The following sermon is from the Westminster Pulpit, extending the worship ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We are a local congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. Please contact us for permission before reproducing this message in any format. I begin in a New Testament letter of Paul to the Philippian church, Philippians. A number of months ago, more than a year ago, we covered Colossians, a similar letter of Paul, and yet quite different in content. We look at Philippians, and we'll spend a few months in this letter going into the fall as we consider it one of the great letters of the apostle given by the Holy Spirit. Today I am going to read the first eleven verses, and I always urge you to follow along. Have the Word open in front of you. Use the Pew Bible if you need to, to follow and think of the words that are being spoken and understood. Here is God's Word, Philippians 1. Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus. to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi together with the overseers and deacons. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this. that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. It is right for me to feel this way about all of you since I have you in my heart, for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. Father, give us the insight of your Spirit to catch the impulse of the apostle here as he was writing to people long ago. May it be alive in our ears and our understanding for your glory and praise, amen. About 20 years ago, the Roman Catholic Church undertook a special interest in the bones of a man buried in a tomb inside New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. This particular man was an African-American born in Haiti in the late 1700s. His name is Pierre Toussaint. Pierre Toussaint was brought from Haiti as a slave to a plantation in the Carolinas. After he lived there for a short time in the late 18th century, his master died, and for some reason, all the slaves were freed. And so long before the Civil War, he was able to go out of slavery and he found his way north and settled in New York City. Pierre Toussaint never had much money. However, he was a leader among men. And it is said that he founded an orphanage and other charitable works that fed the poor and clothed them. And the works that he did actually formed the basis for what you have heard of today as Catholic Charities. That organization was founded by the works of a poor Haitian former slave in New York City. After Toussaint died in 1853, there were folks that said, this man needs to be honored. But of course, those were times when racism was rife in the land and African Americans were not much respected. So it took a long, long time afterward, many decades, even into the 20th century, before the whole idea was revived again And then the church said, yes, we think Pierre Toussaint should be a saint. In fact, he would be acknowledged the first African American saint of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1997, the Pope bestowed on him the title, Venerable Pierre Toussaint. I understand that's the second last step to sainthood. Now, I'd never heard whether the final step was taken or not. but certainly Pierre Toussaint had a life that could be admired. And yet, of course, the Bible says if Pierre Toussaint trusted in Jesus Christ as his Lord, as we hope and assume he did, he was one of a vast company of God's redeemed people who are called the saints, the saints in Christ Jesus, just as you and I are called that. Man-made hocus pocus does not elect a saint. A saint is not a perfect person. A saint is not someone you pray to or whose bones ought to be venerated. A saint is simply another word for a biblical Christian. Now today, we begin to study a much beloved New Testament book, The Letter of Philippians. I think we could take a poll. I don't know if you ever think of the Bible this way, but after many years of familiarity with it, you have your favorite books. And if I have a list of favorite New Testament books, a short list, Philippians is on the short list, probably on a short list of three or four anyway. But really, that's an artificial exercise. I love all of God's Word. But here's a book that many people love. We love the content of it, the spirit of it, the joy that we find in it. It's a book written by Paul. When he was in a situation when, if it had been you, I would think you would have been ultimately as discouraged as you could possibly be, falsely charged. He was in prison in Rome. A lot of his friends had forsaken him. He didn't know the outcome of his situation. He fully expected that a sentence of execution would come down, and indeed, in time after this, it did. And he was writing to his favorite congregation, people with whom he could be candid, people who knew him through and through, and he didn't have to put on any masks with them. They were people beloved to him, not a problem church that he had to correct a lot. People who had been generous with him over the years. And yet when Paul wrote in this miserable situation of being in jail, what he wrote about was his joy in knowing Jesus Christ. 