Paul's Prayer for Partnering Participants

Good morning, church!

There is a story — possibly apocryphal — about a man who was relatively new to his Christian faith. As he chatted with his pastor over lunch one afternoon, the conversation ranged widely from one topic to another, but eventually came around to the topic that was on the pastor’s mind: How was this new believer acclimating to his new life in Christ?

The man told his pastor how happy he was that he had been redeemed, that he had been spared the eternal consequences of his sin by God’s grace and through his faith in Jesus Christ’s atoning death on a cross at Calvary.

He said he was excited to be learning so much about the kind of love that would cause Jesus to leave heaven, live on earth as a man, suffer and die on the cross to bring mankind forgiveness of its sins, and then wait in heaven in His resurrected body for the time when He returns to earth to take those who have followed Him in faith home to spend eternity with Him and with the Father.

The pastor was, of course, pleased to hear that this new believer was growing so well in his faith, and while the man talked, the pastor thought about the fruit that might be produced in this man’s life.

But then the man said something that caught the pastor’s attention: “You know, the only thing I really miss about my old life is the fellowship I used to have with all the guys down at the tavern. We used to sit around, laugh, and drink a pitcher of beer, tell stories, and let our hair down. I can’t find fellowship like that with Christians.” [Robert J. Morgan, Nelson’s Complete Book of Stories, Illustrations, and Quotes, electronic ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000), 321.]

Now, I’m going to pass on the opportunity to preach about the pitcher of beer this morning in order to focus on the truly alarming thing this man said: He couldn’t find true fellowship among his brothers and sisters in Christ. Among the people of his church, he did not feel that he could be genuine like he could be at the neighborhood bar.

Now, I’ve heard enough different versions of this story from enough different sources that I suspect it is, indeed, apocryphal, meaning that even though it’s widely circulated as true, its authenticity is doubtful.

Still, apocryphal stories tend to state broad truths about matters, and that’s why they gain such wide traction. We hear a story like this, and it’s easy for us to believe it, because we’ve all likely experienced some feelings similar to those the new Christian shared with his pastor in this story.

The church is supposed to be the body of Christ. But sometimes we can feel like an amputated limb from that body. The church is supposed to be the family of God, but sometimes we can feel like third cousins, twice removed, sitting across from one another at the annual family reunion.

"Which way did y’all come today?”

That’s a universal code for “I don’t really know what to say, but we’re family so we should try to talk to one another,” and I can’t tell you the number of times I used to hear one person ask it of another during one of the family reunions we had in North Carolina when I was growing up.

Usually it was some third cousin, twice removed asking one of the men who had married into the Virginia branch of the family, trying to break the ice, trying to find some common ground other than, “Hey, you married my cousin, who used to come down here for the summer 30 years ago.”

It’s awkward, right?

But the church is supposed to be different. We have something much greater in common. We are fellow partakers of the grace of God. We are all participants in the gospel. We have all been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. We are all sinners who have been forgiven.

So when we talk about fellowship in the church, it really ought to mean something more than getting together for an hour or two on Sundays, though that should be part of it.

It really ought to mean something more than sharing an occasional potluck together, though I’ll be glad when that can be part of it again.

It really ought to mean more than a handshake or a hug once a week, though we miss that part of it terribly.

And I wonder today whether God is teaching us something through this long drought of what we used to call “fellowship.”

Perhaps He has allowed us to suffer the loss of handshakes and hugs, the loss of potlucks and parties so that we could begin to see how much more our fellowship in the gospel should mean to us than the name of a room where we set up tables for special dinners.

I wonder if the masks that we wear here today are, perhaps, a visible representation of the masks that we ALL tend to put on before we head to this building on Sunday.

“How’s it goin’, brother?” “Oh, fine. Just fine. Everything’s good. Thanks for askin’.”

For all the times that question gets that kind of response in the church, the church should be the most well-adjusted, problem-free place on the planet.

And yet, we know that’s not the case. We have many of the same problems that everyone else does.

So why is it that, to use the terms of the apocryphal story I told to start, we’re more likely to share those problems with our friends in the tavern than we are to share them with our brothers and sisters in the church?

How can we bear one another’s burdens if we’re all pretending we’re completely at ease all the time?

There must be more to true Christian fellowship than we making of it, and I hope you’ll see it with me as we conclude our study on Paul’s prayers for the church today.

We’ll be looking at one of Paul’s prayers for the Philippian church today, and if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and turn to the Book of Philippians.

While you’re finding the first chapter, I want to give you some background about the apostle’s relationship with this church, because it seems he had a deeper and richer relationship with the Philippians than any of the other churches to which he wrote.

