Sermon from April 26, 2026

We welcome Chris Roberts as a guest speaker today.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

All right, hello, hello. Is it working? Can you guys hear me all right? All right. Well, good morning, everyone. I'm so glad to be back here today and to see all of you and to have this amazing opportunity to share God's word. I want to thank you the pastor for letting me come here and uh and and preach. Today's passage we'll be looking at comes from the book of Philippians. So please open up your Bibles to Philippians chapter four. That's Philippians four verses four through seven. We'll be looking at Philippians chapter four verses four through seven. Oh, there we go. All right. So Philippians chapter four, verses four through seven says, Paul writes, God says, rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Let us go to Him in prayer. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that you give us reasons to rejoice today. We pray for unity within the church, unity within relationships in our lives. We pray for those around us, help us to be an encouragement unto others. And we pray that you would help us to rely and trust on you this morning. I pray that this congregation would be able to experience your peace, a peace that goes beyond understanding. Please speak to through me today as I preach your word. Hide me behind your cross that I may be bold. I pray that only what you want to be said is said, and that what is said penetrates all of our hearts and changes us, transforms our lives so that we may live closer to you and have more peaceful lives, Father. We praise you, we rejoice in you, we love you, and we pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen. She always seems to be chill, laid back, and at peace despite her circumstances. When I was in middle school, she sat me down one day and said, Chris, I feel called to go on the mission field. So she began to go over the next few months, she began raising support from churches like this one, who pledged to give her a certain amount of money every month so that way she may go down to Guatemala and help help mission teams be fed, be uh make sure they had they have everything that they need, get them everywhere they need to go so that way they could serve and help at feeding centers and orphanages. She also taught at a school down there, the same school that I went to. So while we were there, we had to rely on a very meager teacher salary, if you could even call it that. And we had to rely on the generosity of churches like this one. When I was in high school, she sat me down and gave me just enough information to understand our financial situation and that we do not have enough to make ends meet. So the anxiety started to fill my heart. Started to think through all the different possibilities of what does this mean? We just uprooted our lives. We just went to a we just moved to a country that we do not know with a language that we do not know to do this ministry. We're building a new life. Now what's going to happen? Am I going to have to turn and go back to where we were? I'm just starting to build a life here. Am I going to have to get a job? Are we all going to have to pitch in just to make ends meet? What is going to happen? I began to experience anxiety, concern for our financial situation. So when I asked mom, what are we going to do? She just sat back and laughed. And she said, I don't know. But I trust God will provide for us. See, she had a, despite our circumstances, she had a peace that goes beyond understanding. Time and time again, we saw the Lord provide for us. Our bills were always paid. There was always food on the table. When my shoes wore out, you can't order shoes online down there. You can't just go to a store and find one in my size. The average Guatemalan's like up to here on me. I could not find a pair of shoes. So God sent a pastor who is my size, who had who always packs an extra three, four pairs of shoes, who decided to give me all of his. When our car broke down, it was right at a time when another missionary family was about to go back to the States for an extended period of time to raise support. They needed someone to watch their car. Time and time again, the Lord provided for my family. And the whole time, my mom just laughed at every obstacle that we ran into because she understood things were outside of her control, but they were under her Heavenly Father's control. So today I would want each of you to be able to walk out of here with three actionable things that you can do today to experience this same peace that goes beyond understanding. That despite your circumstances, you will be able to enjoy this peace, to laugh at your obstacles, laugh at what is going on in your life because you know that the Heavenly Father is on your side. I want everyone to just take a moment to just think about what is called what concerns do you have in life? What anxieties do you have in life? Because we all got them. I have them just as you. Our pastor is an expert at anxiety. We have these concerns in our lives, and it's okay to have concerns, but how we deal with these concerns is what is important. So what keeps you up at night? What constantly is going through your mind? Where are their sufferings in your life? Where are the pains in your life? Think about them for a second and then hear God's response to how to deal with those. The first way, the first thing that we can do, the first action that we can take to experience peace beyond understanding is to rejoice. Look at verse 4 