Title: Introduction to Christian Joy
Scripture: Philippians 1:1-5
Speaker: Nate Pickowicz
We have the blessing of beginning a new exposition this morning, the book of Philippians. And by way of introduction, just thinking this week that there is an epidemic that is surging today, and it's not a virus or a disease, rather it is an epidemic of melancholy, sadness, anxiety, and depression. It's an epidemic of joylessness.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, it is estimated that more than 22 percent of all American adults are suffering from some kind of depressive mental illness. To put it into numbers, that's 57 million Americans. And add to that, the CDC reports that approximately 20 million children are diagnosed with a similar kind of mental illness.
And it's only getting worse. The World Health Organization has stated that mental health conditions have increased 13 percent over the last decade, and yet no one seems to know why. However, the solution is almost always presented in the form of medication.
How much medication? A recent conservative estimate somewhere in the for antidepressants alone, all in an effort to cure sadness and produce joy. While I was researching for my book on spiritual depression, it was impressed upon me how many Christians struggle with depression and joylessness, and not just churchgoers, but also pastors. In fact, one of my friends in ministry told me candidly, he said, every pastor I know is depressed right now.
I almost fell out of my chair. So, the question is, well, what do we do? How do we fix this problem? There is one helpful evaluation of the mental health industry. There's a book by Dr. Greg Gifford called Lies My Therapist Told Me.
Great title. It's all about just evaluating the current medical system surrounding things like mental illness and depression, anxiety. I would certainly commend that book to you.
It's eye-opening. But I want to be very clear to say it's not that everything the doctor will tell you or offering in terms of advice is bad or wrong, but we would be wise to examine everything and exercise discernment, and certainly in pertaining to our health choices. But I think for us as Christians, it's incumbent upon us to ask the question, what does the Bible have to say about joy and sadness? Does God have something to say about this? After all, we're commanded in Scripture to rejoice.
But how do we do it? And in light of the daily challenges that we face, how do we manifest joy and gladness in the face of such adversity, sadness, depression? Thankfully, there is a whole book of the Bible that's dedicated to the blessings of Christian joy. And again, we know that as Paul's letter to the Philippians. And so, I would invite you to turn in your copy of Scripture with me to Philippians chapter 1, beginning from the very start of the book here.
Now, the story of Philippians, the church at Philippi, was a remarkable story. And I wrestled with how much to get into the story today. I did not want the whole sermon to just be a story, a history of the church at Philippi.
So, we're going to have to summarize a bunch, but it's in the book of Acts. And so, I would certainly direct you that way. But sometime around the year 50 AD, the Apostle Paul and several of his traveling companions were engaged in the second missionary journey.
They had three main missionary journeys to the known world. This was their second missionary journey, and they're traveling around to all the places they'd already been to, going to new places, and they were strengthening the churches where they were going. Acts 16 records that they were trying to go to Bithynia, but they were redirected.
They were stopped and redirected. At that point, Paul is asleep at night, and he gets this vision given to him. And the vision is of a man who's in Macedonia saying to him, come over to Macedonia and help us.
He wakes up, and he recognizes that that vision is from the Lord. And so, Paul, along with Silas and Timothy and Luke, they set sail across the Aegean Sea, which is the northern portion of the Mediterranean Sea. It's a large Mediterranean Sea.
It's huge. The large portion at the north is the Aegean Sea, and they travel over to the European continent, landing in what is now known as Greece. They arrived in the region known as Macedonia, and they make their way to the very first place they get to, one of the leading cities, and that city is Philippi.
Well, what do they do now? I mean, now they've gone. They've got on a ship. They've traveled to Europe for the first time.
They're in Philippi. What do they do? Where do they go? How do we begin the ministry? Now, customarily, what they would have done as Jews is they would have gone and found a synagogue somewhere in the city, and they would have begun their ministry there and then branched out from the synagogue. But the problem was there wasn't enough Jews in Philippi to necessitate a synagogue.
And so what they do is they go and they find a group of women who were praying by the river in Philippi on the Sabbath, and Paul sees an opportunity, and he just stands up and begins to preach to all these women who were by the river. And immediately, there's a businesswoman named Lydia, and she hears the gospel. She believes it, and she's saved.
And so now we have the very first convert on the European continent. She then invites them all to her house, and thus the Philippian church is born. But there's a lot more work to do.
