I have been watching Lance Armstrong ride in the Tour de France over the past couple weeks. The Tour de France is a bicycle riding event that lasts 3 weeks and thousands of miles. It is an amazing race, perhaps the equivalent is an event where a group of runners runs a marathon every day for 3 weeks. The Tour de France really is a rough physical test. Training for the Tour takes months and years. The commentators were talking about the training the riders did to get ready for the Tour, scientifically laid out so that their bodies can handle the punishment. I trained for a month and a half for Kilimanjaro with the stationary bike and stairmaster; these riders train professionally most of the year. They ride hundreds of miles each day, getting ready for the Tour. They want to be ready for the stresses and strains of the Tour when it is time. Whether a rider has success or not is rarely decided during the race itself, but usually during the training that they did by themselves, riding, training day after day, out of the limelight, so that when it was time to perform, to ride well, they were completely ready.
All of this got me thinking about training, and how we train ourselves as Christians. We too are running a marathon, the marathon of life. And there is training that can make run the race easier, make us more effective as Christians, more usable by God to accomplish His purposes in this life. We train on the fly, meaning when train as we go through life, but there is still training that we do as Christians. Paul writes about the training, how we should be training our minds and our attitudes as Christians. Last week we talked about perfection, becoming perfect, and how to go poly poly (slowly slowly) up the mountain of perfection. This week we get a chance to see Paul define perfection. Will you please find Phil 4 in your bibles.
2 I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, loyal yokefellow, help these women who have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.
Let’s pray.
Philippians, you will hopefully remember, is Paul’s letter of joy to a church he planted himself. As Paul sits in jail, he writes and encouraging letter of joy to his friends, his fellow laborers in spreading the message of Christ. These folks share Paul’s mission in life; to tell as many people as possible about Jesus Christ. To tell people what He is like, what He did for them on the cross, what He can do for them if He is invited into their hearts. Paul loves this church, his friends, and he is ending the letter on a positive note, encouraging them to be wonderful people, to be people lead and influenced by God in all that they do. This is not a church without its little squabbles, but it is a great church nonetheless. Be all you can be, is sort of what Paul says to his friends at Philippi.
Paul knows and loves this church, and someone has brought him news of two women arguing and fighting. Remember, this was a personal letter, from a real person, to a real church. Sometimes I think we forget the origins of Scripture. Paul wrote this letter to real people, dealing with real human problems and who, like Paul, were also not perfect, but were striving and wanting to be perfect. Part of being perfected as people and as the church is to settle differences in personalities so that the overarching mission of the church continues. And not only continues, but continues well.
I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, loyal yokefellow, help these women who have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
I’ve said this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the problem with the church has always been that there are people in it. Of course, that’s the great thing about the church as well, whether it is this church, or the church in Philippi. The church will always be full of less than perfect people. And that’s okay, because I’m one of them, and so are all of you. Euodia and Syntyche are, at least to my mind, typical church members who happened to be having a disagreement with one another that was having a damaging effect on the entire church. They were encouraged by Paul to work out their problems. This particular disagreement may be the reason that Paul earlier in the letter, in chapter 2, emphasizes unity. Problems in the church need to be worked out, they need to be confronted. This is a family, just like the church in Philippi was. Families hang in together, and solve problems. Don’t let your resentment burn towards someone else, talk about it as adults. If you’ve hurt someone, either deliberately or not, apologize. Be humble, and do what it takes to harmonize in the family. Don’t take advantage of others niceness to get your own way, but when there is a disagreement, hang in there with the other person and work it out. The church is a safe environment to learn how to deal with other people. It is the training ground for dealing with people outside the church.
Paul doesn’t take sides in the disagreement, but leaves it up to them to figure out a solution. Your names are all in the Book of Life, Paul says, you are on the same team as it were, now act like it. You serve the same God, you both have the same mission in life to bring others to Christ, and it is hard to do that while disagreeing with someone in the church. What Paul is doing is bringing the problem out into the open and forcing the church, and especially these two women, to work out their disagreement. Being a Christian is already a hard thing; it can get even harder when there are disagreements within the church family. If this is a problem for you, let’s work it out. We need to be unified to be the best church we can possibly be. Infighting and disagreements only sap the strength of a church, rather than making it better.
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Here’s the start of the training session. Paul says, rejoice, rejoice! Times must have been tough in Philippi if he had to repeat himself. No one who is doing well, who has conquered all their problems and obstacles needs to be told to rejoice. It just happens spontaneously. People who are down, people who have been used, who are tired and frustrated, these are the sorts of people who need to be reminded to rejoice. We need to be reminded to rejoice in all things. We need to train our minds, hearts and thoughts so that our reaction to life, overall, is one of continual rejoicing in what we have been given by God. We need to train our minds to continually have the perspective of eternity, rather than just the frustrations of the here and now. Rejoice in the Lord when? When things are going good? When everything seems to be working? No, Paul says rejoice in the Lord always. The time to remember to do that, the time when we have to train our hearts and minds to rejoice is when it doesn’t seem like we should logically be rejoicing. This is part of our testimony to the outside world.
There was a reporter who went undercover to a Christian university in Texas somewhere, ostensibly to report on the sordid underbelly of the school. Instead, though, he found people of real faith. One of the professors he was taking a class from had a tragedy occur. The professor’s son died unexpectedly, I believe it was in a car crash. The reporter assumed the professor would not be teaching for the rest of the semester, but there he was the first day after the tragedy. The reporter couldn’t help himself, and asked how he could be in class, teaching, so soon after losing his son. The professor explained his son was a Christian, and so was he, and he knew that his son was with Jesus, and that he himself would see his son again. The professor was rejoicing when, by all human logic, he should have been in deep mourning. The reporter was taken aback and very moved by the faith of the professor and his family. The reporter never says in the article whether he converted or not, but his readers did learn he was extremely impressed by this man living out his Christian faith.
