I’ve shared this with you before, but I think it bears repeating. For grandparent’s generation had one primary goal for their children. If you asked them what they most wanted for their children, they would have told you that they wanted them to have a better life than they did. That showed in the work ethic they instilled in their children. It showed in their push for education. It wasn’t always for a college education, but they wanted their children to have more education that they had. And the reason they wanted their children to get that education was so that they could get a good job. A job that would provide for a family and could earn a decent living. The bottom line was, “I want my kids to have a better life than I did.” Does that sound familiar? But things changed with my parent’s generation. Their goals for their kids changed. By and large, boomers did have it better than their parents. They had better education. They had better jobs. They had more money. But that still wasn’t enough. Whether consciously or not, they saw that even though they had those things, they still weren’t happy and content. They weren’t fulfilled. So that led them to have different goals for their children. Education was still a priority. But the goal of education had changed. Instead of getting an education so you could get a good job, you needed to get an education so that you could discover yourself. So that you could figure out what made you really happy. It was no longer the goal to find a good career somewhere and stay there till retirement. No, now the goal is to find somewhere that you will feel fulfilled. The bottom line is, instead of wanting your kids to have a better life than you did, the primary goal of parents for the past couple of generations has been for them to be happy. Go to school to figure out who you really are. Get a job that makes you happy. Get in relationships that build you up and make you happy. Everything is centered on self-gratification. But have you noticed what’s happened? Has all of that pursuit of happiness made people any happier? Judging by all the commercials for antidepressants on TV, I would say that people today are far less happy. So why is that? Why is it that the very thing we have raised our kids and grandkids to chase after… why can most people not find it? I think that Paul found the answer to that question in a Roman prison. And under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he shared that answer with us in this letter he wrote to the church at Philippi. We’re going to spend the next several Sunday nights looking through this book. It’s only four chapters, but it is filled with some of the richest teaching of the whole Bible. It’s not an overly doctrinal book, but it does have one of the greatest doctrinal statements of the deity of Christ in all the Bible. I have wanted to do this study ever since I came here to Brushfork, but for some reason just wasn’t able to. I believe that means that we weren’t ready for it yet. But now we are. I don’t have any idea how long it’s going to take us to finish, but I do know that we’ll be blessed by the journey. For tonight, all that we’re going to get to is the first two verses. These first two verses are really the opening to Paul’s letter. I remember in grade school that we had to learn all the parts of a letter. I don’t know if they teach that anymore with the advent of email, Facebook and text messages, but there is an actual correct format to writing a letter. In the days when Paul wrote this one, the format was even more structured. During that period of time, just like today, letters started off with a salutation. Ours are pretty simple. Usually all they say is something like, “Dear so-and-so.” Their letters almost always consisted of three things. The name of the sender. The name of the one who it was being sent to. And the greeting. And that’s what we see in these first two verses. And just like Paul used the three parts of his salutation to kick off his letter, we’re going to use them to kick off our study. Tonight we’re going to look at the senders, the receivers and the message of this letter. First, let’s look at the senders.
