Philippians 1:19-26 | An Obsessive-Compulsive Christology

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Please take your Bible with me or your device this morning and open it to the Book of Philippians, the New Testament Book of Philippians, as we look together at an obsessive, compulsive Christology from the life of the Apostle Paul.

Your bulletin says verse 19 of chapter 1, I believe, but we're going to start in the last line of verse 18.

And we'll go through verse 26 this morning.

So if you'd like to follow along as I read that for us.

Again, it's Philippians chapter 1, it's the very end of verse 18.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

The Apostle Paul says, Yes, and I will rejoice.

Then he tells us why he will rejoice.

For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me.

Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.

I'm hard pressed between the two, for my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you might have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see you.

As we've just prayed in song together, we ask that your Spirit would illuminate our hearts and our minds to know you better and to understand how we might go about living a life that is built on you.

That shows you to a watching world.

Open our eyes, we pray, to see your word and to see you through it.

To the praise of your eternal glory.

Amen.

Some of you might know the name Howard Hughes.

Howard Hughes was an aerospace engineer, a film mogul, and a business tycoon all together.

I don't know how that all works, but it's true.

All around the mid-1900s.

Interestingly, the Wright brothers, often credited with the inventing the airplane in the first flight, were Howard Hughes's cousins.

One of his ancestors, on his mother's side, baptized President George Washington.

Very interesting individual, but also very quirky.

At eleven years old, he built the first wireless radio transmitter in Houston, Texas.

At age 12, he built his own motorized bicycle.

He was taking flying lessons by age 14.

And the death of both of his parents left him a millionaire orphan at age 17.

Hughes' life had its ups and downs as he took on one business gamble after another.

And his life just steadily went downhill.

At one point, he ended up in jail for striking and killing a pedestrian with his vehicle, but he was released after a witness suddenly and unexplicably changed his story.

Hughes began displaying erratic behavior as his life continued on.

He may be one of the first examples of our modern concept of binge watching.

Only Hughes didn't binge watch an entire season of a television show or a movie series.

He binge watched movies from his own television station that he commanded them to play over and over and over again for four months straight.

And he stayed in his own theater alone, eating only chicken, chocolate, and drinking milk.

He didn't bathe, he didn't cut his hair or his fingernails or his toenails during those four months.

And then he did it all over again.

Following that, Hughes was involved in President Nixon's scandal, which reportedly involved a bribe of some$250,000.

And whenever something annoyed Hughes, he merely bought whatever annoyed him and either destroyed it or ordered it changed.

He demanded that people around him follow meticulous protocols to avoid passing on germs to him, even for small things like opening doors or washing dishes.

Howard Hughes's obsessive, compulsive behavior was so famous that it became the inspiration for multiple movie characters and even entire films and books on end.

He died on one of his planes, with his body and brain essentially destroyed by bacteria, drugs, and disease.

His fortune was divided equally among his twenty-two cousins.

The unhealthy and detrimental tendencies observed in Howard Hughes are the kind that we often associate with OCD.

In our world, obsessive-compulsive disorders are viewed negatively.

Very, very rarely, if ever, are they given any positive insight?

I'd like to change that this morning.

There is another kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior that is not only positive, but should be on display in the life of every single disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul here in Philippians chapter 1 calls on his readers to behave in an obsessive, compulsive way that is focused on Christ.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

And he reveals to us how he does that in his own life circumstances.

We can highlight four righteous, obsessive, compulsive behaviors in the Apostle Paul that we are called to emulate.

Look with me at the first one in verses, verse 18 and verse 19.

He says, Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance.

The Apostle Paul calls on disciples of Jesus to have an obsessive, compulsive trust in Christ's help and his responsiveness to prayer.

Remember, the Apostle Paul is in a Roman jail.

He's chained to a Roman soldier 24 hours a day, day in and day out.

His trial before Caesar is looming in front of him.

All of his guards, in fact, he says earlier, all of the imperial guard in verse 13 have come to know that he is there because of Jesus.

Some Roman Christians are emboldened by Paul's imprisonment so that they talk about Jesus everywhere they go.

Some do that out of goodwill.

Some do it because they want Paul to suffer more while he's in jail.

All of those elements are the this in verse 19.

This will turn out.

All of those circumstances.

In other words, it's negative.

He's chained to a Roman soldier.

He can't go anywhere.

People want his suffering to be worse.

All the while the gospel's progressing.

This, he's certain, will turn out for his deliverance.

That word deliverance is the word for salvation.

Can sometimes refer to rescue or in this case, maybe a dramatic change of circumstances, like being released from prison.

In the New Testament, though, it most often points to spiritual salvation, that work of God that releases us from the penalty of sin and death.

Here it seems to point to the reality of imprisonment and maybe hoped for freedom.

