[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching from God's word you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to him. If you're ever in the Madison, Alabama area, we'd love for you to worship with us on Sundays at 830 or 10:30 a.m. if you have any other questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, find
[email protected] dot. Be sure to also check out our Bible study podcast, Madison Church of Christ Bible studies. Thanks again for stopping by.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Good morning.
How are you doing? That's kind of the way we start every day, right? When we come into this assembly, we grab somebody and we say, hey, how you doing? And we always say, hey, I'm doing great. How are you doing? Oh, fine, fine. Good, good. Busy. Yeah, busy. We're all busy. And we start thinking about these things and that's the end of our small talk, right? And then if we know what's going on in someone's life, we may get a little bit deeper and say, hey, I hear that you guys are going through this, or, hey, I heard about the good news or those kinds of things. And we may share a little bit more of that intimacy, but it's really easy for us to just get into that rut and say the small talk and be done with it. And we all say that we're doing fine, but in reality, a lot of us, and let's just get real about it. We got a lot of things on our mind. We're occupied. We're thinking about things. We've got the next thing in mind. We're moving from one thing to the next. And. And I think life in general has a lot of things that kind of can, can burden our mind. I don't know if you've heard of word bubbles or word clouds that you see online. And there are these word images that demonstrate, like, in a certain arena of life, there are certain things that are more impactful than others. And those are usually the bigger words and then the smaller things, the subtleties in the background are the other things that are on there. Well, I've got several of those word clouds up above. And I think we all start in our life as we just live our lives. We're trying to think about our relationship with God. We're trying to make certain that we have things in order and that we're thinking things through and living our life in a way that pleases God. And then we also think about how that translates to our children. And so we're making certain that we share our faith with them. We make sure they're in Bible study together with their friends, that they're growing in their faith. We're oftentimes battling between that balance of discipline and an accountability, with mercy and love and those kinds of things. It's kind of hard for us to find that balance sometimes. But there also may be, like, a family crisis. There may be some things that are going on. We may have someone who's sick. You know, I was with my parents yesterday, and it struck me that my father's age is, you know, getting a little bit more old. You know, he's getting older and a little bit more in need of some extra help and some caution and for us to just look out for him a little bit more. And so I was just watching those things, and I'm just thinking about, man, the number of ways that you can be concerned about your family are kind of overwhelming. But then on top of that, you think about your job and the pressures that you feel there, the presentation that you're going to have to make, the answers to, the questions that you're going to get as you make that presentation. Or you can think about, like, the burden of being a person in charge and being accountable for those kinds of things, and that can kind of be overwhelming. On top of that, you can think about the political world that we're in right now, where it's back and forth, and we are in a most polarized time of our lives. It feels like where both sides are so far away from each other that no one in the middle is talking and we're not working any solutions. And that affects our livelihood, it affects the economy, it affects everything that we see. And we look around and we go to the grocery store and everything's busy. Is anybody else feeling their heart pressure, you know, blood pressure, heart rate going up? As I talk about these things, all of those things. On top of that, the culture around us influencing us and taking what we know were spiritual and moral norms and just blowing those out the window, flipping things upside down. And we look in this world and we're plagued by these things. Our phones are beeping left and right with notifications and reminders of things that are coming up your schedule, the things that you miss, the things that you need to continue to do, the other struggles that you have in your life. And we are just bombarded constantly with those kinds of things. And when I think about it, that's just the normal range of life. That's just our everyday. That's not. Even if we are finding ourselves in a crisis, that's just in every moment. Our minds are occupied with these things.
