Welcome to Philippians! This is a compressed letter, filled with phrases that jump out and grab you like, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It is tempting to do a “drive by” or “bumper sticker” survey of its four chapters, underlining our favorite phrases and then moving on. That is better than nothing, but a grab bag of slogans ripped from their context can never sustain the soul, especially in seasons of suffering. Slogans may inspire us for the moment but suffering craves substance–spiritual food that sustains. If you hunger to experience God, deep intimacy will not be birthed without meditating on and marinating in the Scripture, then trusting the Holy Spirit to transform your heart and mind.
One of the frequent observations made of Philippians–a letter Paul penned from prison–is that its most repeated theme is joy. Joy and happiness are not synonyms. God never promises happiness; happiness is dependent on happenings. If we pursue happiness we will miss God’s best. But if we pursue God regardless of circumstances, we will find ourselves captured by joy. Happiness feeds from rivers that run dry. Joy is the outcome of living immersed in Holy Spirit reality. It’s rivers of Life, dripping wet with the kind of assurance that can look defeat, abandonment, pain, disappointment, and even death, in the face with the unshakeable confidence that the “Kingdom Plans of God” will overwhelm our broken dreams and bodies. And God grants even more than joy; He gives rejoicing. Rejoicing is when joy gets on a roll and it feeds off itself. Joy that comes from God is irrepressible and impossible to exterminate. It’s like kudzu with no cure, but it’s good.
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Buddy Hoffman
Series: Philippians: The ‘What Ifs’ of Faith
September 8, 2013
The Miraculous Birth of the Church in Philippi
Acts 16:6-40
You might pray for Danny. Danny is the new chairman of the elder board. Mike is here somewhere. Listen, Danny doesn’t deserve any hand yet. Actually, Mike deserves the hand. How long were you chairman of the board, Michael? Mike, how long were you chairman of the board? How long did you serve on the board? Twenty years! Good heavens.
Mike had a heart attack, my whole thing exploded in there, so you need to really pray for Danny. Seriously. I know you think I’m kind of half joking there, but I’m not at all. It’s not an easy job to work with me. When Satan actually is also trying to get in there and mess things up, it really gets complicated.
Also, we’re not giving these out to everybody, but in the back there we have those available, right? Now listen, when you go to church, sometimes it’s easy just to go in and put your time in. “Okay, I went to church. I did my stuff and now I’m done.” This is the onramp on how to really get engaged.
If you really want to get engaged in community groups, there are so many different kinds of ways to get involved. There’s Listening Prayer. There’s the Men’s Frat. There’s a group that goes mountain bike riding together. What mountain? I think they ride in the park. Don’t let them kid you. Do you pray? Only when somebody falls, or before?
Honestly, if you want to get engaged, you can get engaged. If you go through that thing and you say, “There’s nothing there that really interests me,” pray and say, “Okay, what really interests me? What is the passion God has put in me?” and we will train you. We will help engage you. We want you not to just come and be an observer but really be part of what’s going on.
If you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. I want to put a Bible in your hand. My Bible cart guys and ladies are here somewhere. We are going into the book of Philippians. If you’ve been a Christian for awhile and haven’t read the book of Philippians, something’s really wrong with you. Seriously, something is seriously… You really haven’t.
It’s a short little book, and it’s compressed. It’s tightly written. It’s full of phrases that tend to end up on tee shirts, where you find those phrases that say, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” They charge off onto the polo field or whatever and they lose. They go, “I was trusting God I could do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.” The reality is that when you rip phrases from their context you’re not feeding off the Word; you’re just twisting the Scriptures to mean whatever you want them to mean.
Philippians, as has been often observed, is about joy. Now what it isn’t about is happiness. There is a great deal of difference in happiness and joy. Happiness is like what happened last night if you are a Georgia fan. It was fairly easy to be happy last night, but it wasn’t that happy the other night up in Clemson. Yeah, that wasn’t right.
Happiness is affected by what’s going on around you. It’s not that you should not have feelings of grief or you should not have responses of… It always worries me to be around Christians who just kind of chant out, “God is good.” And what’s the right answer? “All the time.” God is good all the time. God is good all the time. And you just kind of want to go, “Yeah, he is good all the time, but life isn’t good all the time.”