Paul begins to travel around and preach the gospel and meet people, and as they're traveling through the city, he starts to notice there's this nagging sound behind him that follows him for many, many days, and it's the sound of a demon-possessed girl screaming and shrieking and calling out and saying, talking over him and things like that. And finally, after a couple of days, Paul's had enough. It is hard to preach a sermon with a lot of noise in your face, let me tell you.
Paul's had enough, and so he turns around and faces the girl, casts out the demon to shut her up. Well, as soon as he does that, it makes a whole group of men very angry. Well, why? Because the demon-possessed girl was using her satanic abilities to perform fortune-telling for them.
It was a money-making scheme for these men. So now that she's been purged of this demon, she can no longer do the demonic arts here that they were making money on, and now their business is destroyed. And so this group of men, they go after Paul and Silas.
They have them arrested, and they have them thrown in jail. And so now, imagine being one of the apostles or disciples, Paul or his friends. You're jailed in a foreign land that you don't know anything about.
You don't know anybody there. Your feet are fastened to the stalks, and you're beaten to a pulp and left to rot in jail. What do they begin doing? Do they begin to be anxious and worried and sad and lick their wounds? The Bible tells us they actually begin praying and singing.
They're singing fastened to the stalks in jail with bruises and blood dripping down their face. They're singing hymns and praises to the Lord in jail, so much so that the whole jail is filled with their singing. Everybody around them can hear them singing.
And then around midnight, as they're singing, a massive earthquake breaks out, rocks the jail, unlocks the chains around their legs, and opens all the doors. All the doors of the jail are now opened, and the assumption is all the prisoners are going to get out. And so what happens? The man is going to be done for, because he didn't do his job by keeping the prisoners in the jail.
But when he gets to the jail, he finds that yes, the doors are open, all the chains are off, but everybody has stayed put. They've stayed in the jail. He comes in, he doesn't understand what's going on, and immediately Paul preaches the gospel to this Philippian jailer, and he gets saved.
The next convert to the Philippian church. Eventually, they're released, they're forced out of the city, and the church continues to grow. Now fast forward a couple of years, Paul then makes his third missionary journey.
He and his companions, they come back to the European continent, they go to Philippi in Acts chapter 20, and he's visiting his old friends, he's making new ones, and then sometime later, right around 59 AD, Paul is arrested again, and he's in prison, this time for two years. He's rotting in jail. Eventually, he makes his way to Rome to appeal to Caesar, knowing that that appeal might actually cost his life.
But for right now, he's sitting in prison, he's chained daily to a Roman guard, and he's awaiting this appeal that may or may not ever come. And then one day, while he's in jail, a man named Epaphroditus shows up, a pastor in Philippi, arrives in Rome, and he brings a gift to Paul from the Philippian church. Now it seems that Epaphroditus intended to stay a little while and minister to Paul, but we read in chapter 2, verse 26 of the letter that Paul mentions that Epaphroditus, somehow between the traveling from the city to Rome, he falls sick and he nearly dies.
And yet the Bible says that God showed mercy and spared his life. And so in response to all of this, Paul decides, Epaphroditus, I don't want you to stay here, I want you to go home. And so he sends him back to Philippi, 800 miles, but he puts a letter in his hand.
And he says, I want you to give this to the church that I dearly love. I want you to read this. And Paul gives him a letter, Epaphroditus goes back, and once he's home, they go and they present this letter to the church, which begins this way.
Philippians chapter 1, verse 1. Paul and Timothy bond servants of Christ Jesus to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons. Grace to you and peace from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now.
For I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is not only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you are all partakers of grace with me. For God is my witness how I long for you with all the affection of Christ Jesus.
And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ, having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. And that is just the introduction. Wonderful scripture.
Now, even in this greeting here, we haven't even covered anything else. In the greeting alone, there's a lot of content. I'm not going to plow through this whole thing today.
If you're lucky, I'll exposit one word. No, I'm just kidding. I'm going to do a couple.
But there's a lot here. I mean, this is a substantial letter, and so we're going to just begin by looking at the first five verses. We'll begin with the greeting in verse one.
Now, it was customary for the authors of a letter to include who the letter was from, and so we read beginning with Paul here, who was an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ called in Acts chapter 9. Paul was a Jewish rabbi and a Pharisee, turned Christian in a radical conversion on the road to Damascus. In time, Paul would pen 13 New Testament letters. He would undertake three missionary journeys before being beheaded in Rome somewhere around the year 65 AD.
