Series: Philippians
Sermon: “One Thing Leads to the Other”
Philippians 1:9-11
Pastor John Bright
Philippians 1 “9 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, 10 that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, 11 being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
I want to cover one more BIG PICTURE idea in the Book of Philippians – OBEDIENCE IN THE LIGHT OF GOD’S GRACE. We often seek to balance grace and good works in the Church. Paul presents it as “both/and” rather than “either/or.” In this epistle/letter, grace is presented as working now and also in the future at the return of Christ – “…He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ…” (1:6) As we experience that gift of grace, we offer our good works as an offering to God. We will look at this down the road a bit.
In these verses I read, Paul now shares what he had been praying for the Believers in Philippi. What he describes are Prayers of Intercession. This is a description of Intercessory Prayer I found at https://www.umc.org/en/content/what-is-intercessory-prayer
“…intercessory prayer, really simply described, is offering a request for God--generally on behalf of others. Intercessory prayer is meddlesome. It exposes us to how we can be in action on God’s behalf. This is how prayer builds relationship. God’s goal is loving relationship--both in having a relationship with us… and also with us having loving relationships with one another.”
It’s like one thing leads to the other. Sometimes we call that the Law of Unintended Consequences. Here’s a classic example - https://fs.blog/2018/02/unintended-consequences/
In 1890, a New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin took his intense love of Shakespeare’s Henry VI to the next level.
Most Shakespeare fanatics channel their interest by going to see performances of the plays, meticulously analyzing them, or reading everything they can about the playwright’s life. Schieffelin wanted more; he wanted to look out his window and see the same kind of birds in the sky that Shakespeare had seen.
Inspired by a mention of starlings in Henry VI, Schieffelin released 100 of the non-native birds in Central Park over two years. (He wasn’t acting alone – he had the support of scientists and the American Acclimatization Society.) We can imagine him watching the starlings flutter off into the park and hoping for them to survive and maybe breed. Which they did. In fact, the birds didn’t just survive; they thrived and bred like weeds.
Unfortunately, Schieffelin’s plan worked too well. Far, far too well. The starlings multiplied exponentially, spreading across America at an astonishing rate. Today, we don’t even know how many of them live in the U.S., with official estimates ranging from 45 million to 200 million. Most, if not all, of them are descended from Schieffelin’s initial 100 birds.
That’s what we are seeing all around us today. Nobody had any idea all of the unintended consequences of shutting down the churches and most of the economy for months.
Yes, one thing leads to the other and we need to see the absolutely in-tended consequences in the Church. Paul is praying for them to –
LOVE MORE
“9 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment,”
As we have already covered, Paul is greatly concerned for the unity of those in the Philippian house churches. Now, he gives them the starting point of that deep unity in the Body of Christ: LOVING OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN THE CHURCH. I was told by a dear friend on the Eastern Shore that he had a simple measuring stick for his personal growth in Christ. These are his words, not mine – “Can I love people this year I could not love last year?”
Let’s be honest. Some people are hard to love! Usually, when I tell folks that, they immediately think of someone in their own family, but we are not talking about anybody’s mother-in-law this morning. (Do you know the difference between in-laws and outlaws? Outlaws are wanted😊) For the record – I’ve got a great mother-in-law and she is more precious to me since my own mother graduated to Heaven – thank you, Becky – love you!
