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Your series on Philippians is all about joy, and Helen and I come to you with a lot of joy today. We rejoice to be sharing again with the Hendersons and with the Pritchetts, these special friends of ours, and with many of you. We rejoice to be in your church again where we sense such vitality and such a welcome for us. And we’re glad that we can share this book which has really come out of a lot of experience with us and we’ve already found that it has really spoken to some others who have struggles similar to ours and we hope it will be a blessing to you—any of you who receive one.

 

And then the great joy that I have today is being able to preach the gospel. You know what the Apostle Paul said:

To me who am less than the least of all saints is this grace given that I should preach among the nations the unsearchable riches of Christ.

 

And we are privileged—we who preach the gospel—to share the message that makes people unspeakably rich. They may be poor and wretched in a thousand ways, but the good news of Christ is what makes everything different for them. And for us to have the joy and privilege of holding that out, sharing that with the world around us, is just a privilege and joy hard to express. And the longer I do this and the more my time that I’ll be able to do it is winding down, the more I prize these opportunities and treasure every chance to preach the gospel. So I thank you for inviting me and Helen back and we can be here today with you.

 

The word from which we listen today is in Philippians chapter 2 verses 12 to 30. I want you, as you listen to it, to think of yourselves for just a moment now as members of that Philippian church—the church that Paul especially loved—who shared his heart and passion for the gospel and to whom he felt especially close. And now he’s in prison and you’ve sent one of your members to be of help to him and he’s writing to talk about that and also to talk about God’s miracle work in the lives of people. So listen to what Paul says. Philippians 2 beginning at verse 12:

Therefore, beloved. Therefore, beloved [what comes next?]. Therefore, beloved, as you have always obeyed—not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence—work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you to will and to do of His good pleasure.

Do all good things without murmuring and arguing that you may be blameless and innocent, the children of God without blemish, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, in which you shine like stars in the darkness and I will be able to boast on the day of Christ. If you hold fast to the word of life, I’ll be able to boast that I haven’t run or labored in vain.

And if I am poured out as a libation on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all. And you also must joy and rejoice with me.

I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, that I may be comforted and cheered by news from you. I have no one like him who will be sincerely concerned for your welfare. For all are seeking their own interests and not those of Jesus Christ. But you know the proof of Timothy, how like a son with the father he has served with me in the work of the gospel. I hope to send him to you soon and I trust in the Lord that I also will be able to come to you.

But for now I need to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, my co-worker, my fellow soldier, your messenger and minister to my needs. He has been thinking of you and he has been grieved longing for you and he has been grieved that you heard that he was sick. And indeed he was very sick; he almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me that I wouldn’t have one sorrow after another. So I’m very happy to be able to send him to you. Welcome him then with the Lord in all joy, and honor such people because he was close to death for the work of Christ, risking his life to make up for the services that you could not give me.

Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord!

 

This is the word of God. And now as we open it together, let’s pray.

 

Holy Spirit, come. As we’ve sung: rain down. Do Your great work in

taking the things of Jesus Christ and making them fresh and real and

luminous and powerful to us. Give help to me, Lord, as I peach this wonderful word of the gospel and to all of us as we receive it. And let there be some deep, wonderful work of God in each one of us today. In the name of Jesus we pray.

Amen.

 

Work out your own salvation. Why? Because you have to do it? Because you have to measure up? Certainly not. Salvation is all about God’s gifts. By grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It’s a gift of God not of works lest anyone should boast. Do it with fear and trembling. Why? Because you’re afraid you may not make it, or that God may zap you? No. Not at all. No. Pull your heart into it and do it with a quivering sense of awe because it’s God that is working in you. That’s the marvelous thing. That’s the thing to make the hairs rise on your neck: that God is doing a miracle work in you, His people.

 

You know you sometimes see a sign: Caution. Men Working? Well, this is sort of like: Heads Up. God Is Working. God is doing something wonderful. God is doing a work in His people so to make them such beautiful, bright people that even the angels would stoop down in wonder to look. That’s what God is up to in the lives of His people.

 

What will you look like as you move along in this matter of having God’s miracle work done in you? Well, Paul starts out saying you’ll do everything without murmuring. You remember how God didn’t like the murmuring of the people in the wilderness? That word murmuring almost sounds like what it is, doesn’t it? It’s like grumbling does: murmuring and grumbling—not music in God’s ears. You’ll do away with murmuring and grumbling and with arguing: the bickering that chills joy, that wounds love among any people. You’ll do away with that. You’ll be becoming—children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you will shine like stars. And you’ll do it holding fast the word of life. This is the word of life. This is the word of Jesus Christ and, when you hold it fast, that makes all the difference in the lives of people.