And because the stuff that we're being fed and those notifications and other things, there's a tendency for us to find ourselves just dwelling in the negativity of all of those pressures mounting on top of us. And, you know, I think it's kind of funny. I'm not picking on Muncie, Indiana, here, but if you look at this, this beautiful weather pattern, I want you to notice at the very end of this, there is a 20% chance of rain. And they have rain and clouds on it. Did you catch that? Like, isn't it something that we have been so conditioned that we expect something to ruin our day? Like, so how much do I need to know? I need to know what small percentage is there that. That there is going to be rain? You don't hear a forecast saying, hey, 80% chance of clear skies today. All you hear is the rain chance. Well, what is that telling us? It's telling me that we feed off that negativity. We respond to it, that we are filling our hearts and our minds with it. And in the process of all those things, we can find ourselves getting to the point where our circumstances put us in a constant state of discontent, and we can find ourselves being prisoners to that kind of concept, that we don't see the joy that's out there in front of us. We don't see the positive things that are going on. And as Christians, we should be the most positive people in the world. We have salvation. We have forgiveness. We have the opportunity to reach other people for God. We have the promise of eternal life. There's so many things that we should be joyful about, and yet sometimes we find ourselves, like, walking around in all this negativity and all these pressures. And I just want to be honest with you. If you're walking around like that and you look your head up and people ask you, how you doing? Okay. Like, that is not very fun to be around. Okay. I'm just gonna say it. So I'd encourage all of us to brighten up a little bit, to be joyful and to be excited about your faith in Jesus and to be a person who demonstrates that every day in your life, to find that inexplicable joy that comes because you're a child of God. We all need a dose of that. And that's why I'm so excited about this study that we're doing. I want to introduce it with this quick little poem, and it says this. One ship sails east, one ship sails west.
Regardless of how the wind blows, it is the set of the sail and not the gale that determines the way we go. I guess what it boils down to is simply this.
God has given us the ability to adapt a certain mindset. If you want to see the negative side of things, you know what? You can set yourselves toward negativity. If you want to set yourselves toward positive and optimistic thinking, you have the ability in your heart right now to find the significance of who you are in Jesus Christ, and you can press forward with that level of joy in your heart. And I want to encourage all of us to do this. As I look at this book of Philippians, and we're going to talk about the circumstances. Paul is writing this letter out of prison to the church at Philippi, and he gives them these great expressions of joy. In fact, there are 18 overt expressions of expressions of joy, rejoice and joy. And these are just some of them. I didn't even write them all down, but these are just examples. You're going to read in there, a passage that says, rejoice in the Lord always. And again I say, rejoice. You're going to read, you know, don't be anxious about anything but prayer and supplication. Let your request be made known to God, and the peace of God that surpasses all knowledge will guard your hearts. You're going to find out that we can lift those things over to God, and he's going to give us a sense of peace about it. A guy in prison saying, hey, I can handle anything that comes my way. That's a paraphrase, but you know what I'm talking about. Philippians, chapter four, verse 13. There's all kinds of expressions of it where he looks and he looks at his circumstances, and one could say, this is not good. But he finds him saying, even in these circumstances, I can continue to teach and the gospel can continue to be and the kingdom can be furthered as a result of me being in prison. There's a lot of things about this, and so it's an amazing book that's filled with optimistic thinking. So it's one of those things that's got 104 verses. And if any of you were doing centurative scripture in lads, this would be your go to right here, because it is a book filled with positivity. And I encourage everybody to commit it to memory. At least read it often. For the next eight or ten weeks, we're going to be studying this and getting deeper into this book. But today I want to give us a little bit of an introduction and go through the first eleven verses of the. Of the letter that Paul has written to them. I'll tell you a little bit about Philippi. And this. I won't get into too deep of the weeds here, but this is an ancient city. Okay?
