Introduction

Series Introduction

It’s been a while since I preached through a whole book of the Bible, so I was thinking about a verse-by-verse deep-dive into Leviticus, but then I decided instead to try something a little more manageable: we’re going to go through the book of Philippians. Philippians is a short letter—4 chapters—sent by Paul towards the end of his life to the first church he started in Europe: at Philippi. Paul is imprisoned, probably under house arrest in Rome, and the Philippian church has sent him a generous financial contribution to support him. Philippians is his thank you letter, but it’s so much more. Paul sends along some advice to help nurture this church that was very dear to his heart. This same advice has been tremendously helpful for Christians ever since. So let’s dig into the Epistle to the Philippians.

Sermon Introduction

What is the point of faith? If asked a random Christian, she might talk about having Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Saviour and going to heaven when she dies. For many of us, faith something personal. In the case of our generic Christian, it’s about her beliefs, her salvation, and her spiritual growth. The people she goes to church with aren’t all that important. It’s not that she actively dislikes them, but they’re simply fellow travellers on the same road.

This way of thinking would feel quite alien to first century Christians. Israel was the people of God, and the Gentile Christians were being joined into Israel’s story. The faith was a faith they all shared. They wouldn’t think about salvation primarily as about how they as individuals would be saved, but how they, as God’s people would be saved. That’s not to say that they didn’t have an individual identity, but they realized something that we, in our individualistic culture can easily forget: We’re all in this together.

The best metaphor that we might relate to their understanding of the church would be as a platoon of soldiers. If you’ve seen TV shows, movies or documentaries about soldiers in combat, it’s not hard to see that the bonds they have are unlike the bonds we have with many other people. If someone enlisted in the Canadian army, they’d be assigned to a group of soldiers. The people would come from all over the country. They wouldn’t have a common race or ethnicity. They wouldn’t all speak the same language. They wouldn’t all vote for the same political party. But during basic training, and if that group was kept together in combat, the men would be knit together into a family. They would be bound together by a common mission and the knowledge that they were the ones who would protect one another.

Now, we’re not called to be soldiers in a flesh-and-blood war. But there are common traits between a congregation of Christians and a squad of soldiers in battle. We’re meant to be a tight-knit family of people who pursue a common mission, setting aside our differences and supporting and protecting one another like our lives depend on it. Of course our mission isn’t seizing land from an opposing army, or killing enemies. Our job is to become a faithful outpost of the coming age of God’s kingdom even in the midst of an age where it doesn’t feel like God is king, and this isn’t something we can do on our own.

The Salvation to which we are called, then, isn’t about ‘getting into heaven,’ although eternal life is a part of it, but its about being transformed into new creation. This isn’t something we can do on our own; it requires the grace of God, and part of that grace only comes to us through relationships.

The Christian life, as Paul talks about it in the first 11 verses of his letter to the church in Philippi is about three things: A new life, a new power and a new family. Let’s examine what each of these look like in turn. But first, let’s read over the text we’ll be considering today:

Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:1-11 ).

I. A New Life

First, I want to look at how the Christian life is a new kind of life defined by values of humility and love. It’s important to note that both of these characteristics are relational. You can’t be humble or loving except in how you relate to others.

A. Humble

First, let’s look at humility. As soon as we begin to read Philippians, there’s a hint that the Christian life is unlike anything people are familiar with. This hint, which we probably all read without a second thought, happens when Paul and Timothy identify themselves as servants of Christ. Actually, the Greek word translated as ‘servants’—δοῦλοι (douloi)—would be better translated as Slaves. In Paul’s day and our own, this would be a bit of a head-scratcher. People now, as then, like to boast about how important they are. People want you to know they’re the executive vice president of marketing, chief financial officer. That’s what makes Paul and Timothy’s greeting so surprising. They’re writing to a church as authoritative teachers and they seem to undercut their authority (at least in the way normal people think) by claiming to be slaves. It would be like a person offering a seminar on political strategy, after running for office 8 times and failing to get elected each and every time.

