Philippians: The Nuance of Good in the Bad

So Philippians 1 is our passage this morning as we work our way to the book of Philippians in the next couple of months.

So if you remember, Paul is sitting in prison when he writes this letter, these words that Sam just read.

He's sitting in prison and he is writing to a group of people, a church in Philippi.

These are friends of his, and he's writing to them, and these people are in a difficult situation.

We talked about it last week.

These people have had some of their leaders almost die.

These people have had divisions, they have enemies, they have arguing.

There's lots going on in their community where there's just divisions and splitting and a lot of discord going on.

So maybe your difficult situation is not prison.

Maybe your difficult situation is not like the Philippians.

But we all have difficult situations.

I don't suppose this morning we're gonna be able to solve the problem of suffering.

Nobody's solved the problem of suffering yet.

So we're not gonna be able to solve it this morning.

And I definitely cannot solve your suffering.

I certainly can't solve that.

And I know, I know, I know, I know that we have all at times felt like we are in prison.

Whether maybe you've even been in prison, right?

I'm not won't have you raise your hand, but we've all felt like it.

That feeling like you are bound in and you are stuck, and you can feel this because you've been sick, you can feel this because your your spouse is sick or your friend is sick, you can feel this because you lost somebody, you can feel this because somebody left you, you can feel this because life hasn't worked out like you thought.

The job didn't work out, the deal didn't work out, Randy got the job, you didn't get the job.

You thought you were gonna get it, but Randy got it.

And you can feel this feeling, right?

Like you're just stuck, like it's not gonna happen, nothing's gonna happen.

The thing I want to happen won't happen, and it's this feeling of being stuck.

Like this, this is horrible.

And maybe it's a legitimate tragedy, right?

Like a like an actual legitimate tragedy.

This is horrible, and this won't get any better.

This difficult thing, this is what's so easy to start to think.

This difficult thing has no good in it, right?

I mean, some of you have gone through depression, illness, lose somebody, and it I mean it's so easily in that horror, legitimate horror.

It's so easy to think there's nothing good inside of this.

Now, and what's also easy to do is to think, well, I'm gonna fight my way out of it.

Like that, the way out of this is to fight.

The immediate, the immediate reaction is that I will fight my way out, I will fight out of this, I will fight harder.

And what's clear in this text, with Paul in prison in because of a situation, he can't fight his way out of this.

He's forced into another path, another way.

And his beginning point is not to fight his way out of the situation, to implement some sort of plan.

His beginning point is to know something.

Right?

Before doing something, he's knowing something.

So, what is that something?

What is that something that Paul knows that enables him to write this text?

What is that something that we could know?

That we could know that when life is difficult, it just makes it a little bit easier.

It doesn't solve it, the pain won't go away, but perhaps it could be a bit easier, perhaps a bit of hope.

So let me reread a few of these verses.

Philippians 1, 12 through 14, Paul writing, I want you to know, brothers, you would say, brothers and sisters, if you're comfortable with that, brothers and sisters, he's saying family.

I want you to know, family, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel.

So that it has become known throughout the whole Imperial Guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ, and most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

So he's in prison, I would say, difficult situation.

Not good situation, tough.

And he's saying, I'm in this, but I'm seeing, in this, I'm seeing good things.

Inside of this, I'm seeing good things.

The guards are learning some stuff.

The brothers that are out there and they are preaching, they are encouraged.

So Paul's saying, I'm in this difficult situation, but I'm seeing good inside of the difficulty.

Okay, and then he does it again in verses 15 through 18.

You'll see the same thing, does the same exact thing.

Verse 15.

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill.

The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel.

The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.

Now I'll pause here because if I'm Paul, I know how I would react to those people.

Right?

You are coming against me to afflict me?

I'm in prison?

And now you're out there and you're saying stuff about me?

And I'm in prison.

I know how I'm reacting.

I know what I'm going to publish in my letter toward you, and it is not this next sentence.

He says, What then only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

So he says, There's even people out there that are proclaiming Christ, but they're doing it out of rivalry, and they're doing it to in some way manipulate people, to turn them against me, and cause a division, and instead of just blasting them, right?

Right?

Just to hit the reply to the reply all email or to post the thing because somebody posted something against you, and you just let them know a little bit that you're gonna blast them.

He says, you know what?

It at least at least Christ is proclaimed.

See, in in both situations, he's able to see in the midst of difficulty and legitimate bad.

Legitimate difficulty and bad.

These are not good situations, but he can see something good.

So this is point number one.

Point number one is this is there is good and there's bad.

