474: Introduction to Philippians | Tim Henderson

Introduction

All right, well you guys, Dave already mentioned this, but Will and Becky are back. Some of you guys that have been around for a while, what we’ll recall is that Will and Becky used to lead our youth ministry and they’re currently serving in Cambodia as missionaries, church planters. We love these guys. It’s Bob’s daughter, Becky. I see Will. Where’s Becky? She off? Becky? I don’t know where you are. She gone? With the baby. Sad. Okay, so she’s not actually here. All the way here to get away from the jungle heat and it didn’t work at all, man. That’s so sad. But they’ll be around for a little while and get some time with them. We just love and admire these guys so much.

We are going to be this summer, as it really starts to feel like summer, doing a new sermon series on Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, better known, of course, as Philippians. And we’re kind of starting this week, but we’re really kind of starting it in two weeks. So today is more of an early warning preview. So next Sunday, won’t be Philippians, next Sunday is going to be Harrison preaching. And Harrison is going to be our main speaker all throughout VBS this week. And we really try to make sure that VBS is welcoming for families that have come, that maybe aren’t part of our church, and that we want them to come to church afterwards.

And so Harrison is going to be preaching next week, kind of tying up our VBS. And then the following week is when we’re really going to begin Philippians in earnest. And so what I’m hoping to do this week is kind of prompt your thinking about it and encourage you for the next two weeks to read and/or listen to Philippians a whole bunch. So that when we start the book, study kind of in earnest in two weeks, we’ll all be ready for it. And I’m really hoping that you’ll do that, not just trusting that what we’re going to do in this room will be helpful, but that in your own personal study that you’ll be jumping into that book.

Because here’s the thing, God’s word is filled with treasure, and you can find it. A few years ago, probably maybe three years ago, Kelly and I went on our first ever vacation without children since having children. So I don’t know, we probably went 30 years without a vacation without our kids. And so we went, it was a long time coming, and we went to Costa Rica. And we went to Costa Rica. One of our stops was to go to, they have this national park, I think it’s called Manuel, what is it called, Antonio, or something like that, National Park, especially a jungle. So we went into this jungle, and that was cool, but jungles are just, I mean, it looks like a jungle.

And so we hired this guide who would tell us where this stuff was. And he was awesome. So we’re walking through, you know, through this trail in the middle of, you know, all these leafy trees, and he would stop, he’d be like, no stop, look there, look up at that branch. And he set up this telescope, and so he would like peer through the telescope and get it all spotted on, you know, and there’d be a sloth or a snake or monkeys or birds or something cool. And it was, it was a ton of fun, right, to have a guide who could see stuff like that.

For Dave and I, one of our most solemn responsibilities is to know the jungle of Scripture and be able to point things out to you. It’s our pleasure to show you things so that you can see them. But you guys, it’s your job to actually see it. Just imagine how lame our jungle tour would have been if our guide would like set up his telescope and he’d look and he’d like spot some sloth and then simply describe it to us. All right. There’s a sloth. He’s in a tree. He’s got these long claws and he’s just like super, super slow. But he never steps away from the telescope to let us see it, right? The dude would be describing these like, these like monkeys, there’s a lot of monkeys in this jungle. And he’s like, tell us, okay, there’s monkeys here. If you look over there, it’s like, oh, gosh, one of the monkeys is eating one of the baby monkeys.

All right. If a monkey is eating baby monkeys, I want to watch that happen, okay? I want to see that, right? And if he never stepped back from the telescope, it was mere narration, narration of what is going on, that would be so lame. I don’t want to hear it described. I want to watch the monkey eat a monkey.

So your job, you guys, is to engage in the book even and especially when we’re not in this room together. We’re going to guide you through it. We’re going to say, point out, like, let’s see this, notice this, but then the hope is that you’re going to go back and you’re going to peer down that little eyepiece yourself. Maybe you’ll go down a side trail that we discuss. Maybe you’re going to discover things that we’ve never seen ourselves, but it’s going to be a lot more fun this way.

So what I want to do today is just kind of give you the backstory of the book. This is the letter to the church in Philippi, the Philippians, but I want to tell you how we got there and kind of give you the human context of the story. So chiefly, I want to talk to you about Paul’s prison epistles, okay? So here’s what I mean by that. Paul is, for my money, I think Paul is the most influential leader in the early church. I recognize that saying that, I’m going to have to spend an eternity with Peter, but dude, it was Paul, okay? Paul was the man. He had the greatest impact on the world.

