Book of Philippians, as Paul, as we know, it's his letter to the church at Philippi, the first church that he had a part in establishing in Europe during his missionary journeys. Title of this morning's message is Unto the Furtherance of the Gospel, and that's taken from our text this morning. As you probably remember, Paul's, the Book of Philippians It was written during Paul's first imprisonment there in the city of Rome. He'd been incarcerated for some time. Now, part of the time was in Caesarea for a couple of years, and then he'd been transported to Rome, waiting for trial before the emperor there in Rome. He had been arrested in Jerusalem We see this in Acts chapters 21 through 28, the history of this arrest. Paul had gone to Jerusalem to meet with the church elders there. He wanted to visit with them. And when he did, some things transpired. He ended up going to the temple. We'll talk a little bit more about this later. He was arrested there in the temple. It was a very violent reaction to his presence in the temple by some of the Jews. They dragged him out of the temple and they were gonna kill him. And he had to be rescued by some Roman soldiers to restore the peace. And that led to a very long incarceration for him. In total it was four years that he was a little over if you consider possibly the travel time from Caesarea to Rome. So it was a long time, but when he's writing the book of Philippians, he's under house arrest in Rome, but he's writing to the church at Philippi, and he's asking them to be joyful, share my joy. After all he'd been through all this time, and that's what we're going to talk about a little bit this morning, he was encouraging them to share this joyful attitude. And we might say, as we look at the circumstances, we might say, how is that even possible? How is it even possible that Paul himself is joyous in any way? but it would be encouraging the church at Philippi to join him in his joy. Well, that's what I want us to look at this morning. What it was that helped Paul, the apostle, to be joyful. We're in Philippians chapter one. I'm gonna start reading in verse 12. Paul says, but I would, ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel, so that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace and in all other places. And many of the brethren in the Lord, waxing confident by my bonds, are much more bold to speak the word without fear." So Paul, he says, I'm in bonds, yes, but it's fallen out rather to the furtherance of the gospel instead of any problems. And that's what I want us to look at this morning. Let's pray one more time. Father, thank you for allowing us to look into your word this morning. Thank you for preserving it for us as we look into these verses from Paul's epistle to the Philippians. We pray that you would teach us what we should see here. May the Holy Spirit show us what we should learn from this passage. Paul had suffered a great many things by this point. He was under house arrest, and yet he could share these words of encouragement to the church at Philippi, and he could say, rejoice with me, because what's happened to me It's not been such a bad thing. It's helped to further the sharing of the gospel in other parts of the empire. And so, Father, we just pray that you would teach us this morning. Remove those things that would distract us today. I pray that we could focus on your word. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. So I want us to look at four different things this morning. First thing I want us to look at is some of what Paul had gone through I'm gonna call them Paul's inconveniences because I think that's what he would call them. Some people look at them and say, this is just tragedy. These are horrible things that happened, but I think Paul would look at them as his inconveniences. Then I want us to look at God's intentions in those inconveniences. God had a plan for this. And then I want us to look at the areas, and there are a couple of areas that were influenced by these inconveniences, if you will. And then I want us to look at the believers' inspiration because the believers around Paul that he was in contact with, they were inspired by what the Lord had brought him through. So the first thing we're looking at is in verse 12, and it's Paul's inconveniences. I'll read this again, a portion of the verse. He says, but I would, you should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me, and I'll stop there. He's referring to these things. He doesn't go into a lot of detail, does he? He doesn't say, you wouldn't believe what happened to me on the way to work or on the way to preaching. Terrible thing. The wheel ran off my chariot. Or my horse went lame. Or I stumbled and I skint my knee. And you wouldn't believe what happened to me before I got out of that house. I burnt a toast this morning. It was a horrible day. He doesn't go into that. He just says these things. I want you to understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me. That term, or that phrase there, the things which happened unto me, it literally means this. the things dominating me. He says, the things that have just seemed to have taken over my life. I don't want you to be too concerned about those things. Because Paul was looking at them, I really believe, as inconveniences. And so let's think about what those things are. As I said, we see them if we look through, as you read through the book of Acts, starting in chapter 21 of Acts and running through chapter 