Paul’s letter to the Philippians ends with an intriguing phrase, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit” (Phil. 4:23). Why does the apostle say, “with your spirit”? Men and women are not mere animals — “naked apes,” as the phrase was common in the 1960s — and so men can resist the wickedness of such exhortations as “Give in to your feelings! Go with the flow! Seize the moment! If it feels so right it can’t be wrong.” That is the level at which mere animals function. They act by their instincts. They don’t possess a conscience. If they have some basic hunger or urge, then what could be more natural for an animal than to satisfy it? How different is man. He is spirit as well as body. He can lay down his life for his friends. He can look up and see the stars. He can consider the brevity of life and the wonders of the creation, and see the handiwork of its Maker both by day and night.

Because man is spirit he can take an ape’s skull in his hand and turn it round and round, wondering all the while how similar it is to his own. But apes are not spirit, and so they don’t take human skulls, weigh them, analyze them, put them under a microscope, subject them to carbon dating, and cry “Eureka!” Because man is spirit he can speak. You have to be spirit to speak. “Why do animals never speak?” asked a wise man. “Because they have nothing to say!” he answered his own question. Man has a great deal to say about sun, moon, and stars; about origins and destinies. He can write a letter and read a letter which ends with the words, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit” and he can say, “Amen! I understand that and agree with that.” He can know that the only way he can become a complete man is by that grace of Christ. There are people with vast wealth, boundless energy, and great cultural achievements, but they have known nothing of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Consider the falls of some politicians that we have been told about in the recent past — all that has happened to them because they neglected their spirits, and were strangers to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. I recently came across some words of the American playwright, David Mamet: “We’re spiritually bankrupt. We don’t pray. We don’t regenerate our spirit. These things aren’t luxuries. There has to be time for reflection, introspection, and a certain amount of awe and wonder.” (London Times, 6 May, 2003). But does Mamet know the cause of this bankruptcy and the Lord to whom to turn? The Christian who professes to know also knows that evil thoughts and imaginations and desires work havoc in his life. A sense of wrong, a grudge, jealousy, envy, lust, self-pity — those are the things which cause us trouble. How much unhappiness and wretchedness we would avoid in this life if the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ were with our spirit!

Or perhaps we can see Paul referring in these words to the whole corporate spirit of the body of Christ there in Philippi. May your spirit, as a church, know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ being with you as you evangelize, as you love one another, as you worship, and as you pray. What a difference in our lives as a fellowship when the grace of the Lord Christ is with us day by day. What does the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ do to our spirit?

1. Christ’s grace gives assurance⤒🔗

If God has loved you before you were born and, in the mystery of His grace, chose you to be His own, do you think He will ever let you go? Never. Never! Of course, if 99 of the links were forged by grace in the heat of Golgotha’s inferno, but one link was forged entirely by us while God stood by and watched, then all our lives we would be worrying about that one link. The strength of a chain is its weakest link. But if all the links in the golden chain were cast by God, aren’t we safe? And were they not all cast by God? “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be con­formed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). Who can break such a chain and separate us from the love of God? “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

Things future, nor things that are now,
Nor all things below or above;
Can make Him His purpose forgo
Or sever my soul from His love.Augustus Toplady

If Christ’s grace is with your spirit, you will know that nothing will separate you from God’s love.

2. Christ’s grace stimulates evangelism←⤒🔗

Does this surprise you? Perhaps you imagined that believing in sovereign grace would discourage evan­gelism. It should do the very opposite. Why? Because we all know from both Scripture and experience that man by nature is either opposed to or indifferent to the gospel. Again and again those of us who have tried to witness to unsaved friends and neighbors have been discouraged by lack of response. Nevertheless, we never lose hope because God has said that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. He will have a people called after His name. The Lord Christ has said, “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me” (John 6:37). Don’t you just love that “shall?” They shall come. God has made up His mind. When Luke gives a summary in the book of Acts of the progress of the church, he says it in this way, “And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). When Paul was afraid outside of the city of Corinth, respon­sible to take the gospel of Christ to that city, a word from God came to encourage him, “Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace: For I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee: for I have much people in this city” (Acts 18:9-10).

God’s purpose is the salvation of sinners and so those engaged in this work are not wasting their time and energy. Of course, if we believed that it was entirely up to man’s “free will” then we would have cause to be despondent, because what the sinner needs the most he desires the least. He would never come. That confidence drove the great evangelists and missionaries in the history of the church to keep preaching, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, William Carey, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and reap a great harvest. They did not believe that salvation needed psychological techniques and manipulative gimmicks to get a response. It was God’s business, so they were men of holy love and courage and integrity. When they centered their message on the divine diag­nosis and remedy, then God honored it.

