PHILIPPIANS
The Fight for Joy
Red Oak Church, Andrews, North Carolina
July 24, 2016 –
(All Scripture references are from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.)
July 24, 2016
Philippians 1:1-2 & Acts 16
Brody Holloway
(Rob Conti)
As a church, what we are committed to is working through books of the Bible; taking the Word of God and studying it to see what God is saying in the text. So, any time we come in here to preach the sermon is coming from the text. The main points of the sermon, no matter who is preaching, will be right from that passage. So, we invite you, and we want you guys to be studying along with us through that book, so that your mind is moving that direction, and that during the week in discipleship groups that study is getting reinforced. All of us know that it’s so easy to go sit in a Sunday service or listen to a podcast and enjoy a sermon and be encouraged as the Word of God does its work, but how often is it that even just twelve hours later that that message is gone and you are not even thinking about it? So, the discipleship groups in the middle of the week are so important and we want the focus of those to be how is that message then impacting your life? Not necessarily going further into what it means, but how we are applying that as a group of believers. So, we encourage you to be studying along and we encourage you to be part of a discipleship group. It’s going to be an awesome study through the book of Philippians.
Most of you already know or have heard, but I wanted to let you know the sad news that this morning Baby Ava passed away. Her battle that she’s had since she was born, she has succumbed to those initial issues with her brain and her lungs. She has passed away and she is with the Lord. We want to say as a church, and on behalf of Blue and Britt, thank you so much for your constant prayers and the encouragement that you were sending to them. I want to ask you to continue to do that and to continue to pray for them. I think a lot of us have that feeling of wondering what we can do. Just continue to pray. Pray for their strength. Pray for their joy in the midst of intense sorrow and suffering that they are experiencing right now and the grieving that they are experiencing—that they would experience that in the Lord and in the joy that the Lord will provide in the middle of their sorrow. So, please continue to pray for them. Again, on their behalf, I want to say thank you again for how you’ve supported them through this. Please continue.
I’m going to read from Psalm 42:1-5,
“As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.”
Pray with me.
Lord Jesus, we love you. As we come together tonight as a body of believers, we ask that your Spirit would meet with us and that you would free us now in these moments to worship you in spirit and in truth. God, we worship you because you are worthy, because you are God and there is no other. You alone are our Savior, our King, our Priest, our Prophet, and I pray that your Spirit would free us to love you and worship you the way that you deserve to be worshipped. I pray that we would have good fellowship with one another tonight by your Spirit and that your Spirit would minister the truth of your Word to our hearts and minds and that you would sanctify us, grow us, and that you would draw people to yourself for salvation. God, I pray by that same Spirit, by your Spirit, by the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, that you would minister to the hearts of Blue and Britt right now, and that you would uphold them in their sorrow and their grief, and that you would uphold them and strengthen them and give them a peace that passes understanding or comprehension, and that you would give them a joy that can’t be touched by anything in this world. God, we pray that you would be glorified in that. As you bring them back to the states, we pray that you would give them safe travels and that you would give them a good time of rest and time with their family, Lord. Tonight, Lord, we pray that you would anoint Brody to open your Word and to speak truth for your glory and that Jesus would be exalted. I pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.
(Brody Holloway)
We are not going to make you stand up or do anything weird. We’re not even going to make you fill out any information, but we do want to welcome you. We hope that you will feel the presence of the Lord here. We love to study God’s Word together.
If you have been coming or if you are looking for a church, Rob mentioned discipleship groups. I would encourage you, if you attend one of those discipleship groups every week, thatit’s great if you bring something to the table there. That’s where conversation happens. That’s where we talk through the text. That’s where we are able to sharpen each other and encourage each other. That’s where you are going to get to know people best.
One of the things that I love about Red Oak is that people don’t get in a hurry to leave. I travel around and preach a lot and this is a true story; a lot of times I’ll be preaching in a church and it won’t be long after the service is over that somebody is flicking the lights on and off. Some crusty old church guy is basically saying that it’s time to go; we’ve got to get to the Golden Corral. Fortunately, there’s no Golden Corral in Andrews. Well, sometimes that’s unfortunate, but when it’s time to leave church that’s fortunate because nobody is in a hurry. So, we do have a good time of fellowship afterwards, and I love that, but I encourage you to maybe try one of the discipleship groups. I think you’ll enjoy that and that’s where we kind of slow things down and really get to know each other.