28, you'll see the history of what has happened here. Paul went to the temple, he came to Jerusalem, as I said, to meet with the church officials, the leaders of the church, the brethren there, and they had some concerns about Paul being in Jerusalem, because you remember, Paul was once a Pharisee, and he started out condemning Christians. And so the Christians, many of them, may have still been a little bit scared of Paul at this point. I think most of that was out of the way, but now, To the Jewish people in Jerusalem, Paul had become a turncoat, because now he was following this way of Christianity. And so the Jewish leaders, they said, we've got some folks here that have taken a vow, and they're gonna go and offer sacrifices that have to do with that vow, and go through that process. And they said it might go a long way to calming the Jewish people in the town a little bit, if you'd go along with them. if you would pay for their sacrifices, that pay the way for this and be there with them. And Paul said, yeah, I'll do that. Because after all, Paul was not trying to alienate the Jewish people in Jerusalem. He was not trying to alienate the chief priests or the scribes or the Pharisees or the Sadducees. He wanted to win them to Christ. And so here he is in the temple and some of the Jews saw him there and they began to lodge false accusations against him. They stirred up the Jewish folks in the temple. They dragged him outside. They were going to kill him. And because they were disturbing the peace, which was, you didn't do that. If you were a Roman province, disturbing the peace was not allowed. The Romans would squash that very quickly. And so there was a Roman garrison there. Some soldiers heard about what was going on. They came and Paul very narrowly escaped death. And the interesting thing is, he was rescued by Roman soldiers, the ones who were assigned to protect the peace. God used them to protect his apostle. God will use whatever means he chooses to protect us when we're serving him. We have to keep that in mind. But they lodged these complaints against Paul, and some of them, they sound like this. They accused him of being, now look, get this, a pestilent fellow. We don't use language like that, do we? He was a pestilent fellow. Pestilence, we know what that is, disease. They said he is a disease. He needs to be removed. He is a malignant tumor on our nation. Here he has defiled our temple. He needs to be gone. They accused him of stirring up sedition among Jews all around the empire. Oh, now that one would catch the Roman centurion's attention. Sedition? No, we don't do that here. We don't allow that anywhere in the empire. So they're accusing Paul of things that will not only turn the Jewish people against him, but they'll also turn the Romans against him. He was accused of being a ringleader of the Nazarenes. Okay, well, so yeah, he was. The Christians, he was somewhat of a ringleader of those, but he wasn't causing any trouble. The Christians weren't pushing for revolt. They were pushing for peace. They wanted people to be saved, not to rise up in arms against the Roman army, Then he was accused of profaning the temple. Now that is something that the Apostle Paul would never have done. Though he had given up Judaism as his form of religion, he still honored the temple because that was God's place for his people to worship. The Lord Jesus himself said, my father's house is to be a house of prayer. It is to be a house, a place where people come and worship and where they share the word of God. And so Paul would never have defiled it But that's what he was accused of. The Romans pulled him aside and took him aside, and they started questioning, okay, what did you do wrong? Why are these people so stirred up against you? You must have done something wrong. And Paul's response would be, I didn't do anything wrong. Well, they called you, they say you're a pestilential. I'm not pestilent. I'm seeking the peace. They say you're stirring up insurrection. I've never done that. There's no evidence against that. Well, they say you're in the sect of the Nazarenes. I am, and we're a peaceful people. They say that you profaned the temple. I haven't done anything to profane the temple. I haven't been here long enough to defile the temple. I've only been in town a few days. They've accused me of things that would have taken a lot more time than that to plan. And so they threatened to scourge him. Well, if you don't tell us what you did wrong, we'll beat you until you confess to something. He was only very narrowly able to escape scourging because he said, well, wait a minute, I'm a Roman citizen. I was born in Tarsus. You can't scourge me. And of course that got their attention as well. The Lord was using their own laws to protect his servant. They couldn't scourge Paul. And so he's protected from that, but they did take him into custody. They found out that there was a murder plot against him. There were a group of the Jews that said, you know what? We're not gonna eat another bite of food until Paul is dead. We're gonna take care of it. They must have been very hungry because by the time Paul wrote these words, he had been incarcerated for years and no one had touched him. None of those people. So the Lord protected him. But the Romans said, okay, there's a murder plot against you. We're gonna move you to Caesarea. We'll get you out of Jerusalem. This is a hotbed for you. So they moved him up to Caesarea for safekeeping so that the Roman authorities