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Thank you for joining us for a sermon from Sojourn North. We have come to this place. Doesn't it look nice? So if you haven't been here before, you see this. This was all red carpet, if you can imagine something like this all over the floor, and there was a lot going on. But we are so thankful for these renovations. And it fits the sermon today to stop and do some family time and just be thankful for a few moments. I mean, Paul, he says, I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you. And it took a lot of work to see this vision come to play and many, many volunteers. And so I want to mention a few of the people that helped, and I have some gifts for them. Some people are on vacation or not here, but I want to mention them anyway, and you can thank them later, and I'll give them gifts. And what's interesting about people who work behind the scenes and volunteer so much, they love stuff like this when you announce them in front of everybody. Just a little sarcasm right there. But I'm going to mention some people, our friend Sean Tippett, he's on vacation. But Sean has done hours and hours and hours of work on media and getting things set up with that. Our main man, Chris Barnes, over there, uh he's barely raising his hand. He has spent so many hours. He was running Ethernet chords throughout. When we got the TVs up and we plugged them in, they worked right away. And we were like, it's a miracle, or it's Chris Barnes, or it's both. And so we'll just say it's both. But he's done so much work on the sound system, and he's up here a lot working on things. So so thankful for Chris. Leah Slayden has recovered chairs. She's got our communion table right now at home. She's stripping it and staining it. She's working like a scientist to get the right stain color for uh the beams so it will flow. And eventually I would like to. I have in my mind, I'd like to build a pulpit and use the same stain and put a nice simple cross behind me as well with that. So it just flows and all that. So we're excited about that. But thank Leah when you see her. Melissa Horn, she works here and she's very, very part-time, but she works like she's not part-time. And she had a positive attitude and just coordinated volunteers. She went so far above and beyond. And I don't know if y'all know this, but she actually doesn't work on Sundays. Did y'all know that? But she does work on Sundays because she's here. And then finally, the person who pulled all this together, amazingly, is Troy Haggard. Troy is a master craftsman. I've been around construction my whole life. I've been doing construction my whole life. It's rare you meet someone who has the skills but also the integrity to do a good job, plus an artistic vision for pulling things off. And so, if you know we had a special gift that allowed us to do all this, but we stretched every dollar, and one of the reasons we were able to is because of Troy. He walked through and we were talking about the paint quote that we had, and he was just thinking. He pulls on his beard when he's thinking sometimes, uh, and he's just like, uh I can do it for less than half that. So he did all the painting. Now, in addition to that, he did so many other things that weren't even part of, he just volunteered. Uh, and it was amazing. He actually spent all night up here one night before they put down the flooring in the fellowship hall because he wanted to paint and not paint over the new flooring, just in case paint splatters, all night long. I came in early the next morning, I was like, You're here early, and he's like, I never left. It's like, oh my goodness, this is amazing. So so thankful for all of these people and for what they've done, and for you who volunteered to move chairs and do so many other things. So we're very thankful. But I want to do a prayer of dedication for this space and uh just just thank God for it. So let's let's pray together. Father, thank you so much for your provision, for your kindness. We thank you for this space, Lord. We know that the church is not a building, but it's us, the people, Lord. But we are so blessed to have this building, Lord, to be able to use it for the community, for them to gather here, to have the grounds that we have to build relationships and just seek to be a light in this neighborhood. Lord, I thank you for all the hands that were gifted to be able to participate in this renovation. And Lord, I pray as the years go forward that this would be a place where people come and they find refuge. Lord, that we would grow together as a family, that people would grow in knowing you and loving you more, and that this should just be a place that people know that you are made much of, Jesus. And we give all glory to you, and we thank you, God, for your grace. And it's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. So let's thank God for his provision. I wanted to show you one more thing before we uh continue in Philippians. We had some people right on the wall last week, so this sound wasn't up. So this is what the wall looked like. And I took pictures of everything to document it, so I if you if you want to know later, I can put down or show you what was on there. But the next slide shows some of the different things. Uh, the bottom right, Isaiah 117, is in Portuguese, and I'm not gonna tell you who that is, but that'd be a fun game for you to try to find out who wrote that. Um, this, one of my favorite verses, Zephaniah, I'm gonna read it. The Lord your God is with you, the mighty warrior who saves you. He will take great delight in you. That's the truth of God. He delights in you. In his love, he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing. Beautiful verse. And then the next, I thought this was so precious. So you got Joey and Julia's verse, Isaiah 40, but then look at this from the kids. Nora, Jesus loves you. Charlie, Jesus loves you. Isn't that what we want our children to know? That our kids could say, Jesus loves me. Sounds simple, but this is profound and it's our anchor in a world that is very unsteady. So all of these things are behind this. I would ask you not to pull off the wall to see them. Just let me show you the pictures. Uh, but we're really thankful, really