I would say that there are hunks of
Matthew where the word disciple, disciple, disciple comes
in great clusters.
It's fun working with a concordant sometimes on
this because you can see that a particular
key word gets mentioned again and again and
again and again within the bounds of a
few chapters and then not at all.
And you may think that perhaps that's for
a reason, that the writer was focusing on
that term at that time for good purpose.
The way you think as a Christian is
obviously part of this isn't it and you've
got certain examples.
Let me move you on a bit, we
haven't completed the exercise, I've just shown you
some of the way in which batting ideas
around is good.
What do you think about chapter 3?
What on earth is all that about?
And how is it different from chapter 2?
What is chapter 3 about?
Show me from the text.
Does it divide up and if so how?
What will you entitle it?
The value of knowing Christ.
Yes.
Now why should he suddenly start to talk
about the value of knowing Christ at this
point?
Why doesn't he talk about the second coming?
Do you think that following the example of
Christ in the early verses of chapter 2
is likely to cause you any problems?
You can't live up to it, so one
problem may be frustration.
This is another very interesting thing.
You get Paul answering in the successive verses
the kind of questions that what he's just
said will produce.
Now do you think chapter 3 does answer
the frustration of...
That's in chapter 1 I think is it?
Or am I mistaking?
Verse 17.
Watch out for the dogs and watch out
for the concision and so on.
We are the true circumcision.
We'll come to that in a minute.
The business about, well I'm just happy that
people are proclaiming the gospel even if some
of them are doing it for wrong reasons.
That comes before in the gospel work chapter.
So he's talked about gospel work and the
hurly-burly of it.
Then he's gone on to talk about the
mind of the worker, humbling himself, serving others,
abasing himself.
Are there any frustrations that that might cause
apart from feeling you're not up to it?
What is one of the worst things that
you have to bear with when you do
what Christ did between verses 5 and 8?
Who's there?
Failure?
Yes, to a degree you feel you don't
keep up to the example.
But I'm thinking of something else.
What is the greatest difficulty about being a
servant?
Nobody appreciates you.
You've got to, I mean you decide to
humble yourself but then you have to live
with it.
Anybody can humble himself if he gets praised
the next day for having been so wonderfully
humble.
If the exaltation would come a little quicker,
we'd prefer it.
If God would only exalt me today because
I humbled myself yesterday, well I could live
with days like that.
That sort of feeling.
Is this chapter psychologically going to help me
with that problem?
So let's give an example, or maybe you
want to give an example.
You commit yourself to an extra bout of
toilet cleaning, or washing up, or endlessly on
your team there are certain little jobs that
nobody ever seems to notice, but you always
do, so you do them, but nobody appreciates
you for doing them.
What's the difficulty about that?
Just going on doing it without appreciating it
at a deeply logical level, is that in
fact the whole basis of your life has
changed.
It's not for outward public acclamation, what a
great person you are.
You are from now on to learn tough
lessons, but to learn to be motivated by
another goal altogether.
It is the secret of the servant of
God.
What is the goal?
Yes, now preach that to me a little
bit, sure.
How is that to come about?
How does, well preach Paul's sermon for him.
How does Paul, having laid aside the goal
of public righteousness and being thought socially, spiritually
so superior, what are you going to satisfy
yourself with?
Will you read for us from verse 7
to verse 10 in a good strong voice?
Now he's talking about two different things isn't
he?
Putting aside the righteousness of the Lord, this
is a matter of his legal salvation if
you like, or my being a Benjaminite and
being a Pharisee and learning the law and
etc etc, doesn't save me.
I have a righteousness that comes by faith,
it's given to me.
But, I also want to go on, not
just to be declared righteous, but to go
on to know him and the power of
his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering.
This is a tough thing for a servant,
that he suffers, and often lonely, often nobody
notices, misunderstood, just gets on with it.
You must have found this in your months
on the ship.
Sometimes you have to do jobs and you
just get presumed on and nobody cares.
Eh?
Just do it.
How are you going to survive such a
thing?
How are any of us going to survive
in a way, when there's jobs to be
done and precious little glory being offered?
Isn't that like the Olympics, when they're going
to put up national flags and you can
mount the podium and you came, you know,
third in the humility stakes and get a
bronze medal and and uh-uh.
It's simply a question of knowing Christ, in
his death.
So we're back to the idea of chapter
two.
This is how he died.
He made a decision, he followed through with
it, he humbled himself.
Now I want to know Christ in his
death.
I want the fellowship of his sufferings, being
conformed unto his death.
I want the cross, in experience, as the
means whereby I get to know him better.
Now is there anything else in the chapter,
that chapter three, that will indicate to me
that my thinking is on the right lines?
I'm beginning to see how in chapter three,
Paul is dealing with the psychological problems aroused
by his teaching in chapter two.
What about the last paragraph?
Can anybody explain why he puts verses 17
to 21 in at the end of chapter
three and not in the middle of chapter
two, for instance?
The particular thing that grieves him in those
verses is what some people are doing, and
it isn't that they're enemies of God.
They haven't become atheists.
It isn't that they're enemies of the church.
They haven't become persecutors.
What are they enemies of?
Verse 18, enemies of the cross.
What they do not like is God's way
of spiritual progress.
It is the cross that they object.
They do not want to know Christ in
the fellowship of his sufferings.
They don't want the road that he took.
God wants to reveal himself to you.
God wants you to know him.
But that road involves crucifixion.
Paul says, I've put away external glory as
a thing I'm going to really go for.
Instead I want to know Christ.
That he is a Christ who humbled himself.
