Philippians 1:9-11 - Lessons from Paul's School of Prayer

Philippians chapter 1.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

Go ahead and turn there.

We're continuing on this study through Philippians.

Verses 9 to 11.

That's the text for tonight.

Philippians 1, 9 to 11.

This is what God's word says.

And I pray this that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior, and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.

Let's pray.

Lord, what better prayer could we offer than to pray that our love would keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, that we would approve the things that are superior, that we would be pure, that we'd be blameless in the day of Jesus Christ.

Oh God, fill us up with the fruit of righteousness.

It's a fruit we know and acknowledge that comes through Jesus Christ.

And we pray that we would do this all to your glory in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Robert Murray McShane was a Scottish minister in the 1800s, and he famously said, If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies.

Yet the distance makes no difference.

He is praying for me.

If you could hear Christ praying, that would bring encouragement to you.

And the knowledge that he is praying for us should bring encouragement to us.

It would bring instruction to.

Even the disciples come to Jesus and they say, Lord, teach us to pray.

And he gives them a pattern for prayer, the Lord's prayer.

Well, we don't have an audio recording of the words of Jesus.

We don't have an audio recording of the apostles' prayers as interesting as those would be.

The apostles, too, can teach us much about prayer.

We do have written down prayers that they prayed.

And we have one such prayer right here in Philippians chapter one.

It's a prayer that Paul himself prays for the Philippian church.

And we can learn a lot from this particular prayer.

The title for the message tonight is Lessons from Paul's School of Prayer.

I'm going to limit myself to five lessons.

You can take more than that.

And there's actually a number of Paul's prayers that are recorded throughout scripture, especially in the letters.

My title is similar to a chapter in a book by someone who looks at a larger number of Paul's prayers.

We're going to focus just on this prayer tonight from Philippians chapter 1, five lessons from Paul's prayer.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

Here's the first lesson.

Three verses.

I'm sure at times Paul said more than just these specific words for the Philippians.

Perhaps he's summarizing some of the things he's prayed for them here.

But those are speculations.

The bottom line is Paul says, Hey, I've prayed for you.

Here's what I've prayed.

And it's pretty short.

That's similar to Jesus' pattern Our Father in heaven, hallowed by thy name, and it goes on.

It's a relatively short prayer.

But Micah, what about pray without ceasing?

I'm not saying that we should rarely ever pray.

I'm saying when we pray for any particular group or person, it doesn't necessarily have to be a long prayer.

We should have a spirit of prayerfulness about us throughout the day.

We should want and desire that.

But we shouldn't feel discouraged if we're not praying 15 minutes straight for New Hyde Park Baptist Church or the Cooney families as missionaries.

But Micah what about when Jesus went and spent all night in prayer?

It's a wonderful thing.

That wasn't every night.

So there's wonderful occasions when we can spend greater seasons in prayer.

I'm not saying overlook those or minimize those, but don't minimize short, simple, scriptural prayers.

Matthew 6, 7, and 8.

When you pray, don't babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they'll be heard for their many words.

Don't be like them, because your father knows the things you need before you ask him.

We're not trying to get God's attention or inform him.

He knows.

Nothing happens.

And Elijah gets up and prays, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you're God in Israel, and I am your servant, and that your word I've done all these things.

Answer me, Lord, answer so that the people will know that you're God and you've turned their hearts back.

And then fire falls down from heaven.

It's the power of the person we're praying to.

It's not the length of our own prayers.

Some of you might be a little hesitant about praying on Sunday night or Wednesday night or even to come on Wednesday night because, well, I just can't pray a long, eloquent prayer.

Don't.

Pray a short, heartfelt prayer.

Lesson number two, we should pray for churches and not merely for individuals.

Who is Paul praying for here in these verses?

Verse 9, he speaks of your love and that in verse 10, you may approve what is superior.

It's not a letter for the saints, uh, for Timothy as an individual.

It's for the saints at Philippi, verse 1, together with the overseers and deacons.

He's praying for the church.