Paul and Timothy are appealing to their low position to bolster their authority. This is a pretty big hint that in God’s kingdom, things work very differently. Lest we think Paul’s just being weird, the idea that a slave is great isn’t Paul’s innovation: It is consistent with Jesus’ example and teaching. Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, Jesus tells us he comes not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

Paul will develop this idea in more detail in chapter 2, but humility is a prerequisite to building the kind of community in which discipling happens, so Paul and Timothy are very intentionally laying aside the power they might exercise in the community. They could try to cow the Philippian Christians into being the right kind of people, but in Jesus they see how God exercises power: persuasively, rather than coercively.

Just as Paul and Timothy follow the example of Jesus in being humble towards others in the community, so we must also do so. All of us have influence over others. Sometimes that influence comes from a formal position: being a boss, being a pastor, being a ministry leader, etc., but often that power comes from informal relationships (people might give our advice greater weight because we’re older and more experienced, or because we are knowledgeable). But Paul and Timothy show us how to use that authority to build up the people around us, not by puffing ourselves up, but by humbling ourselves. For example, if someone comes to me and asks what they should do, I can confidently say, ‘do this.’ I’m authoritative and you should do as I say. But what if you can be more helpful by being open about your past failures: ‘I once thought that was a good idea, but it was a foolish decision that I regret. Don’t make the same mistake I did.’ That vulnerability is harder, but explaining how you’ve recognized your past failures might allow someone to learn the lessons you’ve learned without the pain.

B. Loving

The new life of the disciple is different because it leads us to seek to humble ourselves for the sake of others. But this new life doesn’t just require us to be humble, it also requires us to love. While love is a slippery word in our language, Paul’s prayer at the end of the passage gives us context to understand what he means:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:9–11).

For some people love is an abstract idea. As the character Pierrot says in  Edna St. Vincent Millay play Aria da Capo, “I love humanity but I hate people.” This kind of abstract love doesn’t require knowledge and depth of insight, so it’s not what Paul is talking about. Paul is saying that the life of the discipling community requires us to learn to love each other in the messiness of life.

Some people want a textbook to tell them what love looks like. Here are the rules. Do them and that’s loving. If others don’t do them, feel free to savage them and consider yourself to be loving them, because you’re guiding them back to the straight and narrow (even if the consequence is to push them further away from faith). This kind of ‘love’ doesn’t require knowledge or depth of insight. Real love is complicated and often feels subjective. I remember a situation where a member the church I was going to had left his wife, had an affair, and fathered a baby with his mistress. The wife had moved on and was in a relationship with someone else. Some others in the church said that the man needed to leave his mistress (which a simple, rules-based faith would see as the obvious answer) but the ship had sailed on going back to his wife, and abandoning the child born out of the illicit union would just cause one more innocent person to be hurt). The kind of love Paul is talking about is about walking with people in messy situations like this. It means discerning what is best in our own lives, even if our past mistakes have made the ideal impossible.

The Philippian church is made up mostly of former pagans, whose lives would be filled with regrettable mistakes, but the good news means that God calls us to a new life that incorporates our former mistakes. But knowing how to live a new life while we bear the scars of the old life is not always obvious. That’s why Paul prays that they’ll have knowledge and depth of insight to know what is best and how to move forward as pure and blameless.

That prayer is a prayer for each of us. Maybe your life before you came to faith was a mess and there are effects of that former life you’re still dealing with. Or maybe you made big mistakes after coming to faith. You might wonder if there’s a way forward for you. But There is always a plan A for your life starting from wherever you are right now. Your past failures don’t have to disqualify you from future successes. Our past mistakes may close doors for us, but God has a way of opening new ones. If you’ve blown it, you can always pray, “God I can’t do anything about the ways I’ve blown it in the past, but I want to honour you with my future.” There’s always a way forward. Figuring out what love demands of us is sometimes obvious, but at other times, its not. But the new life we live, in which we are being made holy is possible because God graciously gives us knowledge and incite about what it looks like.

II. A New Power

If we have a new life, characterized by humility and love, we must also realize that this new life isn’t something that we can achieve on our own. If we could make life work on our own, we wouldn’t need God’s help. That’s why all of my attempts to just behave myself are doomed to end in frustration. One of the most important ideas of the Christian faith is that I’m not capable of saving myself. None of us are. Any faith that simply tells us to live God’s way, ignores the fact that the kind of life we’re supposed to live is impossible with human effort alone. The good news of Christianity is that we don’t have to do this on our own, God acts on our behalf to transform us into new creatures if we can only trust him and follow his lead.

