Honor and Deliverance (2)

Greetings to the students and staff here at Southeastern! I’m thankful for the opportunity to open God’s word with you today. Please pray with me. Lord God, I thank you for this day that you’ve given us and I thank you for your word. For the opportunity to open it with the saints around me. I pray that you would be honored and that your Spirit would dwell with me in a mighty way. Also that your word would be illuminated and applied according to your will. Father I pray that our hearts would be changed and your kingdom would be built. In the name of Jesus I pray, Amen.

We will be reading out of Philippians 1 starting in the second part of verse 18, continuing on to verse 26. Please stand in honor of God and the reading of His word.

Philippians 1:18b-26 “Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.”

This is the word of the Lord, you may be seated.

I was blessed with the opportunity to be involved in our Baptist Campus Ministry during my years in college. This was a formative time in my life and I’m thankful for it. The person God used most to guide me in my time there was our campus minister Gene Parr. Now I wish each of you knew Gene, a humorous yet practical man, full of gray hair and wisdom, yet tasked with connecting to a lively group of 18 to 22 year olds. He his remembered by many for his love of C.S. Lewis, polo shirts and hiking boots. But much more, he had many “isms” or certain ways of turning a phrase, making it stick. The “ism” that I remember most of all is that the quality of your yes is often determined by the quantity of your no. I’ve kept that in mind over the years and as we look to the decision Paul is making today, this ism comes to mind.

At the time of writing the letter to the church at Philippi, Paul is under house arrest in Rome. He was arrested for bringing the gentile Trophimus the Ephesian into the temple, see acts 21:28, and because of his Roman citizenship, was able to make a plea to have his case presented before Caesar. He is chained to rotating Praetorian guards. Now these guys were the best of the best, part of Caesars household, these guards had great sway over Rome at this time. They even deposed and implanted rulers in Rome. Just imagine being chained to the meanest Navy Seal we have and he happens to hate you. It is also known that Paul is living imprisoned at his own expense, see Acts 28:30. This actually is the precedent for writing the letter to the Philippians. He is offering thanks for supporting him during this time and giving news of Epaphroditus, the church member from Philippi who acted as messenger to Paul.

Just a few verses up, Paul is rejoicing that even though he is surrounded by difficult people and is in a difficult situation, Christ is being proclaimed. He was rejoicing in his present hardship but now, at the end of verse 18 shifts his perspective toward future joy. “Yes, and I will rejoice” notice the future tense. What is Paul going to rejoice in? He will rejoice in deliverance and in his honoring of Christ. Listen to this again. “Yes, and I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.” Again, Paul has hope for deliverance and an expectation to honor Christ. For these two things, Paul will rejoice.

Let’s look first at his deliverance. Paul here is not speaking only of his temporal emancipation. Does he wish to be freed from his imprisonment? Of course. He later goes on to offer reasoning for his hope of freedom as being to the benefit of the church at Philippi. This temporal emancipation stands in tension with transcendent salvation. Paul could be delivered through death unto life eternal. This is the ultimate win-win situation and Paul will draw this out later. He is hearkening to the words of Job in Job 13:13-16 ““Let me have silence, and I will speak, and let come on me what may. Why should I take my flesh in my teeth and put my life in my hand? Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face. This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him.” Job and Paul understood this well, whatever happens, God is still on the throne. And an almighty God who has your best interest in mind means you cannot lose.

Paul hopes to honor Christ. “as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.” His expectation is that he will have courage, a Christ honoring courage. Paul is up against it at the mercy of Rome and although he knows this, he can have courage to face Caesar because either way he is delivered. Paul was placed on mission and believes that the ultimate opportunity is before him. He gets to present Christ to Caesar. It is quite possible that this would be his greatest and last gospel presentation and Paul expects that he will be courageous.

Now what is the alternative to being courageous? Shame! Shame is the alternative and that, in Paul’s mind is the ultimate humiliation. To fail to bring honor to Christ through his flesh is shameful. To squander the opportunity to be used for the kingdom is the ultimate pain for Paul. A man that has experienced being beaten, imprisoned, mocked, scorned and shunned for the sake of Christ, who in his current circumstance by worldly standards is living in shame, is only concerned with squandering the time he has left. He would be ashamed to strike out in front of Caesar during his time to present Christ.

My wife and I have had the opportunity to adopt four children out of the foster care system. I am so thankful for my kids and I continually say that we have been blessed with the best kids. But as often happens, one of our boys had an issue at school. He said something that really didn’t reflect the values of our family. This shined a bad light on things for a while. I addressed the issue with him by discussing the importance of our last name. On the day we adopted him, we gave him our last name along with all of the rights and responsibilities of being a natural born son. Now it takes a lot of trust for me to give him our last name. He has a great deal of power and influence in our family simply because he carries our last name. Simply put, he can bring honor to our family or shame. He represents us. I have been proud to carry my last name because it means something in our community. We have a place of respect. I don’t take that lightly.

Now, believer, you have been given a name. You carry the name of Christ when people know that you’re a christian and just as Paul had the ability to bring shame, so do you. Just as Paul had the power to bring honor, so do you. Bring honor to the name of Christ. Make him known saint! Bring honor to your family, the church of Christ Jesus, the bride bought and paid for by His blood. The name upon which all of creation will one day bow is the name that you carry. This is the weight that Paul felt when he wanted to honor Christ whether living or dead.

Paul continues on, expounding the idea of deliverance either way. “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.” In these famous words, Paul shows his heart is given over to Christ. Equating life itself with Christ, Paul is saying that his life is completely Christs. Paul is a prisoner not only of Rome but of Christ. He is experiencing joy in his imprisonment, he is experiencing peace in his imprisonment, he is being sanctified in his imprisonment and he is building the kingdom in his imprisonment! Paul is experiencing fullness as his life is given over to Christ.

Is there something in your life that you’re given over to? I hope it is Christ. I hope that you are experiencing Joy and peace and fulfillment that can only be known by the regenerate saints of God.

For Paul, to live is Christ but to die is gain. Paul’s present circumstances may have any other man wishing for the relief of death as an escape from the imprisonment and uncertainty of trial by Caesar but I don’t think that is what Paul is saying. Paul’s perspective on death is not a relief only but much more it is a gain. I consider the short one verse parable of Jesus in Matthew 13:44 ““The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Just imagine the man who is buying the field, and how excited he must be to finalize the sale, go marching down with his shovel because he knows the riches at hand. Paul desires to enter the richness of God, he wants to plumb the depths of mystery God has in store. He wants to walk the streets of heaven, in perfect right relationship with Jesus. Paul is experiencing joy now but will have perfect and full joy in death, Paul is experiencing peace now but will have perfect and full peace in death, Paul is experiencing sanctification now but in death no longer. He will march in perfect sinless harmony with his savior knowing that his toil for the kingdom and imprisonment to this world will be now more. Of course Paul wants this and so should you saint! Long for the day when you will see the full glory of Jesus. Long for the day when your sinless heart will fully be rendered to God. No more to wander and roam or struggle in strife, you will be fully His and he will be fully yours.

Long for that day but like Paul, look to honor God today. “Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.” Knowing that he will be delivered one way or another, he has confidence that his delivery will be a temporal emancipation from Roman imprisonment for the sake of honoring Christ. He wants to bring, as he says, “ample cause to glory” to the church at Philippi. He wants to stay “for your progress and joy in the faith”. Paul has a mission and he doesn’t want to be put to shame.

I pray that you look forward to the day when the mission is over, yet until that day brothers and sisters, keep your eyes on the cause of bringing honor to Christ with your bodies.