Sermon Book: Philippians

About this sermon

Paul counted his former gains, his heritage and his righteousness under the law, as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. He wants to gain Christ and be found in him with the righteousness that comes from God through faith, and he presses on toward the goal. When believers love God first, every other love falls into its proper place, and their union with Christ in his death and resurrection becomes a witness to the world.

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Sermon transcript

And then we’ll be primarily considering those middle verses surrounding 7 and 8. Paul talks about losing things, profits, and then down into his pushing forward, growing. But we’ll be considering those middle verses from like 7 through 12, 13 or so. We’ll read the whole chapter. context. So Philippians chapter 3. I’ll read starting verse 1 through the end of the chapter there. And let me remind us that indeed this is the Lord’s infallible and inerrant word to us. Let us receive it and hear it as such. Philippians chapter 3. Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. Look out for the dogs. Look out for the evildoers. Look out for those who mutilate the flesh.

For we are the circumcision who worship by the spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more.

Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ. and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Let those of us who are mature think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us, for many of whom I have told you often and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body. by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

Let’s pray together. Father indeed these are your words. So take this your word. Take the words of my mouth. the meditations of our collective hearts, and make them acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer, through Christ. Amen.

When the financial world fell apart about 11 years ago, I was actually working in Manhattan, working in New York when all that happened. And it was quite a dour time. Huge financial firms vaporized. It seemed like in an instant leaving thousands of people out of work in New York. And then the Madoff scandal broke and they’re probably still calculating the damage to people for over a lifetime because of his scandal. One of the casualties of that meltdown was a gentleman named Barry Fox. Barry worked for Bear Stearns, one of the financial firms that actually melted down.

And he actually loved working for them. Work was his life. When he got notice that he was let go, not long after that, he caught a subway to his high-rise apartment building. His apartment was on the 29th floor. He went home, up to his apartment, promptly hurled himself out of his window.

Now, when things like that happen, or even large scale catastrophes, lots of truth gets set before us. Lots of things are revealed. I mean, it reminds us that we just don’t know what a day will bring forth. Things can be peaceable, calm. The next thing you know, your whole life is upended. We gain insight into the scripts by which we live. Our deepest beliefs come out in catastrophes. The values that drive us surface. The things we consider profitable, profits, gain, The things we count as true loss, right? A lot of these things are made manifest.

And obviously, for Barry Fox, his value, the thing he thought was great gain and profit, was tied to his job. Clearly, his job was very high in the hierarchy of things he valued and that he thought were profitable. And so to lose it, to lose that job was to actually reduce, in his own mind, his life to almost worthlessness. It wasn’t worth going on. And of course, he’s not alone in seeing things that way, in measuring gain and profits around something like paper with numbers on it, or what we have in our retirement or savings accounts, what things we possess. He’s not alone in thinking that.

In particular, in this text before us particularly, Paul asserts that to be in Jesus Christ, to come into saving union with Him, is to have your whole sense of what is profitable loss, to have our whole understanding of that reordered, to be changed fundamentally from what we as natural men and women might consider profit, consider gains, and consider losses. He says to come to know Jesus Christ by faith. is to have our sense and understanding of value radically reoriented and changed. To come into Christ tells us now what is truly valuable, profitable, and what isn’t. And all things needful for us, we gain in having Him, and nothing needless.

I love how Calvin begins his book three, his institutes. You know, in book one, he richly lays out the knowledge of God as creator. It just gives us great theology. He wrote his instruction manual for believers. He wanted to see, grow a knowledge of grace. Book one gives out the knowledge of God as creator. In book two, he turns to the knowledge of God as Redeemer. The work accomplished by Christ. And then in book three, he turns his attention to the disciple, to the believer. And how that wonderful work of God and Christ as Redeemer comes to be actually applied to us. How it actually becomes ours and something more than just rich knowledge. How accomplished redemption becomes applied redemption.

And as he begins book three, he makes a quick, careful qualification about value. In fact, he uses the word value in the actual title. Here’s what he says very early on, maybe the second sentence. He says, He’s about to talk about how all that wonderful blessing of the work of Christ becomes ours.

And he says, we must understand, though, first, that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, there’s only two possibilities in the universe, in Christ or outside of Christ. And so long as Christ remains separated outside of us and we separate from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us.