16 times in these four chapters, the sense of joy bursts through the surface of this letter. He wants to share with them that he has a life-sustaining delight in belonging to God through Christ that they, too, can know, and we, of course, as the saints at Lancaster, can know also. And so I label the opening theme today of Philippians 1, 1 to 11 as joy to all the saints. I want to just give you some very brief background to the letter, not a great deal of extended introduction, and then I'll have two points out of this passage. First, a bit of background to a letter to God's saints at Philippi that could just as easily be called a letter to the saints at Lancaster. It's unfortunate that so many people do not understand that term saint. It does not mean some person whose statue ought to have candles around the foot, a statue it's prayed to, a person whose finger bone is put in a case for people to admire. It simply means God's set-apart ones, God's people. determined by him from all eternity that they would be the recipients of his marvelous grace. It's just another word for being a Christian. In fact, did you know the Bible never uses the word saint in the singular? Every instance of the word is plural. It always speaks about the whole class of individuals who are God's new creations in Christ. The saints in Christ Jesus addressed by this letter lived in a little town in Greece that had been made a Roman colony, a primarily Gentile place that had many Roman characteristics. The town was named for Philip of Macedon. Philip was the father of Alexander the Great, and Macedonia was the region, the vicinity of this territory that is now part of what we would call Greece today. It was actually the first place where Paul touched down in ministry when, in his missionary journeys, he crossed the Strait of Dardanelles that divided the continent of Asia from the continent of Europe and came across, remember he heard that call in a dream, a man of Macedonia saying, come over and help us. And he crossed over into Europe. And when he did, Philippi was one of the first places where he had a significant ministry. Now, if you wanted to read Acts 16, that would be your homework assignment today. You can actually read how this church began. Paul came to this little town and he found a woman named Lydia. a merchant who sold purple cloth. She had a rather specialized market, a good market because it was a Roman colony, purple was the sign of the aristocracy or of royalty, and so the Romans wanted to wear purple. And Lydia probably had a good business there. You remember how she and some other women found Paul along the waterfront, and they met and had a service together, and she said, come to my home and teach more about these things. And then some other incidents I won't go into unfolded, and Paul was put in prison. And in the middle of the night, there he was, Paul and Silas in a prison cell in Philippi, and an earthquake rocked the place and set the doors askew, and the jailer came running thinking his prisoners were gone. And he found to his amazement, there were Paul and Silas, and they said, don't worry, we're all here. And this man thought this was a sign from God, and he knew that these fellows had something to do with spiritual things, and he approached them and said, sir, what must I do to be saved? Paul gave that great response, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, you and all your house. And that jailer received Christ that night. So you had a remarkable, a wealthy merchant, a jailer, and who knows who else who combined in this Gentile town to begin a church. Paul wasn't there too long, but that church flourished, we know it did. And it always remembered Paul fondly. They sent him offerings wherever he went and he was able to, write to the Corinthians later about giving generously to the work of God and say, I would that you might follow the example of the Macedonians. And he meant these folks at Philippi. They gave out of their poverty. They poured themselves out for me. Well, they had done exactly that because chapter 4, verse 18, I believe it is, tells us of what had happened recently. They had sent a gift. A man named Epaphroditus had come from Philippi. 800 miles. That doesn't sound like too much. You go on vacation and you travel 800 miles possibly. But without a car, without an airplane, without a ship, without a train, 800 miles is something. Epaphroditus came, sought Paul out in Rome, brought him a gift and comforted him because the people at Philippi cared about him. Well, our 21st century world thrives, you know, on sound bites, don't we? We have short attention spans. Little bits of information are what we tweet and Twitter and get across. It's like people can only take so much at a time. I think of Philippians as a letter that's full of these sound bites. If you were to let your line, let your eye go down the line of the text, you would meet many verses, many familiar lines. that are memorable to Christians, favorite texts. I would say that if people said, what's your life verse if you have such a thing? There'd be a lot of people who would have one from Philippians. 121, for example, I just wrote it the other night, going to a memorial service and writing in the family book that we were there, Michael and Carol Rogers, I wrote Philippians 121. Why would I write that? Because it says, to live is Christ, to die is gain. Two, six familiar words. Christ being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. But he made himself nothing and took on him the form of a servant. And more follows there. That very familiar passage about Christ. Three, seven. Where Paul says, whatever was to my prophet I now consider to be a loss for the sake of Christ. Three, 13 and 14. Forgetting what is behind, straining toward what is ahead, I press on. toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ. 