A Christ who kept silent like a lamb
before its shearers is done.
And I want to know Christ the road
of the cross.
And I tell you brethren, he says, I
tell you of many who, and I've got
tears in my eyes while I tell you,
they have become enemies of the cross.
Perhaps they started out well as Christians.
Brethren, be ye imitators together of me, and
mark those which so walk, even as you
have us for an example.
For many walk, of whom I told you
often, and now tell you even weeping, that
they are enemies of the cross of Christ.
Perhaps they seemed to set out as believers.
But they were enemies of the cross.
Their heart never really changed.
Their end is perdition.
Their God is at the belly.
They glory in shame.
They mind earthly things.
Our citizenship is that of Mrs Revolutionism.
This kind of stuff will get a servant
to keep serving.
Because, let's be frank, it's not always easy
to serve people.
To serve the Lord, and to know the
Lord in that service, will psychologically strengthen you
to serve people who don't appreciate you always,
who take you for granted, who despise you
as a servant, who treat you like a
servant.
Sometimes we will, you know, we try to
serve, but we don't want to be treated
like a servant.
But to know God in that, the one
who became a servant, who took upon himself
the form of a servant, and went as
far as death.
Do you see how the ideas of chapter
3 are built up on what he's been
saying in chapter 2?
Are you with me?
So, the idea crucial to Bible study, which
I try to get across to you, is
that you should, in your approach to these
books, expect the thing to be packed together
in a sensible order.
It doesn't just sit and think, you know,
what shall I write them a chapter on
next?
Click through his notes.
Oh, here's a good one.
I wrote something like this to the Ephesians
last week.
Let me preach that to them for a
bit.
You look very, very puzzled.
Please do.
I'm a great believer in the value of
heresy.
You're one of those products of a Christian
upbringing, Andrew, that is frustrating
when you see the odd human being getting
up near there as well.
Now, do you find anything here, I'll be
very honest with this, about a psychological problem
that you have?
And I think actually one or two people
have the same, you know, they immediately,
don't worry, Taps, I'm not.
I keep bashing on.
Every day I try again.
This is why messages sometimes, as I've heard
in conferences after you've had perhaps almost more
challenge than you can take.
Messages on what a wretched failure I am,
23 reasons why I'm...
So I hope what we've done thus far,
in just looking at the broad...
Now, you may be able to help me
here.
Don't be too discouraged.
I find problems with the last chapters of
Paul, because they always seem to be a
sort of, they don't seem to fit into
my theory.
They're much more like a bunch of scattered
thoughts.
But can you pick out from chapter four
things that do follow on from what we've
been seeing so far?
He's talking about the mind of the Christian
worker.
God's work in your heart at the same
time as you're outward.
How you cope with the problems of being
a servant.
What happens to you if you don't?
Now what?
What's all chapter four about?
Yes?
We may find that the whole chapter is
about different...
What were you going to say?
So you see it as sort of like
a musical epilogue.
Yes, just picking up some of the themes
that have been running and just playing the
tune together for the last time.
Okay?
Well, that's the sort of way I tend
to approach last chapters.
Puzzle me.
He doesn't seem...
He seems to sort of throw up a
number of things, often very personal.
Yes.
Let's go back to the beginning then.
This is now about the third time we've
gone back to the beginning.
You've got some idea of the difference between
this epistle and, say, Colossians.
You've seen how it breaks down into certain
sections that seem to hang together.
You've seen a little bit of the way
the thought flow runs through it.
What we do is we work from the
large to the small.
We now want to see if some more
of the details fit our overall sense of
pattern.
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, or
bond servants, or doulois, douloxes.
Anything strange about that?
Do you ever have the experience of losing
your front door key?
And you search high in
the door lock the next time you go
out for the key.
The key to someone's...
He sticks right in at the beginning.
You don't see it there until you've read
the thing through a few times.
But he very often starts his epistles by
calling just a few.
He doesn't.
He calls himself a bond servant, a doulox.
I mean, that is a pretty...
A doulox was the absolute possession of another
person.
You see, if I was Mike's servant, Mike
was the lord of the manor here, and
I came into the office in the morning
for instructions, and he said, oh, I'm going
down to the market today.
Buy me a new pair of sandals, a
couple of bullocks, a toga, and three servants.
Three douloxes.
They were the sort of things that were
on sale in the market.
As you went up and down Sainsbury's, you'd
come to the doulox section, and you'd bought
your cheeses, and you bought your bread, and
you could buy a couple of servants if
you wanted.
And they have no more worth and value
than anything else that you could buy in
the market.
You'd buy bullocks and servants for the same
money in the same way.
A doulox has no rights over his future.
He has no choices that can be made.
He's simply at the possession of the boss.
And Paul is starting this one, calling himself
a doulox.
It is remarkable, writing to Greeks with their
centuries-old traditions of valuing freedom, dignity, and
he says, here I have doulox, buy me
a servant, to Jesus Christ.
And then he writes to the bishops and
deacons.
Why?
Maybe he doesn't very often address the bishops
and deacons directly by mentioning them at the
start of an epistle.
Here he's picked them out.
Maybe because this lack of service thing was
coming from them, a little bit.
They are to be reminded that the role
of leadership in the Christian church is to
serve, isn't it?
Do you remember Acts chapter 6?
The apostles loaded with practical problems, and so
they were to elect deacons who would serve
tables, while we, they said in verse 4,
serve literally.
The word of God.
Both elders and deacons, bishops and deacons are
to serve.
Some serve tables, others serve the scriptures.
He picks that out at the beginning, and
then starts his prayer.