But during his ministry, he underwent severe trials and persecutions. I just want to give you a little taste of what Paul had to endure from 2 Corinthians chapter 11. He writes this, five times I received from the Jews 39 lashes, three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a day and a night I have spent in the deep.
I have been on frequent journeys in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren. I have been in labor and hardship through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches.
And yet, with all of that, Paul was not prone to wallowing in despair. Even though he went through trials and persecution, he just kept ministering the gospel to people. And so here he lists not only himself, but he also lists Timothy.
Well, we've been very familiar with Timothy. We spent a couple months here with Timothy in Paul's letter to 1 Timothy here. We don't believe that Timothy himself was one of the co-authors of the letter, but he might have been one of Paul's scribal secretaries.
Certainly he was with him while he was imprisoned here. Regardless, we know that Timothy's in Rome. Now, when we consider how sick Epaphroditus was when he got to Paul, it's also possible that he considered sending Timothy back to Philippi with him, but he wasn't quite ready just yet.
And if actually, if you look over at chapter 2, verse 19, Paul reasons about whether or not to send Timothy. Philippians 2, verse 19, Paul says, And so that was Paul's intention. He wants to send Timothy back to Philippi, but he also wants to go back to Philippi as well.
But Paul expresses the relationship here. He says they're of kindred spirit. They're like father and son.
We only have two men that Paul refers to this way. In fact, in both of his letters to Timothy, Paul calls him a true child in the faith. He calls him his beloved son.
And while he hopes to send Timothy at a later time, for now, he certainly needs his help while he's in prison. And so Paul and Timothy bond servants of Christ Jesus. I want you to notice here that Paul does not give his apostolic credentials here.
In many of his letters, he says Paul, apostle of Jesus Christ. He doesn't do that here, and I think, frankly, he doesn't need to. And the reason, I think, is because no one in Philippi is challenging his apostolic office.
They all know who he is. They love him dearly. There's no contention.
He doesn't have to prove he's an apostle. Instead, he only assumes the lowly title for him and himself and Timothy. He calls them bond servants of Christ.
Bond servant is literally, it's douloi. In the Greek, it's slaves. We're slaves of Christ.
And so they know who they are, and they know whose they are. They're bond servants. They're not powerful apostles.
They're not leaders of great prominence unto themselves. No, Paul says we're slaves. We're bond servants of Christ Jesus to do His will.
And then Paul addresses the recipients here. He says to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi. Now, this address is noteworthy, I think, for a couple of reasons.
I want you to notice here, he doesn't address the church in Philippi this way. He does not say to the church in Philippi. He does that with other letters, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, to the church in such and such a city.
He gets a little more personal here. He gets a little more theological here. He says to all the saints, to all the saints in Christ Jesus.
Now, contrary to Roman Catholic theology, the Bible knows nothing of sainthood of super-Christians in the faith who are more revered than others. This concept of someone becoming a saint in this second tier of Christian, that's foreign to the Bible. That's man-made.
Now, the Bible calls all Christians saints. If you're in Christ, guess what? You've been promoted. You're a saint in Christ Jesus.
This word, it comes from the word hagios, hagioi, holy ones. Ones who have been set apart for God. That's what a saint is.
Someone who is designated, consecrated to the Lord. And so when the Lord saved you, He consecrated you, He set you, He took you out of the world, He set you apart for His purposes. And He's called you holy, not unto yourself, but unto Him.
You are holy to Him. And again, every Christian is a saint. But once again, we are not intrinsically holy.
We are not holier than thou. Rather, we are holy, Paul says here, in Christ Jesus. In Christ Jesus.
This is what we call the doctrine of our union with Christ. Union with Christ. And I want to give you a spoiler alert here.
It's one of the key sources of Christian joy. To know that you have been bound together with Christ and you're actually in Christ. And that secures you.
That becomes a foundation point of joy. You're not worried about losing yourself out the back end. You're not worried about perishing eternally, because you're secure in Christ Jesus.
Once we've been forgiven of our sins through the sacrifice of Christ, we are then regenerated. We're born again to new life. We're indwelled by the power of the Spirit.
And then once the Holy Spirit takes up residence within us, we're joined to Christ and He places us into the body of believers. We're not only in Christ, but we become partakers one with another. We're in this fellowship together.
