June 7th, 2026

Pastor Michael Crocker

Transcript

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Hey, I was like a second to look into the lens and say good morning to everybody watching online. My name is Pastor Michael. We're excited to have you with us on this Sunday morning. Those of you in church, hello, church! Hey, we took a long time to show the VBS video. It was a 10-minute long video, and um, and so I had to cut like half of my sermon. Oh no, you're okay. Um, but but uh but the reason we do that is because VBS is a huge thing. Um, it is our biggest outreach in this community because we have kids and parents who come from all over who don't necessarily go to church, but they show up because their parents are like, it's summertime, get out of my house right now, and they need something for their kids to do. Um and so they come here uh and and do this, and it's just it's such an amazing week. It is so fun, it is great. How many of you were here this week serving in some way? A lot of people. It is it is so fun. It is one of the it's one of my favorite weeks of the year. Um, and you you couldn't tell it from the video when I would look like the old man on the back of the wall. Um those girls are dancing next to me, and I'm just standing there. Um, I threw my back out on Tuesday and I was in a lot of pain. Okay, so uh I was just it was it was I was great to just be standing. Um, but it was so fun. And I gotta tell you, when they did this song, um when they when I say God is good, you say. And when I say all the time, you say yeah, but that's not how it sounded. Um it sounded like these these 250 kids screaming that at the top of their lungs. It was just awesome. And I invited you all, I told you last Sunday when we were in the jungle together, I said, even if you just come and experience it for just like five minutes and then leave. Um, because put it on your calendar for next year. We're gonna do this again next year in June. This is what we do. We're gonna do VBS. Miss Natalie is already planning it, shockingly, not shockingly, if you know her, um, and we are gonna be come and see what happens because it is a great and glorious thing. So when you see Miss Natalie and her team, Jessica, Hannah, and Victoria, and really and Ozzy and Bobby and Rodney, oh my, I mean, they they everybody poured in so much during this time, and it is just such and all the moms who volunteered, thank you for being here. Um, it was a great and wonderful week to experience Jesus uh in the only the ways BBS can. Um so there uh we're in a new series, and it's our summer series. It's gonna take us through the summer months, June and July. And and and I, as I was looking for something, I was okay. How many of you are curmudgeons by nature? What's that? How many of you are just kind of angry and bitter? Like, and you just see things in a negative way, Briar. That's not you. Totally not you. But how many of you are like that, just on a normal, and some of you are looking to your spouse right now, right? I I am. I am I am normal. That's kind of my go-to is Eeyore, right? My go-to is negativity. Like, how many of you the spurs are done? No Spurs, no, okay? That's that's my that's my like I have tickets to game five, can't use them. Um that's great. That's just my that's my natural bent is to go that way. And some of you are walking out right now, you're so angry right now about that. I'm sorry, this is the way that God made me. In fact, when I get in these modes, my wife calls me by my father's name because that's where it comes from. Don. It's like, oh, Don. Yeah, she called it, you just stop, you know. Because I get into this kind of thing, I could have a tendency to get onto that negative side of things. But look, I'm not the only one. And some of you, like, I asked who amongst you were curmudgeons, all of you are about something. Most of you are about something. And really, the society wants us to be that way. It pushes us towards the negative, it pushes us towards divisiveness, it pushes us towards those things. If you don't believe me, look at your social feeds. Look at the news. What are the what does the news want to show us every day? Only the bad stuff. Right? It doesn't sell it, it just shows us the negative things and the and the things that are like I I watch the local news sometime. I'm like, why do I need to know that? Why? You just you're putting me in a bad mood now. And now I'm gonna have to be my father and just be angry and not watch basketball ever again. Yeah, I'm gonna keep bringing it up. I did say this, and and someone at the first service goes, I'm gonna choose joy that we were actually playing basketball in June. Which sounds a really good comment. I was like, well said, sir. That's that's a good comment. But we have a tendency a lot of times to focus on, I have a tendency, maybe you don't, maybe you're better people than I am. I don't know why you're listening to me if that's the case, but we have a tendency to focus a lot of times on the negative. And this summer I want to look at the letter that Paul wrote to the church of Philippi, Philippians. Because in this letter, this letter is called the Epistle of Joy. In this letter, you have this church leader who, if anyone had the right to be negative, to be, to have a very bad day. It was Paul, but that's not how he lived his life. In the face of everything that was going wrong against him, brother chose joy defiantly. He's like, you want me to be negative? Nope, not gonna do it. I'm gonna choose joy. So we're gonna talk about that. Really, next week's sermon is gonna be the, it's gonna be the one I really wanted to preach, but I'm not going to. Trent's got it. I'm a little jealous about that. But um, but next week's, it's gonna be awesome. Um, so this week's gonna be, eh, it's okay. But it's gonna set up for the rest of the summer. So the Philippians, this church at Philippi. Philippi was the first church that Paul planted as he crossed over into Europe. Right? So Paul's job, as Jesus gives him this job, if you remember, is to be a church planter. And he goes around to these different communities and he sets up these churches and he raises leaders