Philippians 1:3-6 - A Joyful Prayer

Well, good evening.

I'd invite you to take your Bible and turn with me to Philippians, book of Philippians, chapter one.

We'll be looking at four verses this evening, verses three through six.

Shortly after Royal and I uh moved to the house in Maple Drive, we started to have a little bit of a difference of opinion.

We had the exterior painted.

I chose the color, and I swore it was blue.

But Royal, when she looked at it, she said, that's not blue, that's gray.

And uh, we kind of left off the discussion about that just uh agreeing to disagree about what color the house actually was.

I still think it's blue, she still thinks it's gray.

Have you ever had those moments where you see something and you've got a particular perspective about it?

Somebody else is looking at the exact same thing and they think differently about it.

Well, that was one of those.

And there's often those optical illusions that uh sometimes you run across, uh, like the Necker's cube, which is this transparent cube, a little wire-framed cube.

And as it sits there, you think, well, which is the face that's actually pointing at me, right?

Or are the Rubens base where if you look at it at a certain point in time, it it looks like a goblet, but when you look at it again, it looks like two faces, right?

So how how your brain switches from one perspective to another.

Well, we're gonna be looking at Philippians chapter 1, verses 3 to 6.

Philippians 1:3–6

And it's one of those passages that opens up very much like a conventional opening in a letter, particularly in Paul's day, with a greeting, a thanksgiving, uh, with a bit of a report, and then the body of the letter.

And these verses are the the the Thanksgiving's portion of it.

And you would probably just read that like you might read any introduction uh to a letter.

For those of you that are under 20, people used to write things on paper and stick them in an envelope and put this thing called a stamp on them.

And there's a mailbox.

You could actually walk to a mailbox, and three or four days later, people would get that.

That's it's just an amazing thing.

But that greeting and that first word, sometimes you think, well, those are just the perfunctory words that we we often say.

Do we really, really mean them?

We we got to fill it in there before we get to the real stuff that we want to talk about.

It might be easy to look at verses three to six and think of it just like that, to read it quickly, say, look, I just want to dive into the theological stuff that's there in the book of Philippians.

I want to get right into the meat of it all.

I would encourage you not to do that.

I'd like for you to see this as more than just a perfunctory prayer or just a movement from the greetings down into the meat of it, which is going to be later in the book of Philippians.

Because if you stop with this, just like you might with a Nectar's cube or Reuben's uh vase, you're gonna see it from a different perspective.

And if you see it from this different perspective, it's going to do two revolutionary things for you.

You're going to find that it gives you a theology of relationships that'll enrich your life.

And secondly, it will offer you a promise that can hold you through the deepest of times.

But in the midst of this, I want us to see how Paul lays out his relationship with the Philippian church in the middle of being in prison, where he is obviously in difficulty and his life is tenuous, and yet in the midst of it, he's a joyful person.

And so I think here in verses three to six, we find some of that as well.

How we might find within our relationships opportunities to be joyful people, even if our circumstances are not good.

So let's read these verses together.

I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer, because of your partnership and the gospel from the first day until now.

I'm sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.

The prayer, the joy in this prayer doesn't come automatically.

In these four verses, we see that the joy grows out of something, that it has three roots that nurture and bring about the joy that's found here.

And this evening I want us to see where this joy comes from.

And it comes, first of all, from a gratitude that remembers well, and then secondly, a partnership that goes deep, and then third, a confidence that will not be moved.

So we're going to hang our look at joy within the context of those three thoughts.

And the first is this that the prayer of joy is born out of a heart of gratitude that remembers well.

And verses three and four give us that.

I give thanks to my God in every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer.

Now, notice what Paul says there.

Every remembrance of you, to give thanks.

I have a lot of friends that I have a lot of great times with, but there are with friendships, there's always those moments where you think, I'm not sure I'm really grateful about that episode or that conversation or that moment.

There's always those things that you could bring into your thoughts about anyone in your life and say, that was a rough moment.

That was a difficult conversation, that was that one stung.

But here, Paul writes and he says, I am thankful for you in every remembrance of you.

Not just the good ones, not just the encouraging moments, not just the generous gifts that he had received from them, and not just the letters that had arrived just at the right time.

Every remembrance.

