Paul lays out a wonderful picture of what Christian community is to look like in the church as he speaks to these beloved saints who are very concerned about his well-being as he’s been imprisoned for the gospel. As we look to the reading of God’s word, if you’d please join with me in prayer.
Blessed are you, Holy God. In Jesus Christ, your light shines into the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Blessed are you, God of light. We ask that you would shine in our lives with the light of Christ, that we might give you praise through him who lives and who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit now and forever. Amen.
Beginning in verse 9, it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. Filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God. I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it’s become known throughout the whole imperial guard to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. A while ago now, but in the year 2000, Bruce Wilkinson wrote a very small little book called The Prayer of Jabez, and it sold over 10 million copies. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list for years. It was a global sensation. The book was about 2 verses In 1 Chronicles chapter 4, which in Hebrew is just a single sentence of about 20 words, a man named Jabez called out to God to enlarge his borders and essentially bless him.
And this book is a 30-day challenge for people to pray this prayer too. Wilkinson tells us that the Lord’s unclaimed blessings await each of us. And we think, well, who wouldn’t want some unclaimed blessings of God to add to their lives? And this prayer then of expanding my borders was almost entirely interpreted as a prayer to God to make us wealthy. For many, it became a mantra for more money.
Wilkinson’s borders were certainly expanded by his little book. The full might of American consumerism joined the cause. Besides the book, there was the Prayer of Jabez keychains, coffee mugs, backpacks, Christmas ornaments, scented candles, mouse pads, framed pictures, and even a line of jewelry. A somewhat obscure verse becomes a marketing giant for Christian consumerism and it spanned the globe. One of the questions is why, why do we pray for such things as personal gain and success, but spend very little time praying the actual prayers of the Bible?
The Apostle Paul, his heartfelt praise and prayer for his fellow believers here at Philippi is of sterner stuff. It’s heartier, far more substantial. And because God’s glory is our ultimate goal, The prayers and the actions of believers are to start and to end there with the glory of God. And Paul, his trust is firmly in the Lord. And from this deep gospel conviction, he has gone into the world to tell other people this good news.
And these Philippian Christians have a partnership with Paul’s life and ministry because of it. And a deep affection between them has grown. And from this overflowing heart, he prays for his dear brothers and sisters. And this wonderful prayer is given in verse 9. It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment.
Biblical love includes affection and it includes action. Love for us in our society almost exclusively means an emotion, how we feel about someone. Biblical love speaks of acting a certain way, thinking a certain way. Amen. Emotions certainly can be involved, but that’s not what’s driving the bus.
And here in verse 9, Paul is praying that their love would overflow, that it would abound, that it would grow richer and richer. How? In the knowledge and discernment of understanding. Paul prays that their love would grow in the depths of insight into the ways of the Lord. The infinite horizon of the Lord God Almighty is before his people.
And to grow richer and richer in this knowledge and understanding of Him also is to cause our affections to deepen and to widen, not only for the Lord but for one another.
The byproduct of this great love is we will grow in our moral discernment.
Similar to like when, you know, you sit down to do an eye test and they put the round thing in front of you and you’re looking through the lens and you’re like, which one’s better? Which one’s better? This lens? And you’re looking through that and the picture is blurred and distorted until the optometrist finally gets the lens that’s perfect for your eye. And then you’re like, oh, everything’s clear and bright.
And that’s what we see here. That’s part of Paul’s prayer, that Christians would have their moral borders expanded to know good and evil, to walk in discernment through the lens of Jesus, that this love for Christ would give them a greater moral discernment. And he goes on then in verse 10, so that you may approve of what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. It will give you new eyes to see the world around us. There’ll be an inner and an outer vision that will be improved.
Don’t rush over this. To be pure and blameless. Morality, goodness is truly beautiful. Amen. That’s what Paul is encouraging them in.
And you think about even those words in our culture. Beauty for us is really all about looks and outward adornment, not about beautiful acts, moral perfection. In fact, lewd sexual acts are praised, and we are told that we can do whatever we want, and the one thing you can’t do is to tell somebody else what they’re doing is wrong. No, real love increases our knowledge of what is pleasing to the Lord. There is a beauty found in his goodness, his truth.
And Paul goes on in verse 11, to be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ. And in this, then there’s no room for a smug feeling of self-righteousness, feeling that somehow we’re morally superior to those sinners out there who don’t understand these truths. Because we know that the fruit of righteousness does not come from ourselves. It comes from Jesus. This has been a gift given to us.
