Sermon Cloud

January 25, 2009

Philippians 1:12-18 “The Gospel’s Advance”

            Well, this is the last time we’ll meet at the Civic Center before our move to our new facility next week.  This place has been good to us and we are grateful to God for it.  We’ll see you next week at either 9:30 or 11:30.  Let’s keep rolling on in Philippians. 

12 I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, 13 so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. 14 And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

            Paul’s prison time in Rome hasn’t been easy.  Let’s not move past this.  We make a mistake if we move too quickly in talking about what God has accomplished through it.  He doesn’t get to eat what he wants to eat.  He is probably frequently humiliated.  Guards might physically abuse him and taunt him while they are at it.  He probably isn’t sleeping on a therapeutic bed with several pillows.  Let that sink in.

            And another thing.  Do you think his imprisonment would have been an encouragement or a discouragement to the church there?  Think of it another way in modern terms.  Think of a very public figure that is one of Redeemer’s heroes.  Think of Mark Driscoll or John Piper or Tim Keller or C.J. Mahaney or whoever if these guys aren’t your heroes.  Imagine if they were imprisoned in a very death row way while they were on a mission trip visiting churches and proclaiming the gospel.  And, honestly, this parallel isn’t good because none of these people carried the sort of authority that the Apostle Paul did at that time in the life of the church.  I would be discouraged.  I would have thought that God should free them so that Paul or these other modern guys could get back to writing, preaching, and training leaders.  In the face of the potential discouragement to churches all over the region based on Paul’s seeming lack of fruitfulness in prison and suffering that he was enduring while there, Paul offers another take: what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. (Define)

            How?  I thought Paul preaching was advancing the gospel.  Well, it was.  But his imprisonment is pushing another sort of advancement.  There are two parts to it:

1.  Paul has a new audience to communicate the gospel of Jesus.  The imperial guard was responsible for watching Paul and they would rotate in 4 hour shifts.  He saw this as an opportunity to talk about the grace of God through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and even if he didn’t personally share with the whole guard, they would have talked around the water cooler about their inmates, etc.  Everyone would have known why he was in prison and it was pretty clear that it was because of this message.  That’s one reason why Paul sees the gospel advancing through this cruel circumstance and it should encourage us to look around and see every relationship and circumstance around us the same way.

2.  The Roman church is bolder in its proclamation of the gospel.  Paul’s imprisonment caused that church to endure persecution (Nero) and even become bolder in its proclamation of the gospel.  Why?  Doesn’t say here, but it’s fair to say that Paul’s perspective on the gospel’s advance being more important than comfort or his particular role probably reinforced the reality of the gospel to them. 

Paul himself was still sharing to the people God had given him, but a case could be made that the good news of Jesus was being shared to a much wider audience with Paul in prison and unable to speak to people like he used to do!  The church had grown in resolve and the gospel was being spoken widely and this was more important to Paul than his particular role in it.  If his imprisonment causes the gospel’s advance through a mobilized church, then that’s all that mattered.

            That’s great and challenging.  I’ve worked with Christian leaders and churches for a while and tend to see those two priorities inverted.  Yeah we’re interested in the gospel’s progress for sure.  But we’re also interested in being comfortable and having an important place in the church and being recognized as such.  Have you ever thought of yourself as indispensable to your church or in a ministry?  Maybe you’ve experienced it at work or something.  It was a humbling thing for me to watch the 3 ministries I’ve walked away from not collapse.  In fact, they just kept on rolling.  Oh we want the gospel, but we also want to be important.  In case you think this is a struggle for paid Christian leaders only, think again.  I have seen that one of the reasons that people leave churches is that they don’t feel important there.   It is absolutely critical that we flip our values at this point.  The gospel’s advance is more important than our particular role.  Is it ok if you take on a different role than you could have imagined and the gospel advances?

            To some of you here, this is just about as irrelevant as it could get.  Why?  Because you don’t struggle AT ALL with needing to feel important in this whole kingdom expansion thing because its not really on your radar to begin with.  I at least need to raise the question to you: Is it possible that your lack of struggle with wanting to be needed is born out of a lack of concern with your relationship with Jesus?

The Success of “Rivals”

15 Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. 16 The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. 17 The former proclaim Christ out of rivalry, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. 18 What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.

