Your purpose revealed, God’s promise delivered!

Introduction

Good morning. We are kicking off a series today, calling it “Joy Together,” using “joy” as a verb. We want to joy together. We’re going to joy together, just to really trip out all the English teachers there, and also the translation service. I don’t know how it’s going to handle that. But anyway, we want to think about being a church that joys together, that is a church that is on mission together, serving together, and all wrapped up in the idea of deep, eternal joy. And so we’re going to spend some time thinking about that in the letter to the church in Philippi, the Philippians letter. We’re going to spend a big chunk of this term kind of going through the letter to Philippians, and we’ll see that these are two big themes in Philippians: the theme of joy, which we see in the passage we just read, and the theme of together, which we also see in the passage we just read.

We want to do a bit of thinking about what it means for us as a church, doing life, doing ministry, sharing things, and how that is impacted as we think about fitting everything together in our lives. Years ago, I went to a conference run by Planet Shakers, which is a youthy church. That’s the name of their church, Planet Shakers. It wasn’t on our list of name ideas when we were going for names, although I do love the way they talk to their congregation. They say, “You are the planet shakers.” So, welcome not just to planet shakers, but welcome planet shakers. Very cool. We didn’t do that. We could say, “Welcome new lights.” I don’t know. They had a worship section where musicians got together and did a workshop on worship. One of the things they said, and they have some real youthy, really pumping music, was, “If you want to be great in your worship, if you want to really excel in leading people in worship, the key to that is you have to be great friends.”

I thought, what a great message to a bunch of youth people that the way to keep growing in your music ministry is more Xbox together. That’s really what a bunch of youth need to hear when they’re thinking about growing in their music ministry. Of course, that’s an oversimplification of what he said, but it’s also an oversimplification of reality. But there is some truth in it. The truth is that it would be difficult to serve on a ministry team together in front of others if you were enemies, if you had real infighting between you. We could definitely say that that’s going to work against you. So, we would say that friendship and cooperation and collaboration is a key to working on a team. We would say lots of other things are key as well. One of the things he said was, he used this example: “Me and the drummer, we’ve never played together before, and the reason it works for us is because we’re really great friends.” I was like, no, it’s because you’re both amazing musicians, and that’s going to really help significantly. But there is something about partnering together that does involve relationship. It does involve friendship and it does involve a lot of other things. So, as we think about what it means to joy together, I want to think through some of those different elements.

We get that right at the start of this letter when we begin a series in a book of the Bible. That first section we read because it is the introduction to the book, and it’s the introduction to our series. Those two things often come together in that first section. We’ll find that with this as we think about joy together. We will find Paul writing his letter sets us up with the things that we need, and it’s right from the beginning. We see it in his greeting. A greeting is such a small part of Paul’s letter but such a key part. A greeting sets the tone for everything. I remember a few years ago I had an email from someone who had challenged me on something, and I responded, and I imagine I was fairly short with them. I was a bit frustrated. One of the things that was pointed out to me by the person I copied into the letter was that I didn’t put a greeting at the beginning. I just put their name. It was just like, “George, let me tell you this.” The lack of greeting says something. I didn’t mean it to, and I wasn’t thinking that, but it says something about your letter. It’s the same thing’s true about this letter. Paul’s greeting says something. It sets us right up from the beginning.

Our Identity: Servants of Christ

Paul’s Self-Identification as a Slave

What it tells us is that his identity is as a servant. So, for the youth here, if you’re following along, the first blank, I’ve given you the answer. It’s a servant. Although to be fair, from the passage, he uses the word in the New Living Translation, “slave.” These are the words, verse one, “This letter is from Paul and Timothy.” That’s unique for this letter. “Slaves of Christ Jesus.” That’s his identity. That’s how he sets himself up. Now, the word “slave” is tricky for us because of all the baggage that has happened through history. But the word “servant,” which other translations sometimes use, doesn’t really depict completely what Paul is saying. The Greek word is “dulos.” That’s a reasonably well-known word, particularly because the mission group OM had, I don’t know if you’d remember this, but there was mercy ships, and one of them was called the Dulos, and now they’ve got the Dulos Hope, which is a ship that travels around the world. Dulos was a hospital ship, and this one’s a Christian library. Dulos held the record for the oldest passenger ship ever in history. If you can say anything about Christians, they got lots of old things. That’s what Christians do really well.

