Philippians 1:27-30

We study through books of the Bible here at the Village Chapel.

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You can jump online and I'll be reading from the New American Standard Version today.

If you have that access to that online, we're calling our study of Philippians the Hope of Joy.

The Apostle Paul writing to the writing from prison, I think, pretty sure, in Rome.

We're not 100% positive where which imprisonment of Paul this was, but I'm leaning toward Rome myself.

And probably writing around 62 A.D., about 10 years after he founded the church in Philippi.

Philippi was an ancient city established in 356 BC, during the Greek Empire that preceded the Roman Empire.

It was named after Alexander the Great's father, Philip.

And it was right on a main roadway that went sort of east and west.

And so a big trade route.

There were gold mines there, very popular city in a lot of ways because a lot of people could do commerce there, very metropolitan, lots of commerce, as I see lots of people traveling in and out of.

Great place to actually start a church.

That's what Paul did in 52 A.D.

He and his friend Silas, Timothy, and Luke were with him as well.

And together with the help of a successful businesswoman named Lydia and a teenage girl that they met along the way that was unfortunately possessed by a demon and some people were exploiting her.

Paul set her free from all of that.

The businessman had Paul and Silas thrown in jail and trumped up some charges against them.

And in prison, we read in Acts chapter 16, they begin to sing.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

And it's like midnight, and they begin to sing, and can it be that?

Well, maybe something else, but I'm not sure what.

Whatever their hymn was of their day and time, and the Lord sent an earthquake, shook the walls, the ceiling, the floors, and even their chains fell off, as we just sang in that song.

And uh the jailer ends up becoming a Christian and his entire family as a result of that.

So you have Paul, Silas, Luke, Timothy, you have Lydia, the successful businesswoman, you have a formerly demon-possessed teenage girl unnamed, but you also have an unnamed jailer who's a retired military guy, likely in the Roman Empire, and that's the core group that starts a church.

Isn't that awesome?

I love that.

So he's writing ten years later back to this church that he loves.

It's very pastoral, very warm and friendly.

He's not really, doesn't do a lot of corrective uh teaching in this letter.

So he's not trying to correct some problem that he heard about.

He just loves these people.

He just wants to encourage, he wants to send a very encouraging note to them.

And so we now have a feel for the uh, what's called the Sitz im Leben, the uh, the uh, as Germans would say that, it's it's it means a setting in life that Paul was in.

He's in prison that they that they are in, uh, the readers, they're in a in a in a sort of metropolitan area that's very, very busy bustling with culture and art, commerce and all of that.

And they're attempting to be a church in the middle of all of that.

And Nero is the emperor, and they may be beginning to experience some persecution as well, so he writes very encouraging words to people who have a faith in a culture that's not friendly to their faith.

That's one of the reasons why.

A book like Philippians can speak to us in our own day and time as well.

Live in a very bustling city, a hundred people a day move here, we're told.

There's a lot of commerce here, a lot of ideas, a lot of culture making that goes on here in Nashville, a lot of ideas about who God is or might be.

And so it's great for us to look at an ancient letter like this and be able to learn from it.

He closes out what we call chapter one with verses 27 through 30.

And so those are the four verses that we're going to look at today.

There's so much here.

Um we'll try to unpack as much of it as we can together.

Only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, he says.

So that whether I come and see you or remain absent, I will hear of you that you are standing firm, one in spirit, with one mind, striving together for the gospel.

This is really for the faith of the gospel, really powerful.

In no way alarmed by your opponents, which is a sign of destruction for them, but of salvation for you, and that too from God.

For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in him, but to suffer for his sake.

In experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, kind of a reference to his first visit there in 52 A.D., and now hear about in me.

And that's the story of what's going on in his life right now, as he writes, as others have told them what's been going on in his life.

So there's so much there.

Um I'll start with this.

It's the first exhortation in Philippians.

As I say, it's very uh it's very encouraging.

But now he's gonna tell them what to do.

He's gonna give them an imperative, if you will, some instruction to take action.

And the word only is really important there in that verse 20.

