Philippians: Leadership is Caring

He may be seated.

So our text this morning is from the book of Philippians.

We've been working our way through the book of Philippians, this letter that Paul, he's in prison, he's writing back to this church, this group of people are having a hard time, really.

They're having a tough time.

They're divided, they're arguing with each other, there's a lot of problems, and so he's writing back all this encouragement, all these thoughts.

And you get to this passage, and really the first time I saw this passage when I outlined the book maybe a month or so ago, I thought, what am I gonna do with this one?

This doesn't seem like a lot there.

And this week, as I've been studying it, uh I've loved it.

I've just dug into this passage and really, really loved it.

And I think this text is about leadership.

And so for some of us, we love leadership.

We read books about leadership, and for others of us, you're going, you know, I don't think that's for me.

I think that's some for somebody who has like some position or some stage.

But really it's it's different than that, it's much more profound than that.

So this week, my family and then Sam as well, we were at Blue Skies Camp.

So Blue Skies is a camp in our church.

So just you as a church, you being here, y'all are a part of Blue Skies Camp.

We help support Blue Skies.

And so I get to go serve, Sam gets to go serve down there, my family got to go as well.

Financially, we get to support it.

And Blue Skies is a camp for families with children with cancer.

And so the camp is put on, and the whole idea is you know what, let's give these families some rest.

Let's give them a week where they can break away from the constant issues, complexities, uh, stress, difficulties of having a child with cancer.

And they can come and they can participate in some chapels if they choose to, and then they can have a good, restful, fun time where the children and the siblings are just showered and showered and showered and showered with fun and love.

And then, as well, there's group counseling sessions for the parents.

And so I'm there and I lead the chapels.

Sam and I lead the chapels, there's devotionals at night for the volunteers, these group counseling sessions, and then as well, you just get to know everybody.

You just get to know people.

One afternoon, uh, Christy and I sat with one mom, uh, her name is Jamie, and she sat on our couch, and her six-year-old little boy, Brantley, uh, has cancer.

And Brantley learned he had cancer about a year ago, that there's a tumor growing in his neck, around his neck, and up into his brain.

And uh he's terminal.

Um, he has a 0% chance of surviving this, and he has about four months to live.

And so he's there and he and he he wobbles when he walks because he's uh he's going blind, and sometimes he's blind, sometimes he's not, sometimes he sees double, sometimes he doesn't, sometimes he hears double, sometimes he doesn't.

Um sometimes he just falls down, sometimes he doesn't, um, and he's joyful and he's great to be around.

And he was there and he was taking a nap next to his mom just on our couch, and we're just talking with her, and she just starts telling us how he has been coming to her and saying, Hey, mom, you know, he's six years old, hey mom, you know, um, you know, I'm I'm gonna be, I'll be dying and going to heaven before you.

And that's okay, and it's okay.

I want to let you know, the six-year-old saying this, I want to let you know it's okay.

God's been telling me it's okay.

God tells me that at night, mom, it's okay.

And so she's telling us, and I'm there to be the leader.

I'm here to lead, right?

Like I'm the lead, I'm the leader.

I'm supposed to be the leader in this situation.

She's telling us how she is, she is just in these months leading up to what looks like him passing on.

She's just trying to live present, day to day, getting to be his mom.

Right?

And this is what's amazing about this situation.

I'm supposed to be the leader here.

But very clearly, she's leading me.

Right?

Very clearly she's teaching, she's teaching me something about living present, about loving, about how to deal with difficulty and suffering, right?

We think leadership is for people on stages.

That's just one kind of, that's just one kind of leadership.

Leadership's for all of us.

Because listen, here's the secret leadership has little to do with stages and spotlights, and it has everything to do with substance.

And that means it's for all of us.

And that's what this text tells us as we dig into this text, because Paul's in prison, and he's gonna send two guys back to this church that's having a hard time.

And you have to imagine, this church, they love Paul.

Okay, like Paul was their guy, Paul helped the church start, Paul's their guy, they probably want Paul to come back to solve the problems, and Paul's sending two other guys, and he's sort of writing, validating these two guys.

And so the question becomes what are these guys like?

And what is he writing to motivate these people to accept these two guys?

Right?

And I think that's for us where the something deeper comes in because what we see here is he doesn't say, like, hey, Timothy has great stage presence.

Like, oh, Epiphroditus, he's got a social media platform, it will help your church, he has a network, oh, it's gonna be like, oh, oh yeah, sheik and admin, like a CEO.

