Word and Way is kicking off again. This is our second one this coming Wednesday, 7 o'clock start. And I do just want to say, because I know some of you are wanting to come, but you couldn't make it to the first one and you're like, can I still come? And of course, this is the kind of thing you can just drop into at any point. So first and third Wednesdays, we are going through the Book of Philippians.
But it will not matter whether you jump in from the first week or the third week or the fifth week or whatever it might be. So, yes, we will be gathering. Again, we had about 45 people come to the first one. I cannot tell you how encouraged I was. I was fully prepared to just have a nice little holy huddle of a few little like minded folks. And 45 of you came. And there was, there was many more who said, said they wanted to be there but couldn't for different reasons.
So I'm so profoundly encouraged that there are so many people in our church family hungry to, chew on the Word of God, to know it, and to not just know the Word, to know the God of the Word. Because that's a really important part of Word and Way, it is not just about giving you information about Scripture, it is that you would come to know the God of the Word in deeper and deeper and deeper ways, in more personal, intimate ways. So, yeah, I'm super encouraged and very excited.
And so, yeah, we are doing Philippians and I've done it that way just to be kind to myself as we start this new thing.
I thought, okay, we'll stick to the same book that we're doing in church and that way I'm not having to, you know, deal with different parts of the Bible in big and significant kind of ways and so that is to be kind to me and it's also kind of cool, right, to be doing it, this is we're going to go into Philippians this morning and then to have the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into it, on these Word and Way nights but going forward it won't necessarily be that way. I have lots of fun ideas.
in mind. Yes, it is good. It is very good. Okay, so let us begin by reading our passage of Scripture for today, which is Philippians 1 verses 1 to 11. All right, it says this, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all God's holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons, grace and peace to you. From God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, I thank my God every time I remember you.
In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the very first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart. And whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me.
God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. So that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ Filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and the praise of God Amen, it's a great passage, isn't it? Yes, so good. All right, who remembers Marie Kondo? Yeah?
Okay. Who's got zero idea of who I'm just talking about? Who's never heard of this Marie Kondo person? All right, so Marie Kondo, darling back, I don't know, how many years ago do you reckon? Five, six years ago? Do you think she was pre COVID? Yeah, okay, that's the marker, isn't it? You know, it used to be, you know, BC and AD and now it's before, which is still BC. Okay. So Marie Kondo was this wonderful, adorable little Asian lady who helped us all declutter our homes.
And one of the ways that Marie advised us to help us declutter our homes was to take up various items that we are considering whether to keep or jettison from our lives and to ask the question, does this spark joy? Yeah, does this sound familiar? Yep. So it's the whole, if it doesn't spark joy, you get rid of it. And if it does, you keep it. All right. So here's a question for you, church family. As you behold the person of Jesus, does he spark joy for you? It's a good question to consider.
And, and don't just do the, don't just do the whole, yeah, I'm a good Christian. So of course he sparks joy. No, no, no. Answer it honestly, in your heart. Does Jesus, as we have worshipped him this morning, as we have heard his name proclaimed this morning, throughout this week, as you have beheld him, has he sparked joy? Does his gospel spark joy in you as you consider the mission of Christ in the world? Does that spark joy in you? Well, here's one. He's bride. Does she spark joy?
He's bride, which is the church, which is all of us across the planet. Does the bride of Christ that which sparks joy in Jesus? Spark joy in you. It did yesterday. Sharon was sparked with great joy yesterday as she participated in Gather 25. And speaking of that, yesterday, last night I was driving and I was tuning in to Gather 25 as I was driving down the freeway and it was a section on the persecuted church.
And if you're not sure what this Gather 25 thing's all about, you can jump online and you can watch all the stuff that's happened over the last 25 hours or so. It's pretty amazing. Very profound.
Profoundly encouraging, but I'm listening to one story of this young Muslim girl who had come to faith Simply by, she's in a, I can't remember what country exactly she was in, but she had never met a Christian but she had gone online one day, Muslim, just one of these really strongly Muslim locked countries and And just written the question, who is Jesus?
And in that search, she had come to Christ in quite a profound and dramatic way and so much so that, you know, she, she hadn't told her family what had happened or if she knew what would happen to her if she did, but her brother noticed the difference in her. The brother noticed the joy that she now had. And he confronted her and he said, have you become a Christian?
And she said yes, I have and he said you've got two hours to renounce your faith or we will kill you and So she's It took two hours, what am I going to do? But she could not renounce the joy that she now knew. She could not renounce the love that she had now come to know. And so she was martyred for her faith, a modern day martyr. But she was known by what? Her joy. Her joy. Oof. Pretty amazing, hey? You know, I consider some of the people in our church family.
