Philippians Week 1

Pastor Jake opened our new series Philippians by highlighting Paul’s unshakable joy in Christ, even while writing from prison. He reminded us that Paul calls believers to embrace the humility and mindset of Jesus, putting others first and growing in spiritual maturity. The message encouraged us to press forward in faith, finding strength, purpose, and joy in Christ alone.

Our mission is to glorify God by equipping His people to change their world and by planting churches with the same world-changing vision.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Mana Church Stafford Podcast, where we're all about equipping God's people to change their world. We're thankful you're here, and we're praying that this message encourages you to love God, love others, and love the world more fervently than before. Now, let's get to it.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Yes, all right. I like that energy. All right, thank you, worship team. Well, like Kelly said, we are starting a brand new series today. We're gonna be going over the book of Philippians. And we're gonna be doing this verse by verse, word by word. It's gonna be really cool. I'm excited to get into it today. Are you guys excited to hear about what God says to us through Philippians? Yes? Cool. Well, let me pray real quick, and then we're gonna get right into the word. Lord, God, we know that your word is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, and it's able to uh change us, God. It's able to minister to us, Lord. And so I pray, Lord, by your Holy Spirit, God, would you open hearts and minds today to receive the truth from your word, God? May you edify us through this letter that we have from thousands of years ago, God. May you edify us by it. May you teach us, Lord. May you encourage us, God. We love you, Lord. We love your word. Thank you so much for it in Jesus' name. And everybody said? Amen. All right. Well, we're going to start off. We're going to get right into the word. Um, we're going to do the first 11 verses in Philippians today. So if you've got your Bible, you can go ahead and open it up. If you don't, we've got a sky Bible here. You can see it on the screen, so you can follow us along there. Here's what it says Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I'm sure of this that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It's right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me, grateful in my and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness how I yearn for you all with the perfection of Christ Jesus. And it's my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless the day to day of Christ. The story of the church at Philippi, it's actually a very, very powerful one. And it's one that just reading through that text, you're probably like, okay, there's doesn't seem like there's a ton there. There is so much there that we're gonna unpack today. And you're gonna miss the beauty of it if we actually don't go back and get context for why this letter was written and why Paul included just in the intro here some of the things that he did. And so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna talk about five ways and five reasons that God builds his church and advances his kingdom. And my hope is that you're gonna leave today encouraged because some of the means might have changed, but God's character and God's promises to advance his kingdom and God's promises to us as people of God have not changed and they never change. Amen? Amen. All right, so here's where we're gonna start. So so Paul was here in Philippi at least three times. We know that he came and visited this church. You know, sometimes we have uh uh visiting pastors that come and minister, we have leaders that come here to man a church from outside. We've had Joe Adams come from Colorado, Riley Halliday comes from Newport News, Ben Goodman sometimes, he comes in from Fayetteville, and so Paul visited this place at least three times. In fact, it the the reason that Paul and Timothy, because if you notice, this letter wasn't just written from Paul, it was written from both Paul and Timothy. Um, Timothy actually came with them. They were prohibited by the Holy Spirit, it says, from going to Asia, which is where they wanted to go, and they were told they had to go to Macedonia, aka Philippi, which what we'll talk about. And so um the first visit that they had to Philippi was right after Timothy joined him. That's why he's included in the letter. Silas and Luke are also with them. We're gonna hear more about Silas as we get into some of the text today. And Luke is actually the guy who wrote the book of Acts, and he's also the one who wrote the gospel of Luke. So that's kind of the crew. You've got Paul, Timothy, Silas, and Luke, and they're all going to Philippi here. And so to understand this letter, we gotta get the backstory. I I love origin stories. I don't know why, but when it comes to movies and when it comes to books, I love it if they write prequels to books, because I get kind of like all the backstory. In fact, my favorite, my favorite Batman movie, I like the um the Batmans with Christian Bale in them. My favorite one of those is Batman Begins. Such a good movie, right? I also like the The Dark Knight Rises because I really like Bain. He's pretty cool. Um But you when you get the backstory, you start to understand the context and you start to understand the situation around what was going on here. And so, Paul, just so you guys understand a little bit about him, he was between 45 and 50 years old when he first visits Philippi. And so one of the one of the first points we're gonna take out here is that God builds with unlikely people. God builds his church with unlikely people. Paul and his traveling buddies, they first, the people that they first start to