So only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

And it's very important that word conduct is about, it's it's it's akin to the same word that we might we might say when we say, uh, conduct yourselves, you might like behave like citizens of the kingdom of God, is what he's saying.

And this is important because Philippi was a uh colony, a Roman colony.

And so they there was a lot of pride there about being a part of a city and being citizens of the Roman Empire.

That was really important to them, to the people that lived in Philippi.

And so when Paul writes back to the Christians in Philippi, and he's already said, you saints who, in the earlier part of this chapter, you saints who are in Christ, in Philippi, that is, you have dual citizenship.

You're in Christ first, you're in Christ before you have a zip code, and then your zip code is Philippi, whatever that zip code is, okay?

And now he's reminding of that again, and he's saying, your citizenship ought to, you ought to look like people who belong to the kingdom of heaven.

And that looks like something.

That's been helpful for me as I've just been meditating and musing upon these four verses.

Um, it doesn't mean, uh, when he says, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel, it doesn't mean that I am going to earn some more of God's favor, become worthy enough that he owes it to me, or that I have a claim on him.

But I think what he means when he uses that term right there is he means that our conduct should be worthy of the gospel of Christ.

It should become exemplary of the gospel.

It reflects the gospel.

It's suitable for those who believe the gospel to behave this way.

In other words, you start bearing the family resemblance because you're now a son or daughter of the king of the entire universe because Christ has set you free.

Another way of saying it is we display an alignment of our lives to the realities of the gospel.

We increasingly find ourselves participating in the advancement of the gospel.

And our daily lives and our communal life together actually shows people that the gospel is true.

They look at us and they see the gospel at work, or they hear the gospel and they come, hopefully, are attracted to the king of this kingdom that we're now a part of.

The fact of the matter is, you could make the uh study of Philippians 1 and 2 all about unity and about courage as well.

Those are some other themes that I think are there.

Be of the same mind, one in spirit, um, striving together.

Okay?

What he's suggesting here is that I can't do this alone, and you can't do this alone.

None of us can do this alone.

That's important for us.

I mean, a lot of us kind of grow up in the world in which we live right now, thinking to ourselves, I mean, you may have friends.

You're here, so I'm kind of preaching to the choir, but we probably have some friends, each of us, or family members, that don't think they need church at all.

I don't need to do that.

I can be with God up alone on the mountaintop.

All I gotta do is go up on the mountaintop and look down at my navel and just meditate on my navel.

That's what I, that's where I see God.

In your navel?

I mean, really?

You meditate on your navel, and you think that's where you see God.

Well, I don't think you can do that really.

I think all you see if you meditate on your navel is you have a navel.

Okay?

And and why, I don't know.

I've never figured that one out.

Kim says it's a bit of God's design, that God just creatively thought we needed a dot there.

So he put that dot there for us in part of his design, you know.

Um, I don't, I'm not sure, but it's not about knowing God at that point when I isolate myself from God's people, or when I isolate myself from the way he might want to use me as a part of the church, or a part of the witness to the watching world of the church.

And Paul is saying that to the Philippians as well.

Um, it's that you need each other.

You need to be unified if you're going to be courageous.

And so we draw courage from each other.

I see you, it encourages me.

I see you worshiping God, I see you even in your struggles, I see you trusting in Christ.

And then I'm encouraged as well to do the same thing, and that happens for each and every one of us.

So conduct and conviction go together.

Belief and behavior can't be separated.

See?

And I know that that's inconsistent in all of us at best.

Um, I know it's inconsistent in myself, but the ideal is that our trusting and hoping in Christ as we surrender our lives to Christ, we would begin to be transformed by Christ, by the power of Christ, so that we can go out and live for his glory and for the good of our neighbor and for the encouragement of our neighbors.

So living worthy of the gospel of Christ results in a few things.

I'm gonna post them up on the screen for you.

At the very least, freedom and reconciliation for our past life.

No longer running to hide from or forget our past.

Here's the freedom God's grace and forgiveness offer to us.

To know our sins are forgiven, to know we've been reconciled to our Creator, to really be able to rest in his love, that he has got us, that no matter what's gone on before, it doesn't define us.