could examined him later there, and he stayed there, we're told, for two years. The Roman governors there were hoping that he would come up with a bribe, and then they would let him go, and Paul said, like, I'm not gonna bribe, I'm not gonna pay you money to let me out of prison, or let me out of your jail, I'm just gonna keep here sitting here preaching to everybody that comes by, and you can't get away from me, because I'm under your care, you have to listen to me. Isn't that amazing? After the two years, he was sent to Rome because he had appealed. They asked him at one point, are you willing to go back to Jerusalem to stand before your accusers? And he said, nope, not willing to do that. I'm a Roman citizen, I appeal to Caesar's court. And so they had to send him to Rome at that point. So they put him with another set of soldiers. Now, there's already been one set of Roman soldiers in Jerusalem who rescued him. There's been another set, no doubt, in Caesarea who've been protecting him. Now they've got another set. whose job it is to get him to Rome. All of them captive audiences for Paul to preach to. Paul is saying, what did he say? All of these things happened for the furtherance of the gospel. All these things that have happened have given Paul another audience to preach to. On the way to Rome, he got, he ended up being shipwrecked. And so they end up on the island of Malta. The scripture refers to it, I believe, as Melita. It is modern day Malta. The folks who lived on the island, they come out, they take panes to help protect these folks who have been shipwrecked. They're wet, they're cold, they're soggy, so they start building a bonfire for them. Paul reaches out to get a bunch of sticks to put on the fire, and we're told that a viper came out of the sticks and latched onto his hand. You can almost imagine this viper just pumping poison into Paul. It says that the natives of that island, they just sat back watching like, yeah, he's going to swell up. He's going to start screaming in agony. He's going to die because that was poisonous, a deadly viper. None of that happened. Paul didn't even get sick. They thought he was a God before it was over with. No, Paul wasn't a God, but he had God protecting him, didn't he? He was able to share the gospel with them. When he finally reached Rome, he was put under house arrest, meaning that He wasn't in a dungeon somewhere. He was in a house, a rented house. People could come see him, but he was chained to a Roman guard every day. You don't get much more captive audience than that, do you? These guards, as they rotated in and out, they got to listen to what Paul had to say. And as visitors came to see him, they got to do it again. And I'm guessing that's just a portion of the hardships that Paul had faced up to that point. I'm guessing there were more that aren't recorded. I mean, we have to remember, not everything that Paul went through is recorded in Scripture. Not everything that anyone in Scripture went through is recorded here. There's far more. And yet, all of those things, Paul's categorism simply is the things which happened to me, or the things that dominated me. I didn't get to choose all these things, but that's okay. They're just things. They're just things that the Lord has brought along. I think he would say to us, they're just minor inconveniences. Just another day in the Lord's work. That's the way Paul would look at it. I think I've shared this with you before. My stepfather, he was a farmer. He grew up not far from here, worked hard most of his life. He used to work on farm equipment and all of that. And if you've ever had anything to do with farming, anything to do with farm equipment, you know things go wrong sometimes. And they can go very wrong very quickly. But one of his favorite sayings was this, the main thing is don't get excited. He said if something broke, we can fix it. If it can't be fixed, it wasn't worth having anyway, we'll replace it and move on from there. But the main thing is don't get excited. I think Paul took that same approach toward these things that had happened to him. Because what excited Paul was not the things that had happened to it. What excited Paul was the ability to share the gospel, wasn't it? So all these other things that came along, he just took those in stride as he went along. I want you to note that as you look at verse 12, those two words, which happened, are in italics. That means that they weren't in the original Greek copy or the Greek manuscript. They were added by the English translators to help make a smoother translation, hopefully to make it sound a little, to make it read better, to make it make more sense. But I think we can look at it this way. Paul says, these things didn't happen. Paul wouldn't have said these things just happened. These are just things which occurred on their own. No, in Paul's mind, everything occurred because God had a plan for them to occur. Nothing just happens to God's people. Nothing we face could ever, there's nothing that we could say, well, that just happened. No. Everything that reaches us comes from our God, it comes with his approval, and it comes with his purposes. And I think that's the way Paul would say, these are just minor inconveniences that have come. I don't want you to be worrying about those, you folks in Philippi. God brought these about, he's brought me through them, and all along the way I've been able to preach the gospel. So that's the first thing I want us to look at, Paul's