I was told by a friend the other day, that according to research she’d just read, while the percentage of people who currently reach the age of 100 is about 5% of the population, of those who are now teenagers the percentage is likely to be closer to 50%. There’s no doubt that our lifespans are increasing. We’re all likely to live longer than our parents or grandparents. But all that does is raise the question, "Will our lives be worth living?"
As we’ll see next week when we get to Phil 1:21, Paul didn’t see the prolonging of life as a great advantage. In fact the opposite: he saw death as bringing a far greater reward than anything in this life. Yet at the same time, he saw that Jesus Christ had made life eminently worth living. There’s an amazing sense of joy overflowing which comes through the pages of this letter, even though it’s written from a gaol cell as he awaits trial and possible execution over false charges brought against him by his opponents. He wants his readers to enjoy life in Christ, despite their external circumstances, to grow in their knowledge of him, and in holiness, and in the fruit of righteousness.
He begins his letter in an interesting way. Unlike other letters where he reminds his readers of his status as an apostle of the Lord Jesus, here he addresses himself and Timothy as servants or slaves of Christ Jesus and his readers as the saints in Christ Jesus and then he throws in the bishops and deacons as well. It’s as though he’s trying to emphasise their status as the chosen ones of God, and to remind them of the equality we all share as followers of Christ, irrespective of our role within the church.
Having greeted them in the customary way, he tells them of his thankfulness to God for their life as Christians. He says: "I thank my God every time I remember you, 4constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, 5because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now." The founding of the Church in Philippi is a great story of God’s power at work. Paul and Silas, with Timothy and Luke tagging along, came to Philippi after Paul had seen a vision of a man of Macedonia begging them to come and help them. Philippi was a Roman colony, perched in the mountain pass that linked Asia and Europe, so it was quite a strategic city. But because it was primarily a Roman colony there was no synagogue there. So on the Sabbath they went outside the city to the river where they thought there might have been a place of prayer. There they found a group of women gathered, one of them being Lydia, a wealthy merchant woman from Thyatira, who was a worshipper of God. We’re told in Acts 16 that the Lord opened her heart to the message of the gospel and she became a Christian. She then invited them to her house, and effectively began the first Church there in Philippi. So here was a wealthy Greek woman who became one of the first Church planters. But then as they started moving around the city, a slave girl began to follow them. She had an evil spirit by which she predicted the future. She wasn’t your modern day fortune teller. She really could tell the future. And she started following Paul and the rest around shouting out "These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you how to be saved." Well, eventually Paul got so sick of this that he turned around and commanded the evil spirit to come out of her. And she was healed. So there was a rich merchant woman and a slave girl who had been touched by the gospel.
But then the owners of the slave girl, who’d been charging people to have their fortunes told started a riot and had Paul and Silas arrested for throwing the city into an uproar and for advocating customs unlawful for Romans to accept or practice. So Paul and Silas were thrown into prison. Well, in prison with their feet in stocks, they began praying and singing hymns to God. They’d seen God’s power change the direction of Lydia’s life, they’d seen the slave girl freed from her bondage to an evil spirit and nothing was going to stop them praising God, not even being chained up in a dungeon. But there was more of God’s power at work for them to experience. As they were singing an earthquake began to shake the very foundations of their prison. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose. The gaoler was about to commit suicide rather than risk being thrown into gaol in the place of his escaped charges, but Paul chose to stay and help him, rather than escape and take his freedom. The response of the gaoler was immediate: "What must I do to be saved?" Paul told him "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, along with your whole household." And so he and his whole family were baptised. So the Church in Philippi had begun, with a rich merchant woman, a poor slave and a middle class prison officer who all experienced the power of God in different but equally effective ways.
So as Paul writes to the Philippians he can say with great assurance: "I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ." He remembers the way God’s work in them began, in the changed lives, the changed hearts of those first few believers, and he continues to have confidence that God will bring the work he began in them to a conclusion on the day when Christ returns. I met someone recently who had just become a Christian. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me telling you something of her story. She had never had any concept of the love of God before this year. She hadn’t known anything of the work of Jesus Christ. But God touched her heart a few months ago in a real and decisive way. She came to discover that God has the power to change lives. She told me that she had a particular problem in her life that she’d never been able to overcome. Until one night she prayed that God would take it away. And do you know, it hasn’t bothered her since! And it’s been a real privilege for me to see this happening. It’s been so exciting to see her coming to know Christ in a real and personal way. And it’s all been due to the work of God in her life changing her and making her new.
That’s the sort of experience that Paul is looking back on as he writes of his confidence that God will bring his work in them to its completion.