In fact, this theme of unity and fellowship and friendship, that is also central in Philippians. We're going to cover a lot of territory in Philippians, but this unity, this partaker, this sharing, this fellowship, huge factor of Philippians here, because that's the doctrine that binds us all together. Before we were even designated by what city we live in or what nationality we belong to, any marker of identification that we would hold for ourselves as believers, we are first and foremost saints in Christ Jesus.
That's our identity. If you're a Christian, that is your first identity. Everything else is secondary, thankfully.
And even if we are to personalize Philippians in our own context, it would be like writing a letter to you and saying to the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Gilmonton. That's the sense of it. And so, that is the address of the letter.
But Paul adds one more detail to his address. In addition to talking to the saints who are in Philippi, he also singles out, and this is very interesting here, the overseers and deacons. Now, if you were with us in our exposition of 1 Timothy, we covered this quite a bit.
We spent, I think, several months talking about overseers, elders, and deacons and everything, these two main offices within the church. This word very quickly, overseer, episkopos, it refers to church elders, pastors, bishops, leaders, spiritual leaders in the church. It's the office of spiritual leadership over all matters in the body of Christ.
You can find the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3, verses 1 through 7. And then he addresses the deacons, deaconois, it's literally servants. These are servant leaders in the church. We see them featured in Acts 6, and we also see their qualification in 1 Timothy 3, verses 8 through 13.
Both of these offices make up the organized leadership and administrative structure of a healthy church. And both of these are clearly established in Philippi. And the question arises, well, why did Paul single them out in the letter here? This is the only time he does it in any of his letters.
He singles them out. Well, we're not given a purpose here why he does this, but some have noted that it was a way to honor them. And while others have speculated because it would have been through the approval and the efforts that that gift was given to Paul, it came through the ministry of the elders and the deacons, the overseers and the deacons.
Maybe in that address, he wants to thank them specifically. The gift he received while he was in prison, it's certainly from the Philippian church, but he knows the men who are serving in leadership at that church, and he can see their fingerprint on the gift itself. So this could be a way of him saying to the whole church, but guys, thank you so much for ministering this to me, the overseers and the deacons.
Either way, he greets them all here. He uses the word all. He greets them all who were in Philippi, and then he offers a blessing in verse 2. A blessing in verse 2. He says to this church, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this was a standard benediction to many of his letters here. We see almost the exact same blessing in Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, even his letter to Philemon. But it's no less dynamic just because it's repeated often.
On behalf of God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul is offering them a blessing. Now it's not that Paul owns the blessing himself and he's the one giving it, but he's acting as a mouthpiece for the Lord to remind them to share with them the blessing that they have received from God the Father and through the Lord Jesus Christ. And he offers this grace, charis in the Greek, it's unmerited favor, it's blessing.
We are partakers of God's grace. It's the goodness of God granted freely as a gift. They sent Paul a gift.
Paul's telling them, you've received a greater gift, a greater grace. It's apart from works. It's through the sacrifice of Christ.
Oftentimes the word grace in the Bible is shorthand for the blessings of the gospel. Just to give you an example, Ephesians 2.8, for by grace you have been saved through faith. He says it's not of yourselves, it's the gift of God.
You've received the gift of salvation, the grace of salvation from the Lord, not based on anything you've done, but purely because He desires to redeem that which has been lost. But then that salvation by grace, by God's grace, we sang that already this morning, that grace by which we're saved, it produces something. You know what it produces in the heart of the believer? It produces peace.
Peace. It's a settled inward joy and even a relief that we're in a right standing with God. There are so many people, and maybe believers, maybe some of you were in this place before you came to Christ.
There are people who are terrorized by the thought that if they die, they don't know the future, they're worried they're going to perish eternally. There are some people who believe in the fade to black. New Hampshire is the leading state in the belief in atheism in the country.
Lots of people believe that God does not exist, that it's a fade to black kind of a thing. It's a false belief, certainly. But there are quite a few people who know that there is an eternity.
They know there's a future, and they're scared to death, literally scared to death, that when they die, it's going to be torment for them. And they are struggling, and they're anxious, and they're worried, and they're fearful that they have to squeeze every last ounce of joy and happiness out of this life because this is all there is. But we know as believers that there is actually a greater joy, a greater peace found in the Lord, in Christ.