And there are some beautiful, joyful people. We've got loud, joyful Chris over here, but, you know, and I appreciate that so, so very much. My beautiful father and I are in exuberance joy in his commitment to be a person of joy. And that has been a commitment, hasn't it, Chris? It's been a choice. I'm going to apprehend the joy of the Lord and I'm going to share it wherever my foot treads. That is a conviction that Chris has walked with. And, you know, it's, it's a joy for him.
But it makes it him a joy to be around as well. I think of Ahmet. Yeah, most of you will know Ahmet. Where is Ahmet right now? Ahmet's in Albania. What is Ahmet doing in Albania? For the joy of the Lord, he is going wherever the Lord sends him. And if you know Ahmet, you've only got to be around him five minutes. He burns with a joy. for the mission of Christ in the world. And he will count the cost. And he will go wherever the good Lord leads him because of that joy that fuels him.
And it's contagious and it's infectious and it is beautiful to be around. And we all know Steve Scrimgeour as well. You know, he's just Captain Exuberant Joy. The joy of the Lord just literally pours out of every pore in his body. But then we have beautiful people too. I think of, like, Johan. You know, most of you will know Johan. I don't know where he is right now. Is he here? Oh, there he is right at the back. Johan, you just have this most beautiful, gentle joy.
But it's still so obvious, it is still there and it is still clear what inspires it because you hear Johan talk about the scriptures, you hear Johan talk about God and there is a joy about that, there's a joy that comes with it. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And so, let's consider for a moment, this passage I've just read, what is the context of it? We went deep into this at the first Word and Way, we went deep into the context of Philippians.
And it's really important that we apprehend the context to really be able to extract all the goodness that this letter has for us. For Paul is writing this letter, the context from which Paul is writing matters significantly and because it adds so, so very much weight to the words that he says. These are not just idle words, conceptual words, abstract concepts for Paul. This is a lived reality that he is sharing with this church. And so Paul is in prison here as he writes this letter.
This is one of his prison letters. Now he's in a prison, possibly. In Rome, possibly in Ephesus, Biblical scholars can't quite land definitively on which one because it's not clear. You're gonna gotta put the puzzle pieces together, but it really matters not because the conditions would have been the same. And so he's writing from, not just mildly uncomfortable kind of context, from a Incredibly difficult, painful, just the worst of circumstances in so many ways.
One writer writes about the experience of being in a Roman prison. He says this, It is not a surprise that these awful conditions cause such profound distress of body and soul that prisoners, if they did not become sick and die, wish themselves dead or actively sought suicide. So this is the context that Paul's writing from. He's chained to a jailer. 24 7. I'm assuming they're rotate shifts or whatever. And these chains are, you know, they're not fur lined or anything.
You know, they're going to be rubbing the flesh off his wrists and his ankles. There's no bed to lie on. Who knows how many people are in a cell with him. They don't feed you in Roman prisons. And so if people, your friends and family on the outside who are now so exceedingly ashamed of you because the shame of being in prison in that culture was horrendous. So you're going to be lucky if anybody actually does care for you because of the shame of being associated with somebody in prison.
So the only way you're going to survive is somebody actually does bring you food and does actually care for you from the outside. Now you're not in prison as a punishment, you're just in prison while they figure out what to do with you. And so Paul's facing this very uncertain future. Now he only is in these horrendous conditions, he doesn't know what's going to happen to him. And so, the sentence could be passed, he could be sentenced to death. It could be banishment.
It could be, well, flogging. He's pretty good at copying a flogging by the sounds, if you know, you read his letters. You don't know what it's going to be, so he's sitting there in an uncertain future as well. And it is from this place that Paul writes of joy, of rejoicing. He writes of confidence and hope in Christ, of love and passion for the advancement of the mission of the gospel in the world. He writes of contentment. It's amazing what he writes of from this place.
Just incredibly harsh and hard circumstances. And so the vision and the intent of this series is I want us to look at Paul. And I want us to wonder and to come to really want what he's got. You know, that classic Harry Met Sally line, I'll have what she's having. You know, I want us to look at the life of Paul like that and go, I want what he's got. I want to see how he sees. I want to know Jesus, how he knows Jesus. I want to know the gospel, the way that Paul knows gospel, knows the gospel.
I want that. I want that kind of joy and passion and hope and confidence in Christ because that's where it all comes from, from Paul. As you read this letter, all of his joy and his hope, it's not manifested, it's not some hype. It comes from a grounded confidence in Christ. This is where his hope and his joy comes from. His love and affection for Jesus and his people and for the mission of the gospel comes from his confidence. And so I want us to think of Paul as our mentor.
So one of the, Paul is going to mentor us in the areas of joy and the areas of hope. He will be our mentor. So may we lean in with a posture of curiosity, posture of wanting to learn, of looking at a life like Paul's and going, I see that fruit and I wanna, I want that kind of fruit to be the testimony of my life as well. Because if you have the Holy Spirit, Red Door Church family, there will be something resonating on the inside of you, even as I say this right now.