There is.

Prison, bad.

Okay?

Uh people preaching out of rivalry, bad.

There is good and there is bad, and there is good in the good.

We know that part.

There's good in the good, but there is also good in the bad.

So that was a long point.

There is good and there is bad, and there's good in the good, but there's also good in the bad.

And he's not naive.

Paul's not naive.

He's not blind.

I mean, he sees the situation for exactly what it is.

And we need that.

That's comforting, right?

Like we need to see our depression for exactly what it is.

We need to see our joblessness for exactly what it is.

We need to see whatever our difficult, our anxiety or fear.

We need to see that for exactly what it is.

So he sees the situation for exactly what it is, right?

That line is drawn between right and wrong, good and bad.

He draws the line, and then he says, oh yeah, over on that bad side, that that side that is deemed bad, I'm seeing a few, I'm seeing a few good things over there.

I mean, this is a this is a the term, the the wording that came to me this week was like a like a mature nuance to like seeing life.

I mean, it's eyes of faith, is what it is.

It's having eyes of faith to see good on the side of bad.

I mean, this is profoundly deep.

This takes a moment.

This takes a moment.

We've all heard the cliche.

Uh, here we go.

This is the image that came to me this week.

We've we've all heard the cliche.

You know, with the lemons of life make lemonade.

Very good, thank you.

Heather was ready for that.

Okay.

All right, with the lemons of life make lemonade.

What Paul does, and this is incredible.

And you know what?

That's a good cliche, right?

We'd all go, like, that's a good thing.

All right.

I mean, what's your other option?

Just let lemon stay horrible?

Like, okay.

We would all say, that's good.

Let's do that.

Let's make lemonade out of lemons.

We are all for that.

But it can feel like a bit of pressure every time I have a lemon that I have to redeem this.

It can feel a little pressurized there, that I alone in my finitude have to somehow redeem this tragedy.

And Paul's not really doing that here.

That's the amazing thing here.

He's not, he's not making lemonade out of lemons.

He's seeing, and we're getting philosophical here with lemons.

He's seeing, he's seeing that lemonade is inside the lemon.

He hadn't done anything.

He hadn't made lemonade.

He's seeing the he's seeing the difficult situation, and then he's seeing that there's lemonade inside the lemon.

So at times we make lemonade.

We do.

At times we make lemonade out of lemons.

We do that.

That's a good thing.

But eyes of faith is to see that the lemonade's already in the lemon.

Like that's already going on for us.

This is how there's hope and difficulty.

The hope and difficulty is not that I'm going to generate all the good out of the bad, and that I am responsible for bringing the kingdom to come in my life.

That is a lot of pressure on you.

You can't do it.

You don't have the ability.

You don't have the power.

Hope and difficulty is to know that inside the bad, the difficulty of life, God is actually working in our heartache.

Inside of our hurt.

And then you just think, imagine what that would be like.

Like imagine what it would be like the next week.

Like the next week that comes around, and it's just a bad week.

Like it's that the thing happened or whatever went down.

You revisit that place, you keep thinking you're gonna get out of, and you revisit it again, you're stuck in that again.

Just imagine when you're in that week or that season of life or that day, or even the afternoon, you're frazzled, you're let down, you're lonely.

Imagine if you could know, like even in this, something else is going on.

Something else.

You don't know what it is, you don't know how it's all gonna work out, but just that you know inside this lemon, there is lemonade.

And see, that's a gift.

That's that is a gift to know that.

And that's what Paul is doing here, right?

We see him doing it.

He says, prison, there's prison, and here's what I'm seeing inside of this imprisonment.

I'm seeing this.

And then he says, you know what, there's these guys out there and they're talking trash about me, and inside of that, I see, I see this.

Right?

And he knows what he knows is that there's a good, sovereign, and yes, mysterious God that somehow, somehow works, works amidst our heartache.

When I was 17 years old, I was a junior in high school.

It was a Friday, it was sunny out.

I remember it so clearly because it was my first varsity basketball game.

Every day in my entire life had been built up to this day.

This was the biggest day of my life at that point.

Maybe even now it was the biggest day of my life.

I'm willing to say that.

I'm still living out of my high school years.

So I'm a junior high school Friday varsity game, small town USA.

It's a big deal.

I'm gonna celebrate this day because I'm gonna take my 1985 Toyota four-wheel drive truck off-road for the first time.

I am so excited.

I've ridden with friends, and now it's it's my day.

Varsity game, sunny outside, I got Alabama's greatest hits going.

I mean I redneck.