No matter how we've fallen ourselves in the past, that doesn't define us.

Why?

Because of Christ.

No matter what's been done to us, and you think of that young girl in Philippi who was taken advantage of by those businessmen, and yet God comes along and sets her free.

And for the first time, her humanity comes forward.

I think about the scourge of human trafficking in our own world in our own day and time right now.

Um and this is very real, this is timeless as a problem.

People using other people.

And we need to be the kind of people that don't do that, and as well, we need to be the kind of people that have been set free from that as well in our own lives, that God can restore, that God can redeem, that God can set us free, whether we're victims or perpetrators, that God can redeem even the dark darkness in our lives and in our souls.

And so we pray to that end when we repent of our sins and we come before God the Father because of the grace of God that we find in Christ our King.

And there's hope and peace for our present life as well, because we know our past accounts with God have been settled.

We can walk in that freedom.

See?

We begin to walk in that.

We begin to say no, even though those tapes get replayed in our heads all the time.

I had to strike back, I can't trust, I'm mad at, I'm angry, all of that we can begin to say no to.

Why?

Because we too have received mercy and been forgiven.

We can now show mercy and offer forgiveness and grace to others.

And even it's even more than that because it's not just what you stop doing, it's what you start doing as well.

See, this vehicle we call the Christian faith, yeah, it's got a brake pedal, that's true.

But it's also got a gas pedal, it's also got a steering wheel.

If we're gonna push the metaphor a little bit, you're gonna roll down the windows once in a while and stick your head out the window and go, yes.

Hallelujah! You know why?

This is because he's called us to new life in Christ.

It changes the way I see other people, it changes the way I see people that are different than me.

It changes the way I see people that believe differently than I do.

And I'm no longer, my my choices are no longer that I'm afraid or that I hate.

I have more choices than that now.

My choices are I can love.

Even if somebody thinks I'm their enemy, I don't have to be their enemy.

I can love them.

And hopefully, thereby silence what they have to think or say about the God I say I believe in and trust and hope in.

Inexhaustible joy for a future life, isn't that awesome?

Who doesn't want that?

Um, there's Paul chained to the wall, dictating his letter to the Philippians to some uh scribe or someone who's writing it down for him.

And he goes, Oh, yeah, let's talk about joy for a few minutes.

And I'm thinking to myself, how in the world does a guy that's chained to the wall with rats nippling at his toes talk about joy?

And yet he does.

His circumstances almost don't matter to him because Christ matters so much to him, and his love for these other people matters so much to him.

I want that good infection.

I want to I want to catch that.

I want to love Jesus so much, and love the world around me so much, and love his church so much that whatever my circumstances are, it doesn't matter.

Now, look, it's easy for me to say it.

I just came back from vacation.

I got a little bit of a tan.

You know?

I had some fun.

I sat by the ocean and watched the amazing artwork of God every single day.

Had the most perfect weather, ate way too much.

As a matter of fact, last hour I leaned this way, I ate so much, it pinched the microphone, turned it off.

And I'm the guy upstairs going, Well, I didn't do it.

You know, I left it.

I know you know you didn't.

I ate too much.

But the way we respond to others, uh the way that God might use us, no matter what our circumstances are, right now.

I think back to my my mother-in-law when she was dying, and we didn't even know it at the time, but um that became evident at some point.

But every trip to the doctor for her was who do I get to witness to?

You know, she'd lay there.

I remember her telling the story of laying there for one of her first uh she got cancer and she was laying there for one of her first scans or whatever it was.

She looked up and saw a shadow on that on that roof, the ceiling of the room, and she said, Look at that cross.

And the and the person that was the attendant, the tech person.

Right there.

It was opportunity for the gospel.

Here's Paul chained to the wall.

Opportunity for the gospel.

Everything's an opportunity for the gospel.

See inexhaustible joy for your future, hope and peace for your present, freedom and reconciliation for your past.

So we, like the Philippians, have an opportunity to declare, defend, and display the gospel.

And that looks like something as well.

To declare the gospel, he says, I will hear of you that you're standing firm in one spirit with one mind.

