Rejoicing and Relating | Philippians 4:2-9

Philippians 4:2-9  |  Cody Hale

Transcript

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Philippians chapter 4, we're gonna read verses 2 through 9 together. Philippians chapter 4, beginning in verse 2, God's word says, I entreat you, Odia, and I entreat Synthy to agree in the Lord. Yeah, yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women who have labored side by side with me in the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the book of life. 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. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things. And the God of peace will be with you. Let's pray to the Lord together. Heavenly Father, this morning we come as anxious people, as ungrateful people, as forgetful people, as people who were respiraling downward and turning inward. And we ask, oh Lord, that you would rejuvenate our rejoicing, that you would recalibrate our hearts through thanksgiving and prayer toward you, remembering, turning upward. And that, Lord, as you recalibrate our rejoicing in you, that you would reshape our relationships with each other. Lord, would you do that work here and among us this morning from your word? We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. Is joy a selfish pursuit? It seems like a good question for us to answer in a series on durable joy. Is joy a selfish, maybe even an inappropriate pursuit for us? I think reframing the question might help us discover the answer. Would we say that it is selfish and inappropriate for us to pursue a happy marriage? A happy marriage. My guess is that if I went around and I interviewed every person here and I asked you whether it was a selfish and inappropriate pursuit to pursue a happy marriage, overwhelmingly, everybody here would say no, without hesitation. No, not only is it not an unhealthy pursuit, you ought to pursue a happy marriage. Why is that? A happy marriage is generally a healthier marriage, isn't it? And a healthier marriage is generally less selfish, not more. That when we talk about miserable marriages, those are typically ones that are marked by greater selfishness. There was actually a massive meta-study done recently where they took hundreds and hundreds of other studies that were done on the family, and they tried to find composite principles to find what the most common, what the greatest commonalities were across all of these stories, all of these surveys. And what they discovered is that one of the strongest predictors of healthy, flourishing children is a healthy, happy marriage between their mom and their dad. That's not rocket science, is it? That's common sense. You see, miserable people don't build happy marriages. And they don't build healthy families. They drive people away, don't they? They frustrate the people that they love the most. They create divisions among one another, even within the family, even within the church. So think about that. Pursuing joy in your marriage isn't selfish. It actually becomes the context out of which you're able to love one another best. So let's circle back to our original question. Is pursuing joy a selfish pursuit? Is pursuing joy an inappropriate pursuit? Joy is only selfish if you try to find it apart from God and without regard for others. But when joy is rooted in God, it doesn't actually turn you inward, it actually reshapes how you relate to everyone else in your life. That the enjoyment of God actually enables you to enjoy other people to a higher degree and for other people to be able to enjoy you. That the pursuit of joy in God isn't selfish, it's actually the starting line for you being able to love others especially well. In Philippians chapter 4, Paul is helping us to see the bridge between our relationship with Jesus and our relationships with one another. The presenting issue, you'll see it there in verse 2, is a conflict between two prominent women in the church, Euodia and Syntache. Now, what's interesting is Paul speaks really positively about Euodia and Syntache. He says that both of them have been laboring side by side with him in the gospel. He says that both of them have their names written in the book of life. He's commending them. And even though they love the Lord and even though they are co-laborers for the gospel, they find themselves in conflict with one another. This shouldn't surprise us, y'all. This shouldn't surprise us. We are Christians, but we are still sinners in progress. And that means that there are going to be times in which we find ourselves, even regardless of our pursuit of Christ, sideways with one another. But what Paul would have them to see was not that there should be no conflict or that there will be no conflict in our lives, but what he would have them to see is that as Christians, we have the tools in our toolboxes to be able to be the peacemakers and to be able to overcome and resolve conflicts like this when they arrive. And so what's the prescription that Paul gives to these two godly women in order to be able to overcome their conflict? Look at what he says in verse 4, the prescription. He says, Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice. The prescription that Paul gives to these two Christian women in conflict with one another