Paul ever got there. In fact, it was conquered by Philip of Macedon, who was Alexander the Great's father. And of course, he, after he conquered it, he named it after himself. How sweet of him to do that. And then you'll notice a couple of other things. There's one of those that's really cool connection is that Octavian or Augustus and Mark Antony defeated Julius Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius. Y'all remember etu brute? You know, that's a good thing. That's a cool thing that happened there. Philippi. The Romans came in in 168 BC and created a colony out of it. And then later, Augustus, he went back and he took some retired military people from Rome, brought them in, and settled them around the area so it would remain a loyal place to Rome. So this is a roman colony over in Macedonia. That's a really interesting place. Now, Paul's introduction to this came as a part of his second missionary journey. And I know it's kind of hard to zero in, but this is the best map I could find that put both of them on the map. So you'll see at the bottom, you got Jerusalem way down here, and you got Philippi way up here. Now, this is in Greece. So you can kind of see where. Where this all is way up here at the top. So Paul is on his missionary journeys, and you know how this goes. He's flowing around and he's teaching and preaching and doing those things. And he has in his mind, as he's going around and preaching, that he wants to go to certain areas. So he's looking to go into Asia Minor. He's looking to go up into Bithynia. And in both of those places, God sends a message to him, you know, either through angel or through spirit, says to him, don't go there. I don't want you to go there. So I can imagine Paul, maybe as he's going to do this teaching, that that kind of, you know, is weird, that God would not allow him to go and teach somewhere and we don't know why that was, but it says something about Paul that he was willing to absorb that and go exactly where God asked him to go. So he goes to a place called Troas. Troas is on the coast up there of Asia Minor. And what happens is he stays the night there. He has a vision. And in that vision, there's a man, a macedonian man, in that vision, who says, hey, I want you to come over to Macedonia and help us over here. So he takes that as a message from God. The next morning, he and his, his fellow missionaries take off from Troas, and they go across to Neapolis, which is a coastal town. And then looking for people to teach there, they moved on to Philippi, which was kind of a chief city at that time and place. And so they go into Philippi, and you'll remember this. If you look in acts chapter 16, you're going to find the story of Lydia. You remember this, right? There's no synagogue in Philippi because there apparently were not ten jewish men in the town. And so because of that, just a lot of people would gather around different places and pray. And Paul, as he was going around preaching, he found out about this prayer meeting that took place by the river. And so he went down, and the lady there, Lydia, you'll remember the cellar of purple. Well, the Bible says that God opened up her heart, that she was receptive to what Paul was teaching. And so he took her and taught her. She became a Christian. She was baptized in this river you see down at the bottom left. It's become a place now where people can go and visit the exact site where Lydia was baptized. Well, that's great. So now there are christians there. Lydia was baptized, and then all of her household was converted. And so they have, like a little small congregation of Lydia's family and Paul and his fellow workers. And then you've got the folks that were coming to those prayer meetings together. Small place, but good group of people. Well, what happens is they keep going day by day, and as they're there and they are spending their time praying together and teaching, there's this little slave girl who has a spirit of divination. And she is going around following Paul everywhere he goes. And she's saying stuff like, hey, here are the men of God, the most high God, and they are here to tell you what you need to do to be saved. And so she walks around with them for days on end doing this. And it's, to be honest with you, the Bible tells us. And this is interesting. It says, paul was greatly annoyed. So after this chirping little girl doing this, even though she was saying some good things, you know, he said, I tell you, in the name of Jesus, get out of her. So he sends that spirit out of her. But in the process, what happens is the people who own this slave girl, who were using her for fortune telling, ultimately lost their job, lost their business. And so they get angry. They go to the magistrate, and they go to the different authorities, and they say, hey, this can't happen. This jew is coming into our area, and he's stirring up things, and so we cannot have this. So they rose up and came after Paul and Silas, and it says they took them and they beat them with rods, and they threw them into this prison cell that you see on the bottom right. And so they're in this prison. They've been beaten up, battered. They slap them down with locks on their. On their feet. So they're in torture.
They're beaten up, and they're bloodied, and they're bruised. And, you know, I can't help but think, just like I would think, and that's. Wait a minute, Lord. I mean, did I not abandon my other way of life? Did I not give my heart to you? Did I not fully surrender? Did I not show you my loyalty? Did I not go where you told me to go? And after all of these things, you're going to take me to a place where immediately I would have success and then go to prison for these kinds of things? I mean, you can imagine how one. Maybe it's just Brandon, okay? But you can imagine how we might feel.