connect with are actually very unlikely companions and first converts. And so we're gonna pick up in Acts, actually, chapter 16, and we're gonna we're gonna read through when Paul first came to Philippi. So he says, so setting sail from Troaz, we made a direct voyage to Samithras, and the following day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city in the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. So Philippi is heavily populated with Roman veterans, soldiers, legionnaires. It's probably led by a couple uh former soldiers and legionnaires as well. It's actually the first city in Europe to hear the gospel. Europe has not yet had the gospel go there. Philippi is the entry point into the entire continent. And it says we remain in the city some days. So estimates by Bible scholars are around three months that Paul actually stayed, and Timothy and Silas and Luke actually stayed there. So verse 13, it says this. And on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we were where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and we spoke to the women who had come together. So this is actually really significant in their visit here to Philippi. Um, the Jews had historically been separated and spread all over the world. And what they did was they had places where they would meet and they would they would go to synagogues. So as long as there were ten Jewish believers in a city, they would have a synagogue there usually. So the fact that they didn't have a place in the city to go worship on the Sabbath leads Bible scholars to believe that it was there was just not a lot of Jews there. So they didn't have anybody that was like them, that looked like them, that that spoke like them. And so they went outside the city, and that's why they started to first kind of meet people by the riverside here. Um in fact, the the idea that they first meet a woman and start sharing with a woman instead of a man is also very significant. We're gonna talk about that, but let's see what happens here first. So, verse 14, it says, One who heard us was a woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. So this Lydia, she's an entrepreneur. Many people believe she was wealthy, and the reason is because she was selling purple. That's why it's significant. So purple was actually a high-end good. So what we know about Lydia is she she was an entrepreneur. It's not like she worked at the dollar store, okay? She wasn't like a dollar general, she's more like Nordstrom's, okay? High-end. That's the kind of business that Lydia owned. All right? Um and so um you've met people who are kind of like Lydia. She's a good person. It says she's a worshiper of God. We know people like this. They they want to know the Lord, but they just don't really understand how to get to know the Lord. Um, they don't have, they don't have the comprehension of who he is, but they want to worship God, right? They're like, I'm a good person. I think I think I want to follow God, but I don't really know who God is. They don't have any good theology. And there are so many people that you and I have around us who are just like Lydia. They're just like a small step away from the revelation of Christ. And all it takes is just a little bit of time, a little bit of patience on our part, maybe us going to a place we're not super comfortable with and starting to share with them. And then, man, they have a huge part to play in the kingdom, which Lydia does have a massive part to play in the kingdom of God. It says in verse 16 at the end, it says, The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. It's one of the reasons I prayed before we started here that the Lord would open your heart to be able to pay attention to what the word is saying. And after she was baptized and her household as well, she urged us, saying, If you judge me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay, and she prevailed upon us. A couple things about this section. Notice it says, the Lord opened her heart. This is really, really key. It doesn't say Paul spoke so eloquently that she accepted Jesus. It doesn't say he made really good arguments. It wasn't Paul's job to open her heart. It's the Lord's job to open people's hearts. So don't let your own fear of speaking, your own fear of sharing the gospel with someone, don't let that stop you because it's the Lord's job to open people's hearts. It's not our job to do it. Um I told you before that um that it's significant that Paul shares with a woman first, and it is. Don't underestimate the significance of women in the kingdom of God. I think sometimes we do that in the church. We make it a little bit of a men's club, and I'm gonna tell you, Christianity has done more for the elevation and the honoring of women than any other religion in the world. No other religion treats women with the honor and dignity that Christianity does. I love how the Bible, it just shows Christianity, it's not just a men's club. Um, in fact, at the end of Paul's letter, Paul and Timothy, they they write, they actually call out specifically two women by name, Euodia and Syntica. They call they call them out and they say, Man, these women are fellow laborers with us in the gospel. That's really, really significant. That's not common. Women, they have a very, very powerful place in the kingdom of God and with gospel advance. God doesn't treat women as afterthoughts, he doesn't treat them as property. The gospel shows women as image bearers of God. They're essential partners, they're co-heirs in Christ. If you look at Lydia, she's actually the first convert in an entire continent. Think about that. God picked a woman to be the first person in the entire continent of Europe. Jesus himself, he honored women in ways that totally shocked culture. He taught women publicly, he received financial support from women, he