When I was in seminary, I received the following letter from a Christian friend who had, at one time, served in youth ministry and who later went on to become a lawyer. I had written to my friend, referring to him as St. Dave. This was Dave’s response…
Will—
I had to chuckle when I got your letter in that you entitled me a saint! You and I both know that that is far from the truth. I’ve always considered myself quite the opposite—fighting at least once (usually much more) every day from falling beyond the reach of even God’s mighty arms of love
That letter illustrates for me a misconception that I think many people have. That misconception is that saints are the extraordinary Christians, the ones with more righteousness than the rest of us. According to my friend’s line of thinking… clergy are saints, seminary students are saints, people in stained glass windows are saints… but not the rest of us.
Paul thought otherwise. Paul insists that we are all saints so long as we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s look at what Paul has to say in the closing of his letter to the Philippians and see if it doesn’t splash an extra dose of joy into our lives. Listen for God’s word to you from Philippians 4:21-23…
Greet all God’s people in Christ Jesus. The brothers and sisters who are with me send greetings. All God’s people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.
The Greek word translated by the NIV as “God’s people” is the word ἅγιον. It is the word usually translated as “saints”. Paul is unmistakably clear, if we are trusting in Jesus, then we are saints. This word appears some 62 times in the Bible, and it never refers to a special category of believers in the Lord. “Saints” always refers to all believers in Jesus.
So, what does it mean to be a saint? To be a saint means to be set apart to serve Jesus Christ. The word “saint” comes from the same word for “holy” and can be translated as “holy one”.
But it is important to note that when Paul calls the Christians in Philippi “holy ones” he does not mean that they are perfect. We have seen evidence in this letter of how the Philippians are very imperfect. We must always remember, there are no perfect Christians anywhere. None of us will be perfect until we get to heaven. Paul states very clearly in Philippians 3:12-15 that he has not yet attained perfection.
As I have said many times, don’t go looking for the perfect church, because even if you find the perfect church and join it, then it won’t be perfect anymore because you are imperfect! And so am I! So, to be holy, to be a saint, is not to be perfect, it just means that we are set apart to belong to Jesus and serve him.
A child was once asked his definition of a saint. Thinking of the stained-glass windows in church, the child replied: “A saint is someone who the light shines through.”
I love that definition! A saint is someone set apart for Christ’s light to shine through. And in that there is great joy. As Psalm 149:4-5 says…
For the Lord takes delight in his people;
he crowns the humble with victory.
Let his faithful people rejoice in this honor
and sing for joy on their beds.
William Law once wrote:
Who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.
I wonder: do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and thank the Lord for saving you? Do you ever lie on your bed singing for joy because God has set you apart to be in a special relationship with him through his Son Jesus? If we belong to Jesus, then we can rejoice in that honor every day and night wherever we are.
There can be great joy in our lives when we start looking at every part of our lives, every moment, every event, as an opportunity to serve Jesus in some way, however small. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31… “So, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
C. S. Lewis said he was surprised after his conversion to discover that the Christian life involved doing the same things that he did before his conversion, but with a new attitude. I believe that is right. Being a Christian means letting Christ’s light shine through us in whatever circumstances we are in.
Henri Nouwen once wrote…
I have a friend who radiates joy, not because his life is easy, but because he habitually recognizes God’s presence in the midst of all human suffering, his own as well as others’… My friend’s joy is contagious. The more I am with him, the more I catch glimpses of the sun shining through the clouds. While my friend always spoke about the sun, I kept speaking about the clouds, until one day I realized that it was the sun that allowed me to see the clouds. Those who keep speaking about the sun while walking under a cloudy sky are messengers of hope, the true saints of our day.
One way we serve Christ as his saints and spread his light on cloudy days is by greeting other saints in the Lord. Paul says, “Greet all the saints in Christ Jesus.”
It is important to note that in this passage, and others in the New Testament, the word for “greet” is much richer than just saying “hello”. “To greet” means to welcome, to treat with affection, to express good wishes, to embrace. The Hebrew equivalent would be the greeting “Shalom” which means peace in all dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.
William Hinson writes…
I shall never forget in my student days at Emory—not my seminary days, but after I’d served a parish for a time and went back for an advanced degree—I remember being one of the oldest people in the class. And there was another there who had also served a parish for some time. He sat on the other side of the room from me. And we didn’t relate too well, I suppose, to the younger students because we had our own agenda, our reasons for being there. We didn’t have too much in common with the younger students.
I remember one day going over to see this man, who happened to be a black man (he was the only black person in the class). At the end of the class, I said to him, ‘How about having lunch today?’
He said, ‘Fine. Where do you want to go?’
I said, ‘Well, let’s try the cafeteria.’
We went to the cafeteria and enjoyed lunch and began to talk about our churches. He serves one of the largest, predominantly black Baptist churches in the country. We began to talk about our work. And out of that there grew a friendship, so that the rest of our time during our residency, we were together most of the time.
Toward the end of our residency, he invited me to go home with him one weekend to preach in his church. I gladly accepted the invitation. It was a great church. I was waiting my turn to get up to preach, and he said something in his introduction of me that choked me up so much I found it difficult to continue.
He said to the congregation, ‘I want you to know that I set a deadline on the day I met this man, I told God that morning that if I didn’t meet someone that day who said hello to me and wanted to spend some time with me, wanted to be my friend, then I was giving up my education. I was coming back home.’
And I got all choked up, and I still do because what I had done was such a small gesture, nothing… ‘Let’s have lunch together.’ And out of it I not only found one of the best friends I have, but God used that word, unknown to me, as a word of encouragement to him in a time of bleak despair. Isn’t it amazing that God can let an imperfect person be an expression of his word of grace?
