What God Started To Grow In Us, He Will Complete | Grow E1

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Welcome back, everybody. mean, most of us were down at Manly Dam last week, but if you weren't with us then, welcome back to the building, which is great to be kicking off a new year together. you're part of, if you're in our communications, like we call today Vision Sunday. I don't know what that brings up for you in your mind. I feel like for some church communities, that's a day to like get pumped for the program that we're rolling out this year. And here's the kind of five big things we're going to hit. Here's our targets.

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Here's how much we're gonna grow, what we're gonna do. um I'm excited for what we're gonna do and I hope we grow, but today is really about offering from Paul's letter to the Philippians, a vision of the kind of person and the kind of people collectively that we believe God wants to form us into. We're starting the year in this stunning letter. um

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the letter from Paul to the church in Philippi. Barely a line of this letter is wasted. It's so, it's short, but it's so rich. And can I encourage you to go away this week and read it and sit in it. It's just such an encouraging and beautiful scripture. But we're looking particularly at these opening verses, which paint this picture for us of the kind of

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person that God wants to form and shape us into. I don't know how your year has um kicked off. People often ask me at the start of the year, what's going to be the new thing in 2026? I um grew a mustache or I shaved off the bum fluff and highlighted that I did have some facial hair under my nose or something. Lots of people have noticed that. That's new. um I got some new pants for Christmas and some like

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really white shoes. um And I feel like I must be like such a dag, because I get some like pretty normal new clothes, and everyone notices. um So thank you for all of the compliments, whether they were genuine or not. So a girl mustache, I've got some new clothes, that's new for me. I kept saying to people, not a lot really, kind of more of the same. I don't come into this year necessarily with

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goals and big vision for the things I want to do. But as we've sat as a staff team in this letter, God has been stirring in me a vision for who I want to become and reminding me that we are always in a process of growth. And this is really what this series is about. We're calling it Grow. I went down to Officeworks to print out a really nice poster with the sermon series on it, not realising that it's back to school week and the line at Officeworks

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was 100 meters long and they said your printing will take six days. So there will be a poster next week, but not today. But the series is called Grow. We want to think about what God is doing in us and what he might want to grow in us this year. Just want to acknowledge that people arrive in very different places to start this year. Virtually in terms of our energy or perhaps our exhaustion.

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For some reason, we feel like the new year is just a reset, but not really. Like life continues and difficult stuff happens even in the midst of January 1 to 14. know, like that, for some of us, that's holidays, but really life just goes on. So just acknowledging some people might be feeling really hopeful and that's great. Excited, energized. Some people might be tired and feel like there has been no reset and they come into this year kind of just hanging on.

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ah Paul's opening posture in this letter to the Philippians, I feel is helpful regardless of where we start this year. He begins with thanksgiving and he begins with prayer, prayer for his friends in the church in Philippi and he reflects on what God is already doing among them. The interesting thing about Paul is this is such a beautiful, joyful, hope-filled letter. But where is Paul?

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As he writes this, some of you might know he's actually in prison. So Paul's in the thick of the most difficult of life circumstances as he pens these words of incredible hopefulness. And so I think that's a reminder to us of whatever season of life we're in, actually, there is hope and even joy to be found in the midst of it and God may be growing something in us even in those seasons. So he begins to reflect

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on what God has been doing amongst His friends in the church in Philippi. Can I just read it again? These are such encouraging words and this is His prayer. says, thank God every time I remember you. In all of my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Being confident of this and listen to this line. He says, that He who began a good work in you

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will carry it on, will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. So he starts with this expression of just sheer confidence in what God is doing, that the person who began, God who began a good work in you will continue it, will bring it to completion. Do you believe that? Because actually our

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Our spiritual journey is not linear, is it? It doesn't go in a neat straight line. Things don't get easier. Things don't get simpler over time. We don't start with lots of doubts and end up with less. It is an up and down journey. But in all of that up and downness, Paul says, actually, what God started to grow in you, He will continue to grow and He will bring to completion. It's a beautiful promise for us to hold on to, knowing that God

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uses all of our circumstances to move us deeper into his love and the life that he wants for us.

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It's a really interesting word though, isn't it? Bringing to completion. Has this sense of destination or it's a place that we're going to get to. We need to think about where completion sits in this text because he says, bringing it to completion, we'll carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. So for Paul, this completion, this complete or the finishing of the work God is doing in us.

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is very much future oriented. The theological word would probably be, it's an eschatological hope. All that means is it's something that will come to completion on the other side of Jesus' return in the new creation. We will reach this kind of perfected union with Christ and all of the journey will come to a point of completion.