In the middle of prison, in the middle of loss, in the middle of difficulty, in the middle of opposition, where his name is being sort of smeared even by people who are professing believers and preaching that they might add to his imprisonment, and to say nothing to those who are in direct opposition to him, or those who are going to stand in judgment of him.

And in the middle of this, you find his heart moving to gratitude.

The circumstances aren't dictating what's happening to his heart.

And then he says that this thankfulness, which moves to joy, happens in always in every prayer.

This is a natural expression of a relationship that runs deep.

This is not a spiritual discipline that he has to force himself into.

This is not the Philippians, sort of two-thirds of the way down a list where he kind of at after a long morning of praying just goes, uh, well, Lord, you see the rest of this, and here's these people with all their needs.

Uh, please take my prayer list and do something with it, you know, like some people have done.

He is offering prayers for them with gratitude.

And whenever he prays, they come up.

And he mentions the joy here.

We saw that, right?

A prayer with joy.

I'm gonna I'm gonna steal a little bit of uh a thought from Mike Serenano's message next week because he's gonna bring us into verse seven.

So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna pull in a little bit of verse seven.

Is that okay, Mike?

Can I do that?

Here's here's where the gratitude comes from.

Here's where the remembrance comes from.

This is why he's always joyful in verse seven.

He said, It's right for me to think this way about you, because I have you in my heart.

The word in Greek for heart, cardia, is not how we often think of heart, you know, like a junior high student dotting their eyes with little hearts, or um Valentine's Day with little hearts, or watching the Bugs Bunny fall in love and the hearts kind of floating up in the cartoon.

When we use the word cardia or heart, we're talking about the seed of consciousness, that very center of mind, of thought, of will, of emotion.

Um, one of my seminary professors said it's the mission control center, it's the real us.

And Paul is saying that the Philippians reside there.

And that's why he's always thankful for them.

And that's why he's always praying for them.

Because he can't step out of himself and leave them because they they are right there in the innermost part of who they are.

And he's saying, I carry you with me, I think about you always, I feel for everything that you feel, I I want all that's best for you.

And when you hold people that way, when they're genuinely that close to who you are, thinking about them is not a duty, it's actually quite a delight.

And so here he is praying for them and grateful for them.

And this is the first root of Paul's joy, is by being in such a close-knit relationship with the Philippian church that just the very thought of them prompts and provokes a perspective of joy in his heart.

And that's an encouragement to us, but it perhaps could be even a challenge to us because it's easy to look at something like verse three and talk about praying for somebody, but still have them at somewhat of an emotional distance.

We could even say to a stranger, I'm praying for you.

But Paul is saying to pray for you and to be joyful about you and to be always concerned for you and to be grateful in every moment, it's easy to do because you're right here.

And so, just a question to present ourselves: are we cultivating, and by we I mean each of us individually and all of us collectively, are we cultivating that kind of depth of a relationship with the Lord's people?

To where we might be able to say, absolutely, I have a number of people that are right there, they're in my heart, the very depth of who I am.

So Paul's joyful perspective flows out of a prayer of gratitude.

Paul's heart of joy also is born out of a deep partnership.

We can see this in verse five.

He said, Because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

And he uses a word there, which we translate partnership or fellowship, koinonia.

And it appears in verse five, and it also appears in verse seven.

And Paul is using this to talk about their partnership together in the gospel.

When we use the word fellowship, we're often thinking about enjoying a pleasant conversation with somebody over lunch.

Maybe we should get lunch and have some fellowship.

Or even people talk about their place where they put all the banquet tables and say that's the fellowship hall, right?

As though fellowship was wrapped around a buffet and some good food and a sort of a small conversation around the tables.

Or we might think of fellowship as coffee after a church service.

This is not what Paul's talking about here.

Paul is not saying that his joy for the Philippians is rooted in the fact that they simply have pleasant company with one another.

It goes way deeper than that.

Listen to what it says here.

Look at what it says there.

It says, your partnership or your fellowship in the gospel from the first day even to now.

This is not pleasant company, fellowship in general.

This is a partnership in the gospel from the very first day that the gospel took root in Philippi.

Now you might remember in Acts chapter 16, the Apostle Paul is given the Macedonian call, right?