Verse 1 gives us their names and their mission. Their names were Paul and Timothy. The King James calls him Timotheus. That’s one of the instances when the King James translators simply transliterated directly from the Greek. In other words, they took the original Greek word and spelled it out in English letters according to the way it’s pronounced. The Greek word is two words scrunched together that means, “one who honors God.” And the person it’s talking about is really Timothy. The same Timothy that Paul called his child in the faith because he led him to the Lord. The same Timothy that he took with him on missionary journeys and raised in the faith and mentored and ministered alongside. The same Timothy that Paul would later on send to Philippi and then to Ephesus to be their pastor. And the same Timothy he wrote two letters to later on towards the end of his life. But even though Timothy’s name is included in the salutation, he didn’t actually have a part in writing the letter. Paul is the one who wrote it. We know that because the letter is written in the first-person singular. In other words, Paul always says “I”, not “we”. But he included Timothy in the greeting for several reasons. First and foremost, because they shared the same concern and love for Philippi. Timothy was with Paul when they planted the Philippian church back in Acts 16. They were partners in ministry and by including his name in the greeting, Paul was preparing the church to receive Timothy as their pastor. But the Holy Spirit inspired author of this letter was the Apostle Paul. This is one of four letters that Paul wrote from prison. It seems very likely from some of the vocabulary that he uses that he was imprisoned in Rome at the time. Paul had been in prison many times before and would be imprisoned after this time too. This wasn’t the last imprisonment in Rome that would be a few years later when he wrote his last letters—1&2 Timothy. This one was different. He was able to receive visitors like Timothy and Epaphroditus, but it still wasn’t a piece of cake. He was in there for two years and spent most of the time chained to Roman guards. But it was better than other times he spent in prison, because he wasn’t beaten regularly and he wasn’t kept in a hole in the ground. Now, after he gave their names, notice how Paul further identified himself and Timothy in verse 1. He said that they were “the servants of Jesus Christ.” He gave their names and then he gave their mission. And their mission was to be servants of Jesus. The original word that he used for servants is doulos. A doulos was a bond-servant. And a bond-servant was different than a regular slave. A bond-servant was owned by his master just like a regular slave. He was completely subservient to his master just like a regular slave. He was also completely dependent on his master just like a regular slave. It wasn’t like he could just go out and get a job. He was property. But here’s the difference. A bond-servant willingly and voluntarily was in that relationship. At one time or another, he could have been freed from it. But out of his love and devotion to his master, he willingly submitted to him and volunteered to be his slave. That was how Paul described his and Timothy’s relationship with Christ. They were completely subservient to Jesus. He was their Lord and Master. But they served Him out of love and devotion, not legalistic obligation. They chose to serve Him because they loved Him. And they loved Him because He first loved them. So, that was who sent the letter. Paul wrote it and included his son in the faith, Timothy. Now, who did they send it to? Who were the receivers?
Verse 1 goes on to say, “to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi, with the bishops and deacons.” In other words, he wrote it to the whole church. He didn’t single out anyone in particular. There wasn’t some hierarchy that he sent it to. He didn’t just send it to the head man in charge. No, he sent it to everybody. The word translated “bishops” comes from the Greek word “episkipos”. That’s where we get the word “Episcopal” from. It literally means “overseer” or “guardian”. And what’s interesting in the rest of the New Testament is how that word is used interchangeably with the word for “pastor” and the word for “elder”. And how every time it’s used, there are more than one of them in each local church. So, this letter is going to the leaders in the church. It’s also going to the deacons. As you probably remember from Acts 6, the early church chose deacons to perform the day-to-day intimate ministry of the church. So, Paul addressed the deacons at Philippi too. But first of all, he addressed the saints in Christ Jesus. I think the order is important here. Because there is no hierarchy in God’s church. There’s not a king, a ruling body and then the common people. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The church is the body of Christ and He is our head. Yes, there are to be specially called out servants of the church. Yes, there is to be a plurality of leadership in the church. But the church is the body and Jesus is our head. And notice the word that Paul uses here. He uses the word “saints”. Is that just talking about a few select people in the church? Is it some sort of special rank that only a few people might have earned? The Catholic church has a practice called canonization. Canonization is a long, drawn out process that examines a dead person’s life to see if they did enough spectacularly righteous and religious things to earn sainthood. If they are proven worthy, then the Pope canonizes them and calls them a saint. Guess what? The Bible says that if Jesus has saved you, you are a saint. No matter how good you are, you cannot earn sainthood because the Bible says that there are none righteous. No matter how good you are, all of your righteousnesses are as filthy rags. But if Jesus has saved you, you are now IN Him. And when you are IN Him, you are clothed in His righteousness. That’s why Paul calls these people saints. They’re not saints because they were somehow good enough