appeared first to women after the resurrection, which, if you were wanting to get the word out about the gospel advance, you wouldn't appear to women first. Jesus turned so many things on its head when it comes to honoring women. And see, in Christ, well, one of the things that we know is that there's neither male nor female, there's not Jew, there's not Greek. We're all one. We all have equal footing in the kingdom of God. Women, they're not supposed to be silenced, they're not supposed to be silent, we're not supposed to keep them, you know, barefoot and pregnant and sitting in front of the stove, all right? That's not the way that the church, that's not the way that the gospel actually talks about things. They're called to use their gifts where God leads them to advance the kingdom alongside men together with them. Amen? And there are other faiths that we know of that treat women completely differently than this, aren't there? Islam, totally different from Christianity, right? Women, women look totally different when it comes to Islam. A woman's worth, a woman's testimony in court, did you know in Islam, it's half a man's worth? In Islam, a man can marry four wives. Women that they marry one husband. A daughter actually inherits half of what a son marries. Um, in most Muslim-controlled societies, women have to cover themselves to protect men. At least that's what they say. It's so different. The gospel is so different. And this is why Lydia, she doesn't just get saved, she actually gets unleashed for the advance of the kingdom. And that's one of the things that we want to do here, a man of church. Lydia, she uses her wealth, she uses her business as a means to advance the kingdom. And I wonder how much we miss in life, how much we miss of the goodness that God wants to do because we underestimate or we limit what we think people might be able to bring to the table. It's funny, um, last week I was working in my yard, I'm chopping down trees, and um I was I was cutting them up, and of course I'm getting my boys to stack them because I've got a whole herd of boys. In fact, the neighbor kids come over, and when they do, and my boys are working, I'm like, you can stay and work or you can leave. And so they get to help, and well, Elity Bignon is there too, and Elity is small, sweet. My boys are picking up these logs, moving them like they're real tough. And of course, they tell her, like, you can't lift one of these. She tries to lift them, like, you can't lift one of these logs. She's like, Yes, I can. And Uriah goes, I bet you a hundred bucks you can't lift that log. So you know what little Elity does, right? I watch her and she bends down and she grabs this log that's about as big as her and just deadlifts the thing. All the boys' jaws drop. They're like, Uriah, you're poor. You have to give her a hundred dollars now. It's so cool though, because I think in the church sometimes we can have that same mentality, like, ah, you're a woman, you can't really do anything. You're not as valuable as a man. Let's get some men in here to do it. And I'll tell you, our church does very well with a demographic that usually churches do poorly at. Men, 25 to 55 is a horrible demographic for churches. I think it's because some things have just been feminized a little too much. But but see, it in our church, we honor men and women. You know, Leanne Paul Hamus leads man of kids. She leads it and leads it well. You're like, well, great, that that's man of kids. Well, Andrea Campbell leads our first impressions team as well. That's fantastic. Sarah Signor is our lead vocalist up here. All right? We've got Sarah Honaker, who co-leads with her husband on the outreach team. And Heather Martin, her and her husband, both co-lead our prayer team for the longest time. Heather was the sole leader of our prayer team. Catherine Bignon, whose daughter is the deadlifter of the logs, Catherine leads our events team. There are women that lead so well in our church. They do so many things. Without them, I wonder what limitations we would have as a church. So again, I just want you to get this that in Christianity we we elevate the value of women. We don't underestimate them at all. What I love about the gospel too is it's not just for the upper class in society. It's not just for pretty people that got it all together. The constant and consistent testimony of Scripture is that the gospel is for the least, the lost, and the lonely. It's for the most outcast and the most underprivileged. And that's the second thing that God does is He builds where we least expect it. The gospel, it doesn't always start where it's strong, it starts where it's needed. And the disciples and Paul, they actually have this model that they followed. I told you about going into a city where there's at least ten Jews where there was a synagogue. So their model, if you read through the story of Acts, is they would go into a city, um, they would find the synagogue, they would start to talk in the Sabbath at the synagogue, and they would start to convince the other Jews of what was what was happening with the gospel. Like, listen, Jesus was the Messiah, he had to come, he had to suffer, he had to die, and then he had to be raised. And a lot of the Jews there would then believe, and then the Gentiles in this area where they had been persecuted in Jerusalem and then had to had to flee, it's called the diaspora. The Jews and the Gentiles there would start to follow Jesus and there'd be this revival and outpouring, and then they'd go to another city. A lot of times there'd be persecution as well. You read that as you go through Acts. That's not what happens here. There's not any Jewish people in this city, or at least not a significant amount of them. So they they they go not necessarily where they want to go. In fact, it said they wanted to go