01-13-13 AN UNEXPECTED HONOR

We left off our study of Philippians with verse 28 of chapter 1.

But before we jump back into our study at that point

let me just take a couple of minutes

to get our minds back into it again.

Those of you who have been going through this study will remember

that what we call the book of Philippians

is actually a letter

written by Paul from Rome

to his friends in Philippi

as he was waiting for his trial before Caesar

on charges resulting from the riots brought about in Jerusalem

because of his presence in the city.

At the time the letter was written

Paul had probably been under house arrest for about two years.

He could receive visitors,

but, of course, could not leave his confinement,

and was under Roman guard constantly.

This period of Paul’s life fascinates me

because it helps me realize

what pathetic judges we are

of the value of some of the periods

and events in our lives.

From Paul’s perspective

I would guess he viewed the years

he sat in prison

as among the most ineffective

and non-productive years

of his Christian life.

Certainly he influenced

the lives of many of those around him,

but by contrast to the throngs of people

he had been talking with

and preaching to prior to his imprisonment

it must have seemed like his whole life

suddenly came to a screeching halt.

And yet, looking back on Paul’s life,

we who have come after him

can see that the time he spent in that Roman prison

was far and away the most powerful

and productive

and fruitful period of his whole life.

During that period of time he reached

hundreds of millions of people

at a depth and effectiveness

that eclipsed everything else he accomplished

in the rest of his life.

You see, it was during those years in prison

that his forced inactivity and isolation

motivated him to write four letters -

one to his friends at Ephesus,

one to his friends at Colossae,

one to his friends at Philippi,

and a personal letter to his good friend Philemon,

letters that were read

and reread

and copied, and shared with other groups of Christians,

and eventually preserved permanently as the New Testament books of

Ephesians,

Philippians,

Colossians,

and Philemon,

books that have literally transformed the thinking

and the lives of millions of Christians

throughout the past 2000 years.

How does God get Paul

to become really effective in his life?

He locks him up in prison for several years

and brings his public ministry

to an instant, screeching halt.

I have to tell you, I like that!

Sandee and I spent the first seven years

of our married life together

feeling like our life had been put on hold in a huge way.

We felt like we were going nowhere,

doing nothing,

just treading water

without any clear purpose or direction.

Do you remember that song

years ago that began with the line,

‟What’s it all about, Alfie”?

That was the line

we would use to express to one another

our frustration

and confusion about what was going on in our lives.

When one of us would ask the other,

‟What’s it all about, Alfie?”

it was our way of saying to one another,

‟What are we doing with our life, anyway?

Why does God just have us sitting, doing nothing,

going nowhere?”

I heard a sermon from a pastor over in Kenai during that time

that helped me a great deal.

He was talking about Peter

during those few days between

the resurrection of Christ

and the day of Pentecost

when the Holy Spirit was given

and the Church was born.

I remember him talking about how

Peter was going crazy with the inactivity of his life.

He wanted to do something - ANYTHING!

In the Gospel of John 21:3 there is a passage in which Peter just couldn’t take it any longer.

He and the other disciples

were just milling around

not knowing what to do

wondering what plan “B” was,

and in that verse it says, Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing."

The teacher took that verse

and used it to describe the way

we so often view the times of inactivity in our life.

Peter was a fisherman -

that was all he knew before Christ stepped into his life.

When he couldn’t figure out

what was going on

and couldn’t stand to wait any longer

he just went back to what was comfortable.

Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing."

I identified so strongly

with those feelings when I heard that talk.

I felt like my effectiveness and value as a Christian had come to a screeching halt.

I can remember wondering

if I would ever teach again.

Now I can look back on those years

and see how the Lord was using them

to build into my life

the principles that form the basis

for just about everything I teach.

It was the time in my life

when I was forced to throw out

huge piles of religious garbage,

stuff I’d accumulated through years of being a missionary,

and a youth pastor,

and a Bible teacher,

but stuff, much of which didn’t work in the real world.

It was a time when I had to discover

what it meant to be a Christian

cleaning dirty apartments,

or driving a delivery truck and installing modular office furniture.