with me. It says, Rejoice in the Lord always. It doesn't say rejoice in the Lord on Sunday mornings. It doesn't say rejoice in the Lord when things are going well. It does not say rejoice in the Lord when I feel, when you feel like it. But it says, rejoice in the Lord always. Yes, we are to rejoice in those times. But it says we are to always rejoice. Rejoice when you are in the valleys of your life, the valleys of despair. Rejoice when there are times where you are dealing with great suffering, great loss. That's powerful when we begin to think about everything going on in our lives, and now we hear someone tell us to rejoice. With all of our worries, all of our anxieties, all of our sufferings, we might question, why am I to rejoice? Now, Paul was writing to the church of Philippi. That's why it's called the Philippians. He was writing to the Philippians, the people who lived in Philippi. So I want to go back and put ourselves in the shoes of the original church. Because this book is really a letter that Paul wrote to one of the churches that he established. So let's take a moment and go back and look at what it was like back then. The Church of Philippi began with just a few random people in Philippi. Philippi was a Roman colony that was kind of close to Rome, and it had a commercial highway leading directly to Rome, which meant there's a lot of merchants going up and down that road, a lot of money passing through that city. So a lot of people taking advantage of that, and a lot of people were selling their wares. So this was a pretty prosperous city. Being a Roman colony, they also had a lot of special privileges. So this was a very this was a very privileged and blessed community. In their lives, they had the same relationships that we have today. They had friendships that they had today, they have their same anxieties, worries. They had children to take care of, they had tables to put food on that they needed to continue to put food on. And then they also needed times of prayer, times to take a break, to take a rest. So now you have these group of people that go down to the riverside and they're sitting there, maybe praying, maybe taking some time to wash things. And then these two men, Paul and Silas, come up to them and tell them a life-changing story about a man named Jesus. Well, then they want to start getting together to learn more about this Jesus. They turn, they give them, they give their lives over to Christ, and they begin meeting in the church, which was just a household at the time. They were meeting in a house, gathering a small group of people, and then this man who just established a new church in this city, at the time would have been a new religion, basically. It was a fulfillment of the Jewish religion that maybe some of them have heard about before. You have this new church beginning to meet, and then the man who established it goes and casts out a spirit, an evil spirit from somebody, someone who is possessed, and he gets thrown in jail for it. And while he's in jail, there's an earthquake that shakes the gates open. And while the gates are open, and he has the opportunity to leave, he stays. And he uses that as an opportunity to share the gospel with the warden and add to his church that he just established. So this is a pretty crazy start to the beginning of this church. And now, being a more blessed church, financially speaking, they have the means to fund his missionary journeys. So the the church, the Philippian church, was were people who continually funded his missionary journeys. And as he traveled all around the Mediterranean Sea, he would have passed through them a lot, passed through Philippi a lot. He would have been writing a lot of letters to them. And over ten years, they would have grown to be very close. The church would have grown, they would have grown to be very close. But just like in every church, problems arose. And this is where we start to this is where they might have started to think, why are we to rejoice? Because they start looking at the problems in their church. There's a lot of pride in their church. That pride led to a lot of disunity, a lot of arguing. There were those in the church that proclaimed the gospel for their own selfish ambition. There were those in the church that twisted the gospel and made it about what they wanted it to be about. So the church is beginning to fall into chaos. Who do you go to when the church is like that? I would turn to the man who established the church. We need you to come in, we need you to fix these things. Where is this man? And he was thrown in prison. They find out that he is in the prison in Rome. He is under house arrest up there for preaching the gospel. And he does not have his physical needs being met. So, being the faithful financial supporters that they are, they get one of their church members and they give him some money and they send him off to Paul to go take care of him. And if that was not bad enough, you got the church in disarray, you have the person who established it in prison, the man you just sent to try to help him falls deathly ill. They had a lot of reasons to not rejoice this morning. Or when they when they heard about it. And now Paul writes them a letter saying, Rejoice. What do we have to rejoice about? Maybe you might be thinking the same thing this morning when I tell you we are called to rejoice. If you want to experience peace beyond understanding, we are called to rejoice. What do I have to rejoice about? With our anxieties, we we often might think in what ifs. What if my marriage