There's some red going on.

So I turn off the road, I go down a trail over some power lines.

I mean, we're talking redneck, you know what I'm talking about.

Some of you know what I'm talking about.

If you've been on some power lines, you know what I'm talking about.

Power lines, I see an open field, a little muddy, and I'm gonna rip through it.

I'm thinking I'm I'm gonna rip through this, I'm gonna turn it, I'm gonna crane.

I mean, we're gonna have this and be so by myself, but I'm having a blast.

I go, I head into this field, and sure enough, sure enough, I get a third of the way into it, and the mud just grabs my wheels.

I am stuck.

I'm stuck.

I'm going nowhere.

I'm getting nowhere.

I'm going, I'm in there, I'm reverse, throwing reverse, throwing it reverse, throwing reverse, and I'm back and forth.

I'm it's in four-wheel drive down there.

I don't I get out.

I'd seen friends like when they get stuck, they go get like branches and like shove it under the tires and all this stuff.

And I'm doing that.

And I have a game that night.

Coach did not uh tell us to spend our energy this way.

He'd also go home and rest.

I'm gathering limbs, I'm shoving it under the tires, I'm sweaty, I'm muddy, I'm looking at I can't figure it out.

I don't understand.

Like, why can't I drive out of this?

It's pre-cell phone, okay, pre-cell phone days.

So now I'm walking back out, out of the field, up the trail, back to the main road, and I know I can walk, and this is really redneck, I can walk the power lines back to my house to get to a phone.

And so I walk the power lines back to my house, I get to a phone, I call my friend Kyle, he picks me up, we go back to my truck, he walks up to my truck, immediately he walks up to it, he looks at the front tire, he turns his little red knob down there, which I didn't know about.

Some of you know about it right now, turns this red knob to lock in the four-wheel drive, and he says, just uh just drive on out, you'll be fine.

Uh sure and I get in my truck, I drive right out.

Like I'm I'm unstuck immediately.

I'm I'm unstuck.

Here's my point.

Long story.

Here's my point.

I could have stared at that truck forever.

I could have stood there and stared at it forever.

But unless I received a change of perspective on this situation and knew something, and knew something different, it was just gonna stay stuck.

And my friend Kyle, he had eyes to see something because he knew something.

He knew this little bit of information that would have been so great for me to know, and that is there's a little knob on the front tire, and if you turn it, it locks in your four-wheel drive.

It would have been very helpful for me to know that before.

But I would need that, right?

To have the eyes to see it, I needed to know something.

And that's the point here.

The same with Paul.

Paul had eyes to see because he knew something.

He knew that God was bigger than him circumstances.

He knew that God was good, and he knew that good, good does not end because bad begins.

And that's point number two.

Good does not end because bad begins.

See, hope is about remembering, just remembering that something else is going on.

Something else is going on.

You don't always know what it is.

There's been tragedies in my life, and during the tragedy, I get to sort of figure that out and get that eyes of faith to figure that out.

There's been tragedies in my life that I feel like a month later or a year later, you get those eyes of faith, you go, oh yeah, kind of, wow, okay.

That was horrible.

That was horrible.

That was hard, but wow, that was interesting how that came out of that.

There's been tragedies in my life.

I'm still going, like, God, I would like to have some eyes of faith on that one.

That would be, it would be nice to figure that one out.

But I do know, I do know that good does not end because bad begins.

Paul sees his imprisonment, and that's a legitimate bad.

And he says, I see something in it.

He sees this rivalry.

That's the legitimate bad.

He says, I see something in it.

Right?

It's the lemonade in the lemon, even before the lemonade has been made.

Well, do you remember, every for me, everything goes back to Seinfeld.

Do you remember the episode where Mr.

Pitt, Mr.

Pitt was Elaine's boss.

She had lost her job in publishing, and she ends up being Mr.

Pitt's assistant.

And he gets a stereogram.

Do you know what a stereogram is?

It's that computer-generated image.

Do you remember these?

Do you remember these things?

There's like big, I was gonna get one up here, and then I realized that none of you would pay attention to me if it was up here, because it's a computer-generated image with all different shapes, but then like hidden inside the image is like a 3D image.

And if you like look at it long enough and you like unf unfo Mr.

Pitt could never do it.

The whole episode's about him being addicted to this picture, and I can't do it either.

It's extremely, extremely frustrating if you cannot do it.

And I can look at that thing, I can never do it.

Oh, it's a spaceship and it's coming at it.

I'm like, no, I see nothing.

I don't see it.

Mr.

