If we avoid grumbling and complaining, and we hold fast to the word of life, we will shine like stars, especially compared to the crooked and perverse generation of those who do not follow Jesus.

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Philippians #9. Philippians 2:14-18

¹⁴ Do all things without grumbling or disputing, ¹⁵ that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, ¹⁶ holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. ¹⁷ Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. ¹⁸ Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me. Philippians 2:14-18

Paul has just told us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, while reassuring us that it is God himself who is doing the work. I mentioned last time that one of the keys to doing that is trust. Now, Paul tells the Philippians to do everything without grumbling or disputing. Why does he bring up these two things particularly? How is that related to working out our salvation? Grumbling and disputing arise when we are not trusting the Lord.

The people of Israel, wandering in the desert with Moses, grumbled and complained when they didn’t trust that the Lord was going to take care of them. They wailed and moaned when they were cornered at the Red Sea. They wouldn’t have done that if they trusted the Lord to save them. They griped about being hungry, and the Lord gave them manna. This didn’t shut them up for long. Soon, they wanted more than just plain manna—they wanted meat. So he gave them quail. Then they grumbled about not having water, and on and on it goes.

Maybe sometimes it is not so much that we don’t trust him as that we aren’t really paying attention to him at all. We’re living our own lives, for our own purposes, and so we groan and moan because things don’t work out the way we think they should.

Let’s do a thought experiment about grumbling and trust. Imagine that one day, you and your loved ones need to set out on a road trip, heading toward the Rocky Mountains. You have to take your old car—it’s your only vehicle. After a hundred miles, sure enough, the car breaks down. After you finally get it fixed, fifty miles later, you run out of gas, because someone forgot to fill it up after the hassle with the breakdown. Then, you run into a snowstorm. After the snowstorm, you get lost.

Now, picture the conversation inside the car when these things are happening. What is it like? Probably, there is a lot of grumbling and disputing:

“You were supposed to get the gas!”

“I was too busy with the engine. If you remembered it why didn’t you do it yourself?”

“I told you we should wait until the weather was better!”

“Yeah? Do you have a crystal ball for predicting the weather?”

“We should have taken the other road back there, but oh, no, you couldn’t imagine that I was right.”

It’s all too easy to picture how much grumbling and complaining there could be on such a journey.

But now, let’s change the story a little bit. The reason you are taking the journey is because you had an extremely wealthy relative, about whom you knew nothing, before. Your relative has died, and he has left you a fortune worth 10 billion dollars. You will never have to work again. You’ll live however it suits you, wherever it suits you. The executor of the estate had called you, and informed you that you have inherited this vast fortune. The terms dictate that you need to travel to a remote cabin on a lake in the Rocky Mountains where you will sign papers, and officially take over the fortune. You can come anytime, there is no deadline, so it’s not a big deal if you are delayed. Although the cabin is remote, it is apparently luxurious, and is connected to electricity and the internet. Once you are there, you will be able to leave, when you want, via a float-plane (and pilot on retainer), which is part of your inheritance.

Now, would the purpose of the journey, and the result of the journey, have any effect on the grumbling and complaining along the way? A breakdown, getting lost, running out of gas, and so on, are annoying. But when you think about where you are going, suddenly, it seems a little small-hearted to complain about relatively minor, temporary difficulties, the whole time while you are on the way to collecting ten billion dollars. It’s a pain right now, yes, but soon you’ll be able to buy any car you want to. Soon, in fact, you could take the airplane instead of the car. Yes, while you are lost or waiting by the roadside, it’s frustrating. But the bottom line is, everything is actually quite wonderful. The difficulties are annoying and inconvenient. But they are nothing compared to what’s in store for you.

That’s what we need to remember. We are on a journey to an unimaginably wonderful future. What we are inheriting is far, far, better than ten billion earthly dollars. So, the apostle Paul writes, elsewhere:

¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18, ESV)

It’s not worth grumbling about our present sufferings. What’s coming is incomparably better. So, he also wrote to the Corinthians:

¹⁷ For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. ¹⁸ So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18, HCSB)

Obviously, we do encounter real problems and difficulties in this life. My daughter has life-threatening cancer at the moment. I am not pretending that it’s no big deal. And yet, in a sense, it ISN’T a big deal. She is an enthusiastic, mature, follower of Jesus. If we are parted right now, my heart will break, but it won’t be broken for forever. The parting would be only temporary. In our eternal inheritance, neither one of us will ever die, or suffer from cancer.

Our future is so much better than simply inheriting 10 billion earthly dollars. Wealth like that, as huge as it is, can’t change our hearts for the better, or end our bad habits. It can’t make us more loving. It can’t bring our loved ones back from the dead. It can’t comfort us in sorrow, or rejoice with us. It can’t save us from ourselves, or from death. But Jesus gives us all of that, and more.

I’ve used this illustration before, but I think it’s helpful. Imagine you are a football player who is playing in the Super Bowl. Many truly great players never get a chance, not once, to play in that game. So you are in the Biggest Game, a tremendous honor given only to a few. You’ve already made $192,000 in bonuses above and beyond your normal multimillion dollar salary for getting through the playoffs. Your bonus for playing in the Superbowl is $103,000 more if you lose, $178,000 more if you win. In other words, you could buy a house with just the bonus you get for being in the big game.