All that He possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with Him. To be in Christ is to have everything needful, everything valuable from life and eternity. To be outside of Him is to have what is a loss, ultimately. Eternal loss. As Paul said, our sense of profit, gain, and loss It’s changed when we are in Christ. So let’s just pull on two strands here from this passage. In having Christ, we have everything. In not having him, or so we can lose everything, we’ve actually gained even more. It’s one of the summations of what Paul is saying in the central part of this passage.

So let’s look at how our perception changes by being in Christ and then how our pattern of life and existence actually changes from being in Christ. So perception is how we see differently in Christ. verses 1 to 11 generally orient around that, and the second part is the pattern, right? It’s about 12 through the end, but we’ll just pull out some things. You see it in verse 7, right?

But whatever gain I had, I count it as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

So, after the first few verses of chapter three where Paul is encouraging these Philippian believers, he’s encouraging them from jail, from prison, encouraging them to keep on rejoicing, warns them about Judaizers, those who would mutilate the flesh, those who would lift up Jewish cultural identity as essential to Christian identity, They’re warning about that. He slows down and he takes aim at this false idea of religious, Jewish religious or even cultural identity and achievement, right? He says, look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. Watch out for them. We have our own form in our day. Watch out for them.

Why, Paul? Because verse 3 says, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Watch out for the folks who say you have to be physically, socially, culturally, ethically circumcised because that and this point of redemption. History has changed. It was always pointed to the true circumcision. We are ones who have true circumcision, he says in verse 3. What is that, Paul?

We worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Jesus Christ and put no confidence in our ethnic badges, our cultural identity. regardless of how central it was to the economy of God’s work in the past that Christ has come. It’s not about the external badges. It’s about the true badge of being in Christ, worshiping and glorifying him in the spirit.

So we don’t have confidence in the flesh. It’s not the grounds for our deepest sense of who we are. And if you think they are, Paul says, he says, look, if you really think those things matter, I have more grounds to boast in them than you do. And I don’t count them as gains.

There’s a work in New York, you know, the young Christian women were looking for three H guys, they said. That is, they wanted a handsome, Harvard-educated guy with high income. Those were the badges for a young man worth allowing to court, a date, or whatever you want to call it. Paul’s saying, if you think those badges matter, man, I’m like a 5 or 6 age guy. I’m a Hebrew of Hebrews. I’m holy and have all these other ages.

He’s saying, if you think you have value in those cultural markers and badges, I actually have more. And yet, those things, the value of them has been reordered. He says, whatever I had as gain. And people consider those kinds of things gain. Valuable to have. And the tricky thing always is, they are good things. Paul’s upbringing was a blessed heritage. Those are good markers. They are good central things that God in his kindness and providence gave to the Apostle Paul as well as many others.

And yet, in Jesus Christ, he looks at those things and goes, they are worthless compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Physical circumcision was good. To them were given the covenants and the oracles of God. The blessings of his promises were carried and transmitted to the rest of the world through this covenant people. And yet Christ has come. We who are in him by faith have so much more than those kinds of ethnic cultural privileges.

So much so that we can look at those things and go, they were good, but they are like us compared to what we have in Christ. He’s making a comparative statement. You know, it’s a, it’s easy to get on Judaizers. It’s easy to get on people who are so transparently, we’re finding some sense of deep significance. You know, in our day, because religion and race and culture have been separated so much, where kin and creed don’t line up, where I can’t see your last name and know what faith or tradition you belong to, those things have been separated. We don’t have a stronger sense of how powerful this kind of identification was in ancient civilization. don’t have as keen or acute a grasp of it was powerful defining reality to be Jewish and to know the history of what God had given to you and how he had used you and that nouns for Christ to come and to basically say those things were types pointing to greater reality antitypes that they were part of promise fulfilled in Christ and don’t have any kind of saving significance. To see that is, I’m sure for many, to have your whole sense of who you are destabilized. Paul makes the comparison. He says, I counted as lost these things for the sake of Christ, whatever I had gained. in verse 7.

Another interesting thing, you move, you live in a big city, I’ve lived for years out in New York, when I lived in New York, what you find in New York City particularly, Manhattan, is a bunch of people, especially young people, who are running away from small town life for the big time.

