Sermons
Growing in Spirit - 2010-06-27
Sermons for the Growing SeasonGrowing in Spirit
Luke 2:40, Philippians 4:1-9
June 27, 2010
This is the third sermon in a series of sermons in the Growing Season. We have had Growing in Faith, and Growing in Trust. Next week, on the Fourth of July, we will have, of course, Growing in Freedom. Then we will have Growing in Service, Growing in Love, and Growing in Hope. Today is Growing in Spirit. Again, as I have been asking in these other sermons and will continue to ask, you are still growing, aren’t you? I hope so. I hope that you are growing in so many ways. How is your garden growing? Are you gardening this year? Mine is doing pretty good. I did something this week I haven’t done in years. I gave away tomatoes! That is a hurdle I have crossed. I have learned how to grow things in red clay.
The sermon today is based on the scripture in Philippians 4. I suppose there are a lot of approaches you could take to the topic “growing in spirit” but we will stay within the context of Paul’s writing here. He is addressing a personal, and what could easily become a church wide issue in the church at Philippi. The issue revolves around some sort of dispute between two women that Paul names; Euodia and Syntyche . He calls them by name. Do you think we should start doing that? Should we bring to the pulpit, and Wednesday night, newsletter writings, and bulletin announcements who is having trouble with whom? I was always taught to handle things privately. But I think part of the point that is here is there is nothing really private in a church family. It is a family, and what happens with one or between a couple of people affects the whole body. I don’t think that Paul is trying to embarrass these women. I hope not. But it is just to raise the issue that, folks, we’ve got a problem. It could become a real problem if we don’t exercise some real spiritual maturity here. So that is why I have chosen this particular passage to talk about growing in spirit. Because if spiritual maturity can prevail in this issue in the church in Phillipi, and if we can learn from it, then it can prevail in our lives as well.
Paul gives six quick directives that lead to his conclusion, which is peace with God and spiritual wellbeing. So in the sermon today we will look at those six things. This is not the way I normally preach. This will be a bullet-point kind of sermon. I normally like to take an issue or two and weave a lot of illustrations around it. That is how I was taught to preach. In my preaching class in seminary there was a red headed fellow from Florida sitting behind me. He was called to preach, but he was having trouble preaching. It just undid him, and he was a nervous wreck the whole time. One time he raised his hand to ask our preaching professor a question. Dr. Chevis Horne was a good old classical preacher. He asked, “Dr. Horne, how many points should a good sermon have?” And kind, old Dr. Horne said, “I should think at least one.” I thought that was good advice, so I have adopted that. I normally wouldn’t preach on six points, but this morning we will mention what Paul is advocating that will lead toward spiritual health, wellbeing, and maturity in the midst of something that is a little unhealthy. We are not told what the issue is between these two women.
1) Paul says to look for the positives. 2) He says to rejoice. 3) He says to let your forbearing spirit be known. 4) He urges them to remember that the Lord is near, 5) therefore they are not to worry, 6) and they are to pray constantly. If they do these things the outcome will be spiritual wellbeing – peace with God. So let’s look at these points.
Look for the positives. Paul remembers where he has been with these women in his ministry. He remembers that they have struggled with him (in verse 3) or contended alongside of him. I don’t why Paul is hung up on athletic imagery in the writing of this letter to the church at Phillipi, but he is. Earlier he mentioned “pressing on” which is an athletic image of a runner throwing his chest forward to try to break the tape, to be the first one to win the race, to fling himself or herself forward into the competition. Here Paul is using athletic imagery again. They have been involved in the struggle, in the competition, in the game, if you will, right alongside him. “We’ve been teammates,” he is saying. We have trained together. We have performed together. We have competed in this struggle to bring the Gospel message to the world, right alongside one another. Side by side. It makes all the difference in the world when you have someone to train with as opposed to doing it alone.
