I think we shall see our way through the difficulty if we recognise that children and sons are not coordinate here.
“Why, that is just as the missionaries do,” remarked the king, with some surprise. The word occurs only in Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole BibleHeinrich Meyer's Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New TestamentJohann Albrecht Bengel's Gnomon of the New TestamentMatthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy BibleJohn Eadie's Commentary on Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and Philippians [Note: See Richard C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, pp354-56.] It is a title in whose honour all then living, man as man, had not a right to share. Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible - Unabridged"Their spot is not the spot of His children: they are a perverse and crooked generation" We’ll send you a new verse every day to download or share.Your Faithlife account signs you in to all our sites. A Christian ought to be a comforter; with kind words on his lips, and sympathy in his heart, he should have a cheering word for the sons of sorrow. “Lights”: It “means any light-bearing body. Then they would injure no one. (1) The sons of God are here clearly distinguished from the world. It was used of a torch, a lantern, even of harbor beacons” (Hawthorne p. 103). Those who sustain these trials, and in whom are really found all these marks, are they whom the apostle here very elegantly calls “children of God, without rebuke;” those whom the crucible cannot make to blush; those in whom neither the calumny nor the cunning of the enemy can find anything to lay hold of; such as the Scripture sets forth in a Job, who confounded all the artifices of Satan, and justified most fully by his trials the glorious testimony which God had condescended to bear to him with His own mouth. “Oh, no,” he replied, “I had no persecution at all, for though I was working with them for five weeks, they never found me out.” “So much the worse for you,” they replied, “for if your light had shone before them, and you had borne a witness for Christ, they certainly would have found you out.”Lights have a very cheering influence, and so have Christians.
Selfishness will prevent any Christian from having a good reputation among non-Christians and from having pure motives.“Children of God”: Becoming a child of God is just the beginning. Each son won home becomes a source of vital attraction and compels others. Philippians 2:14-15. Or, will we be a child of God that people use as an excuse for why they do not want to become a Christian? “Become implies a process of development. Force had been the Divine thing till then. Why?
(2) And this is what regeneration means. We said, “There is a light over there,” and you cannot tell what a source of comfort that candle in a cottage window proved to us. And this needs a spiritual regeneration. It was to be the sheer force of goodness which should bear the Christian on to the spiritual conquest of mankind. Philippians 2:15 “that ye may become blameless and harmless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye are seen as lights in the world” “That”: “All the injunctions Paul lays down upon the Philippians (,4, 12-14) are for a purpose” (Hawthorne p. 101).
It is the begetting of the spiritual sonship, the carrying up of the child's relation through all the higher powers and faculties of the human spirit, and yielding to God this child complete.
Last week I introduced the passage of Scripture that we will be studying this morning, Philippians 2:14,15, by examining verse 14. That is the meaning of a Church: God's home; Christ's home for souls. “Yes,” answered the heroic sailor, “and I am a missionary too.” (A friend told me that he was visiting a lighthouse lately, and said to the keeper, “Are you not afraid to live here? Philippians 2 – Humble Living In Light of Jesus’ Humble Example A.