Joy in Unexpected Outcomes

Read The Word

Philippians 1:12–14 NLT

And I want you to know, my dear brothers and sisters, that everything that has happened to me here has helped to spread the Good News. For everyone here, including the whole palace guard, knows that I am in chains because of Christ. And because of my imprisonment, most of the believers here have gained confidence and boldly speak God’s message without fear.

Intro: Cause and Effect People

So we are as humans, we are cause and affect people. And what I mean by that is we think that when we do something good, we are going to get something good. And when we do something bad, we're going to get something bad. And this goes back to our question about why do good things or have good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, because that messes with our minds on this idea of cause and effect, right? So, When we read Philippians, we see Paul has this joy, and the joy that he has, we're going to have this series is going to be called Defiant Joy, right? So, With this joy that he has in this situation, it's strange because we see that Paul doesn't deserve to be in prison. He did not do something worthy of, of being in prison from what we would believe. He was just preaching the gospel, right? But he ends up getting put in prison. Because of it. And so what we have to see and what we have to understand about this situation and this defiant joy, right? It's not defiant in the sense that it's a negative thing, a wrong thing. It's defiant in the sense that in spite of the situation, in spite of these things that has happened to Paul, he is still joyful and still serving the Lord, even though the expectation of what should happen in our mind didn't happen. And tonight's message is called joy in unexpected outcomes. We'll see joy throughout this whole book of Philippians, but tonight we're specifically talking about how Paul experienced joy and unexpected outcomes of being put in prison for what he believed, but also for us and how we can have joy and unexpected outcomes, what we need to be looking for to make sure that we remain faithful in every situation.

Context

So the context of this letter, and we're not gonna dive super deep into this, but just so you know, Paul is writing this letter from prison. He's sending this out to the church of the Philippians. And in that, Paul has also experienced a lot of other bad things. Okay? We know that Paul's experience of salvation happened on the road of Damascus, Jesus, you know, knocks them off of his horse and they're blinded and he's saying, you know, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? All right, he goes to this amazing transformation for being someone who was killing Christians, to now being, uh, someone who is on fire for Jesus and is planting churches and sharing the gospel, right? So we see this happen, but again, We start seeing a lot of bad things happening to a, well, we would say, a good guy, right? Nothing specifically happened to make him deserve these things, but he was beat by people they tried to kill him multiple times. He had experienced a shipwreck. He was stranded for a while. Uh, he had danger from his enemies, of course, who were trying to attack him, but even some of his friends, who he thought were his friends, were actually, uh, causing him trouble as well and wanting to hurt him. And so he had to deal with that deception and, and that lack of trust that he had with some of his friends. He went hungry. He went thirsty. He had spent time outside in the cold with not enough clothing. And then on top of all of these bad things that he was experiencing in his life, he also was in leadership of all of these churches. He's trying to take care of all these different churches that he planted or churches that he was associated with. And so we see, Paul has experienced a lot of things that are worthy of him being upset. Right? He's he has a right to say that these things are not fun. And I don't want to do them. But Paul doesn't stay there. He doesn't take that as a way to not have joy, but he finds how to have joy in these situations. So there's there's 3 things I want to point out from the text we just read. I think are going to help us understand how we can stay focused on having joy in unexpected outcomes.