When Allie was back visiting with us from Texas, she came into Audrey's house and she said, Hey, y'all.

And we said, Boy, Texas has got a hold of you.

She said, Oh, oh, sorry.

Hey, you guys.

Paul is praying for y'all.

Paul is praying for you guys here in this passage.

So, how often do you find yourself praying for groups of Christians, especially for churches?

We live in a very, very individualistic society that has some benefits.

Why are food courts and diners so popular?

In part because you can go and people can get whatever they want.

Doesn't work that way at the family dinner table.

At least it didn't used to work that way.

One of the challenges of the society we live in is that we're not as used to caring for groups of people and praying for groups of people.

I go to a pastor's fellowship, and one of the great things about that fellowship is usually at some point we kind of go around the room and ask the question, how can we pray for your church?

I love that question.

It's not uncommon for me to get an email or a text message from an administrator or another pastor here in the area.

Hey, how can we pray for your church this coming Sunday?

Other churches are praying for our church.

That's incredible.

What a blessing.

So when we think about missionaries, yes, let's pray for individual families like the Coonis or the Wissies.

But let's also pray that the Sola Fide Home Fellowship that the Coonis are working with would blossom into a multiplying church.

Let's pray for the Whisies that wherever God lands them, they'd be able to help build up or establish a healthy church for the glory of God by God's grace.

Our prayers don't have to be long.

We should pray for churches and not merely individuals.

Lesson number three.

We should pray that Christian love would keep growing.

That's how Paul starts the prayer in verse number nine.

You can look there again.

I pray this, that your love will keep on growing.

That sounds like kind of a, well, duh.

I mean, love is pretty important by this.

All people will know that you're my disciples by the way that you love one another.

Isn't that kind of obvious that we should pray that Christians would love each other and that that love would grow in in churches?

It's obvious, but it's always needed.

Look around our world.

Even look within churches.

The world could use more Christian love.

Churches could use more Christian love.

There's never enough of that.

So we want to keep praying that it would grow.

Now, as we pray for this growing love, there's two very important guideposts that Paul puts on this particular prayer.

You can see those at the end of verse number nine.

That your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment.

Love that's untethered to God's truth is not really love.

Carson puts it this way: without the constraints of knowledge and insight, love very easily degenerates into mockish sentimentality or into the kind of mushy pluralism the world often confuses with love.

These constraints do not stifle love.

Far from it, they ensure its purity and value.

So we're not just praying for a vague, more positive feeling, although we want our whole mind, heart, soul, and strength to be engaged in loving others, but we're praying particularly that love would grow, that it'd be a growing love in knowledge.

Sometimes those two things are pitted against each other.

Well, we don't really need more knowledge.

We just need more love.

No, that's not what Paul says here.

He says we need a love that's a growing love in knowledge.

We need a love that understands and embraces from a personal way and from our hearts who the Lord is, that we know him, and all the truth of his word that he's given us.

It's all good, it's all glorious, and all that knowledge is fuel that will help our love grow more for him and for others.

When's the last time you heard someone pray for New Hyde Park Baptist Church that our love would keep growing in knowledge?

Is it because we could be tempted to think, well, we we pretty much have all the knowledge we need.

We could use a little more, but we we've got that covered.

If that's the case, let's confess our pride and pray for humility and then pray that our love would grow more and more in knowledge.

The other guidepost that Paul puts out here for increasing love is that it would be a love not only that's growing in knowledge, but also a love in discernment.

You might be looking at a Bible tonight that says depth of insight there at the end of verse 9, that second guidepost.

A discerning love.

Sometimes online you'll see different ministries that label themselves discernment ministries.

You ever run into that online?

Generally speaking, you should avoid them because they're not very discerning.

Just as an FYI.

Usually what they're doing is they're they're gonna want to convince you that every public Christian you know is secretly a wolf in sheep's clothing, or every notable church is just actually a den of iniquity.

And it's at best, it's kind of it can be nitpicking.

At worst, it can be actually slanderous.