inconveniences. The second thing are God's intentions. Look at verse 12 again. He says, but I would that you should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out, rather, unto the furtherance of the gospel. Those words have fallen out. We can, in more modern English, it would be they've taken place. These things that have taken place, don't worry about them. He uses the word rather. He said the things which happened unto me have fallen out, rather, unto the furtherance of the gospel. The idea conveyed here is that Paul says these things that have taken place, they happen for a reason other than you may be thinking. Because a lot of times people would look at things like that and it might seem logical to them that, well, all these things have been going on with Paul. They've been hindering his ministry. He was there in the temple and they dragged him out of the temple so he couldn't worship with other folks there. They dragged him into a barracks and they held him there. They took him off to Caesarea. All these things were hindering the gospel. They didn't hinder anything. Paul would continue to preach the gospel everywhere he went. Everyone who could hear him could hear that gospel message, and they could hear about a loving God, couldn't they? Paul's correction to that level of thinking was something like this. These inconveniences, they're not hindering my work. They're actually supporting the gospel ministry. God put them here for that reason. And then he uses that word, A furtherance, notice that. That's a Greek term, and it is thought to have been linked to what we would call the Army of Rome's Corps of Engineers. Whenever they would go out to battle, if they had to go through, for example, a forested area, you can't take an army through a forest. It just doesn't work well. So they would send an army. We would call them the Corps of Engineers, and they'd go in and clear the forest. They'd just clear out a swath. One commentator referred to them as something like holy woodcutters. And they would go in and clear the path. If it was a marshy place, they'd dump gravel and dirt in it to make a solid road so the Roman army could travel. One of the things that the Roman army was known for was traveling quickly. They would travel swiftly and they would bring immense force wherever they went. And so these folks would would exist solely to make it possible for the Roman army to get where they would go when they needed to be there. And Paul says, all these things that have been happening, they're like a core of engineers that have gone out there and they've cleared the path so that the gospel could continue to go in places that you would never have believed it could go. These things he would say, it was an advanced team that would allow the gospel to to maneuver and to attack areas that it never could have attacked otherwise. So that's, he says, these things have fallen out rather to the furtherance of the gospel. God had ordered Paul's circumstances. They had ordered him in a way that the gospel could reach people who you would think were completely unreachable if you looked at it. I'm sure if Paul had, when he first got to Jerusalem, when he was talking to the church leaders there, If they had sat down and tried to plan, where were you going to take the gospel next? I'm sure Paul would have had some ideas, but I'm not sure it would have included some of the ideas of where the gospel got to. It got to the crowds of Jewish people and the religious leaders when he went to the temple, didn't it? He was able to share the gospel with them. How about the Roman soldiers in Jerusalem? Paul, when he first got to Jerusalem, I'm sure he did not have a plan with You know there's a Roman garrison here, and I'm gonna carry the gospel to them. I'm just gonna march right up to their barracks. I know they'll let me in. I'm a likable sort of fellow. I'm just gonna preach to them. I'm sure there was nothing like that, but God arranged for him to meet those Roman soldiers, didn't he, and their leader. How about the Roman soldiers in Caesarea? Paul's in Jerusalem. I'm sure he didn't have a plan. Well, after I go up there to the Roman barracks here, I'm gonna go to Caesarea, and I'm gonna talk to the governor, Felix, Governor Festus when he shows up and the others. I don't think he had that plan, but God did. Then on the soldiers on the trip to Rome, they were supposed to guard him. He didn't have any way of reaching them before these circumstances happened, did he? As I said, the Roman governors, when he was in Caesarea, Felix at first, and then Festus. Felix was replaced by Festus. He was able to preach to both of them. He was able to preach to King Agrippa II. How was Paul gonna reach them before? They didn't know. If they knew who he was, they weren't reaching out to him. The people he met on the trip to Rome, again, as I said, Paul wanted to go to Rome. He had expressed that in some of the epistles I want, or maybe it was in the book of Acts. He said, I'd like to come to Rome. At one point, I think he said, I wanna make a trip to Spain. And when I go there, I want to come by Rome and see you folks as well. Paul got an all expense paid trip to Rome. The church didn't have to pay for that at all. And not only did he get all expenses paid, he was protected by the Roman army. If you were a Roman soldier and you were given the charge of protecting a prisoner and getting prisoner X from point A to point B, you better get prisoner X from point A to point B and he better