Acts 16 · chapter mention

He was wanting to go different directions.

He has this dream, he needs to bring the gospel into Europe, and so he heads into Macedonia and Philippi, and he lands in this place, and he looks around, and there's no synagogue to go to.

This is a little different for Paul.

This is outside his norm.

And so he goes down to the river to see if perhaps there's a place of prayer there.

In order for there to be a synagogue in any city, there had to be a minimum of ten men joined together.

Philippi didn't have that.

And so he goes there and he finds that there's a person by the name of Lydia who's a dealer in purple cloth.

She was a purveyor of some of the most expensive garments on earth at that time.

These were things that were actually banned from common folk, and only royalty could purchase these goods.

She's there.

And in Acts chapter 16 and verse 14, as Paul is there with him, it says this the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul said.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

She believes.

They've been together with him.

They've supported him financially.

They've sent people to inquire about him and to help him.

They've prayed for him.

They've not been observers of Paul's ministry, they've been participants together.

And that's what true fellowship is.

It's a mutual working together for the effort of the gospel.

That's fellowship.

One way to look at how that pulls a heart together is found by a man by the name of Broughton Knox.

And Broughton Knox was a chaplain in the British Navy, and he was part of the preparations for the D-Day invasions in Normandy.

And he was saying that as the people were making their preparations, he said, during the months that were moving up to the invasion, he said, every man on board, regardless of rank, was focused on entirely on one thing, the success of the invasion.

They had one mission in mind.

Every one of them focused, zeroed in on that one thing.

And he said, nobody thought of their own interests, and everybody thought about how they might serve toward this shared objective.

And after D-Day, he lived through it, and he was reflecting on it, and this is what he said.

I remember noting in my mind that I had never been happier.

It's interesting, right?

But after the invasion, which was successful as we know, the ship returned to England, and he said the atmosphere on the ship changed.

The ship was still well run, the men were still friendly, but something was gone.

And some of the men talked to him about it, and he said this.

He said, During the months that preceded and followed D-Day, our thoughts had a minimum of self-centeredness in them.

We gave ourselves wholly to our shared activity and objective.

But once the undertaking was over, we reverted to our own purposes as people naturally do.

So for a short little bit of time, those men on that ship got a little bit close to what it might have been like for Paul to say, we in the Philippians have a fellowship in the gospel.

We have a unified thought about serving the gospel.

And as they served the gospel together, there was a production not only of a unification of heart, but of a joy in the work itself.

That kind of partnership produces joy.

Because there's a synergy in your hearts derived by the Spirit of God who activates your service together.

And what a wonder it is when you see a church that's moving all in one way toward the work of the gospel.

It's a beautiful thing to see.

And what's wonderful about it is this partnership in the gospel can bring together people who have never met each other.

If you've been anywhere and visited churches or been in other countries and you land in a church and you don't know the language, you don't know the people, but all of a sudden you feel this immediate kinship and you recognize the gospel is a unifying factor.

There's a great story about a World Congress of Evangelism in 1966 that was being held in Berlin.

And there was one of the men from the Wolrari tribe.

Is that did I say it right?

We used to call them the Akas.

He was one of the guys who was there in the killing party that killed Nate Saint and Jim Elliott and the other three.

And he was there with a translator.

And he got up and he spoke at this Congress and he talked about how they had lived in fear and in violence and tribal warfare, and how the gospel reached them through those early motions of those five men and then later their wives, as even in their grief they stayed and shared the gospel.

And as this man was speaking at the Congress, way back in the back of the building was a man who was brought out of tribal religion in Africa and still had some of his tribal markings on his face.

Of course, he would have done.

They would have scarred his face.

And he comes running up the aisle and jumps up on the platform and hugs this guy from South America.

And he realized he was speaking his heart.

This is absolutely the same thing that's happened to me.

The gospel met me in my fear, in my anger, and in our conflict with one another, and it's transformed me.

And he could hear a man who was almost halfway around the world from him saying the exact same thing.

And he said, Our hearts are one.

Our hearts are one.

And it brought him joy.

This is the koinonia, the gospel.

Serving the gospel, sharing the gospel together.

It builds within us an understanding of God's goodness and grace to us.

And out of that, when we see it amongst others, it brings us joy.