 

We went to a conference yesterday, Helen and I, before we came down here and the speaker, Tim Brown—who’s a dear friend of ours—was talking about Bible-reading habits in this country. In a Gallup poll recently it was discovered testing how many people in the churches—people who are professing Christians—how many people read the Bible seriously at least once a week. What percentage do you think they came up with? People who are serious enough about the Bible to read it intentionally at least once a week? The percentage is seven percent! Now, of course, he didn’t do the test in Indiana. Maybe it would be much better than that here and even more. So that would be up to fourteen percent if you doubled it. Or, he surely didn’t come to this church because he would know that there are a lot more who do that: maybe double that—twenty eight percent—for the group here. But still isn’t it dismal in terms of the attitude of people today toward the Bible? And the speaker was saying maybe this is the reason why the Christian church in the world today—in this country especially—has so little impact. Maybe this is the reason why there aren’t the obviously transformed lives that get people’s attention. Maybe this is the reason why Christians are not salt and light full of love and joy in the world around them, instead very much resemble the unbelieving world.

 

Because this is the word of life. This is what sustains your spiritual life; this is what nourishes you; this is what keeps you going and fills you with love and joy. Meditating in the word of the Lord day and night makes you like a tree planted by the rivers of water always drawing up fresh refreshment and food and strength for the journey.

 

So you’ll be holding fast to the word of life as his miracle work goes on in you. Those will be some of the qualities.

 

Now what Paul does in this marvelous passage is give us three sketches of how the miracle work of God in someone’s life translates into the experience of real people. And the first sketch is about Timothy.

 

Timothy was the treasured son that Paul never had and he was so dear to the apostle. The apostle writes to him in a couple of the letters; calls him my child Timothy, my loyal child, my dear son, my beloved son. He talks about Timothy’s sincere faith and how there’s a fire burning in his heart that’s been burning there ever since his ordination. Timothy was a man after Paul’s heart. He served with Paul in the ministry of the gospel like a son with a father. And so now Paul wants to send somebody to you Philippians and he’s looking around to find the right person. Nobody else seems to measure up. In fact, he says what has been for me maybe the most piercing word in the Scriptures. He talks about these other people that might be candidates for mission to the Philippians and he says about them they all seek their own interests and not those of Jesus Christ.

 

Does that stab your conscience the way it does mine? I try to think of how the Apostle Paul might have sized me up if he looked at large tracts of my life and experience. How he might have said, “Yeah, Bill Brownson he’s a believer all right, but he’s always so concerned about his own reputation and his own image.

And you know if it isn’t that, he thinks too much about the fortunes of his athletic teams, or about his golf scores and those things are not bad in themselves but they sap his energy and they keep him from being steadily passionate about ministry to people in their needs.” And I would have to say, “Mea culpa. I’m the man!”

 

I won’t ask about how he might size you up and how he would consider you as a candidate for ministry to the Philippians because these people were the joy of Paul’s heart. He writes to them. He says, “You know, every time I think of you I rejoice because of your fellowship in the gospel.” And the word can also be translated “your fellowship in furthering the gospel.” You see, Paul was passionate his whole life long about sharing the gospel with the world, and whenever he found people who shared that vision and who felt the pulse of that heartbeat, he was so close to them. And he was so close to the Philippians and they were close to him. They remembered how he came to Philippi, how he endured being beaten with rods and put into the stocks of a filthy prison because he came there to tell them about Jesus. So, they responded to that and whenever Paul left there—went somewhere else, the Philippians would pursue him with gifts. They’d provide food or clothing or money or books or whatever that would bless him and encourage him in his work and we’ll find later they sent him Epaphroditus.

 

But Timothy, he was one that Paul could count on. He knew that when Timothy went to Philippi he would have no other agenda than that of ministering to the needs of these people and caring about their highest, deepest welfare. So he was ready to send Timothy. What a man! Read about him in the letters to Timothy and you see what a wide-ranging set of gifts and what a marvelous character this man had. He had learned what it is to set aside his own aims and desires and to pour himself out in ministry to people.

 

The second sketch is about Epaphroditus. That’s one of those long names in the Bible. I have a friend down in North Carolina who whenever he gets to a name like that, he doesn’t even try to pronounce it; he just says, “Hard word.” So, he’ll be reading along, “…and then they went to ‘Hard word’ and they met ‘Hard word.’” He has some other challenges in his use of language. I remember I was down there once for some revival meetings, and he was fervently praying before the services began. “O Lord, we pray that you will survive this church.” And the Lord, of course, did! But maybe the funniest one is when we were sittin’ at the table and he was bowing his head to pray and he said, “Lord, we thank thee for the hands that have repaired this food.”