So which is it?

Is it the typical New Testament salvation from sin and death and Satan?

Or is it salvation from prison, a rescue?

Is it temporary in time?

Or is it eternal salvation?

I would suggest to you that the Apostle Paul intends us to see both aspects.

If we keep reading in the same sentence, we see that he is considering life and death.

Look at verse 20.

It's my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by freedom from prison or dying and going to my eternity with Christ.

It seems as though the Apostle Paul sees release from prison either in deliverance for further life or deliverance for death as his ultimate rescue, both of those are in view.

Notice then what that shows about the mindset of the Apostle Paul.

Freedom and death are both means of salvation and deliverance.

Think about it this way.

Sometimes we pray for brothers and sisters who have been imprisoned for their faith.

And we ask for their release from prison.

What would it do for us if we started praying for their deliverance?

Whether it was freedom from prison or deliverance directly to the presence of Christ.

Because both are a means of salvation.

Think about how this impacts our view of life's circumstances.

We tend to pray in ways that are grounded in this physical world.

So we we ask properly for healing and other kinds of grace that deliver us from the struggles and the trials of a physical life.

But how would our view of life's circumstances change if we saw death as a way of being gloriously delivered?

Think about that.

How would our perspective change of our world, of our life circumstances, if we saw death as a way of being gloriously delivered?

That kind of mindset can only be driven by an obsessive, compulsive trust like the Apostle Paul's.

And his trust is grounded in their prayers, in the prayers of other believers, and then in Christ's responsiveness to their prayers.

I know that through here's the means of your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus, this will turn out for my salvation.

So we see two aspects of faith at work in the Apostle Paul.

He believes in the power of prayer first, and then he trusts in the responsiveness of Christ through his spirit, answering the prayers of his people.

As we see in the book of Acts, Jesus is in heaven, right?

But he's still working on earth through his spirit.

The book of Acts is the Acts of God.

It's Jesus at work through the power of his spirit.

And the apostle Paul here has a settled trust that Christ is at work in his situation, chained to a Roman soldier, and that the Lord's will includes receiving and responding to the prayers of the Philippians on behalf of the imprisoned Paul.

Now, what that means is the discomfort of being chained to a Roman soldier doesn't halt his trust.

The continuation, the unending nature of being shackled to a Roman guard doesn't minimize his belief in God's power.

The impending trial before Emperor Nero doesn't restrict his spirit from rejoicing in a settled trust.

He is obsessively, compulsively resting in prayer and Christ's work through prayer.

Do we exhibit that kind of obsessive, compulsive trust in our Lord Jesus Christ?

That's the first, what we might call OCD behavior we see in the Apostle Paul directed towards the Lord Jesus Christ.

The second one is in verse 20.

And it is an obsessive, compulsive motivation to honor Christ.

He says it's my eager expectation and hope that I won't be ashamed at all.

But instead of being ashamed, the opposite will occur with full courage.

Now, as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.

So here, expectation, eager expectation and hope are linked together.

We understand expectation.

We are expecting snow.

Maybe you don't expect that eagerly.

I do.

I like snow.

Christmas.

Being with family.

We understand that desire of eager expectation.

That is combined here with hope.

And hope is an assurance, not a possibility.

This is about as close to a certainty as you can get.

The Apostle Paul is almost certain that whatever is in front of him will not bring shame to him or to Christ.

Instead, it will spur him on in boldness.

This is the kind of attitude that characterized those early believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.

For example, in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 10, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth that Jesus delivered us from such a deadly peril and he will deliver us again.

2 Corinthians 1:10

On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

So you can see now how that first obsessive compulsive behavior of trust now leads into hope and eager expectation.

That then tells him, I don't need to be ashamed.

I think again, both are intended here.

Paul's conscience is clear, and his purpose and intent are so straightforward that he is sure that he's not going to be ashamed before his try in his trial before Caesar, nor will he be ashamed if he dies and stands before Jesus Christ.

That enabled him to be shamelessly bold.

He could speak plainly, openly, and directly, regardless of what happened to him.

We all know, right, that fear, fear can make us hesitant to do something, hesitant to go forward.

Fear might be something that is holding us back, something that maybe we're even hiding, that we don't want to become known.

Fear can hold us back if we are uncertain or if our trust in Christ is a little bit shaky.

But the Apostle Paul says he can be bold and without fear when speaking of Jesus.

He wasn't afraid of shame because his life was not his own.

He had given his life to Christ.

In fact, over in chapter 3 and verse 8, we read: I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ.

See, an awareness of the surpassing value of Christ over all things in this life motivated the apostle to honor Christ in his body.

Now we're not talking about health and fitness here.

We're not talking about a gym membership.

