan to save the world via Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  It has no other application to our lives or anyone else's.  In fact, not even Christ's own submissive humbling of himself to death has anything to do with the text—it is only about the plan of God, mechanically followed. But to accept such a disembodied reading of the text, divorced from the wider context in which Paul offers the model of Christ, then of Timothy and Epaphroditus, and then of himself, all for the reason of pleading with Euodia and Syntyche (and the rest of the church) to "be of the same mind in the Lord"—well, it misses something important.  Namely: it misses the doctrine of the Incarnation.  If the Scriptures are only present to teach us right truths, right systematic theological beliefs, but not at the same time bear on the way we live our lives in imitation and response to that truth—then we deny that the Word can or has become flesh and made its dwelling among us.  In 1 John 4:2-3, he offers us a simple way of "testing the spirits."  The smell test he gives is the incarnation.  "Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God," he says.  The ones that don't are the spirit of anti-Christ.  That is: they deny that Christ, the eternal word—came in the flesh, in our real world.  I am not suggesting that the writers of the cited overture above are guilty of this—but there is an unhealthy tendency represented here that's worth noting. Because "the Truth" as we have come to know it as Christians is no longer a propositional statement about something as abstract as a theory of the atonement.  The truth is a person: Jesus Christ, come in the flesh to die and rise for us.  A truth who we are to imitate and model our own lives and behaviors upon. This is what Paul is talking about here at the end of our passage.  "Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice.  And the God of peace will be with you."  Elsewhere, Paul says it even more plainly: "follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1). We human people learn just as much—if not more—by imitation and apprenticeship than we do by classroom lecture.  We are invited therefore, to model our lives on Jesus' life, on Paul's life, and on the lives of other faithful Christian who have grown and are continually growing up to maturity in Jesus Christ.  We need mentors and role models in the faith—people we can ask questions of, learn from, and imitate—trusting that in all of this—the God of peace remains with us by the power of his Son and Spirit. So: how are you practicing the Christian witness found in the lives of those like Paul or other Christian role models in your life or in the scriptures?  And, how are you being a Christian role model to others?  Whatever you do: continue to put the life of Christ into practice—trusting always in God's presence, accomplishing it within you as you go.  

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