 

But Epaphroditus, once you get the hand of it, is not really hard to say. It kind of rolls off the tongue. Say it now with me: Epaphroditus. Yes. And this is another man in whom this tremendous miracle work of God goes on. I mean of all the people in Philippi that they thought about that they could send who would really encourage and help Paul, they picked this man Epaphroditus. And this is what Paul says about him: he’s my brother—he’s a soul mate for Paul; he’s my co-worker—he labors with me in the gospel; he’s the fellow soldier—he’s right out on the front lines with me in all the conflicts of the gospel, Epaphrotidus; and he’s your messenger and your minister to my needs. And he brought gifts from there and he was just there to be a friend to Paul. And he was a friend in costly ways. He got sick. You know, sometimes when you visit people in prison (I’ve done quite a bit of that in my life), they treat you in the prisons as though you were an ally to the prisoner. They sort of suspect you, so they make you take off your shoes and your socks and look in your mouth because you’re suspected, you know, of being possibly in league with these. Well, he probably didn’t have it very easy there in that prison trying to minister to Paul and he got very ill and almost died. And then Paul talks about him that he was near to death for the sake of Christ—risking his life to make up for the services that you couldn’t give me. If Timothy was able to lay behind him his personal aims in order to pour himself out in ministry to the needs of others, this Epaphroditus was ready to leave the routine of life to risk everything for a friend.

 

You know, we had a speaker in one of our classes at our church who spoke recently about friendship, and he talked about how friendship in our American culture is viewed in a very shallow kind of a way. I mean if you have a number of people you get along with fairly well, you say, “Oh, I’ve got a lot of friends and I’m a friendly guy.” But what our speaker was saying is, “They’re talking about acquaintances.” Friends, in the biblical vision, are people who will risk for you: people who will lay down their life for you. Jesus spoke about friendship in that way. Friends like Jonathan. Remember Jonathan who was David’s friend? Jonathan was the heir to the throne, but because he knew that God had tapped David to be the next king instead of resenting him and trying to get rid of him, he loved this man as his friend, and he gave him his sword and his belt and really his throne and cared more about him it seemed than he did about himself: real friend. Have you had any like that? I ask myself, “How many people am I a friend to like that? How many friends do I have that will deal with me that way?” I think of, I think of one especially: a man named Steve. When Helen and I served a church in Chicago, he was one of the elders. He would come at six o’clock in the morning to pray with me—and when he had a busy, busy day ahead of him. When we had to send our son, Billy who was brain-injured, to Cove School in Racine, Wisconsin which was more expensive every month than my monthly salary almost, it was Steve who gave generously to make that possible and he enlisted other people to give. And then when Steve became very ill with multiple sclerosis—see, his love for us just continued. There were nights during a period of seven years night after night when he just could not even sleep because of the pain, but he never missed a night praying for me, for Helen, for each of our boys. I mean, that was a friend.

 

Then our son, David, who went through all kinds of struggles in his life: he went through mental illness—twelve or fifteen hospitalizations, and just all kinds of inner anguish. Then, in the latter years of his life, had a wonderful recovery and became just an amazing friend to people. There was a friend of his who fell off a roof and smashed his leg and ankle and tried for months to get some kind of treatment to make it better and finally they had to amputate. And he told us after our David’s death that David called him on the phone every week for five years to see how he was doing. I mean those are friends. And you know, we listened on the way down in our car yesterday to a CD by John Piper about William Wilberforce. Wilberforce you know was a remarkable leader in the British parliament oh close to two hundred years ago and he was wealthy; he was powerful; he came from a distinguished family; he had everything that the world would consider important. But Wilberforce became gripped in the depths of his soul with the plight of slaves, and for decades he labored seemingly fruitlessly—I think he proposed twelve bills in parliament that were all turned down; his life was threatened but he was such a friend to people who he saw going into the awful misery and living death of slavery that he never stopped. He was a friend to the slaves.

 

And Paul had one such friend and his name was—say it with me—Epaphroditus.

 

All right, now the third sketch—I’m not sure Paul intended to draw this one, but he did in the way he spoke about himself. He said, “If you hold fast to the word of life, I can boast on the day of Christ that I didn’t run in vain or labor in vain.”

 

This man Paul, he had no other aims in life. He didn’t care a rip about riches or fame or position or power. What he lived for was to see other people hold fast to the word of life, to see Christ formed in the lives of others. He could say to them, “Now we live if you stand fast in the Lord.” He could say to the Thessalonians, “What is our hope, our joy, our crown of rejoicing? Is it not you in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ in his coming?” I mean this man poured himself out for others all the time amidst dangers and shipwrecks and beatings and imprisonment. He just kept on. That was his heart. And then he says, “If I be poured out like a libation on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I’ll be glad and rejoice with you all.”