Like, like there's none of that.

What there is is there's something, something much more profound that hopefully, even if any of those things are true, is the foundation of anything else.

So let me reread a few of these verses, Philippians 2, 19 through 24.

I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you, for I have no one like him, who will be genuinely concerned for your welfare.

For they all seek their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ.

But you know Timothy's proven worth, how as a son with a father he has served with me in the gospel.

I hope therefore to send him, just as soon as I see how it will go with me, and I trust in the Lord, that shortly I myself will come also.

So Timothy, he what we know about Timothy is uh he was Greek, his his dad was Greek, and we know nothing about his dad's faith.

His mom, his granny and his mom, they were Jewish women who believed in Jesus, and Timothy believed in Jesus, and then Timothy, probably in his later teen years, started to follow around with Paul, travel around with Paul and set up churches and help churches form, and Paul would go this way, Timothy would go this way, then they'd come back together, and Paul would send Timothy over here, and then they'd group back up.

And this happened for about 13 years.

And so for Paul, Timothy's his boy.

I mean, Timothy's been his guy, like his go-to guy.

This is like, and not to mention, Paul's in prison, and Timothy's been there helping Paul.

Like day in, day out, his needs while he's in prison.

It's not like our prisons, get a TV, three meals a day.

Timothy was there to help Paul while he was in prison with his food, with his with the things he needed.

So for Paul, he's sending away like his best friend, his confidant, his helper, his son.

And Paul says, I know, I know this guy, and here's the thing you need to know most about him, about anything else.

He's not mentioning probably a whole bunch of stuff, but the one thing he mentions first is he will genuinely care for you.

And so I have a few points about leadership and leaders.

Number one, leaders care for people.

Like that's it.

Leaders care for people.

So this week at Blue Skies Camp, I watched one of our church folk, Melinda Mayton, who she she started Blue Skies and she runs Blue Skies.

That's her job.

She's, I guess, I don't know, director of Blue Skies might be the title.

And she's when she's in town, she comes to church here.

And Melinda, years ago, she started another organization, another camp for children with cancer.

Years into that, she found herself outside of the organization.

So certainly a put a spot where she could have said, like, that's it, like, I'm done.

It's been hard.

I'm done.

But no, she just does it again.

She just starts, she goes, okay, well, all right, well, not in that one anymore.

I will start it anew.

I will start another one, and we'll call this one blue skies.

I will do it all over again.

And why would you do that?

I think at that point I might just be like, ah, I'm out.

No, she does it.

She cares.

Like she cares for the kids, she cares for the families.

Right?

She does it again, she rebuilds.

And when you're there and you're watching, she clearly knows how to run a camp.

But the the great thing is, is like there's Timothy's all over the place at that camp.

Like you got, you know, Scott was the camp coach, and he's kind of running the camp.

And then you got Abby and Allie and Kay, and you got all these different people, and they're all in charge of different things, and all these different people are doing different things.

And you almost never saw Melinda in front of anybody.

And she can be.

I mean, she she can hold a stage.

She has stage for it.

She's hilarious.

She can get up in front of people and kill it, but you almost never, I think maybe one time I saw her stand in front of the group.

But three places she surfaced, three places I really noticed her.

The first was this, is just she constantly walks around during the day and she has this golf cart, and in the golf cart she has candy.

And constantly during the day, she walks around and she finds just kids, and she she just piles them into the golf cart and she takes them for rides around the camp and she gives them candy.

So at the second, it was beach day, it was pool day, there's games going on, there's all this stuff going on.

We're eating, we're playing games, we're swimming, and and you look around and you look at all these different people running different stuff, right?

And you go, like, oh, where's Melinda?

She's in the pool the entire time with at least one kid in her arms.

And probably a water gun, squirting other people.

And then on the last day, the last chapel, we were serving communion, and she's telling me how they do it at each camp.

And what do you want to do?

She said, Well, I hold the cup, is what I do.

And so I said, Oh, that's great, I'll hold the bread.

You know, I'm used to that, that's what we do here.

And so out of the bread, she holds the cup, and families would come up.

So the guest families, the families with one of the children as cancer, they would come up first to take to take communion, and then everybody who served that family would surround them, and so you'd serve the guest family, then you'd serve everybody else, and I would go around and I would serve each person, and then she'd follow around, and then everybody would take, and then after that, I would pray for all of them, and then after that, Melinda would go, because she'd be weeping, and she would hug each parent and cry over them, and she would kiss each child.