be safe when he got there. Otherwise, they were gonna hold you accountable. And so these people took great pains to be sure Paul got there safely, didn't they? The Praetorian Guard members that were assigned to protect Paul while he was in Rome, they were the ones who were chained to it. This was the elite guard, Praetorian Guard that was assigned to protect the emperor and his compound. They got to hear the gospel from Paul. Paul wouldn't have, I'm sure he didn't have any reason when he went to Jerusalem that I'm gonna preach to the Praetorian guard one of these days. It's right here on my checklist. All the people who were allowed to visit him in Rome, he was able to reach them with the gospel. You see where I'm going with this? And finally, the emperor himself, Nero, wicked man. Paul got to go to his court. Why? How did that happen? Did he plan that? No, I don't think he planned it. I don't think it was on his checklist, but he did have a right as a Roman citizen to appeal to Caesar's court. So he got to go and he got to carry the gospel there. I think Paul, his message to the Philippians would be something like this. Satan may have intended the circumstances to halt the gospel, to stop it in its tracks, but God intended all these circumstances to clear the paths so that I can take the battle, the spiritual battle that Satan in places he never expected to get attacked. I believe Satan thought he was gonna stop Paul right there the day they dragged him out of the temple. Paul took battles, spiritual battles, to Satan's ground everywhere he went, and the gospel was able to succeed. So we've seen these are minor inconveniences to Paul. We've seen the intentions that the Lord had in mind. Look at verse 13. We're gonna see some areas that were influenced. Verse 13 says, so that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace and in all other places. The bonds themselves. Paul was chained. He was in bonds that identified him as a prisoner of the Roman Empire, didn't it? Then he says, in Christ, these bonds are manifest. It's not. It's we're tempted to read this verse to say so that my bonds in Christ, as if The bonds are because I'm a Christian, and they were, to a certain extent. But the way the Greek is written, I'm told it should read like this, so that my bonds in Christ are manifest. What does that term manifest mean? It means to make something known that wasn't known before. His bonds are allowing him to make Christ known to people who didn't know him before. He's able to make the gospel known to people who didn't know it before. and the bonds are what draw attention to that. Think of it this way. There's people that Paul meets while he's in Rome, whether they're soldiers or they're people who come to visit him or whoever it might be. And I can imagine the question goes something like this with conversation. Paul, why are you under arrest? You seem like a nice enough guy. You don't seem to be a troublemaker. You're just sitting here calmly. You're chained to a soldier every day, and you're taking that in stride. And you continue to write letters to people telling them, be joyful, share my joy. So what in the world did you do to get arrested? Paul's answer would be something like this. Because of my belief in and my teaching of Jesus Christ, that's why I was arrested, no other reason. And I think Paul would answer it much like that. And that has to bring the next question to, he's in Rome now, right? He's not in Jerusalem anymore. He's not in Judea. He's not in Galilee anymore. He's in Rome, so the inevitable next question will be, well, who is Jesus Christ? Why did he get you in trouble? What is it that believing in him, how did that get you in trouble? And I can almost imagine a big grin on Paul's face. Well, I'm glad you asked. Pull up a chair. Let's talk a while. Let me tell you about Jesus Christ. I'll tell you why I'm in Barnes and why it's not a problem to me, why it was inconveniences only that brought me here in this chain. It's only an inconvenience too. Can't you imagine that conversation? And so he's able to influence people in ways that he couldn't have before. Where did this influence take place? In two different areas that we see in verse 13. One, in all the palace, and then in all other places. That term palace, it is the actual Greek term praetorium. Praetorian means like the emperor's compound. It could mean the emperor's court, Nero's court at this point. But it probably means that the entire area of Caesar's household, his palace, his court, those who guard him and all of that. And as I said, he had a very elite group of people called the Praetorian Guard. And they were to protect the emperor at all costs, no matter what, no matter what harm might come. And so the idea here, when he says that his bonds are in Christ's manifest in all the palace, the idea is that he's even able to preach to the Praetorian Guard members who are chained to him every day. And you can imagine they rotate out. Wouldn't you imagine that? I'm guessing it wasn't the same guard every day that came and sat all day long with Paul chained to it. So as they come in, he's able to preach to them again. very literally, and a captive audience, isn't it? He could directly relate the Christian story, the gospel message to each one of these guards. But more than that, they would hear him as others came, as visitors came to him, wanting to ask him, believers maybe, people who wanted to know Christ, as he was able to preach to them, these guards would