 

He didn’t think he would die in prison, but he knew there was a very great possibility that he would. I mean there’s no way to want that or to want to be released, but he said, “Hey, if I can be poured out as a libation, that will in some way serve your faith and the faith of others, I say, ‘Bring it on!’”

 

So don’t you think that Timothy and Epaphroditus from their association with Paul learned a lot about forgetting your own interests to serve others and about risking everything for the life of a friend? So what made the difference? What was responsible for the miracle life of Timothy and Epaphroditus and Paul?

 

Well, you don’t have to go far back. You probably heard just last week about the passage just before this one about this in the life of Jesus:

Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be clutched, but he emptied himself and made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.

 

Paul, Timothy, Epaphroditus learned from Jesus the way downward. Have you every thought of how much Jesus did that? He emptied himself to make us full with the fullness of God. He came so far down to lift us up. He became so poor so that we could be unspeakably rich. He suffered so that we could taste joy. He died that we might have life. He became the son of Mary so that you and I could become the sons and daughters of the living God and they learned that from him.

 

And, friends, with Paul and Timothy and Epaphroditus it wasn’t labored imitation. It was participation. You see, what Paul is talking about when he says that God is at work in you to will and to do of His good pleasure, he’s talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit to our lives to more and more transform us into the image of Jesus Christ, and what you see in the lives of these three people as sketches—Exhibit A—you see the life of Jesus being expressed in the lives of others.

 

And it’s when people hold fast this word and, for me this is the pattern of my life for a long time now: every day I want to give my life afresh to God and like Paul says, “By the mercies of God do it.” So every day I try to think about how great God’s love for me has been and I want to offer up my life to Him. Don’t you want to do that? That’s the response of a grateful heart to what God has done for you in Christ. So you give your life over to Him and you recognize that you are a man or woman in Christ and so you count upon it that you have died in the death of Jesus and you’ve been raised up in the resurrection of Jesus and now you are to live your life to God: this miracle life to God.

 

And so every day what I want to do after I commit my life to the Lord, I want to ask Him (this is one of my life verses—Luke 11:13): If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? I mean, you just ask; you commit your life to him; you ask to be filled with the Spirit and God always keeps his promises. You don’t have to go through any day without being filled with the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to face any problem or challenge or loss or trouble without the filling of the Spirit. You don’t have to try any teaching or evangelism in any strength of voice you can be filled with the Holy Spirit. And you see what the Holy Spirit does, friends, [we heard about that in Galatians 5 in the prayer] what the Holy Spirit does is bring the life of Jesus into your experience—those things we read about: the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, long suffering, generosity, kindness, meekness, self control, fidelity. Those are so many facets of the character of Jesus.

 

And you know here’s another life verse for me—Galatians 2:20:

I have been crucified with Christ yet I’m alive. I’m alive and yet it’s not I; it’s not the old I; it’s not I alone, but Christ is living in me.

 

That’s what the Holy Spirit does. He brings the presence of Jesus Christ into your life and every day you can say, “Lord Jesus, I’m called on this twenty first day of October to live a certain kind of life. I’m called to love you with all my heart and soul and strength and mind and I can no more do that than I can jump to the moon. But, Jesus, you are living in me and I trust you today to live out your life of love in my life and your life of praise and trust and believing prayer and your life of listening and then speaking the words you receive from God and your life of evangelizing and discipling, your life of acting justly and loving kindness. Your life lived out in my life and, friends, you know the only way you will ever live the Christian life is that way: trusting in Jesus Christ to live out his life in you.

 

The only way you’ll ever be to the praise of God’s glory will not be by any dependence on your own resources but trusting him to live out his life in you.

 

The only way you will ever accomplish what God gives you to do will be by the power of Jesus’ risen life.

 

So, friends: God, if you have trusted Jesus as your Savior, he has begun a miracle work in you and I pray for myself as well as for you that every day I’ll work out the salvation he’s worked in. And I’ll do it with fear and trembling and knowing it’s not me, it’s the Lord: but trusting Him to reveal in me the beauty, the wonder, the power, the grace of the life of Jesus.

 

Let’s pray.

 

O God, yes, yes, yes that’s what we want! Our efforts to live a Christian

life are so much futility without you. But how we praise You that You have given

Jesus to die for us and You have raised him from death and You have sent Your

Spirit to the hearts of those who believe more and more working in us so

that the life of Jesus can be expressed through us. Lord, may the truth of

that dawn on our hearts and may the miracle work of God go on in our

lives so that You will be honored and rivers of living water will flow out

from this church in every direction. In the name of Jesus.

Amen.