Dulos doesn’t quite mean “slave” in the way we use the word today, and it doesn’t quite capture the idea of “servant” because it’s more than a servant. In Paul’s day, there was a concept of slavery which wasn’t like go to another country and steal them and make them work for you. It was actually people, it was a way of paying debts. You would be indebted to someone. You couldn’t get a mortgage, couldn’t get a loan. This was a way to do large loans. You could sign up to someone and say, “I will live and work for you, and my family will live and work for you to help pay this debt off.” So, things like that happened with this. This is someone who is tied to someone else, dependent on them, most likely living with them. That’s the picture that Paul wants to paint. That’s his identity. His identity is as this servant, this servant that is bonded to someone. The one he’s bonded to is Jesus.

The Saints and the Bishops

He contrasts that with the congregation that he’s writing to. Look what he calls them. He says, “I’m writing to all God’s holy people.” He uses the word “holy” to describe them. In fact, we get the word “saint” from the Latin, the “sanctus.” So, he calls himself a slave, and he writes to the saints, talking about the church. See that contrast that he puts himself in, almost like he’s bringing humility and submitting himself. We see a picture of that of servant leadership in the Bible, although it’s tricky sometimes because it’s not tied to necessarily authority. I remember a minister once, when he started out in his role, was trying to set up the organization structure of the church and communicate that. Rather than drawing a traditional org chart where him and the board were at the top and then the other leaders, he drew it upside down. He put him and the board at the bottom, and he built his org chart that way as a way of communicating that the minister and the board are the first servants of the church, which is really great and helpful. It’s unhelpful in the sense of thinking about authority. It’s not that he was saying he has no authority. It’s not saying that the church congregation members at the top of it are going to make all the decisions down to him, and he’ll execute. That’s not the picture there, and it’s not the picture here. Paul is not pointing himself as someone who has no authority. He is putting himself in a position of humility, but he brings leadership into the picture. In fact, he includes the leaders in the picture. He says they’re including the church leaders and deacons.

I’ve already mentioned one Greek word this morning. Let me go for another one. The word there that we translate “leaders” or NIV translate “overseers” is the word that you get the word “bishop” from. Quite literally, what he’s saying here is including the bishops and the deacons. Now, we don’t use the word “bishop” quite like that in the Anglican church. This is like a local leader. It’s not like the bishop of an area happens to be there’s a local leader in this picture. But I love the way he puts that picture. This is what he says, “Including all the holy ones and the bishops and deacons.” It’s like my challenge would be next time the bishop’s here, whoever’s service should say, “Welcome to all the holy ones.” Oh, and also bishop. That’s my say that. That’s the challenge. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Unless you’re quoting the Bible, and then he can’t stop you. But that’s it. Almost sounds like that. But that’s not what’s going on here. Paul is including the leadership. He’s saying together with the leaders, they are the holy ones. So, you get the picture that’s happening here. He is not saying, “I’m a slave, and you are the masters.” He’s saying, “We all are in this together.” In fact, the picture is, “I call myself a slave, and there’s an invitation for you also to be in that.” You see what’s happening there? This is an invitation from Paul. He’s not going to go so far as to say, “You also are enslaved to Christ,” but he’s saying, “You should be. This is where we should all be.” In fact, he spells it out. He says, “We belong to Christ Jesus.” He says, “We are all indebted to him. We are all in the one boat of dulos” in that picture. Paul is saying him and Timothy are these bond servants, the slaves, and the church and the leaders also belong to God. So, they are also joining us in that. The invitation there is to join together in that.

Serving with Humility

I think it’s really helpful for us to think about some of that space as we think about what it means to do life together, that we should be coming from an attitude that we are serving God. The classic thing of thinking through in church is to be very careful when we feel like we get into that space where I’m doing something because I have to. I’m serving in the church because no one else is doing it. The reality is sometimes we are called to serve and consider serving in a way because no one else is doing it. But we do need to be careful when we get to that place of bitterness and frustration and say, “I’m only doing this because no one else is doing it.” That kind of attitude doesn’t end up being an attitude of a servant. That ends up being someone feeling indebted to the role that they’re doing, to the one that feels bitter towards the role that they’re doing. We want to come with that kind of humility. Same thing’s true for leaders, not in a leadership position because no one else would do it, although it’s often the case that we step into roles because there’s a need. We need to be careful that we don’t do it out of some sort of bitterness or the opposite is true, that we do it because it gives us a position of power, a position of recognition. There’s a place of saying we should come with a heart to serve Jesus. That’s what we should do.