Paul had planted this European church with Silas and Timothy and Luke during his second missionary journey, around A.D. 51, after he had a vision from God in which a man of Macedonia had appeared to him and said, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

The first convert to Christianity there was Lydia, the seller of purple fabrics. You might also recall that Paul encountered a slave girl in Philippi with a spirit of divination, and he cast out that demon, which made the girl’s master angry because he had been earning money from her fortune-telling.

The slave-master had Paul and Silas arrested, and they spent the night in a Philippian prison praying and singing hymns of praise to God — at least until an earthquake came and broke their chains and opened the doors of their cells.

You may remember that when the jailer awoke and saw the doors opened, he prepared to kill himself, but Paul cried out and stopped him, because they had not fled the prison.

By the end of that night, the Philippian jailer and his family had become the next converts in Europe.

So the fellowship that existed between Paul and this church in Philippi had been forged in suffering and by the grace of God, who had supernaturally drawn Paul to this place and who had empowered Paul and Silas to sing hymns of praise even while they were shackled.

Imagine what that Philippian jailer must have thought of Paul in the years to follow. If Paul and Silas had taken the opportunity to escape, the jailer’s life would have been forfeit.

So we see a little window into the fellowship of this church even from the story of its founding. But I think we will get an even better picture of what true Christian fellowship looks like as we study Paul’s prayer in Chapter 1 of his letter to the Philippians.

We’re going to read the first 11 verses, and then we’ll go back and pick out a few points to look at a little more closely.

READ PHILIPPIANS 1:1-11

Now, this prayer starts with a thanksgiving for the church and concludes with a set of petitions for it, and along the way we will see him describe true Christian fellowship with three thoughts.

First, he tells the Philippians: I have you in my mind.

Do you see that in verse 3? “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you.”

Now, you need to understand that this is one of what are called Paul’s prison epistles. He wrote this letter, along with Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, during his first Roman imprisonment.

And even while he was in prison, Paul did not forget his brothers and sisters in Philippi.

By now, we shouldn’t be surprised at this, but I want you to take note of Paul’s emotional situation while he was in prison.

He was “always offering prayer with JOY.”

One of the things we have to stop doing is letting our circumstances define our state of mind.

I’m as guilty of that as anybody else; these days of remote worship have been hard on me as your pastor, and I confess that I find myself more often than not feeling depressed on Saturday as I wonder who will be here with us on Sunday.

How much better to follow Paul’s example of meeting hardship with the joy we have in Jesus Christ! Christian joy comes from having a mind centered on Jesus Christ, and that’s a big part of what this letter is about.

But Paul had even greater joy because of what he called in verse 5 the Philippian church’s “participation in the gospel from the first day until now.”

Your translation might use the word “fellowship” here, and that’s a more literal translation of the Greek word koinonia, but “participation” picks up on some of the subtext that’s involved.

“The relationship between Paul and the church went deeper than human friendships. They had a tie that came from joining in the work of God in the world. Such cooperation in the spread of the gospel was something Paul appreciated very much.” [Richard R. Melick, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, vol. 32, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1991), 56.]

This fellowship is more than just enjoying one another’s company — it’s more than asking what route you took to get here today, and it’s more than asking how you’re doing and expecting to hear, “Fine. Just fine.” This fellowship is a close familial partnership in Jesus Christ.

And this fellowship is only possible because it is God’s work.

Look at verse 6.

There are three things we can know about salvation from this verse. Salvation is God’s work, not ours. Salvation is a good work. And salvation is a sure work. (Ellsworth, Roger. Opening up Philippians. Opening Up Commentary. Leominster: Day One Publications, 2004. 18-19)

This should be one of the most encouraging verses in Scripture if you are a follower of Jesus Christ.

The God who gave you the very faith by which you could respond to Jesus Christ’s gracious sacrifice on the cross will complete His good work in you when His risen Son returns from heaven for His church.

If my salvation had depended on me, I would be lost. If my sanctification depended on me, I would be lost. And if my glorification depended on me, I would be lost. All of those things are in God’s hands, not mine.

Though I am to participate in my sanctification by working, God knows that I will fail more often than I’d like to admit. In fact, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit that I ever have success.

Paul put this another way in his letter to the Romans:

Romans 8:38–39 NASB95

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When you fail in your walk with Christ, repent and move on, secure in the knowledge that nothing you can do will ever make God love you less. Conversely, nothing you can ever do will make Him love you more.

Rest in the grace of God. His grace saved you, His grace sustains you, and His grace will perfect you.

So Paul has revealed that having his brothers and sisters in Christ in mind is one part of what defines Christian fellowship.

Now, in verses 7-8, he shows that having them in his heart is the second part of what defines Christian fellowship.

He felt the need to think of them and pray for them because he had them in his heart, and that’s because of the fellowship they had.