is a doubled-down pursuit of joy. And I think that's showing us the main point that he's making this morning in our text. What he wants us to see is that our rejoicing reshapes our relating. Our rejoicing reshapes our relating. Paul's prescription in this conflict is probably a little bit surprising to us. We would expect Paul to say, look, sit the ladies down, let them talk it out, let them hear one another's side, get both sides of the story, and then figure out a compromise on how they could meet in the middle. But Paul doesn't do that at all. Instead, what Paul says is, no, no, no, have these ladies rejoice in the Lord always. Let me say it one more time, rejoice in the Lord always. Now, why is that? You see, the problems in our relationships are not fundamentally relationship problems. It's not just about what's happening between us, it's about what's happening inside of me. And it's about what's happening inside of you. You see, if my joy is fragile, if it's tied to my circumstances, if it's tied to your approval of me, if it's tied to things going my way, then guess what? I'm gonna find myself being defensive, being insecure, being easily offended. I'm gonna be quick to withdraw or perhaps quick to go on the attack. So, so how is rejoicing in the Lord related to a conflict between these two women? Well, you see, when I am secure and I am satisfied in the Lord, when I am rooted and I am grounded in the Lord, I don't now need from you what only God can give to me. I don't need you to supply to me what the Lord is meant to be the source of. And that actually changes how I relate to you. Think about this. It takes the pressure off the relationship. You don't have to make me happy. You don't have to make me happy. The Lord has made me happy. It takes all the pressure off of you. You aren't responsible for giving to me my sense of significance. My significance comes from my identity that has been found in Christ. It takes the pressure off of you. I don't have to feel pressure in the relationship because I don't have to feel the pressure to impress you, because your approval is not preeminent in my life. And when I don't feel the pressure to impress you, guess what? Now I am actually liberated to love you with a pure love. I am set free to be able to love you because I don't need anything from you in return. My joy doesn't come from your approval. My joy comes from the Lord. And when my joy doesn't come from your approval, but comes from the Lord, that makes me more patient with you. That makes me more gracious with you. That makes me more forgiving with you. The rejoicing reshapes the relationship. Our rejoicing in God reshapes the way that we relate to one another. This is what Paul is getting at when he says something that might seem strange here in verse 5 when he says, Let your reasonableness be known to God. That's a word that might be translated differently in your Bible. It's a word that's really difficult for translators to get just right. It might be translated as let your graciousness be known to everyone. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. You see, what he's saying is, is when he says, let your reasonable be known, he means let people feel your gentleness. Let people experience your grace. And the connection is that gentleness is what your joy in Christ looks like on the outside. That our reasonableness or our graciousness are how others experience our rejoicing in the Lord. They experience our intimacy with God through our graciousness and our patience with them. That our rejoicing in God is meant to set the tone, the pace, and the trajectory for every other relationship that exists in our life. So the solution to the impatience problem in your life and the irritability problem in your life and the harshness problem in your life is actually deeper rejoicing. The last place that many of us would think to look. It isn't to pursue our joy less, it's to pursue our joy in Christ more. You see, if we're trying to answer that original question, is it a selfish pursuit to pursue joy? I think we could push back and ask this question. What kind of person do you most enjoy being around? A joyful person or a miserable one? What kind of parents do you want? Joyful parents or miserable parents? What kind of boss do you want to work for? What kind of husband or wife do you want to be married to? What kinds of friends are you drawn to? What kind of pastors do you want to serve under? All of us emphatically would say that we want to be around joyful, life-giving people. We want to work for joyful, life-giving bosses. We want to hear joyful, life-giving pastors. We want to be married to joyful, life-giving spouses. Why? Because they bring more grace, more peace, more reasonableness into our lives, don't they? So the pursuit of joy is not just unselfish, it's actually our responsibility in the Lord. It's our responsibility so that others experience God's grace and God's mercy when they experience us. You'll notice that there are two qualifiers that he gives there in verse four. Let me erase this so that you can see this a little more clearly. He says, Rejoice how? In the Lord. There's the first qualifier. And then he says, What? In the Lord always. So it's not just joy, it's joy in the Lord. And it's