Christian, You Are Heaven Bound, Meanwhile Make A Difference - Philippians 1: 20-26 Series

Well today we come to verse 20 in Philippians, verses 20-26 in our passage today. As we do, we're going to see Paul's secret ingredient. The main thing that helps Paul be emotionally, spiritually, and mentally healthy. If you're looking for those things in your life, the solution really is found here in the Bible. God gives us this revelation through Paul's openness and his open understanding.

It starts with this key element right in this first verse in verse 20. I'm picking it up in the middle of the sentence, that's the three dots at the beginning. This is from the ESV version. If you have your little notebook that we write in the workbook, then you can take notes there and circle some of the words that I've circled and draw lines as I'm going to show you that I've done here. If you don't have one of those booklets, they're back at the table. They're free and you can take one and use it for your ongoing Bible study, just writing in your spiritual journal.

He says in verse 20 – …but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, You see that's the secret ingredient. That Christ will be honored. The word honored means to magnify or to make big.

Now if you [garbled], this heart is this room, we’ll imagine. And inside the heart, you've got this place over here with all the desires. The desires of your heart, the Bible talks about. So we know desires exist in the heart. That's where your longings are, your hopes are, your dreams. That's where desires turn bad and they become temptations. This is where our expectations develop. That's all in this corner of the room. It's a pretty active corner within our lives, because a lot of desires going on. And then over here, on this other side, we have this sense of emotion, of anger and sadness and anxiety (three negative emotions), but also joy and peace and love, those things that God wants us to have. Those we can see in this other corner of the heart. Then we've got the corner with the beliefs in it. We have strange beliefs sometimes that cause us to affect our behavior in particular ways.

But in the midst of all these things that exist in the heart, in the center there is this master space. This space with the chair. It's the where the mothership is controlled. See the heart is this central unit that guards the whole body. So it's this mothership and there's a chair in the middle there. That chair is very important, what's in it or who's sitting in it. When you become a Christian, you invite Christ into your life, and He is on the chair. But the problem is that these other things are competing inside the room for the chair. Our desires will push Christ off and put Him over here a little bit, and the desires take over. So our desires become temptations and then we end up doing the wrong thing if we're not careful. Or emotions, an emotion of anger gets on the chair and prompts us to do the wrong thing.

So Paul is saying, let me tell you the secret here, because this is what I want in my life and what you need in your life. He says it is my goal that Christ be honored or magnified. That He's not this little thing in our lives, which can be the case with us as Christians, that we relegate Christ to this small place in our lives. But He's actually magnified. He's honored. He's made into something big and He's sitting on the chair of our lives. Because then when He's the master controller, He's also the professional organizer, who organizes our life, gets all these desires and emotions all in place. Because we're honoring Christ.

We can say that the greatest tool for emotional, spiritual, and mental health is to honor Christ in our hearts. In that place in our hearts where we're making all these decisions, where our mind is going crazy sometimes. When we honor Christ, He organizes all of that. We have now a fixed goal. We know where we're going. We're honoring Christ. I think that's really the sermon for today. But Paul is going to explain it a lot more for us so we can understand it. Paul is going to do this in two ways. He's going to do this either by life or by death. Let's just go and I've diagrammed the verses for you so that you can see them.

So do you see where it says life and I've kind of shown you all the different parts in the passage where he's talking about life. It's either the life or death. So this is the life part. I'm going to talk to you about all of these different pieces. But there's really two pieces. There's life or death. He says I'm either going to live or I'm going to die. Now for him that's a very real possibility, both of those, because right now he is in prison in Rome. He's about to face the trial and go before the courts there and they're going to determine whether he's guilty or not guilty. If they determine he's guilty, he's going to be killed right there. And if he's not guilty, he's going to be released. So for him this life and death is a very real thing.