4.12 and 13, I've learned the secret of being content in any situation. I can do everything through Him who gives me strength. There's nothing but positive affirmation in this letter. Affirmation. that seems to be driven by the pilot light of a great authentic joy that allowed Paul to live above his immediate circumstances and even above the probable sentence of impending death. And he wants to remind these believers that they too can have that pilot light of joy burning in them. I hope you'll find it as we review this wonderful letter in weeks to come. Today there's just two main divisions of the text I want you to see. They both have to do with prayer. Verses three to eight is a prayer of thanksgiving. And verses nine to 11, a prayer of intercession. Let's try to observe some things here in this introductory passage before we close today. Verse three, Paul says, I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. This is Paul's prayer of thanksgiving. Is that the way you begin praying? What's your habit of prayer? Is it the gimme kind of prayer? Does it begin with praise to God? You know the acrostic, A-C-T-S, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. Don't we do it backwards? Most of our prayers are all supplication. Somebody I read said one time, here's what Christian's prayers sound like, quote, give me some of this and some of that, please be quick, and that's that. Is that how you pray? Do you ever begin with thanksgiving? You could pray, you should be able to pray a half an hour with thanksgiving. and simply thank God for the wonderful things He's done in your life, for His grace, for His salvation, for the privileges and the benefits He's given to you. Paul thanked God, not these people, he thanked God for the joy he had of partnership, fellowship, real fellowship with these folks. He saw these Philippians and himself as if they were concentric planets spinning around the sun, and of course the sun was Jesus Christ. Paul said, we're not the center of the universe. Most people pray as if they are the center of the universe. Oh God, here I am now. You know what I need. I need this and that and the other. And since I'm the center of the universe, hurry up and do it. That's not how Paul prayed. He said, I thank God that we together have the privilege of spinning around the true center of the universe, who is Jesus Christ. And we are bound together in him as one people. You know, you really need to have times in your life when you better discover true fellowship with other Christians. And in the several weeks I've been away from you, I was reflecting as I prepared this sermon how amazingly that's exactly what I've been doing the last few weeks on a time of going to General Assembly and also a time of vacation. I think of several ways in which God has refreshed me and strengthened me in the partnership of real fellowship with other Christians. You have to get out of your own circle of regular life to do that sometimes. That's one thing a missions trip does. You go and wonder of wonders. Here are people in Nairobi who really love Christ and whose lives seem to glow with it more than yours or something. Mexico City, wherever you go. I sensed it first in Nashville, Tennessee a few weeks ago as I was there for our denomination's general assembly, as we call it, with 13 other elders and pastors. And you know, there's a lot of things that go on there that might be called boring, meetings, business, reports, and yeah, I have to admit it's not all stimulating. And yet I come away from it and say, glory to God, because I realize after three decades in this denomination This Presbyterian church in America still has a heartbeat that is close to the heart of Scripture and the heart of Christ, and the majority decisions, time after time after time, are decisions that are on track with Scripture. We're not fighting each other to have basic faithfulness over the things of God. You come away and say, thank you, Lord, for the ability to belong to something like this. After that, my wife and I came back to town, and sometimes we're in town, and we don't worship with you. Sorry about that. but we don't want you to ask us what we're doing there since we're on vacation. So we go to Ephrata. We worshiped with our friends at Reformed Presbyterian Church in Ephrata that's almost a second home to us. What a blessing. What a great thing. I was there, by the way, and Pastor Irvin was also visiting there that day and baptized his four grandchildren in one service. What a blessed time. What a refreshing time to be greeted by those saints who love the Lord and love our ministry and pray for us and told us so. After that, my wife and I had a very extensive travels and we were all over the place from Western Massachusetts to Ohio. We participated in the installation of two different pastors and I preached at those churches. Never been to either of these places before. Millers Falls, Massachusetts and Hudson, Ohio. Churches of the saints. Guess what? We were welcomed. It was like an embrace both places. We didn't know these folks, and yet we had the same