No matter the circumstances that are coming upon you, if you have the Holy Spirit, your Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit within you will start to Resonate and go, yes, because that is what the Spirit is for. Yeah, the Spirit is to reveal Jesus in you but through you as well. And so it might be quiet and it might be very, very dormant because there are many other things squishing it, crushing it, crowding it out, but it will be there. Lean in to that voice, that stirring.
Start to stoke the fire of it. You know, just towards the end of last year, and I've shared this a little bit already, but I really started to feel a growing conviction around this area of joy, particularly in my own life. So this is, you know, a personal thing as well. I'm certainly not standing up here as one who has absolutely got this nailed. That's what I'm saying. Paul as a mentor and not Dale, right? Because Dale tends to the dark side quite easily.
And so I felt this growing conviction around joy for my own life. Where was it in my life? Why was it so absent? And now, I could give you a lot of justifiable reasons, you know, there's a lot of hard stuff that we deal with in our life, both in a peripheral but in a deeply personal way as well. And you could look at that in the eyes of the natural and go, I understand why you might struggle to have joy, because you are faced with pretty painful stuff on the daily.
Situations that don't look like they're changing at all. And I can understand why you might feel discouraged, despairing, hopeless in that. But there's this little fact that, well, I profess to know Jesus. And I have the Holy Spirit, the fruit of which is what? So where is it in my life? Why is it not manifesting? And so I have been on a personal journey of wrestling with this myself.
But as I've looked around, in all honesty, I feel like there's a pervasive lack of it within the broader church family as well. You know, it's there in little But I see way more despairing than I do persevering in joy. I see an awful lot of weariness and discouragement. And this is not to keep condemnation on anyone, but it's like how sad it is to have it right there. To have joy right there and to not grab hold of it. What a waste!
Because what Jesus did, what it cost Him, what it cost the Father to send the Son to give us joy. Okay, I'm just for a moment going to go to the very last scripture of my message because I'm going a little bit off script. But anyway, it's really good. Okay, so John 15, 9 11. Jesus said, as a father of love me, so I've loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you'll remain in my love. Just as I have kept my father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this. What?
So that my joy may be what in you and that your joy may be what? Complete, I mean, take the implications of what Jesus is saying here. All that he has suffered is what? So, and Jesus suffered a lot, right? Like, that's an understatement. An understatement of the universe is to say Jesus just suffered a lot. No. The worst that any human being has or ever will suffer. Jesus suffered so that we could know joy. And so it's all there for the taking.
And yet we somehow fail so often to apprehend it and to live out of it. Which seems such a very waste to me, doesn't it? And like, what does it say to a watching world? About the sufficiency of Christ in our life when the people of Jesus walk around Burdened and discouraged.
It's like what have we got to to share with the world If we haven't apprehended the joy that is right there for the taking it is right there Do you know my friends you're sitting there and you're going I can't imagine how I could have joy in my circumstances Well try harder. All right, and I know that's not a cool thing to say in church, right? Because oh, that's so condemning. Mm hmm You've got a God given, God given imagination. Right? Right? Just imagine yourself in your place of trial.
Imagine wrestling through whatever you're wrestling through with joy. Right? Because this is what Paul is telling us we can do. It is all there. Right? It's not that we need the circumstance to go away to have joy. No, no, no. So this, this was my lesson last year. It's like, God's saying to me, you have this wrestle, and this is a daily one, and it is a hard one, it is a painful one. But will you allow imagination to rise up, that you can endure this with joy?
That each day you can get on before the reality of this, and you can come with joy, and you can still grieve, and you can still wrestle, but you can do it with joy. Sometimes I think our, our, our imaginations are just a little bit limited, or we've believed the lie that, These two things can't exist. Grief and joy can't co exist together. Or, you know, struggle and wrestle can't co exist with joy. They absolutely can! Happiness can't co exist with these things. Oh, but joy can.
And we've just been sold the lie, and we've bought it that happiness and joy are the same thing. They're not, right? Whatever excruciatingly painful and difficult circumstances, and I'm, and I know a lot of your stories here, and they are hard, but my word to you is if we take God's Word seriously, you can face these horribly difficult situations with joy, and you know what that does? Oh my gosh. It just transforms. everything. And it doesn't make it, well in a way it does make it less hard.
But we can have joy and we can hope, have hope in the wrestle and the struggle and Paul is going to teach us how we can do that. And that was way longer introduction than I wanted it to be. Alright, so key themes through this letter. We've got spiritual mentorship going on through the personal example of Paul. We've got defiant joy in the midst of adversity. Paul is putting his money where his mouth is here. Remember where he's writing from, right?
