FILLING IN PHILIPPIANS: A TABLE FOR SERVANTS AND SAINTS
Philippians 1: 1-2
08/5/12 © Dr. Ronald W. Scates
As some of you may know, I am a person who loves closure. I like all my ‘i’s dotted, all my ‘t’s crossed, all the blanks filled in, and that’s the genesis behind this sermon series during June and in August that I’ve entitled, “Filling in Philippians…” because during this sermon series I’m preaching all those texts that I never got to preach over a decade ago when we did a sermon series going straight through Philippians but those were the texts the associate pastors preached.
So when we finish this sermon series, I’ll be able to check off Philippians, “I’ve preached through the entire letter. And this morning we’re going to be looking at the very first two verses of this great letter to this 1st Century Mediterranean church. It’s the salutation. It’s the greeting. The authors are Paul and Timothy and they are absolutely head-over-hills in love with the Philippian church.
But they are writing this letter from a Roman jail. Are they cellmates? We don’t know. But they have been apart from this church; their greeting is going to a church that they have been away from a long, long time.
So perhaps it is only appropriate that since I’ve been away from you all for 5 Sundays that I bring you a greeting as well. It really is good to be back with you, to sit under the Word of God with you, to gather at the Lord’s Table with you once again. And I bring you greetings from all of your brothers-and sisters-in-Christ, in those churches where we worshipped while we were apart from you. Incarnation Episcopal Church, right on I75; our church plant down on Oak Lawn, Park Cities Presbyterian Church, Providence Presbyterian Church here in Dallas and Preston Road Church of Christ and I bring you special greetings from my new friend, their new pastor, Wade Hodges.
You know, sometimes greetings, salutations, seem to be just so much formalities, kind of throw away protocol stuff but let me remind you that the first two verses of Philippians are just as much the inspired infallible Word of God as any other verses in Scripture and so they innately carry a depth, a weightiness to them that might elude us at first glance. So let’s take a close look this morning. I invite you to turn with me in your bibles and keep them open to Philippians 1 and let’s pray before we look at those two verses.
Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds now to Your Word that we might clearly understand it, that we might gratefully receive it and that we might faithfully apply it to our lives. For Jesus’ sake! Amen.
And now, if you’re able, please stand for the reading of God’s Word this morning beginning at Philippians, chapter 1, verse 1:
1Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons:
2Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Please pray with me again. And now Father, as my words are true to Your Word may they be taken to heart but as my words should stray from Your Word, may they be quickly forgotten. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen. Please be seated.
The first thing that ought to strike you and me in this greeting there in verse 1 is the big fat contradiction between verse 1 and the title that the editors of the ESV give to this entire letter. This is not just the letter of Paul to the Philippians. It is the letter of Paul and Timothy to the Philippians.
No, oftentimes, Paul gets all the limelight, all of the credit, all of the accolades and affirmations but it’s never ever Paul just by himself. It’s always, Paul and Silvanus or Paul and Silas or Paul and Barnabas. Indeed, Timothy co-authors, with Paul no less than 6 New Testament letters. They’re a team. That ought to be a reminder to you and me that we are never to go it alone in the Christian life.
The Christian faith is all about relationship—relationship with Christ and with your brothers and sisters in Christ. Lone Christian is a total oxymoron. The Christian faith is all about being connected. In fact, the literal root, the simple root meaning of the word, ‘religion’ is ‘connected.’
But what an unlikely connection there is between the Apostle Paul and Timothy! Paul is old; he’s at the end of the trail. Timothy is young. Paul has a pristine Hebrew pedigree; Timothy is a mutt! He’s a half-breed. His mother was Jewish, his father was a pagan. Paul came to Christ through THE literal Damascus Road experience—blinding lights—a vision of Christ! Jesus has just kind-of always been the wallpaper of Timothy’s entire life. He probably can’t remember the day and time that he came to Christ.
In 1981, I took a bunch of college students from 1st Pres. San Antonio to the Intervarsity Urbana Student Missions Conference--20,000 college students on the University of Illinois campus.
The first night at dinner, one of our college girls came to me in tears and said, “Ron, my roommate, before she asked me even my name, said, ‘Tell me the day and the time you were saved.’” And Margaret couldn’t do that; Margaret was just like Timothy, she had just grown up her whole life in a relationship with Christ.
Now, I was not very wise at age 30 but I said something really wise to Margaret that night. I said, “Margaret, sometimes people act like that because they’re unsure about their own salvation.”
Sure enough, by the end of the week, Margaret came running up to me and said, “Ron, you won’t believe it. Last night, at the bible study on our dorm floor, that girl broke down in tears and confessed that she wasn’t sure that she was really a Christian.”
You know, Paul never looked at Timothy and said, “Timothy, you haven’t had an experience like mine. I’m not sure you’ve ever come to Christ.” Timothy never looked at Paul and said, “Paul, I suspect that maybe your relationship with Christ is based on a lot of emotionalism.” No!
You know, God connects you and me oftentimes with the most unlikely of people—racially, politically, sociologically, economically—and my friends, that is a part of God’s grace and also a part of His sense of humor.
Now, here you’ve got this great famous important missionary church planting team of Paul and Timothy and how do they refer to themselves in verse 1?
They call themselves “servants.” The Greek word, “doulos” which literally means “slaves.” They identify themselves as servants or slaves of Christ Jesus.
Now, wait a minute! Servants! Aren’t those the things that we aspire to have in our lives, not be? A servant is someone who takes their orders from someone outside of and at a higher level than they are. A servant doesn’t map out their life and then tell their master or their boss the plan.
What about you and me as we carry out our everyday lives, our careers, or our lifestyles? Do we wait for our marching orders, like Paul and Timothy, or do we go out and do our thing and then inform Christ about what we’re going to do? I have to confess that’s oftentimes the way I do it.