But that's not the situation.
Paul and Silas, at midnight in that prison, in the darkness, began singing, and everyone heard it.
And then there became an earthquake.
And the earthquake shook so much that all the bars of the prison doors were open. And the jailer who saw the situation and recognized what was going on, fearing for his life, was about to fall on his own sword and kill himself. And Paul speaks out of the darkness and says, don't do this.
We are all here and safe.
And he runs over to Paul and Silas, I'm sure, having heard their singing, sirs, what must I do to be saved? And that night, Paul and Silas taught him till he believed. And then he and his household were baptized. Look at the church at Philippi. Just in a short order of time. They now have these two family units that are together in Christ, worshiping together.
And so eventually, I'll make a long story a little bit shorter.
In that you fast forward a little bit of time. And Paul, through his missionary journeys, goes back, and he visits Philippi for a while, but then ultimately he must go back to Jerusalem. And he knows as he's going to Jerusalem, there's persecution waiting on him because he had turned his back on the way the jewish nation or the Judaism had been taught. And so because of that, he goes back, and sure enough, he finds himself in the synagogue, he gets called in the temple, and then he's imprisoned.
And so through a series of appeals and different things, he ends up, over two year period of time, a little bit more than two years, he has trial after trial after trial. You remember Agrippa and Festus and Felix and all those. All those different exchanges that he had with them as he talked to them about what was happening. And they were trying to say, well, you know, we could try him here. And he says, hey, I'm a roman citizen. So he appeals to Caesar. And ultimately, I think it's Felix who says to Caesar, he has appealed to Caesar. He must go. And so ultimately he finds his way to Rome. And this is ten years after his initial meeting with Philippi.
So what's amazing about the book of Philippians is it's after all of those series of events, all of those things that happened, all of that frustration that he finds himself in a roman prison chained to a guard, some say house arrest, some say maybe solitary confinement, but either way, chained to a. A personal soldier.
And here it is that he writes this letter to the Philippians.
And, you know, I don't know what you think about all these things. That's a background that gives you a little bit of a history. But it might be good for us to go back and consider who Saul was prior to Jesus. Think about him. He's there on the scene when Stephen, the first christian martyr, is put to death. And it says he was there holding their clothes, holding their coats, and he was consenting, or he was approving of that particular sentence and that execution of Stephen. And so he's standing there and he's one of those in training maybe saying, hey, let me hold your coats, you guys stone him to death. And so later it says in acts, chapter nine, it says he's out there now breathing out threats and murder against Christians. Do you understand this? This is his life.
I mean, he is not necessarily the poster boy for Choi. He is not the person that we know of as the person that we hear in the book of Philippians in this letter that he's written to them. No, he is. He's basically a terrorist, for lack of a better term. As you look at his life and the lifestyle he had, it was about judgment, about condemnation. It was about seeking justice for things. It was about going out and imprisoning people and brutalizing them and persecuting them. And so I think about his life and who he was doing the things that he thought were in a good conscience. And later in Philippians, you'll hear more of his resume. Jew. Of a jew from the tribe of Benjamin. Zealous, persecuting Christians, those kinds of things. But I say all that to say this, that this guy had an experience, okay, something happened to Saul, but also something happened inside of Saul, that something that happened to him was on that road to Damascus, as he had letters from the Sanhedrin to go into Damascus and persecute and imprison and put to death christians. As he's on his way, a bright light shines down. He's blinded. You know the story. He's sent into Damascus to wait for God to show up and to give him what he needed to do next. God sends ananias. And you can read this in acts, chapter nine. You can read it in acts 22. Ultimately, as Paul is retelling the story, it says, ananias says to him, what are you waiting on? Arise and be baptized and wash away your sins. Call on the name of the Lord. It says that Saul got up and he began teaching and preaching in the synagogues, and he began to understand things differently. Do you understand? Something happened to him, but something happened in him.