Sometimes you get around these Christians who have these… Do you remember those smiley faces? It’s just kind of a smile that’s painted on their face, and we’re almost afraid to say, “Man, life is hard right now. What I’ve been going through is difficult right now.” So there is this lack of authenticity that happens in our lives.
When the church becomes groups of people that lack authenticity, we really don’t know how to dig in and find those deep resources, those rivers of living water Jesus talked about that never run dry, that just overwhelm us not with happiness but with joy. Joy is different. Joy is a resource God gives us when we understand properly that no matter what we face…
Paul talks about this in Philippians, “I don’t know if I’m going to live or die. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of prison or I’m not going to get out of prison, and I know some of you have been really worried about me being in prison,” and I think that’s just hilarious, because when we get to that point, people always say, “Well, which time was it that Paul wrote this book out of prison?” Now the fact you have to ask, “Which time?” says something.
Some people say, “That was when he was in Rome,” or, “No, that was when he was down in that dungeon prison,” or, “This is at the end of the book of Acts that he writes this, when he’s under house arrest.” Listen, Paul spent a lot of time incarcerated. Now I seriously doubt that many of us here have ever been arrested for preaching the gospel. How many of you have been arrested for preaching the gospel or sharing the gospel somewhere?
Well, actually I know of two of us. Mike and I have, and I have on more than one continent and in more than one country. But the reality is Paul’s life wasn’t like… He wasn’t sitting out there on the Riviera writing inspirational books, but that’s the way we treat the book of Philippians. When we think about the book of Philippians that way, we really find a lack of… It doesn’t really relate to my life. My life doesn’t look like these inspirational quotes. “I’m content with everything.” Well, do you know what? I know so few people who are actually genuinely content.
But there is a reason and there is a root to that whole reason. I’m never going to get through all this. Have you heard that before? But I do want to give you some questions you can dig into. If you have your Bible, open to Philippians. I actually want you to turn back over to Acts 16. The top of that Acts 16 is Paul’s second missionary journey. These are questions for contemplation. I’ll try to explain them and tell you where they fit. The references are there. Let me just read through these questions and then we’ll work our way through the passages.
1. What if God had an audacious kingdom plan for us? We have our dreams, but who do you think really can dream bigger, you or God? Say God, okay? God is pretty creative. That’s like one of his names…the Creator. On the scale of things of his ability to come up with amazingly creative things, God can see things so much bigger than our little small-scale plans.
I put that word in, the pronoun there, us, not what if God had an audacious plan for me, because the reality is when God does something, he does it through not just individuals; he does it through groups of people. He does it through alliances. He does it through not just Paul, but a Paul and a Timothy and a Paul and a Silas.
Paul is out there ministering and planting churches, but he’s being supported by the church in Philippi. Sometimes I think we get this idea of the Lone Ranger ministry, “God, what do you want me to do?” But let me just really say this very clear. The question of relationship, “God, who do you want me to do ministry with?” is actually a bigger question than, “What ministry do you want me to do?”
When you look at those ministries and you look at things God has called you to do, relational ministry, doing things in community, is God’s plan. Do you understand one of the reasons why that is so important? Jesus didn’t say to the disciples, “By this all men will know you are my disciples…if you carry your Bible to church, or if you go to church, or if you have an office in the church, or if you do these things.” Here is the thing he said, “By this all men will know you are my disciples if you love one another.”
Okay, let’s just get real. It’s not always easy to love one another. It’s hard to like one another. It’s difficult. Proverbs says, “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens his friend.” When you sharpen things, there are sparks. What people tend to do is when there are problems, they just go, “Let’s just walk away.” Now let me tell you something. If you walk away from every situation that you have a problem, you’re going to end up by yourself, and you’re not even going to like you, and you’re going to kind of wish you could leave you.
Now I have wished I could leave me. I remember when Jody and I first got married, she got really mad at me. We were in Boise, Idaho. We were 2,000 miles away from anybody we really knew, and we were trying really hard not to make each other mad, because if the only person you really know within 2,000 miles is that person, you want to say, “Okay, let me try the best I can to stay friends.”