You see, rejoicing doesn’t mean be happy, it means celebrate. Paul himself was in a rotten position, sitting in prison, awaiting his day in court before Caesar…but here he is telling these folks to rejoice. Celebrate. Be glad because Jesus came to us, for us. Rejoice, because despite present circumstances, present pain and suffering, present loneliness and problems, ultimately, God loves us. Therefore, we live lives full of rejoicing, in direct contradiction, sometimes, to what non-Christians would be doing in similar circumstances. I mean, look at who is telling the Philippians to rejoice, and where he is! Paul is sitting in a Roman jail, awaiting his fate from the Emperor, and yet, he is telling them to rejoice. So often in life there is a huge “nonetheless”. What I mean is, things can be going very poorly, but we can resolve to say, despite the circumstances, nonetheless, I will rejoice, and live a grateful life. Life may not be exactly what I had hoped it might be, or things haven’t turned out the way I thought they might, nonetheless, I will rejoice. There is a defiance in nonetheless, a defiance of the ordinary responses of humans to tough situations and choices. We see this sort of attitude in David’s Psalms sometimes, like Psalm 22, we see it in the radical trust Christians have had in God. Despite the circumstances, nonetheless I will rejoice in God my savior.
Having said this, Paul goes on to illustrate what he means when he says rejoice. Be gentle with everyone. Be mellow might also be a good translation. Be anxious for nothing, but in the wonderful gift prayer is, give up to God you worries and cares, your pain and your hopes. This is part of rejoicing, that is, knowing exactly what to do with our cares, with our prayers and petitions. Being able to give our anxieties over to God leaves us free to rejoice again, once we have given those things over to God. We as humans cannot help but have anxieties pop up in our lives. The question is what we are to do with those worries. Do we dwell on them, and live in a state of panic, or do we give them over to God. Its so odd how I dwell on the things I cannot change, or even do anything about. The only person who can do something about what I’m worrying about is God, and so often I neglect to pray and offer up those situations. I would guess I’m not alone in this practice. Whatever your worries and cares, remember to give them to God. Doing so will reduce your stress and worry, and will help you to lead a life full of rejoicing, which is our aim.
This is part of our training as Christians; that we have the discipline to give up our cares and worries to God so that we might rejoice. We have to stop and think when we get bad news, we have to stop and pray. We are in training so that we might live life well. The better we practice, the better we become at living out the Christian life in an attractive way. We want that peace that surpasses understanding to rule our lives, we want to rejoice that Christ is in control of all that we do, all that happens to us in this life.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.
This is where the training really gets serious. We have to train our minds not to dwell on the muck of this life, but rather to seek the higher things, to seek Christ. This does not mean we ignore social injustices, but rather that we seek out the beauty in life. This world has all sorts of ugly aspects. But we are training ourselves to not dwell on the uglier aspects of the world, and of people.
Maybe a quick illustration would help. There was an important woman a while ago who had been sinned against very badly. Another woman had done something pretty terrible, although I can’t quite remember the circumstances. When events circled around again, as they often seem to do, at some point the woman who had hurt the first woman was in need of help. The woman who had been hurt helped her without a thought, without a verbal jab, without anger. When someone reminded her of how badly she had been wounded by this woman who she was helping, she gave a classic response. She said, “I remember deliberately forgetting what she did to me.” That is the response of someone who has been in Christian training. The pain had been given to Jesus, and what was left was someone who was free to help someone in need. She had received the peace that passed understanding and was able to turn around and minister out that peace, rather than the anger that would have been there had she not been a trained Christian. Here was a woman who thought about what was noble and true, what was right pure and lovely.
The world isn’t always ugly and painful. Christians certainly ought not to be contributing to the ugliness of the world. We are called to be salt and light, to show people that there is a better way to live, a better person to live for than ourselves. We ought to be training our minds and our reactions so that we rejoice in the Lord always. We ought to celebrate the good things that happen to us in life, rather than just taking them for granted. People in our society tend to take for granted all the good things they have, family, places to sleep, enough to eat, and emphasize the problems, or what is not right or perfect about their lives.
Being a Christian means that we don’t take for granted anything we have been given by God. We rejoice that God would give us siblings, a spouse, children. We rejoice that we have enough money and can actually share some of our money with others. We rejoice that God loved us enough to send His son to us so that we would not have to lead miserable self centered lives, but that our lives would have meaning, a mission while on earth and after death, that we might live forever in God’s wonderful presence. That’s what we are training for, that our reactions to different situations that arise in life would be rejoicing, and a focus on God, rather than on our problems. You see, if we have God at the center of our lives as our focus, then things may happen the way we don’t want them to, but ultimately, we are going to be just fine, because we have God with us. For people who have themselves as the center of their lives, as the focus of their lives, anything that goes wrong is a major tragedy, possibly one that will cause them to mourn forever.
We are training our minds through the reading of Scripture daily, through worshipping God in the church each Sunday, through prayer times, through times spent in Bible studies at church, or at the Alpha program, or at something like Tres Dias, to rejoice, to have God’s perspective, to have an ultimate trust in God that He loves us, and even when bad things happen, to know that God is still in control, and can use those events for good. There is physical training, and there is life training. We are being trained for life, not just this life, but also the life to come. Train hard, each day is another day to practice the training, to see how your training is coming along. Train hard, because life is hard. But it is so much easier when the training has been done.