Main Points

1. Don’t Let Your Perspective Blur Your Purpose

So here's the 1st point. Number one. Don't let your perspective blur your purpose. So we have different lenses that we look through life, and I've used this analogy before, right, where we have sunglasses or you have regular glasses to help you see or glasses that aren't prescription, they're just for decoration, right? Depending on which ones you put on. It's going to change how you see things. And so when we go into a bad situation and we get unjustly treated and put into a situation undesirable, we really want to reach for those glasses that help us see everything as bad and try to talk about, you know, woe is me, that this is this is a bad situation. I'm not being treated fairly. And so, while, you can have those feelings, and I'm sure that at certain points, Paul was upset at his situation because he couldn't do some of the work he wanted to do, and the fact that, It was not really fair to put him in jail in the 1st place because of this. But, We have to make sure that we're putting the right glasses on the right lenses and perspective of how we should view our situations because if we don't, we can miss out. We can be blinded to what the purpose is of our situation. And so a really good example of this is Joseph's story. So to quickly recap Joseph's story, Joseph had a bunch of brothers, and he made a mad pretty frequently, because he kept getting these visions of them bowing down to him, and he had this really nice coat, and his dad, he was his dad's favorite. They're like, we're gonna kill this guy. And so they end up not killing him. They end up selling him into slavery, so Joseph gets sold into slavery. But while he's in slavery, he becomes really close with the pharaoh and ends up, uh, getting, getting too close with Pharaoh's wife, and she tries to trick him and make something happen that, that Joseph knew was not the right thing to happen. And so because of that, Joseph gets unjustly put in prison. And he's stuck in prison. There's some guys there. They have some dreams. Joseph interprets the dreams. They're supposed to come get the guy out because he's like, hey, if this dream comes true, right, you see that I'm correct. You need to make sure they remember me. Well, the guy gets out of jail, the other people that were in there, and they forget about him, of course, for like years. So Joseph's still sitting in prison, unjustly. Then, because of another vision that happened with the pharaoh, the the guy that was originally with Joseph then remembers Joseph. They get Joseph, Joseph interprets the dream. Joseph is now like one of the top guys. He is now in command and they're about to go into this really bad season of famine. And so because of the Lord's provision in helping Joseph interpret the dream, Egypt was able to, Basically prepare for this fame better than anyone else. So then guess who shows up looking for some food? Joseph's brothers, okay? Joseph's brothers don't recognize Joseph. Joseph recognized them. Pretty sure it'd be hard to forget your brothers that did that to you. But Joseph does something absolutely incredible, because after all of the situation, all the things that he could have said that were wrong, what he says to his brothers is that you meant this for evil, but God meant this for good. And that is an interesting thing that we can read that verse and look over and we go, oh yeah, like, oh, that was nice, that he didn't, you know, retaliate against his brothers, but I really want you to think about that for a 2nd. That, that God, knew about the situation and meant it for good while allowing humans to make evil decisions and to do bad things. And that is the lens that we need to put on our eyes whenever we are in a bad situation. And when we want to, Start throwing stones at other people, try to fight back and try to, you know, claw our way out of whatever situation. We might want to make sure we try those glasses on 1st and just confirm that God maybe has a plan in what's going on here. Because if we're not careful, we will miss out on that. And what Joseph was able to do, not only to reconcile with his brothers and to show them grace and mercy, and obviously to, um, just be a huge part of the story of God. But even in that, he was able to help save a bunch of people because God put him in those positions that he would have never been in. If it hadn't have been for those bad situations that God didn't specifically cause, but he did allow, so that something greater could come from it. And so that is the 1st point, right? We don't let your perspective, don't let the fact that you are hurting or that you are mad because this is not fair. Blur and mess up those lenses that you put onto where you may maybe miss out on the purpose that you're there for.