We need to set appropriate expectations. If we come to faith and believe our lives will be instantly and effortlessly transformed, we’ll be disappointed. Learning a new way of life still takes time and practice, even when God’s grace is at work in us. God respects our free will, and so being transformed is about learning to surrender our will to God’s loving kindness. But during this often drawn out process, we can see signs of God’s work in us that ought to encourage us.

Metaphorically, we might imagine it like planting tomatoes. You put the seed in the soil and you wonder if it will come to anything. But after a week or two, green shoots begin to poke through the soil. These shoots aren’t something we can eat for dinner, but they do prove that the seed has taken root and is growing. Tomatoes aren’t here yet, but tomatoes are coming. In much the same way, when the Spirit starts to work in our lives, small changes portend something much bigger. This is the basis of Paul’s confidence for the Philippian Church. Their collective generosity towards him is a sign that God is at work in their midst: it is the first shoots that show God’s love has rooted itself in their life together. Because God’s love is growing in their hearts, Paul knows that God will continue to be faithful to them as his grace continues to transform their lives. This is why he can see that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Their generosity is a sneak peak of more transformation to come.

Looking at our own lives, we can sometimes be discouraged by the slow growth we see. We long for a time when we become the version of ourselves that we long to be. One that is joyful, kind, patient, humble, generous, wise, and self-controlled. But unlearning our old ways of being and becoming new is hard work that takes a long time. But just as the gardener can be encouraged by the first budding shoots to protrude from the soil, so we can be encouraged when we can see God’s work taking shape. What might that look like? Maybe you’re able to pray for that person at work who is rude to you when before you would have secretly wished them ill. Maybe you had the faith to go out on a limb and be generous with a family member in need in a way you weren’t formerly willing to do. These transformations also happen in our life together: Maybe we as a church see more people volunteering to help with the Market meal, or we see more people voluteering to help in some sort of community outreach. Those little changes may feel like baby steps, but they are the incontrovertible evidence that more is coming. So don’t despise humble beginnings. Look for God’s work in our life together and long to see more of it. Give praise and honour to God for it, because it is the work of his grace, not of our unaided willpower.

III. A New Family

So the life of salvation is a new life that embraces humility and love. It is empowered by the gracious gift of the Spirit, but it is a life where we are made holy together. The Christian life isn’t me, God and my bible. It is about being brought into a new way of living with God and a new way of living with God’s people.

A. Mentor/Protege Relationships

One of the ways we learn to live this new kind of life is by being mentored by the community. This is a lot like how families mentor the next generation. We have children, and over the course of their childhood and adolescence, we try to impart values, wisdom, and character, so that when they become parents, they can pass those things on to the next generation. As the church, we do the same thing. People come to faith, sometimes as small kids, sometimes as fully grown adults. They don’t become spiritual grownups just by listening to wise teaching. After all, Paul, a very able teacher, seems unable to coax many of the believers to maturity. Writing to our favourite dysfunctional church of the first century—Corinth—Paul shows how even a skilled pastor alone can’t transform a community.

Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? (1 Corinthians 3:1–3)

If Paul can’t turn people into mature Christians, then there isn’t really any hope that any pastor or church leader can make us mature. The maturation must also involve the willing participation of the person who needs to mature, but also, and often overlooked, the participation of the Christian community.

Often in church, we overemphasize the importance of teaching and underestimate the importance of authentic fellowship. This isn’t to say that a sermon doesn’t matter, but it does mean that the time we spend talking about life and getting to know each other, which allows us to encourage and challenge each other, is just as important. So you could come to church 2 minutes before the service starts and leave the moment it ends, but you’re missing out on what God wants to do through the community. God wants to use all of these beautiful people (and all the ugly ones too!) to shape you into a new creature. So don’t look at the unstructured time at church as a frivolity, but as a necessary part of your discipleship journey. Be present. Make connections, and be honest about where you’re at. This is how we learn to love, encourage and challenge one another to grow into people God has called us to be.