They think their small town they grew up in was a great place to be from, not a great place to be. And so they were looking to make it big, to move up with all the opportunities of the great big global city of New York. So they were actually, their sense of identity was defined by running away from the suffocating, limiting small town life of their youth. They were running, so they were defined, they literally would define themselves as, I’m from there. They’re running away.

And then I moved back to small town. Western Pennsylvania, where so many revel in the provinciality of small town life and are suspicious. The big town people think they’re better, right? In one case, cultural identity was defined by rejecting or running away from it. You’ve got these big cities, the coastal cities, the giant cities. Come back into the small town, it’s defined by resting and reveling in.

People in my family are proud that they’ve never lived anywhere else than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s grounds for boasting. Cultural identity is found in the kind of provincial sense. Right? So in one case, one is running away from, and defined by that. In the other case, resting and reveling in. Paul does neither of those. He’s relativizing them.

He can boast in his identities that God has given him as a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the tribe of Jeff Benjamin, as Pharisee, blameless concerning the law. He can actually assert those things as truth. But yet say all of that, as good and true as it is, relative to knowing Jesus Christ and being him. The true circumcision, one in which we boast in glory of Christ by the Spirit, far better than the physical circumcision.

He can wear it lightly. He didn’t lose any of those things. He wears it lightly. He can take it off. It doesn’t define him. So he doesn’t reject the reality of those things. He doesn’t revise his background. But he doesn’t rest in it either. He doesn’t run away from it. He doesn’t rest in it. He compares it to his true identity in Christ. He says, I have physical circumcision, but here’s the real circumcision. The circumcision, verse 3, where we glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. I have the fleshly markers, but I have no confidence in them.

So recognizing the truest sense of who we are, how God has named us as being in Jesus Christ and having all the benefits of redemption come to us, while being given in God’s providence these other badges and markers, to recognize what is first and what is truly profitable helps us to actually appreciate properly all of the other blessings and badges and things we have. To recognize the true circumcision helps us to identify and recognize whatever good there is in our natural circumcision. Just like when we know that our deepest marital satisfaction, our deepest marital union satisfaction, is in our union with Christ. Our earthly marriages are only strengthened by recognizing the deepest union we have. Because then we don’t put too much weight on the earthly institution. We don’t demand that it give us what only Christ himself can give us.

That’s why spouses should say to each other in loving ways, you’re not enough. And that’s a good thing. Jesus Christ is enough. Single should say that. Whether God gives us spouses or not, Christ is enough. Marriage is a wonderful thing. It keeps the world going. But our union with Christ is where our life is found. And so we can accept The natural marriage. Better, and receive it as God’s good gift. Good imperfect gift. Imperfect gift. Because we have first accepted the greater marriage.

I love C.S. Lewis when he’s talking about lovers. He says this, he says, when I’ve learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. Insofar as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed, but increased. Augustine talks about the order of love. We cannot love earthly objects the way that they should be loved if we do not love God first.

For when we love God first, all other loves are put in their proper place, therefore we love them best. So when we understand our true circumcision, our true spiritual circumcision and position in Christ, we can understand the other circumcisions of our lives, the other benefits and badges and things. We can properly relativize them. in light of our primary badge in defining reality of being in Christ. We can accept the other things for what they are. So our sense of value, gain, profit gets radically reordered.

I don’t want to diminish the strength of Paul’s language. Relative to Christ, counts those things that were gain as loss and indeed in verse 8 I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish. Paul doesn’t know rhetorical restraint. In order that I may gain Christ that was the great goal.

But look at how it reframes not just his way of seeing. Look how union with Christ, being in Christ, doesn’t just change the way we see life, particularly our earthly identities, culture, the things God has given to us. Look how it doesn’t just reorder our perception. It actually pulls us in. Being united to Christ pulls us into this new pattern. Not just new perceptions, but a new pattern.

You see it in verse 9 and 10, right? And be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes with the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. That’s basically Paul’s explaining our justification there. But verse 10, here’s the new pattern.

This happens. We come into Christ. that 10, I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Here’s the new pattern of the person who is in Jesus Christ. We live out this drama of death to resurrection. Suffering, and on the other side of that, life.