Paul was a Jew who hated Christianity, but he had this encounter with Jesus. And when I say he had an encounter with Jesus, everything about that encounter was strange because Jesus had already been crucified, had already raised him to dead, and it already ascended to be with the Father. But he kind of comes back and he confronts Paul who’s doing an enormous amount of damage to the church. And when he confronts him, it’s over. Paul believes. Paul’s entire life in a moment is just flipped upside down. And he goes from being one of the greatest antagonists of the church to one of the greatest apologists for the church. And he spends the rest of his life traveling from city to city, basically across the Roman Empire, telling people both Jews and Greeks how they could know the God who came and made the world and died for them. He is, again, I think he’s the most influential evangelist and discipler that the church had and his impact continues forever.

So that’s Paul. But then what he would do, when he would leave a town, he would still be concerned about the people he left behind, he’d form them into communities, make new believers, introduce them to each other, and then he’d move on to the next city where he would do it again. But then word would reach his ears that they had fallen into some error or they were confused about something or in some cases that they were killing it, that they were just doing such a great job. So he would write them letters. We call, because we’re fancy about everything, we call these letters epistles. All that it means is letters. We should just call them letters. We should speak the way people speak. But anyway, Paul’s epistles are simply Paul’s letters, letters that he wrote to these early churches.

Here’s the thing, though, well, he would write these letters and he would tell people, “Hey, this is what you’re doing wrong. This is what you’re doing right. Let me clarify this,” and very quickly, like immediately other people would realize, “Hang on a second. Can I read that letter that Paul wrote you?” Paul would write specific letters to specific people at a particular time. And then those letters would get copied down, hand copied, and then distributed to other towns.

You’ve probably never gotten a letter in the mail from somebody that you sat down and like hand made a copy and then sent to someone else. The closest that you’d come to this is if you’ve ever forwarded an email that came to you and you bounced it to somebody else. What happens is the early church recognizes, “Hang on, there’s more going on here than meets the eye. This is not merely a letter from Paul to the church in Philippi. This is also a letter from God to the church everywhere.” So these letters get copied and bound and distributed, collected into these things.

Over time, all of this collection of these letters from Paul, not just from Paul, but letters from James, letters from John, letters from Peter, all the early church leaders, these things start to get collected and treasured because very early the church realized these are not ordinary letters. There’s more going on here.

That’s Paul’s letters or his epistles. Third thing, Paul’s prison epistles. There’s a collection, a subset of these letters that Paul wrote, or what we call the prison epistles. All we mean by that was that Paul was literally in prison when he wrote them. Anybody know what they were? Paul’s prison epistles? Could you tick them off? Ephesians is right, Nick. Good job. Philippians. Two for two, you guys are killing it, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon, okay?

Now, it’s not particularly important that you know that, but when we say that there is prison epistles literally, those letters, if you just go back and you’re reading Ephesians on your own, you’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, he keeps talking about being in jail.” So in Philippians, he says things like this. He says, “I hold you in my heart for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.” He says, “Most of all brothers, having become confident,” and most, I’m sorry, “and most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment are much more bold to speak the word without fear.” It says, “The former proclaimed Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.”

He’s being literal. He’s actually in jail. Philippians is one of Paul’s prison epistles, but it is maybe the most prison-y epistles because it’s doubly a prison epistle. He’s not just that he wrote it from prison, but he wrote it to a community that came into existence while he himself was being imprisoned many years earlier, all right? So I want you to see where this happens. Go to Acts 16, and by the way, I was told after the first service that I’ve got a couple of mistakes in my slides, I think we’re going to call one of these Acts 15. That’s a lie. They’re all Acts 16, and there might even be one missing. That’s all 100 percent my fault. No one in the back is screwing this up. That’s on me. You know, you’re smart, kid. So, you know, you’ll figure it out.

Okay? Acts 16. Here’s what happens. Acts—oh, let me see if it exists. Acts is not a letter. Well, actually, it kind of is. It’s a letter from this guy named Luke, another guy named Theophilus, but it doesn’t function like an epistle. What it functions is is the storyline for the whole thing. What’s so great about Acts is it gives us about the first 30 years of Christianity. After the resurrection, the first three decades is all these new believers are grappling with all that’s going on and trying to make sense of it all. We get to watch what they did, the things they struggled with, and then all of these other letters that Paul and Peter and John wrote, we can kind of fit them in. This acts as the timeline, and we can see where things line up, and there’s real people in all of these, and they all, they interact with each other, so what you’ll see, you might read about one person in Acts, and it shows up in this letter, and then in another letter. It’s all the same thing, right? These things are not just lowered down from heaven, but there’s this dynamic story that’s happening.