This is an obsessive, compulsive motivation to hand over his body for the Lord's use.

Paul was fine with living and fine with dying as long as Jesus is honored.

What that meant was if Paul was beheaded as an enemy of the state of Rome, and that honored Christ, so be it.

If Christ would be honored by Paul's release and further ministry, praise be to him.

It was worth all costs to Paul to honor Christ, whether in life or in death.

This obsessive, compulsive behavior is selfless.

It says, I am not my own.

I belong to the one who bought me with his blood.

And I want to honor him in everything.

Even in prison, chained to a Roman soldier, the apostle Paul had an obsessive, compulsive trust and motivation.

That trust and that motivation were grounded then in a third behavior in verse 21, which is an obsessive, compulsive, Christ-centered reality.

For to me, to live is Christ.

And to die is gain.

Moses expressed the human perception of reality very succinctly in Psalm 90, verse 10.

Psalms 90:10

He said, The years of our life are seventy.

Or even by reason of strength, eighty.

Unless you're Mr.

Jensen and then you're getting close to a hundred, right, Grant?

Yet their span is but toil and trouble.

They're soon gone and fly away like a bird.

Let's not be pie in the sky, life is a bed of roses, kind of people.

Death is our enemy.

But it's a conquered enemy.

And one day it will be entirely destroyed.

We shouldn't treat death lightly or or flippantly, but but As sons and daughters of God who are given new life by the power of Christ's resurrection, we should have no fear of death.

Instead, our perspective on life and death should be drastically altered.

You see, when Moses expressed in Psalm 90 that life is short and painful and toilsome, he's reflecting the typical human view of reality.

That's just the way we see things.

Life is short.

It's full of trouble, it's full of labor, and then it's gone.

But Jesus changes our view of reality.

It's not that reality changes.

Heaven and earth remain the same.

The sun rises and travels in its circuit in the sky.

The seasons progress from summer to winter, from planting to harvest.

Our lifespans are generally consistent, and everyone still dies.

Reality has not changed.

But in Christ, our view of reality changes.

Because life no longer remains about me and my experiences and my desires and the shortness of my life.

In Christ, my life becomes consumed by Him.

My view of death even changes because Christ has conquered it.

Death becomes then not simply a dreaded end to a short life, but the path by which we will gain all that Christ is.

That's why the Apostle Paul could say to the Galatian church, I have been crucified with Christ.

It's no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

And the life that I now live, after I've been crucified with Christ, I live by faith in the Son of God because He loved me and He gave Himself for me.

Therefore, for me to live is Christ.

And to die, it's gain.

Beloved brothers and sisters, would that we could go from this gathering and see everything before us as an opportunity for Christ to live in us.

Would that we could see life with the joys, triumphs, trials, and journeys through Jesus' eyes rather than our own, that his will would be in view for us rather than our own goals and feelings.

For to live is Christ.

And to die is we need to say that like we believe it.

To die is gain.

I think there's a bit of foolishness in laughing at death.

After all, it's still part of the curse of sin on God's creation.

But don't you think that an element of our fear of death would be diminished if we could truly trust that it is a means of gain?

What kind of fearlessness and boldness would the world see and hear if we were obsessively compulsive about Christ?

Let us trust in the Lord's help and his people's prayers.

Let us compulsively honor Christ in our bodies.

Let us see now and forever through the eyes of Christ.

Let's be obsessively compulsive about Jesus.

There's a fourth OCD behavior that we find here.

Verses 22 through 26.

And that is an obsessive, compulsive desire to act like Christ.

We already know.

To live is Christ, and to die is gain.

You're a little better.

That's good.

We're warming up.

So with that in mind, he says, if I'm to live on in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me.

But I'm not sure which I'm going to choose.

I'm hard-pressed between these two options.

For on the one hand, my my desire is the gain.

I want to leave and be with Christ.

For that is far better.

But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

And we're getting into the Apostle Paul's brain here.

He says, now, convinced of those two options, I know I'm going to remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith.

Why would he do that?

So that in me you may have ample, sufficient, enough cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again.

These few verses are a look into the apostle's decision-making process.

He has one life.

He has one future and two options.

One life to live, one future, which means he has two options.

So remember the situation.

He's contemplating his upcoming trial and the result of that trial.

His future is on the line.

And there are two options for him.

The first option is freedom, and the second option is death.

Christ or gain?

Freedom means to live is Christ.

That means fruitful labor for Christ.

Death?

To die is gain.

And that is far better.

Paul's thought process here is fascinating.

Especially when we consider it in light of verse 10.

We go back to verse 10, actually, verse 9 maybe is better.

He says, 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.

Approve what is excellent.

When we were looking at that, we saw that approving what is excellent means determining the value of something.

