11-18-12 TURNING EVIL INTO GOOD

We are going to return to our study

of the New Testament book of Philippians today,

and with it we also return to what I find to be one of the most

fascinating statements

in the entire book.

We are in Philippians 1:12:

Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel...

Now I know what we tend to do

with verses like this in scripture.

We tend to view them sort of as filler -

as words that are there

simply to help the writer transition

to the next important thing he has to say.

With this phrase

our natural tendency is to rush on

to verses 13 and 14 so that we can find out

how things have turned out.

But I don’t want us to leave this 12^th verse

until we have really heard

what it is that Paul is saying.

You see, there are two words in this verse

that we rarely put together in our own minds -

“circumstances” and “progress”.

If we were to translate this 12^th verse literally it would read,

“Now I want you to know, brethren, that the things concerning me have turned out to the advancement of the good news...”

The things concerning me...

My circumstances...

If you’ve been here for our study of Philippians up to this point

you know that Paul was writing this letter from a Roman prison

where he had been waiting for 2 years

for the trial that would determine

whether he would live or die.

For years prior to his arrest

Paul had hoped and planned to visit Rome,

the center of the known world.

Six years earlier Paul had written to the Christians in Rome saying,

For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you.

For more than 6 years Paul had been praying that God would make it possible

for him to get to Rome.

In his mind as he prayed those prayers

I think he saw himself walking into that city a free man,

ready to boldly proclaim the message of Christ

to the capital of the great Roman Empire.

In his mind it must have represented

the ultimate outreach opportunity -

with the potential of being

the crowning achievement of his life.

But his grand entrance

had not turned out at all like he’d anticipated -

Rather than cheering crowds

and great speeches

and hundreds turning to Christ,

Paul made his entrance into Rome

chained to a Roman guard

who tossed him into his prison,

closed the door,

turned the key,

and walked away.

And to complicate this mess even more,

Paul’s presence there

was the direct result of the actions

of a group of evil men determined to destroy Paul and his message.

They weren’t just sincerely confused,

or misguided,

they were evil,

filled with hatred

and committed to the pursuit of their evil ways at all costs.

And the object of their hatred

was focused directly on Paul.

And yet Paul writes:

‟Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out to the advancement of the good news...”

Where has evil touched your life?

Where have the evil actions of others

imprisoned you?

Where do you find yourself bound in fear

or shame

or painful memories

because of the circumstances in your life

brought on by the evil actions of others?

It’s one thing to look at our life

and know that what we struggle with

is the result of choices we’ve made

and things we have done.

But what if the turmoil in our life,

and the pain,

and the sorrow

is the direct result of circumstances brought about

by the evil actions of others?

You see, its one thing for Paul to say,

Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel in my life...,

but it is quite a different thing

for us to be able to make the same statement.

Left to ourselves

apart from the working of God in our lives,

our approach to circumstances

is usually very different

from what we see here in Paul.

You see, when Paul talks here about “circumstances”,

he’s talking about all of those things in our lives

that are totally out of our control,

things we didn’t ask for,

didn’t want,

and would change in an instant

if we had the power to do so.

It includes the way other people treat us

or don’t treat us.

It includes our health,

or the lack of it.

It includes all of the basic operating equipment we were handed at birth -

our IQ,

our temperament and basic personality,

our talents,

our weaknesses,

our special areas of vulnerability.

Everything that can in any way

be tied to any type of genetic link

from our past.

It includes the parents we were given,

and the environment in which we were raised.

It includes the schools we attended

and where and how we fit into

the social structure of those schools.

It includes every act

of every other human being

that has in any way touched our life.

And apart from the hand of God in our life

we have only a few options

for what we do with those circumstances.

Sometimes we turn bitter -

we hate,

we return evil for evil.

“How could they have done that to me?

Don’t they know how it hurt?

I’ll show them!

They’re going to pay for what they did

or said.”