She got really angry at me about something, and it was probably justified. No, I’m sure it was justified. She looked at me and she said, “This really scares me, because I really don’t like you right now, and I just want to get in the car and drive off.” I said, “I feel the same way about myself.” If I could just like get in the car and drive off from myself, wouldn’t that be amazing? What if you could like take a vacation from you?
But you know what the problem is? Wherever you go, there you are. That’s important. It’s important because it is so mindboggling to the world. When the world sees people who love one another, they go, “Wow, what’s that really all about?” When we first started LUG and our high schoolers were mentoring our middle schoolers, one of the high schoolers went over to the middle school that was next door to find this little middle school kid. One of the principals saw it, and she said, “Get that high school kid.”
They went and got the high school kid and said, “What are you doing over here?” He said, “Well, there was this kid in my youth group, and I was going to pray with him today. He was having a hard time.” She said, “Tell me the truth!” She didn’t believe him. She called the church and she said, “There’s like a high school kid over here. He says he’s looking for this kid and he wants to pray with him. Is he telling me the truth or is he just trying to really just play a game on me?” We said, “No, no. He’s really in his group.”
The next week, that principal showed up at church and she goes, “That’s not normal. High schoolers hate middle schoolers.” I wanted to tell her everybody does. Like, “You’re a principal and you just discovered that?”
In Acts 16, you find Paul. There is where he finds Timothy. I don’t know any way to say this without just saying it. He invites Timothy to become part of the team, because he has kind of had a problem with Barnabas. Barnabas and he get into this argument. Literally, the word that is used in Acts 15:38 is they’re in each other’s face over John Mark.
So if you think there’s the idea of churches… I hear sometimes people say, “Oh, I wish it was like it was back in Acts where everybody just got along.” No, they didn’t. Paul was not the easiest guy to get along with, I just guarantee you that. They separate. Then he goes into this city, and there’s a young Jewish believer there. His Father is Greek, his mother is Jewish. He says, “Why don’t you let Timothy come on a mission trip with me and join my team?” They agree, but they say, “Before he can come on the team, he has to be circumcised.” Man, how would you like that to be the qualification? I’m not even going to… I’m just moving right through there.
Silas is traveling with them. In verse 6, they’re traveling through Galatia and Phrygia, which is a funny name for a town. It’s important to note there. It says, “…because the Holy Spirit had prevented them from preaching the word in the province of Asia at that time.” (Acts 16:6) Sometimes what really seems like a great idea, God just says no. When God says no, it’s no.
Then they come to another place, a group here, and God says, “No, you can’t go in there either.” So they go to Troas, and in verse 9, it says, “That night Paul had a vision: A man from Macedonia in northern Greece was standing there…” (Acts 16:9) Macedonia is the first place the gospel goes into Europe. Macedonia was in Greece. It was the home base station of Alexander the Great.
He’s “…pleading with him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us!’ So we decided to leave for Macedonia at once, having concluded that God was calling us to preach the Good News [the euaggelion, to announce the kingdom] there. We boarded a boat at Troas and sailed straight across to the island of Samothrace, and the next day we landed at Neapolis.” Polis means city, so a new city.
“From there we reached Philippi, a major city of that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. And we stayed there several days. On the Sabbath we went a little way outside the city to a riverbank, where we thought people would be meeting for prayer…” Now why they did that is because in a city if there wasn’t a certain number of men to lead the synagogue, women would meet and they would just meet by a body of water and they would pray together. These people were called God-fearers. They weren’t necessarily fully Jewish, but they had this openness and they prayed to God even though they didn’t know him well.
“…and we sat down to speak with some women who had gathered there.” By the way, which is something Paul didn’t normally do as a Pharisee until he broke loose of that law. This is not something he would’ve done. “One of them was Lydia from Thyatira, a merchant of expensive purple cloth…”
Now that doesn’t mean much to us because you can buy purple pretty cheap. But in that day, purple was a royal color, because the only way to get that purple was they would break open a certain kind of snail that had this one little drop of colored dye in it. They would dye it and they would make these beautiful purple garments. Lydia is sort of like a fashion merchant.