That Jesus has opened the eyes of our heart and that we are able to see because of him. And so when we do see someone who’s made in his image and his likeness, they’re sitting and eating foul and rancid food. And we have the fresh banquet of the Lord’s bounty before us to feast on. You do go, you feel compelled to go and say, dear friend, this is not food for you. This is not life.
Come with me to the Lord’s table, the one who has made you for himself. That you long to see them embrace what is true and good and beautiful to feed their soul. Because of the love that God has put in you that’s growing and that’s expanding. This abounding love found because the Lord gives us knowledge and discernment. And it’s not simply for ourselves, but as Paul declares, to the glory and the praise of God.
God is the end goal of our righteousness, of our holiness. It’s his glory. Amen.
And that enables us then to look at the world with new eyes, that we are a people waiting, waiting for the completion of God’s redemptive work. And Paul, he points us to the time. He says in verse 10, for the day of Christ. We are being fitted. We are being readied for Jesus’ return.
And it, it should give us a healthy understanding of what we are doing and where we are going while we wait. Paul’s prayer is not for some expanded borders of personal selfishness and gain. It’s, Is expansive.
It’s looking for the needs of others. It’s looking to the glory and the praise of God. Notice that it’s more than a shopping list prayer. Sometimes, you know, those when we pray and God does tell us to come to him with our prayers and our supplications, we do come with our needs before him. But so often our prayers can sort of be like, Lord, help Grandma to feel better.
Bless Uncle Bob. Help me do good on the math test I got tomorrow and be with Aunt May. Amen. Now, again, there’s a place for praying those needs, but I would also encourage you that a piano has 88 keys. And when we listen to a musical score, we want more than 2 or 3.
Might not get all 88 in one run, But God has given us the ability to come to him in prayer. We’re talking to God that we have been freed to be able to come and converse with him in a deep and abiding way, more than just kind of going through a laundry list of needs because of who he is, that we’ve been made for relationship to him. If you want to expand the borders of your prayer life, maybe pray the actual prayers of the Bible for others. An example of that would be out of Ephesians 3, using that as a basis for a prayer where we go, Lord, I pray that out of your glorious riches, you would strengthen Uncle Bob with power through your Holy Spirit in his innermost being, that Christ would dwell in his heart through faith. And Lord, I pray that he would be rooted and established in your love.
Father, grant him the power to see the width, the depth, and the height Of the love of Christ for him, that he would be filled with the measure, the fullness of God.
That would not be a bad prayer for someone. And that’s what Paul is doing in Ephesians 3. You see prayers like this throughout scripture. And sometimes when we limit ourselves, we’re like, I’m not sure what to pray for. Just take the words of scripture and pray them for people.
Because we want the truth of who God is to permeate our souls. We want that knowledge to be able to be extended to others, to expand, as it were, our vocabulary and capacity of worship and praise. And we pray for others. We take our eyes off of ourselves. We pray that Jesus would bear fruit in their lives.
One writer has pointed out that 8 words tell us the domain of love, the word love here, agape. And Paul is using 8 different words to explain this dominion. We have knowledge, insight, judgment, uprightness, blamelessness, holiness, glory, and praise to God. That is all-encompassing what this love he’s asking that God would expand in them. And this love changes everything for us.
New eyes, new perspective. The circumstances of our lives take on new meaning and significance now. And that also then changes how we see prayers answered. Paul begins in verse 12. He knows that these Philippians are very concerned about him.
He’s in prison and they’ve sent Epaphroditus to help him out. And they, and they wanna know, how are you doing? And Paul, right from the get-go, I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. He’s in prison for preaching about Jesus. Of course they, they wanna know.
And no doubt one of the prayers they’re praying for him Is, God, please free him, get him outta jail, release him to the work that you’ve called him to. But Paul is able to see the bigger picture. He knows that God is still at work. So much so that in verse 13 he says, so that it has become known throughout the whole Imperial Guard to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. Now the Imperial Guard or Praetorian Guard, they were the elite forces of the Roman Emperor.
And Paul is a Roman citizen. He has appealed to, to the emperor himself. And so they’re the ones watching over him. And Paul has a captive audience. He’s sharing Jesus with them, and some of them no doubt are having their eyes opened.
But more than that, goes on in verse 14. Most of the brothers become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment. Are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Well, how does that work? From a human standpoint, this doesn’t make much sense.
You know, you take the leader of a group and put them in jail and everybody’s, oh, they, they get nervous and afraid and they don’t want to say anything. But from a gospel standpoint, the boldness of the Spirit moves through us. And Paul, he sees this. His suffering is not futile. It’s not wasted.