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But it's not necessarily a destination that we might expect to reach next week or next month or this year or within this lifetime. So why set out on a journey that may not come to completion within our life? You see here, the destination or that completeness gives our lives direction. It's held out as a future promise that actually gives everything that we do in this life.

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sense of direction and movement and purpose. So what Paul is and isn't saying here, he's not saying that life will steadily improve for you until that day of completion. He is not saying that faith in Christ will become simpler over time and many of us know actually becomes more complex as we have to wrestle with new experiences and upheavals in our life over time.

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He's not saying that life improves, it becomes simpler, it gets easier, but he is saying that God remains faithful to the work that he has begun in us. Even when we don't see it, he's still at work.

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And so when we think about the goal of spiritual formation, which is this language we use, you might say the goal of our discipleship, think of it as direction, not necessarily as arrival at a destination. The Christian life has a goal, it has a purpose, it has a direction. We're moving somewhere. We are deepening in our union with Christ. We're growing in maturity. We're growing in Christlikeness over time. That is the goal.

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That is the direction, that's the sense of movement in this passage. And it reminds me of a definition of spiritual formation that as a church, we've returned to again and again to kind of give a kind of clear sense of or shared language around what is the goal of this journey of faith that we're on. Comes from Richard Mulholland and he says that spiritual formation is a process of being formed

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into the image of Christ for the sake of others. It's a process. It's a process of formation. A formation has a goal. The goal is the image of Christ. That is what we're moving towards. And here's a really beautiful bit at the end. It's actually for the sake of others. This is not just reaching some kind of Zen state so that we can be at peace within ourselves. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's actually for the sake of others.

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that we might be a person of love and that as we move out into the world, what Jesus is doing in us kind of overflows and spills out in love to the people around us, that they would experience Christ through us because we are so shaped by his life and his wisdom. So some of the implications of this definition is that it is a process which means formation is ongoing. If I ask you today, how's your

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faith going, how's your formation going, how's your journey of discipleship going? You might say it's great, or you might say it's stagnant, or you might say it's going backwards. But what I think Paul is trying to help us to see here is that whichever category you feel like you're in right now, even that is part of the journey. Even that which feels like a backward step, or a challenge, or a deep kind of

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earthquake in our faith in Christ. Even that can be something that Jesus uses to grow us in maturity and deeper into union with Christ. In fact, I bet you if I asked a bunch of you what was some of the most formative seasons in your life, you wouldn't talk about easy times. You talk about the most difficult times.

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Times where your prayers sounded something like, God, where are you in all of this? I don't see you, I don't get what's happening.

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even those moments that feel like we're stepping backwards all get wrapped up into this process of formation that God has begun in your life and will bring to completion. It's a beautiful promise that Paul starts with.

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So, what then does this formation look like? What are the signs that we are actually growing? I'm missing a page or I've got it mixed up here. Look at that. So, I'm to read verses 7 to 11 again. Paul says, it's right for me to feel this way about all of you since I've had you in my heart. Whether I'm in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me.

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God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And listen here, he says, and this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and in depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

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to the glory and praise of God. Do you know what stood out to me when I read this passage? Those three words, more and more.

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I actually described uh my year, someone said, what's your year look like? I'm like, look like I'm like probably just more of the same. But now I hope it's actually a year of more and more, more and more growth. That's the promise held out to us that any year is an opportunity to grow more and more, more and more in what? The central themes of this prayer is that Paul asked that God would grow us more and more in love, in knowledge and in discernment.

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love, knowledge and discernment. Verse 9, this is my prayer that your love may abound more and more.

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Love is the first marker that Paul names. Love is the real sign that we are growing in Christ, that we are deepening in our relationship with a God who is described by John as love, the very embodiment of love. If you've been around church and you've read the Bible, you might know that actually the English word we have for love, there's multiple Greek and Hebrew words sitting behind it.

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And the word here that Paul is using is this agape love. It's an unconditional love or it's a Christ or cross shaped love. It's a love that knows no boundaries. It's the deepest kind of love. And Paul reaches for that word here. And he prays that we will grow more and more in that Jesus shaped love. So growth in love for us

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It's not a kind of abstract or sentimental thing or a feeling kind of thing. Growing in love looks like actually growing in our capacity to just stay engaged with difficult people. That's a sign that we are growing in love. That we can go the distance with people who are actually difficult to love.

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Growing in love, Paul will say elsewhere, is a willingness to bear with each other through difference. Growing in love looks like patience that deepens over time.

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definitely not an instantaneous thing. uh romantic love can come in an instant. It's just brought on by a relationship. We know it's pretty fragile though. Comes and goes but the love he's speaking of is something that God has started to grow in us and that will grow over time in depth as we deepen our union with a god who is love.