That’s the pattern and drama that we participate in with Christ. Because Paul later says, imitate me. Your life is going to be like this. Imitate me. Follow me. He didn’t have books you pick up and read on discipleship and leadership. There were no Skype conferences with a mentor. You literally had to watch people, follow them around, and imitate their life patterns. And Paul’s saying, his life? was in it lived out of participation in Christ, which imitated the pattern of death or suffering and resurrection life on the other side.

That’s why he said to the Corinthians, as they were in their suffering, we have, what is it? Where is it? We have this sentence of death. In chapter 1 verse 9, St. Corinthians, we have a sentence of death. That’s how hard Paul’s life was at that moment. We know his badges. We know the suffering he went through. And he’s speaking to other people going through various kinds of sufferings, right? And suffering is part and parcel of abiding in a living, groaning creation that is not yet what it’s going to be one day.

We have the sentence of death in ourselves. Why, Paul? Why did you have a sentence of death? I thought we were supposed to have victory and triumph. We have the sentence of death in us so that we might not trust in ourselves, but in the God who raises from the dead.

He knew in the depths of pain and suffering that he was being prepared and refined. When we have our crutches of comfort, physical health, and financial health and stability, when those planks are pulled out from us, as well as when relationships fail, And there’s just all manner of hardship and suffering as you are one, united to Christ. We have those things. Our trust is being purified. We’re being cast upon the mercy of God. And yet we are not nihilist. That is not the end of the story.

We have this sentence of death written in us so that we might not trust in ourselves, but in the God who raises from the dead. The pattern of our life in Christ is one of deep, deep, deep, deep suffering, because we are in a fallen world, and it does not avoid us. Deep, deep, deep suffering. But resurrection life, at the personal level, but also at the collective level. This is how Christians can look suffering and death in the face, and not fail. Because we know There’s life after death and suffering. We’re in Christ.

So we’re not to be the kind of people who go about our life knowing this is our pattern. I might know him and the fellowship of the sufferings, the power of his resurrection. We’re not to be those who go through our life, you know, carefully managing it so as to avoid suffering. to be safe little shopkeepers who just want to make sure our life is as comfortable and middle-class American as possible. That is not the calling. That is not the pattern to be lived out.

I love the example from Rodney Stark’s book on why Christianity exploded in the first few centuries. He talks about that great plague in the second century where a second century Rome, it was a plague that wiped out a quarter to a third of everybody. You could read it, probably Google it, probably Stark, there’s probably other accounts of it. Right, it wiped out about a quarter to a third of the population over 15 years. So it was huge, it was massive, right? And what was interesting is people recorded and recounted how the Christians were known for caring for the neglected family members in the streets.

Pagan families, whenever one of their children or one of their household members showed marks of the plague, would often take them and throw them outside in the street. Christians would go by and collect them and take them into their homes and put themselves at risk to love their neighbor. So they would take on greater suffering for the neglected as well as their own. They created basically the first kinds of social care networks voluntarily. Now you might think that that would have wiped out the Christian population because they took on greater risk. They went down to the depths of suffering with others and exposed themselves in the process.

But actually, Christianity exploded, continued to grow and explode. Because what happened is minimal care actually reduced deaths. So as over 15 years, the population of Romans declined, the population of Christians grew. That I might know him and the fellowship of his sufferings with others and the power of the resurrection. New life came in dramatic, numerical ways, even as death and suffering were embraced by Christians.

That’s a little bit of what it looks like in a collective sense. This happens to us personally, too. We don’t just perceive these things, changes in what’s valuable, what is not, what is profit, what is loss, our lives actually are order, we live out a new pattern. Suffering is not something to be raged against as having no redemptive value. We know that it is something that God and His great redemptive purposes in Christ, as we are united to Him, uses. So our suffering is not apart from the power of the resurrection.

We have to stop here. Let’s stop. That’s just one point. Let’s pray. Let’s embrace suffering and power of resurrection. United in Jesus Christ, we have all we need. Nothing needless. Let’s embrace that with Paul. Imitate him as he imitates Christ in this. Let’s pray together. Father, take your word. Confirm it to our hearts.

Give us the grace to embrace these truths and these realities and to live them with joy. And to see not only our own lives changed, but as we bear witness to one who has died and suffered, that his elect might live. As we bear witness to that in our own lives, may others see and come to believe. May you draw others to yourself. as we imitate out of participation in the Savior’s work, saving work for us.

