Love Exercises - Philippians 1: 7-11 Series

Open your Bibles or your workbooks to Philippians 1:7-11. That's where we're going to be today. If you do not have a workbook, they are free. They're back on the back table there. We have extras and we'd love for you to have one so that you can take notes. Not only so you can take notes about the current time so you have the notes there for the study, but you can use this in the future when you can go back and look at here's what God was doing in my life during that time of my life. So it's a great little study in Philippians. I'll give you some things to actually write in your workbooks today as we go through and talk about this passage.

If you look with me at Philippians 1:7-11, you're going to see the first sentence. Let me read it to you. It says this: It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart. He's going to use this word heart, which is the word kardia in the Greek. The word heart is used 750 times in the Bible.

Now many years ago, Joanne Miller and I wanted to write a book on parenting. We recognized the heart was the key to reaching a child's life. Not just their behavior, but the heart. So we took the 750 times the word heart is used in the Bible and we compartmentalize them all. About 350 of those are all the physical heart of the body that we're not really interested in. That's like “the arrow went into his heart” kind of thing. And so we took those off the table. Then we still had about 400 verses. We actually took them and photocopied the Bible and we cut the verses and put them in piles to so that we could figure out what the heart is. We identified nine functions of the heart by doing that. And that's how we created our book, Parenting is Heart Work. I just recommend the book. It's a great book. It's being used now in two seminaries as a textbook in their parenting program. But it's a book about the heart of a person. And the first two chapters are the biblical study of what the heart is.

Let me just summarize. Let's imagine your heart is a room and I'm going to take you into the room now. So let's go into the room, the heart room. Inside of the heart, we have these things. Over here in this corner of the room, we have desires. Delight yourself in the Lord and he’ll give you the desires of your heart. So desires exist over here. They are those things that are raging out – I want, I want, I want. Feed me. You know, those kinds of things. Okay. That's what's going on in this part of our heart. Then in this part of our heart, we have our emotions. And those emotions are calling out, wanting us to do something. Then we have our beliefs. Not all the beliefs we have are true (believing something is true), but they are beliefs that we have. Like “if my brother's annoying, I have the right to punch him” kind of beliefs. You know. So those are beliefs we have in our heart. Then we have God's word in our heartbeat. Remember it says – Hide God's word in your heart. So we know God's word is there. And there are a bunch of other things inside the heart, including Jesus Christ Himself. When you become a Christian, He comes in and organizes all this stuff inside of the room of your heart.

So imagine this room and all of these things are in there. Now there's some doors into the room, particularly the senses that you have, where you're gathering information and data. It comes in and it has to be sifted or sorted through this main CPU, this main operational principle, all these things that are going on. It has to pass through there and then it comes out in our behavior and our attitudes and so on. So the heart becomes a strategic place that we want to work.

Now today, we're going to work in the heart. This is the word that Paul is using here. Because we're particularly focused in on Paul's ability to be emotionally stable. I am just amazed at this guy, so strong in his ability to handle his emotions. So what we want to do is we want to figure out what is it that he is doing. He is doing some things that are strategic, and we want to be able to take those same ideas and apply them to our own lives so that we can be spiritually, emotionally, and mentally healthy. That's kind of the target I have. As I'm going through Philippians this time in my life, I'm applying it specifically to our own emotional, spiritual, and mental health, and our wellbeing. So we're going to look at what did Paul do in order to be that kind of a person that would be able to understand and process all of these things emotionally? Okay, that's where I'm headed here.