I just want to say one other thing
before we break for a quick drink, and
then we'll start looking at some more of
these things in detail.
I picked this out of William Barclay.
Now there's a heretical commentator for you.
I'm going to make a confession, please forgive
me.
He's one of my favourites.
His doctrine is on occasions of the war,
but for his knowledge of the Greek world
and for his insights into what particular phrases
in the New Testament may mean in context,
tremendous.
I remember noticing that he picked out nine
occasions in which Paul speaks of joy in
this epistle.
Nine-fold joy.
Chapter 1 verse 4 he talks about his
joy in prayer.
He enjoys praying for the Philippians.
Verse 18, his joy in evangelism.
Verse 25, the sheer joy in believing.
Do you get that ever?
Please reassure me that you do, now and
again, feel rather glad that you're a believer.
In chapter 2 verse 2, he refers to
the joy of watching other believers grow.
That's great.
To see someone converted, beginning to grow, come
on home, go out, work somewhere, join one
of the ships or something, that is a
thrill.
And Paul knew that joy too.
He speaks in chapter 2 verse 17 of
the joy that comes from suffering for others.
Chapter 2 verse 17, Yea, if I am
offered upon the sacrifice and service of your
faith, I joy and rejoice with you all.
That's getting a bit beyond me.
That's not so easy, is it?
To rejoice being crucified for the sake of
other people.
Chapter 2 verse 28, joy in returning workers,
coming back from the mission field.
Or from being out on time service.
Joy.
It's great frustration to me, when folks come
back from the summer campaign, and maybe I
recruited a bunch of them, and talked to
them a little bit, seen them go out,
and when they come back, you know, you've
only got an hour or two before they
have to return home to England.
But to hear some of the stories, it
is a thrill to see folks coming back
from the field, to hear God's provision.
It's great.
He talks in verse 29 of chapter 2
of joy in hospitality.
In chapter 4 verse 1, joy over our
spiritual children.
In chapter 4 between verses 10 and 19,
joy in receiving a gift.
Again, a lot of happiness in the epistle.
But we can spell out different things that
he's particularly pleased about.
Now let's break.
A few more than we had?
Awesome.
Good.
And if some have to go to do
duties, I don't mind, I understand you have
to do duties.
So I just tipped her out, and I,
as one brother has said to me, I
won't assume that it's because I've said something
heretical.
Any questions or problems so far?
Anything that you want to throw back at
me?
You're all happy.
Anna had her hand up first, yes?
The question is, was there any Jewish influence
on the Philippians?
Often you do find this cropping up in
different churches.
It's obviously clearest in the Galatian epistle.
Was there any Jewish influence on the Philippians?
You've pointed to chapter 3.
The difficulty with Jewish influence is that in
some ways it is exactly like any other
human religious system.
The way the Jews were living, it had
become that way.
And so there are common features between all
the world religions in that they tend to
concentrate on externals, on righteousness measured by human
standards.
And Paul is revealing the radically revolutionary way
of Christ and knowing Christ and the value
of that.
Now there is likely to be less strong
Jewish influence in this particular Roman colony.
I've no doubt that there were Jews around,
I mean they were all over the Middle
East.
But he's not, it doesn't seem to me,
to be addressing that primarily.
But in the circumcision, the dogs, right.
Yes.
But that's about all that we get in
it, isn't it?
Let me come back to you with a
question.
What is circumcision all about?
The sign of a covenant that they have
with God is one suggested answer.
Are you happy with that?
A people marked, yes I think those two
answers have a good deal in common.
It is indelible.
You can't do away with circumcision once it
has taken place.
And it would be a constant reminder, particularly
among uncircumcised people, that you were different.
You were different because God had made a
covenant with you.
That's obviously part of it.
Yes, Kathy?
They're setting apart of the circumcised nation.
Yes, Paddy?
And God made the covenant with Abraham and
his descendants.
Yes.
Let us just remind ourselves historically of the
origins of circumcision.
We'll run through the life of Abraham very,
very quickly.
God, you remember, one day in chapter 12
of Genesis proposed marriage to Abraham.
Marvellous day.
He says, Abraham?
I don't know, I mean, how did you
propose marriage, Mike?
Really?
Where was she at the time?
This was in India, was it?
In the officer's mess on the Lobos.
In the officer's mess on the Lobos, you
suggested that the pair of you go away
to Canada and live together.
So you offered her a new place to
live, the only condition being that she would
have to allow you to marry her.
And this young lady, she agreed to this
deal.
New country, new name, new family.
That is actually what God does in chapter
12.
He says, Abraham, I will change your name.
I will make you great.
I will protect you.
You will have children.
Do you want us to read it?
Genesis chapter 12.
Listen to God proposing.
The Lord said unto Abraham, now I want
you to leave your country and come away
with me.
And I want you to leave your family
too.
Join my family.
Come out from your father's house to the
land that I will show thee.
Canada in this case.
And I will make of thee a great
nation and I will bless thee and make
thy name different.
Great.
You'll take my name.
I will even make you a blessing to
other people.
And I will protect you.
Oh boy, I'll bless the one that blesses
you and the one that curses you better
watch out.
And in thee shall all the families of
the earth be blessed.
The beginnings of the bride of Christ, there's
God proposing marriage, you see.
Change your name, change your place, change your
family, change everything, look after you, protect you,
love you, care for you and so on.
Now the story of Abraham's life divides into
three, each section beginning with problems that Abraham
had with his wife.
You get problems in chapter 12, you get
them again in chapter 16, you get them
again in chapter 20.
I mean, I haven't got time to even
get you halfway excited about this.