Amen. Let’s take our hymnal. Of course, all of this, Paul says we died with Christ in His death, he tells the Roman Christians. So the cross, when Christ died, is the center, the historical, redemptive center of our own participation in dying with Him to be raised in newness of life. So let’s sing about that, the cross of Jesus, in hymn number 177.

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About this sermon

Paul tells the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord always and not to be anxious about anything, but to bring every request to God in prayer with thanksgiving. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, then guards their hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, who knew sorrow himself. A life free of anxiety comes from a transformed heart and mind that dwells on whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, and lovely.

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Sermon transcript

You may be seated, please. And let me invite you to turn to passage we’ll be considering together in the book of Philippians chapter 4. Philippians chapter 4 and We’ll be considering verses six and seven, but we’ll read four through nine. And Paul tells us here, verse four. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.

The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there’s anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things and the God of peace will be with you.

This is the word of the Lord. Let’s pray together. Father, indeed, we come down to hear from you. through your word, through the proclamation of it. So we would pray that as you by your spirit inspired the original authors, would you so illuminate our hearts and minds that we may indeed hear what it is you have to say. So take the words of my mouth. the meditations of our collective hearts and make them acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Well, according to, and I’m sure this is no surprise, but according to mental health professionals, the number one problem is depression and anxiety. And just on the surface of that, what that says is that worry, and people recognize it. Millions and millions of people recognize that worry is a prominent feature of our fallen human condition. It is a part of our fall that people are very concerned about in big numbers.

And of course, that’s no surprise. Everyone carries some level of anxiety, rather acute or kind of subterranean anxiety. draining effect that we have. Everyone carries something. We live in a fallen world where things don’t work the way they’re supposed to work. And we feel that. You know, there was even a record-breaking song about worry. And it broke all kinds of records from the 80s. And that again shows our collective desire as a people to be free from it. To have, to live without anxiety. We live in a worrying world. In fact, I mean, we’re such worrisome people that we even worry about worry. That we’re going to get it when we don’t even feel it or have it. We worry about that. We just think it’s right around the corner.

And so it is the such people as us, sons of Adam and Lady Eve, such people as us that the apostle Paul issues these well-known words in particularly verses six and seven of chapter four, do not be anxious about anything, but everything by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, your requests be made known to God. So I’m going to turn our attention, gives consideration to a few things from those particular verses. But in the context that we read in verse four down through verse nine, the apostle Paul is giving a series of short and brief exhortations and encouragements. And it’s in the midst of those little short encouragements and admonitions that he so often deploys in closing up his letters, that he gives us the words, this classic exhortation. The text is classicists of anxiety and worry in verse seven, six and seven. So let me say four things about this together. I’ll say four things. First thing. We can gather from this text, and this is a straightforward one.

Circumstances don’t cause anxiety. Circumstances reveal our anxieties. By anxious, Paul says, don’t be anxious for anything. What he means is He’s referring to those kind of harassing thoughts and concerns that run us down, that chase us. And usually those are concerns about present or future circumstances, which we find ourselves. It’s the same thing that Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount. when he says, don’t be anxious about your life, about things that you’ll eat, you’ll drink, what clothes you’ll wear, what’s going to happen 24 hours from now. It’s the same kind of thing. It addresses those thoughts, those concerns that harass us, usually about present or future circumstances.

But again, our circumstances aren’t the thing causing the worry and anxiety. They’re simply revealing them. Why do we say that? Because in verse seven, Paul says, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your heart and minds.

What God deals with when we’re anxious is not our external circumstances, not the things outside of us. He actually deals with our inner life, our hearts and minds. It’s us that he works on, not our environment. His worry and anxiety is a reflection of what’s at work and internal to us, not the things external to us. And what is it that’s actually going on inside of us when we’re worried, when we’re anxious?

I think one way of looking at it is to say, worry is really just a function or a fruit of an obsessive desire to control. I like how one author puts it, one of my former professors, he said, worry assumes the possibility of control over the uncontrollable. The illusion of control lurks inside your anxiety. Anxiety and control are two sides of one coin.

When we can’t control something, we worry about it. The child who’s supposed to be home at 11 is not home. You worry about it because you don’t have omniscience to know exactly where the child is, and you don’t have omnipotence to actually do something for sure about it. You lack the kind of control. On our health problems, we worry because we can’t make our bodies work.