Why? Because the endgame is the praise and the glory of God.
Now we could see having a conversation with the Lord if we were in Paul’s place. That might sound something like, look, God, I’m a traveling apostle. I travel, I move around. That’s the idea, place to place. And right now I’m not traveling.
How am I supposed to fulfill your calling in my life? You are the one who made me an apostle. See these chains? I’m not moving anywhere. My great gifts and my great abilities are being underutilized.
God, fix this. Some form of that kind of prayer is usually what goes through our mind when we’re in those kind of circumstances. The problem is God’s not listening to us.
Paul is not seeing it this way. He’s making the most of every opportunity. He couldn’t go anywhere, but the guards could. That’s right. They had to rotate shifts.
The message of the gospel is not stifled by his imprisonment. The good news of Jesus does not move forward in spite of our suffering and adversity. Paul is actually telling us that the gospel moves forward through suffering and adversity. Paul has a much bigger view of God’s sovereignty. With Christ at the center, Paul’s suffering is not wasted.
And this in turn encourages others. They’re saying, look, Paul is able to bear fruit for Jesus in prison. How much more should we who are free?
And that motivates them by the Spirit in them to continue the work of Paul in a greater way. Now, so often we pray for something and it seems like the Lord doesn’t answer our prayer. And again, we’re upset. But Paul’s reminding us that what might initially be seen as a no from the Lord is actually a yes in a way we’re not anticipating.
Adversity and affliction are not hindrances for the Lord, but tools in his hand to accomplish his purposes. What is happening to Paul is now becoming a source of encouragement for filling others with boldness, courage to take his place. And we see that. We see unlikely things happening in circumstances that are beyond our control that we are wanting God to change. And Paul is saying there’s a bigger purpose happening here, and it’s all going to be to the glory and the praise of God.
Some of you may be familiar with David Brainerd. David Brainerd was born in 1718 in Connecticut. And he was born to a very frail family. His parents died early. His brother Nehemiah died at 32.
His brother Israel died at 23. His sister Jerusha died at 34, and he himself died at age 29. A descendant of the family, Thomas Brainard, he mentioned in 1865, he said, in the whole Brainard family for 200 years, there has been tendency to morbid depression akin to hypochondria. Physical weakness and depression seemed to be simply in the DNA of this family. His was a short life.
He was only a believer for 8 years and only a missionary for 4. After he came to Christ, he had this great desire to be a pastor. And in a great travesty of justice, he was actually expelled from Yale Divinity School for essentially being a committed Christian. And the door was shut to him. Jonathan Edwards and others took him in and licensed him to preach, and he became a missionary to the Indians.
He struggled with almost constant sickness. He ended up contracting tuberculosis. That’s what he would eventually die from. But more than that, he was lonely. He battled depression, melancholy.
His travels were physically hard. The wild frontier and traveling on horse in hostile weather. Hostile land, hostile people. He struggled even to like the very people he’s supposed to be ministering to. In the last week of his life, he was tended to by Jonathan Edwards’ daughter, Jerusha.
And it’s almost certainly they were in love with one another. 4 months after he came into their home, he died.
And then she died soon after. Having contracted tuberculosis almost certainly from him. And you look at that and go, that’s terrible. That’s a tough miniseries.
Edwards published Brainerd’s journal, The Life of David Brainerd, in 1749. It’s still in print today. And the Lord used it to launch, really, the modern missions movement. Here, here’s some of the entries. He, he wrote a lot of things as daily things in there too, but Lord’s Day, April 5th.
It grieved me to find myself so inconceivably barren. My soul thirsted for grace, but alas, how far was I from obtaining what appeared so exceedingly excellent? I was ready to despair of ever being a holy creature. April 16th. Was in bitter anguish of soul in the morning, such as I have scarce ever felt, with a sense of my own guilt.
I continued to stress the whole day attempting to pray wherever I want. I dared not look anyone in the face. January 2nd. Had some affecting sense of my own impotency and spiritual weakness. It’s nothing but the power of God that keeps me from all manner of wickedness.
I see I am nothing, can do nothing without help from above. Oh, for divine grace. And multiple entries like this, again, regular ones and then ones of just his own despondency, his own discouragement. And you think, how’s that going to move anyone?