But what God is doing is giving Abraham
a vision of marriage at one level and
then asking him to work out the implications
of that spiritual vision at the level of
his own marriage.
Now actually he tells lies about Sarah on
occasions.
He allows her to be taken off into
Pharaoh's palace.
He puts her aside and takes another girl
instead.
And he tells another bunch of lies about
her.
And sometimes it's a impetuosity of his own
flesh, sometimes he just wants to get a
bit wealthy.
Frankly, in chapter 12 he prostitutes his own
wife.
Now each time that you get a crisis
in Abraham's marriage at this earthly level, it
reveals a problem.
Because Abraham isn't just on a physical journey
around the Middle East, he's also on that
spiritual journey that Christ describes in the Gospels.
Now circumcision comes from the middle of the
central section.
Abraham, looking at his wife over the cornflakes
in the morning, becomes very aware that the
dear old girl, I mean, she's well into
her nineties, still no baby, been waiting long
time.
God gave all kinds of promises, but I
mean, well, ninety.
And so he takes Hagar.
In the flesh, he does it.
Actually, Sarah cooperates.
And they produce Ishmael.
Now the Bible doesn't say an awful lot
about Ishmael, but it describes him in Genesis
chapter 16 as a wild ass of a
young man.
We have a few Ishmaels in this movement.
He was, I mean, he used to let
down the tents at night.
He used to put sand in the sleeping
bags.
He put cactuses under the saddles of the
camels.
He chased the goats off in the desert.
And there's no record of God speaking to
Abraham for 13 years.
No record.
Can you imagine poor old Abraham with the
results of the flesh growing up in his
own family?
This twit, this bonehead.
Oh, how many times he wished he'd never
done it.
Nothing but trouble, this Ishmael.
Oh, why did I do it?
And then God speaks to him in chapter
17.
Genesis chapter 17.
Abraham was now 99.
I am God Almighty.
Walk before me and be perfect.
I will make a covenant with you.
What's this covenant all about?
Well, I will make kings out of you.
I will establish my covenant with you.
You will have children.
Your children will enjoy the land of Canaan
and so on and so on.
And the sign of the covenant is that
you are to be circumcised.
Abraham, are you willing to judge the flesh?
To agree with me in my judgments of
the flesh?
The flesh in the long run produces only
irritation, disaster, annoyance, frustration, endless trouble in the
future.
Are you willing to be circumcised as a
sign that you put no trust in the
flesh anymore, Abraham, to accomplish my purposes?
Abraham then says very significantly in verse 18,
oh God, that Ishmael might live before you.
Live meaning inherit the blessing.
May Ishmael be the one.
No, says God, under no circumstances.
Sarah shall have the child.
And then he agreed to be circumcised.
He was finally willing to agree with God's
evaluation of what his flesh had produced.
And say in circumcision, my flesh, what I
achieve, going my way, it's nothing.
It produces only rubbish in the long run.
Circumcision was a mark to every successive generation
of Jew that their flesh could not save
them.
That going their own way produced only frustration.
What the Jews did over the following centuries
was to make circumcision perhaps the greatest mark
of pride in the flesh that the race
possessed.
They turned the whole thing on its head
you see.
Instead of circumcision being a mark of not
trusting the flesh, as it was for Abraham,
that God was going to have to give
a child by promise, God was going to
save his people only by what he had
said and by doing a miracle.
Instead they turned circumcision into something that they
were proud of.
And they would speak disparagingly of the uncircumcised
Philistines.
Do you see how they reversed the thing?
Now says Paul here in Philippians chapter 3,
we believers, we are the true circumcision.
Let me turn back to the page.
We are the circumcision who do three things.
We worship by the spirit of God.
God has put his spirit in us as
believers.
We glory in Christ Jesus, this one who
was executed, crucified, spat at by the Romans,
despised by our own Sanhedrin.
We glory in him.
This must have been a living crucifixion for
a man like Paul to go around preaching
a crucified Jew as the saviour of the
world.
And we have no confidence in the flesh.
We are the true circumcision.
Believers here, I don't care whether you are
circumcised or not physically, it doesn't matter.
But we are circumcised in heart when we
have said to God, I need your total
rescue because I cannot save myself.
That by the way, if I can just
bring out another general principle, shows you how
increasingly as you go on in bible study,
certain bits of scripture, you feel you've got
somewhere, you've understood what's going on.
And they will then illuminate other bits.
The bible is like a rabbit warren.
You may jump in through Philippians, but once
you get inside the warren, you find that
you're led off into 1 Kings 3 Samuel
8, 8 Hezekiah, Exodus, bits and pieces all
over here and there.
Well don't be afraid to follow the leads.
If it says a little bit about circumcision
and you're not quite sure what circumcision is
all about, trace it back to the beginning.
See what he's talking about.
The New Testament, particularly Paul's letters, will lead
you again and again and again into certain
passages of the Old Testament.
Actually there's a bit of Judges at the
end of chapter 3 brings to mind.
Do you remember that character Eglon, the
materialistically best of bits, and the people of
Israel were oppressed by the Moabites, and there
was that unusual character, he was a Benjaminite.
Interestingly enough, Paul has just described himself as
a Benjaminite.
What was his name?
Ehud.
He was a left-handed character, and most
of the Benjaminites seem to have been left
-handed.
Can you think of any more Benjaminites in
scripture?
David?
No, no.
Ah, well done.
Saul was a Benjaminite.
And this particular Benjaminite came to visit Eglon,
and he had conducted a sort of diplomatic
encounter with him, and then as he was
going away he said, no I've just got
one final message I want to give.