No longer is he going out persecuted christians. He has now fallen in love with Christianity. He has fallen, for the first time, recognize what Jesus has done for him and how all of those prophecies and all of the history that they have has all led up to this pivotal moment where Jesus Christ is on the scene. He is the messiah, and he's the first one to kind of piece it all together. So when I tell you that Paul changed or Saul changed, it wasn't that he completely repented of the things that he had done before. It was that he understood his marching orders differently, right? He just knew that this was the fulfillment of all that had promised before, so it changed his direction. And now, instead of looking to persecute and kill those people, he'd fallen in love with them. He found joy.
So that's a beautiful thing about this letter. So as he is writing this and he writes with Timothy, and I'm not going to get into Timothy too much. We'll probably talk about him more through the book, but he has his partner here, Timothy, and he is in prison, and he is writing this letter. And he says, paul. Paul and Timothy, bondservants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus, who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons. I hope you're picking up on some things. If you're looking back and thinking about that church, there's some things that maybe jump out to you that help you see this was a growing and awesome church. The first thing he uses is the first term is bondservant. And this just simply means that he was willing to give up. He and Timothy both were willing to give up their rights in order to serve their master, and their master, in this case, being Jesus Christ. And, you know, sometimes these kind of. This word for Bondservant is due loss. It just means that a person forfeits their rights for the sake of someone else. And, you know, there's a story in the Bible where, you know, a slave, if they wanted to, when they were freed, if they wanted to stay with their master, they could go to the doorpost. You remember this? And they would put their earlobe up against the doorpost, and they would drive an awl through their ear. And it was the piercing of the ear that signified that they were giving over their rights so they could continue to serve their master out of love and appreciation for what they did. Well, that's kind of the word picture here that's happening is Paul and Timothy are saying, we are resigned to the fact we are loyal to Jesus Christ, and we're going to obey him with all that we've got. And there is a significant joy that comes from that relinquishing of myself to trust in him.
But then another thing that you will pick out of that first verse is the growth of the church. Right? What do we talk about? You got two families that started out this church, and now, as he's writing to them ten years later, he's talking to them about different things. And one of the three words that pop up there are all the saints, which kind of gives you the idea of a bigger number of people. And it says with overseers and deacons, the idea is that they had grown so much spiritually that they were now, like, had leadership. They had a structure within their ministry. They had deacons who had specific areas of service that were used to be a blessing to the church. And really and truly, if you're Paul and you've established this congregation, and it's been a long time since you've been able to be back with them. The idea that they have grown and that they have prospered is the reality that God is continuing to do a good work in them. And he'll say that much here in just a few verses, but it's a powerful statement of how they were growing. So you can see that when Paul writes to them, it's not like when he writes to the Galatians. You know, he says to the Galatians, you foolish Galatians, he chews them out. He go to chorus. He's writing letters to them, chewing them out about different things. But no, here in Philippians, he's like, whoa, man. To the church that is thriving and growing, look, with all of the saints and the overseers and the deacons, how awesome it is. And he takes a typical greek greeting and modifies, does a little play on words and actually reaches out to them and connects them in a different way, says, grace to you and peace from God. Grace to you was a common greeting from the Greeks. That was really more like blessings be upon you. And the word for that was chiron. Okay, well, this word for grace is Kyris. So the idea is that he used this play on words to indicate it's not just blessings, but it's something a little bit deeper than that. It's loving kindness. It's favor from God, and it's that grace that brings peace. Well, in the jewish culture, they say, shalom, y'all have heard that probably. When I was younger, Donnie Hilliard, a friend of mine, went to the holy lands, and he came back and he brought me a gift. And the gift was a plaque that said, shalom, y'all. And I thought that was great. Must have come from south Israel. But anyway, it was a great. A great thing I've got in my office now. And the shalom was a common term that they would say as they left each other or as they greeted each other. And it was. The idea was peace be upon you.