So, a little background to the Church in Philippi. We are only going to look at two verses tonight—Chapter 1, verses 1-2. It says,
“Paul and Timothy, servants…”
The word for servant there is ‘doulas,’ which is a slave. Which, in the context, keep this in mind when you see the word ‘doulas’, that it’s ‘servant’, or some translations say ‘bondservant’ or other translations say ‘slave.’ Let me put this in context. The thing about the Church of Philippi, and we are going to see this in a bit of detail in a minute, is that the city of Philippi was a Roman colony. We will see that when we read over in Acts 16. This is the first church that is founded in Europe, so if you have done any backstudy going into this study in Philippians or if you have done any reading this week, you’ve seen that it’s the first church that’s founded in Europe. So, when the Gospel comes to Philippi it comes to Europe. We are going to see that it was miraculous and very divinely appointed, the way that God moved to get disciples there, or missionaries there, and the Church got planted in Philippi. But, the word ‘slave’ in the Roman context was a gritty, powerful, cultural word that we just miss. We don’t get it. You can study it all you want, but you know how you can study something as much as you can but it’s not the same as being there and feeling the weight of it.
Take somebody who may be a history buff and they like to study time periods. You can read people’s journals and read people writing about something and you can really get into a mindset. Or you could go and look at items that come out of that era but you can only go so far in really feeling what it was like to live in that culture, can’t you? You study about another culture or another place. If you’ve ever studied about a place and then gone and visited that place, you realize that it’s not what you thought it was going to be like. That’s because there are certain cultural aspects of being someplace where it takes a long time—even most missionaries will say that you need three or four years to really feel like you are engrained in the culture and the culture is engrained in you.
So, when we hear the word ‘slave’ a couple of things happen. One, we think of something like European slavery that was part of what early America took part in, which was horrible, but that’s the only context we have of slavery. But, in the Roman culture and context, you are talking about everything from the gladiatorial arenas where they would fight for entertainment with slaves, to people selling themselves into slavery in order to pay bills or pay debt. Fathers would give away their daughters or sons to pay debts. Probably, a lot of you have at some point studied a little about slavery, but the weight or the thud of that word in Philippi would have been greater than it was even in Palestine, because this is Roman. This is Roman—this is Rome—and slavery is Roman. So, when Paul says we are slaves of Christ Jesus, we are ‘doulas’—we are enslaved. It’s reminiscent of the book of Romans, where in chapter 6, Paul says that you used to be a slave to sin but now you’re a slave to righteousness. Those are powerful words, where someone submits themselves to or is brought into captivity to—it’s kind of all those things in one—the Gospel captures, the Gospel rescues, the Gospel enslaves, and we surrender to that slavery all at the same time. It’s a powerful word. So, he says that Paul and Timothy are slaves of Christ Jesus, and,
“To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Now, like we said, we are going to turn over to Acts 16. Actually, I want to look at a couple of verses in Acts 15. So, let’s jump over there and get the background on this city of Philippi, specifically the Church and how the Church was founded there.
So, for a quick background history. There is this missionary team made up of a guy named Barnabas and a guy named Saul, okay? You can read about this earlier in the book of Acts. They go and they are predominately travelling around Asia. They are planting churches and here is their method of church planting. This guy, Saul, had been a rabbi in the Jewish Church, so that was something that gave him a lot of credibility. They would go into a town, go into a synagogue, and Saul would speak in the synagogue, and that’s why you might remember Paul saying that the Gospel was to the Jew first and then to the Greek. If they had gone to Gentiles first, the Jews would not have listened because it would have been a pagan, or Gentile, religion. So, when it says it’s to the Jew first, it’s not just this idea that the Jews were the favorites; it’s the idea that for the Gospel to do its work through the promises of Judaism, in the fulfillment of the Old Testament and the Patriarchs and all of that, it had to go to the synagogue, and then from the synagogue the Gospel would spread to Gentiles, and that would be to any Greek people. So, that was kind of the way that they would take the Gospel around. They would go into a city and they would proclaim the Gospel, and see converts, and see people come to faith—both Jews and Gentiles. They would establish a church, and you might remember Paul telling the Ephesians, there used to be two people, Gentiles and Jews, but now there is a third category, Christian, made up of both. So, the Gospel is having that work. These missionary journeys occurred where Saul and Barnabas and their team would travel around, and preach, and proclaim the Gospel.