And she did this not because she's the next, like Cheryl Sandberg or even Andy Stanley.

She just did it because she cares for people.

Like that's the big requirement here.

Now, now listen to this quote I ran into this week.

It was in the New York Times article called Not Leadership Material?

Good.

That was the name of the article.

Not leadership material?

Question mark.

Good.

I like, I liked the title.

I don't know if you a bit of a paragraph here, but it's really good.

If college admissions offices show us whom and what we value, then we seem to think that the ideal society is composed of type A's.

This is perhaps unsurprising.

Even these examples come from highly competitive institutions as part of the American DNA to celebrate those who rise above the crowd.

Yet a well-functioning student body, not to mention polity, also needs followers.

It needs team players, and it needs those who go their own way.

It needs leaders who are called to service rather than status.

Whatever the college's intentions, the pressure to lead now defines and constricts our children's adolescence.

One young woman told me about her childhood as a happy, enthusiastic reader, student, and cellist until freshman year of high school, when college applications loomed on the horizon, and suddenly my every activity was held up against the holy grail of leadership, she recalled.

And everyone knew, she added, that it was not the smart people, not the creative people, not the thoughtful people or decent human beings that scored the application letters and the scholarships, but the leaders.

It seemed no activity or accomplishment meant squat unless it was somehow connected to leadership.

Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the outsize glorification of leadership skills is to the practice of leadership itself.

It hollows it out, it empties it of meaning.

It attracts those who are motivated by the spotlight rather by the ideas and people they serve.

It teaches students to be a leader for the sake of being in charge rather than in the name of a cause or idea they care about deeply.

Right?

So Cain, the author of that article, is saying the same thing Paul is saying when Paul says about Timothy, I'm sending you a guy, and the thing you need to know the most about him is he cares.

And at this point, I almost feel like I needed to say we can't get too prescriptive about this, about what that even means.

Or else you'll become quickly judgmental about yourself and judgmental toward anybody else.

Because if we go back to the pool at Blue Skies, right?

And Melinda is in the pool and she's carrying around the kids, and you go, what a leader.

What a leader.

She's incredible.

I mean, that's what I did, right?

I'm standing, I'm standing there, I'm observing everything.

Wow, she's incredible.

That's unbelievable.

And but you know what?

Joe got there early to that pool, and he stood in the heat.

And he had prepped the ground beef and the hot dogs, and he stood at a grill for three hours grilling.

And Kay, she had been on her feet all day long with a camera and just in front of her face, walking around constantly taking pictures for the family.

And Jeff wasn't talking to anybody because he was over on this like big boardwalk area setting up games.

I don't know if I saw him talk to a kid.

And then you didn't even you could get judgmental towards Janet because she was taking a nap.

Like she was poolside, she was taking a nap, but what you don't realize is like she drove all night to get there for the next two days because she had been at home, because she needed to be at home for somebody in her family, and she just needed a break just for a moment.

And then you don't even see Carl because Carl's not there.

Carl's at work.

Because he has a company in Locust Grove, and they gave$20,000.

Now I made Carl up because I don't know the financials of blue skies.

But you don't see that guy.

Right?

You see my point at this, right?

You see my point.

We can't get too prescriptive about what care looks like because caring can look like a million things based on how you're wired and what's going on in your life.

But leaders care.

Point number two, leaders are not perfect, but they are proven.

That's verse 22.

It doesn't mean, you know, it doesn't mean that Timothy's perfect.

It just means that Timothy doesn't bail, right?

I mean, if you've been ever worked with anybody in an office setting on a project, in a team, a project at school, like you don't need the person perfect, right?

You almost don't want them perfect.

That person's really annoying to work with, anybody who's close to that.

Like, you just want them not to bail.

Like, are you gonna be here?

Are you in this with me?

Are you in this project or in this thing?

Are you in this concern with me?

And Paul is saying, this guy, Timothy, I know this, I know this.

He's not perfect.

That's why Paul writes two letters to him later to give him a bunch of ideas about what he should do with his life.

But he won't bail.

He won't bail on you.

And then we have this other guy, Epiphroditus.

There's a name.

One guy got the name Timothy, and then this guy got Epiphroditus.

Verses 25 and 26.

I have thought it necessary to send to you Epiphroditus, my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier and your messenger and minister to my need, because that church had sent Epiphroditus with a gift to help Paul survive, some financial means, most likely.

For he has been longing for you and has been distressed because you heard he was ill.