“…who worshiped God. As she listened to us…” Now look at this. This is important. “…the Lord opened her heart…” (Acts 16:6-14) Now I’m just going to say this you. It’s incredibly important to understand. Unless God opens someone’s heart, you and I aren’t going to do it. You can stand and argue. You can give every imaginable rationale. If you have a friend who you have just told everything and you’ve given them all the apologetic books you could possibly imagine and they just give you back other apologetic books, you’re really headed down the wrong way, because it isn’t really the head that opens first; it’s the heart. It’s the heart that opens the head.
There are so many things in life that simply don’t make sense really at all. Why do we want to have a child? That doesn’t make any sense at all. They’re going to keep us up at night. They’re going to eat all our food out of our refrigerator. They’re going to want money for college. Kids are like trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble. And we want them. Not because they’re like, “Oh yes, you’re going to go make money for me,” because we love them. It’s not rational. It’s not something we can just add all those numbers up. Sometimes we think everything can be put on a spreadsheet.
The Lord opened her heart “…and she accepted what Paul was saying. She was baptized along with other members…” And this is important. See this word? “…of her household…” (Acts 16:14-15) She was a big-time businesswoman and highly respected in the community. Again I come back to it. She was like a fashion merchant, and her whole household comes into the kingdom.
“…and she asked us to be her guests. ‘If you agree that I am a true believer in the Lord,’ she said, ‘come and stay at my home.’ And she urged us until we agreed.” (Acts 16:15) If you take notes in your Bible, underline that word urged. It literally means she just wouldn’t quit asking. She just put so much pressure on Paul, “You’re going to come into my house. You’re going to be my guest. You’re going to bring Timothy and the team in.” Literally, this is where the church begins.
I don’t know if you kind of recognize anything like what’s going on here. My wife watches those… What are those fashion programs, Jody? Fashion Emergency. No, that’s the old one. Project Runway. Okay, I’m telling on her, and you can pray for her. I come through the room sometimes and they’re telling them what they’re doing wrong. I even know the girl’s name who’s in charge. It’s Heidi Klum and she’s like from Norway or something. She tells them this and this and this.
Now can you imagine you’re going to plant a church in Heidi’s house? You’re going to go, “Wait a minute, people might get the wrong idea here.” But do you know what? Paul had no problem… Well, I’m not going to say Paul had no problem. It sounds like he did have a problem. He didn’t really want to do it, but always God’s plans are so big, they’re bigger than our brains. Now there’s going to be launching this church out of this fashion industry’s household.
So first, what if God had an audacious kingdom plan for us? I put some references there, but Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11) I have no idea if you ever just sit down and contemplate this, that God has a dream for you. He has something he wants to do in his kingdom that’s bigger than you can possibly imagine.
You say, “Well, I don’t really know what that is.” Well, the way you discover what that is is first you get engaged with God’s people. That’s how you do it. It may be you come up here and you work LUG or KidzLife, or you go, “Okay, I need to find some people I can dream with and ask God what God really has in mind.”
2. What if God’s plan is beyond my comfort zone? Now the answer is really clear…It will be. It will be, because if God calls you to move into something that is in your comfort zone, you’re just going to do it under your own strength and power. You’re going to go, “Ah, I can handle this.” It’s when you get into those situations where you feel so desperate that you feel like, “I really can’t handle this. This is really beyond anything I can imagine.”
3. What if God’s audacious dreams are always birthed in relationship? You can look through those passages. I’m not going to do that. But that’s the way it works. God’s great big plans are always birthed in our relationship with him, that we know him, but also in relationship with others.
4. What if I have no other choice but slavery? Now that’s in verse 16. “One day as we were going down to the place of prayer, we met a demon-possessed slave girl. She was a fortune-teller who earned a lot of money for her masters. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, and they have come to tell you how to be saved.’ This went on day after day until Paul got so exasperated that he turned and said to the demon within her, ‘I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And instantly it left her.” (Acts 16:16-18)
Now you’d think, “That’s a great thing,” but look at verse 19. “Her masters’ hopes of wealth were now shattered, so they grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the authorities at the marketplace [the agora, the center of the city]. ‘The whole city is in an uproar because of these Jews!’ they shouted to the city officials. ‘They are teaching customs that are illegal for us Romans to practice.’
