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Joyned Together
Phil. 4:1 Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved. Phil. 4:2 I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. 3 Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
Message from Adam.
I’ll start where Paul ends, which Paul’s appeal to the church:
Phil 2:29 So receive him in the Lord with all joy, and honor such men.
In the second chapter of his letter to the Philippians, Paul draws a portrait of three ministry workers. These are the men Paul wished to send to the Philippian church. Paul himself hopes to come soon, but until he is able, or if he is not able, he wishes to send men like Timothy and Epaphrodites to them. He writes that the Philippian church might be willing and ready to receive such men, to wait for them, to welcome them, and to honour them and they serve the Phillipain church in the place of Paul. So here Paul is writing letters of commendation to the church, but also in a sense instructing the church as to what sort of shepherds, pastors, ministry leaders they should be receiving and honouring in their community.
When we consider the quality of ministry leaders we often jump to passages that describe the qualifications we are to look for in them such as Titus 1 or 1 Timothy 3. But as we’re looking for Christ’s servants to lead our churches, here Paul gives us a portrait of three such men, and it is clear that Paul’s hope is that men like these would be found shepherding all of the churches of God, including ours: we have a small portrait of the Apostle Paul, his coworker Timothy, and another man named Epaphroditus, who was sent by the Philippian church to care for Paul’s needs in prison, but now Paul was hoping to send back to the Philippian church. So what sort of men is Paul looking to send?
Yesterday we invited the community to come through the church as part of Doors Open Ottawa. Not many came, as we did not do as big a production like last year, but those who came were given 1 on 1 tours through the church. We were a bit discouraged as no one had come for hours and were thinking of packing in early when suddenly we had a rush of three visitors. So I showed a man named Tim around. As I showed him around, Tim shared with me a little of his background- much like mine, baptized and Christmas and Easter Catholic, he was raised functionally atheist. He asked me about the church and our services and then asked which denomination we are a part of. Now, you may or may not know this, but our church is part of the Evangelical Free church of Canada. So then he asked, what’s an evangelical? Has anyone asked you that? How would you answer? I usually answer something like, Evangelicals believe you need to have a personal encounter with Jesus, that it’s important to tell people that Jesus is able to reconcile us to God, and we take the Bible very seriously as our rule of faith and life. And then I usually say “free” means that we believe in the separation of church and state.
Here’s another question - how would you feel answering that question? Defensive? Apologetic? Wondering what the person has heard? I sometimes feel like that. For many in our culture, the only impression they have of evangelicals is through the news or social media. Some think that we are a political group, or they hear us associated with “white evangelicals” in the US. i always wonder when people ask me that question, how much ground I may have to make up with them, because of the public reputation of Evangelicals. Some Evangelicals even are thinking of changing their branding.
Now I believe much of the public reputation of Evangelicals is slanderous. I believe Satan wants to tarnish our reputation, and slander of the negative always spreads faster than the encouraging or positive. However, I do believe some of our reputation is rightly earned. If we’re known as a political organization, then maybe we have allowed political stances to eclipse our love of Jesus. If we’re derided as hateful, then yes, it is true that some of us struggle to love our neighbour. If we’re called hypocrites, well there is some truth to that as well.
What is the reason for this hypocrisy? I do believe that if we’re honest with ourselves, many evangelicals have allowed a gap to enter into our thoelogy, and thus we are not living biblically. What is that gap? The sanctification gap. Evangelicals focus on conversion, to evangelize someone. That they might be born again. We sometime refer to the past tense of salvation. Having been saved from the penalty of sin. Evangelicals often also focus on the future tense of salvation, our eternal destiny, that someday the kingdom will come and we’ll be at home with Jesus and perfected, removed from the presence of sin. Yet, for some evangelicals - that’s the gospel, we’re saved from the penalty of sin, and someday we’ll be in the presence of Jesus.
Do you see something missing there? There is another tense to our salvation - our sanctification. The present outworking of God’s salvation through us in the here and now in which we gain ever growing victory over the power of sin in our lives. It is this tense of our salvation that actually affects our reputation in this world as God’s children. And it is this tense of salvation that Paul speaks of as he urges the Philippians to go on and grow in their maturity without him. In Philippians 2:12-18 Paul speaks of the process of our sanctification and the purpose of our sanctification.
Today’s key thought is about one-mindedness. I got to witness an amazing display of one-mindedness this week. A couple friends and I were able to go down to the Raptors game this past Tuesday. I’m a Bucks fan, but I have to give credit where credit is due. I figured there would be a couple of hundred of us. Nope. We counted 10. At one point Giannis, the Bucks star, missed a free throw and it got loud, the loudest I’ve ever heard at an event. I left there amazed at the crowd and thought, there is no way the Bucks are winning in Toronto, and after last night I guess I was right.
Paul is as big a fan of the Philippian church as anyone in that stadium. See The raptors may give their fans joy, but Paul says to the Philippian church in verse three that they can complete his joy. He’s found much joy in them, he always prays for them with joy, but now, as he has shared his hopes for them, to go on without him, he tells them how they can fill up his joy, he’s cheering for them.
complete my joy by being of the same mind,
‘I will need no further happiness,’ he says, ‘if only I can hear that you are a united church.’
See last week, we saw that Paul had told the Philippians that he may never see them again, but his one charge to them was that they would go on together living as an outpost of the kingdom of heaven, living as citizens of the heavenly kingdom set apart from the world, standing firm in the teaching, striving together in the gospel and not fearing anything. We noted last week that Paul was speaking to them as a church together, and now he addresses that togetherness, even more directly, for in order for them to continue on as an outpost of the kingdom, they must be united. They must be one-minded. For a kingdom divided cannot stand.