The sin underneath the sin, as it were, the thing underneath worry, is a lack of control. That’s the kind of sin beneath the sin, as it were. And our anxiety is just an expression. of that lack of omniscience, that lack of omnipotence, ability to manage everything that comes at us in life.

So Paul isn’t an environmental determinist. It’s not that our circumstances and situations determine how we respond and who we are. He’s the opposite of that. Our circumstances, of course, influence They put pressure on us. They impact us, but they don’t determine us. They don’t determine our worries.

I remember someone talking about how our circumstances are like a cinnamon tea bag in a cup of hot water. You put that tea bag in the water, And what does it do? It doesn’t make the teabag cinnamon flavor. It reveals the cinnamon flavor. It just shows us what was already inside of the teabag. It didn’t create it. It just made it manifest. It revealed it.

And even the Apostle Paul, in writing this letter, wrote it from the confines of a Roman prison. And yet this is known as the epistle of joy. And he writes this words. In fact, he just said in verse four, rejoice in the Lord always. And again, I say rejoice. So clearly. It wasn’t his circumstances that induced joy. Because that would tend to sorrow that would tend to sadness to be imprisoned. And yet. Here he is in prison writing what has come to be known by the church through the centuries as the epistle of joy.

And I love the passage in Corinthians where Paul writes to the Corinthians encouraging a kind of generosity, 2 Corinthians chapter 8. And he’s wanting to encourage the Corinthians to give, and he grounds it in Christ’s own giving. He who was rich, for our sakes he became poor, that we who are poor might become rich. And he grounds it in the grace of God seen in Christ. But he also motivates them by pointing out the Macedonian church and says that they were under severe affliction.

So this was a church that was suffering a lot. And they were extremely poor. But they gave from beyond their measure. So their external circumstances, their personal circumstances didn’t hinder them. And what he says that that was at the heart of their giving was this abundance of joy that overflowed. So a church under severe affliction, a church that was extremely poor, still was incredibly generous. The circumstances didn’t determine their response or even their disposition. They had a disposition, a spiritual working that produced the fruit of joy. This abundance of joy overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part, the Apostle says. So of course, what this means is that a joyful life, an anxiety-less life, they are tied to some kind of inner heart-mind transformation.

Not circumstances. The circumstances don’t cause worry and anxiety. They only reveal them. That’s one. Two, the call to stop worrying, to not be anxious, isn’t a call to self-mastery. It isn’t just a bare command that comes to us as humans. Paul wrote this.

There was a group, a philosophical school, many of us know it, the Stoics, and they had their way of achieving freedom from worry and anxiety. It was through a kind of emotional indifference, a kind of cool detachment. They just released, you know, a sense of care for anything. and just no complex emotional involvement with things. So guys like Epictetus at Seneca urged this kind of cold embrace of one’s life and its problems and its pressures.

There’s one thing that Epictetus said. He said, make the best use of what is in your power and take the rest as it happens. And you know, to a degree, that actually works for some people. to a degree. It won’t work ever at a fundamental level. There’s a couple things the Stoics ignored.

One, we are actually made, created, to care, not to worry, but to care about. To not care is to not be properly human. Peter says about the ministry of Christ to us that he cares for you. Now, obviously, if the perfect son of God cares, has proper concerns, then to care and have concerns is not a sin. He was perfectly sinless and he cared.

And there are only a small group of people in any case who have ever been successful with the stoic approach. And again, not even completely successful. There was a certain level of success in which they’re able to detach themselves. But for the average person to stop worrying is like telling water to stop being wet. It’s so endemic to who we are as human beings.

And if you doubt that, Check out the amount of money made on anti-anxiety medication. But in any case, the self-mastery or just the bare, cool detachment that the Stokes encouraged, this buck up, grin and bear it, is not how Christians are to deal with worry. It’s not a Christian technique. or method according to Paul. Because Paul says, in response to that command, or in addressing it and supporting it, says don’t worry, and implicit in that is point three.

This call to the priority of prayer. You see the emphasis, it says in verse six, do not be anxious about anything, there’s the command. And it immediately adds to that, but in everything by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, let your request. He’s using three different words. It’s covering all the prayer bases as it were.