You're jumping to conclusions about motives or behaviors or associations without that much information, without that much knowledge.

And is the goal love, or is the goal just to kind of be the Christian alternative of a world's cancel culture?

The goal is love.

And another note: if you run into a Christian individual that says, God's really given me the gift of discernment, they probably don't have it.

Um but you can help them, be kind to them, uh, be patient with them, and hopefully you can help them see and know scripture even better.

A growing love is a discerning love, so it doesn't rush to believe everything that calls itself discerning, but we do need discernment.

It says so right here.

We need a love that clearly and carefully distinguishes right from wrong.

A similar word to the word that's used here in verse 9 is used in Hebrews 5.14.

That passage reads, solid food is for the mature, for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil.

That's a lot broader than just this novel has some bad words in it.

I need discernment whether I should read it or not.

It's much broader than that.

It's all-encompassing all of life.

Lord, I want to know what's right and wrong in your eyes, and I want to love and celebrate those things and avoid whatever's not good and righteous and lovely and all those words in your eyes.

Pray for a growing love.

Fourth lesson.

Four out of five.

So that we do five lessons.

Here's the fourth one.

We should pray with the end in view.

Let me say that again.

We should pray with the end in view.

Verse 10.

So that praying for this growing love, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ.

The day of Christ there refers to the second coming of the Lord Jesus.

That's a common theme in the Bible.

Live with the end in view.

1 Corinthians 1 8.

He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you will be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Thessalonians 5.2, you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.

Let us stay awake and be self-controlled.

So if we're praying with the end in view, the end of history, the final wrapping up of all of God's purposes, to bring in the sermon from this morning, this day of the Lord that has come, and that yet in another sense will come climactically and finally.

If we've got the end in view, we're gonna want to pray for churches to approve things that are superior, as verse 10 says.

That's that's the Christian Standard Bible, the Pew Bible.

Yours might say to approve what is best or to approve what is excellent.

If you know eternity is rushing in on you, don't you want to live for what's the best thing you could live for?

Again, it's a very sensible prayer, but it needs to be lived out and prayed out in light of what's coming.

So, how can we pray to approve what is superior?

What does that look like?

Lord, help Crossbridge to understand that Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches are better than McDonald's chicken sandwiches.

They're far superior.

No, that's obvious.

You don't have to pray for that.

Pray for more important things.

There's an example of the kind of thing that Paul is talking about right here in this very letter.

So flip over to Philippians 3.

Not gonna do a sermon on this passage, it's coming later.

But I do want you to see this because Paul's gonna elaborate on the excellent things, superior things, the what is best kind of things.

Verse 7 of chapter 3.

Everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ.

More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

There's one thing of surpassing value, you can always pray that they would know Christ more.

Paul goes on, because of him I've suffered the loss of all things, and consider them as dung, that I might gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own from the law, but one that is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.

There's the end in view, the resurrection from among the dead, and all the while he's got the surpassing value knowing Christ more.

So we can pray for other churches and for our own church and for Christian organizations.

Help us to have this grasp of the surpassing value of Christ and who he is.

Paul suffered and he found Christ to be of inestimable value amidst his suffering.

We're not praying for people to suffer more, but we're praying for them to have a kind of experience and mindset in their suffering.

So think about how we pray for suffering churches, and even we could say this applies to individual prayers.

How do you pray for suffering individuals?

It's fine, it's kind, it's right to pray that they would be healed.

But if 95 plus percent of our prayers are merely, Lord, heal this person who's gotten a bad diagnosis, heal this person in the hospital, Lord, this church is going through some hard times, you know, bind them up, heal them.

If that's all that we're praying, we're not capturing Paul's full heart of prayer.

We pray that they'd be able to say, amidst their suffering, I know something about fellowship with Christ.

And I have a resurrection power that's at work in me, that's sustaining me, and I have a vision of Christ and a relationship with him that's carrying me through this.

That's what we want to grow and flourish, along with whatever physical healing the Lord may bring into their lives.

Let me switch to a different arena of application.