Now I understand why the Holy Spirit is having us study Philippians together. Philippians is a letter written to an anxious church, a church that is anxious because their pastor, Paul, has left, and he’s now in prison, and they don’t know what will happen to themselves or to him in the future. So now that makes more sense. I didn’t know when I started promoting this series a week before Easter that I wouldn’t be staying on with you. But by the first message, I was beginning to really wrestle with the spirit about whether He was calling me to stay on. Paul spoke about constraints in ministry in the second message, and that has been a passage that I’ve taken to heart many times of the years when I consider constraints in ministry, and so it was necessary that I wrestle with the word and spirit over that passage. In last weeks passage, Paul is wrestling with his own interior struggle - what it better, to remain on which is profitable for you or to depart and be with Christ? Only that for me to live and to die is gain. The last two weeks have been hard because I’ve had to conceal a bit of my struggle from you. But now everything is in the open. And today we come to verse 27, and I have set aside this passage for you, and it is on my heart to share it with you. It is the appeal of the gospel worker for the church he loves, the church he may soon be leaving, the appeal that they may carry one and continue in the gospel of Jesus Christ
Philippians is a book of joy for an anxious church. Theme similar to Ecclesiastes - we also spoke about joy. Joy comes from God, not from our stuff or our circumstance.
But we should be careful here, because it is surely true in our experience that we do find joy in people, things and circumstance. “How sweet to hold a newborn baby and feel the pride and joy he gives.” Holding your loved ones, relaxing after a hard days work. Hamburgers. :)
However, the message of Ecclesiastes does not deny that there are some circumstances from which we might find joy or reason to rejoice, but again, joy is not to be found in the temporal, fleeting, trivial matters, but in things that last, and if we try to extract joy from the breath, we will be left unsatisfied.
The apostle Paul would agree. In the book of Phillippians, in writing to that anxious church, Paul writes about the things that bring him joy. Last week Paul shared his gratitude and the joy that he has found in the Philiipians partnership in the gospel. And today, he will speak of another matter that brings him joy. And again, that which brings him joy is not in temporal, fleeting, trivial matters, but connected to the eternal matter of the gospel of Christ.
What is the gospel? The gospel is the proclamation of good news. The good news of what God has done for us in Christ. That thought our sins have separated us from God and have placed us under God’s just wrath, that God in his love for us sent his son Jesus Christ into the world that we might be reconciled to God, redeemed from our sins, and renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is surely not a temporal, fleeting, or trivial matter, but is the most important, substantial and eternal of matters. As I stated last week, Paul has given his life to the gospel, lives for the gospel, and as we’ll see today, Paul’s Joy-Producing Metric: The Gospel is Advancing. What I mean by metric is that this is the standard of measurement against which he measures the circumstances in his life and that even through the difficulties of life, if the gospel is advancing, Paul finds joy.
We live in apocalyptic times. Or at least, that is the perception. People are concerned that something is happening. Something big. I hear it in all sides of the political aisle. Those on the left are apocalyptically concerned about the existential danger of climate change - Ottawa just declared a climate emergency. They say that we have 12 years to do something about this all or it all explodes. People on the right are apocalyptically concerned about the breakdown of society’s institutions, such as family and the rule of law. People in the middle are apocalyptically concerned about the increasing polarization between the right and the left and the disintegration of dialogue and the rise of totalitarianism on the right or the left. The church is facing apocalyptic-level persecution. As we gathered for worship last week on Easter Sunday, believers in Sri Lanka were crawling out of the ruins of 8 bombings that left over 300 dead and many more wounded at the hands of Islamic radicals. I heard this week a report that Christians are now the more harassed minority group in the world, suffering harassment in 144 countries. So left, right, centre and non-political, the perspective is, that we live in apocalyptic times. If I only heard these things being pushed in the media, I might write it off as click bait from a money-grabbing sensationalistic press. But I hear people in coffee shops speaking about it. Neighbours in conversation saying things like, it just seems like something big is about to happen. Anxiety is epidemic in this apocalyptic age. We’re on edge. Always on edge.
We’re starting today a new series in the book of Philippians. The Philippians were an anxious church. They were anxious not about global warming or internet censorship, but their anxiety stemmed from one particular circumstance, the arrest, detaining and potential execution of their friend and spiritual guide, the apostle Paul, who had started the church about ten years before his current imprisonment. The church at Philippi was desperate to gain any information of what might be the outcome of Paul’s trial, and so they had sent on of their own, Epaphroditus to Paul to aid and assist him and bring back news of Paul’s outlook. Upon coming to Paul, Epaphroditus became deathly ill, delaying his return, and now the Philippians had another thing to worry about, his health and well-being.
If anyone had reason to be on edge, it would be the apostle Paul. He after all was the one in chains, the one awaiting word on whether his sentence would come back, live or die. While he awaits word of his execution, Paul writes a letter to the Philippians, and it’s a perplexing letter. Instead of asking for prayer for his condition, Paul prays for the Philippians in their condition. Instead of being a letter ridden with anxiety, it is an epistle of joy. 16 times in four short chapter Paul speaks of joy, or rejoicing. Philippians: the epistle of joy in the face of apocalypse.
These themes are introduced to us in the first 11 verses of chapter 11, which includes Paul’s thankful, joyful prayer for the Philippian church.