fails? What if my business goes under? What if I am fired from my job? What if another unexpected expense comes up and banksrupts me? What if all of my relationships fail? What if I turn everyone away from me? What if I mess up the only relationships that I have? What if my family m member never talks to me? What if they don't what if my the my loved one doesn't make it out of the hospital? What if, what if, what if our brains are wired to think, what ifs? Are are wired to be anxious. So in all of this, the church today, the church back then might have asked, why are we to rejoice? What do we have to rejoice about? Who are you, Paul, to tell us to rejoice? You don't understand all the things I have to deal with. You don't understand that broken relationship. You don't understand my wayward child. You don't understand how hard it is at work. You don't understand how I'm trying to deal with the constant, never-ending bills in my life, the debt that is stacking up in my life. Whatever problem that you have, that we all have pain, we all have sufferings, and I by no means want to invalidate anyone's sufferings or pains. I just simply want to point to a hope that we can find in this scripture. So he says, Rejoice in the Lord. Paul wrote that. And he didn't just write rejoice in the Lord always, but he wrote, rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say rejoice. He actually said rejoice several times in the previous chapters, constantly saying to rejoice. And we look at him and say, We are suffering, why are we to rejoice? You don't understand what I'm going through. And that's why Paul was the perfect person to write this. God knew what he was doing when he chose Paul to write this letter. Paul was an expert in suffering. When he first came to the faith, he was shunned by his community. As he went on to the missionary journeys, he was constantly persecuted, chased out, imprisoned, beaten, whipped, shipwrecked. He watched those around him, his fellow believers he watched get persecuted and murdered for their faith. Amongst all of that pain and suffering, he had a physical pain in his side. He had a pain that God refused to take out, a thorn that God refused to take away from him. He was an expert in suffering. So now the question might change to why is Paul saying rejoice? He seems like he had he had it really bad. Why is he rejoicing in all of his sufferings? Well, with this letter, it would have been delivered to the church and read aloud from start to end, and they would have been reflecting on what he said in chapter one. When he calls them to rejoice, he started the letter by saying exactly why he is rejoicing today when he wrote this letter. He is saying, I can rejoice because I have a church who cares for me, who's willing to send me financial support even in prison. I can rejoice today that yes, some people are preaching the gospel for their own selfish ambitions, but guess what? The gospel is still being proclaimed. And yes, I am in prison, but guess what? The gospel is still being proclaimed because I have an opportunity to talk to the guards and share the gospel with these guards that they might have not otherwise heard the gospel. So the gospel is being proclaimed. That's another reason he has to rejoice. And then we see at the end of chapter one, he says, To live is Christ, and to die is gain. So as long as he has breath in his lungs, as long as he is alive, he has a reason, a glorious purpose to be alive, and that is to spread the gospel. He has an eternal purpose. Yes, he has pains and sufferings, but those are temporary. The kingdom that he is helping God build is eternal. My friends, today we have the same reasons to rejoice. You have a church that loves you. The gospel is still being proclaimed today. We have a glorious purpose to share and play a part in that. And when we do pass away, he says, To die is gain. We will enter into an eternal paradise with our Heavenly Father. So the first way that we can experience peace beyond understanding is to rejoice. Let's look at verse 5 for the next action that we can take today to experience that peace. It says, Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. To be honest, when I first read that, it kind of it kind of seemed to not really fit in with the rest of the passage. What does that mean to be reasonable? Well, the Greek word that it comes from epiekes can really be translated as let your forbearance, which is not really a word that we use often. Maybe your scripture says, let your gentleness or let your gentle spirit be known to everyone. This idea of forbearance is an idea of a patient, restrained kindness, a gentleness. And you'll notice all of those words involve self-control, patience, kindness, gentleness. Those are all fruit of the spirit. So yes, we are called to be gentle. That is the second way that we can experience peace beyond understanding, is to be gentle. But it says we're not to do this on our own. We're not, it says, let everyone know that you are gentle. So it's not, I'm not gonna have each of you come up here and announce that you are gentle to everybody. That's not what that means. It means we are to let everyone know, in every encounter, we're supposed to go into it with a kind and self-controlled patience. That by in our each and every encounter that we that we sh that we have with someone else, that they will understand that we are a gentle spirited person. And we are not to do this on our own. Look at the the next part of verse 5, it says the Lord is at hand. We are to rely on God. We are to spend time