The Gospel First

Introduction

What’s up guys?

How many of you guys have ever dealt with something, and it did not go the way that you planned?

It has happened to me more times in my life than I can count.

That is Paul in our passage today.

Paul was in prison and being in prison as a missionary is not a good place to be, not a whole lot of people there to share the gospel to.

But even though Paul did not chose this situation, God controlled the outcome.

Prison seemed like a road block, but that did not stop God from using Paul.

Let’s pray and jump into tonight’s sermon.

Roadblocks Do not stop the Gospel, they redirect it (vv. 12-13)

Philippians 1:12–13 CSB

Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually advanced the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard, and to everyone else, that my imprisonment is because I am in Christ.

Has anyone ever had anything bad happen to them? Like terrible, just horrible?

We have all been through some sort of hard thing in life.

There is so much that is out of our control.

There is a ton that we want to control, but there are factors that we cannot control.

There are things that we can control:

How we say things,

what we say,

Our effort

our focus

our obedience

But there are also things that are out of our control

We can think of so many what if’s to fill in the gap

Terrible events, like a car crash

How other people respond to you

What others say

Friends that betray you,

There are so many things that can pop up.

Out of no where, you never see them coming,

then boom! Life is hard.

We are going to see this in Paul’s life.

Look at what he said, that the things that have happened to him, have caused the gospel to advance.

So let’s recap.

Paul is writing this letter from … prison.

He has been stoned,

The ship that he was riding on heading to Rome was shipwrecked

He got bitten by a snake

So writing this letter chained to a guard he says “man, God is working everything for good for the Gospel.”

I would be beyond myself!!!!!

I would be complaining about everything.

If the things that happened to Paul were happening to me, I would be asking “Why, God, why…”

but

Paul knew that what he was going through did not matter because he cared more about the Gospel than he did himself.

There was not a road block that could get in his way.

Look at what he says in Acts 20:24

Acts 20:24 CSB

But I consider my life of no value to myself; my purpose is to finish my course and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of God’s grace.

He considers his life worth nothing.

We have to be like Paul.

This is a big and daunting task! We will not get there over night. But by the power of the Holy Spirit we will grow into who God is forming us to be.

And when I say we, I mean me too.

I love my life, there are lots of things that I still want to do.

But Paul says even in chains, all I care about is the Gospel.

Paul was preaching the Gospel everywhere, where he went, people were giving their lives to Christ.

So much so, that Jesus and the power of the Gospel was challenging the Roman authority.

So let me ask you all, why did they arrest Paul?

They wanted him to shut up.

It did not work though.

We will get into, but the Gospel was spreading even more now that they arrested Paul.

Paul was in prison, but the Gospel was not.

When God closes a door, he opens up another.

Paul was going to preach in Rome, but then they arrested him.

There that door goes slammed in his face.

but guess, what? Y’all this gets me hyped up with how awesome God is.

That one door closed opened up two more.

The first is the people on the outside start sharing the gospel more; just hold on we will get there in a minute.

The second is he was chained to a guard.

These were the imperial guards, they were hand selected men from the emperor.

They were on four hour rotations where they would watch over him.

So Paul goes fine. Put me in prison, now I’m just doing prison ministry from the inside.

So now Paul is sharing the Gospel with people who are close to the Emperor, which causes Roman officials to hear the good news as well.

Paul was able to look at the guards and say “I might be in chains, but more importantly I am in Christ.”

Then the message of Christ spread in the higher ups in Rome.

And we see this at the end of the book in Philippians 4:22, but it says some of the emperors household were saved.

So what Paul thought was a door slammed in his face, all these terrible things were happening to him, God used to show that he is the sovereign Lord over all.

What you didn’t choose, God can still use. What you can’t control, God can still redeem.

We ask the question why, when hard things are happening.

The thing is, we do not know how God is moving.

We might only see one of the things that he is doing when there could be millions that we do not see.

Paul didn’t chose prison.