A mob quickly formed against Paul and Silas, and the city officials ordered them stripped and beaten with wooden rods. They were severely beaten, and then they were thrown into prison.” (Acts 16:19-23) Now let me just stop right there. This fourth question is…What if I have no other choice but slavery? and here’s what I want to say to you. Whether you realize it or not, you are a slave. You are.
You were created to be a servant of God, and you will, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan (remember this?)… You gotta serve somebody. You will. You will serve somebody. You will live for profit. Your life will be driven by something or somebody. If your life is not given to the service of Almighty God, you will serve something.
You say, “Well, no, I’m not. I’m just my own man. I have liberty and I do what I want to do.” In 2 Peter 2:19, he says, “While they promised themselves liberty, they are slaves to sin…” They promised themselves liberty. “…but God has set us free.” What we find in Jesus and what we find in the King of Kings is a liberty that is beyond imagination, but it is still a joyful service.
I remember, I think, six or eight years ago we were preaching through Acts, and I got to this section right here and I kind of got off on a track on human trafficking. Remember that? It was at the same time that the FBI had just let go of their records that Atlanta was the number one city in the United States for child human trafficking.
That really hurt my feelings, but it made me mad that that would happen in Atlanta. We’d actually just come back from Cambodia because there’s so much child trafficking there. Ann Stevens on the plane coming back said to me, “Buddy, you know we have the same problem in Atlanta.” I said, “Ann, I don’t believe that.” Do you know what she said to me? “Be ignorant if you want to.”
So we started trying to dig into whether that was a reality. I preached on it here at Grace. Some of you were exactly like me. You were indignant, and many of you wrote checks and said, “Let’s form a fund. Let’s do something about this.” We were in the early stages of planting Midtown at the time.” That Sunday night I preached the same message I preached here, but do you know what that congregation did that night? Do you remember this, Jody?
They were just a bunch of kids. They cried. I looked out through this group, and they had their heads on the pews, and they were shaking, and they cried. And they cried hard. I was standing at the back door, and they kept walking by and they said, “Well, what should we do?” I said, “Our generation has handed you off this problem. You’re the best and brightest in America. If you can’t solve the problem, it won’t be solved, because I don’t think our generation is going to solve it.”
I was sitting in staff meeting on Tuesday, and I got this phone call from one of the girls from downtown. She was from California. She was raised by a hippie mother and she was kind of a hippie herself. She said, “Can you come down to a meeting we set up with the mayor and the chief of police?” I said, “When?” She said, “Like in an hour.”
I said, “You have a meeting with the mayor and the chief of police in an hour?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, you’re on your own then. I told you it’s your problem. You solve it.” She said, “Well, will you just come and sit in the room for support?” I said, “Okay.”
So I went down there, and the chief of police is trying to explain the logistics of what’s going on and why it’s a problem, yada, yada, yada, and is going on through all this. All of a sudden this little blonde girl from California stands up and she slams her hand down on the table and she said, “We don’t care why it’s a problem; we want it solved, and if you’re not going to do anything about it, we’re going to go back over to Emory and burn down a building!”
She said, “Then we’re going to go and we’re going to find the kids on the street and we’re going to grab them off the street.” The chief of police said, “It’s not going to help at all if some of you good kids get killed on the streets trying to solve this problem.” She slams her hand down on the table and she says, “You still don’t get it. You think they’re bad kids and you think we’re better than they are. That’s why we have police over at Emory and there’s not police down here where these kids are being sold.” The mayor looks at me and she goes, “What did you do to these kids?”
But let me tell you something. There is some really good news there. Laws have been changed. At that time in the state of Georgia, the act of pandering, that’s selling a minor for sex, the fine for that was $50. Can you imagine that? The reason slavery exists…make no mistake about it…is money.
We can sit very easily in our chairs and say, “I’m glad I don’t have anything to do with that,” but across this world… In Hong Kong today, there are people who live in cages. They live in cages. In India, there are miles and miles in sections of India where children are kept in cages to be sold. We’re not talking about 1860; we’re talking about right now as we sit in our churches. What’s crazy is it doesn’t break our hearts, that we don’t cry, that there’s not a moral outcry that this cannot stand.