A message, and I must give it privately.
So he sent all the servants out, shut
the door, and he stuck a sword right
through the belly of Eglon.
I have a message for you, the sword.
And then he locked the doors behind him
and tiptoed off out.
The servants presumed that Eglon was busy, and
didn't disturb him for a while.
Eventually discovered that this Benjaminite had stuck the
sword right through the belly of their king.
You can ponder that little passage when we
read about those whose God is the belly,
who mind earthly things, who reject the cross,
and contrast it with us.
Our citizenship is something that God has in
hand, is in heaven.
Anyway, don't worry about that.
Let's go back to the beginning.
I get sidetracked, I'm sorry.
We're starting with Paul's prayer.
I want to try and proceed through now
as much of chapter one as we can
in the next half an hour or so,
in some detail.
You've looked at Paul and Timothy, the servants
of Christ Jesus.
He mentions particularly the bishops and deacons.
They are to be the servants in the
church.
Grace to you and peace from God our
Father.
Then Paul's prayer from verses three down to
eleven.
He starts off by being thankful for the
past.
I thank my God upon all my remembrance
of you, always in every supplication of mine,
on behalf of you all, making my supplication
with joy for your fellowship in furtherance of
the gospel from the first day right up
until now.
That real unity born out of working together
that we were thinking of earlier.
He speaks in verse four of his joy
in the present, and in verse six he
speaks of his confidence in the future.
I look back with thanks, I enjoy praying
for you, I'm confident as I look ahead.
My confidence as I look ahead is not
anything to do with your work in the
past.
My confidence in the future depends entirely on
God's work in you.
Verse six, that he which started the whole
thing will perfect it right up through until
the day of Jesus Christ.
See God started the work there didn't he?
He gave Paul the vision.
He took him over to Philippi.
God it was who allowed him to be
imprisoned.
God it was who then controlled the events,
the earthquake that smashed the prison that then
caused the Philippian jailer to cry out in
need.
Whose work will be examined on the day
of Jesus Christ?
The day when Christ returns.
I agree with both of those.
What does it mean for us?
The day of Christ.
What are we going to face then?
Anything?
Judgment?
Oh dear you make me frightened.
What do you mean by judgment?
I thought there is no condemnation for those
that are in Christ Jesus.
Examination of what?
Our faith, our works.
I mean we might fail.
The past mark.
Tell me the past mark.
Supposing I haven't.
I mean all this talk about judgment and
examination.
Tell me quickly am I to look forward
to this or be terrified of it?
Look forward to it?
I never look forward to an exam in
my life.
Reward?
And now you're on to a very interesting
idea.
You say you don't know but you nearly
say one of the most important things today.
His glory as what?
As our Redeemer.
What will he have done by then?
According to this verse.
We'll need rain.
Colin do you think there'll be a lot
still to be done?
Like that.
So we can sort of potter along for
a bit and then perfect.
Now theology at this point is very interesting
isn't it?
And there's a lot of I suppose or
maybes or perhapses coming in here.
Yes.
He's talking about a wedding day.
He's talking about examination day.
And you're talking about what?
He has indeed.
But how can we begin to get something
encouraging out of all these different ideas?
Here am I.
I'm a Christian.
I've been redeemed.
Not by my works but by the blood
of the Lamb.
I'm doing my best to do a bit
of service for the Lord.
I've become a servant.
Bad but anyway appointed.
As a servant is my work ever going
to be evaluated?
Well sure.
Sure it must be.
I will be judged one day as a
servant.
I was judged as a sinner already at
Calvary.
I will be judged as a servant at
the judgment seat of Christ.
But in addition to the judgment of me
is there going to be any evaluation of
what Christ has done?
And is that going to be evaluated?
Christ's work will be evaluated?
So although I look forward to the judgment
day not as something to be terrified of.
It will be a sober occasion but it
will be an opportunity for there to be
a public evaluation of God's work in me
and the degree to which I have cooperated
with that.
Are you happy with that?
At all?
You look very unhappy.
Well I think I can honestly say that
it doesn't cause me any fear.
Not in that sense of fear.
There are various passages that speak clearly about
the evaluation of the service of the believer.
And yet we're reminded even here in Philippians
that although we are to work out our
own salvation with fear and trembling it is
God who works in you.
Don't imagine that you're sort of left to
run on your own.
God is working in you.
Christ has started a good work in you
and will bring it through to perfection.
So there is one sense in which Christ's
own work in the believers is going to
be evaluated and be shown to be perfect.
How can he do less than that which
is perfect?
But I am also going to be evaluated
as a servant of God.
1 Corinthians chapter 3.
From verse 10 onwards Paul is speaking there
of building on the foundation which is laid.
Your work in a church.
Paul says I laid the foundation there in
Corinth.
No other foundation can anyone lay than that
which is laid which is Christ Jesus.
But if you come along into the church
well you're going to build on the foundation
I laid.
Some of you may build gold, silver, precious
stones.
Others of you may build wood, hay, stubble.
The whole lot will be put into God's
incinerator and some of it will disappear.
It will prove to have been not eternal.
It will prove to have been worthless.
The man himself will be saved, verse 15,
but as through fire.
It isn't that you're going to lose your
salvation.
This is not what that passage is talking
about.
But it is talking about the evaluation of
your work as a Christian.
And 2 Corinthians 5 talks about the same
thing.
Romans 14 talks about the same thing.
So it's a time for, let me put
it this way, for there to be an
opportunity for the approval of what the Holy
Spirit, what Christ has done in us and
through us.
How do you think Paul lived with the
knowledge that he had presided over the first
Christian martyrdom?