So he's not just writing about some abstract theological concept. This is real for him. And another key theme that's so important is the reorientating around the worth of Jesus Christ. It all centers on this. Paul calls believers to the center their lives around the incomparable value of knowing Christ, suggesting that true fulfillment, true joy and hope come from this relationship. And yes, they do. So let's go through this passage bit by bit.
So, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all God's holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseer's deacons, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So let's just pick up a couple of things from this introductory verse here. So he uses the word servant. And the Greek word for this is the word doulos. Some of you would have heard, that word before, and it just means, it means a slave, right? Interesting, isn't it?
Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus. It's not a, the word servant, the word slave, they're not particularly compelling words in our culture today, are they? No. But when you understand what is actually meant by the word doulos, you understand what Paul is saying here. A slave is one who has given himself up to do the will of another. That's the definition of doulos, one who has given their own will up to do the will of another. And so who is Paul and who is Timothy?
He is one who has given up his own will to do the will of Jesus Christ. And we should all have that posture. Because guess what? Our own wills largely suck. Our own wills are very, very corrupted. Our own wills are bent in on themselves. They are full of all sorts of unhealthy deceptions, distortions, corruptions, right? We should be tossing our wills off with gay abandon because mostly they are fairly putrid things, right? And going, oh my gosh, Jesus, your will is good. Right?
It's just not that simple though, is it? We get so attached to our own way of doing things and our own way of being in the world. But what Paul is saying here, I am one who has given up my own will to give my life wholly and solely to pursue the will of another and that other is the person of Jesus. And then he says this line here, Grace and peace to you from God. Grace, the favour of God and God's empowering presence to do his will.
Peace, the deep soul assurance that comes from knowing that you are saved, that you are in right relationship with God. God wants you to know these things. Paul writes, right, this sit, the way he's written it is effectively this is coming from God's heart through mine to you. And this same God is saying this same message to you, church family. In the midst of what can be a challenging word for sure, God's heart towards you is grace and peace.
It is that you would know His presence, His empowering presence, and that you would know and have a deep abiding assurance that you are good with God, that you're good with your Creator. Yes! That's pretty great, right? Considering What giant Muppets we all are in this room, right? In terms of the goodness of God and the holiness of God. And considering how much that we have all sinned against Him, right?
And we've misused His good creation in various different ways and the different ways that we all participate in the ways of evil in this world. And you'll see me going, I do all this? Yeah, you do. We've just, we're just really good at sanctifying it. We're really good at going, yeah, but I'm not as bad as that guy, so I'm actually okay. And I'm compared to a holy God. But then we get to say, we're good with Him.
We're good with Him. We could end the sermon there because there is enough joy to be gleaned just from the truth in Paul's introduction that we could just go, oh my gosh, praise the Lord, let's worship. But I've got pages more to go, so Yes, the joy, preach it Chris. Yes, alright, and the joy sit before you in the pages and pages I've still got to go. No, alright, it's going to be great people, hang with me. Alright, next slide. Next part of this passage.
I thank my God every time I remember you and all my prayers for all of you. I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. So good. There is again, just in this couple of verses here, there is so much, but let me draw your attention firstly. To the third and fourth words there.
I thank my God. What does that say to you, church family? Just that little phrase, my God. Is he your God? Or is he just God? But this, how personal is that? How intimate is that? This is my God. When He is your God, when that's how you speak of Him, you will know joy, my friends. You will know joy, unstoppable, unshakable. Is He your God? And again, it's all there for the taking. You just have to enter in, and you just have to have faith that it is true, that that's who He wants.
to be for you and to you. He wants to be your God, intimately acquainted with you. Song of songs, my beloved is mine and I am his. Is that how you think about your relationship with God? As beloved as the beloved. He says, I always pray with joy. I always play, pray with great pleasure and great delight. Picture him in a. This is pretty powerful, potent stuff, isn't it?
If it can enable you to express things this way, it's gotta be pretty powerful, this joy of which Paul testifies to, that is all grounded in his confidence in Jesus. He's joyful because of their partnership in the gospel. So because the gospel is his very great treasure and delight and mission and purpose to have people who are partnering in that with him, the spreading of it, the advancement of it, that brings great joy to his heart. And what is the gospel exactly?
It is the good news that the risen Jesus is Lord and King of the world. That is the gospel. I don't know how, maybe how you've heard it framed before, but that is the essence of the gospel. That Paul is so passionately and joyfully devoted his life to see advanced in the world. That the Lord Jesus Christ, the risen Lord Jesus Christ, is king of the world. Again, we could just leave it there. Because there is enough joy to be had from that reality alone. Because this king has defeated death.