But also this word that's used in this text, the greek form of this, talks about joining and tying people together, having a connection, and having this idea that we are essential parts of one another. So as he's using this play on words and he's reaching out to them, he's saying, hey, it's not just about greetings. It's about the grace of God that we share together. And that grace of God has brought us to this unity, this togetherness, this being joined together. And it's brought such a peace in our lives that we have each other. And again, continuing to think that he's doing this from a prison cell, he says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you. Now, I don't know how many of you have had this verse shared with you before, but when I was in, I'm going to say, middle school at camp, we had a cork board Bible camp. And this was before the days of warm fuzzies. This was probably the beginning of it for us, but you could go and write a little note to somebody and pin it on that cork board, and then everybody all day would go by and see if their name was on the corkboard. Oh, you know, and, no, there's no hope for me. But one time I went over there, and there was beautiful handwriting. It said Brandon Presnell. And I was like, whoa. So I go over and I picked that thing off of the cork board and opened it up, and someone said, I thank my God upon every remembrance of you. And I was like, this has to be a beautiful girl, you know? Like, that's kind of how I felt about it. How awesome is this? I wonder who's in love with me, you know? No, but I can tell you what it did for me when I heard that verse. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.
Have you ever written that to someone?
Have you ever encouraged someone with that? And I think about Paul, all the memories he's got, and we'll go over those in just a second. But he says, always in every prayer of mine, making my prayer with joy. Because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. Are you catching this? There's this joyful overtone. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you. And we just talked about a lot of them. These are just things that we know overtly that happened, for sure. But there were probably other things in those other missionary journeys that we could see, that we could maybe make deductions and stuff, and there's probably way more memories. But literally everything that Paul thought of when he thought of this church was positivity. It's like, that is a product of the Lord at work. Like, what happens when the Lord works in the hearts and the minds of people? That's it. In Philippi, they grow, they challenge themselves, they develop maturely in spirituality, and they are leaders and they are servants, and they are doing all of these things. And not only that, but they also supported his ministry generously, and we'll get more into that, just a few moments as well. But the expression he uses is joy. And the word for that is exceeding gladness. It's like my heart is dancing. It's kind of the idea. And the only way I can describe this is. And I know some of you will relate to this, two weeks ago, my daughter got married. And, you know. And I know right now all of you are thinking that I was a blubbering doofus. And I get it. I get it. I'm an emotional guy, and I know that you were all thinking that I lost it emotionally. Can I tell you something?
I did not lose it emotionally. Thank you very much. For those of you who lost money, it's on you. All right?
I did not.
I got to walk her down the aisle.
I got to take her down. And I was looking at this young man up front who had a tear in his eye and a smile on his face, and I got to present her to him to be, you know what happened in me? Joy leaping out of my chest, not because I was sad or because I was upset or I was so excited for her that she had found the man that she wanted to marry. I was so excited for him that he found the girl of his dreams, and I couldn't help but just exploding out of me. They went off on their honeymoon to Canada, and, of course, I'm watching live 360 going, are they safe? Are they around bears or they have bear spray? You know, I got all these things going on in my mind, wanting them to get back home. And when they showed up back home, what happened again, my heart leaped out of my chest to go see them and to hug them and to see the joy in their hearts. That's the expression here that Paul has about the christians at Philippi. He loves them with a deep love, and when he hears about them, it's exceeding joy that billows up out of his Chest and into his heart and into his mind about them.
And that joy is based on something. It's based on their partnership. Now, this word partnership is the word Koinonia, and it's used in a lot of different ways with regard to the church, because in that word is this idea of intense connection, intimacy, fellowship, but also the idea of a Buy in, the idea that we work together, that we are participating with one another. And so he says that the thing that makes it so joyful is that you are part of this ministry. You're not just a part of my work somewhere else. No. You're a part of the growing kingdom of God. And so there is this connection. It's the same thing that happens when we contribute our money on Sunday morning. It's the same thing that happens when we come together and have Koinonia, communion at the Lord's supper. It's the togetherness. It's the intimacy in Christ that pulls us together and makes us so connected to one another. And in two corinthians, chapter eight and nine, we talked about this a few weeks ago about giving generously. And Paul, as he's talking about, he references the churches in Macedonia. Who do you think he's talking about? He's talking about Philippi. And perhaps it was Lydia who maybe had serious wealth, but the whole congregation, it seems like they poured out their funds to help support the work that he was doing. And so he felt this strong connection, like everything that he did, they were a part of that. So my question to all of us this morning is, we enjoy this fellowship, right? We have a spiritual community here. You have friends that you spend time with. And I want to say this. It's not bad that we have friends here. In fact, that's a great thing that we have friends. But what I do want to ask us is this question is, is that association we have about being partakers in the gospel, or is it more social?