Moved John Wesley, Henry Martyn, William Carey, Robert Morrison, Robert Murray M’Cheyne of Scotland, John Mills of America, Frederick Schwarz of Germany, David Livingstone of England, Andrew Murray of South Africa, Jim Elliot of modern America, all looked at Brainerd’s journal and Brainerd with a kind of awe and drew power from it, from the way that he persevered with all of his own internal struggles. It motivated them because they saw the power of Christ at work in frail and fallible people. John Piper, he asked the question, why has the life Brainerd had such an impact. And he said, the answer for me is that Brainerd’s life is a vivid, powerful testimony to the truth that God can and does use weak, sick, discouraged, beat-down, lonely, struggling saints who cry to him day and night to accomplish amazing things for his glory.
And throughout Brainerd’s journal, we see these prayers. It’s clear that he had a deep and and hearty theological depth. Prayers of agonizing intercession for those he was ministering to, a longing for personal holiness and communion with God, an acknowledgement of his own sin and limitations. And, and of course, what we see is that suffering and weakness and, and limitations, these are not obstacles to the Lord. He is the one who can make fruit thrive and flourish on languishing plants.
This is what Paul knows.
We see in Psalm 1, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, but he’s like a tree planted by streams of water that yield its fruit in season. He’s been planted. In John 15, Jesus said, I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him He bears much fruit, but apart from me, you can do nothing. You see, it’s the quality of the vine and not the branches.
That’s why we pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And we recognize what can seem like a no on earth is often a yes in heaven. And this is the perspective that Paul has and that he’s wanting to cultivate in these new believers. To be able to show them, oh, I know and understand why you’re praying for me and, you know, thank you, but also know that God’s purposes are being accomplished through my adversity, not in spite of it.
You see how freeing that is for us?
David Brainard wasn’t a superhero.
I’m sure he’d probably be diagnosed today with some deep form of depression, maybe bipolar. Someone who struggled greatly, come from a lineage of people of frail, broken bodies, frail, broken minds.
Through him, God helped launch the modern missionary movement because the power of God is manifest in weakness, not in our strength. And we see this is again a theme of Paul through Philippians, that joy is not dependent upon our circumstances. Paul, the one where he and Silas are in prison at Philippi, Acts chapter 16, and they’re singing and praising God in the dungeon. And prisoners are listening. Like, how is that possible?
Because of the Holy Spirit in the life of Paul and Silas. And Paul is praying that the love of God would increase in their understanding. Again, it’s more than simply an affection. It, it’s a love that permeates everything.
It has truth to it. It’s the moral fabric and compass of our creational God who has made us in his image and his likeness. And to know that love is to expand in all these other arenas that gives us fiber to our being. It’s like steel girders of the soul.
This is what Paul is praying. And it is in this that his security rests. It is in this that he has put his trust and his faith in the good news of Jesus, that it is the power of Christ that’s transforming people’s hearts and lives. It is the power of Christ that is enabling him who is placed upon the earth to go into the world as an evangelist to sit and somewhat be spinning his wheels as it would be to us, proclaiming this truth to those around him and encouraging other people to go. And to broadcast even further because Paul is one man, but when you have an entire church in an area that had been impacted by his own devotion and discipleship, they now are many people going into the same region.
The life of David Brainerd was 8 years a believer, 4 years a missionary, and not super successful.
God chose. To bring forth his power to answer the prayers of David Brainard in a way that he never realized. He now knows he and his family who are before Christ in the wholeness of what God intended and the freedom that he has received from a melancholy and weak disposition now knows the joy of the presence of Christ in a way that he could only just trust in. While he rode horseback in miserable conditions.
It is Jesus who sets his people free. There is not a condition you have, a disposition of your mind or body that the Lord Jesus cannot use for his glory. Making yourself available to him, to his transforming love in all of these arenas.
Is to put the gospel at the forefront, the good news for you and for the world around you. And this is what transforms the hearts and the lives of men and women for the goodness of the kingdom, for the expansion of the church. This is God’s intent for his people, that we would learn to pray in this manner. Amen. With these types of answers.
May the Lord of glory capture our hearts afresh and anew. Pray with me. Father, we do thank you.
And Lord, we confess we struggle, Lord, when you say no on earth, we struggle to see very far. We ask that you would give us a further horizon, Father, that we would have a greater vision of Jesus. That you would fill us with power in believing. And Lord, that the love that you have for us would expand our knowledge and understanding and our moral discernment, that it would increase and grow, that you would receive glory and honor and praise through the lives of your people. And this we would ask through Jesus, our risen Lord.
Amen. Please stand.
There is one gospel. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.