            What’s happening here? It doesn’t say.  It could be some people that just didn’t like Paul and wanted to stick it to him.  Another option would be to you widen our lens to look at Paul’s letter to the Roman church, it could be that the issue is stated there: tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians.  The early part of Romans shows how Jews and Gentiles are alike in their rebellion against God and are both converted in the same way- through believing the gospel.  The last couple of chapters return to some practical issues where the Gentile Christians were urged to give grace to the Jewish Christians that were strong in their insistence on continuing to observe certain dietary and ceremonial customs.

            It’s possible some Jewish Christians saw Paul’s imprisonment as an opportunity to spread their particular brand of Christianity over and against Paul’s brand that maintained that Gentile converts were not required to observe Jewish customs.  Let me be clear.  If this is the issue, Paul wouldn’t be so affirming of it if they were preaching that doing these Jewish things was necessary to salvation.  That’s not it.  These people affirm that faith in Jesus is what saves, but they have some distinctives they can advance in this vacuum of leadership.  It’s not that Paul agrees with them or that their stances aren’t a big deal because they are.  But Paul is showing us and them something valuable:  He is distinguishing between a gospel issue and a non-gospel issue.  If they differ on secondary matters, he is for them.  If they differ on the gospel issues, he won’t see any silver lining in their success.  The fact that they may be sticking it to Paul and using his imprisonment for their group’s gain doesn’t take away from the fact that the gospel is being preached and lived out…and that’s the most important thing.

This is huge for us.  I haven’t heard too many sermons on this, but jealousy and competitiveness are dirty little secrets among Christian churches today.  It’s almost like we are so well versed in “coach speak” that we can’t get to place of honestly long enough to repent of it.  If you stick around in a church long enough, some rivalry lines will inevitably form.  How will we respond to each other?

It’s also true between two (or more) churches.  We hear of another church or denomination succeeding and we say all the right things.  But inside, we don’t really like the brand of Christianity they are spreading.  Or even more personally, we don’t like the leader(s) of that church/denomination.  Sometimes, we can even resent a church’s success because we don’t like their methodology.  The first step in repentance is admitting that we have issues.  We like to be right.  We are proud.  We sometimes don’t do a good job of distinguishing between primary (gospel) and secondary issues (everything else).  Here are a couple things to remember:

1.  The gospel is growing-figure out how to be faithful to your particular place in it! Consider Jesus’ words in Mark 4. 26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Keep your eye on the ball!  Let’s make the gospel and its advance the standard for fellowship and then have charitable discussions and debates where we differ on secondary issues.  Its not that these secondary issues are no big deal (see the Romans), but at the end of the day they are secondary.  If we’ll remember that, we’ll be more gracious within our churches and extending to those outside of our own church.  Remember, God isn’t calling us to speak into other churches and how they do things.    You need to be faithful as an individual believer with your friends, family, and place of work.  You won’t have to answer for other Christians.  We’ll answer to Jesus for what we did with what we had in our context.  I don’t need any more responsibility! 

2.  If you aren’t a believer, please hear these verses on what the most important thing is (the gospel).  I know that many of you have been turned off because of the thing I’m talking about…churches and Christians acting harshly and critically of one another.  Regardless of how charitable (or uncharitable) we’ve been with one another, I want you to consider the gospel of Jesus that Paul felt was more valuable than a comfortable life, being important, or anything else.  Jesus is so valuable that you need to spend all of your energy and thought on trying to figure that out.  What if it’s true?

The Big Picture

            Paul is in a tough place, but his mind is on the main thing (the gospel) and God wants that to be the main thing with the Philippians and you.

            Is it?  Is seeing the gospel’s advancement the most critical issue for you right now?  In your marriage? In your children?  In your career?  In this church? In your Redeemer group?  In Lubbock among people already in your life? Among the unreached nations?  Or are you distracted by other things?  Do you see every event (good and bad) as an opportunity for the gospel’s advancement?  Spend some time on this.  If you look at the situations/events/people in your life that cause you the most frustration right now, you will likely see that through those things or people, the gospel is advancing in you and through you in mission.  The advance of the gospel is in its spread to new people (evangelism), but it’s also its deepening and sweetening in followers of Jesus.  That’s why we are a gospel-centered missional family.  It is advancing and causing us to love on another more deeply and to be more focused on mission. 

Make it your aim to place to look at you life, other Christians, and other churches not with rose-colored glasses pretending that secondary things don’t matter, but with gospel-colored glasses recognizing that everything matters, but everything is subordinate to the gospel.  Everything.  Fix our eyes on this great news that we are entrusted with to study, enjoy, and proclaim.