He didn't decide when he would be let free.

But God controlled how the Gospel would move forward.

So keep seeking God.

Matthew 6:33 CSB

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.

Seek God first and he will take care of you.

There may be times where it feels like things aren’t going well, but he is still working.

We have to keep the Gospel first.

Look at Paul, he was obsessed with the Gospel.

That is how we need to be.

We need to be talking about the Gospel with our believing friends,

With the people we know that are unsaved,

knowing that we are to seek Christ and the Gospel first and that is what Paul did.

Does anyone know what the Word gospel means?

Good news.

The good news that Jesus lived a perfect life, died on the cross, rose again, and in doing that took our sin.

We all need that and that is why we share.

But like I said, we were going to get to that other door, and it was people on the outside started sharing the Gospel more.

We see…

Faith under pressure produces boldness (v. 14)

Philippians 1:14 CSB

Most of the brothers have gained confidence in the Lord from my imprisonment and dare even more to speak the word fearlessly.

Have you guys noticed that a lot of the time when something happens like this, where the people in power are trying to get the voices of a movement to be silent, that it does not work?

Paul here, they want him to stop preaching the Gospel and it says people on the outside are speaking the word even more fearlessly.

And we see examples of this all over history.

In history John Bunyan was preaching the Gospel, and the government arrested him and said that he was preaching illegally.

But in prison he wrote a booked called the Pilgram’s Progress that reached the world.

It is the second most sold book of all time, and guess what, it is second to the Bible.

The government shut his pulpit, but opened the printing press.

Then there was a man named William Tyndale.

Maybe some of you might not know this name, but he was a Bible translator.

He was translating the Bible into English, and they killed him for it.

He translated 80-90% of the KJV, then when they killed him for it, people took over, translated the rest and accelerated the distribution.

Today if you have a NLT Bible, it probably says that it was produced by a company named Tyndale.

And we see today one of the fast growing Churches in the Chinese underground house churches.

The government has had crackdowns and arrests, trying to prevent Christianity.

And we see that the church has exploded with people.

y’all

Every time power tried to contain the Gospel, God used the containment to send it further.

This is exactly what happened to Paul.

The people on the outside saw this persecution and it made the go on mission for the Gospel even more.

Paul says they dare speak the word fearlessly.

This tells us how dangerous it was to be a Christian in Rome.

When something is challenging a governments power they will go out of their way to stop it.

Again, we talked about last week the Paul was a Roman citizen.

They arrested one of their own.

They treated the other Romans way better than they treated outsiders.

Because Paul was a Roman, he got to go on trial, but non-citizens they did not care.

They did not have a right to a trial, they were treated as lesser, so some people say there was a high chance that execution was coming a whole lot faster for them.

But they did not care.

This is our model.

When people see someone trust God when life is hard, it changes what they believe is possible.

When I played college football I always had a coach that would say it is not about what happens, but about how we respond.

I played linebacker, so when the offense was out on the field, I sat there, able to do nothing.

When somethings bad happened, an interception, a fumble, whatever it may be and the defense had to go back out, it was always how do you respond.

If you go out there saying man the offense sucks, you cause division.

But when it was hey you’re all good keep, your head up, we’ve got you, then things were a lot better.

Paul is in prison, not by his own measure, and he responds by fully trusting in God.

Then that causes the people on the outside to take courage.

I want you all to know that how you respond matters.

If you are being mocked for your faith.

When you keep worshipping when life gets hard in painful.

When you make the right decision even though you think you probably could have gotten away with it.

When you respond well people notice… and it affects them.

For Paul it affected:

The church

The culture

and the confidence of others.

God used him to strengthen an entire community, and we know God does not change.

He can do the same with you.

Ask yourself how am I going to respond to the pressures of this world and stand firm for Christ.