not just joy sometimes, it's joy in the Lord always. So what I understand him to be doing in the remainder of our passage through verse six is he's showing us how this actually becomes possible. That he has in his mind our relationships with each other, but having in mind our relationships with each other, he wants to draw us deeper into our rejoicing in our relationship with God. And so he begins to give us at least three methods here for how we can rejoice. First, what he would have us to see is that we must not forget. We must not forget. Paul is telling us, don't forget. In 2013, I got pretty heavily into mountain biking for a while, the place that I'm from, we had some really great uh mountain bike trails. And so one day, one of my close friends and I, we're going down, and we're gonna go down this typical trail that we usually go to, and we get to the top of the mountain, and they have a piece of tape across a new section of trail that hasn't opened yet. But I've never seen a piece of tape that can stop me from going where I want to go. You know what I mean? And so we decide that we're gonna go and we're gonna go down this new site, uh, this new side of the mountain that we had never gone down before. And it was steeper and it was faster and it was awesome. I'm telling y'all, we have I have never had more fun on a mountain bike in my life that day until I flipped over the handlebars and crashed. And when I crashed, I went over the head bar handlebars and my head crashed into the ground. It actually caved in the left side of my bike helmet and it knocked me out cold. And it took my friend, he says that it took him, he said he found me on the side of the trail, and there was like foam coming out of my mouth, and I was curled up and I was out. And he said it took him about five minutes just to get me back to myself again. And he said that, and we wonder why I have headaches, right? Uh this is what my wife says anyway. But he said that when I finally came to, I didn't even remember that I had just gotten home from vacation that day. About two weeks of my memory was just white. It was just gone. I don't know if you've ever experienced anything like that, but it's a surreal experience. Honestly, that's what happens to a lot of us, a lot of us a lot of times spiritually, isn't it? When life hits us hard, we tend to forget. We tend to forget who God is, we tend to forget where God is. We tend to forget what's true about ourselves and what's true about God. And I think that's why he's using really the sweeping language. He said in verse 4, he said, uh, rejoice in the Lord always, always. Now in verse 5, he says, Let your reasonables reasonableness be known to everyone. Verse 6, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known to God. What he's showing us is that these pursuits are not meant to be determined by our circumstances or our situation. These pursuits are meant to be an intentional and daily part of our lives. You see, we tend to have situational and amnesia whenever we take a blow. We tend to focus on our problems, and when we focus on our problems, we tend to forget our rejoicing. And that's when we begin to spiral deeper and deeper and deeper inward, and that's when we begin to unravel anxiety in our lives, isn't it? You see, anxiety is what happens when you start talking to yourself about everything that you can't control. Now, I want to be clear that what I'm not talking about here is a trauma-induced anxiety or an anxiety condition which your mind believes what is true, uh, knows what is true, your heart believes what is true, but your body is still responding as though it is in danger. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about lowercase A anxiety. I'm talking about the anxiety where you rehearse the problems and you run the scenarios and you are trying to figure out everything in your life. That anxiety is wrestling with the assumption that you have to fix everything and you have to handle everything. It's talking to yourself in hopes of saving yourself. But what happens is it lingers and it ruminates over the realization that you aren't actually in control. And so Paul is here and he's stepping in and he's thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Don't be anxious. Don't try to seize control. Don't talk to yourself as though you're in control. Don't ruminate over your lack of control. No, no, no, no, no. That's forgetting. Instead, pray. Pray. See, he's saying, stop talking to yourself about everything that you can't control and start talking to God who is actually in control. If anxiety is forgetting who God is and where God is and what is true about God, then prayer is remembering those things. Prayer is remembering at least two things that we see in our text: that God is good, to use Paul's language, that God is in everything and in anything. Not only is it telling us that God is good, but it's also telling us that God is close, that God is near. He says the Lord is at hand. In other words, he's bringing his mind to the sovereign reign of Jesus, and he's reminding himself that Jesus is close, Jesus is sovereign, and Jesus is working all of these things together for his good and for his glory. Do you know what happens? Do you know what happens when you stop