If Romans 5.1, therefore, here's where we connect these two worlds here, therefore having been justified by faith through grace, he says we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. When Christ redeems you, when He saves you by God's grace through faith, we now have peace with God. The war between us and God because of our sin and condemnation is over.
Romans 8.1, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Well, I'm in Christ, but I'm scared that God's still going to judge me. He's not going to.
I'm not talking about consequences for sin in this life. I'm talking about condemnation eternally. It doesn't exist for the believer, for the saint, for the Holy One who's been called out.
We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That is a foundation for joy, to know that we're at peace with God. You don't have to be afraid of Him.
Reverential fear, certainly. Yes, the grandiose nature of the Lord is awe-inspiring, and I fear the Lord in that way, but I'm not afraid of the Lord for condemnation. Huge difference.
And so Paul is giving this blessing to the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi. He's offering them grace and peace. And then starting in verse 3 now, all the way to verse 11, which is the content we read already this morning.
We're going to get to some of those verses in the coming weeks here, but this whole extended greeting offers a lot to the Philippians. Before we even get into the content of the letter itself, verse 3, we have his expression of gratitude. Verse 4, we have his joyful prayer for them.
He offers joyfulness in the light of gospel participation in verse 5. He has confidence in the work of God, verse 6. I'm going to do that one all by itself, hopefully next week. He expresses love and affection for them, pastorally, in verses 7 through 8. And then we have his prayer for spiritual fruit in verses 9 through 11. So much content, doctrine, theology, blessing, just in the introduction alone.
So wonderful. So there's a lot here. We're only going to have our time enough to dip our toe in the water here.
Just the first couple of verses, which I think will be beneficial for us. But verse 3 begins with Paul's expression of thanksgiving. Verse 3, he says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you.
This word here right at the beginning, I thank my God, this thanksgiving to God, the word is eucharisteo in the Greek. It refers to gratitude, to thanksgiving. In the New Testament, it's always connected, almost always, with thankfulness to God.
Eucharisteo. We see the word used in 1 Thessalonians 5, 16 through 18, where Paul tells the young church, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks. Eucharisteo, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.
We are called to a life of thanksgiving. As we'll see here, Paul is always giving thanks, which serves as another key to experiencing joy. We're not even out of the introduction yet, and we're already seeing keys to joy here.
In fact, when I was researching, again, I'm going to pause the sermon for a second here, but when I was studying out to understand spiritual depression, I've been battling it for 20 years in my life, and I finally got to the point where I said, that's it. I know the Bible has a lot more than what I'm picking up about this issue. And I sat down for a year, and I just mined the scriptures.
And so the book itself, Spiritual Depression, is just my Bible study. That's all it is. Personal Bible study, hopefully written in a way that's helpful.
But over and over again, I began to see time and time again, the thankfulness that's connected to joy. Joy and thankfulness, gratitude to God. When we're spoiled children, when we don't have thankfulness, when we're not grateful to God, it robs us of our joy.
You want to be joyful? Find something that God has done in your life and be thankful for it. I don't want to oversimplify, but it really is that simple. In the times that I fail to be joyful, I can usually draw a direct connection to the fact that I'm a spoiled child and I'm not thanking God for what He's doing.
That's a side note. But you see here, there is a connection to giving thanks always and experiencing joy. Again, the first Thessalonians verse, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and everything give thanks.
Right there, it's there. Joyless people are often thankless people. But here, Paul says he's giving thanks, he thanks his God.
No, he's not saying I'm thanking my God as if He's mine versus yours, but he's personalizing the thanksgiving. I'm not just giving a generalized praise and thanksgiving to a generalized deity. No, I'm thanking the Father, the God I love who saved me.
I'm thanking Him. I give thanks to my God because He's cherishing His memory of this Philippian church. He remembers this church.
Philippi was a good church, not a perfect church. There is no perfect church. And you know the old saying, if you find a perfect church, leave immediately because you'll ruin it, right? There is no perfect church.
Harvest Bible Church is, I believe, a healthy church, a good church, but we are not a perfect church. And the pastor is the most imperfect person in the whole assembly, okay? But Philippi was a good church. They loved each other.
They worked hard in ministry. In fact, Paul offers very few rebukes in this letter. I mean, almost nothing.
There's a couple of small things you can find in here, but for the most part, he's writing a letter to friends. These are beloved family. He loves these people dearly, and when he remembers them, he remembers them fondly.