You know those scenes at the end

of so many movies, and books

in which the hero finally gets his hands

on the villain who has been destroying his life

and our hero finally gets his chance

to just pound the little crud into the dirt.

And you know how

that scene just makes you want to cry out, “YES!!”

Do you know why I think we respond that way?

I think a big part of it is because

that’s what we long to do

with all of those circumstances in our own life

that have been beating up on us for so long.

We long to grab them around the neck

and fling them to the ground

and pound the pudding out of them

in a nice Christian sort of way.

It’s always fascinated me to notice

the way in which God

so clearly removes vengeance

from our hands

as an acceptable response

to the injustices in our lives.

King David in the Old Testament

is certainly the most powerful example

of how to do it right

when it comes to seeking vengeance

against those who are committing evil against us.

In case you would like to read it on your own,

beginning with about I Samuel 18

and continuing through the end of I Samuel

there is the account of the transition of

the throne of Israel from Saul,

the nation’s first king,

to David, the nation’s greatest king.

In that account there is a several year period between when David was anointed King

and when Saul actually died

and David ascended to the throne.

During much of that time

David was forced to go into hiding

and Saul is actively searching the land

looking for David in order to kill him.

Several times during those years

David had the opportunity to kill Saul.

Once he was so close to Saul

that he was able to cut off the end of his robe,

and take Saul’s spear

when Saul was inside a cave.

And when he was asked, “Why didn’t you kill him?

He wants to kill you,

you know you have been appointed by God

to be the next King of Israel,

and you know God has already rejected Saul

and given the kingdom into your hands...”,

David responded by saying, “NO! I will not raise my hand against the Lord’s anointed.”

David was saying, “God has placed this man in my life,

and only God has the authority to remove him.

Vengeance for evil committed against me is not mine to deal out.”

And so David continued to run,

and to hide,

and to live under the misery Saul’s evil brought into his life.

But during those years when David

was running and hiding from Saul

God accomplished an amazing work in David.

During those years he was in hiding,

all of the rejects of the Israeli society

began to go out to David

and join themselves to him.

He collected around him all of those who were discontented with life,

the rebellious young men

who were bored or wanted a change,

the stubborn,

undisciplined,

selfish men of Israel.

David had to take those men

and fashion them into a

disciplined, functioning army,

and in that process God took the shepherd boy David

and reshaped him into a man

qualified to lead an entire nation into greatness.

If David would have removed Saul when he had the chance,

he would have been forced into national leadership

long before he was ready for it.

It’s not that vengeance against evil is wrong,

it’s just that God tells us clearly

that we are not the ones qualified to deal it out.

Romans 12:19 says it best:

Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord.

God’s books are always balanced,

and I assure you, He is a strong supporter of the good guy coming out on top.

But He wants us to understand

that the vengeance thing

must be left in HIS hands.”

By the way, since I got off on this movie ending thing,

even though that scene where the hero

pounds the villain into the dirt

is probably not what God has for us,

there is another common movie ending

that is very much God’s way.

It’s those endings where the hero

has suffered unjustly throughout the entire movie,

and then at the end he is revealed to be

the rightful king

or the true owner of the magnificent estate,

or finally, publicly recognized for what he has done,

and he is suddenly elevated to a position

of great honor and prestige

and wealth.

Tolkien did a beautiful job with this

in the final scenes of the Lord of the Rings.

Throughout most of that entire remarkable story

Frodo and Sam churned through a world of evil,

among the most insignificant and unimportant creatures in society,

faithfully doing what they’d been given to do.

But in that final coronation scene

when Strider, the rightful king takes his throne

and the entire world bows before him,

when the Hobbits begin to bow,

suddenly the King stops them

and then proclaims to everyone there,

“NO! Hobbits bow to no one!!”

Folks that’s...do you remember...He who overcomes...

1PE 5:6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, [7] casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for you. ...[10] And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen {and} establish you. [11] To Him {be} dominion forever and ever. Amen!