This king is the one that calls you his own, has chosen you, has called you, has united his life to your life. Can you see how it's just a little bit wrong to not have joy? Yeah? To be called a child of God, to be permanently united to the resurrected life of Christ, now and for all eternity, unshakable, unbreakable, the love of God, bound to you now and forevermore, in perfect faithfulness. It's a little bit of an injustice to not be people of the deepest and profoundest joy, right? Right?
I don't want to be insensitive. I don't want to downplay anybody's sufferings by this. But then I don't want to leave you in that place and go, well, oh, they're there. Your stuff's really hard. It is. But it's not the end of the story, and it's not even the biggest part of your story by a long shot. Because the risen Lord Jesus Christ It's the king of the world. Oh! And that's what Paul was willing to suffer anything to see proclaimed and believed and testified to.
And then he writes being confident of this. And so he's got this deep assurance and knowing that what God has started, God is going to finish. There is a good work that God is working in you, my friends. And he's God. He can't lie. He started it. He's going to finish it. He's not like so many of us who are really great at starting jobs and not good at finishing them. Yeah? I'm sure there's plenty of us in this room right now. We've got a lot of half finished jobs at home.
You should see our ceiling. It's just, oh, it's just, don't ever come and look up, right? Because we have this very unfinished job on our ceiling. Um. And some of us are great starters, right? We're not so great at finishing. That's not God, okay? Because God is perfect in integrity. If He starts something, He will finish it. He's not going to get distracted. He's not going to get bored. He's not going to go, Oh my gosh, that's too hard. He will finish it.
So He has started a good work in every single one of you who has called Him your King and your Lord. And He will finish it. And you can have the very greatest confidence. No matter how it might look to your natural eyes, you can be full of joy and hope that He will complete it. Because He is faithful. And you know, we, you hear a lot, you hear it quite a bit around Red Door, you know, is this whole, we're called to be disciples, we're called to follow Jesus, to be with Him that we would be what?
Come like Him. Yeah? And sometimes I think we can hear that and what we can end up doing is we can end up trying to be like Jesus. Yeah? So yeah, we do the whole WWJD thing, you remember that was Great bracelets. Oh man, those bracelets are crushing What a crushing weight to try and do what Jesus did. Right. It's like, oh gosh. We don't have to try to be like Jesus, 'cause God's doing that work in us. We do have a work to do, however. Right. And that's to die.
Okay, we, our work is to die to ourself, to daily take up our cross. Okay, your, your cross that you take up isn't your difficult spouse. Okay, it isn't your painful friend. Oh, we've all got our cross to bear. It isn't your bad hair. Okay, your cross is your whole life. Yeah, when you're daily taking up your cross, you're saying, I'm laying down my life and killing a dead that your resurrection life can be birthed through me. You know resurrection life can only come through death.
The only way you're going to taste resurrection life is to die to the things that are outside of the will and the way of God. And that's our role. And then God does the rest. He does the transforming into Jesusness in and through us. All right, next bit. It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, says Paul. Really start to hear Paul's affection for this church. Now Paul writes quite a few letters in, letters in Scripture, doesn't he? Yeah?
And not all of them are super friendly, right? But he really has strong affections for this church. And if you want to Do a deeper dive into the backstory of this church. Go read Acts 16. Gives you a beautiful, beautiful explanation of the foundations of this church in Philippi. So this church, okay, just a sideline. This is fun little fact, right? Do you know who was the first member of this church? Anyone? Lydia, right? So Paul's on this missionary journey. Paul wants to head over east, right?
And it's so great when you read it in Acts, right? It's so functional, like the Spirit of the Lord was like blocking him, going, no, no Paul, you can't go that way. No, you can't go that way. And then Paul has a dream about this Macedonian guy. He says, come help us. And like that, but I'm going east and they are over west. And so he's like, well, okay, keep getting blocked. So I better go that way. So Paul goes that way. This is the very first church in Europe.
The very first Christian church in Europe is the church in Philippi. And he gets there, and he's like, well, who am I going to preach to? Okay, it's a Roman outpost. There's no Jewish people there, because there was no synagogue. You need to have a synagogue. You needed ten Jewish men. There was no synagogue. So there's not, he's not got a lot of Jewish people to leverage off here. So he finds himself down by this river one day, and there's this lady with some other Girls, and they're praying.
They've got a little prayer meeting going, and they're praying to God, but they've never even, they don't even really know who this God is, right? But they're still praying anyway. And then it beautifully says, you know, and God opens Lydia's heart to receive the good news about Jesus Christ. And her and her household get baptized that day. That is, Lydia is the founding member, a Gentile woman is a founding member of the very first church in Europe. So, and do you know who the next member is?
Because you know what happens then? Right? Paul, they're, they're wandering around Philippi and they've got that annoying, like, slave girl who keeps telling the future behind them and then Paul just gets so jack of it and just goes, Get out of her!