I think there’s a real challenge, particularly in leadership, but in the way we handle people and this attitude towards serving others, it becomes a real challenge when we come into places of stress, difficulty, when things aren’t going the way we want or the way we’re serving is difficult or pushes us to our limits. Those are the moments where we’re more in danger of falling back on bitterness or falling back on indignation or falling back on, I think the classic one for leaders that I hear a lot about lately is just we use words like bullying or being too aggressive in leadership, this reaction under stress, kind of demand people follow. We get in danger of that sort of thing. Me and my family have just come back from two weeks. So, Monday, first day back at work. Monday, Tuesday this week were maybe my most two stressful days I’ve had all year. Monday we met for staff meeting. That wasn’t the stress bit. They’re lovely. Miles made me two coffees. What a man. To be fair, it was my first time seeing the work that’s been done here. Also, that wasn’t the stressful bit, but a lot of work still needs to happen. It’s quite dark up here, I’m sure you noticed. We need to install some of the lights that we’ve taken out need to go back in. There’s work that still needs to be done. It was fine. Kicked off with a bit of stuff floating around. Where are we going to install speakers? Where are we going to install lights? That sort of thing. Went from that to a Sydney Anglican property meeting. Now you’re seeing the stress lines. Trying to build a property up at Hamilton Street. It’s just stressful talking about multi-million dollar deals. That’s just not my world. It is my world, unfortunately. It’s not my experience. Things are moving much slower than we want. The next day I had a meeting with another group that works on investments to try to figure out how we can use our land in a way that can help fund that. Once again, multi-million dollar deals right over my head. I had email from a school that we might have to move to, and the prices to rent that were higher than we had liked. All of that adds up. Two days back at work, and I was ready for a holiday again.

There’s a moment in those kinds of moments where that stress builds up that it’s easy for a leader to jump onto being aggressive, jump onto trying to demand things happen, trying to solve things in a really bullish way, and not take the attitude of a servant. I don’t say that just to say, “Woe is me.” Paul’s writing from prison, and I’m not trying to say, “Oh, look at me, just like Paul in prison. It’s hard.” I think he’d have something to say about that, but saying it that we will all experience this in our own ways. We all have stressful times in our lives through family, through work, through things that are impacting us. It’s very easy for us to react to all that in ungodly ways. This attitude, our identity, must be as a servant, and it is the way we serve Christ not just when we’re together but all of our life. Paul writes that in his letter to the church in Colossians. Colossians chapter 3, he says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as though you’re serving the Lord.” He’s saying that attitude of service is not just when we gather together or filling some rosters on a Sunday. It’s all of our life is an attitude of service. So, our identity should be service.

Our Partnership: Spreading the Gospel

Gospel Partnership in Prison

Our partnership is in the gospel. Paul says our purpose to our identity is tied together in the gospel. The thing about this letter is Paul is not with them. He is in prison. So, when he talks partnership, he’s not talking about getting rosters done on a Sunday. He’s not talking about making things happen in the church community. He’s talking about their gospel partnership across everything they’re doing, across all the churches. He’s praying for them. This is what he says, “I pray for all of you with joy, for you have been my partners in spreading the good news about Christ.” I’ve already gone for a few Greek words. Let me go for another one. The word “partnership” is the word “koinonia.” I only mention it because when I was at college, we were, you see I’m wearing my Moore College shirt today. I wore that at one of my meetings this week, and he said, “Oh, I can see it’s laundry day.” My year group at college was putting together a shirt that we wanted to have printed to represent our year group. Koinonia was a word that they grasped hold of. You can see on my on the back here we wrote “Koinonia.” All around that circle are all the names of my college mates. Bunch of nerds. They put on the shirt because koinonia captures something about partnership. Sometimes the word can be translated “fellowship.” We don’t use the word “fellowship” in that kind of same way anymore, but churches used to talk about we’d have fellowship or there’d be fellowship groups. I’ve been going through the history stuff preparing for our 140th anniversary, going through photos, and you see the craft fellowship and the youth fellowship. That was a language that churches used a lot more to talk about community. It’s more than just community is the picture we’re getting here. It’s community with a purpose. That’s the picture of koinonia. That’s the picture we get that Paul is talking about here.