Paul is talking to them about loving each other in the Church and, most of the time, you don’t have to go and further than the Church to find folks that are hard to love. Here we find Paul giving advice for increasing Godly Love – not warm-fuzzy love. To love more we should grow in knowledge. What kind of knowledge? In the other Epistles/letters of the New Testament, knowledge is related to spiritual matters:
• “…they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” Romans 1:28
• “…till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,” Ephesians 4:13
• “…who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” 1 Timothy 2:4
If folks in the Church are growing spiritually, they will be growing closer to one another. One thing leads to the other. We will love more as we grow spiritually. Let me give you a personal example – one of the ways I try to love in the Church is to extend grace to someone who does something I might not like. Why? “But for the grace of God, there go I.” Ever hear that before? So true! I’ve either done that thing another person is doing or I’m certainly capable of doing that thing. So, I offer forgiveness because Christ has forgiven me. I did not get to that place over night and plenty of folks in churches rubbed me the wrong way before I could give them any kind of love. It was a journey that took lots of spiritual growth on my part (not correcting others). If we grow in the knowledge of spiritual things, then we can –
DISCERN MORE
“10 that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ,”
Here is a description of discernment I found at https://www.gotquestions.org/Bible-discernment.html
“It means “to distinguish, to separate out by diligent search, to examine.” Discernment is the ability to properly discriminate or make determinations.”
We live in a day where it is hard to make moral decisions – so did the Philippian Believers. The Roman Empire was a place of religious pluralism and sexual immorality (like today). There were also folks bringing false teachings into the Early Church (like today). Paul is blunt in his warning about those spreading false teaching – Phil. 3:2 “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers…”
Trying to love one another in the Church, as we grow in Christ together, will require us to discern what is God’s will for Believers in every generation of the Church. There are a couple of questions that must be answered as the Church tries to navigate in the culture: What things are excellent? WHAT REALLY MATTERS?
In the United Methodist Church today, those questions are being answered in vastly different ways. There are folks who say we have to embrace all the ways of the world – things like openly gay clergy and homosexual marriage. If you are in the churches I serve, you already know how I feel about that! Let me ask a question of UM congregations – Do you want a gay or lesbian couple living in your parsonage? What about 3 people in a relationship? Folks today call that a “throuple” and you see it on several prime-time TV shows. When it’s normal in the culture and the church embraces the culture, you can plan on the church bringing it inside. Every generation of the Church needs to ask – Do we look like the world or do we offer an alternative to the world? There are others in the UMC that stand on the Word of God and seek to defend the Apostolic Faith.
That’s all a matter of discernment – being led by the Holy Spirit within each Believer and the Holy Spirit among us as we seek the excellent and the best. This is how we endure until Christ returns. This is how we stay sincere and without offence (another translation says “pure and blameless”) and we stay that way generation after generation in the Church. This will lead to –
BEING FILLED
“11 being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
I looked to https://www.gotquestions.org/righteousness.html for a definition of righteousness -
“The Greek New Testament word for “righteousness” primarily describes conduct in relation to others, especially after beginning the relationship to God. It is contrasted with wickedness. The Bible describes the righteous person as just or right, holding to God and trusting in Him (Psalm 33:18–22).”
The word Fruit is usually a reference to how we see what’s on the inside of the Believer manifest on the outside of the Believer. Here are a few examples:
Isaiah 5:7 “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
And the men of Judah are His pleasant plant.
He looked for justice, but behold, oppression;
For righteousness, but behold, a cry for help.”
Matthew 7 “15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
There is an old saying that helps me – “The fruit of the tree reveals the root of the tree.” That leads me to my over-simplified definition of righteousness – “Doing what is right.” So, how do we figure out what is right? Is it whatever I “feel” is right? Is it whatever is “right for me?” If that’s how we figure out what defines the fruit of righteousness, it will only bring “glory and praise” to each individual person. We see this today as the goal of “virtue signaling” which is defined as “the sharing of one's point of view on a social or political issue, often on social media, in order to garner praise or acknowledgment of one’s righteousness from others who share that point of view, or to passively rebuke those who do not:”
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling
If our fruit of righteousness will bring glory and praise to God – we must allow God to define what is righteous and this is always the opposite of what God defines as sin. If we love one another and seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit to discern, the fruit we bear will bear witness to the world – WE BELONG TO CHRIST! WE ARE HIS CHURCH!
We are the Church that loves one another and seeks to do God’s will.
What a beautiful picture! What a beautiful message to a world that looks more and more like a lost cause. That’s the broken world to which God has called us to take His message of healing. Amen.