and then he moves on and he replicates it. The story is told in the book of Acts, chapter 16, of how Paul gets to Philippi. And Philippi is a very important city, it was a very strategic city. It was sat in between the border really of Europe and Asia. And right there, there's these hills and these mountains, and it goes down into this valley where Philippi sits. And because of its location, it had a huge military strategy. It was important. And so people wanted to be there. In fact, it was founded by Alexander the Great's father, Philip, who named it after himself. And it became a really, there's gold and silver mines there, it became an incredibly wealthy center, it was a big commercial center, and it was a pass through which, if you were going to Europe, into Asia, Asia into Europe, you had to travel through there. It was a strategic spot in the Roman times as well, fast forward. Brutus and Anthony have a huge battle that sets the course of Roman history right there in Philippi. And it becomes a Roman colony. And Roman colonies were really important. It was a place where they elevated that status of that city above other cities that were not in Rome, that were not Rome. And if you were a colony, they would send soldiers, retired soldiers and their families to go populate that area. So the population was very patriotic towards Rome. They were very into the whole Caesar thing. And if you see the story of when Paul is starting the church there, one of the big differences is who is in charge. Paul keeps saying that Jesus is king, and they keep saying, no, no, no, Caesar is king. And in fact, it gets a little intense during this time. He encounters three different people, which I this is, I really love this. Lydia, the slave girl, and the Roman jailer. And it's an interesting kind of swash of the Philippa, the Philippians. You have Lydia, who was a purple merchant. She sold purple dye, and so she was incredibly wealthy because that stuff was super, because all good things come in purple, right? And it was a super expensive thing, and so she was the upper class. The slave girl who told fortunes, if you remember that story, she was nobody. She was a slave. She had no value whatsoever or no worth in the eyes of the Romans. And then the Roman jailer, he had authority. He was kind of the middle class. And Paul, as he comes into this place, he's like, Jesus is for everyone. Which I just love that about the the Philippian church, of how it shows like Jesus isn't just for a group, Jesus is for everybody. But he starts this church and he moves in about the year 50. And he moves on, and a decade later, he writes this letter back to them. Paul happens to be in prison when he writes this letter. Old time scholarship says he's in prison in Rome. Modern scholarship says he's in Ephesus. I believe that he was in Ephesus because he talks about wanting to come back and visit them. Once he was in prison in Rome, he knew his time was over. And so he was, okay, hey, I want to come back and see you. But he writes them this letter for a few reasons. One, it's a practical reason. He wants to say thanks. Because the Church of Philippi has just sent him this gift. They sent a guy by the name of Epaphroditus to go visit Paul while in prison. And the reason that's a big deal is because when you were in prison, you had to take care of yourself. Like the prison didn't feed you, they just put you in a cell and left you there. If you wanted to eat, if you needed new clothes or something like that, it had to come from the outside. It had to come from your family or friends on the outside. And so the church at Philippi was like, we know you're in prison, and so you probably could use a bite. And so they send him a gift basket with epaphroditus. And they also sent him apaphroditus to be his kind of sidekick, to stay with him, to care for him, to take, to take whatever he needed to do to care for Paul while he was in prison. And so Paul writes to say, hey, thanks for the gift basket. Really appreciate the salami and cheeses, that's awesome. Um and thanks for sending Epaphroditus, but he sends Epaphroditus back. And the reason he does is because while Epaphroditus is there, he gets incredibly sick and almost dies. And he he's like, because he's almost dead, he's like, I want to go home. And Paul's like, you need to go home. And he sends him home, but he's writing to tell the church at Philippi, hey, Epaphroditus isn't quitting. Like, welcome him back in. He did everything you asked him to do, but he got really sick, and he needs to be back there with y'all. So he's kind of sending this little letter back with Ephroditus. He's encouraging the church at Philippi. He's trying to get because the Roman citizen thing was still big. Caesar is king, and he's like, no, no, no, you keep swinging. We know who the king is. You've got this. Stay true to what I taught you. And then the last thing is he's talking about unity. At the end of the book of Philippians, there's there's this these two ladies that get into a fight, and we don't know what the fight is, but we do know their names because he calls them out by name, so that thousands of years later you could, that's the original church fight. You know, these these two ladies, like, oh my gosh, I'm forever going to be known as the one who was causing problems. We don't know what the problems were, but he just said, Stop it. Knog it off. We're one, one church. So he writes this letter back to them. But in this letter, you have more times than any other place where Paul talks about his joy. In fact, that's one of the names that they call this letter, the Epistle of Joy. Because time and time again he keeps coming back to this reference. Time and time again, rejoice. Again, I will say it. Rejoice. Right? He opens the letter this way. This letter is from Paul and Timothy's slaves of Christ Jesus. I'm writing to all God's holy people and Philippi who belong to Christ Jesus, including the elders and deacons. May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. That's a very typical Pauline opening. And then verse 3. Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God. Whenever I pray, I make my request for all of you with joy. For you have been my partners in spreading the good news about Christ from the time you first heard it until now. He's in prison. And I don't know if you've been in prison. Um, if you have been, I bet it wasn't a prison like he was in prison. Like it was not nice. It was just a filthy place. It was a dark, dreary place of no hope, of going to the bathroom in a bucket or just on the ground. When you walked into that prison, it was not a place that, and this is how he opens his letter. Hey, every time I think of you, it brings me joy. It just, man. It just, ah. I just, I was sitting here and I just had to write this letter because every time I think of you, I just, ah, it's just all warm and fuzzy inside. I don't think I would have opened the letter that way. Like, I've been like, hey, thanks for the basket. Come get me out of here. Do you know the conditions I'm living in? Like, that's great and all, but he's like, man, you bring me. Do you have somebody like that in your life? Like that every time you think of them, you're just like, oh, I know you're all thinking about me right now. I know. But somebody in your life, when you just, you just think when they come to mind, you're just thankful that they came to mind? Because your heart just warms and you're like, oh, I can't wait to see her. I can't wait to talk to him. Oh, just every time I think of you. You know, it's not that that church at Philippi was filled with such awesome people. Because clearly a little bit later, he gets into two of them that are having a fight and he calls them out. It was him. It was his response. It was his go-to of choosing joy. That's just the kind of guy that he was. He would open with gratitude. You know, that's an art that's lost in the world today a lot. Just choosing joy, defiantly saying, I will be joyful regardless of what happens at the Frost Bank Center. That's right, I am not stopping beating that drum. Because they're not beating it. There we go. Oh, that was too low? Too long? Too soon. Choosing joy. And if anyone had an excuse not to be joyful, it was him. Let's look at his life. Like Paul was shipwrecked multiple times, thrown over, he was bitten by a snake, he was thrown in prison multiple times, he was stoned on three different occasions, and not the kind of stoning that makes you feel good, but the kind of stoning where they were throwing rocks at him, trying to kill him multiple times. If anyone had the position to go, you know what? Life's tough. And I want to complain about it, it was Paul. Yet time and time again, he leads with joy. Look, happiness is based on our circumstances. Joy is a choice. Right? Happiness can come and go based on what's going on your day and your life and whatever's going on around you. But joy is a decision that you make every day. Today, no matter what happens, no matter what waves come across our ship, I will be joyful. That sounded angry the way I said that, didn't it? Or defiant. In the midst of a world that seems to be one dumpster fire after another, I choose joy. I choose joy because I know Jesus. See, that's what it all came down to with Paul. Is Paul understood who he was because of Christ the King. Because of the sacrifice that Jesus gave to Paul, Paul was like, man, I don't deserve this. But because I have it, my life will be joyful. What would it be like if we just if all of us started just living our life that way? If we were just those type of people that when you walked into a room, you're like, yes, she's here. Oh man, I'm so glad he came today. Because we exude that joy. And when because don't you want to be around those people? Aren't the people that throw joy off more entertaining and more fun to be around than those that don't? Like whoever said, I want to hang out with Eeyore? Nobody. We want to hang with Tigger. Everybody loves when he comes in the room. Like no one's gonna get anything done, but I'm so glad he's here. There's all the you know those people that walk in the room and they just suck the energy and life out of it? And you all just go, uh. And you maybe even out loud, you know, you're like, oh, I can't believe she came. This is gonna be a horrible day. And then you know those people that walk in and it's just like, yes. Right? That's who Paul was. I think Paul was that guy when he walked in the room, you're like, oh yeah, something's going down, and it's gonna be fun. Maybe painful, but we're gonna be joyful through it. That's what this series, that's what this letter is about. It's about finding the joy in life, choosing the joy in life, regardless of the circumstances that you are presented with. And boy, that's a skill that we need to cultivate and grow in this world. What if St. Andrews became known as that just a stupid happy church? Like every time you go there, people are just like, hey! So great, nothing goes wrong at St. Andrews. Everything is always wonderful, beautiful. But if we believe this, that's how we should live. If we truly believe that Jesus Christ lived, he died, and he conquered death so that we would have life. That's something to be joyful about. Because one day he will come and bring us home to be with him forever. One day I'll get to see my dad again. That is joy. Regardless of the circumstances that happen in our day, we know that his love just never, never leaves us. And because of that, how about we just remain defiantly joyful? Choose joy is great. But I'm gonna take my little Don Crocker negative side and say, we're gonna be defiantly joyful. We're gonna love Jesus, and I'm gonna love you too, even if your death is making me mad. Because we choose joy. Let us pray. Gracious and heavenly Father, we thank you and praise you for the way that you move in our life. We thank you so much that you gave your Son. We thank you so much, Jesus, that you gave yourself so that we might have life. We pray, Father, that we would be people of joy. Not because everything is always going right in our world, but because you're in our world. Because you're in our life. We remain joyful, knowing that in the midst of trials, you bring us hope, peace, and life. We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.