thankful for those. Well, last week we started introducing Philippians, and I am so excited about the series going through it in the summer. I asked you to look at Acts 16 for the context of when Paul came to Philippi and then Philippians 1, because all of this is rooted in a story. He didn't just write a random letter to a random people with random truth. This was a story that he had embodied and lived. And so as he's writing Philippians, uh, he is writing a decade later than when he planted the church there with the people. And so when he's being reminded of them, and we'll see that in the passage in just a moment, he's, I can imagine him as he sits in jail, uh, he is thinking about Lydia and meeting her and going to her house and building those relationships. He remembers the slave girl he cast the demon out of. He remembers the Philippian jailer who, after the earthquake, was about to take his life, and Paul and Silas say, We're still here, and his life is saved, and not only that, his physical life saved, he comes to know Jesus because he says, What must I do to be saved? And Paul shares with them, and the Philippian jailer and his family are saved. And so from these converts start this church in Philippi. And so when Paul says, I thank God in every remembrance of you, he remembers them. And he's writing a decade later. And if you remember Paul's life and kind of the framework, his conversion, these are approximate dates, we don't know the exact he gets saved by Jesus appearing to him on the Damascus Road around 33 A.D. He has his second missionary journey and goes to Philippi around 50 A.D. And here he writes this letter around 60 A.D. And so he's in the last years of his life as he sits in jail. This is his first imprisonment, uh, second imprisonment, third. I can't, I forget how many imprisonments he had, but he had so many things going on with his life. And uh he writes this. So if you wish, you may stand for the reading of God's Word. We're going to look at Philippians 1, 1 through 11. And we remember this is rooted in a story. Paul writes, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. I am sure of this that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Indeed, it is right for me to think this way about all of you because I have you in my heart, and you are all partners with me in grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness how deeply I miss all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And I pray this that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So we have our outline, three points, and we'll start with remembering God's grace among us. But even as I reread the passage, I've read it a lot this week, I've read a lot in the past. I'm just taken again by Paul's deep affection for the people in Philippi. His heart is for them. He loves them dearly. And so remembering God's grace among us, as we continue to seek to find ourselves in the story, let's look at the story where Paul begins his greeting. He starts with relationships to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including overseers and deacons. So he's saying once again, the church is all of you. The members, the deacons, the overseers, the pastors, it's all of it. We see even the church structure as it's forming in the early church that this was intentional and a gift from God. But it's it's to everyone. God's truth is to all. And then in verse 3 he says, I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you. And so he is in thanksgiving, giving thanks. And what's beautiful, I think, to me is that we've seen letters where Paul starts with just fervor and correction, but he starts here. The church in Philippi had issues. It had struggles and needed things that were needed correcting, but he starts with this just this gratitude. And he he just chooses to remember. And so I just imagined all the things that he was remembering. So he had his ten years earlier, his his journey, second missionary journey, and that took him to Philippi. And remember, God blocked his way to go different places and landed him there. Sovereignty of God. And so this church is birthed, and then over the years, he sends people and he hears people come from Philippi to give messages to him saying, this is what's going on. And so he has all these things in remembrance. And the thing that he thanks God for is this after a decade, and what's beautiful about this church and sojourn churches, um, there's there's six, and we're all independent, autonomous churches of each other, but we're family related, so we still hang out and do things together. But this is a beautiful thing because he says, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, and I'm thankful for Sojourn Church, and I'm thankful for the churches that were here because they were gospel churches, and they believed the word of God, they believed in the saving grace of Jesus Christ, that it's a free gift, that there's nothing we can do. But as he says, I thank God for your partnership in the gospel, he is thanking God for the perseverance of what they've been through and that they've stuck with it. And so, my application for even this first point, I would like to term it like this we have a default way of remembering, and then there's a remembering that we can choose. So you can get 10 encouragements and one discouragement. Which one do you remember more typically? I know for most people, I know for myself, you're gonna remember the discouragement more. You can get built up, built up, built up, and then one small snide remark or one thing over here, and it's like I can focus on that. That's kind of our default mode, and it makes sense with us in this fallen world. Uh, it just is. I mean, I I remember uh I told a uh a bad joke about cake. That think about this. I don't even know what it was, but it was about cake and catholicism and Lent. It wasn't even a joke, it was like a side remark, and some people chuckled and laughed. This is 20 years ago, so I wouldn't do this anymore. So I have a little more uh cooth, I would say. But this guy comes up after the service, and I just poured my heart out. At Midtown, we used to preach or we'd do four services, so I preached the same sermon four times. It was mind-blowing because you didn't even remember