And how do you how do you hear unless somebody's actually speaking?

You know, everybody knows the quote from St.

Francis of Assisi.

Go out in the world and preach the gospel, use words if necessary.

Around here, we always say, it's necessary.

Raise your hand if your life is so holy that you don't need to use words.

Okay, good.

I hope nobody raised their hand.

Do somebody a favor if they started to go, woo, do that, you know.

You're not that holy.

No, words are necessary.

Yeah.

Why?

God's communicated to us in words ever since the beginning.

You know?

Even at the creation event, we have this account.

Is it literal or is it symbolic or poetic or whatever?

All of the above.

Okay?

Nobody was there, we don't know.

But the way God has revealed it for us is that He spoke words.

And things came into being, and the power of God's word created everything out of nothing.

All right?

That's pretty powerful.

Pretty amazing.

Words are necessary.

Let us declare the gospel in word and indeed.

Both.

Yeah?

Defend the gospel.

What does that mean?

Does that mean I'm just always arguing?

I'm the argumentative Christian.

I'm the one who's always sort of getting, oh yeah, well, brother, you gotta stop doing that.

You know what it?

You're always on people and all.

No, no, that's that's not.

Defending the gospel means to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.

It it looks like something.

It's not, could it include apologetics, as we call it?

Yes, that's true.

It might.

Uh, there are both positive and negative apologetics, meaning they're using it a here's a positive reason you ought to believe in the gospel.

Uh-oh, or here comes an accusation against the gospel and you defend the gospel.

Okay, got it?

So there can be positive or negative apologetic approaches to the gospel.

But there's more than that.

You see, there's defending the gospel means we're actually being examples of the gospel at work in our broken relationships coming together and reconciliation starting to show.

Um, forgiveness flowing from one person to another.

Um, while we're gone, we heard of five different deaths uh here at TVC.

So we're gone for one week.

Five different situations, people that are TVCers or related to TVCers who passed away.

I did a funeral uh memorial service yesterday, I'll do another one tomorrow from those five.

Um but what I'm so uh amazingly overwhelmed with is to be able to tell you that from all the way in Mexico, I could see our church doing what it's supposed to do to defend the gospel, living uh in a loving community relationship, giving sacrificially of their time, setting aside their calendar, their moment for what they had to do, so they could run to the rescue and run to comfort others.

And continuing to step up and express love.

And sometimes it's in the form of a casserole dish, sometimes it's in the form of a prayer or just an arm around somebody's shoulder, and and sometimes it's just in the form of weeping with those who weep and ministry of presence.

But as a pastor, I I was able to come home not afraid that everything had fallen apart, but thrilled that the body of Christ was defending the gospel by living it out and displaying that's a third way, displaying the gospel.

It becomes irrefutable when people start to see it, to feel it, to experience it in the way that the church is, and the ontology came used that word earlier, that means the study of being.

What kind of being are we?

Well, we're the church, we're the body of Christ.

We're his arms, his legs, his feet, we're his voice.

And so ontologically, we are being the body of Christ together and displaying the gospel, just as Paul writes to the Philippian church, encouraging them to do that as well.

I'll close with a few quotes.

Um as you conduct yourself in a manner worthy of the gospel, Paul reminds us that in the gospel we're both brought lower and raised higher than we can imagine.

We're brought lower in that we must acknowledge first.

To believe, to come to believe the gospel, we first acknowledge our sinfulness, our need of redemption.

I've told all of our services, you know, we get asked this all the time, are you a welcoming church?

And I say, yes, we are a welcome church.

We welcome anybody.

Our doors are open to anybody to come in.

Some will say to us, are you an affirming church?

And that is code language for some people.

It's not for everybody, but for some people it is.

That means, will you affirm whatever I happen, my agenda, whatever I happen to be doing.

And the answer is, we're universally non-affirming.

We don't affirm the pastor, we don't affirm the staff.

The only thing we can affirm about human persons is that they all need redemption.

Every single one of us, we affirm, every single one of us needs redemption.

So if you come in here thinking, you know, God's gonna accept every little and endorse every little thing I am and want to be, or whatever, you come to the wrong place.