So unlike Stoics, Paul urges and commands believers to not look to self, the inner resources of our strength. To not look to self, but to look to our Savior for the deliverance from worry that we seek. And that happens by prayer. Prayer reveals exactly where our heart trust is. What we most rely on. Our prayers reveal that.

You remember how Jesus talked about worry in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, you know, all these birds, your heavenly Father knows when they fall. He knows how many fall to the ground. He knows the numbers of hairs on your head. In light of that kind of fatherly omniscience, worry is a colossal waste of time. You can’t change things by worries, how Jesus argues. Then he says, you know, don’t worry. Don’t be anxious because your heavenly father, what knows what you have need of before you even ask.

That is an implicit statement To trust. Implicit command is the word. To trust. He knows what you need. In other words, you have this Heavenly Father who is infinitely aware of all the kinds of things you’re inclined to be anxious about. Trust Him. Trust. Prayer is an expression of that trust.

So in the logic of Paul, the opposite of careful, being full of care, isn’t carefree. The opposite of anxious care is faith. So we don’t be full of cares or stop being full of cares. No, the opposite of being full of cares is actually faith in a Heavenly Father who actually cares. That’s the proper response. That’s the opposite.

And that faith, that trust, is evidenced in a praying life. A life that, as opposed to being anxious, turns in trust, trusting reliance, to God, who actually cares for us. And this praying is, of course, no vain, meaningless chant, there’s a result here that Paul says prayer is the instrument of, it is the means to which we gain. There is this result of a peace that is beyond the human ability to comprehend, to fully understand.

And that peace, you know, it’s not It’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s a tough, not wimpy piece. The language literally is this garrison of guards that line up and protect fortress like our heart. That’s the kind of piece that comes again, not a change in the circumstances, a showing up of us, establishing us, our hearts and minds.

One of the most beautiful things I like to do is go to rocky cliffs, rocky seashores in the Pacific Northwest, in the New England area, and to see the waters come in and just crash against the rocks and then go back out and just kind of do that repeatedly with the very loud swishing sounds and things like that.

You know, you see the water rage out, rage in, recede, rage, recede, cover the rocks, and then the water leaves the rocks. And something interesting about the rocks, they’re still there. They don’t move. All that water, over and over and over and over, rushing up against it. Loud noises receding back out into the ocean. And yet the rocks remain the same. That’s the heart of peace. It’s not moved. The circumstances rage. They can be calm. They can be terrifying and chaotic. But the heart that has been guarded in peace doesn’t change. doesn’t move.

I like what Augustine says. He says, only a love for the immutable can bring tranquility. And his point is, actually, that was a philosopher summing up Augustine. I don’t think he exactly said that. But his point was that Augustine was talking about love. and how our love for fallible, mutable objects doesn’t lead to peace in the lover. When you love something that changes, you change with it. So if you love something temporal, then your love is only as strong as that temporal thing remains. When it changes, your love changes.

And he says, the only object, the only object of our love that can lead to a permanent tranquility, as it were, is a love for an unchanging God. That our hearts will be incredibly restless when we fill it with anything less than God himself, because our hearts are made for him. So the only kind of peace that will be truly lasting is in the God who gives the peace. Any lesser thing actually can’t give us tranquility. And this is a piece that comes from God. And a piece that is in our final point here, let’s consider the worry as it relates to Jesus, the passage talks about.

Because it’s possible, and most people do it in our therapeutic age, they deal with anxiety in a psychological way. you know, revise your reality, rid yourself of negative thoughts. There’s all these kinds of techniques that people employ, particularly in secular fields, psychology, to deal with anxiety. And they can turn, they’ll even accept, you know, Christians who say they should pray about their anxiety and go to the Lord. And they’ll make that into a kind of relaxation technique, right?

Or a thanking of a power. a higher power or something like that, right? And we could even think that except for the very last words of the apostle Paul in verse seven. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

I listened to this radio interview actually on anxiety, just to kind of just like to hear what people say about it. And the psychologist said the way to deal with it, you know, she was just throwing out a bunch of stuff that she uses and encourages. She said you could use Buddhist meditation. She was encouraging certain kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy. And I thought to myself, no, that’s a dead end ultimately. It may have some temporal value, common grace value, but at a fundamental level it fails.