what you preached in the previous sermon. It's like, have I told this story before? Go go try to write something and do it four times and just it's like it's maddening. Uh but he was like, I was very offended by that joke, and I was like, brother, I'll tell you the truth. I was too. I was too. I shouldn't have said that, but I did. And it was just about Catholicism and eating cake. It didn't even make sense. Okay? But I took that, I felt so bad, I hadn't remembered anything from the rest of the day, and that stuck with me for weeks. But what we seek to do is, and when Paul's saying, set your mind on things above, not the things that are temporary on this earth, we have to functionally with intentionality set our mind to remember different things. So I tell you this quote, I've said it several times over the last year from Kurt Thompson. He says this, what we pay attention to, we remember. So what we're paying attention to, we remember. Makes perfect sense. But he goes on and says this what we remember becomes our anticipated future. So if I pay attention to only the discouragements, to only the disappointments, we don't want to just pretend they're not real, they are real. But if that is all I focus on, that is what I remember, and if that's what I remember, then I assume that's gonna happen in the future. And the truth is there will be disappointments, there will be hard times. But if we with intentionality can remember the grace, as Paul has shown us here in this first part of the letter, we shift our mind to what God has done. It's redemptive remembering. So as we intentionally say, what I'm paying attention to is what God has done, his story, his bigger story. That's what I remember, and what I remember becomes my anticipated future that God is with us. God is still working, He hasn't forgotten your address. No matter how guilty you feel, no matter how much shame you feel, He has not He hasn't forgotten you. So where have you seen God in your story? I would encourage you this week, and I've got an assignment for you in just a little bit in the sermon, but redemptively remember. But we don't just redemptively remember, that's important. We look at the second point. We want to remember, and that leads us to trust that God's work is within us. It's one of the most precious verses in Philippians, and I want to camp out here for a moment. He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. Let's go word by word with it. He, God, began a good work, he's the one who begins the work. That's his prerogative, and he's done it. Praise be to him. He will carry it on. So he continues it for how long? To completion. It's his deal. He begins it, he continues it, he completes it, he begins it, he continues it, he completes it. That is God. There's not a moment in your life where you're not in God's mind, in God's heart, your names are engraved on his hands. Like he is for you. Romans chapter 8. If he is for you, who can be against you? Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities. Nothing in all creation can separate you from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are his. Remember. But it's not just that he loves us, he sends the Holy Spirit to live within us, and he's doing a work in us. Why can Paul be confident of this? And I love it. He says, I am confident of this. This is what this is what happened. He looks at his own life. He's towards the end of his life when he writes this. The last five years of his life, maybe. Think about his life. And think about the progression of his life. I thought about it this way this week. You can look at it many different ways. Early in his apostolic ministry, he writes this in Corinthians. He says, For I am least of the apostles. Pretty humble. He's a humble guy. But then later in his ministry in Ephesians, he writes, Though I am the very least of all the saints. And guess what he writes at the end of his life, towards the end, 1 Timothy, he says, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. I'm the chief of sinners. Now, if you look at Paul's life, did he become more sinful as he grew? No. He just understood more the holiness of God, more the wickedness of his flesh. But that did not lead him to despair. It actually led him to glory in the cross more, to trust more in Christ and his work. And the beauty of the cross grows. We tend to think that maturity is I'll have it all together and then I'll be mature. That's not biblical maturity. Biblical maturity says, I understand more clearly than ever that everything I have is grace, and I will seek his face and I will depend on him. That's Christian maturity. I have to cling to Jesus because he is my rock. And Paul can say, I am confident of this, that he who began the work continues it to completion because look at my life. I was persecuting Christians, approving of their death, throwing them in jail, separating families. And Christ saved me. And he grew me. So here's your homework. Some of y'all aren't in school over the summer, and it's like, what do you need? You need someone to tell you to do an assignment. Okay, so here we are. Here is your assignment. And let me say something first. God is faithful. So this is a faithfulness assignment. Take time this week to write out a story. It can be a brief story of when God showed up in your life. It can be a long time ago. It can be recent. When he showed up in your life and worked. So you're writing out just a story, an example. It can be a paragraph, it can be pages when God showed up and did work. So you're going to take that story, and what I want you to do is go to someone who loves you, a dear friend, it can be a family member and read it. Read it to them. Ask them, what do you see in that? Hear their words reflect back to you. And then go back and just reflect with the Lord and see what that has done to your soul. Because you haven't just thought that. What I find in life is that so often we just think like, if I can just think enough, I'll be okay. But there's something about physically writing something out and declaring it, saying it out loud, having another person hear it. I'm testifying and then having them reflect that back and then taking it and saying, what was that experience like? When I've been able to do this in my life, and