You people know that I try to exercise a lot, and if I did not, I would not be “the least among you, my brethren.” I would be one of the greatest among you. You would have trouble getting me through that door. I have the metabolism of a two toed sloth. Betsy and I have been getting ready for a triathlon, and I have been training on the bike portion alone until Friday when we both had the day off . We were on the stationary bikes together, and I kept saying, “It makes all the difference in the world to have somebody here! The miles are just flying by. This is so much easier because I am not alone. Somebody is right beside me.” Paul says, “My life, my ministry, my work has been made so much easier because these women were right alongside me. They were my teammates, and they helped me.” He is focusing, not on the negative issue going on between the women, but he is focusing on the positive. He is remembering that these have been my true teammates, right alongside me. Paul chooses to see them not one dimensionally, as people who cause trouble, or people who are having trouble. But he remembers the totality of who they are. He refuses to caricature them or to paint them in just a negative light. But he remembers all that they are.
We need to take that positive approach in our lives as well. It is easy to caricature people, to say, “He’s always grumpy,” or “She’s always silly,” or “He’s always late,” or “That one’s always tight fisted.” That is making a one dimensional caricature of people. I remember my senior trip in high school. We went to Disney World. It had just opened. (That’s how old I am.) There was an artist there drawing caricatures of people. We had coaches and teachers on our trip as chaperones, and we got him to draw a caricature of Coach Britton. He had tight curly hair. When the artist got through, there was this huge afro on our coach. We thought that was hilarious. When you looked at it, all you saw was hair. It was funny, but he was more than that. We all laughed and laughed. The the guy drew a caricature of me, which I didn’t think was very complimentary at all, nor was it accurate! It was all brow ridges. I looked like Neanderthal man! I thought that was terribly unfair. But don’t we do that to people? We focus on some little negative.
But Paul said to remember all the good stuff as well. He remembers one other positive thing. At the end of verse 3 he says that their names are written in the Book of Life. Paul is saying, “They are blessed, saved, redeemed, empowered, and gifted by Jesus Christ just the same as everyone else, just the same as me. Their names are written in the registry of heaven.” That resonated in Philippi. It was a Roman colony and everybody had to register. Their names had to be on the civic roles as living in the Roman colony as Roman citizens of the town of Philippi in Greece. They had to register. Paul is saying, “They are registered somewhere else too. They are registered in heaven in the Book of Live. That’s where we are all going to end up.” Paul says that as a step in spiritual growth, as we handle this problem; let’s remember all these positive things that are going on as well.
Then Paul says to Rejoice in the Lord. He is going back and connecting with what he just said. “We are all Christians. We are all in the Lord. Rejoice then, in the Lord, and I will say it again for emphasis,” he says. Rejoice always. Fight those urges to focus on negatives and hurt feelings. Don’t go looking for a fight. Remember all the good things you have to celebrate. Here is what we have. Here is what Paul would say we have. And in this room, here’s what we have. We have total forgiveness of everything we have ever done wrong, in every way we have ever failed God or one another. The slate is clean. We also have a place, membership in, and a role in the most powerful entity ever in human history - the church. The church, even for all of its ills, has done, and is doing, and will continue to do more good than any institution ever created. They were a part of it, and you and I are a part of the most powerful movement on earth. We have forgiveness. We have a place in the church. And furthermore, we are all bound for glory. We are all going to shake off these shackles of limited human existence, and we will sit down in the presence of God Almighty one day, without fear, with God’s full blessing and welcome as his precious children. That’s what we have, and that’s why we rejoice. This is worth continual celebration! This is the spirit in which we exist. Paul is inferring, don’t let anything take away that joy. Keep that in the forefront. Don’t let some problem between you and a friend in church take away your joy. Don’t let a squabble in your church sour everything for you. Keep your joy.