I know now that those years were in many ways the most valuable

and crucial years of my entire Christian life.

Well, Paul was in prison when he wrote this letter,

and his prison experience

was giving him eyes to see things

from a perspective he’d never had before.

He was learning and sharing the principles

that allowed him to live through

the times in life when things don’t make sense to us,

those times when God doesn’t do it the way we think He should,

those times when it doesn’t work

the way that preacher on TV promised it would.

Our study of the letter so far has taken us

almost through the first chapter.

Along the way we’ve heard Paul share with us

some powerful principles of survival.

He began his letter with the bold affirmation that,

... I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

That’s where we always need to start

at those times when life doesn’t look

or feel the way we think it should.

We need to hear the voice of our Lord saying, “My child, I can and I will take care of you.

I called you to Myself,

and I will keep you in the palm of My hand forever.

You will find Me adequate

for whatever comes your way.

Nothing will touch your life

without My permission,

and I can and will cause all things

to work together for good in your life

as we share them together.”

Paul then goes on in the letter

to share a number of other principles

that help equip us for the prisons in our life,

including a definition of God’s deliverance that tells us

He is committed to delivering us through,

not delivering us from those prisons.

Then, most recently in our study

we have been looking at the last paragraph of chapter one

in which Paul urges his readers

to conduct themselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

He calls us to approach life

in a way that accurately reflects

the life our Lord has given us through Christ.

He offers a number of characteristics of the worthy walk,

and the last one we looked at

was in verse 28 where Paul calls us to be, in no way alarmed by your opponents-- which is a sign of destruction for them, but of salvation for you, and that too, from God.

We actually ended up spending two weeks

on that verse.

Now, with that as background

I want us to move on to the last two verses of chapter one,

two verses in which Paul makes another one of those statements

I’ve never heard anyone preach on before.

When I read them

you’ll see why.

In Phil. 1:29-30 Paul says,

29] For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake, [30] experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, and now hear to be in me.

Now for the power of Paul’s words

in this passage to reach us

we’re going to do a little word study

on one of the words in verse 29.

It’s the word “granted”.

The word means literally ‟to show favor,

to give freely”.

It’s used in Luke 7:21.

Speaking of Christ it says,

Luke 7:21 At that very time He cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits; and He granted sight to many who were blind.

The word is used to describe

an obvious act of kindness and compassion on the part of Christ,

as he bestowed the greatest physical gift He could ever give

to a blind person - the gift of sight.

It is used in Luke 7:42

to describe the way in which a money lender

faced two of his debtors who could not pay their debt,

and how he graciously forgave their debts in full.

It is used in I Cor. 2:12 to tell us that God has given us His Holy Spirit,

“that we might know the things freely given to us by God...”

It is used by Paul in Rom. 8:32 when he says,

‟He who did not spare his own son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”

Those words, ‟freely give”

are the same Greek word as we have translated “grant” here in Phil. 1:29.

It is used in Phil 2:9 to describe the way in which God the Father highly exalted Christ and “bestowed upon Him (granted) a name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Repeatedly throughout the New Testament this word is used to describe

the giving of some honor

or gift

or action that is highly valued

by both the giver and the one who receives.

It is usually given by a ruler,

or by someone who holds power or authority over someone else,

or by God Himself.

Implied in the word is the understanding

that the act of giving shows favor

and the act of receiving is an honor.

Now let me read verse 29 again.

Phil. 1:29 For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake,...

And I’m afraid that word “suffer”

means exactly what it sounds like it means.

It’s the same word that Christ used

to describe to His disciples

what He would go through

in His own crucifixion.

It’s the same word used by Paul to describe his own numerous beatings

and imprisonment.

And as Paul writes to his fellow Christians in Philippi,

he says that to them it has been granted

the high honor of suffering for the sake of Christ.

The God who died for them

now shows His great favor to them

by granting them the privilege

of suffering for His sake.

HOW STRANGE!

What a funny faith.

Now Paul is not saying here

that all human suffering

is an honor from God.

Certainly God assures us

that He is able to bring us through

any kind of suffering,

even when we brought it on ourselves

as a result of our wrong choices.