with God and let Him transform our hearts. The more we spend time praying to him, the more we spend time searching his word, the more that we will begin to bear the fruit of the Spirit, which is being self-controlled, which is being gentle, kind, patient. Think about a time in your life where you've experienced an interaction with customer service. Maybe this is you, maybe this is somebody that you witness this happen to. Or you have a customer who is just completely frustrated, who is fed up, who wants a solution to their problem. They barge into the store, they walk up to the customer service desk, they slam their item down, and they demand a solution to their problem. But they're met with a gentle spirit. They're met, their anger is met with a peace, a peaceful understanding. As the interaction continues on, they begin to calm down. That gentle spirit begins to disarm them. Maybe by the end of it, they even apologize. Even if their problem has not been solved, they might apologize for how they acted out. For us to truly experience peace in our lives, we need to have peace with those around us. So it says, let everyone, every encounter that you go into, let it be known that you are a gentle spirit, and you'll begin to experience more peace in your relationships. Now that does not that does not guarantee that they're going to change their actions or how they talk with you, but it is going to guarantee that you will have more peace in your heart, and you're not going to let this interaction get the better of you. So it says, let your reasonableness be known to everyone. So yes, the Lord is with us, but this is also saying that Jesus will return one day, and when he returns, he will hold us accountable for our encounters. So we are to live lives and go into every situation with a gentle spirit. So we're called to rejoice, we are called to be gentle. The third thing that we can do today to experience peace beyond understanding is found in verse 6, and that is simply to pray. Let's read verse 6 together. It says, Do not be anxious about anything. That, my friends, is a lot easier said than done. And it's not something that we can do on our own. So if you feel guilt when you read that, it's not a guilt of, I should be doing better. I shouldn't let these get the better of me. I shouldn't, and then that that guilt comes from a self-reliance. You see, the initial church, they were very prideful. Paul takes all of chapter 2 telling them, you guys are so prideful. Humble yourselves, please. Look at Jesus' example. Jesus was on high, ruler of the universe. He didn't need to come down to earth, but he chose to humble himself and come down to earth. Not just as a human, but as a servant. Not just as a servant, but one who would die on the cross. That is the example we are to follow, Paul says. And we can only do that by praying. Look at the next part of verse 6. It says, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything. Not just when things feel outside of your control, not just for big life decisions, not just letting God handle the little things, and then you'll take care of the important things because you don't want to give that control over to anyone else. But it says, but in everything, by prayer, we're to replace our thoughts of anxieties with thoughts of prayer. But in everything by prayer and supplication, which sounds just like another word for prayer, but this is really the idea of humble request. We are not to barge into God's room and say, This is what I want to do with my life. I need you to answer my prayers. Give me what I want, when I want, and how I want. But no, God is saying, Don't barge into my room, don't demand stuff of me. But he's saying, Come humbly, seek my will for your life. See, my mom did not have to worry about her needs being met because she was seeking God's will, not her own. She understood she was where God wanted her to be. She understood that she had a heavenly father who was in total control of the situation, that loved her, that cared for her, and that would provide for her. Just as he provides for the flowers in the fields and the sparrows in the sky, he'll provide for those that he's made in his image and those who follow after him. So it says that we should enter into prayer instead of focusing, letting the constant thoughts of anxiety run through our minds. We are to turn those thoughts into prayers. And when we begin to pray, we should enter humbly with thanksgiving. We get so focused on our own lives, it seems like the world's busier now than ever. We are so focused on what is to come, and we forget about everything that God has done for our lives. So when we enter into prayer with a rejoicing, gentle spirit, with humility, with thanksgiving, we'll be focused more on what God has done and who He is than what we need. And when we begin to think that way, we'll begin to have a peace because we'll be we'll begin to be able to trust God. Trust Him with everything. So with prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. Think about when the Israelites were fleeing Egypt. They were on the run, entire families running towards the Red Sea, and they meet a dead end. They have chariots chasing behind them. And if they don't surrender, they will surely be killed. If they try to cross, so they're probably starting to think, how are we going to cross this thing? They're trying to be, I'm sure many of them were anxious and trying to be self-reliant, trying to come up with an idea of solving this problem on their own. Surely if we try to run around the Red Sea, they'll