He doesn't remember the squabbles and the challenges, none of that stuff. It's all good in Paul's mind when he remembers. Chapter 4 verse 16, he remembers how when he was in trouble in Macedonia, he says, nobody else helped me, but the Philippians did.
They were the only church that helped him when he was in trouble. In fact, he says they sent him a gift more than once. They helped him all the time.
So he remembers their generosity. He remembers their friendship. He remembers their spiritual growth.
And he says, as he has remembered them in my remembrance of you, he thanked God for them. It's a wonderful thing to thank God for your church. Thank you, Lord, for the beloved saints in Philippi.
And then in his thanksgiving, he also prayed for them. Verse 4, always offering prayer, look at this, with joy in my every prayer for you all. Now, I just want to note something about the grammar here.
Scholars, when they analyze the Greek text, they're divided over whether or not this word always at the beginning of verse 4 belongs to the thanking God or belongs to the prayers. The scholars are divided about this. Now, certainly both things have an element of truth in them.
What do I mean by that? Well, certainly we're called to always be thanking God, but we're also called to always be praying as well. So again, that's why there's a division of thought about whether the grammar brings the word backwards or forwards in the text. The New American Standard, which is the translation we're using, if you look at how its punctuation is put in here, it's placing this word always with prayer, always praying for you with joy.
The idea here is that Paul was always joyful in his prayers for the Philippians. Furthermore, we see a sense of the rest of the verse when he says this. He says, offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all.
It's not that he's praying for them non-stop day and night doing nothing else, but rather it's more that as often as he's remembering them in prayer, he's always joyful in that prayer. Does that make sense? Oftentimes, and this is maybe just a helpful pastoral thing or a believer thing to you, when someone will say, hey, will you pray for me for this, and you know in the back of your mind that you might have a hard time remembering to do so, something that's very helpful that was told to me is to say, as often as I remember, I will pray for you. I think that's honest because to commit to praying day in, day out for a request is hard, and you don't want to say, I'll pray for you and then not do it.
That's even worse. So as often as I remember, yes, I will pray fervently for your need. That's essentially what Paul says here.
As often as I've remembered you in my prayers, it's a joyful prayer. I love praying for you is what he's telling them. He says something similar to the Ephesians in chapter 116 of that letter.
He says, I do not cease giving thanks for you while making mention of you in my prayers. Every time I pray for you Ephesians, I'm always giving thanks for you. Also to the Thessalonian church, another church you love dearly, we give thanks to God always for all of you, making mention of you in our prayers.
Anytime I'm praying, I remember you and I'm giving thanks for you. That's the sense of it. So Paul was very thankful for these churches.
He thanked God for the churches and certainly for the Philippians. He was particularly joyful, particularly joyful. Again, joy is a major theme here in this letter, as well as the active engagement of rejoicing.
Just to give you kind of a 30,000 foot view here, just very quickly, if you want to take notes, I know some of you try to keep up with me when I talk quickly. Good luck. Chapter 1 verse 18, Paul rejoices that Christ has proclaimed.
Chapter 1 verse 25, Paul labors for the church's progress and joy in the faith. Chapter 2 verse 17, despite his sufferings and persecution, Paul rejoices and encourages the church to rejoice with him. Chapter 3 verse 1, he commands them to rejoice in the Lord despite the trouble with false teachers.
Chapter 4 verse 4, in calling reconciliation between Euodia and Syntyche, he commands them to rejoice in the Lord. Chapter 4 verse 10, despite Paul's poverty, he rejoices in the Lord greatly because the church has cared for him and longed to help him. 14 times in 104 verses, Paul is speaking about joy and rejoicing.
Joy and rejoicing, it punctuates the whole letter. He can't stop talking about it. Joy, joy, joy, rejoicing, rejoicing, more than any other New Testament book by far.
And this becomes all the more remarkable when you consider, hey, wait a second, Philippians is a prison epistle. Paul's writing about joy at a time where he's imprisoned in a faraway city, in the imperial city, chained to a soldier awaiting trial, possibly execution. And yet, all Paul can talk about with this church is joyfulness and rejoicing.
But there's another reason for his joy in verse 5. He says all of this, offering prayer with joy, and my every prayer for you all, verse 5, in view of your participation in the gospel from this, from the first day until now. Now this points to another major theme in Philippians. We're covering a lot of major themes, and these we're all going to come back to as the exposition progresses here.