He had led a Jewish death squad the
length and breadth of those provinces trying to
separate Christian families from each other.
It's pre-conversion.
Yes, but do you think that Christ only
died for your sins up to the point
of conversion and from then on you're left
to do the best you can on your
own?
Or do you think that Christ died for
your sins after conversion as well?
How are you getting on with living with
that problem now?
Because, you see, since you became a Christian,
you've realised a few things about yourself.
But you did after you were a Christian.
Now, are you learning to forgive yourself?
Are you learning from your mistakes and just
praising God for his grace that through your
mistakes you have been able to learn?
Is this what circumcision of the heart has
to do with it?
Did Abraham learn from the mistake of Ishmael?
And did, in fact, his own mistakes cause
him to know God better, to know the
power of his resurrection better, to want to
press on towards the prize of the high
calling, forgetting those things that are behind him?
Yeah, you're great.
Are you encouraged by that?
Tell me, Anna, that I'm going to ask
a very personal question.
I'm not supposed to.
Husband is saying no.
My question is, did you ever...
Oh, it's a terrible question.
A wicked personal question.
Did you ever have any boyfriends before you
met Sean?
You said yes.
Do you spend a lot of time these
days thinking about them?
There is obviously something very important in what
she says, isn't there?
That the presence of Christ and the revelation
of actually how merciful he has been all
the way through, it overwhelms you and it
takes away the sense of the things that
you did wrong.
You also see that even though you did
do some things wrong, he has been merciful,
he has been patient.
You have been brought to learn through your
mistakes and that glorifies him too.
It will all act together to give you
an overwhelming sense of the wonderment of his
glory.
I don't see how you're going to live
in eternity thinking about yourself all the time.
I think that it's very important that our
sense of the reality of the gospel, that
even the good that we do, is to
his glory.
It's not a matter for our pride.
The great thing about God's mercy is that
he forgives even when we don't know that
we've done wrong.
When the Jews had a great day in
their calendar, it was the day of atonement.
It was a God-appointed feast when blood
was to be shed and carried into the
most holy place, not for sins that they
knew they'd done.
If they knew they'd done sin, there was
appointed sin offering.
This was for the sins that they did
not know they'd done.
God has demonstrated that he is the one
who forgives even what we don't know sometimes.
Now, if I have revelation of a false
motive, a failure, well I learn through it.
Thank you God for showing me a few
things.
Let me not get too far away from
the cross.
In the long run, the experience of the
believer is one of Christ becoming more and
more glorious as he's seen as merciful, as
patient, of how far reaching the cross is
in its effect.
What chapter 3 is talking about.
This morning you talked about some of the
frustrations of not being able to reach the
standard.
But Paul does say, let's press on, let's
forget, let's keep going, because of who God
is.
I don't imagine I'm going to spend the
rest of eternity in deep regret.
I failed a few O-levels.
Honestly, he doesn't give me a moment.
I haven't thought about my failed O-levels
for some years now.
Isn't that great?
I think it's important to distinguish between the
guilt of sin, which when he forgives, he
forgets, and the consequences of sin.
A man can go get blind drunk and
come home and brutally beat his children, and
then get terribly convicted and repent.
Cry to God and smash the bottles and
swear never to touch another drop again and
be forgiven.
But he has now got to live for
some time with the consequences in his children's
minds of what he did.
And the great lesson of the life of
Abraham, in some senses the life of Paul,
is that God forgives at a stroke, but
he teaches through the consequences.
God forgave Adam, and yet Adam had to
live with land that would now produce thorns
as well as wheat.
And that taught him something.
You can say something stupid and go to
the person and ask to be forgiven, but
actually you may find that you've gone backwards
a little bit with them, and you've got
to re-earn their trust, and there are
consequences to live with, and that will teach
you to guard your tongue a little bit
more.
Isn't that so?
God is great in that he uses the
results of our mistakes to teach us, while
giving us the security of knowing that the
actual guilt is forgiven the moment we repent
and ask for that forgiveness.
And it's a very, very important thing in
the psychology of being Christian, isn't it?
Now, this is really interesting.
The Bible, I've given up talking about Philippians.
The thing seems to have bitten some of
you.
Yeah.
That leads, thank you, right on to the
next verse or two.
You see, we've talked about his attitude while
we pray, while he prays.
Verses 9 and 10, this is what he
prays, and it is to do with love.
You've just said the one that's forgiven most,
loves most.
It's true in a marriage.
You can have these tense times, things are
a bit cold, the other person's done something
that you wish they hadn't done, and you
can get a bit of, and then somebody
will say sorry.
How often have the barriers come down, maybe
even the tears too, and you've felt drawn
much closer together by the process of happens
with kids.
Have you ever noticed?
Do you ever remember?
Verses 9 and 10, this I pray that
your love may abound.
I'm thankful for all the memory I've got
of your gospel work, but I'm praying this,
that your love may abound more and more
in knowledge and discernment.
There's no doubt about their love.
Their love for Paul, the gift they gave,
the support they sent, Paproditus carried it, their
love for the lost around them.
But I want your love to increasingly become
a thinking love, says Paul, because real love
will always lead to greater understanding, won't it?
If you love something, supposing you love fishing,
motorbikes, French cooking, romantic poetry, whatever you like,
whatever you love, you will tend to find
out more about it, isn't that true?
Happens between people.
Fascinating finding out about someone that you are
growing to love.
Their family and their schooling and the time
they spent in hospital when they were a
kid, and what their grandfather did, and the
wicked old uncle who wasted the family fortune,
and it's all fascinating because you love the
person.