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Can reminded me this week of, as we were talking about this passage of something, I think it was came from maybe the practicing the Wake Horse and a bunch of you have done that. But it's this idea that if you want to know if you're growing in love, ask the people closest to you. I have a remarkable capacity to love people in the context of my work or when I'm with Horizons and maybe sitting across a client who might be in that category of difficult to love.

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You know, I think I do pretty well in those spaces. And sometimes I exhaust all of my love in those spaces and come home to my family with a very low love tank. To be growing in love is probably best evidenced by the people who know us the best. How am I going in those most intimate relationships? And I share that knowing actually Eliza's in the room next door, leading.

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loving our kids and leading creche. maybe afterwards you can ask her how I'm going with that. It's challenge, hey, but what a great question to keep asking ourselves this year. Am I growing in love? What would those people closest to me say if they were to give an honest answer? Paul asked that our God, that our love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.

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So our love is grounded in something, grounded in knowledge and depth of insight. Knowledge here, again, is a relational term. It's not just head knowledge, it's the knowledge of knowing someone. It's a relational phrase, not just informational. And it's not enough for us to know about Jesus, it's not enough to have good theology or knowledge of scripture for the sake of it.

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Here, Paul is talking about knowing Christ in the sense that we have an ever deepening relationship with him. It's knowing the ways of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, well enough to live them out moment to moment and in every situation. So obviously to grow in knowledge, there is a role here for reading the scriptures and soaking ourselves in the

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the world of Jesus and the vision he has of God's kingdom and what it looks like to live in that kingdom. There's a role here for teaching, but there's also part of growing in knowledge is developing intimacy through our inner life with Christ, through prayer, through time in silence and solitude, being alone with him. It's reading the gospels again and again until we kind of inhabit that world.

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and can instinctively know what Jesus might do if he was in my shoes or in this relationship or had kids like mine. um That's the role of formation here. Happens over time, happens with practice, it happens with repeated exposure to Jesus through the Word and in prayer. But Paul doesn't just pray for knowledge, he asks for knowledge and depth of insight.

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so that you may be able to discern what is best and that you might be pure and blameless for the day of Christ filled with the fruit of righteousness. So there's a reason for this knowledge. He asked for knowledge and discernment and discernment really is about applying knowledge. It's wisdom for real life situations. So good our kids are talking about wisdom today.

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and how to apply the truth of Scripture and the truth of Christ to day-to-day situations. That's a challenge that is lifelong. It's the ability to recognize in any given situation what's going to be, what's going to bring life here. How can I act in a Christ-shaped love in this circumstance? And this discernment really matters because life is flipping complex.

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And we just get thrown into the most difficult dilemmas, conflicts, relationships all the time. Discernment is the ability to take the love that is growing in us and the knowledge we have of Christ and actually live it out and put boots on the ground and walk, walk the walk when it comes to our faith in Jesus. Life's complex choices that we have to make are rarely clear cut.

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And you know what? There's often not a specific Bible verse that'll tell us what to do as much as we wish there was, but there is wisdom for living.

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Love actually needs wisdom to be expressed well.

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Love needs discernment to be lived out well. Zooming back, you look at our world right now, I'm reading too much of the news and seeing all that is happening across the world and happening in Australia. But like I listen to a lot of like American politics podcasts. And one of the really interesting things at the moment is watching how Christians are responding to really complex things with almost opposite reactions. Has anyone noticing that?

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This isn't a comment on what's right or wrong at the moment, but just noticing that people who claim and profess to follow Christ are responding to things in almost polar opposite ways. And so the question that asks, that raises for me and should raise for us is what are we more shaped by? Are we more shaped by a political ideology? Are we more shaped by

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a culture or a national identity? Are we more shaped by the ideas of a party that we vote for or a group that we're part of, more so than we are shaped by the life of Christ and His wisdom and His ways, which often somehow cut through not the middle but find a third or a different way through a situation, a way to express love?

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in the complexity of real life. But gosh, it's hard, isn't it? It's really hard. So that's a challenge for everyone.

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But we know we're growing when we make decisions that are experienced by other people as being like the love of Jesus.

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when we're able to respond in ways that bring mercy and grace and flourish, healing and wholeness. Where the kingdom of God shows up in our midst. We know we're growing when we're able to navigate tension and difference in relationships and still maintain a sense of unity in Christ. One thing I love about this church, um and actually is one of the beautiful things about church community right back to the time of Paul, comes out in his letters.