to Asia. They wanted to go to Bithynia, they wanted to go to Cappadocia, to Pontus, to all these places. The places that actually, if you read the book of 1 Peter, that's where Peter writes his letter to is the Jews in the diaspora in Asia. This is Turkey. That's actually where Lydia was from. She's from Thyatira, which is in modern day Turkey, where they're at now in Philippi is modern day Greece. So the gospel is going where it's needed, and God is going to expand it. It's super cool. I think what happens for us too is we we do this a lot. We like to build in places where it's comfortable. Don't we? We write off places or people or organizations or fellowship that we might have lost hope in. We don't see a way that God could work there or do something special. And maybe you, right now, as you think about some of the circles that you walk in, you think about your workplace, your school, your unit, your neighborhood, maybe a friend group, you're like, man, there is no hope for the gospel there. There's just no hope for this organization. I can't see myself advancing the kingdom there. I guarantee it probably wasn't as bad as Philippi. I think one of the great things about the gospel advancing is that it's not up to us. In fact, as we just read in Philippians 1 6, it says that God finishes what he starts. It's up to him, it's not up to us to do the work. He's the one that advances his kingdom. And I think if some of us could open our eyes to see the possibility of God moving in a special way and in our isolated, our godless circle and realize like he put us there for a reason. Your work might be your filipi. Your neighborhood might be your filipi, where you go and you start to talk to people about the gospel, and God opens their eyes to hear things differently, to see things differently, and then the gospel advances through people that you might have never expected would be a powerful person for the kingdom advance. We see that the same thing happens actually here again in verse 16. It says, as we're going to the place of prayer, they've been here in Philippi for a couple few months now, maybe. We're going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling. So mediums are real, demons are real, this girl has a demon. Right? Still in the city of Philippi so far, Lydia and her household are the people who are believing they're starting to see some building, and now they meet this girl who's got a demon. She followed Paul and us crying out, These men are servants of the Most High God who proclaim to you the way of salvation. I think it's kind of interesting. Even demons know the truth. And they can't help but but saying it sometimes. Kind of interesting, blows my mind. Verse 18, it says, This she kept doing for many days. Imagine this, you're going trying to preach, and you're walking around the streets of Stafford and Fredericksburg, and somebody's following you around, just pestering you, annoying you. But they're saying true things, but they're really not helping you. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the Spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her, and it came out that very hour. I don't have time to talk about it, but I love that annoyance is the trigger for deliverate deliverance for this girl. That's so cool. So cool to me. Um, verse 19. But when her owners, she was a slave, saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. So no good deed goes unpunished. This is where they have some really memorable experiences that start to pick up in Philippi. Things get bad. So at this month they've been there, at this point they've been there for months teaching Paul, Silas, Timothy, Luke. But now they're gonna start to get sideways with the authorities. Verse 20 it says, When they, the owners, had brought them to the magistrates, they said, These men are Jews and they're disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice. The crowd joins in and attacks them, and the magistrates tore the garments off of them and gave them orders to beat them with rods. They deliver a girl from a demon, and the next order that they get is beat them with rods. Strip them down, had to be humiliating, and beat them up. This is Paul's real introduction to the city of Philippi. It's fun, funny how it can go from really, really good to really, really bad really, really quickly. This is a fast turnaround. They deliver somebody and then all of a sudden, bam, they're beat up. And whoever owners are and however many of them they were, they bum rush Paul and Silas, they take him to the leaders of the city, and then everybody else starts to pile on. What does this sound like? Sounds like Jesus, doesn't it? It sounds like what they did to Jesus. They bring him in, and then they start, everybody starts shouting all these accusations against him, and then the people who are in charge say, you know, we should beat this guy. And that's what they do to Paul and Silas. They don't do it a little bit either. It says they do it with many blows. Verse 23. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them with rods, okay? You ever seen a fight online? I I get these videos, maybe my eyes. Algorithm is messed up. But I see these videos all the time of like groups of people like ganging up on someone. They're like punching them, kicking. It's not like a one-on-one fight anymore. It's like 20-on-one. And you watch the person, you're like, oh my gosh, how can they even survive that? That's kind of how the picture that we get from this. It's not like one person smacked Paul and one person smacked Silas. They're like, uh-uh-uh, don't do that anymore. It's a crowd, and the crowd is angry, and they are inflicting many blows on them. And then they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks. Think about how, again, how dramatically this shifted. Just like that. So the inner prison, this is the place for the worst of the worst. It's like solitary confinement. Stocks are these wooden things put between your legs meant to add a little bit of discomfort and keep you there. It's not an enjoyable situation for them. And you gotta believe that they're sore. I mean, when I go for a hard workout, I just want to lay in like a nice hot bath because I don't want to sit, because it, you know, it's it's uncomfortable. These guys just got beat up and they're put in a nasty cell, probably stinks to high heaven. It's very small, it's dark, and their feet are in stocks. Not a good situation. They're not comfortable. This is awful. Now, the way God builds his church, he builds it through suffering, not around it. A lot of times we want to go around suffering, but God builds through suffering. And up to this point in Philippi, things have been going really well. Everything's been positive. But now, not only are they not in the good graces of the city, but they've also been beaten and they're in jail. I think we need to be careful when it comes to building God's church and building the kingdom that we don't mistake comfort for confirmation. Just because things are all hunky-dory and good doesn't necessarily mean that we're in God's will and we're doing exactly what it is that He wants us to do. You can be in God's will and still be in great pain. We see that here. You can actually be in great comfort and still be completely outside of God's will for your life. I think too many times we take God's confirmation of peace and comfort. We take that as confirmation that, like, oh, I'm doing the right things. That's not necessarily what we see in the gospels. The advance of the kingdom oftentimes happens through pain. And if you are serving the king, you're gonna be in some warfare. And y'all, I don't know if any of you have ever been in warfare. It's not fun. It's not comfortable. And so if you're engaged in this conflict of advancing the kingdom, there are gonna be things that happen to you that aren't super comfortable and fun. And if you never have that happen, it might be something to consider. Like, am I actually am I actually engaged in the conflict or am I just sitting on the sidelines? Paul and Silas, in this example, they were not on the sidelines. If if the faith that you have, if it only works in good conditions, it's not necessarily faith, it's preference. We see that here. At this point, for Paul and Silas, it's like the entire mission is going off the rails. And I know all of us, we've experienced that sometimes. Like things are going good, and then all of a sudden, bam, like everything goes badly. Catastrophe. Look at how they respond, though. This is so good. Verse 25. Again, think about the context of where they're at. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God. And the prisoners were listening to them. How do you respond when it comes to trials? If you were in this situation, what would you do? This is how Paul and Silas respond. And I think this is a behavior that we need to remember. It's something as we go through this letter to the church in Philippi, this will make the letter make so much more sense. We're going to go back and read these first 11 verses again here before we end. And I think that after you have this context, it's going to change the way that you look at it. You know, Paul, in his letter, he talks about rejoicing in all circumstances. A lot of people say these things. Paul actually shows that he did it. Man, he put his money where his mouth was. And what you do in pain, it actually reveals what you believe, what you really believe on a deep fundamental level. And we have the luxury, as we read this narrative, of knowing that this was just a temporary setback. We know that they get out of jail. We know that Paul continues to advance because he writes a letter back to the church at Philippi. They don't know that, though. Again, he's just been beat up. He's in prison. For them, it could be like, our next step is we're gonna get killed. In fact, they know that this happened to one of Jesus' apostles. So we know Jesus kind of had his three bros, Peter, James, and John. James and Peter got rolled up by Herod just a few chapters earlier in Acts, and James was killed. He was murdered. And Herod saw that it pleased the people, and so he sets up Peter. He's like, We're gonna kill Peter next. And what happens is really cool. An angel comes in the night and actually escorts Peter out of the prison. Peter thinks he's having this weird like vision dream, and it's not until he's standing at the door of a friendly house and they knocks on it. It's like, hey, I'm Peter, I'm here, and they're actually there praying for him. That's when he realizes, like, this isn't a dream, this really happened. And so Peter kind of had a similar experience, not too far, at least literary-wise, not too far before this. Chronologically, it was it was well before it. So Paul and Silas, they know about this. It's so interesting. I think it's also interesting that the other prisoners are watching him. The other people that are there. People love train wrecks, don't they? Like, this is why we have bad traffic on 95? Is because when there's something that happens, everybody wants a rubber neck and go back and look. I look, I've waited in traffic for 20 minutes, I will see this crash. And you all will wait behind me because I'm gonna slow down and see what happened. Is it actually bad enough to cause all this traffic and all this pain that I just had to deal with? Right? We love to watch train wrecks, and these people are watching the train wreck of Paul and Silas. They're watching that they got beaten and they're in prison with them. The prisoners, everybody is watching. I had a friend who told me Daniel and I were going through a struggle several years back. Like