Because I think while the social stuff is important and good for us to have those connections, I think what Paul would say if he's here with us today is he would say the greater, more substantive connection and relationship is when all of us are united in our efforts together. How much did you love last week? Going out and serving green shirts all over the place, and we were doing some work in the sun. We were. It was hot. It was, you know, laborious. It was sweaty. It was tough. I saw some people walking back really tired from some of the things that they did. And you could say, well, that was, you know, fairly miserable, right? But that was not the tone in anybody's voice. The people that I worked alongside, the people that I saw coming back together for worship that night, there was an excitement and an enjoyment about us doing something together. How special is that when we are partakers in the gospel? And that's what he's calling them to be. He says, I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. Think about this. God doesn't leave us alone when our hearts are receptive and when we're open. God is at work, and he's shaping our hearts. Right? He's carefully reminding of us of his priorities, his truth. He's reminding us of his love for mankind. He's reminding us of the things that are his priorities. And he's also inviting us into two things, personal refinement and then influence in this world.
See, God uses us to reach out to people, and he uses our influence to bring people into the kingdom.
And so there's two things that should be happening with all of us is to recognize that God is still at work in us. And when we're receptive and when we read God's word and we let it impact the way we think about things, and we take it and we apply it to us and say, hey, I'm not doing those things, and we turn and shape our lives a little bit more, resembling what God's word has to say about us, his instructions for us. Then what happens as a byproduct is we get this idea of joy working together and influence in this world for him.
So he says, it's right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.
This statement resonates with me this morning.
God gives us something special when we engage in spiritual ministry together, doesn't he?
And that thing that we get as a result of it is the significance of inexplicable joy.
Right?
How is Paul able to say these things from prison?
How is it that he can look, in his circumstance, falling in this situation because of what he's doing for God and still find joy? It's because he set his sails for joy.
I'm reminded of Nehemiah, chapter eight, verse ten. You remember when Ezra came and he read the Bible, read the book of law to everyone, and they began to hear it. And as they were reading it began to touch their hearts. And some of them were touched by it. Some of them were convicted by it. But either way, they were grieved in their hearts because they knew they had failed and they didn't quite know where to go from here. And what does Ezra say to them? He says, don't grieve, for the joy of the Lord will be your strength. In other words, we have brought this back. Let it shape you. Let it be the joy that you have, and let it fuel your life moving forward.
So he says, for God is my witness how I yearn for you with all the affection of Christ Jesus. The word for affection here has, as it, the idea of. It says, the bowels of affection. And the idea is that there's something deep inside of us, a longing, a yearning inside, that we just have to be with each other. We have to support each other. We have to be there for one another. When we know things are going tough or we're going through difficult times, we just have this sense of a feeling, a pulling at our hearts for that. And that's what he's saying. And that affection is the same affection as Jesus Christ has for his followers. He says, and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and discernment.
You know, I see a lot of bumper stickers, and I'm sure you guys do, too, that say, you know, love, not hate.
And you'll see things that say, hey, let's love everyone.
And can I tell you something? Love everyone is actually a very strong christian principle.
We have an obligation to love everybody.
Everyone.
I don't care what their history is, their background. I don't care what they've gone through. I don't care what heinous things they've done. Jesus said to all of us, he said, love your enemies.