But in this passage

he’s talking specifically about the type of suffering that comes into our lives

as a direct result of our obedience

to the leadership of Christ in our life,

or at those times when we are simply the victims

of the evil that saturates our world.

He’s talking about those times

when bad things happen

even when we have chosen to do good,

to do what we know is right.

Paul makes this statement to the Philippians first of all because

he wants to disarm a potential weapon

Satan would certainly try to use against them.

These people were making right choices,

following the leadership of their Lord

the best way they knew how,

and yet those choices

were not removing the hardship or suffering from their lives.

The natural response in a situation like that would be to doubt -

to doubt God’s love,

to doubt themselves,

to doubt the choices they were making.

In part I’m sure Paul wanted to strongly reaffirm to the Philippians

that they really were exactly where they needed to be,

doing what they should be doing,

and that they needed to keep focused

not on the circumstances around them, but rather on what God was saying to them.

But there’s something more going on here as well,

something I have seen,

something I have experienced,

something that I cannot explain

but I know it to be an amazing and incredibly powerful work of God,

a work of God that has the power to proclaim Him to the world in which we live

with a power and clarity

that nothing else can do.

I will try to state it in a single sentence

and then talk a little more about it

to try to explain what I’m seeing.

But before I offer you that sentence,

let me say first

that suffering...pain -

both physical pain

and emotional pain

are inescapable certainties

in the lives of every person who will ever enter this world.

All of that pain

can be traced back ultimately

to the rebellion of the human race against our Creator.

And now, the consequences of that rebellion

has brought about a world

in which we will hurt.

Some of the pain we suffer

is an obvious direct result of our own wrong choices.

But much of it enters our lives

simply because we are the victims of the wrong choices

of the human race stretching all the way back to Adam and Eve.

There are more than a few of you here this morning

who live everyday of your lives

forced to cope with something that doesn’t work right in your physical body,

something that causes you both physical pain

and emotional pain because of what you have to cope with.

What you face is a direct result

of what happened to our physical bodies

as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden.

And all of us at times face intense emotional pain and suffering

because we live in a world in which,

apart from the transforming work of God in our lives,

selfishness always trumps love,

resulting in intense emotional isolation,

and loneliness,

and fear,

and shame,

and perversion,

and bigotry,

and racism,

and hatred.

Simply put,

pain, suffering in some form is the constant backdrop of life on this planet.

And now that sentence I promised you.

Suffering apart from the working of the Spirit of God within us

makes us bitter, angry, self-protective, guarded, and self-centered members of society,

but suffering in the life of a person whose heart is open to the Spirit of God

creates tremendous inner strength clothed in gentleness, kindness, compassion,

and a longing to reach out to help and heal others who are in pain.

I cannot explain that,

but I know it to be an absolute certainty of life.

When I meet a person who is obviously filled with compassion,

or with kindness,

or with gentleness,

or courage,

I know I am with a person who has gone through pain in the presence of God.

And this is in no way just an old people thing.

Suffering knows no age limits.

I have known some young people still in their teens

who already display tremendous qualities of strength, courage, and compassion

as a direct result of the things they have suffered during their few years of life.

I cannot explain to you

how the Spirit of God accomplishes this

in the lives of those who are open to Him.

All logic tells us

that suffering should make us thick-skinned, bitter, and resentful.

But in the most miraculous way

God is able to use suffering in the lives of those who are open to Him

to literally reshape us into the image of His Son.

I think it has something to do

with His commitment to undo the curse in the lives of His people,

to literally bring good out of evil in our lives.

And when Paul told the Philippians, For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake...

He was telling them the truth -

to suffer in the presence of God as His child

is indeed a gift, a high honor

because of what God is able to accomplish first in our life

and then through our life

as a result of that suffering.

And there simply is no one in our world today

who more clearly and more powerfully proclaims the reality of God

than the person who has gone through suffering

and come out on the other side knowing their God is absolutely good

and absolutely adequate

for anything we may encounter in this life.

Phil. 1:29 For to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake,

Phil. 1:30 experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, and now hear to be in me.