2. Don’t Confuse Destiny with Discipline

Second point is this. Don't confuse destiny with discipline. So we just talked about, right, God, having a plan and making this thing happen while also, you know, humans making decisions and all that. So we have this idea of destiny, right? That God has planned something for us. But we don't want to confuse destiny with discipline or God, you know, kind of getting us to see where we're doing something wrong. And so, we, we saw how God allowed those evil choices to produce God's plan, but in this situation, we see with Paul, right? Paul's on house arrest. We think of prison more like the prisons here, right? You get thrown a cell, you got people watching you. Well, this reason was a little bit different. So, so they, he was kind of on like a house arrest kind of thing in the palace, and he had to be chained to a prisoner 24 seven. So there's 4 shifts a day. And for 2 years, he had a prisoner chained to him. Paul, again, looking for the opportunities to see what his purpose may be in this situation, saw that, he has an active audience. They cannot move. They're literally chained to him. He had almost 3000 opportunities to share the gospel because of being in prison for 2 years with those 4 shifts of different Roman soldiers. So, there was absolute opportunity in God ordained plan that these bad things would happen so that Paul would be put in the position where they would have to listen to him and that people would be saved. But the problem that we have sometimes, and this is not all the time, but it can be a problem, is that we start to over spiritualize our problems. And when something bad happens, we immediately just chalk it up to, well, God's got a plan. And it was just supposed to happen. It wasn't really my fault. I didn't do anything. Wrong. And so that might be something like a relationship, right? Like your boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with you and you just kind of, you know, hey, like, I didn't do anything wrong here. They're making a mistake. That might not be completely true, right? You might have those lenses on where you're trying to look, uh, for a purpose when really the lenses you need to put on are the ones that examine yourself, because maybe there's a problem that you need to work on that would help you in relationships. The same thing with sports, right? You don't make the team and you want to blame everybody else. Uh, and just say it's something outside of you that made this decision. Well, that may be true, but also maybe you just need to practice more. Maybe you need to put in the work that someone else did because they were just better than you and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. If you are. Wanting to be honest with yourself, right, about grades or whatever it is in your life that you feel that maybe you're being unfairly treated. You can't just immediately assume that you don't have anything at fault. And and this is why I'm bringing this up is because when we read this verse and we see, uh, how Paul was having this joy and he had this purpose within this bad situation, the reason he could have that is because the reason he was in prison was very clear. It was Jesus. That is why he was put in prison. He wasn't put in prison because he did something wrong. Right? And he was being punished for that thing. It wasn't like he murdered someone. He's like, oh yeah, God's got me here so I can share the gospel. Well, maybe he might use that for that too, but also you might be in jail because you killed somebody. Right? So, We need to examine our lives in a way that we don't confuse God's plan, right, with God acting and showing us that we need to change our lives and something in it, because that's not even really including the fact that, you know, God withholds some things, sometimes from us, because we are living in sin and he wants to bring that up to us, that we need to get that sin out of our life. We know from the book of Job, that not every situation, and we can even say from Paul here as well, that not every bad situation happens because there's something wrong in your life. But we also do know that sometimes there are things that happen in your life because of something wrong. And we just need to acknowledge that before we start just going, okay, well, there's nothing wrong with me. It's the whole part of God's plan. So that's my 2nd point. Like, don't confuse destiny with discipline.

3. Influence Others With Your Obedience

And my 3rd point is this, influence others by obedience. You are an influencer. If you are claiming to follow Jesus, then people are watching you. People are watching how you live. They want to see what you do, how you respond to situations. And we need to make sure that we are faithful. We need to make sure that we are obedient to the Lord, even when the bad situation happens, because just as God's love for us doesn't change, our faithfulness to him shouldn't change. If we believe that God loves us no matter what, he has unconditional love for us in the sense that it's not something that I can earn or I can do well enough, if I make a mistake, he's just gonna completely cut me off, right? That, that's not what we believe about how God's love works, but if that's the case, then that means that no matter what my situation is, I can't just love God situationally. I can't love God when it's convenient for me. I have to love and be obedient to God all the time. And so when others are watching your life, we need to make sure that we are inspiring them with obedience because we see in this verse, we see in 14 that because of my imprisonment, most of the believers here have gained confidence and boldly speak God's message without fear. Paul was starting a revival. He was starting this bold, um, uh, act of faith within these people that he was around, even while he was in prison, because they saw him in prison, still worshiping and joyfully singing to the Lord. Like, that's incredible. We are inspired by those things when we see people going through a hard time yet remaining faithful. Don't just allow someone else to be part of that story. You be the one who inspires people by being obedient in every situation. Because you don't know who you will be impacting. You don't know what God may be wanting to use in your life to help someone else, and you receive joy, not just from the fact that you are able to continue following the Lord and see purpose in what you're doing, but you receive joy from seeing someone else find purpose in their life and find obedience and faithfulness in their life. To summarize all this. This is... really just kind of pulling everything together.

Summary

Paul's joy defied expectations because he chose to be faithful to the calling God had given him, despite being unfairly treated, and in an unfortunate circumstance. We can follow Paul's example by looking for ways to serve God in every circumstance, examining our lives to make sure we don't need to take action, to resolve issues. And then no matter what the situation is, we stay obedient to Jesus and allow our lives to be an example for others.