3. Christ’s grace promotes worship←⤒🔗

This most of all. The truth that salvation is by God’s grace humbles us, but it also exalts our God, doesn’t it? It gives God all the glory. When a sinner sees this he doesn’t say, “I think I made the smartest choice a man could make. I chose eternal life.” He knows that it was the mighty God who set His love on him. God knew all about us; he had seen the file. He understands us better than our own spouses or parents, but He still loves us with a love that continually forgives and will never let us go.

Then our worship has to be God-centered. If it is to fasten attention on God’s saving grace to adore and praise the Lamb and have communion with Him, it is obvious our response must be God-centered. And this is one of the places the professing church has gone astray; it is confused about worship because its approach to worship is this, “What am I going to get out of it; am I going to leave feeling good about myself? Am I going to be moved?” We have come with all the wrong reasons and are asking all the wrong questions. We shouldn’t be asking what are we going to get out of this but what is God going to gain. How will His name be blessed and His loveliness portrayed? As we fasten our attention on God and seek His glory and commune with Him, our hearts will break. We will be exuberant; we will rejoice with trembling; we’ll serve the Lord with fear. We will indeed be moved from the depths of our being because we sought Him. Just as in a marriage relationship, if we seek our own wellbeing, our marriages are wrecks. But, if we seek the wellbeing of our spouses, we find our marriages to be fulfilling.

I ask you this very simple question: if an uncon­verted person comes to a worship service and leaves feeling good, who has not been present? God. The unconverted cannot come into the presence of God as we’ve described it and feel good or fulfilled. His con­science is going to be scratched with the strong claws of the Lion of Judah. He’s going to be probed. As Paul says, he’s going to fall down before the Lord, his heart laid naked and bare before God. Then God saves him­ that way. We are so foolish to take that which is God’s and profane it and adulterate it by trying to package it for the world. We are changing God’s glorious and holy celebration into an outreach enterprise, and He is no longer the center of attention; He’s no longer hon­ored and glorified in our worship. But when an entire congregation knows they are what they are by the grace of God, then all of them give glory to Him with one heart and one mouth. Without an appreciation of grace there can be no full-orbed doxology. Watered down grace leads to watered down worship, and how deadly an ethos is that for the future inhabitants of heaven.

4. Christ’s grace strengthens and sustains our spirit←⤒🔗

Grace is not a sentiment or a divine attitude or feeling. Grace is God’s omnipotence, saving and sanctifying His people. Grace is strength. Grace is the total commitment of God. He holds nothing back. He spares not His own Son. With Him He freely gives us all things. You see it perfectly in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. He is telling them about his thorn in the flesh, and how the Lord refused to remove it. Paul knew constant weakness, distress, and tribulation. He longs for deliverance, but he was told this by the Lord, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Then you see the next parallel phrase in the Lord’s tender reply to Paul, “For my strength is made perfect in weakness.” The grace of Christ is the strength of Christ upholding His hurting servants. His grace can change every circumstance, strengthen every weakness, cheer every distress, lift every burden, bear every responsibility, and handle every privilege. All those things are experienced by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So there is no need for God to remove the thorn in the flesh. Paul can do all that God plans to have done through him by His grace. What is put forth in grace is the energy of Almighty God. Christ’s grace is His commitment to us of the power that spoke to the winds and waves in the boat and there was a great calm; the authority that was evident as He preached in the synagogue; the dominion He exercised over death and demons. When we say that our spirit has been touched by grace, we are not saying that we are in the grip of a great sentiment or that we are the objects of a great mood, but that we are gripped by the might of the Creator of the heavens and the earth. The One who conquers the grave has us in His grip.

I suspect that for us the concepts of “power” and “grace” are kept in two different compartments, but that is not the case in the Word of God. In the Scriptures there is the closest possible relation of God’s power and God’s grace, and the wonder of our spirits being sustained by grace is the power that helps us in our time of need.

When Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones came to the end of his studies on the letter to the Philippians fifty years ago, he looked at the congregation and said,

My beloved friends, we live in an uncertain world, an uncertain life; no one knows what is going to happen to any one of us. There are an almost infinite number of possibilities. Can we end our considerations of this mighty epistle on a grander note than this? Whatever may happen in life or in death; whatever may take place in any conceivable situation or circumstances, whatever may be your lot, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ will be sufficient. It will hold you, it will sustain you, it will even enable you to rejoice in tribulation, it will strengthen you, establish you, hold you, keep you, answer your every need, and take you through. Ultimately it will present you faultless, perfect, in glory in the presence of God. ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.’The Life of Peace: Studies in Philippians 3 & 4, p. 271