Now my last point is…

God’s work is bigger than people’s motives (vv. 15-18a)

Paul is going to say here, the Gospel is spreading, but there are two different reasons, so let’s take a look:

Philippians 1:15–18 CSB

To be sure, some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of good will. These preach out of love, knowing that I am appointed for the defense of the gospel; the others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, thinking that they will cause me trouble in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Only that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is proclaimed, and in this I rejoice.

So we see there are two groups of people sharing the Gospel and preaching.

There are people who have good motives for sharing the gospel,

and there are people who have bad motives for sharing the gospel.

but

We should strive to serve Jesus with good motives.

This group of people that Paul says were serving Jesus out of their good will.

These were the people who saw how Paul responded and they responded in a good way.

Out of their love for Christ, the shared the gospel more.

Out of their love for Paul, they wanted to help him share the gospel to Rome.

When I was thinking about this sermon in general there was a family that kept coming to mind.

If you were here on Sunday at the begining of the year you probably heard both Joel and James talk about Philip Shuford.

He was my connection point to South Gate and recommend to me that I apply.

But he had cancer and ended up passing from it.

This family was the definition of serving Jesus and responding in a good way.

When life was hard, when his body is failing, when he was looking at the end of the road and saying this might be it,

Phillip always pointed to Christ, at his lowest.

And it was because of his love for the Lord, he truly loved him so much, that even the negative going on in his life, his motive to endure till the end stayed pure.

We are to be on fire for Jesus with love.

1 Corinthians 13 tells us without the love of the Father we are nothing, we are just a noisy gong.

So why do you do thing things you do?

Why do you come to church?

Why do we wear the title of Christian?

We should be overflowing with God.

Saying out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

and we are overflowing with Jesus, so we spread the Gospel.

we have to strive to have these motives that point back to our love for the father.

so

We should examine our motives honestly.

Because as you see in the passage there were people out there sharing the gospel who had bad motives.

Note: these people were not sharing a false gospel.

It was still the message of Jesus.

We see in Galatians that Paul did not respond well when a false gospel was going around, but this was still Jesus.

It was just there motive that was off.

They were doing it our of rivalry, out of self, to trouble Paul.

So some of them knew what Paul was doing was making the gospel take off, so they wanted to out do him.

We talked about last week that Paul was that guy, he trained under the best guys, it was like he went to Harvard, so these people hated well equipped theologians.

They were prideful.

Pride is so dangerous.

It points to us, not Jesus.

It leads us to a higher spot than we think we are.

But it keeps taking us up and up.

but as high as pride leads us, is as high as our fall will be.

We must check our motive for pride.

If we are doing work for God we are all on the same page.

Then there were those who wanted to put salt in Paul’s wounds.

They did not like Paul so they said if they can make the Gospel go further, then the Roman government will hate him more and make his time in prison worse.

So they went out and shared the gospel.

Terrible, right?

This is not how it is supposed to be.

But this shows us that even good actions can carry mixed motives.

Genesis 50:20 CSB

You planned evil against me; God planned it for good…

so what does Paul do?

He says who cares?

It is not that Paul does not think motives matter, it is that God’s power does not depend on motives.

we have to know that…

God works beyond our motives.

Paul is like it is terrible that they are in sin. That they are plotting against me, but he finds joy.

He finds so much joy that the gospel is being spread regardless of what is happening to him.

Paul wants their motive to be pure, but he places the highest importance on the words in the message. The words of the gospel.

Paul care so much more about the Gospel than himself.

we should too.

Paul never said “why me” he said “what now” and it was to keep preaching the gospel.

Because Christ is proclaimed, Paul rejoices.

So where are you at?

Paul was fine if it was just him and the Lord.

I stole this from Pastor John Marshall,

but think of yourself in a circle,

and go this circle is just me and God,

and ask, is this enough?

Is just you and God enough?

Because for Paul it was, and he had pure motives to let nothing be a roadblock to the gospel and nothing be a roadblock to his joy.

Let’s strive for that this week.

Any thoughts, comments, questions, concerns, stones for heresy?

Let’s pray.