And in Acts 16, we’re going to get the back story for how the church in Philippi came to be. So in verse 6, and Melissa made this look easy, didn’t she, with all these proper names? I don’t know how to say any of these words, I’m just going to fake it, and maybe I’ll just try to remember what Melissa said. Acts 16, they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. So when they had come up to Mecia, Mecia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.

That’s a really interesting moment, and honestly, I don’t know what’s going on there, I don’t know what happens. We don’t get to hear how did the Spirit direct Paul, “Hey, don’t go there, don’t go there,” right? Maybe it was just super difficult, the circumstances were not able to be overcome. Maybe there was a vision, maybe there was a dream, we don’t know, we don’t get to hear what it is, but for some reason or another, the path is blocked, and so Paul goes somewhere else. And by the way, of course he goes somewhere, he always goes somewhere else. Paul is not going to encounter some difficulty and then just stop. He’s always going to be like, “All right, fine, we’ll do something else, and we’ll get it done.” There was a guy, when I was on staff with a crusade, we love to do evangelism, we love to see the gospel spread, and there was this guy who led like a million people to Christ, he was unbelievably fruitful in his personal evangelism, and somebody asked him, like, what is that? How does that work? And he said, it’s really simple. When I sit down next to somebody, I talk to them about Jesus, and if they don’t want to talk about Jesus, I sit down next to someone else. Isn’t that brilliant? That is what Paul does, right? He’s like, “It doesn’t work here, all right, fine, we’ll go someplace else.” And so he does. There’s eight, passing by Missia, they went down to Troas, and a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. This time we get a little bit more detail about how he’s being directed. He has a vision, and he concludes on the basis of that vision, Macedonia, it is. And so they go. Now, it might be helpful to know that Macedonia is a region, whereas Philippi is a city. So it might be a little bit analogous that we could be talking about right now. You are in both Virginia and Roanoke. And usually when the Bible is talking about Philippi, it just calls it Macedonia. It’s just giving you the big area. So whenever you see Macedonia shows up, I’ll show you why in a little bit. It’s a pretty, it’s a significant place.

So they come here to Macedonia in particular to Philippi, and verse 11. So setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace and then following date in the Apollus and from there to Philippi. Here we are, which is the leading, a leading city in the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. And we remained in the city for some days.

A couple of things about that, they’re kind of important. Philippi is a Roman city. This is the—right here, Acts 16. This is the first time the gospel penetrates into Europe. If you think about how much the gospel transformed Europe and how much European Christianity has transformed the world, this is where it starts. Philippi is the beachhead for the gospel into Europe. It was a big, big deal.

Second, it’s a Roman city. There’s not a lot of Jewish people. And so one of the peculiar things about Philippi, or the letter to the Philippians, is that it never once quotes the Old Testament. Paul cites the Old Testament over and over again, generally because there’s a Jewish audience in these cities that he writes to and he’s speaking within their cultural context, not so in Philippians. No Jews. He doesn’t quote the Old Testament. It’s just a different environment altogether, okay? So when he goes there, do you remember where does Paul always go when he goes into a new city? What’s his first stop? Synagogue, right? When you get to Philippi, Lily, there is no synagogue because there’s not enough Jews to have a synagogue. So what they have, do you know what they have when they don’t have a synagogue? It’s a place of prayer, right? So a place of prayer, think of like a mini synagogue. There’s not enough, a large enough community to kind of support a synagogue.

So he goes there and he goes to where he imagines people who were gathered to pray. So he’s going to meet this wealthy woman Lydia, verse 13. And on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside where we suppose there was a place of prayer, small community of Jews. When we sat down and we spoke to the women who had come together, the one who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods. Who was? And he uses a technical phrase here, a worshiper of God. You may know what that means, but he says she was a worshiper of God. It means she’s a Gentile who worships the God of Israel. It means that she’s not, she’s not Jewish, she’s neither Jewish nor a pagan. She’s this weird crisscross of a pagan who was recognized that the God of Israel is the true God. So she’s already free inclined to worship him, but she doesn’t understand the gospel. So the Lord opens her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized and her household as well, she urged us saying, “If you’ve judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.” And she prevailed upon us.