Now, in the game, you play hard. But maybe you make a mistake and cost your team a penalty. Maybe an opposing player gets away with a bad one that wasn’t called. Maybe the refs make a bad call. All these things are upsetting, to be sure. You see players getting upset about such things all the time. And yet, at the end of the day, no matter what happens, you are a multi-millionaire who has earned at least an extra $300,000 this year. When the game is over, win or lose, you have the next several months off, and you are set for money for life. When you are playing, the game feels all-encompassing. The things that happen during the game feel like major events. But when the final whistle blows, even if you lose, you go home to a life that most people can only dream about.

The same thing is true for us. When we draw our final breath, we will go home to a life we can only dream about right now. That should give us some perspective. It should help us moderate the grumbling and disputing.

When we live with a clear view of the perspective of our life in Christ, it will make us stand out from other people. I would guess that at most workplaces, if you don’t complain or argue, you will stand out, in a very good way.

Now, at times we do have to take a stand for what’s right. We can’t be party to doing something wrong, something that will end up hurting someone else. At times, expressing the truth of the Gospel involves disputing conflicting ideas. But I think those times when we need to take a stand on principle are not at all the same thing as grumbling and disputing here in this text. We need to do the right thing, even if it brings us into conflict with others at times. Even so, we don’t stand on principle by grumbling behind the back of the person we need to confront. When we have to stand up for what’s right, grumbling doesn’t really apply. I think it’s safe to say, Paul is talking about grumbling and unnecessary disputing.

Paul says that if we remember that we are citizens of Heaven, and from that perspective, minimize unnecessary disputing, we will shine like the sun when we are among people who are not doing that. I think anyone who has ever had a job where they worked with other people knows that this is true. It seems to be human nature to gripe and moan about life. But because we are heading to an amazing eternal future, we can let the small stuff go.

I do think it is more than simply remembering that we are bound for the New Creation. As we saw last time, it is the Lord himself who works within us. Jesus within us does not grumble or quarrel. The more we recognize that he is living his life through us, and the more we let him do so, the less we will grumble and dispute.

If we avoid grumbling and complaining, and we hold fast to the word of life, we will shine like stars, especially compared to the crooked and perverse generation of those who do not follow Jesus. I think sometimes we get kind of overwhelmed and fatigued with how twisted and perverse the world truly is. We get used to it. If you could take a television show or movie from 2025 back in time to 1991, things that are normal now would horrify and shock us back then.

I remember when pornography was something people were ashamed of. Now, it has been “normalized.” 61% of all people report viewing pornography. That’s 78% of men, 44% of women. 73% of teenagers have viewed porn. One survey of thousands of online porn videos found that almost half of them involved at least one act of violence. No wonder our world seems to be going down the tubes—this is insane. We do indeed live in a crooked and perverse generation.

Paul expects also that the Philippians will be holding fast to the word of life. That is for us, also.  This week I’ve come across two different groups of people who believe that Jesus wrote a book and the Roman Catholic church suppressed it, along with other books that were supposed to guide Christians. Those ideas are completely at odds with historical reality, with about as much evidence for it as there is that a secret cabal of lizard people rules the world, but it was clear that these people had found support for their conspiracies online, and fully believed them.

If anyone reading this worries about whether the Bible is reliable, I encourage you to watch this video by Dr. Peter Williams.

Lecture – Dr Peter Williams – New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts

The video is several years old, but not too long ago, Dr. Williams also wrote an excellent (and short!) book called: Can We Trust the Gospels? If, like me, you prefer reading to listening or watching videos, you should pick up that book. You could also look at my own book, Who Cares About the Bible. The first several chapters of that one address the reliability of scripture.

We need to be clear in our minds that the Bible is in fact, the word of life, and we need to hold fast to it. Holding fast means that we know the truth taught by scripture, and we live our lives in step with that truth.

The world around us has mostly rejected the truth of the Bible. Especially online, it isn’t hard to find people living almost the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches. It’s easy to find people mocking the Bible, undermining it. Everywhere we look, people seem to be getting on with their lives as if scripture is irrelevant. We need to understand that this was exactly the situation for those Christians in the city of Philippi. It was a pagan place. Most people neither knew, nor cared, about Christianity. In such an environment, we need that helpful encouragement to hold fast to the word of life.

Paul points out that he himself is holding fast, and if they, too hold fast, then his labor would not have been in vain. This would have been a powerful appeal to the Philippians. In that period in history, in that culture, teachers and leaders were held in very high esteem. Most normal people would have wanted to please someone who was their teacher or leader. It would have been very important to them that the teacher/leader could be proud of them. So, Paul is essentially saying: “Make me proud. Don’t make my work meaningless. Make all my hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.”

Paul ends this section by reminding them that even his death would not be in vain. In fact, both he and they can rejoice if Paul is executed, because it means he will be stepping into his inheritance in Christ. That inheritance is so good, so wonderful and amazing, that it can influence how we live here and now.