I mean, here what we talk about is repentance.

And it's not a very popular word in our day and time.

In our day and time, the idea would be just, you know, God's just this big genie in the sky that just can't wait to help you do whatever it is you want to do and endorse everything the way you want it to be.

And that's not the God of the Bible.

I mean, that's not the God that's come on a rescue mission.

There would be no need for a rescue mission if we were all okay.

I'm not okay.

I don't affirm me.

I just affirm that I need redemption.

That's what I can confirm.

And probably some of you already know that about me, so that's okay.

Um, but yeah, we we all need uh repentance because we all need redemption.

And the great news is we're all welcome here.

And uh no matter what it is you wrestle with, no matter what it is I wrestle with, the gospel is a universal offer to all of us who are broken and all of us who struggle and wrestle with our sinfulness in whatever category it might be.

Hallelujah.

Uh we are brought lower, but then we are raised higher than we could possibly imagine.

I think Keller's right on there.

Uh Alex Moye or Motyr, however you say it, if you're from the South, it's Motier, you know.

Um why should people believe our defense of the cause of Christ if they cannot see Christ in us?

Beautiful.

Why should they take any notice of our offer of a saving Christ if they do not see the fruits of salvation and the beauty of holy living?

You see there, that's rich, man.

In other words, when you look at this group of people that claim to be Christ followers, is all you get sort of self-righteousness and hypocrisy?

And again, I've just been on vacation.

You know, I come back.

How many of you go on vacation?

When you come back, it takes you like a few days to recover from your vacation.

Raise your hand if that's you, because I feel really bad about myself.

Okay.

So I'm coming home and I'm just so tired.

I'm like, whoa, you know, and and I I kind of run, I'm an extrovert, but I run out of my extrovertness on the airplane home.

It's hard for me.

And so we're on Southwest, it's three and three most of the flights, right?

And you don't get a seat assignment on Southwest.

You're just A, B, or C or whatever it is, and you got a number, and you get on and you kind of scramble for your seat.

Well, the plane looks like it's gonna be pretty full on the way home.

So Kim and I always do this is our pattern, man.

We get a three, we get on there, we try to get in the A group, and we get in there, and she takes the window and I take the aisle.

The only thing open is that middle seat.

Nobody wants the middle seat.

You know?

And to add to that, to make sure nobody sits in that middle seat, I've got a few suggestions for you.

If you would like no one to sit next to you on the airplane, don't shower two days before you go home.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, wear some kind of a really weird t-shirt that says something about I survived or whatever, and make it a tank top.

Then no one will sit next to you.

Especially if you're an old guy.

Wear a tank top.

Yeah, that's good.

Put on some noise-canceling headphones, right?

And be wearing them when people are coming in, you know, and be doing this.

They are not gonna want to sit next to you.

That's just, but the plane was full, alas.

I the every every seat was full.

And uh, and so I I at one point caved in and knew it was gonna happen.

So I moved over next to my wife, took the middle seat, and then I started praying for a really small, like a 20-pound person to come in and somebody that wasn't wearing one of those t-shirts and all that sort of thing, and had showered.

I wanted them to sit right there next to me in that very precious aisle seat, you know.

And uh, man, this older guy comes in, he sits next to me, he's a big guy, he's kind of quiet and all that sort of thing.

Kind of a kind of a nicely dressed guy and everything like that.

I'm thinking, oh boy, so I got my noise counselors on, and I just decided I'm going zone, I'm going to my zone, I'm going the whole way home.

I'm just gonna be listening to my music.

Got a little need to breathe, got a little Matt Carney, got a little Ben Rector, whatever.

I'm I'm just there in my space, you know.

And then I start to get convicted about what I'm gonna tell you on Sunday, about declaring the gospel and displaying the gospel.

And so then the Lord's kind of working on me, he goes, You really need to talk to this guy.

You should say something to this guy.

You know, I'm like, I've had a really great week of vacation.

Yeah, it's been riddled with a little bit of bad news from home, that's true.

And I gotta come home and do some things that are gonna be tough.

You gotta hit your ground running, all that sort of thing.