And they're like, you know, and then the owners of this slave girl are not happy because she can no longer tell the future and so they end up in prison and then the whole in chains and they're worshipping and praying and the earthquake and the chains and then the jailer says, What must I do to be saved? Right? And so the second founding member of this church. is a jailer. This is cool, isn't it? And this is how the Gospel moves through the world, right?
Not through fancy famous preachers, but just this move just through ordinary people, that God, whose God opens the hearts to. Oh, go read Acts 16. It's so good. All right, back to this. It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart. And whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. Now put another translation here.
This is N. T. Wright's translation. And so let's just have a look at this and just see if you can see the difference. It is right for me to think this way about all of you. You have me in your hearts. Here in prison as I am, working to defend and bolster up the gospel, you are my partners in grace, all of you. Yes. God can bear witness how much I'm longing for all of you with the deep love of King Jesus. Did you pick up the little difference there?
It's like, okay, who's got who in whose heart here, right? You know, in Paul, in this first translation, NIV, it's like, you know, I've got you in my heart. But then, so it must be tricky to translate, right? Because NNT, right, is saying, oh no, Paul is rejoicing because they have him. in their hearts. Okay, I think the point is, right, it's, it's this beautiful expression of delighting in one another. And I, you know, I delight in you all most days. Not every day, right?
But, but I want this, right? I want this posture, right? Just so, just Just be full of delight in the body of Christ, in the church family, in my church family. Imagine church family, if you got up on a Sunday morning, you're like, I'm so full of delight for my church family. And you spring out of bed and you're just getting ready so eagerly with so much joy because you have so much delight in your heart that has come from where?
Jesus's delight in this church family, because while you might not find this church family particularly delightful, Jesus does. Jesus finds this church family incredibly beautiful and actually worth dying for. We need a little bit re envisaging, don't we, a lot of the time. But imagine getting up with that posture. Oh, Lord, give me your delight for your church family. And you come through those doors at 1050.
No, 950. Because you delight in the music team so much, and you want to encourage them by being here when they start, and you've got your kids in there, and when the rooms are open, and you know, and you've, and you've just been just overflowing with joy as you've come in. This is possible, people. If we posture ourselves and we have a vision for it, it is all there for the apprehending. There is so much agape love going on right here. And this is loving with the deep love of King Jesus.
Paul loves this church with the love of Jesus because Jesus has first loved him. And this is not just lip service. This church has sacrificed for Paul in big ways in the sending of resources to him. Firstly, for the spreading of the gospel and the good news. And now to support him in jail. So in 2 Corinthians 8.
Verses 1 to 5, Paul talks about this and he's writing to the church in Corinthians here, but in Corinth, but he's referring to the church in Philippi as he does and he says and now brothers and sisters we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. So Philippi is a part of that, the church, church in Thessalon Thessalonica as well. So in the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity.
Wasn't a beautiful link from our generosity series we just finished. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able and even beyond their ability, entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the Lord's people. And they exceeded our expectations. They gave themselves first of all to the Lord and then by the will of God, also to us.
And so my point here is this love and this affection, this delight and this devotion that they have for one another, it's not just lip service. These people have put their money where their mouth is, giving beyond what they even had, it's said here, in order to support the work of the Gospel, to participate in it, and Paul himself as well. What a beautiful, beautiful picture of what church family can be. Alrighuh, next bit. And this is my prayer. Oh, I love this.
I've been praying this prayer so much lately. This is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and to the praise. of God. So he uses the word knowledge here. Your love would abound in knowledge. That's interesting, isn't it?
So often when we think about love, it's all this feeling kind of stuff, right? But he's actually talking about knowledge here, your love would abound in knowing, in, and it's a specific knowing that he's talking about. It's not just general knowledge. It is a knowing of God's will. It's about knowing of God's way, a knowing of the gospel and the promises and the benefits of knowing Christ. So that particular knowing would deepen.
And the insight, so what's he's talking about, this has to do with perception, perspective, how one perceives the world, that your love would abound more and more In how you know God, but how you see the world as well. You know, through the generosity series, we kind of talked about, you know, when Jesus uses the whole good eye, bad eye. Parable. If your eyes are good, then your whole being is full of light. But if your eyes are bad, then how dark is that darkness that is within you?
You know that? And so, this idea here is that, is this prayer that Paul has, is that these people, that their eyes would be good, that they would look out with eyes of love and see the goodness, and they'd see the God in the world, and their being would be full of light in that place. All right. Righteousness. What's he talking about here when he mentions righteousness is to be in alignment with God's reality in thinking and in feeling and in acting. And so what's the implication in all of this?