Pitt can well, I kept, I spent an hour watching uh the Seinfeld clips of that episode just over and over and over again.

Had a good hour that day.

Here's the point.

Paul is sort of doing that here, where he sees this situation that it'd be so easy just to see confusion and uh you're not sure how this will work out, but like he can see something else going on inside of it.

Like he sees, he sees it, right?

He sees prison and then he sees further.

Right?

And that's eyes of faith.

To see your thing.

I don't I don't know what your thing is, to see your situation and then to see further.

See, hope is about remembering something, something else is going on.

Something else is going on.

I do think there's probably a couple practical things that could help.

Not a I don't like to prescribe too much here, but I think remembering that God is faithful in the past can be very helpful in the present.

That can be very, very good.

Go like God is faithful.

He's faithful here, he's faithful here, he's faithful here.

Then you got a present situation.

That can be very helpful to slow down enough to remember to be, to remember his faithful, but also to slow down enough to reflect on all the aspects of the situation, right?

Like you get a situation, it's so easy to always just see the situation from one side and to forget to view it from the other way, because that's what Paul's doing.

He's sort of, he has this like like a cube, right?

And let's call this cube prison, and it'd be so easy to view that as a in one way, right?

And it's like he turns it, right?

He sees it in one way, and we would go prison, horrible, horrible, right?

We would see it in one way, and he just turns it for us and goes, Oh, like all the guards know about Jesus because I'm here.

Oh, oh, all the all the brothers out there are being encouraged.

He just takes, he takes it and he just turns it for us.

And I think deeper than that is to know that the same truth that I've been talking about the past 10 or 15 minutes is also true about you.

Same thing's true about you.

And this is what I mean.

Point number three, last point.

Just as something else is true in any difficulty, something else is true in you.

Meaning your your difficult, you being difficult, me being difficult is not our entire story.

God doesn't just view you and go, oh, he's she's difficult.

End of story.

It's not your sin, like the sin meaning your self-saving practices to feel redeemed and valued and maybe earn your way out of forgiveness.

I'll be a good enough person, or I'll redeem myself and feel valuable by accomplishing whatever in the world.

All these practices that we put in place are sin, anything other than relying on Christ for our righteousness and justification and value.

Anything else, that is sin.

That's what sin is.

It's the motive of the heart to be inward bent by our own self-justification.

All of that difficulty is not our whole story.

Oh, that's such good news, right?

That is such good news.

And that is what Paul is calling here good news, gospel in this passage.

And you have to remember when Paul uses this word gospel, he's using it to a particular people, right?

He's using it to these people who live in Philippi, which is in the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire is ruled by Caesar.

Caesar is not just a politician, Caesar is a proclaimed God, and they have the saying.

They had the saying, this word, the gospel of Caesar, the good news of Caesar.

So when Paul uses this word and says, hey, the gospel of Jesus, when he says this, this would cause a remembrance in their minds to go like, oh yeah, we are not saved by a politician.

Our circumstances, our value, our safety, our security is not in a system and it is not in a politician.

It is in Jesus.

God incarnate to us.

That is good news.

See, this is a different message.

It's a message that no person, no circumstance, a better circumstance, a better behavior can't save you.

None of that can deliver you out of inner difficulty, shame.

None of it can absolve you or forgive you.

None of it can make you feel finally at peace, secure as a loved child of God.

Only the finished work of Jesus can.

That's the gospel.

Our saving is a righteousness apart from the law.

It's in God's work for us in Jesus.

That's gospel.

The gospel is that God works the good and the bad in circumstances and in you.

And you and I are quite difficult, aren't we?

If we get honest.

Quite difficult.

And so we need the gospel.

We need that there is a good inside of difficulty and bad, and that God is a redeeming God, who though we are imperfect and broken, He loves us perfectly.

My brothers and sisters, may you be at peace in the love of Christ, and may you have eyes of faith to see the good and the bad.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that you are somehow mysteriously sovereign over all things.

And we confess we don't understand that and our love for control.

We would love to know so many things in our lives.

What is going on and how you will bring about good out of it?

Would you help us to slow down enough to remember your faithfulness?

Would you help us to slow down enough to reflect on the situation?

Would we continue to open our hearts wide to your love for us?

The only thing that heals and brings acceptance and security to all the places in our hearts that love to self-justify and find security in other places.

Forgive us for the paths of self-righteousness that we love to use to feel prideful in our own work and not your work for us, and also to stack ourselves up against other people to live in comparison and judgment.

There is no situation on earth or a person or politician or leader that can say that you will not try to.