But back to Paul

and Philippians...

Without the work of God in our lives

bitterness, and hatred,

and a hunger for revenge

is a natural and common response

to those circumstances in our life

that we don’t like and can’t change.

It would have been the most natural thing in the world

for Paul to spend his days in his Roman jail

brooding over the injustice that had cut his glorious ministry short.

A second common response to circumstances

and the effect they have on our life

is to find some place to hide from them -

to hide from the pain,

or the shame,

or the confusion,

behind an frantic schedule

that leaves no time to think or feel,

or behind an iron-fisted control

over every aspect of our life,

or behind a fog of alcohol or drugs or entertainment or anything else that keeps us from feeling the pain.

A third common response

to the circumstances in our life

is to use them as excuses,

convenient explanations

for our unwillingness to grow,

or to heal,

or to move into the kind of life

our Lord longs for us to know.

It seems like Paul’s imprisonment

would have made such an ideal excuse

for him to bow out of the work

God was seeking to do through him.

“Sure, I’d like to keep up the crusade,

but what can I do? I’m in prison,

and until God gets me out of here

there’s nothing I can do.”

When I read Paul’s statement in Phil. 1:12,

PHI 1:12 Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel,...

I couldn’t help but think that

this is exactly where the Spirit of God

is seeking to lead every one of us.

Because there is a 4^th possible response

to the circumstances in our life as well.

We can also take those circumstances,

place them into the hands of our God

and trust Him to bring good

out of evil.

All Paul is doing here in this 12^th verse

is illustrating with his own life

what he told the Roman Christians

six years earlier in Rom 8:28:

28] And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

The only world currently available

for us to occupy is a world coated in evil.

The only life currently available for us to live

is a life stained with evil.

The agreement our God has made

with those of us who call Him Father

is not one in which He promises

to remove all evil from our lives.

Rather,

He invites us to place that evil into His hands

and allow Him to reshape it into good in our life.

And I do find it fascinating

when I realize that in the end

the most effective and enduring impact of Paul’s life

came as a direct result of the things he did when he was in prison.

If he would not have been in that prison,

the world would never have had Philippians, or Ephesians, or Colossians, or Philemon.

When I started 1^st grade in the fall of 1953

it became evident to my teacher very quickly

that I was not catching on to this reading thing

as quickly as I should.

Getting the words from that page

to my eyes

to my mind

and then somehow out of my mouth

was an extremely frustrating process.

All the way through grade school

when the class was divided up into reading groups

I was always in the one with all the really slow readers.

Whenever we would have to share a book in class

with the person next to us

and tell them when we were finished with one page

so that we could turn to the next,

I learned very early that I could never finish a paragraph

in the time it took the other guy to read a page.

At first I use to think they were lying

when they said they were finished,

and then eventually, I’d just wait for them to say they were done,

and then I’d say I was done too.

When I read my school books at home

I would often read them out loud

because it didn’t take any longer

then trying to read them silently

and I seemed to understand them better that way.

In our modern school system

I suppose I would be tested and labeled dyslexic.

In order to survive in school

I gravitated towards those subjects

that involved very little reading -

first drama,

and then speech.

In college I actually majored in speech.

And when my Lord entered my life

in my late teens

I began to read His Word

out loud

because it was easier to understand.

And then I began to memorize it

because that made it even easier to understand.

And now, looking back on my battle with the written word,

I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the good news in my life...

And to be honest,

that’s just the tip of the iceberg,

and the easiest one for me to share

of a whole bunch of pain-filled circumstances in my own life

that my Lord has recreated into good in my walk with Him.

I have no idea what circumstances in your life cause you the most frustration

or pain.

But I know with certainty that no circumstance in our life is beyond the healing power of our God,

and that right now in each of His children’s lives

He is actively working to bring us to the place where we can see and say,

I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the good news in my life.