Who knows but that the person sitting next to you today could be in a time of bleak despair? Your greeting, reaching out to them in love, inviting them to join you for fellowship hour downstairs, might make the difference between that person giving up or continuing in Christ. As Paul says in Galatians 6:10, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.”
A second thing I would like you to notice from Paul’s farewell to the Philippians is that anyone can become a saint. Paul says, “The brothers and sisters who are with me send greetings. All God’s people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.”
Any type of person can become a saint. Just look at the saints referred to in this passage. Paul was writing from Rome. The Church at Rome included both Jews and Gentiles. That means that no matter what your ethnic background, no matter your exposure or lack of past exposure to the Bible, you can become a saint. There is no age limit to being a saint. Timothy, who was one of the senders of the letter to the Philippians, was a young man. Paul was an older man. Luke may have been with Paul when he wrote this letter; Luke was a physician. Paul wrote to a diverse church in Philippi. Lydia was a wealthy merchant. A jailer was part of the Philippian church. A slave girl was part of the congregation at Philippi. To me this means that regardless of our vocation or status, we can all become saints in Christ.
Even members of Caesar’s household in Rome had become saints. This may mean that even members of Emperor Nero’s family had become Christians. Certainly, it means that some of the workers, both slave and free, who served Caesar, had become Christian.
This brief farewell reminds us never to regard any person as a hopeless case. The people you know right now, whom you consider to be the most unlikely candidates for sainthood, are not beyond the reach of God’s grace.
There was one prominent Christian leader in Los Angeles who never believed that my father had truly become a Christian after his profession of faith at the Billy Graham meetings. This woman had known my father for a long time and seen many ups and downs in his life. But God’s grace was greater than this one woman imagined. God’s grace changed my father’s life. Don’t ever count anyone as a hopeless case, even yourself. God’s grace can change your life too. As Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “God creates out of nothing—wonderful, you say; yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful. He makes saints out of sinners.”
The third point in Paul’s farewell is that you can be a saint anywhere. There were saints in Caesar’s household. This teaches us that we don’t have to come out of the world to be saints. As Robert J. McCracken once wrote, “A man can be as truly a saint in a factory as in a monastery, and there is as much need of him in the one as in the other.”
The Roman senator Seneca once said after leaving one of the gladiator games during the reign of Nero: “I felt like I was in a sewer.” When Nero came to power in AD 54, he reinvigorated emperor worship. He asked all his subjects to bow and confess that “Caesar is Lord.” These saints in Caesar’s household would have been the first to be asked to confess Caesar as Lord. What a temptation they faced to compromise their confession of Christ! But perhaps they remembered the words of Jesus,
Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven. (Matthew 10:32)
What an awkward place to be a Christian… in the household of Nero. Yet, Jesus can work through people in the most awkward places. If we live in one of those awkward places, we need to remember Paul’s words in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.”
The Good News of Jesus is powerful; it has power to change lives. Think of it: because of the witness of those believers in Rome, Nero did not become a Christian, but eventually there came an emperor who did confess Christ, and that event turned the world upside down.
The final thing I would like to point out from Paul’s farewell is that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is what makes it possible for us to be saints. And we all need fresh doses of God’s grace daily if we are to be his saints, shedding his light wherever we go.
What is grace? Eugene O’Neill once wrote in one of his plays, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue.” I love that! The grace of Jesus Christ is the glue that puts our broken lives back together, piece by piece.
As we have seen many times in our study of Paul, for him, grace is God’s unmerited favor. Paul says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23) None of us deserve God’s favor. But in his grace, God forgives us of our sins because of the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross. Grace is “God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense”. Grace is the free offer, the gift, of God’s forgiveness.
G. Campbell Morgan was once approached by a miner who said he would give anything to believe that God would forgive sins, “but I cannot believe he will forgive me if I just turn to him. It is too cheap.”
Dr. Morgan said to him: “You were working in the mine today. How did you get out of the pit?”
The miner answered, “The way I usually do; I got into the cage and was pulled to the top.”
“How much did you pay to come out of the pit?”
“I didn’t pay anything.”
“Weren’t you afraid to trust yourself to that cage? Was it not too cheap?”
The miner replied, “Oh no! It was cheap for me, but it cost the company a lot of money to sink that shaft.”
Just so, we must always remember, God’s grace is free to us, but it cost Jesus everything, it cost him his life to pay for our sins on the cross. As Paul says in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
How do we receive the gift of grace? How do we become saints? I think the following story illustrates the answer…
Bruce Thielemann once wrote…
Copenhagen is a nice city and there are many things to see there. But if I could only spend one hour in Copenhagen, the place I’d go again would be the Church of Our Lady. That’s where the great Thorvaldsen statues are. When you walk into the church, it’s very dim. But after you’re there for a few minutes, you begin to see the statues. They’re carved out of cold stone, but they look like warm, living personalities—so warm they melt your heart.
One statue of Christ stands with his arms extended. I walked up to that statue, and as I looked, I thought, He has his eyes closed. He must be at prayer. A man who sat in the front pew said to me, “You have to get on your knees to see his eyes.” I got down on my knees and looked up, and there was such grace and mercy and compassion in those eyes that it was almost more than I could bear.
If Bruce Thielemann saw grace in the eyes of a statue, how much more grace might there be in the eyes of the living Jesus? We become saints by getting down on our knees and looking into the gracious eyes of the living Lord Jesus Christ. And as we do that, we receive the joy of salvation. As Paul says in Romans 10:13, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Let’s pray…
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