Partnership in the Gospel

I wonder if you found a good way to organize your photos. I haven't. I know the days of keeping physical photos and albums or shoeboxes is over. My brother told me I should take all of the old photos from my childhood and scan them into the computer. Who's got time for that? The move to digital photos seemed great originally, I had some folders on my computer desktop starting in the 2000s, the early 2000s. You know, they had a couple hundred photos in them. But I don't know what happened. I mean, it was some combination of smartphones and getting married, having children. And the hundreds of photos became thousands and became 10,000s. And my computer started to meet an early grave again and again. Again, my brother steps in. Tells me that I need a massive two terabyte external hard drive to store. And I need the cloud kind of syncing with that. But then the devices in my home started multiplying like rabbits. Plus we've got the Apple versus PC battle going on. It's a mess, seriously. Somebody help. But you can't give up because pictures are significant. They tie us powerfully to the past. I mean, you've probably had the experience of looking at an old photograph and being transported to a different place and time. Looking at an old photo, it doesn't just produce a sense of nostalgia in us. It can provoke a sense of reflection on the passage of time that can actually help to clarify our priorities in the present. So we see a snapshot of ourselves in our school-age years, and we see our braces and our haircut and our clothes, and we think, why did I care about that stuff so much back then? Why was I so concerned with how other people viewed me? Or maybe we see a picture of ourselves with friends, and we remember how significant relationships are to us in life. Maybe we're encouraged to press into current relationships by that photo. Even sometimes a photo of people we don't even know can affect us. There's that powerful scene in Dead Poets Society, that Robin Williams movie where the... He's an English teacher and he takes the pupils to the foyer, the lobby of the school to look at these black and white photos of students from a bygone era many decades earlier. And he tells them to look closely at these young men. And then he says very bluntly, they're all food for worms now, lads. He asked them to lean in even closer and he tells them that they could hear Those students speaking to them, whispering, carpe diem, seize the day. It's powerful stuff, even just from a movie. We realize that a snapshot of the past can clarify priorities for us in the present. Over the next number of weeks, we're going to be studying the book of Philippians, Paul's letter to a church that he helped plant. This is written only about 15 years after the fact. It's only 30 years after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And I'm drawn to this book for a number of reasons. For one, it's a thank you letter of sorts from a missionary to a church that supported him and that he loved so much. And so as a missionary who's supported by this church and who loves this church, I thought that was somehow fitting. But secondly, I'm drawn to this letter because it's called the Epistle of Joy. Joy is used, joy the noun or rejoice the verb is used some 16 times in the letter. in just four chapters, but it's an epistle of joy written from a jail cell, written from prison. So I think it's just the sort of book we need as we seek to find joy in life when life is hard. I often ask myself, why is the prosperity gospel so popular these days? I think a simple answer is just because life is hard. And we think it might be nice to imagine God as a genie that we can rub a lamp and get the wishes that we ask for. We who know our Bibles know that's not the picture of God that we find there at all. But how is it that you and I can find joy when we're weary in life, when we're frustrated with how things are turning out, or when tragedy strikes us? We need the epistle of joy. A third reason I think we need this book is because Paul turns this thank you letter into a handbook on how to grow in the Christian life. He's writing to them to tell them how they can have progress and joy in their Christian discipleship. He wants to show them how to forget what is behind and strain towards what is ahead to win the prize of the upward call of Jesus. He tells us what it means as a Christian to seize the day. So for all those reasons, let's take up this book, let's get a snapshot of Paul the missionary and Philippi the church, and let's let this old black and white photo clarify our priorities for the present. If you're taking notes this morning as we turn to Philippians, the main idea of our text is this. With God's help, partnership in the gospel leads to fruitfulness as a church. With God's help, partnership in the gospel leads to fruitfulness as a church. And we'll have four points. Number one, the local church. Number two, partnership in the gospel. Number three, spiritual fruitfulness. And number four, the help of God. The local church, partnership in the gospel, spiritual fruitfulness, and the help of God. So let's dive in first of all to the local church, looking again at these first two verses. Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. In some ways, this is a very standard way to open a first century letter. We begin with Paul and Timothy as the senders, and then he names the recipients. After that, there would normally be greetings. or a blessing pronounced, but everything in Paul's hands becomes about the gospel, doesn't it? So note his little alterations here. He wants them to know that he, Paul, and Timothy, his assistant, view themselves as servants or slaves of Christ Jesus. Really, this is how all believers should think of ourselves, as servants or slaves of God. And then Paul changes the usual word karein, meaning greetings in Greek, into the similar sounding keres, or grace. And he says grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace means the favor of God, and it describes all that comes to a person who has repented of their sin and trusted in Jesus Christ. So if you're not a Christian and visiting with us this morning, It's important that you understand that Christians don't think that they are better than anyone else, quite the opposite. We think that we are desperately in need of God's grace because we don't have anything to offer him. Really, all that any of us bring to the table when it comes to our relationship with God is our sin. We have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet, because God loves us, he made a way for us to be saved. When he sent his son Jesus to live the life that you and I should have lived, and then die the death that we deserved on the cross, he was putting forth his son as a substitution for our sins. And so that's what we mean, and that's what Paul means when he says, grace to you. It's God's grace that can come to any of us if we will believe in Jesus, the unearned, undeserved favor of God. That second word, peace, that's the result of God's grace. We who were at enmity with God, the Bible describes unrepentant sinners as God's enemies, we now have peace through Christ's blood shed on the cross. Paul gets all of that into just the salutation. But then he thinks, wait, I can get church government in here too. Look again there at the recipients, how he describes the church. The saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons. First, we know he's talking to a local church, right? Those at Philippi. In the early church, usually as the gospel came to a new city, there would be one church there initially. Everybody would have gone there. The church at Philippi. Second, notice that this is a defined group of people. So there's inclusivity and exclusivity here. It's inclusive because it's all the saints. Saints means literally holy ones. It's not those who are holy on their own, but holy because of their union with Christ. So we are holy because he's holy. It's all of them, but it's only them. Only the Christians, he underlines this by saying that it is those who are in Christ Jesus. There is a solid line around this group of people. They would have known who was in the church and who was not. It was not an amorphous group of people that would come check it out for a while. It was a local church. And then third, notice that we have a structure of the church laid out for us there. Saints, overseers, and deacons. Overseers is a word that is also used for elders or pastors in the New Testament, or I should say those three words are interchangeable. You go to Paul's sermon in Acts chapter 20, written to the Ephesian elders, he calls them shepherds of the sheep or pastors. He also says that they are overseers. They oversee the church by praying and teaching God's word and making decisions. So that's what Brian and Ben and Keith, when he's not on sabbatical, do. And then deacons, literally servants, they assist the work of the overseers by caring for the practical needs of the church. So all Christians are commanded to serve, but the office of deacon is specifically set aside to build the unity and effectiveness of the church. So Alan and Jason and Alex and Jack, thank you for what you do. Now a church goes a long way towards effectiveness just by following that pattern that is laid out here. I've basically spent the last 10 years in China trying to get churches just to put this into place. Saints, overseers, and deacons. But now I want to stop and point out that Paul is not bringing up the local church on accident. He means this to be the foundation, the center, the context of everything that he's about to write to them. This would have been obvious in ages past. I think it needs emphasis today, basically because of our American entrepreneurial, innovative, creative spirit. We've taken something else that is in the New Testament, the parachurch organization, and we've gone to town with it. So we see the parachurch in the New Testament. So Paul and Barnabas and Timothy, as they gathered together and started going out from Antioch to plant more churches, They weren't all from the same church. They were cooperating together to do a good thing. And there are many such parachurch organizations that we should be thankful for today. Missions agencies, and seminaries, and orphanages, and Christian publishers, and on and on. But the problem for so many, including me as a young believer, is that you can forget that the local church is essential and the parachurch is not. So you can do stuff with and support crew, or Chi Alpha, or Athletes in Action, or Christian Aid, or Nine Marks, or middle-aged golfers who love Jesus. I made that last one up. You can do those, but you must be a committed member of a local church. Think of the local church as the main meal, the main course of your Christian meal. The other stuff is appetizer, or dessert, or snack, or whatever you want. This is the context of everything else he's gonna say in Philippians. So brothers and sisters, make sure that you join a church. This one or some other gospel preaching church. And don't just join it. Build your Christian life there. Build your schedule there. Think about how far away you want to live. A healthy church has people making career decisions and home purchase decisions and kids' schooling decisions and kids' activity decisions centered around their local church. It's the first reality we see in our snapshot here that we want to emulate. But let's press on and consider a second thing, partnership in the gospel. I'll pick up reading in verse three. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I'm sure of this. that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It's right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. Partnership in the Gospel. Paul talks here specifically about his relationship with this church. He's alluding to something here that he'll come back to in chapter four, that they have sent a monetary gift to Paul while he's in prison through one of their members, Epaphroditus. Paul mentions his imprisonment here. We read at the end of the book of Acts, he's under house arrest, we think, in Rome. He's awaiting his trial before the emperor. In those days, it was up to the friends of the prisoner to provide food for them. I mean, if you didn't have someone bringing you food, then you would not eat. So that's what they've sent money to him for. And this isn't the first time. Notice he says they've been his partners in the gospel from the first day until now. He means from when they believed until now. But how are we to understand what this phrase means, partnership in the gospel? I want us to notice three things about it. First, it's based on what God has done in our lives. So verse 6 there describes what God does in the life of a person who believes in him. He begins a good work in them. What is the work? Well, it's transforming them into the likeness of his son Jesus. He takes us where we're at, he declares us righteous by virtue of Jesus' righteous life and substitutionary death, and then he begins the work we call progressive sanctification. He begins changing us slowly, painfully at times, as we put off sin and put on righteousness. If you wanna know more about growing as a Christian, sanctification, you gotta come to Wednesday Night Live at Jefferson Park Baptist Church, the prayer meeting on Wednesday evening at six o'clock. We're, for the next two months, going to be walking through Ephesians 4 and thinking about just that, sanctification. But this is incredible news here, because it means no matter how lousy I feel about myself at any given point, I'd like to be more patient. I'd like to be less angry. I'd like to be more honest. I'd like to be less lustful. However I feel about myself, I have the promise of God that he's not finished with me yet. And he's not going to finish until the last day, but he will finish. So brothers and sisters, let that encourage you this morning. The partnership is based on the fact that that's true of Paul and it's true of them. Second thing to notice, the partnership is concerned with the spread of the gospel both here and there. What do I mean? Well, because the Philippians are sending money to Paul and praying for him and his work and his ministry in Rome, that's hundreds of miles away. They're concerned with the spread of the gospel there and the other places that Paul had traveled on his missionary journeys. But when Paul says that they are partakers with him of grace, both in his imprisonment and defense and confirmation of the gospel. He means something else. He means that by standing up for Christ under pressure in Philippi, where they are, that they are doing the same thing that Paul is doing. It's in that sense that they are fellow partakers of God's grace. So they're concerned with the gospel in Philippi, they're concerned with it in Rome. And that's important because it reminds you as a church that you aren't just supporting missionaries in Sweden and in Zambia and in Shanghai and wherever else you support missionaries, you are doing mission work here in Charlottesville. I'm not a huge fan of saying all Christians are missionaries and kind of everything is missions. I do like to preserve the word. I'm a bit self-interested there. But I think it's useful for us to remember that the partnership in the gospel is based on the fact that we share the same mission, right? We're doing the same thing in that sense. Third, notice that this partnership leads to affection and it leads to joy. Why is Paul making his prayer with joy? The man's life is not trending well, right? He's in jail. His ministry has had checkered success. Lots of the churches he's planted are not doing well. We know he's a few years away from being martyred. He knew he could lose his life at any time. But the man thinks about the Philippians, and he has joy. I want to ask why. That's a question we're gonna continue to ask as we work our way through the book, but we can say at the start, it's because it just doesn't seem like he's thinking all that much about himself. He's joyful because of them. If the gospel spreads to people and they believe it and they grow and they partner with others to reach more people, then Paul's circumstances don't really matter all that much to him. He has joy. Here's the takeaway. There's zero chance that you and I are gonna have joy if we locate our happiness in our circumstances. It's just not gonna go well in life if we do that. Further, we aren't gonna have joy if we accept a view of the Christian life that doesn't include a passion for evangelism and missions. Many try that. Their view of the Christian life is pretty minimalist. Show up Sunday. tie the little, maybe even add a little Bible reading to your schedule, but then mentally and emotionally throw yourself into your career and your house and your kids' activities and your retirement account. What happens if you do that is a subtle movement of the good news of Jesus Christ from most important thing to a less important thing. You aren't rejecting it, you're just silently reordering your priorities. And then you gradually find yourself looking back to an earlier time in your life where you were fervent and you were joyful, when you felt spiritually alive, when you were trusting God in prayer, when you were pushing yourself to step out in faith and have a conversation with others about the Lord. Friends, don't do that. The Philippians were in it with Paul in two ways, trying to reach Philippi in the face of persecution, same way he was in Rome, and by sending resources to him as the one trying to plant churches where there were none. This was their thing. This is the only thing left recorded about the Philippian church. And for Paul, that brought him joy. It should bring you