hear that same thing. Can you imagine? These guardsmen going back to the barracks after a day with Paul, and saying, they said, what'd you do today? Well, I was guarding the Hebrew over there, Paul. What'd he do? Best I can tell, he didn't do anything. Seems like a really nice guy. You gotta, listen, eventually you'll be chained to him, too. You need to ask him. Ask him about this guy, Jesus. He's got some stories to tell. He says he's the son of God. Oh, come on, we got lots of gods. Yeah, but our gods have never done anything like this guy's done. He's raised people from the dead. He's created food enough to feed thousands of people just from a few morsels. This guy saw him, he met him, and he was brighter than the noonday sun, struck him blind for a few days, and then he sent somebody to give his sight back to him. You gotta talk to him. Can you imagine that? These Romans have never heard anything like this before. And they'd never heard anything about a God who was kind and gracious and merciful because their gods weren't. They were anything but that. They were warlike. And so Paul was able to witness to them, to preach to them. They were also able to hear him as he dictates the books that he wrote. He wrote four epistles from that first imprisonment while he was there, chained to these guards. The epistles to the Ephesians, the Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. They're referred to as the prison epistles. All of the information that was in those epistles, these guards got to hear them as he dictated those words, didn't they? Chuck Swindoll said, in this way, the gospel penetrated the imperial barracks like an arrow through armor. I think that's exactly what it was. That the gospel could penetrate in areas no one ever thought it could get to. And that is what we're told as his bonds in Christ are manifested in all the palace, but it goes beyond there. It also says in all other places, Paul's testimony spread, not just by his words, not just by the things that he said, but by the things that the people he told would say to the people they met. The Roman Empire, remember now, this is the biggest empire on the face of the planet at that point. We remember, things that we've learned in history over the years about the Romans. They had very good system of roads, didn't they? Because they wanted the military to be able to get wherever it needed to go quickly. And so they had very good roads. They wanted messages to get where they needed to very quickly. And so people could travel. They could also travel safely because the Romans ensured if you were on their roads, you were going to be safe. And if anyone tried to attack you, they got squashed like a bug, didn't they? And so the Romans had put in place a way for people to travel all through the empire. And we think, well, okay. Okay, so it's all the empire. Think of how big the Roman Empire was from what you know of history. When he says it went to all other places, I'm told that in the first century, the Roman Empire was some two million square miles of territory, not including water that separated some of those areas. I'm told that it It extended from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Euphrates River in the east. That it spanned from the Sahara Desert in the south as far as the Scottish Highlands in the north. That's a huge amount of territory. Paul had all of that opened up to him as he shared the gospel with people in Rome. It could go anywhere as a result of that. So when it's very literal, that his bonds in Christ were manifest in all the palace and in other places, or all other places as well. The gospel was moving, and that Roman traffic could carry it to all of that, again, with relative safety. The gospel reached places that Paul could never have dreamed, and it all came about by these inconveniences that furthered the gospel message. That's what we're talking about this morning. The last thing I want us to see is in verse 14, we look at the believer's inspiration. We're told, and many of the brethren in the Lord, waxing confident by my bonds, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. That term many, literally in the Greek, it doesn't mean many, it means most, or it means the majority. He says the majority of the believers who have heard me preach while I'm here have waxed more confident. It says, but again, it says in the Lord, they're waxing confident. Their confidence didn't come from Paul's sharing the gospel, their confidence came from the Lord who strengthened them. Because they saw Paul, even this man who's been through all of this, even this man who has been persecuted the way he has, a man who's been under arrest, he's been incarcerated for years now, he's still sharing the gospel boldly. He hasn't given up on that at all. And so they're gaining confidence that they would share it as well. And that confidence, again, it comes from the Lord. It doesn't come from us, does it? If you have confidence to go out and share the gospel, did you work that up? No, it comes from the Lord, doesn't it? He says that by my bonds, these Christians are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Previously to this time, We're told that Roman persecution in the area of Rome, Nero's persecution, had pretty much silenced a lot of the Christians. They weren't going to talk. They were afraid. But here Paul is in Caesar's household, chained to one of Caesar's praetorian guardsmen, and he's still preaching the gospel like nobody's business. He's not