to become saints. No, they were saints because verse 1 says that they are in Christ Jesus. Acts 16 tells about the time when Paul planted this church. And it shows us who some of its founding members were. First there was a lady named Lydia. Lydia was a Jewish woman who sold fancy purple fabric to rich people. There weren’t even enough Jewish men in Philippi to have a proper synagogue, so Lydia had to take things into her own hands and lead her own prayer service outside by a river. Paul came and shared the Gospel with her and she was saved along with her whole family. They were the first members of the church at Philippi. A single working mother and her kids. Not exactly the top of the social ladder of the day, were they? But that’s where the church started—in Lydia’s home. And then there was the next member that is talked about in Acts 16. If anything, she was worse. She was a young slave girl. When Paul met her, she was a fortune teller who was possessed by demons. When Paul cast out her demons, her owners got real mad and had Paul thrown into jail. Then while Paul was in jail is where he found his next church member. You remember that while he and Silas were bound in stocks in the innermost part of the jail, after they had been horribly beaten, they began singing praise to God around midnight. Then God sent a great earthquake that opened all of the prison doors. All of the ruckus woke the jailer up. When he saw all the doors open, he thought the prisoners had escaped. He knew that if they had escaped, he was as good as dead anyway, so he started to kill himself. But Paul stopped him and reassured him that everyone was still there. And through all of that, Jesus saved that jailer and his whole family. So here was Paul’s church planting core group—a single mother, a formerly demon-possessed slave girl, and a formerly suicidal jailer who used to beat Christians. Not exactly your textbook core group was it? But they all had something in common. They were saints in Christ Jesus. And when Jesus saves us, old things pass away. When Jesus saves us, all things become new. We are now saints. Not because of what we’ve done. But because of who Jesus is and what He’s done in us. The saints in Christ Jesus are who Paul was writing to. So that means that if Jesus has saved you, he wrote this to you. In the same way he wrote it to the church at Philippi, he wrote this letter to Brushfork Baptist Church. This letter is to us here tonight. It’s from Paul, it’s to us. But what’s it about? What is the message of this letter?
That’s what he mentions in verse 2. In verse 2, he gives the spirit of the message, the author of the message and the person of the message. The author of the message is God our Father. The person of the message is the Lord Jesus Christ. And the spirit of the message is grace and peace. Paul primarily had five reasons in mind when he wrote this letter. He wrote to tell them how he was doing. He wrote to thank them for their concern and for their gifts. He wrote to tell them he was sending Epaphroditus back to them. He wrote to encourage them to do the work they were called to do. And he wrote to warn them against false teachers. But do you know what’s beautiful about this letter? What’s beautiful is that there is one golden thread that runs through the whole thing. That golden thread is joy. This letter is literally a letter of joy. But what’s amazing is that Paul never specifically tells us how to have joy. He doesn’t give us a specific list of all the things we need to do to have joy. As a matter of fact, as he is writing this letter that is completely dripping with joy from start to finish, Paul is in a completely unjoyous situation. I don’t know about you, but if I was to construct a list of things to do to be joyful, being chained to a guard in prison wouldn’t be at the top of that list. So, that takes us back to where we started tonight. We started by talking about the pursuit of happiness. And how it seems like the more we chase after joy and happiness, the harder it is to find. We raise our kids and grandkids with the sole focus of having a happy life. We buy things and do things and take things and chase after things solely in order to be happy. So, why do we seem to be more miserable than ever? Because we will never be able to find joy by seeking after it. Paul doesn’t seek after joy in this letter. This letter only contains 104 verses. And in those verses, he makes a direct reference to Jesus 61 times. Also, throughout the letter, he continually makes reference to our mind. In other words, the key to living a joyful life doesn’t come from chasing after joy. No, the key to having a joyful life is having a Christ-centered, Christ-focused, Christ-like mind. Or as he says later on in 2:5, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
So, let me ask you. Are you ready to have a joy-filled life? Are you ready to experience joy, no matter what circumstances you might be going through? Are you ready to have everything you say and do absolutely permeated with joy? Well, I can tell you that you can’t get it by chasing after joy. You can only get it by two things. First, you have to be a saint. Are you a saint tonight? Not because of anything you might have achieved or earned. But are you a saint because you realize that there’s nothing you could possibly do to be good enough to be called a saint. And because you’ve realized that, you’ve thrown yourself on the grace and mercy of Jesus and fully trusted in His righteousness, not your own. Are you a saint tonight? That’s the first thing you need in order to have joy. The second thing you need is to be open to receiving the message. This letter is going to show us some things that are really going to challenge us as a church and as individuals. That’s probably why the Lord has not freed me to preach it till now. Because we weren’t ready. The question is, will you be open to receiving the message? If you are a saint, and you are open to the message, the joy awaits. Unspeakable, impossible joy that is completely unshaken by any circumstance. Are you ready for it?