But man, Lord, just let me just ride home in peace, you know.

No, no, you gotta talk to this guy.

I take my headphones off as the plane lands.

I go, hey, how you doing?

You know, you coming to visit somebody or going home?

He goes, I'm going home.

And I go, Oh, that's cool, me too.

Uh what do you do?

And he goes, I'm a pastor.

I say, really?

Yeah, what church you uh he says, what church he's from?

And uh I said, well, what kind of work do you do there?

And he goes, I I I do all the funerals for our church.

Yeah.

And uh, and I'm like, okay, Lord, could you needle this anymore?

You know, make this more specific than you, you know, you wanted it to be or whatever.

And he just goes, it's a very encouraging uh uh conversation that we had for just a few minutes, and uh um it just was one of those times I was reminded again, God is ultimately in charge.

Does he does he does that mean that I'm supposed to speak to everybody on an airplane?

No, I think some people are set down next to you on the airplane so that you can sleep.

I think that's true sometimes.

But I think sometimes as well.

And the question is: am I alert?

Am I awake?

Am I listening for his leading and his guiding?

And when he calls upon me to declare the gospel, when he calls upon me to defend the gospel or display the gospel, am I like Paul's encouraging word to the church of Philippi, am I willing to do that?

Am I available to do that?

Really good uh questions for us to ask ourselves.

Esau Macaulay is a professor of New Testament at uh Wheaton College.

He's also uh a priest in the ACNA, the Anglican Church in North America.

It's a theologically more conservative group of uh uh what typically would be called Episcopalians, but they're they're Anglicans, uh part of the Anglican Church worldwide.

He says, Well, Paul wanted to encourage Christians, he didn't say to them that their breakthrough was around the corner.

No, he helped them to make sense of their suffering in light of the coming reign of Christ.

If we suffer with him, we will reign with him.

What a promise.

The reality is, and I love this about the New Testament and the entire Bible, it does not hide the brokenness of the world.

Or the brokenness that's in my heart, for that matter, or the brokenness in your life.

It doesn't hide that, doesn't sweep it under the road, doesn't deny it.

Whether you're the victim or the perpetrator, it doesn't hide that darkness.

It presents it right up front.

It says no matter who you are, you're welcome to come to the cross of Christ.

No matter who you are.

His grace is completely available to you.

You can't outrun it.

You can't outrun his love.

It's for the guilty and undeserving.

His mercy is for the helpless and the needy.

Is that you?

Because that's me.

And I think it's you.

That's why I stand up here to tell you this every single week.

I think it's all of us.

The question is, how will you respond to him?

Umly walk, only conduct yourselves, only walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.

One that displays that you believe the gospel.

Not a rule follower, it's not just about that, but in loving obedience, you give your life back to the one who gave it to you in the first place.

And you give all of it to him.

And you find in him the redemption you so desperately need.

The love that you've longed for, you've tried to find it in so many other things, but now you're finding it in him.

And he will never leave you nor forsake you.

Whether you're coming home from vacation or your Paul chained to a wall, it doesn't matter.

Because he'll never leave you nor forsake you.

Let's pray to him, Lord God.

Thank you for your great love for us.

And uh, you know, even in a room like this or watching on the internet or whatever, I know you're working and moving in our lives and hearts.

I pray that you continue to do that.

Draw us to yourself, Lord.

Help us to see you in the beauty of who you are, uh, the love and the grace and the forgiveness that's on offer to us.

But grant us the faith that leads to repentance, that we might respond to you by bowing before you.

Uh citizens of the kingdom of heaven, not citizens of the kingdom of self, not citizens of the kingdom of our culture, not citizens of the kingdom of our jobs or our passions, physical passions, whatever that might be.

Lord, citizens of the kingdom of God, whose king is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Pray that that would be the kind of faith you give us, the kind of transformation and work that you do in us this week.

Uh, Lord, as we go out into the world, I pray that the gospel would fall freely from our lips and become very visible in our lives, that you might be glorified and that our neighbors might be encouraged to trust and hope in you.

Pray this in Jesus' name for his sake.

Amen.