Okay. So we are, the trip into Philippi is going really well. Everything’s encouraging. They found a community. He found people that have an open heart. Lydia in particular, the Lord opens her heart to respond to Paul’s message. Everything’s great. However, right now, everything’s about to go incredibly sideways for Paul. He’s going to meet this woman—I’m not going to read it. This would be one of those things where you can like look through the telescope on your own, but you go home and you can chase this down.

In the rest of Acts 16, everything, everything that happens is super, super weird. Okay, so there’s going to be this woman and she is like a fortune teller, you know, possessed by some kind of a demon. Paul drives this demon out of her, which really ticks off her owners, that woman was a slave, and they throw him in jail. They don’t just throw him in jail, but they beat him. And so begins the strangeness of Paul’s time in Philippi. He and Silas, his tribal companion, have been severely beaten. They’ve been put in stocks. I don’t know what that looked like. I think of like pilgrims, you know, like that wood thing, you know, where they get their head in your hands through. They’re tied up, they’re chained up, they’re beaten, they’re in pain, they’re in prison. And what a normal person would do in that circumstance is complain or whine or cry or moan. And what do Paul and Silas do instead? They sing praises. Okay, he’s just a very strange response.

Well, not only are they strange in their praising God for this circumstance, which is so miserable, but then there’s an earthquake and it’s kind of a magic earthquake because not only does it shake the building, not only do the doors open up, but their shackles come off. You can kind of get to like, I can see like an earthquake makes the doors open, but when the heck is making, why do you get unhandcuffed when there’s an earthquake, okay? What do you do? If you’re in prison and there’s an earthquake and the doors break open and your chains fell off, you leave, right? I mean, of course, don’t be stupid. Of course you leave. This is a divine intervention.

You guys, Paul doesn’t leave. He stays in prison and we find out the reason he stays in prison is that he knows that if he leaves, then the jailer is a dead man. And Paul, who has been singing songs to Jesus this whole time, wants his jailer to come to know the Savior. And so he stays in prison, leads this guy to Christ, he and his whole family, kind of like Lydia and her whole family. So there’s this transforming effect and then here’s the third thing that I think is maybe the strangest thing of all. We can kind of get our head around Paul who lives to talk to people about Jesus, why he might stay in prison, but don’t miss this fact, everybody else stays in prison too. You have all these unbelievers who have, like, their chains come off, too, their doors are open, too, they could jet, but they stay. And it doesn’t, the text doesn’t say, this is one of those mistakes, it’s Acts 16, that’s a lot, okay? The text doesn’t tell us why, but I think you guys, that the reason that they don’t leave is because they’re so intrigued by the Apostle Paul, who is this guy? What does he know that we don’t, that enables him to sing in his pain? Who is this guy that is more interested in what is beneficial for his jailer than his own freedom? And so it’s like, I think I wanted to see the end of the show, like, hang on, hang on, I just want to see how this finishes and they stay too, okay?

So when you read Acts 16, you guys, all kinds of weird stuff happens. This is how the Philippian church gets started. This is the ground of it, which is why I say that in some significant way, this thing is a double prison epistle. It’s written from prison, but it’s written to a community born out of its experience being in prison. And so what I want to invite you to do in the next two weeks is read it, read it a bunch of times, just kind of let, get, get from it, it’s four chapters, you can bang through it really quickly. You can read it many times and be familiar with it. So as we dig through it together, starting a couple of weeks, you’ll be ready for it.

But here’s one better. You could also not just read it, but you could listen to it. When you came in, you should have gotten one of these, right? On the bottom of this, that thing’s called a QR code for those of you over the age of 40. What you do is you point your phone camera at that, it’ll bring you to a website, and then you can download this free Bible app. This app is fantastic. This will take you to this Bible app. It’s free, it’s always free, everything about it’s free. You can get every translation known to man. Not only can you get them so you can read it, but you can get them in audible form so you can just listen to it. And I’m a huge fan of having an audible Bible, especially a free one, especially a free one that’s in my pocket at all times.

So when you’re doing mindless things, you’re doing the dishes, you’re cutting the grass, you’re walking your dog, just turn it on and let Philippians run through your brain. You will, invariably, phase out of attention. So what? You will also phase back into attention, right? And so the more that we just have God’s Word just kind of coursing through our brains, it would just stuff will start to stick. You’ll hear things. You’ll remind, you’ll remember things. And as you do, there’s going to be rich treasure, it’s in there and you can find it. As you do, I’ve only got four minutes. So let me tell you, I’ll give you a handful of things to look for or to listen for in the next couple of weeks as you read through Philippians, okay?