creed with them, the same Lord, the same purpose for existing, and it was marvelous how quickly we could talk about everything in common. And then icing on the cake, one more experience we had. I'm just trying to illustrate this. My wife and I went to a reunion party of the Rogers family, which is a very scattered family. I have relations that I haven't seen in decades, some of whom I saw just a couple weeks ago, some of whom I have never seen before. I sat across the table from a second cousin who was two or three years older than me, I think. I knew who her parents were, but I didn't even know she existed. She found out I was a minister, asked, are you in the PCA, the conservative church? I said, yes. She said, you must have known D. James Kennedy, right? I love him. He's great. And wham, Christian fellowship. And in fact, among my relatives, many. of different denominations who love the Lord. And as I talk with those folks, it was clear that the real fellowship going on there wasn't between a group of people who have common ancestry or a common genealogy. It was this wonderful lower layer of fellowship between those who had Christ in me and Christ in you. It's marvelous to discover the partnership of God's people out there. A partnership that is built on a confidence, Paul says here as he goes on in verse six. We're confident that we are one people and something important is happening, not because of who we are or what we do, but because of God's work. You see what he says there? He who began working in us is going to complete his work in the day of Christ. Our fellowship is based on a mutual confidence in God completing what he does. There's nothing uncertain about it. If he has begun to redeem you in Christ, he isn't going to overthrow you at some point and say, oh, I'm sick of that guy. I've lost patience with him. He's going to complete his work in the day of Christ. He's going to complete his entire people, in fact. God doesn't start anything. that he doesn't finish. And then, too, he's given us a great affection for each other in this fellowship. Paul goes on here to say that in verses seven to eight. He says, I have you in my heart. He didn't see these people very often. His contact with them was fairly fragmentary. He had started the church. He had stopped back there once or twice. Maybe there was some other communication between them or messages sent to them. But they remembered him and they knew Paul was important. They prayed for him. They sent him gifts. Paul said, how can I thank you? I long for you people with the affection of Jesus Christ. You see, Christianity is much maligned and yet in the first century it is a proven fact that there was nothing like Christianity that was a leveler that cut across every barrier of racial division, religious division, social class, wealth, education, all those things and made those who possessed Christ in common as one people. It was so amazing that the world in the book of Acts looked at those people and they said, look at that. Look at those Christians loving each other. We've never seen that. We've never seen an educated government official loving a homeless man. Why, we've never seen a wealthy woman like Lydia sharing her resources over here with a young girl whose life is a mess. Look at how they love each other. There's a great bond. in the fellowship that God gives in his people. And it's the bond of our common work of grace that God is doing. Let me tell you a quick story that I remember. It comes from a true event in 1966. There was a great Congress on Evangelism, it was called, in Berlin, Germany. Billy Graham and others organized this. And it brought people from around the world, every continent, came to this Congress to speak together, pray together, learn together about how to evangelize the world. Well, at one point some people were speaking, giving a testimony, and two got up by a plan. They were two Alca Indians from Ecuador. Now this will ring a bell with many of you, especially of you who are older. You remember that 10 years before, in 1966, in 1956, the Alka Indians massacred five American missionaries. And it was a shocking event that went through the Christian world. Jim Elliott and others there killed. Now, two of those men had come to Christ. and those who had been instrumental in their salvation and their growing in the Lord had brought them to Berlin, where through an interpreter, these men from a very primitive culture who certainly had never seen a city like Berlin before, I imagine, were there on a stage telling, we used to be violent killers who killed anybody we didn't know because we thought that's what we had to do. Now God changed us, and now instead of killing, we want to tell, about the mercy and the love of God in Jesus Christ. The story is told that that day in a hall of more than a thousand, listening to these two Alcas, a man got up at the back, and even though the program wasn't finished, he walked rapidly down the aisle and came right up onto the stage. He was an African man wearing long, colorful robes. And he went right over to those two Alcas. He must have startled them. and he, the black man, embraced them each in turn, the two brown men from the other continent, and he said in his language, this happened to me too. This happened to me too. What happened? The grace of God turning a life inside out. What else binds people together