The last thing that Paul talks about that brings him joy is this prayer of joy born out of confidence.

And we see this in verse 6.

I'm sure of this.

He says that he who started a good work.

And you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

What a confident statement.

I am sure of this.

No tentativeness, no hesitation in that language whatsoever.

Paul's not expressing a hope or a wish, but he's declaring a certainty.

And the certainty is not based on his confidence of the Philippians and their faithfulness.

It's not based upon what measure of growth he expects to see out of them or what kind of track record they've had in the past that he anticipates them to continue on.

He says this my confidence is based on this.

He who began a good work in you will complete it.

God started it, God's going to work it.

God's going to finish it.

This good work of salvation, which brought you to faith, which is transforming your life, is going to bring you to glory.

And he can say with confidence, this is going to happen.

Because it is originated in God Himself.

Just think about that verse in Acts 16, 14.

God opened Lydia's heart to hear what Paul said.

This was a lady religious, well-to-do, but it took God to open her heart to hear this message of the gospel.

The beginning is not the Philippians, it's God's.

And he will carry it on in the present until the day of Jesus Christ.

The completion is not when we feel like we've grown up enough spiritually, or we might be able to say, I've been in this church for 20 years, or any of that sort of thing.

The movement of growth is until the day of completion when we bear the very image of Christ Jesus himself.

And Paul says, I have no doubt that that's going to happen.

No doubt.

So think about this.

When Paul is talking about that completion point being the day of Christ, the day of his return, the day of the resurrection and glorification, the day when the work that was begun in grace is finished in glory, and he's saying, it's going to carry you through even when you're struggling.

It's going to carry you through even when you're inconsistent.

It's going to carry you through even when you go through the worst of seasons.

It's going to carry you through even in those days, weeks, maybe even months, when it feels like your spiritual growth is invisible to everybody else, and even sometimes absent to yourself, God will carry it through.

And he knows this.

And he writes, I am sure.

And because it's locked into the character of God, he knows the outcome is certain, and therefore his joy is full.

It doesn't rise or fall with how the Philippians are doing.

Now, of course, he receives news about them and it heartens him.

But even in those moments of absence, even when his curiosity can't be satisfied, he says, I'm praying for you.

I'm doing so with gratitude.

I have you in my heart.

I remember our constant partnership together in the gospel.

And here in this moment, I can't let go of this thought that whatever God has started in you, He's going to complete.

So whether or not you're still struggling with the same sin, whether or not your faith seems to be cooling, whether or not you can see or feel any evident growth within yourself, know this.

If God has started to work in you, he will perform it and he will bring it about.

And there he can find joy because his confidence is in God.

One commentator put it this way: He said, Paul's confidence rests in the Godness of God.

He said, This God who is faithful to his purposes, this God who is incapable of abandoning what he's begun, this God who will complete his every promise, this God who starts everything, sustains everything, and will complete everything about your salvation.

The Godness of God will bring you joy when you lock into who He is.

So here we are this evening.

Perhaps joyful, perhaps not.

But one way we can understand how joy comes is by recognizing the vitality of spiritual relationships in which we hold one another deeply within our hearts.

It doesn't come by finding the things within ourselves so much as we find ourselves together with one another and doing so for the purpose of the furtherance and service of the gospel.

And in recognizing we have a God who is over us all, whether it's easy or hard, he will work his work until the day of Jesus Christ and bring it to completion.

And so with that, may your hearts rise above happiness and enter into joy, the joy of the Lord.

Let's pray together.

Father, thank you for your word.

A very, very short, simple prayer, the one that offers us deep understanding and insight into how our hearts might abide in the recognition that you are performing a good work and that you are shaping lives to give priority to the gospel, and that you're deepening our relationships so that we might hold those who in any other place in this world would be very different than ourselves, deep within our hearts.

Here's a Jewish man speaking to those who were Gentiles and talking about just how vital they were at the very center and core of his person.

So, Lord, we pray that you would increase our love for one another, that we might truly love one another sincerely from the heart, and to do so fervently, that you might increase our service together for the sake of the gospel, and that you might increase our confidence in you that supersedes whatever circumstance we might be in.

And in that way, Father, securing our heart and joy.

And we ask this in Christ's name.

Amen.