And what the verses that that Sam read, it continue to say is by God's mercy he got better.

I'm sending him back to you.

And all we get here, I think, is you know what?

We don't know a lot about this guy, but what we do get is the fact that he was willing to take an 800-mile journey from Philippi to where Paul was to bring a gift.

And so we get point number three: leaders are willing to help.

So leaders care.

Leaders are not perfect, but they're proven, and leaders are willing to help.

Now, this week, as a pastor, this passage has given me a lot.

I think probably because there's a huge overemphasis of stage and spotlight and what leadership is at the core, at the core of even what of that.

And I think because I can be an introvert.

And so caring for people can be difficult.

I can be very selfish.

I'm I'm good at that.

I'm good at selfishness, and I can be an introvert.

I'm good at boundaries, right?

So I can create a very small world very quickly.

And some of you know what I'm talking about because you're probably like me.

I I can get I can create a small world.

I'm good at boundaries and I'm good at loving my family.

And I can do that and a few friends and give me like a DVR with a Seinfeld on it and a lake to swim in.

And I'm good.

Like I'm good.

It's all I need.

I don't need much more than that.

And so this is this is hard.

This pushes, this pushes me.

What's natural for me is that.

And so I really need my wife, who's a helper, to push me.

I need the Holy Spirit to push me outside of that world.

And some of you know exactly what I'm talking about because when I just described that, you go, oh, that's that's me.

Like I'm good, I'm good in that smaller.

The others of you go, like, you're you're a jerk.

Like, I know you, or I'm married to someone I like you, and like I don't get you, because you would give your right arm.

No, I don't need it.

I barely use that arm.

You can have it.

You can have that arm, and then later, like the next day, like you resent giving your arm to that person.

And and then your family resents you because you can't do the dishes anymore, and you can't help them out.

And you see what I'm saying?

Like you, the helper in you actually causes a disservice later, right?

So I just think it's harder than anyone likes to make it out to be.

The idea of caring for people is harder because it really requires you learning who you are, what God's calling you to, what it means for you to care for yourself in order to care for somebody else.

But that's what leaders do is they they work their way through all of that.

So perhaps you're here, you heard everything I just said, and you go, okay, well, I don't have a stage.

And when it comes to substance, well, I screwed that up a long time ago, or I screw it up all the time, right now.

Like you go, okay, I don't have the stage, and I don't have substance.

Right?

So what we're asking when we say that, or we think that is, how do you care for people when you don't care for people?

Has anybody ever asked that?

No, I'm the only one.

I'm the only one.

Okay.

Great.

Just revealed it all.

Nobody backed me up.

I think the only thing is to keep remembering that it is it's not about perfection, it's it's about the s it's about the substance that's inside of you.

Okay, not substance, but the substance inside of you.

And when I say that, I mean the gospel.

I don't mean your character.

Your character's great, but your character's flawed.

The substance inside of you is the very thing that will help rescue you.

I mean, do you remember the first two verses of this letter?

I mean, it set the context for everything.

Paul and Timothy, there he is, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The whole letter is in the context of grace and peace.

The substance of Paul and Timothy is not perfection of leadership, of character, of caring.

That's not what it is.

The substance, the substance in them is grace and peace.

These guys did not lead out of perfection or even the demand of it.

They let out of brokenness and confession and vulnerability.

That's what they let out.

That's available to any of us to lead out of that.

And the thing that redefined their lives, that rescued them, was the good news that to take risks and love people was not something they had to do to be righteous and beloved by God.

That's the paradox of the whole thing.

That the truth and power that helps them to love people is the fact that they don't have to love people to be righteous and beloved, and that that grace that you don't have to do it is the thing that gives you peace from the demand of it, which then relieves you of self-justification, and now you have peace, and now you're not so inward-bent and consumed in self-justification, and now you can begin to look up just a bit to see other people and to exist in some way in a non-judgmental presence in somebody's life.

Leaders care.

Leaders care.

And the good news is that even when you don't care, even when you don't care, God always, always, always, always cares for you.

So my brothers and sisters, may you lead in whatever, whatever way that looks like, and your family or neighbors or friends or companies, may you lead from the substance of the gospel placed deep into the core of who you are.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you.

Though we are not perfect leaders, we are not perfect people who love perfectly you took upon the cross all of our selfishness and apathy, and you put on to us your righteousness.

Help us to rest more in your grace that we might know peace, that we might be transformed by your spirit inside the core of who we are.

May you create in us, may you create in us eyes to see and to care for people.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.