Number one, his favorite recurring term is joy or rejoice. It’s the same word, noun and verb form are the same thing. Joy and rejoicing. It’s four chapters long, 12 times. He talks about joy and rejoicing. He’s in prison, he’s suffered enormously, but the dude is just so cheerful. There is, there really is, a transcendent joy. So he’ll say things like, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” I will say it again, “Rejoice.” He’ll say, “Therefore my brothers, you whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown.” So watch the cheer, the tone of this book.

You might also notice this, Paul’s primary teaching method is to give examples of people. His primary example is Jesus, but he also uses himself, Timothy, and Epaphroditus. So you might watch these character portraits, four different snapshots that he gives of these people. And what I think we’re supposed to do is watch them and notice them and be curious, like, “Why are they like that?” And how could those character traits become mine as well?

The primary example by far in this book is Philippians chapter two, we call it, it’s called the Christ Tim. And it is where Paul probably didn’t write this, he’s probably borrowing a song or a hymn that was existent in their culture, maybe. But it’s a famous passage, he’s talking about Jesus who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing becoming a servant, being humbled, right? Humble himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. And there’s this descent from the heights of being God himself, not considering that equality, you know, kind of, lower, lower, lower, and humbles himself as a beating to death, even death on a cross. And then it just reverses, therefore God exalts him to the highest place and gives him the name that is above every name, that is the name of Jesus every knee would bow, every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. That is sometimes called the V-shaped gospel. We go to the lowest place or exalted to the highest place. Sometimes it’s been called the J-curve that God begins us here and he brings us through lowliness and then slingshots us up to the highest things.

Philippians 2 is the heart of the book. And so when we start our study of Philippians in a couple of weeks, we’re actually going to start in chapter 2. We could start in chapter 1 like a normal person, but we’re not going to because I really want to drill down. This is the primary portrait. So as you go through it, pay attention to Philippians 2, it’s a beautiful picture of Christ.

Let’s see what else. You might notice the Philippians is a thank you note. So I mentioned the Philippians are usually referred to as Macedonians elsewhere, it refers to the broader community. Do you know what they’re famous for in the rest of the New Testament? What is their kind of claim to fame? You might have just said it. I didn’t hear it. Say it louder? Wealth. Wealth. Yeah. Not okay. Close. Yeah. They are Paul’s favorite. They are—Lily, those are them. They are… His favorite might be the Thessalonians. He loves the Thessalonians, but the Macedonians, you guys, they fund his ministry over and over again. When you see them mentioned, it’s all in place, Acts 18, Paul’s functioning as a tent maker for a very short window until Timothy shows up with a bag of money from the Macedonians. Second Corinthians 8, he’s bragging about the Macedonians with generosity. Romans 15, same thing. The Macedonians are his primary financial supporter. They are equipping ministry across the area.

And so Philippians, chapter four in particular, is a thank you note. So notice that when you read through it. Opposition. It’s a happy letter. It’s a joyful letter. It’s a cheerful letter, but it is just riddled with warnings about their oppositions. He’ll say things like, “There are those who stir up trouble for me while I’m in change.” He’ll talk about dogs, men who do evil, mutilators of the flesh. He’ll talk about those that live as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose destiny is destruction. Okay, so as you walk through, it’s cheerfulness, but there’s a lot of opposition. Apparently, those two things can coexist. And then finally, just notice literally anything that catches your eye. There may be things that you see that you discover that no one else in this room has ever noticed or put together, and there’ll be the pleasure of self-discovery.

So that’s all in two weeks. You’ve got two weeks to get a bone up on Philippians. Get ready for it. In Acts 16, read all four chapters of Philippians, and then when we get together, the goal will be that we would all learn to kind of peer through the telescope to see what God has for us, because it is not just a letter from Paul to the Philippians. It is that, but more than that, it is a letter from God to you, and there’s treasure in there for all of us. Good enough.

The Context of the Passage

Okay. Let’s pray. Jesus, we love you, we thank you that you are at the center of this book, as you are at the center of all things, Lord, your loneliness, your willingness to go from the highest place to the lowest place. For us, that is the heart of our lives, that you would take upon yourself our culpability, our blame, that you would credit us with your righteousness is so fantastic and so magnificent that, of course, your Father raised you from the dead. Of course, your Father has seated you on the throne that you would rule over all things.

I pray that as we read this and study this this summer, you speak to a siege that we would discover things that will be helpful to us right here, right now, as we consider the particular circumstances of that group of people at a moment in time whose lives are not really that different from our own, but we love you, we exalt you. Amen.