And certainly, if we're to love our enemies, we're to love everyone in this world. For God so loved the world that he gave his only for everybody, right? The principle is laid out that we love everyone, but then we have to compare this to the passage that says, but we can't love the world and the things of the world, right? So we have to be in the world. We have to love everyone, but we can't love everything that's in the world. And he says this. This idea of love overflowing. And, you know, we've had a lot of talk about overflow, but I want you to imagine, like, a. A water source just flowing out. And let's just think of it like in the sense of a flood, okay? Water is great, right? We all need water to survive, and. But an abundance of love. An abundance of water overflowing is wonderful, but there has to be something to guide us. And so Paul here is giving us a couple of parameters that I think are very important for us to filter our love through. Love everyone. Yes. Love everything. Absolutely not. What does he say? That we love overflowing, but he gives us this idea of there's some parameters, and those parameters are knowledgeable discernment. Think about like this. We have a. Sometimes we get floods in the back of our yard. There's a drainage pipe that runs down beside. Behind our house, and sometimes when it gets backed up or clogged, that water will run up into our backyard.
But it's those culvers, those areas of lower that they are trying on purpose to reroute that water, to take it away from the things that are, you know, harmful to your house and to your life.
They move that in different directions. Right? And so I think about this when I read this text. I want us to understand that we ought to love everyone. But there is this knowledge of God's word is really important for us to be able to say, hey, that's right. And that's not. And there's not right. And then discernment is the right and special way for us to deal with those two things. So I love this. He says, your love should overflow, and all of us should overflow with love. But it is in step with knowledge and discernment. And that's important for us to be reminded of. We can't love everything out there and be in agreement with everything out there. We have to be set apart, as God calls us to be.
But we do love every single person completely, with all of our heart.
So he says, so that you may approve what is excellent and be pure and blameless before day of Christ. This reminds me a lot of his words to Romans in Romans chapter twelve, where he says, you know that when we are not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewing of our mind, what does it say that you may be able to discern? What is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God? That's the same kind of phraseology here. And then the next verse sounds a whole lot like Galatians, doesn't it? Filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
As Christians, when we walk by the spirit, there are certain things that should be characteristics of who we are.
One of them is love.
The second one is what?
Joy.
We should have a smile on our face. We should be excited that we represent Jesus. And then there's patience and kindness and gentleness and self control, all those different things as well. Those are all byproducts of who we are and what God is doing inside of us. So joy is the result of valuing God's work in us above the pressure surrounding us. I think that's what Paul is teaching us here. Your circumstances don't matter, and we'll get into this a little bit more as we read into this text.
But if we want to let our circumstances dictate the way we feel, we're going to be pretty miserable most of the time.
But there is the ability inside of us. It's not about happiness. It's about joy. It's choosing to have a joyful spirit, knowing that this life is a temporary thing. There's something much better that waits us ahead. That perspective opens up our eyes to see beyond our circumstances and find joy. So let me give you two things to think about this week, and then the lesson is yours.
First of all, refuse to let life circumstances rob you of of the joy of the Lord.
Again. We can fixate on the things that we're going through, the struggles all around us, the concerns that we have and all of those different areas, and maybe even more. We can focus on those things, or we can say, hey, God is with me. He's going to help me through this difficulty. And then the second part of this is make the partnership of the gospel your fellowship. Make it important to you that you are walking alongside people in this assembly, others, to reach other people with the good news that Jesus Christ came to save them from their sins. I hope all of us will commit ourselves to that. It may be this morning that there are some who need to commit to Jesus, have their sins washed away, die to yourself, be buried in baptism and be raised up to walk a new life. Or it may be that there's some in here who have just lost their joy.
Maybe you have fixated or focused yourself on the things that are surrounding you, and you've allowed that to take away the joy that God has given you in Jesus.
I ask you this morning to embrace that again. Come forward. We'll encourage you. We'll encourage you in prayer and our support.
And if you need anything, I hope you'll come this morning while we stand and sing.