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is the way in which the gospel brings together such difference in unity under Christ. I look around this room and man, uh we're a wacky mob with all sorts of different ideas of all sorts of things, but grounded with this deep love for Jesus and a desire to know Him more and faithfully serve and follow Him. And that'll mean we actually have to wrestle with some stuff. This discernment thing is often not like

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Okay, you're right and you're wrong here. It's like, wow, we came to completely different conclusions, even though we share the same faith, isn't that interesting? Like, what can we learn together in conversation as we navigate difference together? It's hard. That's actually what God often uses to grow us. Sometimes we want to resist it. But actually, if we lean into it with a sense of God may want to do something in me through this navigating of this tension or this difference, we might find that it's

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one of the most fruitful environments for growth and formation into Christlikeness. So these are some of the signs that we're growing in our Christlikeness, that we're growing in love, growing in our knowledge and our ability to apply that knowledge and discern what the love of Jesus looks like moment to moment, situation to situation. And the outcome of that

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Paul describes in this beautiful organic garden imagery as the fruit of righteousness. I'm imagining, knowing Paul, that this is something akin to what he describes elsewhere as the fruit of the spirit in Galatians, which he kind of names for us as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. I'm not sure that the list is exhaustive, but this is what growth actually looks like.

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And the reason I love that idea of fruit and that organic nature of that imagery, mean, fruit is something that comes naturally and organically, but over time. And it needs to be watered and cultivated.

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Um, but the idea is this, that fruit, fruit just springs out of a life in Christ. Um, initially things like love, patience, kindness, like we really need to work hard and practice and just like grit our teeth and do it. But the idea is here, if we're growing in Christ, over times, these things will be second nature that they'll spring up organically out of our life. And we almost can't help but be loving patient kind in any given situation.

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I don't think I'm describing myself necessarily right now, but I am describing the goal of my discipleship. Is that over time through deep relationship with Christ, I'll almost not be able to help but be like Jesus in any given situation, relationship, complex or conflicted as it may be. Does that make sense? So that's the goal is that we might bear this fruit of righteousness.

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And the final thing to keep in mind is all of this is a communal endeavor. It's not something we can do on our own. actually Paul's language throughout this letter is highly relational. He even opens up thanking God for their partnership in the gospel. Like Paul's like the guru, he's out there, he's like getting shipwrecked, going to jail. He's the man, but he says like, I'm just one of many.

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who are in partnership together to spread this good news to every corner of the earth. It's something we do together. And so formation happens through shared practices. Not that we would just go and read the Bible by ourselves and grow in that way, but that we'd come together and talk and wrestle and chew over it. It comes through shared perseverance.

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that we'd stick out community even when it gets tricky. It comes through shared challenges. And as a community, we share the good moments and we share the challenges in each other's lives together. We walk with each other through the ups and downs. And actually, even though Paul's in jail, that actually serves as an enormous encouragement to the people he's writing to. So his challenge and his perseverance through that

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has a communal effect to spur on love and faithfulness and perseverance in the broader church. So the whole way through Philippians, we see that formation is very much a communal endeavor.

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So Vision Sunday, I hope you've been given a really beautiful, encouraging vision for the life Jesus is calling you into individually and us into collectively. And if we together are growing in this way, what you'll find is that this community begins to be like a living, microcosm of the kingdom of God. So people would actually step in here and they'd be like, oh, in relationship.

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In my friendships here, I get a taste of what heaven is like, of what the kingdom of God Jesus spoke about is like in real life. That's the beauty of what we're being called to here.

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So he doesn't offer a program, he doesn't set it out, but he does offer a prayer that can become our prayer at the start of the year. And he offers us a long view and a trajectory and a direction that ought to guide the way that we live and move and be in the world. And so the invitation for us this year is just to remain open to the forming work of God, trusting that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion. Even if I feel like I'm going backwards, forwards, sideways, whatever.

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It's all part of what God is doing through us and he can work everything together for the good of those who love him. So let's stay committed to that journey together. We're going to be talking and communicating about some of the things that we're offering to enable us to come together and do that. So there are structured ways that we can do that. There are unstructured relational ways that we can do that together. But let's grow in love, wisdom and discernment that we might live a more and

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a more Christ-like life, a life that is shaped more and more into His likeness, day by day, week by week. So I'm actually going to close today by praying this prayer for myself and for us collectively. And so just let these words wash over you once more and then we'll come back together for a moment of worship before heading off to our community dinner this evening.

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Thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for H3O, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. And it's right for me to feel this way about all of you since I have you in my heart and whether I'm in chains or defending and confirming the gospel,

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all of you sharing God's grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless.

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the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. Amen.