Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Good morning!

I’ve enjoyed getting to worship together last week and now this week.

So, thank you EM, for welcoming us into your space over the last couple of weeks.

Pastor Sam and the team will be back late tonight, so let’s keep them in our prayers today as they travel back home.

I have a confession to make.

If you were to into my dorm room on campus, the first think you would see is my clean laundry piled up in a suitcase.

I hate laundry.

I hate doing it so much, and so typically, I’ll wait a few weeks until I have absolutely nothin left to wear, then I’ll do one giant load of laundry, and then I’ll bring it back into my room, and I’ll start putting it away, but I can’t finish it.

It usually takes me a week until it’s fully put away.

Or, if you were to look on my book shelf, you’d see 30-40 books that have been started, and there are book marks or folded pages placed either halfway or 1/4 way through the book, but none of them have been finished.

I struggle to finish things that I’ve started.

And honestly, I think I got this from my parents.

When I went home last summer, my bathroom that I used for most of my life, was gutted.

Everything was torn out of it.

I went back home for Christmas, and I thought, surely by now, the bathroom has been remodeled.

Nope.

I went home in May, almost a year after I first saw the gutted bathroom, adn I thought okay, this time, it will be finished.

It’s been a year.

Nope.

still gutted.

The only difference is they close the door so no one will go in there.

And I’ve thought about this in my life, I’ve always struggled to fully complete things.

But, I’ve also noticed that when it comes to God, when he starts something, he always finishes it.

Let’s open to Philippians chapter 1.

EXPLANATION

1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons:

2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Thanksgiving and Prayer

3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Last week we looked at how the Church in Philippi was started.

We looked specifically at three People: Lydia, a wealthy business woman who was in the fashion industry, Through Paul and Silas’ teaching, God opend her heart to the Gospel, and she became a believer, a slave girl, who through Paul, God brought to salvation, and a Prison Guard, who after seeing the way God rescued Paul and Silas from their imprisonment, and after seeing through Paul and Silas how believers behave, came to salvation.

In this we see how the Gospel brought three complete strangers, from totally different backgrounds, together for the sake of the Gospel.

The Gospel is for everyone, the gospel breaks through the walls that separate people, and because of the Gospel, God is able to unite people from all different backgrounds for his glory.

This is the background of the letter.

When Paul is writing this letter, he is thinking of these people and the church that has flourished since.

So, let’s look at verse 1: Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,

So, let’s look at verse 1: Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons.

The word servant in the original language is doulos, and it means slave.

Paul is referring to himself and Timothy as slaves of Christ Jesus.

Now, this interesting.

Often, when Paul begins a letter, he refers to himself as an Apostle of Christ Jesus.

When he does that, he is appealing to his authority, but here, however, he opts to designate himself as a slave.

Let’s not miss this.

This isn’t the main point of what we’ll be looking at this morning, but it is important nonetheless.

When the receivers of this letter read the word doulos, or slave, they would have immediately known that the word referred to someone owned by, and obedient to, the master of a household.

Gordon Fee, a scholar and pastor known for his work with the book of Philippians notes that this word, servant or slave, also refers to the old testament term “servant of Yahweh, or Servant of the Lord, and this would have been well known to the Philippians.

This phrase, Servant of the Lord, or Slave of Yahweh, was a kind of honorific title for those in special service to God.

So, when Paul uses the phrase here, he means it in two ways: He and Timothy are slave of Christ Jesus, and they are bound to him as slaves to a master, and they are also servants of Christ Jesus, and their bond in this regard is expressed in loving service on behalf of Christ for the Philippians.

This title becomes even more important later in the letter where Paul says that Christ himself has taken the “very nature of a servant.”

Here’s what we need to take away from this.

We are all servants of something.

The gentleman I mentioned earlier was a slave to his addictions.

If we aren’t servants of Jesus, then We’re servants of academics, of music, of friendships, of our parent’s expectations, of societies expectations, of our fears, of our anxiety, basically, we’re servants of the idols in our lives that we’ve placed before God.

We think these things will satisfy us, give us meaning, or give us a purpose, but they don’t.

Most wealthy people aren’t happy.

They want more.

In fact, I could argue that most people in general aren’t happy, because we’re slaves to things that can never satisfy us.

But, Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, to those who are in Christ 5:1, For Freedom Christ has set you free, stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

If we are in Christ, we have been freed from the bondage of sin, from the bondage of our idols, from the bondage of all the things I just mentioned.

We have been freed from them.

But, with this freedom, we are able to choose to serve Jesus Christ, or we can continue to serve the other things.

Now, a true follower of Christ will choose to serve Christ.

Those who are free in Christ should use that freedom to submit to his authority and serve him.

Now, the bible is full of these types of scenarios or paradoxes.

We’re free so that we can be slaves, but by being slaves to Jesus, we are truly free.

So, we have a choice: Be slaves of Christ Jesus, or be slaves of the world.

Let’s continue: What Paul does is verses 3-11 is he sets up the rest of the letter.

He gives a preview of all of the things he is getting ready to talk about.

This section is called the exordium, or introduction, and Paul uses emotional, heartfelt language that speaks more to emotions rather than logic.

He appeals to the Philippians emotions, and he sets up the themes of what he is going to hit on throughout the rest of the letter.

Let’s go on to verses 3-5: I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

Here we need to zoom in on the word “joy.”

This word appears 16 times throughout this short letter.

Now, as we talked about last week, Paul is writing this letter from prison.

Paul has been beaten, and Paul has suffered for the sake of the Gospel, and now he is in prison.

We have to ask, how is Paul joyful?

How is Paul, who is in one of the worst circumstances imaginable, able to say that he is making his prayer with Joy?

So often, we confuse Joy with happiness.

Joy is not happiness.

Happiness often depends on our circumstances, our mood, our situations, our achievements.

Joy is different.

One commentator writes this: For Paul, joy is more than a mood, or an emotion.

Joy is an understanding of existence that encompasses both great happiness and depression, that can accept with creative submission events which bring delight or dismay because joy allows one to see beyond any particular event to the sovereign Lord who stands above all events and ultimately has control over them.[1]

Paul list Joy as one of the fruits of the spirit in Galations 5, placing it right after love.

This means that joy is the fruit of the inward working of the Holy Spirit within the believer.

And, since this is the case, joy is not something the world can give us, and it is not something the world can take away from us.

Joy does not depend on our circumstances.

Our source of Joy is Christ, and our ability to be joyful comes from the work of the holy spirit.

The world cannot take away our joy, or give us joy, because joy is created by the living presence of Jesus Christ in our lives.

So, because of the work of Jesus in our lives, we are able to have joy, and from here we go on to verse 5 where Paul tells us the basis of his Joy: verse 5: because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

Paul is joyful because of the inward work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and this Joy is sparked by the Philippian church’s partnership with him in the Gospel.

Now, the term partnership here is important.

Paul has three things in mind in regard to the Philippians when he uses this word:

1.

They believed in the Gospel.

This one might be obvious, but you cannot partner with someone in something if you don’t believe in the same thing or share the same purpose.

2. Paul had in mind their support.