joy as well. I often wish that I could take everyone from our supporting churches to Shanghai. And though many of you may not understand the services at Shining Light Baptist Church or Springs of Water, church or some of the other places in our association, but I wish you could just watch and see the Chinese believers there. But it brings me joy to know your efforts right here in Charlottesville. It's the second thing in our snapshot here, partnership in the gospel. Let's consider a third thing and keep reading in verse nine. Follow along with me. And it's my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. This was what Paul was praying for them. He records it for us. It's an excellent prayer to memorize, pray for ourselves and others around us. Sometimes we don't know what to pray for each other. We can just use this prayer. Praying scripture is a great way to go. But let's think about the content of the prayer by noticing that there's a kind of structure to it. Three things at the front and three at the back, and the key is sandwiched in the middle there. So at the front, he prays that their love would abound more and more in knowledge and all discernment. Jesus said that the whole of the Christian life is love, right? What's the greatest commandment? that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And what's the second? That you would love your neighbor as yourself. But notice what Paul says here. He doesn't want us to have a squishy view of love. I mean, Paul McCartney was singing All You Need Is Love in the 1960s, but you know that love has kind of been redefined by our culture, right? I mean, the view of love that predominates today is you love me if you affirm all my choices. So I make a choice, you give me a thumbs up, you love me. All right? That's not the older definition of love. The definition of love used to be something like desiring the good of the beloved. So you love me if you desire my good. Well, if you stop and think about that for a moment, you can't desire my good if you don't know what is good. It's gonna take knowledge, and Paul says all discernment if you're gonna know how your love can abound. I think he's thinking about love for God and love for others. So love with knowledge and discernment is the beginning. The center here is so that you may approve what is excellent. Now let's come back to that. We need a love grounded in knowledge and discernment so that we can approve what is excellent. But notice three results come from that. First, pure and blameless for the day of Christ. This is speaking of holy living and the sanctification we talked about. Notice how repeatedly in Paul's thought the day of Christ comes back again and again. He's living in light of that day. But pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness. The idea of fruit, it's a metaphor that we're like a tree that bears fruit. Fruit is what is coming out of our lives, resulting from our life. Are we bearing fruit? We remember Paul's description in Galatians 5 of the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience. So these are internal character qualities, but they lead to external fruit in our relationships, don't they? That's definitely in view here in a prayer that began with love. So on the day of Christ, Paul is praying that their basket of fruit would be full. And all of this, thirdly, will be to the glory and praise of God. But let's come back to the center of the prayer. What's the goal of love and that which will lead to this fruitfulness to God's glory? So that you may approve what is excellent, I like the new international version here, so that you may discern what is best. The idea of the Greek verb is the need to test and consider alternatives. Do I do this or do I do that? Is this true or is that true? I think here we see the greatness of the prayer. This hits us where all of us live. Sometimes our choices in life are clear alternatives between right and wrong. So should I lie or should I tell the truth? Okay, it's clear. But so many of our decisions are between alternatives that are not so clear. Should I take a job that pays me more but requires more time away from my family? Should I sign my children up for more activities or spend more time with them at home? Should I go on a date with the person who has asked me? How much time should I be spending on social media? Am I reading good books that will feed my soul? None of those questions are between good and evil. They're ones that require us to have spiritual wisdom and insight. But they have a huge bearing on our fruitfulness as individual Christians and as a church. We want to approve what is excellent. We want to discern what is best. Now, before we move on to the final and crucial point here, again, we need to see how Paul is giving us a vision of the Christian life that's very different than the world around us. Abounding love is not something that will fill out your resume as you're applying for a new job. Knowledge and all discernment spiritually isn't something they're testing for on the SATs. And the kind of fruitfulness that results from a life built around spiritual priorities isn't going to get you much praise in the broader community. But that's just it, right? As Christians, what should characterize us is this future orientation that keeps coming back, as Paul says again and again, to the day of Christ. That's what we should be living for. So let's say that we embrace Paul's vision here. And we just throw ourselves into the life of our local church. We start showing up on Sunday morning and Wednesday night, and we team up with a friend at church to start a Bible study on a Friday night that we can invite others to. And let's say as we do that, we start to get to know some younger Christians that need to be discipled. And so we start meeting up with them weekly to reread the sermon text from the previous week and talk about application or read a Christian book