And there was a guy named John Mark. He is the same man who is known as writing the Gospel of Mark.So, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—that Mark. He is a young man and he’s a nephew to this guy named Barnabas. Barnabas and Mark are on the team and they come to a very difficult place in ministry and Mark totally chickens out. He doesn’t have what it takes and he bails. In fact, you will see this happen often on the mission field. I was talking with Jay, who is Bobby Lane’s direct boss with the Echelon[1] team, this past week, and he was giving me stats and numbers of how many missionaries wash out in the first year. It’s a really, really high number, particularly when you are talking about bush people, like going into the bush or the jungle. Jay lived in the Amazon for ten years, I think, and now he’s been in East Africa for six, or something like that. People have a more difficult time going and staying in the more remote places. They just wash out because they can’t handle it. So, this happens to John Mark. There are different ideas about exactly what happened, but we know that he backed out. He quit the team.
So, that didn’t sit well with Saul, who would later become Paul. That didn’t sit well with Paul. He was not okay with it that John Mark bailed and went home. But, they went on and continued the work and did great things. The first missionary journey was completed and they sort of rebooted and started doing this thing again and there came a point in chapter 15 of Acts, in verse 36, and it says,
“And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.” 37 Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. 38 But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia…”
So, Barnabas is like, “Let’s take my nephew. He’s ready to roll now,” and Paul says, “Un uh. Nope. Not going to do it.” Let me explain something. Just because you apologize, doesn’t remove all the consequences sometimes. There is this really wrong idea—and I’m not going to pick a side here between Barnabas and Paul in this argument—but there is this idea that if you are going to forgive somebody that you have to wipe the slate clean and let them start from ground zero. But, y’all, that is just not practical. That’s not practical. There will be times when you will extend forgiveness to someone but there will be residual consequences to their actions. Do you understand what I’m saying? An example of that would be that if a man has been unfaithful to his wife there may be longstanding repercussions to that. If he leaves her and then she is free biblically to remarry, and she remarries and he comes back and says he’s sorry, is she supposed to leave this guy that she is now in a covenant relationship with? No. See there can be residual consequences. Likewise, in the Church, if the Church is vigilant and faithful, there may be times when someone may come under the hand of discipline. You can even think of this as a parent. If you have raised teenagers there may be a point where you take something away from that teenager, like something that they would consider a right but you would consider a privilege. You say, “Sorry, but you don’t get to do that anymore,” and they say, “But I said, ‘I’m sorry.’” “Okay, great, I accept your apology.” “So, you should give me the car keys back.” Not always, right? It doesn’t always work that way. There are sometimes residual consequences.
Young people, ‘residual’ means something that lingers, something that hangs around. Okay? So, there are other times when, through repentance and through forgiveness, the opportunity is there for that person to rebuild the confidence of the Church. An example that I would think of would be like when I was talking with Jay this week. We have a ministry partnership with a team that we have done some work with here in the states and they do restoration ministry with men and women who are dealing with sexual addiction. The guy who spearheads that was once an IMB missionary who fell into major sexual sin on the field and set back a work among an African people group by about a hundred years. It will take two or three generations to get over what damage he did, but he is now faithfully serving in ministry, but it was a long, long process, under supervision of pastors who were faithful. So, he has worked through that, and his wife worked through it with him, so they are faithfully married to each other, and they are doing ministry, but there are repercussions to his actions that may take two or three generations to deal with. Sometimes that’s how it works.