The Christian way with worry is connected to Jesus Christ. It is in and through Him, the Apostle says. Jesus is at the very center of how anxiety and care is dealt with. There are only two types of people in the world. There are those who are in Jesus Christ, and those who are outside of Jesus Christ. There are two ways we can deal with our worries. In Christ Jesus, in Jesus Christ, or without, outside Jesus Christ.

But the only people who get this supernatural, this peace that surpasses human comprehension, that goes beyond the natural, the only people who get that peace are the ones who know the Prince of Peace. The one who is the source of all true peace. All lasting and eternal peace. Not temporal peace. Fake peace.

It is only in and through Jesus Christ. We must look to Him. See Him. If you’re a person who is in Christ, then you know and you see that He is the one who bore all of our griefs and sorrows. That He took all of our anxiety and placed it on Himself. We can see that. If you’re in Jesus Christ, then you see that. That’s why you go to Him.

He is the one that was acquainted with grief. He’s the one that said in the garden that my soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He knew care because he took all our cares on himself. He’s the one that told his disciples, you know, stay and watch because his soul was overwhelmed.

And if you’re in Christ, you know that was for you. He did that for his people. You know that and you can see that. And so you see the good news under worry. You see that we don’t need to worry, that we can go to Christ. We don’t need to worry because Jesus has taken all of our worries. and cares on himself. That sin is fully dealt with. So now we have a heart and response of faith and trust that goes to him to deal with remaining sorrow, remaining cares that we have.

Make two quick practical points in closing. This should lead us to do two things, to listen and to look. Listen. Paul says, don’t be anxious for anything, but in everything. So presumably, the everything is anything that will cause us worry. In everything, by prayer and supplication. So that implies we actually know those things that are causing us anxiety and worry. That we’re aware of it. That we’ve slowed down enough to know what is going on in our hearts that is causing anxiety.

What lack of control do we have that is leading us to work, right? So we actually need to listen to what’s going on inside of us. The psalmist says, when he was anxious or depressed, however we want to categorize it, why is my soul cast down? Oh soul, why are you cast down?

He has a self-awareness that leads to prayer. So we have to actually slow down enough to have our heart searched and known in order to bring those things that cause even the low grade anxiety before the Lord, who actually cares for us, who garrisons our hearts with his supernatural peace. So one, you have to listen to your heart. in the sense of figuring out what cares are going on inside of it. Because in everything, by prayer and supplication, everything that would cause us care.

Two, look. So listen, figure out what’s going on, and look. What Jesus says to those gathered when he’s giving the Sermon on the Mount, he says, consider the birds, consider the littlies of the field. That traveling father clothes them. Basically an observation from general revelation reveals a quality about our Heavenly Father that He actually cares. So look at the actual circumstances.

How do we pray with Thanksgiving? Paul says, you know, pray with Thanksgiving. He doesn’t say pray and then you’ll be thankful. He says pray with Thanksgiving. How is that? Thanksgiving, Eucharisto, it comes from a recognition that God has gifted us and has demonstrated His goodness and that life is a gift and the circumstances in which He’s put us I mean, things are simple as sitting in a warm building and not having to flee for our lives.

I just read a letter from Chinese pastors. The government is cracking down on gospel preaching pastors in China, and they have to hide and change locations almost weekly to stay a step ahead of the government. And here we sit in absolute freedom and peace to listen, to respond to the gospel. And I don’t think anyone’s going to leave here and go and starve.

So an observation of God’s general revelation of goodness to us in the circumstances of our life, of praying with thanksgiving is what is always in order. It’s a means by which he uses to deal with our worries. So listen and look. And may the God of peace, as Paul asked, establish us in his peace. Let’s pray. Father, indeed, we’re thankful for your word.

We recognize our own fallibility and weakness and need of your continual need of your sanctifying grace. So would you help us to not worry, to not be anxious? We don’t know what a day brings forth, but you do. you’re well aware, you have it all in control and you give to your people a peace that passes human comprehension, our ability to take in. So we’re thankful for your word, Lord, cause it to take root in our hearts and to bear fruit in our lives. In Jesus name, Amen. Let’s take our hymn, hymn Nolan. Sing an affirmation of The peace that only God gives to His people, hymn number 587.

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