Notice too, that the experience he had in sharing the gospel with them has left him with a deep affection for them, and vice versa. He says "I long for you with the compassion of Christ Jesus." Now Paul was no soft touch. He was as tough as old boot leather when it came to facing opposition to the gospel. In fact in Philippi, when the authorities released him, he didn’t just walk away as you or I might have. No, he pointed out to them that he and Silas were both Roman citizens who had been publicly beaten without trial, quite illegally, and demanded what amounted to a public apology from the magistrates. So he could be tough when the occasion warranted it. But he also had a softer side.
In v5 he speaks of the way they share in the gospel. In v7 he says they share in God’s grace together. J.B. Lightfoot translates v8 as "His heart throbs with the heart of Christ", for them. Paul has had some bad publicity in certain circles, but it’s places like this where we see his softer side, that we realise that the times that he’s hard, it’s because he desires only the good of those to whom he seeks to bring the gospel. His great motivation is the love of Christ. We need to remember, in fact, that Jesus was hard when it came to those who refused to listen to God speaking through him. Some of the harshest words in the new Testament in fact appear on the lips of Jesus. But he also loved those he came to save with a life-giving love. We’ll read in a couple of weeks how Paul exhorts us to have the mind of Christ in the way we relate to others, but he shows us here right at the start that he has that mindset himself.
He longs for them with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And what is it he longs for? That their love "may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight 10to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, 11having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God." He wants their love to overflow the way his love for them is overflowing. And he isn’t talking about some gushy, sentimental sort of love. The love he’s talking about overflows with knowledge and insight. What sort of knowledge do you think he’s talking about there? Is it knowledge of God perhaps? A knowledge born out of a personal relationship with him through Jesus Christ? A knowledge that, ultimately, comes from God’s Holy Spirit coming to live within us, filling us with the knowledge of God. A knowledge perhaps of what pleases God, that, again, comes from our relationship with him as well as from our familiarity with his word? And how do we build on that knowledge? By being students of God’s word so we grow in our grasp of the truth, in our grasp of the gospel.
But is it also a knowledge of humanity? Of the weaknesses and foibles of our fellow Christians? A knowledge that helps us to empathise with one another, to make allowances for the failings of our fellow mortals. A knowledge, perhaps of what might be helpful to another person in a given situation? That seems to be the idea behind the word insight. Insight is that faculty which allows our love to be directed in a way that’s right for a particular situation, or for a particular person. Insight allows us to see through the obvious or the superficial to the deeper significance of what’s below the surface, to get to the root of the matter, so we can know how to act in the most loving way. Again this is something the Holy Spirit gives us as we ask him for it.
Finally the aim of Paul’s prayer that their love would overflow in knowledge and insight is both personal and global.
It’s personal because his aim is that they might each be found to be pure and blameless in the day of Christ. That is their overflowing love for God will result in lives that are kept pure and without sin. But it’s also global, because the result of such purity of life will be that they’ll reap a great harvest of righteousness. It seems to me that when Paul talks about a harvest of righteousness, he’s looking beyond our personal righteousness, to the righteousness that will spring up in the hearts of others who see us and are drawn to the gospel like a moth to a flame. It’s as though the love we show becomes a seed that’s planted in the hearts of those around us.
It’s like a contagion that spreads on contact. The sort of life he’s talking about, you see, a life characterised by love overflowing in knowledge and insight and purity and righteousness, is a very attractive thing. People love being near people whose character exhibits that sort of love. Just think how effective we’d be in spreading the gospel if our whole life was characterised by that sort of love!
Do you ever pray that sort of prayer for your friends here at Wattle Park? Do you ever pray that sort of prayer for me, or the other leaders of the congregation? Let me suggest that this would be a great thing to pray every day for those on our congregational prayer list. That their love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help them determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ they may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
Paul prays with confidence and joy because he knows that in the end, it’s God who determines our future, not our outward circumstances or the various schemes of human beings. He knows that our place in God’s family has come about by God’s grace alone and that God’s grace is sufficient to keep us there, that God can be trusted to see us through. He prays out of the love he has for them, that the same love, the love of Christ would flow out of their hearts and fill them to overflowing. And he prays in confidence because he knows that the harvest of righteousness that he’s asking for itself comes through Jesus Christ by the grace of God.
We too are recipients of God’s saving grace. Each one of us is here because God has worked a miracle in our lives. None of us would have chosen Christ if God hadn’t first chosen us. So we too can depend on him to bring to completion what he’s begun in us. As we just sang,
God is working his purpose out
as year succeeds to year.
God is working his purpose out
and the time is drawing near.
Nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be
When the earth shall be filled
with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.
So let Paul’s prayer be ours as well: that our love would overflow in knowledge and full insight so we’d be able to determine what’s best, so we might be found pure and blameless in the day of Christ and so our lives might bear a harvest of righteousness, not only in our own lives but in the lives of those we influence by our love, for the glory and praise of God.