it was just a it was a rough season. And a friend of ours, dear friend, Rochelle Preut, she um she said, Hey, God gave me a word. He told me to watch you guys because you'll prove faithful through this. People are watching. I'm not saying that to say, like, look at us, we're great, because I'll tell you, there's a lot of times during that trial I wanted to quit and give up. But that word encouraged me because it reminded me, people are watching. And that's what I want you to know and see from this text is that people are watching. When you suffer, people dial in. Just like when they see a car accident on 95. How are they gonna respond? When you're going through something, people want to know what you're gonna do. Is your faith real? Is it just something you say, or is it actually something that you live and you do? And Paul and Silas are showing that. It's so cool. And of course, they're praying, they're worshiping, and God does what he does. God shows up. Verse 26 that suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. This is midnight. Foundations of the prison shaken, immediately all the doors are open, everyone's bonds unfastened, not just Paul and Silas, everybody's bonds come unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was going to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried out with a loud voice, Don't harm yourself, we're all here. Remember, I told you earlier that Peter escaped from jail. You know what Herod did to the jailer? Killed him. Paul knew that story. Paul knew what had happened. Paul knew that the jailer had died before, and so he knew that this was probably gonna happen. He knew that the jailer, at least the jailer feared for his life. So somehow Paul knows he's got his sword out, and and Paul tells him, stop. So interesting. Just because God gives you a way out of a difficult situation doesn't mean that you need to take it. I think it's so cool that that Paul is so in tune with the Holy Spirit in the middle of this struggle that when a door opens in the physical for you to get out of it, you don't even take it. Listen, freedom is not always like leaving. Freedom is just being on mission. It's just being on mission. I I I'll never forget when I was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, one of my detailers, the guys who are like the drill instructors, they always used to say, You have the easiest job in the world. All you have to do is what you're told. And there's a actually, there's a lot of freedom in that. And that's the way that Paul and Silas are living, even as they're in bondage, is they're just doing what the Holy Spirit is telling them. They're on mission, and their mission includes the prisoners, and their mission includes their jailer. They don't want him to die. They actually want him to receive salvation, and that's actually exactly what happens. Everybody's watching this. And so I think for us, when we're going through struggles and trials, we should always be asking ourselves this question: what are my actions communicating right now? Your attitude, your kids watch when you go through struggles. They see how your attitude starts to come out. Are you confident? Do you believe God's gonna come through? Are you patient? Are you firm? Are you steadfast? Or do you get anxious? Do your worries build? Do you get impatient? Do you get frustrated? Do you start to accuse and lash out and just look for a way to get out from under the stress and the struggle? That's not what Paul does. He's aware that there are other people that are observing what's happening and they're going to be affected by what he does or fails to do in this moment. Says the jailer, verse 29, called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? This guy went from a jailer to suicidal to saved, like that, that, that. Pretty powerful. And they said, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. Couple things here. If you remember last week, what we talked about, just calling Jesus teacher, rabbi, it's not enough. You have to believe that he's Lord. So they said, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. The second thing is you and your household. We notice that with Lydia, her entire household was saved and baptized. And this jailer, the same thing happens. Not just him, but his entire household. Moms, dads, leaders of families, friend groups, leaders and friend groups, realize that you have an influence on the people around you. Sometimes the gateway to the people that you love being saved is your conversion, your moment of actually yielding something that you've been holding on to and submitting to the lordship of Jesus. That's what happens to this jailer. It's what happened to Lydia. It's the story of the gospel advancing. It's not just individuals, it's entire households, entire families. So powerful, so cool. It says they spoke the word of the Lord to him and all who were in his house, and he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. Then he brought them up to his house and set food before them, and he rejoiced along with his entire household that he believed in God. Super cool. Acts 20. Paul eventually leaves, like the next day, he actually gets released from jail. It's this interesting encounter where the magistrates tell him he can leave, and he's like, Well, oh, they're just gonna send me out at night now? No, I'm a Roman citizen. You guys beat me publicly, you're gonna come and apologize to me to my face, and then I'll leave. And so they asked him, like, hey, well, will you leave the city, please? And so he actually does that. He goes back and visits Lydia, he goes back and visits the brothers that that have been there in Philippi that they've kind of discipled up to this point, and then they move on and go somewhere else. We see in Acts 20, four chapters later, that he goes back to