But another theme in Philippians is the progress of the gospel. The progress of the gospel. Now he's going to go on to elaborate on this in chapter 1, verses 12 through 26, when he talks about how he engages with the gospel and the gospel through his ministry.
But here in verse 5, Paul notes the church's participation in the gospel. Now, it's interesting because this word that he uses, participation, in our English translation is the Greek word koinonia, which is usually translated as fellowship. Fellowship, koinonia.
Of course, that is the essence of the gospel, that we're brought into a saving relationship with God through the work of Christ. In fact, 1 Corinthians 1.9, God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship, koinonia, with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. And so, when we talk about fellowship as believers, the first point of fellowship is with God.
Again, we're justified by faith alone. We're not at war with him anymore. We have peace with God, and having peace with God, we're adopted by him as children, and we actually have this blessed fellowship.
I was reading just John 17 this morning in my devotions, talking about Jesus praying for the believers to have fellowship with God in the same way that the Son has fellowship with the Father. We are wrapped up into the blessed fellowship of the triune God. He brings us with him in this.
This is not a distant relationship between us and God. It's koinonia, participation, fellowship with God. Remarkable.
I don't think we always, I would say even rarely, grasp what this fellowship with God really is. And as saints in Christ Jesus, the Philippian church certainly has already participated in this saving relationship with Christ, but now Paul is intending a little more here. It's not just that they have this participation fellowship with God in a saving way, it's quite literally a partnership in the ministry of the gospel.
You've already participated in the gospel personally, yourself, with your faith, but you're even doing more. See, it's very easy for churches to experience something called mission drift. Mission drift.
And forget why we exist. It's very popular. I'll tell you, you get excited about doing things, and those of you who know me well know that I'm very leery of what's called parachurch ministries.
I'm not anti-parachurch ministries, but I am conscientious about them because by nature they can devolve into spiraling interest away from the mission and onto something else. And it happens all the time. All the time.
And I think we intend to do good things. All these ministry ideas and opportunities are always good things, but are they the thing that God has called us to focus on? We always have to be evaluating that. What is the most important thing that we could be engaged in doing? Guess what? It is the advancement of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is the great commission to make disciples of all nations that comes through evangelism, through gospel, as well as discipleship and spiritual encouragement. All of that, the great commission, is wrapped up in what our mission really is. And so again, there's a danger of mission drift.
We have to be so careful, believers, so careful, that we don't let any other thing, even if it's a good thing, pull us away from the focus, the gospel focus, of the church. But here, the church in Philippi, they didn't have that problem. Not the Paul names at least.
He says, no, they excelled in their participation in the gospel. And he says, it's taken place from the very first day all the way until now. The first day, well, what was that? Well, that was the very first convert, Lydia.
Lydia was the first convert, and the very first thing she did after believing the gospel is she opened up her home so that these gospel ministers could come up a base of operations. Now, she was a seller of fabrics and linens. I mean, she was a well-to-do businesswoman in town.
And she says, you know what? I'm just going to set this aside for one second. I'm going to bring you guys in. Whatever you need, I'll provide for you.
She gave her home to gospel ministry, and she wasn't the only one. So from the very first day with Lydia opening her home, Paul says, even until now, even right now, I'm holding the gift that you gave me from Epaphroditus' 800-mile journey here. I'm holding the gift.
You're participating in the gospel right now. He's so encouraged by the work that they're doing, the participation. And he knows that this financial gift, whatever it was, we don't know what it was specifically, but whatever this gift was, it was given to him to help him to continue the ministry of the gospel.
Because, spoiler alert again, at the end of the letter, he talks about those who are ministering in Caesar's household. And we'll talk about this later, but you've got to love how God works. Caesar and the government of Rome, they bring these Christians in as prisoners, but what they've done is they've just opened up the Trojan horse here.
Now these gospel ministers are ministering to soldiers and elected officials all the way to Caesar's household. They've now brought the gospel into the innermost reaches of the empire, and they don't even realize they've done it. So Paul says, I'm excited about this.
You've got to think here. Boy, the soldier that was chained to Paul for days and days, he got a sermon, man. You got to know that, right? I mean, that's like being chained to Billy Graham.
I mean, you're going to hear preaching and preaching and preaching and preaching. But that's the idea. This church was so focused on gospel ministry, on participation in the gospel.