Jesus says, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The verse here additionally speaks of being pure and being blameless in the day of Christ.

Again, that there's the goal in mind, but what's beautiful here in part is that Paul's not demanding perfection right now.

That's not to say he's excusing sin at all, but he's praying with the end in view and wanting Christians to progress towards that end.

Pray with the end in view.

2 Peter 3 The day of the Lord will come like a thief.

On that day, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed.

Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of people should you be in holy conduct and godliness as you wait for the day of God?

Based on his promise, we wait for a new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells.

That brings us right into the final lesson.

Lesson number five from Paul's School of Prayer.

We should pray that righteous lives will bring glory to God through Christ.

Right from verse number 11, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.

Pray for our church.

Pray for North Shore Baptist Church.

Pray for Beacon Church.

Pray for West Hills Baptist Church.

Pray for other churches that they would be filled with the fruit of righteousness.

Does that sound kind of pious or overly self-righteous?

It's Paul's prayer.

Can't be wrong, provided it comes from a good heart.

How often do you get a letter from a Christian organization?

And it says, pray for us coming up in 2026.

We'd love to have a larger influence.

We want our ministry to expand.

Pray for us as we're making staffing decisions.

Pray for us as we try to hit our goal of$2.3 million by the year 2030.

Those aren't wrong prayers.

But you ever get a letter from an organization, missions organization, camp, Christian camp, and they say, pray for us that this year we'd be filled with the fruit of righteousness.

Would that be a letdown?

I hope not.

It's the kind of thing that desperately is needed in prayer and in churches and organizations everywhere, the fruit of righteousness, lives that are more and more and hearts aligning with God and his purposes, his heart, our heart, his mind, our mind.

We want those things lined up in these morally beautiful and compelling ways.

There's one other place in the Bible that mentions the fruit of righteousness.

You don't have to turn there, but I'll read it for you.

James 3, verses 17 and 18.

James 3:17

The wisdom from above is first pure, then peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense.

And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace.

Pray that.

Pray that.

Pray that for one another.

The ultimate reason that God's doing this is that he would receive glory.

The works of the flesh contrast with the fruit of the spirit.

It's supernaturally produced by God.

And so if it's supernaturally produced by God, where else can we go but to God to ask Him to do it?

The ultimate test, one writer says, is the test of our motives.

Our prayers reveal more and more whether the grand central hub of our lives is ourselves, or whether it's God.

So we pray that God's glory would increase, that his fame would increase in this church, in that church, and the churches that everywhere name the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that's where this prayer of Paul actually comes full circle with the Lord's Prayer.

When the disciples say, Teach us to pray, Jesus begins, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

May your name be set apart as holy.

The devotion of your glory, would that be the first thing that headlines our prayers?

This is how Paul ends this particular prayer.

It's coming through Jesus Christ, but it's multiplying to the glory of God.

That love that we have for others, part of the prayer, growing love, it's going to be growing horizontally to the extent that it grows vertically to God.

That's the source and supply of the love.

And it goes back to him that he might receive glory, that others might be compelled to say, I want that love for the Lord.

I want that kind of a growing love for his people.

And we love him because he first loved us.

When we gather on Sunday, we don't want to be a Tower of Babel church.

You know what I mean by that?

They wanted to make a name for themselves.

It can happen in kind of subtle ways.

Hey, welcome to our church.

Hopefully you met our great ushers.

You're about to hear from our great band, then you're going to hear from our great pastor.

Yes, I mean, we're we're thankful for all those things, but we're gathering because we want people to hear about our great God.

We want him to have the spotlight because he's the one that satisfies far more than any one other thing, individual idea, plan, or purpose or program in a church.

So that's what we pray about.

I'm going to close us once again with this prayer from Philippians chapter one for our church.

I'd invite you in your own hearts, pray along.

Hopefully, you can say amen to this short and beautiful prayer.

Lord, how we thank you.

And we're praying this that our love as a church would keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, that we would approve things that are superior, that we would be blameless and pure in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to your glory and praise.

Amen.