Macedonia, he returns through Philippi two more times, and then he departs from there. So we know that's how we get Paul visited there at least three times. So this is actually the context of this book that we're gonna be reading. This is the backstory, this is the relationship that Paul has with the city and the people of the city. And so this letter is gonna make a lot more sense when we read through it again. You know, I think it's important that all of us, we all have backstories. Every single one of us. And people treat you differently when they know your backstory, don't they? Like if they knew the struggles that you had gone through, what it took for you to get where you are, maybe they respect you a little bit more. Maybe they're a little bit more kind to you. Some of you might think, man, I don't want anybody to know my backstory. Because they're gonna treat me poorly. I don't know. One of the things that we do, and one of the things I just want to plug here, is we do a small group called Growth Track. Um, it's a series of small groups, and we're gonna start it here in a few weeks. And I'd love to invite you, if you haven't been through it yet, to join me because we're gonna talk about what your story is. That's gonna be one of the things that we discuss in Growth Track, is how your story relates to your walk. Just like the story here in Acts relates to what God's sharing with us in Philippi here. And I love, you know, like some of us got really bad places we started in, but God doesn't leave us there, which is the other way he builds his church. God always finishes what he starts. And God, he's responsible for the outcome. You're not responsible. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to just read through Philippians again as we close. I just want to read through it again with the context of everything that happened here and see how God is bringing this to full, full completion. Verse 1, it says this Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons. I'm gonna pause there. Notice how he talks to three groups of people. He talks to saints, overseers, and deacons. So the saints, those are all the people. A lot of times when we come to church, we think, man, I'm a worthless sinner. Paul never identifies people in the church as a bunch of worthless sinners, he calls them saints. There is an identity that you walk in when you accept Jesus. And sometimes I know at church we have like people, and I love it when people raise their hand at the end of service, but a lot of times we get repeat, repeat hand raises, right? I want to let you know that comes from not recognizing where your identity is. Once you accept Jesus and you've made that decision, doesn't mean you're gonna be perfect, but it does mean your identity is now firmly rooted in Christ. You are a saint. That is who you are, and that's how Paul addresses this letter to the saints in the church. He's not saying everybody there's perfect saying you are now a saint because of the work that Jesus did, and because you called him Lord. And so if you've believed him to be your Lord, you can also be a saint in him. Amen. And he says, so there are saints, and then there are overseers and deacons. Overseers are just leaders in the church. They're the people who are kind of designated to help make decisions, to set the vision. We have overseers who are external here, and we also have leaders who are who are internal. And then the next group is deacons. These are the people who serve some of those lane leaders that I mentioned. They're the people who just serve the church really well. We don't use that exact language, but the official roles are still there. So there's a structure. And Paul actually gives this same structure to Timothy when he tells Timothy, remember how we set up all the churches when you were on these trips with me. Make converts, make disciples who turn into saints, set in elders, overseers to kind of administrate things and teach people, and then set in people who will serve the church faithfully and and and just through persistence. Let's go on. He says, Grace to you and peace from God our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you. He's remembering all these encounters, he's remembering meeting Lydia. Like, man, I remember when I met you. Every single time I remember you, I thank God. He's remembering that girl that he cast the demon out of. He's remembering the other brothers there. He's remembering this jailer. Like, man, every time I remember you and your family, I remember going to your house at like two in the morning, telling you about the gospel and baptizing your whole family. I remember that. I thank God every single time I remember that. Always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy. Because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day, that first day I was down by the river, until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. Paul was there at the beginning of their origin story of their walk with Jesus. And I love it that he knows it's not his responsibility to finish the work. So I think there's two really good takeaways here. Number one, if if you feel like you're you're kind of a house half-built when it comes to your faith, be confident. It's Jesus' job to complete the work. It's his job. He's gonna do it. And if you're a leader, if you're an overseer, a servant, or you're leading your family and you're worried about the people that you're trying to disciple, there's great release here. Your job is to just be faithful. God's job is to finish the work. And Paul was able to leave after being in jail, only being there for a few months and be confident that God was gonna continue to do a work in the people in Philippi that he had delivered the word to. That's really cool to me. I probably would have tried to stay longer. I'd have been