You don’t need to know Greek to know that because Paul has given us all the hints to what he’s talking about there. We see the relationship. He’s praying for them. He wants good for them. He says, “You have a special place in my heart.” God knows I love you. You don’t need to read the Greek Bible to see the picture of what he means by partnership. It’s more than just a job. It’s a community. It’s more than just friendship. It’s community with purpose. That’s what’s going on here. The purpose, he says, is in spreading the good news about Christ.

Friendship with Purpose

I think there is one danger for churches when you think about church fellowships, church communities. There’s many dangers. One of them in particular is the danger that we fall into patterns where our community together becomes about little more than just friendship. We want to have friendship. Of course, we gather together in our small groups in our church. We have ministry teams that work together. We want to have friendships, but we want them to be friendships with purpose. We want them to be friendships that are building one another up and that are a family together on mission together. That’s the picture of partnership that we want. We want to try to do that. As we think about all the things that we’re doing in our church, we’re doing them because we have that partnership together. When we’re talking about building a new building up on Hamilton Street, we’re not doing it because we think we could get some comfier chairs and some nicer air conditioning. That’s not what’s happening. I imagine that while Paul is sitting in prison writing to the church in Philippi, he wouldn’t be writing, “I love our partnership and the fact that you are building a nice air conditioned building with comfy seats while I’m here in prison.” We wouldn’t call that partnership because the partnership is in the gospel. That is why we want to build a larger church not so we can be more comfortable but so we have more opportunities to multiply the gospel.

One of the things we’re going to do over the next few weeks, we’ll launch it, but one of the things we’re going to look to do is some fundraising ourselves towards the building. It’s a multi-million dollar building, and we can use some of our land to pay for it. The diocese is doing some fundraising to help pay for it. They are looking to get around $2 million from large donors that might support us, but there is around $600,000 that we want to try to seek to fundraise ourselves. The short-term goal for that is we’d love to raise at least $150,000 to pay the cost that we need to submit DA. It’s hard for us to get anything going, and we don’t want to sell assets before we get things really going. We want to get those funds so that we can get the ball rolling by submitting. As we go through a process like that, that is a cost to us. I don’t know what you think when you hear those kind of numbers, but the idea of us as a church raising $600,000 is a big number to me. It’s a scary number to me. There’s bigger numbers going on as we think about building, and I don’t even know if we can reach those targets. What I do know is that we want to be a church that has a heart for gospel partnership, and that means that we will partner together in this particular partnership and seek to do those things not because we’re trying to do something for ourselves but we’re trying to do something for the gospel. As we celebrate 140 years of that building, that part of that building, to be clear, when I was preaching this morning, I stepped backwards, and I was in 100 year old building, and then I stepped forward, and I’m in 140 year old building. When we think about 140 years plus of ministry that has happened in this area, those people didn’t really build a church for themselves. They built a church for the many generations that came after. We want to be building for generations. We have been as a church building for generations, and we want to keep building for generations. This is not us investing in something that is going to bring a financial return to ourselves or investing in something that we will just get to enjoy. This is a gospel partnership. That’s what Paul’s talking about. It’s the same when we think about the cost to us of having to move off site and go to a school where we might be setting up every week. There’s a cost to us in these things. This is the gospel partnership that God calls us to. Partnership is the gospel.

Our Maturity: Growing in Love

Growing the Kingdom

Last point I want to make is that maturity Paul says is love. As we think about growing the kingdom, the question always comes, these two things that we have. We think about growing the kingdom is reaching more people and bringing them. What about growing ourselves? I want to say those two things. Growing the kingdom is not one or the other. When we use the language of growing the kingdom, we are talking about both those things. You are growing the kingdom in your own heart as you grow in Christ. You’re growing the kingdom in sharing good news of Jesus to others. Both those things are growing the kingdom. Paul brings both those things together. It’s not one or the other. It’s both together. He says it’s both together in love.

We often mention how helpful sometimes the New Living Translation is in making things really clear for us. This next verse is one where I would argue the translation is not as clear as some of the other ones. This is what the New Living Translation says. It says, “I pray that your love will overflow more and more and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding.” You see what’s happening there? The New Living Translation separates this as two ideas. The idea one that you grow in love, and it’s overflowing, and we might think of that as reaching more people, sharing out of ourselves. The second idea is that we grow in understanding, but I don’t think that’s a helpful translation of what’s happening here. The NIV I think puts it much clearer as to what’s actually going on, and it’s the two ideas are tied together. Listen to this is what the NIV says, “And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more.” It doesn’t use the word “and,” that your love might abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. That’s the picture we get from Paul here. Not that there’s two things he wants us to grow in, not love overflowing to others and growing in knowledge for ourselves with Christ, but actually that our love that overflows should be growing in knowledge and understanding. Those two things are tied together. It’s important that they’re tied together as we think about maturing as Christians.