So when the people of God abound in knowing the will and the way of God, they are seeing and perceiving God's true reality so that the way they think and feel and act is in alignment. Then God is glorified. We can't miss that last little bit there. All of this is to the glory and the praise of God. All of this. You know, if you are wondering, if you've got questions about how you should be in the world, decisions before you, put this framework over all of it. Will this bring glory to God?
Will this bring glory to God? It's incredibly clarifying. If you are wrestling with something, how to respond, how to behave, what to do, what to choose, what decision to make, will this bring glory to God? It's a really, I found a really helpful question to sit under in moments of uncertainty. What is the purpose of the church? The purpose of the church is to bring glory to God. And this mean we live lives where we feel, we think, and we act in ways that reflect the greatness of God.
And this is what Paul is doing so beautifully, and how he expresses himself in this letter. But when we have a joyless and a hopeless and an anxious faith, my friends, this does not bring glory to God. And again, this is not to make you feel bad, alright? This is just to stir up faith and vision. For all that God has put before you, that all is right there, if we would just apprehend it. Not only is being joyless, hopeless, and anxious, you know, a sad way to live.
It is offensive, as we've touched on, to God in light of what he has done for us and what it cost him to do it. All right, so in summary, let's just look at this final little bit. When your confidence is in the good news of Jesus Christ, as Paul's clearly is, and in the love of God, and God's willingness and ability to work in and through you, God's ability to work in and through you, oh gosh, if we would just rest alone in that. There would be so much joy to be had.
You will have a joy and a hope that fills and fuels you with a deep affection and desire for Christ's mission and for those that you have been called to partner with in the advancement of this mission. So just quickly as I do bring this home, all right, what application can we take from this? Firstly, let's ask the question, where is your confidence, church family? Where is your confidence? Again, a really good question to sit with, because we know our confidence.
When, when, when discouragement and, anxiety begin to take hold, you know, it's usually a sign we need some kind of recalibrating. Our confidence has shifted. Yeah, it's shifted outside of the person of Christ, outside of the gospel of Christ, outside of the sufficiency of God in our world, and it's shifted on to something else. And often, you know, Adam touched on it at the beginning of the service, right?
So often we get wobbly and shaky because You know, it's, it's actually, you know, if you're feeling wobbly and shaky right, shaky right now in the world, you know, just go, oh, okay, just allow it to be a gateway into deeper peace with God, okay? Don't go all boo hoo about it, oh my gosh, I'm a bad Christian, I've got anxiety, I'm feeling hopeless, just go, oh my, take it before the Lord, and go, oh wow, alright, Lord, I need some recalibrating here, alright?
Remember, this is not about earning favour with God, this is not about earning approval with God, you've already got it! You've got as much favour and approval that you're ever going to get, right now, okay? So you're free to just come with your anxious, weary, weighed down heart and go, Lord, I am off track. The wheels are wobbly. What are we going to do about this, Lord? Okay, because I really don't know how to fix this myself. And you are free to come before Him like that.
Okay, don't try and fix it in your own strength. Okay, bring it before the God who wants you to know His grace and His peace, as we talked about right at the beginning. All right, secondly, what do you need to die to? That this Christ confidence would stop being choked in you. What might you need to die to? So my friends, let me put it in another way. What maybe are you beholding? What do you set your eyes on in any given day? What, I guesuh, fills your field of view?
As you look at your day, as you look out at your week. What are you beholding? Are you beholding the beauty of Christ through the Word of God? Are you beholding just the beauty of God just through creation as you're out in the world? Or are you just feeding off the life sucking news cycles and social media dribble? No wonder you're struggling, folks, because there's ain't no joy and hope to be found in those places at all.
I swear the very best thing a lot of you could do for yourself would be to walk out those doors this morning, put your phone under the rear tire of your car and back over it. Oh my gosh. I reckon joy would flood your heart in an instant for many of you who beholdened to this thing and all the toxic crap that you feed your soul as you come before it. Oh, we gotta be more vigilant in this space. It's not good. You know what? The world doesn't need you to know all the news for the world to be okay.
Because guess what? Jesus is king of the world. And that is the good news. And Paul says it later on in Philippians, whatever is noble, right, pure, lovely, whatever is admirable, excellent, praiseworthy, these things, put those things in your field of vision. And oh, it's transformative. For me personally, a big one, and God has put his finger on, it's like, you need to die to worry. Now, I'm not necessarily an overtly anxious person.
I don't know that people, you know, know, they've known me for a while, go, oh yeah, Dale's got, you know, because we know people who are anxious, right? But it's amazing how much anxiety we actually operate. at a chronic level, right, not necessarily an acute level that manifests in obvious ways, but at a chronic level, chronic level anxiety. And God's really had his finger on that in me. And it's like, and it's been a call to die to it.