together. And as we do that, we kind of find ourselves wanting to serve more in the church. So when the deacons stand up and ask for volunteers, we just find ourselves volunteering to help with funerals. And when people move, you know, we become one of those people. What's going to happen? Well, there's going to be a cost, isn't there? I mean, if you're saying yes to all those things, you're going to have to say no to others. Gonna be some hard decisions, a cost to be paid, but if we see with Paul the great future benefit of spiritual fruitfulness, as well as the present joy we get, well then we'll figure it's worth it. So partnership in the gospel leads to fruitfulness in the church. There's one last essential for us here. Let's think forth and finally about the help of God. We may hear all of that and find it to be a tall order. It may be hard for us in lots of ways, but let's not miss the fact that this whole section is bathed in prayer. He's praying grace and peace to them in the Lord Jesus Christ in verse two. He's praying and giving thanks to God with joy for them in verse three. and the spiritual priorities that are laid out in verse 9 to 11, which would surely motivate them as they heard this letter read to them. They weren't spoken to them first. Paul first spoke them to God. He's not ultimately relying on them to bring this about, but he's praying that God would work in them to will and to act according to his good purpose. He's a great example for us here. Brothers and sisters, we too should give ourselves to prayer. Now I know on the list of ways to discourage a Christian is just asking this question, how is your prayer life? I know that can be discouraging. I think there are a number of reasons for that. We recognize pretty quickly after we become a Christian that we should talk to God so much more than we do. We know he's there. We know he loves us. We believe what the Bible says, that he hears and answers prayer. We're surrounded by people who encourage us to pray. So what happens? Well, for one, we get busy with things that are just kind of right up in our face. And we slip, I think, into thinking that prayer is a quadrant two activity. You know, it's important, but it's not urgent. And perhaps over time, we begin to wonder about how important it is. Different thoughts plague us. Like, if God is sovereign, does it really matter if I pray? We know that isn't how biblical logic works, but it bothers us. I think at the core of the problem with our lack of prayer is right at the heart of living by faith and not by sight. God wants us to live here, believing in him, though we don't see him, and talking to him, although we don't get immediate audible answers. We aren't supposed to treat prayer, what I'm saying is, like we treat the person who doesn't return our text messages, right? We all have those people. But God isn't doing that to us. I think thinking that way can make us become dry and lifeless in our prayers. This prayer that we've just looked at might be one of the best prayers out there to help us overcome our spiritual dryness and our excuses for prayerlessness. Because we know that we really want all the things Paul is talking about. You and I want more love in our lives for God and for others. We really want that. We want to be able to approve what is best. We're bombarded with choices all the time. So friends, the motivation is there for us. Let's pray. Go home today and find a quiet place to pray this very prayer to God, asking him to help you grow. Ask Him to help give you a burden for praying for others in this church. Use that wonderful app, the Glide app, that you can go right down and see faces of people that are members of the church and pray for them. Pray for a couple every day. Ask God to give you a desire to be at the prayer meetings of the church. That's the center, that's the furnace, that's the heart of any church, is the prayer meeting, where they come together, to pray. So beloved, let's give ourselves to the work of prayer. We should conclude. We talked in the beginning about the power of a photograph, even an old black and white one. You know, there's a picture on the Jefferson Park website that's just such an old black and white photo. I don't know if you've seen it. It's the first meeting of the Fry Spring Baptist Mission Sunday School on July 12, 1960. If you go there, I assume this is the group that started meeting that led to the planting of this church out of First Baptist Church originally. If you zoom way in on that photo, you'll see lots of fascinating things. First, you'll notice that there are a lot of bow ties on the men. And there are no men without ties in the photo. You'll notice that the girls all have white poofy dresses. There are a lot of Sunday hats on the ladies. A lot of people holding Bibles. It's July 12th, 1960. I don't know a lot about that first group that began to gather and pray that they could plant a local church. I don't know what was in their minds and hearts. I don't know what became of them as individuals. But I know by God's grace that what they began remains here 61 years later as a faithful Bible-preaching church. I know most of them are not alive anymore. A few are. But I'm sure that if we could lean into that photo, they would say to us something similar as the Philippians church. If they could speak to us from that picture, they would say, give yourselves to the life of this local church. Give yourself to partnership in the gospel, lock arms with other people with whom you can testify to the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Pray together that you'd have a love abounding with knowledge and all discernment so that you can approve the things that are excellent. Rely on God's help, because without him, you can do nothing. They would say to us, in effect, carpe diem, seize the day. And brothers and sisters, that's exactly what we want to ask the Lord to do in our midst. Let's pray together.