forgetting and you start remembering who God is and where God is? You start rejoicing. You start rejoicing. And when you start rejoicing, do you know what has happens? A peace which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts. It begins to dislodge your anxiety, in other words. And that brings us back to the original point. Do you know how people act who are at peace in Christ with reasonableness? With gentleness, with patience, with graciousness. See, when you forget God, you get anxious. But when you pray, you remember God. And when you remember God, you begin to rejoice. And when you rejoice, you begin to have peace. And when you have peace, you become gentle in your life. You become pleasant to be around. Your rejoicing reshapes your relating. I want to ask you, I want to ask you, how are the secret conversations of your life going right now? How are the secret conversations of your life going right now? See, the most important conversations in your life are the ones that only you know about. If you spend all of your time talking to yourself and trying to manage everything and control everything and fix everything, you're going to feel it. And the people around you are going to feel it. You're going to be intense, you're going to be defensive, you're going to be easily irritated. But when you spend the secret conversations talking to the Lord and ruminating on the Lord and meditating on the truth about the Lord, when you remember who he is and where he is, when you remember the truth about him, well, you don't have to live like that. You realize you don't have to carry all of the weight. You it begins to turn down the intensity of your life. And other people are going to experience that experience with you. They're going to experience you as being more patient, more gentle, more graceful. So here's a simple challenge this week. Would you pray more this week than you did last week? However much you prayed last week, let that be the baseline. Let that be the baseline. If you prayed, if you prayed five minutes, you prayed five minutes. But next week, would you pray ten minutes? Last week, if you prayed an hour, if you prayed an hour, the whole week combined, you add it all together, you prayed an hour. Next week, would you pray two hours? Would you just wherever your starting place is, that's fine. Start there in the Lord. But would you start there and just pray more this week? Because here's what I bet. I bet that this week you'll see that your heart is more at peace. I bet this week what you'll see is not only is your heart more at peace, but you will feel more grounded in your life. And I bet, I bet your husband or your wife or your kids or your boss or your coworker, I bet they'll experience you as a more reasonable person. See if your joy doesn't start reshaping your relationships. So the methods of rejoicing starts with don't forget. Then it's spiral upward. Spiral upward. Nobody has to teach us to go into downward spirals, do they? We have a negativity bias. I heard one psychologist say that like 80% of all of our thoughts are negative, right? Well, it comes really natural. We will latch on to one criticism in the midst of 10 compliments, won't we? It's so frustrating. We'll sit there, we'll have one awkward conversation during the day in which we said something that we thought was a little bit weird and it'll ruin our whole day, won't it? We'll spend the whole day analyzing, like, what if this goes wrong? What if that falls apart? What if I can't fix that? What if they think this about me, right? And before long, you're not just dealing with a problem, you're spiraling downward into misery and feeling like everything is heavier than it actually is. But that doesn't just affect how you feel, does it? That affects how you relate to your wife or your husband. That affects how you treat your children. That affects how you respond to your boss or to your employee or to your coworker. That will get frustrated against them. And what we'll do is we'll we'll pick out that inevitable personality flaw that literally. Literally every person on earth has, and we'll zero in on it, won't we? And we'll ruminate on it, and we'll we'll go in this downward spiral of making a case against them, and then we'll start gossiping about them, and we'll build momentum against them, and we'll impugn their character. But you know what? Picking people apart is the opposite of what it means to let your reasonableness be known to everyone. And so Paul is stepping into this and he's saying, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think differently. You'll notice that in our text, there are six whatevers, right? Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. And then there are two any or any things. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise. And by using them, what he's doing is he's coaching us up. He's coaching us to look for the goodness and the kindness of God wherever it may be found. That he's saying, look for it in whatever you experience. Look for literally quite anything good that you can find. In other words, the antidote to our negativity bias is meditating on what's right rather than ruminating over what's wrong. That the command here is that we would be intentional and take responsibility for our downward spirals, and that we would recognize that we have some measure of control over the direction in which we spiral. When we spiral downward, what do we do? We move from negativity to negativity to negativity, from bad thing to bad thing to bad thing, from character flaw to character flaw to character flaw. He's saying, No, no, no, let's spiral upward instead. Let's find those things that are good. Whatever is pure, whatever is just, whatever is good. If there is anything that is commendable, let your mind be drawn to those things. Because what you think about shapes what you rejoice in. And what you rejoice in shapes how you relate to other people. Your rejoicing reshapes you're relating. Ten years ago, I tell you sincerely, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Um, I have two grandparents in my family that had nervous breakdowns, and so there's probably a genetic component there. There's also the fact that I have this sinful bent in my heart toward perfectionism and toward wanting to be able to control things that I really just can't control. And so what my mind would do is it would find one negative piece of information and it would just latch onto it. And like a rock hitting the windshield, it would just splinter and spiderweb in a thousand different directions. And before I knew it, knew it, I had catastrophized my entire life, and I had lost literally everything that mattered to me. And it was in that season that this verse really became a lifeline of faith for me and a lifeline of comfort for me. That I realized that I couldn't just try to stop the spiral. I had tried and tried and tried to stop the spiral. No, I couldn't just try, I couldn't just try to stop the spiral. I had to take responsibility to actually start a new one. And so what I would do is uh on my my office there, it was in a more rural area, looking out, it looked out over to this big 10-acre field, right? And then behind the field, there were these the Appalachian Mountains that were back there, and you would see the f the birds flying and the sky would be blue. And so I would go to my window and I would just try to meditate on every positive, good thing about the Lord that could come to my mind. I would think, God, you are sovereign, even you know, when every bird falls out of the sky, Lord, you are the one that that carved the mountains and holds them, the dirt in the palms of your hands. Lord, you you are the one that that is seated upon your throne, that has placed all of the skies and told them what color to be, and the clouds were to go. And I would go from one thought to the next thought to the next thought, and slowly my perspective would shift and my heart would settle, and my nerves would calm down. And guess when I was a better husband, and guess when I was a better dad? And guess when I was a better pastor, and guess when I was a better leader? It's after I had come back from Panic Town to meditate on the truth of who God is. That's what Paul is after here. That's what Paul is calling these two ladies here. He's not just telling you to think positive thoughts in the way that the self-help folks might tell you to think positive thoughts. He's telling you to train your mind on what's true about God, to train your mind on the gratitudes of what God has done in your life, to train your mind on the sovereign rule and the sovereign reign of a benevolent king. Because when you do, when you do, you start to rejoice again. And when you rejoice, peace begins to dislodge the anxiety. And when the peace begins to dislodge the anxiety, you're more gentle with people, you're more reasonable to deal with, you're more gracious with others. So this morning, I want to call for you to begin taking responsibility for the direction of the spirals in your life. To begin focusing intentionally, not just on stopping the negative spirals, but starting a new one. And the best ways, one of the best ways that I know to be able to start upward spirals in your life is to allow yourself to savor and meditate upon the promises of who God is and what God has said is true of his people. Can we just think through a couple of those together? I think it would be great if you had a list of these by your computer. Maybe, maybe you start memorizing them so that you can call them to your mind really quickly. Do you find yourself afraid? You find yourself afraid? Redirect your spiral with Isaiah 41:10. Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous hand. Do you find yourself being abused by a guilty conscience? By those past sins that you just can't seem to forget? Spiral upward with Romans chapter 8, verse 1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Do you feel too weak and too weary to keep going? Spiral upward with Matthew 11, 28. Come to me, Jesus says, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. You feel heartbroken and forgotten? Man, change the trajectory of your spiral with Psalm 34, 18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and he saves the crushed in spirit. Do you feel used, abused, and left out for ruin? Spiral into the words of Jesus in Matthew chapter 12, verse 20. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench until he brings justice to victory. We could keep going, couldn't we? Do you feel your heart beginning to rejoice? Do you feel your heart recalibrating to the glories of God and the truths about God? Oh, take one true thought about God and spiral upward. And then see. See if that doesn't impact the way you treat your wife. See if that doesn't impact how you respond to your children. See if that doesn't give you more patience in the Lord. So the methods of rejoicing are don't forget, spiral upward and follow your map. You know, it's really hard to go somewhere that you've never gone before. It's one thing to know the destination, to know uh where you want to end up. It's quite another thing to know the directions on how to actually get there. A lot of the men that I talk to today in particular, they have a vision for their family. They want to sacrifice and serve their wives. They want to be able to raise their kids in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. They want to be spiritual leaders at home and at church and in their community. They want to be able to do all of these things. They're honorable men. But what most of them tell me is, Cody, I just don't know how to do it. Most of them did not grow up in a home in which they saw a father living this out in front of them. Most of them have never encountered a strong male figure in their life that mentored them who lived boldly and clearly for their faith in Christ. And so they have the aspiration and they have the desire, but they do not know the method. They have no idea how to get there. Well, do you know what you need when you know the destination that you want to arrive at, but you don't have the directions on how to get there? You need a map. You need a map. This is exactly what I understand Paul to be doing here when he lands on verse 9. He says, What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. He's saying, I'll be your map. I've shown you what this looks like. I've shown you the path forward. That the book of Philippians for Paul is not an academic treatise. He's not giving it to them as a dissertation. He's showing it to them so that they have some understanding of how a man of God deals with rejoicing and suffering simultaneously. He's showing them how the faith intersects with real life. Think about the picture here. He's in prison, yet what is he doing? Yet he's rejoicing. In chapter two, Paul acknowledges, he says, I have anxiety over all of the churches. And then he comes into verse 4 and he says, So what is my hope? My hope is to rejoice in the Lord always. It is to know that whatever I'm facing, I can do all things through him who strengthens me. That what we have here is Paul showing and demonstrating and saying, This is how I have come about doing this in my own life. This is not Paul talking down to us, but Paul being eyeball to eyeball, man to man, across the dining room table, saying, I know what you're struggling with, I know how hard it is, I've been there, let me show you how I've done it. And once I show you how I've done it, what I want you to do is to begin practicing these things in your own life. You see, that's what we mean when we talk about discipleship around here. That's what discipleship is. It's learning how to rejoice in Christ by watching someone else do it. It's having a map, someone whose life shows you that this is what it looks like to trust God when things are hard. This is what it looks like to be patient with your wife when you don't want to be patient. This is what it looks like to have peace and to be kind to your children when they're driving you crazy. This is what it looks like when your job isn't going the way that you would have it to go. This is how rejoicing looks like in the rigors of real everyday life. So if I were to talk to the men this morning that have feel that tension inside of them, and we could apply this to virtually any group here in the church. Some I just want to talk specifically to the men. If I were to talk to the men and you were to tell me that you knew exactly where you wanted to go and you knew exactly who you wanted to be, but you had no idea on how you how you were gonna get there, I would tell you what you need, brother, is to find a good map. To find a good map, to find another brother that's a few steps ahead of you that knows what this looks like to live out this rejoicing faith, this pursuit of joy in Christ in real life, in the rigors of every day, of the everyday grind. See, how is it, as dads, that we raise joyful children who are anchored by their faith and their values? Well, we have to teach them. And we teach them by showing them. How do we teach them? By demonstrating this with our lives. But how do we learn how to do that ourselves? By finding someone else who's doing it that we can watch. And that's why our pursuit of joy isn't a selfish one or an inappropriate one. Because joy in Christ doesn't terminate with us. Our discipleship is the selfless pursuit of joy in Christ so that we can help those we know and love find that same hope. It's pursuing joy so that you can help others pursue joy. And that's not selfish, that's transformative. That our rejoicing in Christ reshapes how we relate to others, and our relationships with others leads more people to rejoicing in Christ. Our rejoicing reshapes our relating.