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
As I’ve already said, as Christians we receive as one the benefits of knowing God, the assurance that the universe has a purpose, that life has meaning and that our individual and collective lives are being lived in fulfillment of God’s intent for us. “We are,” the scripture says, “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Yet its not only the sense of overriding meaning and purpose that God gives to our lives, but also, as we are part of the Body of Christ, we become part of God’s mission in the world, to exalt his Son Jesus Christ in every corner of the globe, and to seek and save a people for himself from every nation. He shares this mission with His Son, when He sent Him into the world, and His Son then shares that same mission with us: “As the Father has sent me”, He said, so now i send you”, and in the very first chapter of the book of Acts, the book we’ve been studying, Jesus gathered the disciples around him and told them, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to all the ends of the earth.” So we, the church, the called out people of God, are given not only a purpose, but a mission.
The first major section of Acts was to set in front of us the Jerusalem church as a model church, a church for all ages. The second major section of Acts was to demonstrate for us the new people that God is calling us to become, a church for all people. This section is not focused around a specific church or a specific city, but the focus of these chapters is the mission itself - we now see the church fulfilling the words of Jesus that we will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.