Not to go to therapy about it, not to say I'm not against therapy, okay, okay, it's alright, it's all good, alright, but to literally just, to not pick, to choose to not pick it up. Okay, today I'm stepping into this day, and all the circumstances which are relatively similar to the day before, but I'm not going to pick up worry about it. I'm going to pick up joy. I'm going to pick up confidence in Christ.
I'm not going to wear worry anymore, because it is not helping anything at the end of the day. And so there was a real call upon me. And so my weapons of mass destruction against worry? Gratitude. You know, you talk about how worry kills gratitude, but you know what? The opposite. Gratitude kills worry. Prayer, confession, the presence of God. And so I had this new motto, and look, I've even, I've even written it on the top of my page here. No worry, no hurry is my new motto. No worry.
And some of you are going, would you please hurry up and finish this message? No worry, no hurry, for the glory of God. Yeah, for my good, for sure. And for your benefit, because it is so much better that you have a Dale that isn't full of worry and hurry, right? I am far bigger blessing to you all. A non worried, a non hurried Dale. But ultimately, it's for the glory of God, right? So I'm laying this down for the glory of God.
I'm laying it down because Jesus is king of the world and he's called me his own and this does not honor him. And that's not from a place of guilt or condemnation. That's because I love him. And I want to do what's pleasing to him. So you're walking out of here with a, with a sense of weight and burden and guilt and shame that you have failed to hear me. And you've missed what Paul is saying here as well. Don't have a bar of it. The enemy will try to convince you, right?
Don't listen to his stupid lies. There is no guilt, shame or condemnation in this at all. It is all glorious, joyful, hopeful freedom. You know, the other thing I've had to come to die to, and this is true for many of you as well, that my success in life, my well being in life, is all dependent upon me. So I have got to take up the truth that Paul talks about here. That God will do it. God will do it. He is faithful, and He will do it. And I am His responsibility. That's liberating, isn't it?
He's called me His own, therefore I'm His problem. I mean, it's not to say I don't have responsibility, right? I'm not abdicating responsibility here. Okay, my responsibility is to apprehend the truth and to follow Jesus and to yield my life and surrender and all those things. But ultimately, I'm his problem, right? Because, you know, one of the things that crushes us as leaders here at Red Door, Is when we think that you all are our problem, right? And that sounds bad, okay?
Hear me out, alright? We are here to love and serve you, okay? And to see you experience all the fullness of Christ and, and to be released into the callings that God has upon your life. But when we take ultimate responsibility for that Well, that is, that is above our pay grade, right? And we forget, and then we get crushed and weary, and we go, Oh my gosh, actually, no, Red Door is yours, Lord. You are the buck stops here, guy. Yeah?
So don't get weighed down by your own ability to fix yourself, change yourself, because that's his problem. That's above your purview, okay? You don't have the goods to be able to conform yourself into Christ's likeness. So just don't even bother. It's just an exercise in frustration. Just go, Lord, what are you asking me to die to? And then trust He will bring the resurrection life from that place. All right. Okay, no, let's, let's call it there.
Okay, you're going to wonder what that amazing last point was, but never mind. Team, how about you come on up? Because I think it's probably more important at this point that we worship than we hear what I have written on this piece of paper. This one thing I will say for you though, church family, you know, just, just quickly touching on Paul's affection for this church in Philippi.
This deep, deep affection that he has for them is really quite U you know, I really want that level of affection for those that God has called me to partner in the work of the gospel with. And for a lot of the time I do, often I just sit back and pinch myself and go, oh my gosh, the people I get to do this work with are just beautiful. But that's not always the story, right? And and so what I found incredibly powerful is, come on up, come on up, come on up, chickens.
Could we have a, this final prayer here, um. The one that, I'm going to put my glasses back on, bear with me people. Yeah, this. Okay, so this final prayer. Here. And this is my prayer. That. Okay. So who, my friends, are you struggling to have fond affection for? Perhaps in this church family. Maybe it's me right now. Put their name in there. That their love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that They may be able to discern.
You start praying this prayer for specific people, you watch your heart transform towards them. Pray this prayer of Paul's on the regular, on the daily. Pray it for your church family every day. Pray it for your brothers and sisters in Christ. If God has called you here, these people are your family. And that's not a lip service thing, right? The blood of Jesus binds us more strongly, or is meant to, than the blood of our ancestors.
Yeah, these are your brothers and sisters, so pray this prayer for one another and just watch your heart posture shift. And you know what, one of the, what does Jesus say? How will the world know us? By our tolerance of one another? By our frustration with one another? By our offence with one another? The world will know us by our love for one another. And let me tell you that love doesn't come from just trying to grit it out. Love comes from praying prayers like this for one another.
And it's then the affection of Christ that fills your heart. You don't have to stare it up on yourself. Is that good? That's good. Let's stand.