giving up. He's not letting anything keep him back. And so that inspired confidence in those Christian Romans. It still does, doesn't it? to know when we read that Paul's going through all of this and he's continuing to share the gospel, doesn't it stir up within you a little bit more confidence too? It makes us ashamed when we don't, doesn't it? When we don't share the word of God. But people who were there in Rome that were once frightened into silence, they had found their voice again. They had come out with boldness now. They had come out with courage to continue to share the gospel to people who needed to hear it. Again, I would say it went something like this. If Paul can preach under his circumstances, how can we not preach? How can we fail our Lord with our silence? And so it stirred him to action, to preach the word of God themselves and to share the gospel. Philippian Christians, as we draw this to a close, they apparently thought that all these things that happened to Paul, that they were hindering his ministry, and they were feeling sorry for him. And Paul apparently caught wind of that, and he said, let me write him a letter and tell him, don't feel sorry for me. These are just minor inconveniences. The main thing is here, don't get excited about this stuff. If you want to get excited about something, get excited about sharing the gospel. Because I think Paul would fall into the category, truly, of someone who could not possibly care less what his circumstances were, as long as they fell out, rather, to the fervorance of the gospel. That was his goal. Always. And it should always be ours. But why? Why is it that Paul would feel that way? He told us in Romans chapter 1 and verse 16 when he said the gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. Paul knew that. He knew that was true. He believed that with all his heart that anyone who put their faith in Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ alone would be saved. And he knew these Roman people needed to be saved. They were steeped and idolatrous worship, if they worshiped at all. Many of them just worshiped their power, their authority, the fact that we're the greatest empire. Does that sound familiar? You ever heard the opinion that there's only one superpower left on the earth and we're it? There are people in this country who worship that, the fact that we're on the top. I'm gonna tell you, the only way you're gonna get on the top is to bow yourself to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what makes us great. Not our military prowess, not our education level, not our wealth or anything else, is it? Paul knew that, and he wanted to share that with everyone he met. They needed Jesus Christ. If you would bow your heads this morning, as we close, I'm gonna ask you, if you're here this morning, you're a Christian, I'm gonna ask you just a few questions. Are you faithful in sharing the gospel message with people? Are you as faithful as Paul was, or as even these Romans were? Are you witnessing for what Christ has done for you? No one can refute that. Have you allowed circumstances to hold you back? That's what the Philippians were afraid of, that these things would hinder the gospel. Paul said, they're not hindering me at all. Kenneth Weiss said this, He said, the things that hedge us in, the things that handicap us, the tests that we go through and the temptations that assail us are all divinely appointed woodcutters used by God to hew out a path for our preaching of the gospel. No matter what our circumstances are, they can help us to share the word of God. So if you're a Christian this morning, pray that the Lord would give you that boldness. If you hear this morning, anyone under the sound of my voice, you've never trusted Christ. I'm going to ask you this morning, Won't you come to him for salvation today? Won't you bow the knee to him? Ask him to be your savior today. Many things have contributed over the years to the furtherance of the gospel so that you could hear it, so that you could hear it one more time today. So I would invite you, if you've never done it, don't let anything stand in your way of bowing your heart, your will to Jesus Christ today and ask him to save you. Father, thank you for the message that we've seen in your word this morning. We thank you for the testimony of the Apostle Paul. We thank you for all the things that happened to him, that he said they just simply helped to further the gospel message, reaching people who needed it so desperately. They allowed him to reach people that he may never have been able to reach any other way. We thank you for that. We thank you, Father, that the gospel reached each one of us, having been furthered by events we don't have any idea of sometimes. but we thank you that it reached our ears. Father, I thank you for each person here who has trusted Christ, and I pray that you'd strengthen each of us to be better witnesses for you, more effective witnesses, more faithful witnesses to you. But Lord, I pray for any who have never trusted Christ, that you'd bring them to that point. They would submit to you. They would simply acknowledge their sin before you and recognize that only you can save because of your grace and because of your mercy. I pray they'd call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ today Because as Paul said, the gospel is the power of God and the salvation to any who will believe. Bring them to that point of belief today, we pray and ask it in Jesus name. Amen.