I do it quite often, I'm encouraged. There are a whole bunch of different things that go on. I'm remembering I'm not alone. Even when I hear someone reflect back, it's like, oh, I see God working like this. It's in ways that I'm like, oh, I didn't even see it like that. That's the beauty of the body of Christ. So we remember we're trusting, and finally, we're participating in God's love through us. Paul closes this section with a prayer, and I love it. I love the prayers of Paul. Uh, if I I say it every time we talk about a prayer of Paul, that you can look at the prayers of Paul, write out what he prays for, and then compare it to what you pray for and what I pray for, and it's like, oh, he prays for a lot of different things, different than what I do. Look at Ephesians 1, Ephesians 3. It's like, what does he pray for? Oh, that you may understand the ununderstandable or comprehend the incomprehensible, the love of God, that's the height, the width, the depth, all of those things. But let's see what he prays right here. He says this, verse 9, and I pray this. So I broke this up in my notes. I just dissected it. What does he pray for? He prays that your love will keep on growing. Okay, that's a good prayer. I pray that for you this week. I pray that your love would keep growing. In what, though? Growing in what? And remember, growth in the biblical terms is uh agricultural growth. It's slow, but it's it firms up with roots and it produces fruit. But what what growing? He goes on to say, in knowledge and every kind of discernment. So knowing, and we know biblical knowing isn't just in the head, it's in the heart, it's through all of us. But let's go. Your love will keep growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment. Why? So that you may approve the things that are superior. He says this a lot in a lot of different ways in his letters. He says, So you can choose the best way, the way that God has for you. And what else? That you may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ. He says, I want you to know Jesus, to love him, to grow in knowledge and discernment, to be pure and blameless because that's what God desires for us. Why? Because he wants what's best for us. He longs for what's best. And what will this look like? He goes on and says, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ. Once again, the fruit that comes forth to the glory and praise of God. That's the purpose. The glory and praise of God. So my question as I pray this for us here today, and I actually want to stop and pray this for us before I go to communion. Let's pray together. Father, I pray for us here today that even as we see Paul's prayer, that, Lord, that our love will keep on growing. Lord, we acknowledge that the greatest love commands are love you with all we've got, our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then love our neighbor as ourselves, Lord. May our love grow. And that we could approve the things that are the best things, the superior things that you have for us. That we would seek, even as we looked at Galatians, that we wouldn't drift to the right and to the left and fall away, Lord, that we would come back and seek your face. Lord, that we would be pure and blameless because that's your heart for us. And that we would be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, Lord. And all of this is to your glory that we get to show off what a great God we have, that who saved us, who sent Jesus, Jesus, that you came and died the death and received the punishment that we should have received. But we are given your righteousness and freedom because of your grace. May we grow in this love. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. I I won't tell you specifically, but I'm gonna, if you want to do a coffee conversation, I feel like I just turned 52 that things I've known for 20 years that are really beautiful truths have come alive in a new way, and it's like, oh, that's what that means. And it's like I it's not like I just strove to understand, but it's like, oh, it took 20 years for that to, and maybe I don't even understand it to the depth of what it really is, but it takes time, and we can be patient with ourselves, and we remember the story isn't finished, God's at work. Here's your sentence to remember, to carry for this week. The story is not finished because God is still at work. Your story is not finished. Your story's not finished because God is still at work. I'm confident of this. I look at my life, God's grace. We come to the table this morning and we remember that this is our participation, a reminder of what God has done. This is a way we each weekly redemptively remember what Jesus has done. And if you're a Christian here today, you've accepted Christ as your Savior, I'd invite you to come forward after I pray again, and you can take some juice and some bread back to your seat and just hold on to it. And I'd invite you to reflect on the words of the song that's being sung. You can sing aloud, the words will be up. But as Brian leads us in Good Shepherd, uh, just the power of these words as he's been leading us in it. Some I it's just one of my favorite songs. I hadn't even heard it before it was sung here. And just remember that he's at work in your life. And after that song's sung, I'm I'll stand and lead us in communion. But remember, God is at work. He who began a good work in you carries it on. He will, I promise, bring it to completion. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you so much for your grace and your love and just the amazing nature of the reality of our salvation and and that you have started this work and you're not gonna you're not gonna bail on it. And it brings you great joy to see us know you more and love you more, and you know it's what's best for us. And Father, I pray for my brothers and sisters here today, Lord, wherever they may be, that you would give them grace to receive from you today, grace to receive this redemptive remembering that Jesus, you love them so much that for the joy set before you, you endured the shame of the cross. And the joy was the redemption of us to the glory of you, God the Father. Lord, we thank you. Please work in our midst. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.