Love and Knowledge

The tying together of love and knowledge is key in being effective in our love. Love gives knowledge more purpose. There’s a danger sometimes that we seek knowledge about God, but we don’t really act on that knowledge in love. The classic line we often use is that there’s a difference between knowing about God and knowing God. One of those is love motivated. Knowing God is to be in relationship with him. Knowing about God doesn’t need to have that. It could just be head knowledge. Lots of atheists would know about the Bible and about Christians but not actually have a relationship with God. There’s a difference when you put the idea of love and knowledge together. Love gives knowledge purpose, but also knowledge grows love purposefully. What I mean by that is it’s knowing more about something can help our love be more effective. I’ll give you a very simple illustration. Many of you know that Susie and my son Jet had surgery when he was born, heart surgery. You imagine if I said to the surgeon, “I love my son more than you, so let me do the surgery.” You understand how that doesn’t work. It’s actually wouldn’t be loving, would it? It completely undermines love. There’s a sense where knowledge can actually make love more purposeful. When we grow in knowledge, we can learn to love better. Paul says, so that we might be able to discern the ways of God. That is to say, if God’s way is the best way, then knowing God’s way will help us love people the best way. Knowing God’s ways helps us point people God’s way. That’s true as we deal with the dynamics of life. It’s true as we deal with the complexities of relationships, of people’s identity, as we live in a world that wrestles with identity in so many ways, the better we understand what God’s way is, better we can actually point people to God’s way.

That’s tricky when we think about the idea of love because it feels like the most loving thing to do can be let people live the way they want. I want to say we can’t as Christians, you can’t force someone to live your way or God’s way. History has shown that’s an unhelpful thing to do. We have laws to try to restrain community in a way. We try to as Christians pursue laws that align with the Bible. We can’t force people to love God or force people to follow God the way we think they should follow God, the way we choose to follow God. The better we know God, the better we can love people by pointing them towards him in helpful ways and try to do that in a way that is loving.

Let me finish with this, and then we’re going to spend some time in communion together. Our identity like Paul should be as a servant. He invites us to that. Our partnership is in the gospel, and our maturity should be in love. I think something that really stands out to me as I look at this passage is how it’s wrapped in a prayer. Paul’s invitation here is a prayer for people and an invitation for them to be prayed. It’s quite amazing when you look at the words and themes of that prayer. The challenge for us in prayer is often we come to prayer with worries and wishes. That’s the classic kind of prayer approach. Here’s the things I’m worried about, God, and here’s the things I’d love you to do to solve my worries. That’s nowhere near what Paul is praying. Paul, listen to this prayer. His prayer is that your love may abound. I don’t know when the last time you prayed that you might have more love. Maybe when we’re praying about some of the worries of relationships that we have, maybe that’s precisely what we should be praying, that we would have more love. He’s saying that your love might abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. That’s his prayer. Not some wishes of things that he wants to see God do out there in the world, but wishes that he wants to see God do in himself, in the church themselves.

I want to encourage you. I want to finish by encouraging you that put that in your prayers. When we pray that Jesus gives us the example to pray the Lord’s prayer, which I don’t think specifically he’s telling us we should use those words, but he’s telling us that these are helpful theme and structure for us to pray. When he says, “Hallowed be your name,” I want your name to be holy. There’s a sense where that’s an inside out thing. That’s saying, “I want your name to be holy. I want to treat you as a holy God, and I want to see others see you as a holy one. May your name be heard Holy.” The second one, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven. The prayer is once again, not that God’s kingdom, not just that he would return and his kingdom come, but even right now that his kingdom might be coming in our own hearts, transforming us towards his kingdom, and that it might overflow like the love that overflows from us, that it might overflow into the world around us. That is the way Jesus says we should start our prayers. I encourage you in that that that is something you should consider in your prayer life to come to God praying that he might grow you to be more like him. Praying that he might grow your love. Praying that he might grow your knowledge in love that we might grow in maturity together. Let me take a moment to pray.