You know, one of the reasons I wear a clerical collar in the pulpit is to remind myself that I am not free to preach from this pulpit whatever I want. And I’m not free to preach whatever you want. I’m only to preach what is in accordance with the Scriptures as the divinely, inspired infallible Word of God. You see, this collar is the symbol of a Roman slave collar. And it reminds me and it ought to remind all of us, when we gather here Sunday by Sunday, we don’t come into this place to do my thing. We don’t come in here to do your thing. Or even our thing. We are here to do Christ’s thing. And one of the things that repels us from this whole idea of servant hood is we value our freedom so much.
But here’s one of the paradoxes of grace, my friends. Paul, in Galatians 4:7, says that when you and I take the posture of servanthood, under the authority of Jesus Christ, God the Father then takes us from being a servant/slave and actually adopts us and makes us His child. And then Paul pushes it even further than that and He says you then become an actual heir of the entire kingdom of God.
You know, my friends, there’s just no way around it. If you and I want true freedom, perfect freedom, that is only found as we take the posture of being a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ and bring our life under someone who is and whose cause is far, far bigger and more and more weightier than us or even our most grandiose dreams.
And this greeting from Paul and Timothy, we find out in verse 1, is to the saints, all the saints—the 1st Century saints there in Philippi and also the 21st Century saints in Dallas and New Orleans and all over this planet.
Now, do you qualify to be a saint? Your first reaction is probably, “Oh, no!” My friends, a saint is simply a human being, a fallen, sinful, broken, bumbling, some times even black-hearted human being who, for some strange supernatural reason, has been set apart onto a road where they are struggling to follow where Jesus is leading. A saint has nothing to do whatsoever with how good you are, how spiritual I am.
The word, “saint”, hagios in Greek, literally means, “one who is set apart.” A saint is simply a human being that God in His strange graciousness has chosen, elected, set them apart to be in a relationship with Him and to follow Jesus, however fumblingly.
Sainthood by behavior is the mythological demonically-deceptive default religion of the day and it’s an impossibility; that idea that by something you and I can do, by our behavior, we can achieve, earn, merit, qualify the certain spiritual level for sainthood or salvation. The only way you and I are saints, the only way you and I are saved, has nothing to do with what you and I can do because it has anything and everything, the only thing is what God does, that He in His unconditional love and grace chooses you and me despite, (that’s one of the greatest words in Scripture, it’s a gracious word—despite…) Despite who we are.
In fact, there’s absolutely nothing you and I can do to undo our unworthiness but God can and He has through the Once-For-All-Sufficient-Perfect-Sacrifice of His Son, Jesus upon the cross.
Why, that has even opened the doors to sainthood and salvation for church leaders. Paul mentions overseers and deacons. Whew! I’m glad about that. In 1st Pres., San Antonio, we had our older adults pastor, Dick Ryan. He’s a wonderful godly man. He used to say all the time, “If you can work on a church staff and remain a Christian, that is a miracle in itself.” Because when you’re a church leader or you work on a church staff, you see the underbelly that every church has because you see every church is merely just a hospital for sinners or broken fallen, sometimes even black-hearted men and women. We are totally unworthy. But the reality of grace, my friends, is that through that sacrifice of Christ the door is open for you and me to be set apart to belong to God, to be a part of His team, to enjoy a restored relationship with Our Maker and Our Savior.
Sainthood is all about God choosing us, not that we choose Him. It’s all of grace. It’s all of grace. That’s why Paul and Timothy close their salutation, their greeting in verse 2, with that tandem word phrase that you find in all of their letters, “grace and peace…” “Grace and peace…” “Grace and peace…” and that word order is of critical importance. A reminder that you and I will never have true peace, will never find authentic peace, until we first get the ‘grace’ thing right, until we experience God’s grace so mercifully poured out upon us.
I don’t want you leaving here this morning thinking that grace is some kind of substance that you have to find or that it’s some kind of ethereal abstract concept that you’ve got to wrap your head around.
My friends, sainthood, servanthood and salvation is all of grace but grace is very simple. Grace is Jesus. You know, we talk about grace being not getting what we deserve. What DO you and I deserve as broken fallen sinful human beings? We deserve condemnation, judgment, punishment, hell, and eternal death, utter separation from God. But grace is also about not getting that but getting what we don’t deserve which is Jesus—a Jesus who comes in and takes all that other stuff on Himself so it never comes our way. Jesus is God’s undeserved, unmerited gift to you and me. And through a relationship with Christ, it’s then that peace comes—that peace the world can’t give, that peace that passes all understanding.
My friends, this Table is the table of grace and peace. This is a table for saints and sinners and servants and slaves who gather at this Table in the unique presence, real presence of their Master and their Savior. Every time you and I come to this Table, we are declaring to the world that we are completely helpless and hopeless without what Jesus Christ has done for us through His life, death and bodily resurrection.
I hope you leave here this morning with something that you’re never going to forget the rest of your life. You’re going to come, in a few minutes, and dip a wafer into the cup, and believe me, you’re going to experience a unique taste and texture. It’s not necessarily the best of those things in the world but you can’t argue with me, it is really unique—that taste of the dipped wafer and the texture. And I want you, when you experience that this morning to remember that this Table is all about the Incarnation of Christ—God actually entering into time and space and linking our physicality with our spirituality in the embodiment of God in Christ. And then as you experience the physicality of that taste and texture, that unique taste and texture, I want you to start, always linking that to the reality of grace that you have never belonged to yourself, that God thought of you before the foundation of the world and chose you and set you apart to be His, to be His servant, to be a part of His mission team extending His kingdom throughout the world, to be His child, to be the heir to His entire kingdom—that is what is wrapped up in being a saint.