worried, oh, they're gonna mess this up. Paul was like, nope, I got a mission. You guys got the word, you got some leaders, I'm out. I got my next thing to go on to. Super cool. He says, verse 7, it's right for me to feel this way about you all because 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. You might not know this. Paul's writing this letter from jail again. He was like a frequent flyer. If they had if they had uh jail rewards, he would uh he'd be on the list. He'd have a lot of rewards stacked up. He'd get a lot of free stays. He's in jail again. In Rome, most people believe because of the way that the letter ends. And the people in Philippi, they were familiar with his jail time experiences. So they know it's probably not super easy for him. Verse 8, he says, For God is my witness how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And it's my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Notice, he is praying the same thing that happened for Lydia. For Lydia, he knows that God opened her mind to receive the gospel. He opened her heart to this revelation, and he's saying, Man, I pray that that continues to happen. And I'm gonna tell you guys, I pray that for you guys all the time. I pray that God would open up your minds and your hearts to hear what is in this word and that it would change you, and that it would it would make you more excellent in how you live, and it would allow you to be able to discern right from wrong in the world. That's what he wants for the church there, and that's what I want for you. There's a lot of confusion out in the world, but man, the answers to all that confusion are found here. They're found in him, and they're found in Christ. He closes it, he says, that you would be filled with the fruit of righteousness. If you're here, I think you probably want to be a righteous person. All of us, we we want that. None of us want to be people who who live terrible lives. We want to be righteousness, we want to be righteous. And Paul and Timothy, they're praying this for their friends in Philippi. And he says, he says, that comes through Jesus Christ. Righteousness only comes through him. He's the place, he's the source of righteousness. You're not going to get it anywhere else. And he finishes, to the glory and praise of God. It's the last way that he builds his church. He doesn't build his church for our stories. He builds it through our stories, but he builds it for his glory. That's the purpose. That's his purpose. His purpose isn't to glorify us, his purpose is to glorify himself, to glorify his son. And that's the mission that we're signing up for. It's to see God be glorified. And sometimes he's going to build it through unexpected people, he's going to build it through uncomfortable experiences, he's going to build it in unexpected places where you would not be anticipating it happening. But he's going to do it in you, and he's going to do it through you. And so, what God did at Philippi, I'm encouraged because I know that he can and will, and he is doing it here at Manna Church. He's still in the business of bringing glory to himself through his church. And I'm glad to be a part of the work that he's doing here on this earth. And what I believe is that he wants to use you, and he wants to use me, and he wants to use the person I was and the person that you were to continue to advance his kingdom. And he's going to do it in places that we might not consider, whether we're a woman, a man, or whether we're tall or short, or any of those things, whether we're young or old, he's going to lead us through moments of suffering, and he's going to lead us into moments of epic triumph for what he's going to do in the earth. Amen. Let's close. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this word. I thank you for the testimony of Acts. And I thank you, God, for the work that you continue to do in the earth, in us and through us, God. Lord, we pray that you would continue to build your kingdom, God. Just like you built it in Acts, Lord. Just like you built it at Philippi. Lord, would you continue to build your kingdom here in Stafford? Build it in Quantico. Build it in Omaha, God. Build it in all the places where Manna Church meets, Lord. Would you continue to build your kingdom? And would you use us, God? I pray, Lord, that anybody who's going through suffering right now, going through a trial, going through a struggle, Lord, would you bless them? Would you encourage them, God? Would you help them see that you're going to build your kingdom through their suffering, not around it, God? You're going to use that as a means, Lord. I pray that you would uh bring to mind people that we might have written off, that we might not think like, man, there's no way you could ever reach that person. Maybe people who are enemies of us right now. They're like the jailer almost. Father, would you help us see hope for them? Help us just submit to you, God, on times where we could tap out, just like, I'm not gonna be around them. They just ridicule me, they frustrate me. Lord, help us not tap out when you've called us to lean in. And Father, I pray that you would advance your kingdom here in Stafford for your glory, God. Glorify yourself, Jesus. We love you. Amen. Could y'all please stand with me? We're just gonna worship real quick as we close.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

Thank you for listening to the Mana Church Stafford Podcast. If you would like to connect with us, you can find us on the web at manastafford.church or download the Mana Church app to listen to our new episodes as they become available. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast. We would also love to meet you in person. If you are local, our services take place each Sunday at 10 a.m. We pray you have an amazing week and we'll see you next time.