catch up to us. If we try to swim across the Red Sea, we'll drown. Maybe some of them were even looking for boats or ships. What are we going to do? And that's the thing about our Heavenly Father. His ways are higher than our ways. His are higher than our own. So while everyone was in a panic, he said, Moses, pick up your staff and slam it down and get out of my way. And that's exactly what Moses does. And then God parts the Red Sea. God made a way forward in their lives that they had not considered as even a possibility. He made a way for them to not only get out of their current temporary situation, because once they get across, the Egyptians would have probably tried to go around or do something if they managed to flee on their own. They still have this problem over their heads. And God said, No, I am not just going to dissolve your situation, but I am going to give you a permanent solution to this situation. So as they flee down this new path, take a new step in faith down this way that was not considered an option in their minds. My friends, we are called to live with such faith. Because the same God who saved the Israelites, that is a real story. That really happened. That's the same God that is watching over us today. So when we begin to think about all the things that He's done, and we see in His Word all the things that He's done, when we see His faithfulness, we continue to praise Him. I'm sure there's several songs that you've sung just in the last, just this last year, about God's faithfulness. But how reliant are you on the Father? Are you constantly filled with worry and anxiety, trying to do things in your own power for your own selfish ambitions? Or are you following after Him, seeking His will, and relying on Him to provide for you? It says, if you do these things, if we rejoice in the Lord, my friends, we have many reasons to rejoice, and we are to do it always. If we rejoice in the Lord, if we enter into every encounter in our lives with gentleness, if we be gentle, and we're focused more on unity than on being right all the time. And if we pray and we give all of our concerns to the Father, we might not get an answer right away. But we can at least just take solace in the fact that we gave it to the Father. He's got it handled. When we do these three things, look at verse 7, and we'll end with this. It says, the peace of understanding, the peace of God, sorry, the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Now, it doesn't need to be guarded if it's not under attack. As we grow closer to the Father, Satan and his forces are not going to like that. And we are going to face problems. Just by the fact that we live in a fallen world, we are going to face problems. We're going to have things that we are going to be concerned about. We're going to face things that will produce a great anxiety in our hearts. Even Paul says in chapter 2, he said, I am anxious. You see, when he heard, he deeply cares about this church. And when he heard how concerned they were about their friend who is going to be so sick that he could die, he became anxious. And he writes at the end of chapter 2, he says, I really want to send him back to you. He is in good health. And I'm going to send him back to you. And I really want him to send it send him sooner so that I may be less anxious. Also in chapter 2, he says, Timothy, I'm going to send Timothy to you. Timothy is concerned. It's the same word used here. Timothy is deeply concerned for you, your church. Everyone, even Paul, had anxieties, concerns. And it's okay to have concerns. It's okay to have pains and sufferings. Because we know that God is with us and that they are temporary. It says that this peace that He will grant us as we get to know Him will guard our hearts and our minds, will keep us from feeling anxious. We cannot do this on our own. It's not simply stop being anxious, stop worrying. No. The solution here to that, to stop worrying, is to give our concerns to God. And when we do that, he will guard our hearts and minds and look at these last two words. I can't think of a better way to end a sermon than these last two words. In Christ Jesus. That's where the gospel comes together and enters into this situation. You see, you can't have the peace that goes beyond understanding. You can't have the peace of God if you do not accept and proclaim the gospel as your own, if you do not profess to follow after him and proclaim that yes, he died on the cross, but he is risen again. So when when we truly rely on Jesus, when we accept him into our hearts, when we rejoice in the Lord, when we become gentle-spirited, and when we pray all of our concerns and give them over to him humbly and with thanksgiving, you will know peace beyond understanding. Let us pray. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for your salvation. We thank you that even though we deserve death because of our sin, that you sent your son to die for us. Father, I pray if anyone here does not follow after you, that they would seek to turn from their ways today, to turn from their sins and to follow after you. Father, I pray of a peace and a unity over this church that has never been experienced before in such a great way, Father. I pray that each person here would experience your peace as they begin to rejoice in you. And as hard as it can be, Father, amongst all of our chaos and all of our sufferings, I pray that you would help us to be content in any circumstance, Father. We love you, we rejoice in you, Father, and we pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you.