They were a focused church. They were a participatory church. They were a gospel church.
And Paul knew this. He knew that they were, and that's why he had such cause to rejoice. In fact, this is remarkable.
This virtue of gospel-focused attention is so embedded in the church in Philippi that 50 years later, Pauly Carp, who writes a letter to the Philippian church, he writes this. This is Pauly Carp 50 years later. I rejoice with you greatly in our Lord Jesus Christ, in that you have welcomed the models of true love and have helped them on their way as opportunity was given to you.
Those men who were bound in fetters, which became the saints, which are indeed the diadems of the true elect of God and of our Lord. And I also rejoice because the firm root of your faith, famous from the earliest times, still abides and bears fruit for our Lord Jesus Christ today. 115 AD, Pauly Carp is writing this letter to the Philippians, praising God because their faith is still strong 50, 60, 70 years later after they were planted as a church.
Remarkable. And so, they were faithful in their faith, in their love, in their participation of the gospel. And for Paul, this was a cause of great joy.
What is the beginning of all of this? What is the introduction to Christian joy? We know it is the salvation granted to us in Jesus Christ. We know that our sins are washed away at the cross. God removes the penalty, the condemnation.
Our relationship with God at the cross is restored. We're granted eternal life, life forever with God. Our fellowship with Christ is secured by the ministry of the Spirit.
We have a new mind, a new heart given to us. We know that no matter what we suffer in this life, it pales in comparison to the glory that we're going to receive in Christ Jesus. We all go through trials and afflictions in this life, and some are heavier than others.
Some of it is very momentary, light affliction that doesn't really matter. Some stuff is heavy. Some stuff breaks your heart.
But even in all of that, we have God's grace. We have God's peace all through the Lord, all through Jesus Christ. And that becomes the foundation of our joy, knowing that nothing on earth or in heaven or in hell, nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.
That's the foundation. That's the basis of our Christian joy. And so I want to ask, do you know Him? Do you know Jesus Christ as Savior, as Lord? Do you have Him dwelling within you by the ministry of the Spirit? Are you in Him? Have you confessed your sins and believed on the only Savior of the world? If you have, He's given you all you need for life and godliness.
And even if joy and happiness and gladness and thanksgiving, even if that is fleeting right now, He's given you what you need. You can find joy. You can find gladness in Him because He is, as the Bible says, our joy and our strength forever.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You. We thank You for this brand new study.
Lord, I'm excited for this letter to spend all this time that we get to spend in Philippians, Lord. And my earnest prayer is that not only would You bind these truths, even from this just short introduction, bind these truths to our hearts today, but Lord, I pray that You would prepare this church, prepare our hearts to learn and to grow. Lord, as we consider our trials and difficulties in light of eternity, Lord, would You help us grow? As we consider opposition to the gospel and competition and the things that would attack the work that we think that we're doing, Lord, would You help us grow? As we consider unity with one another and love and kindness toward each other, would You help us grow? Lord, as we consider the magnanimous, wonderful, bountiful Savior that we have displayed to us in chapter 2, would You help us see Christ afresh and grow? Lord, as we battle for contentment, as we battle for a singular focus on Christ's likeness, Lord, would You please help us grow in this season, in the life of this church, Lord? And Father, just personally, I thank You for this church.
I thank You for the saints who are in Gilmonton. I thank You for the work of grace that You have done in each of their hearts, Lord, to draw them to You, to save them. Lord, I thank You for their generosity.
I thank You for their love for one another, for me, for our family, for the leadership here. Lord, I thank You for how they love each other. And Lord, even the last couple of weeks to see this church rally behind a family in desperate need of love and care, Lord, that's a cause for great rejoicing and thanksgiving.
I thank You for this church. I thank You for the earnestness and the eagerness by which this body comes to the Word of God every week and wants to learn and wants to grow and wants to understand. Lord, I thank You when You've convicted them of sins in their own hearts and You've grown them to become more like Christ.
I thank You for Harvest Bible Church, Lord. And I pray that You would help me, help the elders and the deacons here to serve well and minister to this beloved church in a way that is pleasing to You and edifying to them. Lord, I thank You, my God, in my remembrance of this church and my prayers, and thank You for their participation in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
For in You we have received grace and peace, and it's wonderful. Help us, Lord, to rejoice. Help us to be joyful in all things to give thanks.
In Jesus' name, amen.