I can remember being a young pastor and realizing, oh about 4 ½ hours on the job, that “all is not well in the church!” It never is. It is not ever all right. Trying to get everything all right all the time in the church is impossible. If you try to make it so, you just wear yourself out. The image I have had is like being in a swimming pool and trying to keep twelve basketballs under water all at one time. You can’t do it! You get this little problem worked out and oops, there goes another, and another. You can’t do that. But what you can realize is that even despite some negative things, there is even more to celebrate. The wonder of who we are in Christ, and what we do in Christ, and where we are bound in Christ outweighs everything, doesn’t it? Paul says to just keep rejoicing in that!
We can keep rejoicing that way if we learn the next point. That is to maintain a forbearing spirit and to let that show. “This is a characteristic of Christ, himself,” Morna Hooker from Cambridge writes. She says that this is part of what it really means to be in Christ – to have a forbearing spirit toward each other. To me, this is the crux of the issue. If I am going to live in a good spirit with God and with others, I simply have to learn to let a lot of things go. That is easy to preach, but that is harder to do. That has been a lifelong struggle and learning curve for me. (If you don’t believe it, ask my wife!) It is easy to have your default position one of brooding, fretting, worrying, and dwelling on something that has gone wrong. Oh, I can brood with the best of them. Hopefully I am learning and will continue to learn to let things go in light of all the positives that surround me.
I have had people do that for me, to treat me with such grace that I don’t deserve, that it caused me to be more gracious toward other people. I remember making a mistake as a young pastor that was just foolish and wrong. No, it wasn’t a moral failure, but it was administratively stupid! Unlike our church, the pastor was the administrator and the doer of everything! Boy that gets tiresome. As pastor, I maintained the giving records, as well. Soon after I came there they were changing over from one deacon body to the next. The outgoing deacon chair persuaded me to let him have a look at the financial records. I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was wrong, it was stupid, and it was a breach of confidentiality. I probably should have been fired for it. The new deacon body came on board, and I realized I had made a horrible mistake. The new deacon chair deserved to know about it. I called him to say we needed to talk. He came to the office. I was young and dumb and scared and embarrassed. I rehearsed my speech a thousand times. Like the prodigal coming home, “I have sinned against thee.” I told him about it and braced myself for the reaction. He said, “Well, we don’t need to do that anymore, and I am sure you won’t.” And then he started talking about something else! It was a horrible mistake. How would you like for someone to parade your giving records around? (I don’t know your giving records, by the way.) Wisely, the pastor here is not given access to that kind of thing. But imagine! That wasn’t something to blow off. But he knew how much I had messed up and how much grace I needed, and he exercised a forbearing spirit. When somebody does that for you, it calls you to be that way toward other people, to understand that we are all flawed. We all make mistakes, big ones and little ones, and we all need to forbear with one another. I have had that grace extended to me when I didn’t deserve it at all. Hopefully, that makes me want to extend it to other people – letting some things go. “God’s final work of grace is to make us gracious,” is the way Fred Craddock puts it.
Next, remember that the Lord is near. Remember that when Jesus Christ walks in this room, (and we should remember that he is here now in Spirit,) but when Christ walks in it will make all our other little struggles seem so insignificant. All the things we were so wrapped up in and so concerned about and we beat one another over the head with now, aren’t going to mean much then. It will be kind of hard to understand why they were such big deals then. Because there is so much more to celebrate and be involved in.