across continents? There you see the roots of true Christian fellowship. The common grace of God makes us absolutely one with those who are going to share eternity with us someday. All different denominations, all different skin colors, every appreciation of every kind of worship music you can imagine. You better believe it, folks. You're gonna sing some different tunes in heaven. And they're gonna sing ours too, I hope. We rejoice in the company of the people of God. We belong to something that's so much larger than ourselves. We're refreshed by these people, and we yearn for these people. Now, lastly and quickly today is the final part of this introductory text, verses 9 to 11. Paul has prayed to God with thanksgiving. Now he prays with intercession, and he asks for some things for these friends of his in Christ. Real quickly, three things he asks. First of all, in verse nine, he asks that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. You realize you can love a person either wisely or stupidly? You can love a person naively and do them as much harm as if you hated them. Paul says, I want you in your relationships to be wise, to be discerning. Think of parenting as a good example of that. You know, parental love, the best parental love is not the love that says, okay, you're my child, you've got carte blanche with me, anything you want to do, just do it. Go ahead, have a great time. That's not parental love. Parental love has hard edges on it. Parental love knows it has to say no and stand its ground. Because it loves, it has to love wisely. Paul's saying, I pray that as you love each other in the world, you would have the wisdom of God to love as he does, to love people through the hard things that you might have to do or say, that they might grow. Then secondly, he prays for Christian friends to make good moral choices. He says it this way, that you may be able to discern what is best and pure and blameless until the day of Christ. The word for pure there is a strange meaning. It means oven tested. That sounds odd. What's that? It seems that it refers to the idea that a clay pot has to be fired in the furnace. And if it has a key deformity or a buried weak place in the clay, the heat of the oven could easily make it crack where that is. Paul's saying, I pray that you would make good choices of what is good and excellent and pure before God so that there would not be in you this hidden deformity that would make you break and crack in the heat of life. We all face crucial choices every day. What will we read? How will we spend our time? What are our leisure pursuits? What will our friends be? How will our business ethics be conducted? How do we use the internet? How do we speak to our spouse? How does a single Christian conduct herself or himself with others? Choices have to be made. Paul says, I want you to make the best choices, the things that God reveals, not just mediocre choices, but excellent choices. so that the fabric of your lives will be pure and excellent and be revealed that way in the day of Christ. Pray that way for those you know. And then thirdly, an intercessory plea in verse 11, he prays that these people would be filled with the fruit of righteousness, that there might be byproducts from their life. If the righteousness of Christ, the character of Christ is working in them, it ought to change them. And they ought to become forgiving. They ought to become humble. They ought to be willing to serve. There will be byproducts of Christ's righteousness seen and acted out as the evidences that God is in them. Well, I've only scratched the surface of the introduction of this letter today. We're going to discover an apostle here who has a source of deep joy, not something he was born with. Not something he got by education. Joy that came to Paul by the presence of Christ. And it made a difference. It made a big difference in a filthy jail cell. Later in this letter, he's going to even exhort and command these people and say, rejoice in the Lord. I say to you again, rejoice. Because it seems he believed that this deep, authentic joy was the essential evidence of Christ at work. Just like sweetness is the essential evidence of sugar, joy is the evidence of Christ. Paul found that joy as his mind and his heart were filled with consciousness of his Lord. I ask, can we become so preoccupied with Jesus Christ as this apostle did that we start seeing our world through the lenses of his presence, his character, his teachings, his revelation in the word? If we're still at the center of our own world, we'll never see it that way. But if we, like Paul, see ourselves as spinning in concentric orbits with other Christians around that solar center of Jesus Christ, everything else starts to fall into place. And we too may find that it is Christ in me, my joy, the center of all meaning, and the center of all glory to the praise of God. Our Father, we pray that you would teach us more from this letter. How this apostle could live in such a remarkable way in such dire, difficult circumstances where we would be miserable, we would be calling for a lawyer, we would be saying, get me out of here. He could glow with the presence of Jesus. I pray, Lord, that we could learn that. that we might know your Son more and more, until our confidence of what He's doing in us would outweigh everything else, for your honor and praise. Amen.