You see, the people of the church at Philippi were, as Paul wrote in verse 7, “partakers of grace” with him. They had all been saved by the same grace by which Paul had been saved, the same grace by which you were saved if you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ as the one who paid the debt for your sins at Calvary.

But this participation is more than just a matter of them all being partakers in eternal life in Christ. They were also partners in the shared mission of sharing this gospel of grace. They had supported him while he was in prison and while he shared the gospel on his missionary journeys, and they had even sent one of their church members, Epaphroditus, to help him in his prison ministry.

And so we see that Paul longed for them because of the true Christian fellowship they had.

He had them in his mind. He had them in his heart, and now we see that he had them in his prayers.

And in verses 9-11, we see the petitions Paul brought before God on their behalf.

There are four of them, and you’ll see some overlap with the things Paul prayed for the other churches we have studied during the last several weeks.

First, Paul prayed that their love would abound, still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.

In other words, Paul prayed that they would have an intelligent and discerning love that would continue to grow.

Clearly, the Philippians already excelled in love. But in the second part of this chapter, Paul talks about people who preach Christ out of envy and strife, so there is reason to believe he was concerned that in their love, the Philippians might be too quick to accept those kinds of teachers into their midst.

Their love should, instead, “arise from an intelligent appraisal of reality. It should also rest on spiritual sensitivity to truth as God has revealed it in His Word and not on mere sentimentality. God’s revelation and His Spirit were to guide their loving. … In the context, this discernment applies primarily to what will advance the gospel best.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Php 1:9.]

Through their discernment, they would be able to distinguish the best things, the best ways of advancing the gospel — that’s Paul’s second petition.

And as they distinguished those best things, God would grant Paul’s third petition — that they would be “sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.”

Now, the word “sincere” doesn’t have the same sense of “honestly trying hard” that we might give it today. In the Greek, it had the sense of something that was found pure when examined in the light of the sun.

The idea was that a buyer might detect an imperfection or impurity in merchandise by holding it up to the sunlight. [Earl D. Radmacher, Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House, Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999), 1546.]

So Paul’s prayer that they be sincere in their faith was a prayer that they be real, that they be real with God and that they be real with one another.

We should not be “Fine, just fine” Christians. We need to be sincere with one another and with God.

We also need to be blameless, but that doesn’t mean being sinless. Blameless here means not putting stumbling blocks in one another’s way, not leading others into sin by our own behavior. [Earl D. Radmacher, Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House, Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999), 1546.]

We have talked a couple of times in the past few weeks about Christians being saved INTO the church, the body of Christ. And the idea there is that there is a very real sense in which our individual sanctification happens in a group context.

We should be challenging one another to walk in the Spirit. We should be calling one another to holiness. We should be encouraging one another in Christ. We should be praying for spiritual growth for one another.

But that group context can also be dangerous if we allow our own sins to trip up other believers.

What Paul has in view here is the fact that every Christian will one day stand before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account for what he or she has done here on earth.

With that in mind, we should be vigilant to be sincere and blameless in all our thoughts, words, and deeds.

But the simple fact is that you and I cannot accomplish such a tall task on our own — or as Paul would put it, in the flesh.

We can only accomplish this by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that brings us to Paul’s fourth petition in this prayer, which we see in verse 11.

He prays that the Philippians will be “filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ.”

That’s the fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.

As we walk in the Spirit, we bear the fruit of the Spirit, and it’s not for our own glory or praise, but for the glory and praise of God.

If you have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, then your salvation is a RESULT of Christ’s sacrifice on your behalf, but it is FOR God’s glory, to reveal His love and His mercy and His grace to all creation.

If you have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, then your sanctification is a RESULT of the work of the Holy Spirit within you, but it is FOR God’s glory, to reveal His power to change your sinful nature.

If you have been saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, then your eternal glorification — your perfection into the very likeness of Christ in eternity — will be a result of God’s love for you, but it will be FOR His glory, to reveal that He is a God of life, that He is a God who creates good things, that He is a God who imparts the very righteousness of Christ to those who were once dead in their trespasses.

Let us resolve to bring God glory through true Christian fellowship in this church. Let us resolve to glorify Him in our sincerity and our blamelessness. Let us resolve to glorify Him by loving in an intelligent and discerning way that nonetheless abounds — overflows — everywhere we go.

And let us resolve to pray for the church — and for one another individually — in the way that Paul prayed. Let us pray for God to do BIG things through us. Let us pray for Him to demonstrate the righteousness of Christ by our pursuit of true justice. Let us pray for Him to make us obedient as we grow in our knowledge of His Son. Let us pray that our lives would reflect the peace we have by the love of Jesus. And let us pray that God would be glorified in it all.

To Him be all glory and praise through Christ Jesus.