If you love fishing, it's more than just
drowning worms at the end of a...
You know, we wanted a fishing rod this
summer, so we went into Woolworths, and we
bought him the cheapest fishing rod that we
could get.
I'm finding out a lot about fishing, all
kinds of things, because he's growing to love
it.
If kids like pop music, it's amazing how
much they will remember.
At the age of five, they can tell
you, you know, the top ten, what fits
in the doodah, you know, you can tell
it's not my first love.
What you're interested in, you're interested in football,
you know, people could tell you immediately who
won the championship in 1962, you know.
They've just got it in their mind because
they love the thing.
And Paul is praying that you may grow
in love and abound in knowledge and discernment,
understanding why people behave the way they do.
Euodia has got to understand a little bit
about syntychy, and vice versa.
If you have a clash with someone, there
are very often reasons why they do what
they do, and it helps to calm you
down when you understand why they've done that,
or why they've said that.
And real love will make you want to
know.
Then you understand.
And you need discernment too.
If you have a little six-month baby
in your arm, and it looks up at
Dad, and it goes, like that.
Well, it's only six months, I mean, now
he's still living.
If your six-year-old looks at Dad
and goes, it's a different matter, isn't it?
The 16-year-old does it.
The same event, blowing a raspberry, and yet
you need discernment.
With a little six-month-old, it's just,
you know, it's the only way it's got,
is saying, Daddy, you're great.
With a six-year-old, it isn't quite
saying that.
And we need discernment.
We need, in the church, on the team,
we need to love people enough to discern
why they're doing what they're doing.
That helps to build unity, doesn't it, and
fellowship, right?
With me?
Because you're great, you're working hard, you're preaching
the gospel, but I'm praying for you.
I'm praying that this love in the church
may grow in knowledge and discernment, because that
too will draw you together.
And I want you to value, approve the
things that are excellent, and really aim for
that.
Not just get by somehow with standards that
are sort of mediocre, but the best.
And so be filled with the fruits of
righteousness, which are through Christ.
I want you to be sincere and void
of offence.
Give no offence to anyone right through until
the day of Christ.
It's rather like a teacher working towards the
exams.
Paul is wanting his pupils to come through
to the exam time and do well.
Or a teacher in a school where there's
going to be a parent's day, and all
the little paintings have got to be up
on the wall, and everything's got to be
just neat and tidy.
And Paul is watching over his folks, taking
them towards that day when there's going to
be an evaluation.
And so he prays.
But for these people, he prays particularly that
their love may grow in knowledge and discernment.
Now, from verse 12 onwards, he's telling a
little bit of what's been happening lately.
It's his prayer letter section.
And I want you to know, brethren, the
things that have been happening to me.
You've probably heard that I'm back in jail.
It is vital for the Philippians to think
right about Paul.
It's actually vital for us all to think
right about Paul.
How much gospel would you have without the
writings of Paul?
You wouldn't find out anything about the doctrine
of justification by faith if it wasn't for
the writings of Paul.
You wouldn't get too much of it from
Peter, or John, or James.
The great doctrines that set you free to
love God without a troubled conscience.
We are given them actually by Paul.
And Paul alone in our New Testament.
The others allude to them, but Paul expounds
them.
And that is part of Satan's strategy, to
cause us to think ill of Paul.
Undermine Paul, the attitude we have to Paul.
How much time have theologians spent knocking the
reputation of Paul?
And it happened in the New Testament.
You find at the start of 2 Timothy,
Paul saying with great sadness, you know, every
person in Asia has turned against me.
And he's urging Timothy to go on preaching
the same gospel.
Well, he's back in prison and he doesn't
want the Philippians to misunderstand that.
It's not because he's done any crime.
It's not because he's stolen anything or been
an immoral man.
It's no disaster.
Dear Philippians, I want you to understand why
I am back in this prison, but from
God's point of view, what is God up
to?
God was doing the most amazing thing, but
out of mercy to various people in Rome
who probably could be reached no other way.
The Philippians alone of all the churches perhaps
should have understood this.
How else is Paul going to reach the
Praetorian Guard, that crack regiment of Roman troops?
They were turbulent, they were arrogant, they were
the king-makers, they protected the emperor.
In fact, as Roman history developed, they began
to make the emperor.
If you hadn't got the confidence of the
Praetorian Guard, you couldn't become emperor.
How do you think the believers were ever
going to reach a character like Nero?
I mean, you can't go knocking on the
door of the palace, excuse me, has Nero
got a moment, has he finished his violin
practice?
I've got something I'd like to share with
him.
There's no way you're going to reach anyone
like Nero.
God's strategy to reach Nero was to have
a man stand in chains in front of
him, a man who wasn't afraid of the
worst that Nero could do.
And I have no doubt at all that
Paul explained the gospel to Nero as fully
as he could.
And it all happened about six months before
Nero committed suicide.
Nero died in, as far as we know,
the June of 68 AD.
And Paul is preparing himself for his last
trial in 2 Timothy, and he knows that
he's about to be sentenced to death.
Very shortly.
He had a chance to explain Nero's need
of divine forgiveness and a new start.
And God's way of reaching the Praetorian Guard,
I mean, these poor Japs, these soldiers.
If you were guarded by the Praetorian Guard
in the dungeons in Rome, you had a
soldier chained to each wrist.
And they chained the guard every four hours.
There's nothing these soldiers could do about it,
they got chained up to Paul for four
hours.
Paul now and again wrote the odd letter
or chatted with some of his friends.
But I expect it was the most marvellous
evangelistic opportunity they've actually chained to you.