I am a Les Miserables “nut.” I have actually read Victor Hugo’s book and have seen the Broadway show in the travelling production. It was wonderful. If you are familiar with the story, do you remember the first time that Marius sees Cosette? At his first glimpse of her, he is just love struck. He is thunderstruck. He wabbles back to the headquarters of the revolt where they are planning the big revolution, and they realize that something is all of a sudden different about Marius. They don’t know it, but he has seen the love of his life for the first time. They question what is wrong, and he tells them that he has just had this vision of this unbelievable beauty, this Cosette. And the response was, “Who cares about your lonely soul? We strive toward a larger goal!” In other words, “That’s good for you, Marius. But we’ve got bigger fish to fry today!” They were involved in a revolution. In a way, we are going to realize that about ourselves and our things of immaturity in life when we are in the presence of Jesus Christ. When Christ walks in the room we will realize that yes, we thought this stuff was important. But we strive toward a larger goal – the Kingdom of Heaven and our place in it, and the salvation of mankind through the Word of Jesus Christ. We have a role in that. So let’s band together as teammates and pursue that above all else. We’ve got power, and we’ve got help, because this is God’s movement, and we are involved in it. So we strive toward the larger goal. If we are striving toward the larger goal we remember that the Lord is near and therefore we really don’t have any reason to be anxious.
Therefore, we are not to worry. Again, that is easy to say, and that big statement is hard to live by. We all have creeping anxiety in our lives, things that we are worried about. But in Jesus’ presence there is really no place for that. It is not that we have to tell ourselves that now that I am a Christian I don’t have to worry. But the closer we get to Christ, the more the worries themselves, by themselves tend to subside and move away from us. If we believe that Jesus really is our salvation, and that he will bring us to heaven where all of our needs and all of our wants will be supplied, then we know we don’t have to worry about things in this life. Remember, Paul wrote this letter from prison. We know that he had been in prison several times, and it is very likely that he wrote this from his last incarceration while he was awaiting execution. We are not sure about that, but it is a pretty good scholarly guess. Paul was going to be executed and probably knew that there was very little realistic hope of getting released or pardoned. So even then Paul writes that in Christ, we really don’t have anything to be anxious about, even if you are locked in a jail, awaiting your execution. “There is far too much to celebrate. There is far too much good going on around you,” Paul says.
I got a lesson in that from one of my children one time. When I was in my first pastorate over in the western hills of North Carolina, we had a joint revival and brought in some speakers and a music leader for our joint services. While she was there the woman leading our music received a pathology report on a biopsy. She found out she had cancer while she was there with us. Of course she was upset, and everybody else was upset. We prayed for her and announced to the other churches to please pray for her. My middle son, James, was a kindergartner at the time. He was beginning to understand how serious a diagnosis like cancer was. He wanted to talk to me about it. He said, “Daddy, she’s got cancer, right?” I said, “That’s right.” He asked, “Can that kill you?” And I said, “Well, yes some forms of it can.” Now this is coming from a five year old, and he said, “But, she is a Christian, right?” I said, “Yes, she is.” And he said, “Well, the worst that can happen to her is that she goes to heaven!” I said, “Well, James, that is a bit simplistic.” (I had to explain to him what simplistic meant.) I said, “There is more to it than that.” He said, “Why?” And I said, “Well… you know… I understand what you are saying, but you know…she’s…and so…” There is some truth in what he said, isn’t there? Between a diagnosis and a crown of glory there is a lot. I know that, and you know that. Some of you have lived that. But Paul, on death row, wrote, “I don’t have much to be anxious about.”
So Paul continues, (point #6), “So I pray. I ask God anything, and I give God thanks, knowing that whatever the answer is, whether I am released from prison and get to be with you or I get to be with the Lord, whatever it is, it is going to be wonderful, I know. So I pray, and as I pray, my anxiety wanes away. I ask God. I give thanks. My anxiety goes away, and I grow in spirit. The end result is,” he says, “peace with God.” God guards my heart and mind in Christ Jesus, and that is a point of spiritual maturity.
I think that is a good lesson in growth from scripture today. Whatever the issue is that we are trying to grow through and beyond and mature in, whether, as in Phillipi it is an interpersonal conflict, or maybe physical, or vocational, or whatever it is, that if we can look for positives, that we can rejoice, that we can exercise a forbearing spirit, that we can remember that Jesus is near. And therefore we don’t have to worry and have anxiety. And we can pray always, the peace of God will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. That, I think, is spiritual maturity for us all.