5. What if how I invest resources entrusted to me will echo in eternity? What happens is this church really becomes the primary sending church for Paul. When you read the book of Philippians, keep this in mind. Philippians is basically a thank-you letter back to Philippi for their financial support for sending helpers to Paul. It’s a thank-you letter. It’s a letter, “Thanks for your fellowship in the gospel.”
I want to say this to you. Into eternity, you who have made Grace and helped make Grace a missional church of planting campuses…Midtown, Athens, Monroe (and we aren’t done, God willing)…we’re going to be so absolutely overjoyed when we bump into some kid tonight up in Athens who’ll give their heart to Jesus. I promise you. It happens almost every Sunday night…more than one usually. That kid is going to go and impact whatever industry or whatever God has called him to. Let me just read through these last few.
6. What if doing the right thing will disturb an ‘evil peace’? Because that’s what happens. They end up getting beaten and put in prison.
7. What if I choose to live my life as sacrificial worship? There are two ways to die here. One is the Philippian jailer. He says, “I’m just going to kill myself.” Paul, when he is there being beaten, they start singing. That’s a different thing. They just start singing worship unto God. Now the Bible says that God inhabits the praises of his people. The chains fall off. An earthquake breaks out. The doors open.
I believe as you read Scripture what you will find is when we practice (and I want to use this word carefully) defiant worship in the face of all kinds of problems… You think about Job. Everything happens to him and he says, “I came into this world with nothing. I’ll leave this world with nothing. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The forces of darkness of this world don’t understand that, because Satan says, “The only reason Job serves you is because you’ve made his life easy and you’ve given him and you’ve set up this hedge of protection. You take that hedge of protection down, and he’ll curse you to your face.”
Do you know what Job does? He doesn’t curse God; he blesses God. He worships God. The whole book of Job is about the reality that when we worship God we unleash the kingdom work of God in a way that nothing else does, because he comes and he draws near and he listens. Let’s pray.
Lord, I read Philippians and I hunger for Grace to be that kind of church. Lord, we have some things we want to do this morning. We want to pray for our missional community group leaders. We need to receive the offering this morning. Lord, the question the Philippian jailer said, “What must I do to be saved?” and he just said, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Put your trust in the King of Kings, and he will deliver you.” So just in the next few moments, Lord, I ask you to do some powerful things.
I’m going to ask the ushers to come on forward. Let’s receive the offering. If you want to be a part of the koinonia, the support base of Grace financially, you can do it through this, or you can do it online, or you could not do it at all, but whatever God lays upon your heart, just go ahead and start that.
If you’re here this morning and you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior and you’re like that Philippian jailer, your life is just apart, and you want to say this morning… I could have everybody bow their head and close their eyes and do all that stuff, but if you’re here this morning and you say, “I need a new king. I’m not a good king of my life. I want Jesus to be the King, the Lord, the Ruler of my life, and this morning I want to be in that kingdom. I’m not in that kingdom this morning and I want to be in that kingdom,” just slip up your hand. I want to pray for you.
Do you want to be honest or you want to be just where you are, where you’ve been. Anybody here? You want the King of Kings to be the Lord of your life and you want in that kingdom. Just slip up your hand.
Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re here and you’re a missional in community, one of those leaders, we want you to stand and we want to pray for you this morning. So just stand up where you’re at. If you’re one of those leaders, we want to pray for you. If you are around one of those people, I want you to reach over and put your hand on their shoulder and pray for their group just while we’re doing this. Then we’re going to go into a few minutes of worship here. If you want some prayer for some of these other things, we have a prayer team available right here on my right.
Lord, we lift these leaders up to you. We ask you for more. We ask you that this church will not be just what happens in these walls, that we’ll take the church to the community. Lord, we pray for these high schools that surround us. We pray for these colleges that surround us. We pray for these neighborhoods that surround us. Lord, we desire desperately that people know you. We ask you to do some things in these groups this year that is beyond our richest imagination. We ask for your audacious dreams to take birth and root in these community groups. In your name we pray, amen.