The prayer for believers in general is that we, as Christ's disciples, might grow in our ability to determine the value of things.

And in our passage before us this morning, we see the Apostle Paul doing just that.

He makes a value statement.

It would be fruitful to survive his trial before Caesar, gain his freedom, and continue serving Christ.

That's a good thing.

There's fruitfulness in that.

But to die is gain.

And that is far better.

So do you see the Apostle Paul practicing what he preaches?

That far better phrase is a value statement.

He's considering two options, and he says one is of greater value, it is more excellent.

Dying is far better because it instantly takes us to the presence of Jesus.

To live is Christ, but to die is gain.

It's one thing to be fruitful for the cause of Christ in the world, but it is another far better thing to be with Jesus.

The greater value lies in being with Jesus.

That is a conviction, a mindset, an attitude, and the life motivation that grows as we mature in Jesus.

So the Apostle Paul clearly discerns what is best.

Between the options in view, one is of greater value.

He says that is far better.

It's not even close.

He can see that.

But the choice here is not between what is good and evil, what is righteous or unrighteous.

The options represent two legitimately righteous paths, and one is far better.

Now here's what's astounding.

Because wisdom and discernment are significant in the Christian life, and we want to approve what is excellent, we anticipate the apostle Paul to choose what is best.

We anticipate him to choose what is far better, in his words.

But he doesn't.

What do we do with that?

It's a difficult decision.

He says that in verse 23.

He says, I'm hard-pressed between the two.

It's like being in a vice.

And then the tensions of the circumstances are just squeezing in on him, and he's trying to decide which one of these is going to be his choice, as though he has a choice in the matter.

Maybe he does.

We don't exactly know all the details.

And he determines that what is second best in value takes priority.

You see that?

One is far better, but this one gets priority.

This falls in line with Scripture's teaching on wisdom.

Wisdom is very simply skill in living.

In a biblical or godliness context, it means the skill of living out God's ways in a fallen world.

Wisdom doesn't imply that there is only one right way.

Wisdom means that we weigh what is before us, we weigh the options, and we skillfully choose the best path.

And sometimes that means the wisest choice is not what we perceive as having the greatest value.

He says being with Jesus is far better than living and being fruitful for Jesus.

So he chooses the path of lesser value, and the question then is why?

If it's that clear, why would he choose that?

The answer is that he has an obsessive, compulsive desire to act like Jesus.

Look down at chapter 2.

Chapter 2 and verse 3 and 4, he says, Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourself.

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, in other words, it's good to look out for your own interests, but also look out for the interests of others.

The Apostle Paul says, if we back up to verse 24 of chapter 1, to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

So in Paul's mind, it is far better to be convicted before Caesar and be beheaded and instantly be with Christ than to continue on in this world in fruitful ministry.

But that value pertains only to him.

To be like Jesus is to think of others and not only to think about them, but to act on their benefit.

To remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

Why?

Because as he'll say in chapter 2, this is the mindset of Christ Jesus.

He saw the greater value as being with Jesus.

He approved of what was excellent.

He was able to determine the greater value.

But wisdom told him that it was more necessary to remain alive on behalf of the Philippian believers.

The greater value lay in being with Jesus.

But skillfully evaluating the situation showed Paul that considering the Philippians more significant than himself shifted that perspective.

Displaying the character of Christ for the benefit of others was of greater priority.

In other words, Paul wanted to go to heaven.

But somehow, he knew that he needed to set that desire aside for the benefit of others.

The greater value was to be with Christ in glory.

The greater need was to look out for others' interests so that they could make greater progress and joy in Christ, as he says in verse 25.

He wanted to see Jesus.

But Jesus would receive more glory if they, the Philippians, saw Paul again.

So wisdom says, remain and continue.

What an example to follow.

There's all kinds of lessons here in how we face hardships, how we face the pressures of life, how we process decisions, and in the humility to put others before ourselves.

What makes this so helpful for us is that it's real life.

It's Paul's life.

And in the pressures of his life, he shows us how to be obsessed with the Lord Jesus Christ.

It should be our prayer that we become obsessed with him too.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, may we see through the clouds and the fog and the storms of life to become obsessively compulsive about you.

May you consume us so that you are the one by your spirit who lives out who we are.

Make us more like you day in and day out.

As Scott prayed earlier, put to death what is evil in us, what is sinful, what is fleshly, and cause your spirit to rule in us so that it is the fruit of the Spirit that displays Jesus that is seen in us.

That's what's where the Apostle Paul started.

That ultimately we look through life because we see the end.

And the end is glorious, it is gain, it is being with you.

All because of what you've done for us, and taking on flesh.

And being found as a human being, you humbled yourself to the point of death, even death on a cross, so that by faith we might trust in you.

And so state with belief and faith and glory that you are Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.