And they're getting paid for being there.
They can't escape.
The door's locked.
And there they sit, chained to you.
I wonder what they used to talk about
in the barracks.
Oh, I've got to go and be chained
to that fanatic now.
And this is what Paul says.
I want you to know, brethren, that the
word of God is not bound.
Things are happening.
God's still in control.
Prisons are no bother to God.
That which has happened unto me has fallen
out rather unto the progress of the gospel.
So that my bonds, my chains became manifest
in Christ throughout the whole Praetorian Guard and
to all the rest.
So these soldiers have started getting converted.
They've started going back to the barracks and
saying, you know, I think that Paul's got
something.
In fact, I can't wait till next week
when I'm due to be chained up to
him for my first follow-up lesson.
And one after another these soldiers began to
get converted.
How else could God do it?
It's a stroke of genius.
But have the greatest evangelists of the day
locked up with them hour after hour after
hour.
Some of them probably got fed up.
But a lot got converted.
He wants them to understand that circumstances can
take different turns when you're in Christian work.
God is sovereign, isn't he?
God is in charge.
The things that happen actually, surprisingly, amazingly, often
turn out to accomplish the very thing that
you may have been struggling towards but couldn't
see how to get there.
And the painful crisis or the suffering or
the imprisonment or the bad judgment that comes
in court, well, God works out his own
purposes through it.
He even says, look, there's another strange thing
happening here in Rome.
There's people out on the streets preaching the
gospel from completely false motives.
How do you understand that?
What is going on?
Let me read to you.
Most of the brethren in the Lord, verse
14, being confident through my bonds are more
abundantly bold to speak the word of God
without fear.
Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and
strife, some of goodwill.
One does it out of love, knowing that
I am set for the defense of the
gospel.
The others proclaim Christ out of faction, not
sincerely.
He's been talking about his goal in praying
for them that they would be sincere and
void of offense.
Well, he says some are preaching Christ outside
the jail wall, but not sincerely, thinking to
raise up affliction for me in my bonds.
What does that mean?
How would you do that insincerely?
Is that preaching out of faction?
And is it designed to raise up affliction
for Paul?
And would you preach the gospel with your
real motive being to make a political point
or to release a prisoner?
But it's in that area that the answer
seems to lie.
Somehow, yes.
Maybe that to show that they could do
it better.
Poor old Paul, I mean when he preaches
there's riots and he gets locked up.
But we know how really to preach so
that we stay free and carry on tomorrow.
Possibly.
Preaching the true gospel, but actually in your
heart it's a factionalist motive.
Yeah, doesn't that happen between evangelists an awful
lot?
Head counting, cash counting, comparisons between Billy Graham,
Louis Palau and all the others.
And I tell you this, it comes into
the hearts of the preachers too.
It may be that.
Any other suggestions?
Yep?
I have no idea.
My version doesn't say distress anyway, it just
says affliction.
The motive in preaching the gospel seems to
have been other than trying to glorify Christ.
However we understand it.
It may have been to create trouble for
Paul.
So that these people came out of the
woodwork, they were preaching on all the street
corners, hoping that as a result even more
wrath would descend on Paul.
May have been that.
He does say that they're preaching Christ.
I'm not sure that they're going preaching false
doctrine, trying to cause distress because Paul hears
rumours of false doctrine being preached outside.
It may be that they were trying to
cause trouble with the authorities.
Or it may be that the focus is
on doing it from faction.
They're trying to split the church and show
how it really ought to be done and
take a party line.
It may be that.
One or two more suggestions and then we'll
come to the real lesson in this.
We've got a range of possibilities and I'm
happy with all of them and they all
seem that they might be there in the
text.
But the crucial point is that it is
possible to preach the gospel from party spirit
motives.
Now that we learn from, don't we?
That I can actually be going out in
evangelism as an Oema and think that I'm
doing it better than my brothers and sisters
in YWAM, shall we say.
Or that I really know how to preach
the gospel better than that other jerk on
the team.
And that's for that team leader.
And all the time you're preaching what you're
actually doing is trying to exalt yourself.
It's remarkably easy, isn't it, to do.
It's another area where this epistle is all
about motives in Christian work.
Now Paul's reaction to that is interesting.
He doesn't say, I want to command the
factionalists to stop and I want to sift
and examine everybody's motives.
He says, you know, it's great because somehow
anyway Christ is getting preached.
Of course he prays for these folk, he
gives them an example, he gives them some
appeals, but at least he's glad that Christ
is getting preached.
Do you think people only get converted when
Christ is preached out of the purest of
motives?
Obviously not so.
People get converted when Christ is preached out
of some fairly hairy motives sometimes.
Because the work of conversion is God's work
to exalt his Son.
God is quite prepared even to use preaching
that's not so hot.
But it's up to me to examine my
heart when I preach, isn't it, to see
that my motives are not out of faction.
Now I see the time has come to
an end.
He's going on to talk about the court
case.
This is actually the second court case.
We've been thinking first of all of how
we stand before the Lord and answer to
him.
Now he's going to talk about how he's
got to stand before the Emperor and his
attitudes to death.
It's a tremendous passage to preach honour to
funeral, to live with Christ is what life
is about and to die is actually gain
and so on.
What we need is another day or two
to go any further.
But I hope, I'm going to have to
stop now, and I think really that's no
bad thing, I hope that we've opened a
few cracks into it and stimulated you to
read.
Can I ask that just two or three
people perhaps lead us in an audible voice
in prayer and thanksgiving as we come to
an end, perhaps mentioning something that the Lord
has given you during our studies.
Let's pray.