The Philippians have been mentored by God, by Paul and by each other. But that mentoring often happens when we engage in shared mission and purpose.

B. Shared Mission & Purpose

When a diverse group of people gets together, it tends to subdivide into groups that have things in common. If you work for a big company and they have a Christmas party, you probably gravitate towards spending time with the people on your team. If you go to a big church, it feels natural to focus your energies on people around your age or in the same life stage as you. But if we are drawn to people like us, the converse is also true, we have a harder time being unified with people with whom we have little in common.

This difficulty is especially great in the church because the church is meant to be a deliberately diverse, welcoming all kinds of people. In the early church, this was most obvious because Jesus sent his Jewish disciples to make disciples of the nations (the Gentiles). Jews and Gentiles had a long history of mutual suspicion and hostility, and yet this community of Jesus’ followers was commanded to bring Jews and Gentiles together, and to hold them together in unity. This can sometimes feel like an impossible task.

But while a diverse group pursuing the various interests of its member is difficult to unify, a group with a shared mission and purpose is much easier to hold together. In World War II, the British and Americans seemed like natural allies, but not so much the Soviet Union (for those of you who don’t know world history, after Germany attacked the Soviet Union and Japan attacked the US in 1941, they both joined Britain in the alliance against the Nazi Germany). But as long as the three countries had a common goal (defeating Nazis) they could cooperate. When Germany surrendered, and the common mission disappeared, the diverging interests of the Soviets from the rest of the alliance quickly transformed the allies into Cold War antagonists.

It can be similar in the church. If we’re a collection of people who just worship in the same building each Sunday, then we’ll struggle to find unity, but if we’re united in purpose, then the mission becomes more important than our differences, and we’ll find that our differences of ethnicity, gender, politics or class don’t really matter as much.

The Philippian church has such a common purpose: they are Paul’s partners in the gospel. Their support for Paul, even when he’s in prison, shows that they so identify with the mission he’s working on that they’re willing to give out of their poverty to help him. This mission has become bigger than themselves, so it transcends their personal differences.

We need a common mission too. As a discipling community, we can’t hold together young people and old people, Canadians and Filipinos, Conservatives and Liberals, men and women unless we have a common task. What is this task? In a general sense, it’s the same as the Philippians: to “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.” How to do this specifically is something we must discern though prayer. But the goal must be that when the world sees us, it sees the kind of purity and righteousness that brings praise to God.

The community that takes note of its call is a community that disciples. If we catch the vision, then we will gladly serve. In the context of service, our work together transforms us.

My mother-in-law gave Naomi a rock tumbler for her most recent birthday. You start with a bunch of not-interesting rocks and you put it in the tumbler. And then it goes for a long, long time (It ran for a month in the bathroom next to my home office making a terrible racket—Thanks Mom! ). In the place where those rocks constantly bump into each other, the sharp edges are chipped away and the rocks’ true beauty is revealed.

So it is with us. As we are thrown together into the crucible of serving together, we change each other. We have to deal with this person’s odd way of doing things, and that person’s wonderful gifts and their maddening quirks. Our sharp edges are broken away and we become the beautiful people that God desires for us to be. This isn’t something that happens with just me, God and my bible. The rock tumble requires a ‘community’ of rocks. Just as discipleship requires a community of people, at the writer of proverbs put it, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:13). We need each other and we need the mission, and we need God’s power. But what emerges from all this banging and smashing is something beautiful and holy.

Conclusion

I hope in this discussion, you see the through-line. The life God calls us to live isn’t something that we can experience alone. The new life is defined by ways of responding to each other: Humility and love. The Power that makes it all happen—God’s grace—is mediated to us in community. This new life happens when we’re plugged into a new family that mentors us and gives us a shared sense of mission and purpose.

So let’s not neglect the relational side of our faith. We can’t collapse it into a private, personal faith that doesn’t include or relate to other people. Instead, let’s find the joy that God wants us to discover that is only possible as we place ourselves in each others’ hands. God wants each of us to be participants in each others’ great and continuing work of renewal and transformation.