Saturday, August 3, 2019

partners in the gospel: Rejoice in the Lord as we press on together towards the prize (Philippians 3:1-21)



here is an audio link to this sermon (the last minute of the sermon is not on the recording... sorry) 


We are working our way through Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi. A letter he wrote to thank them for their ongoing support and care for him, as he is in prison in Rome. It’s a letter where he calls them to stand strong, kia kaha, as they face external opposition and internal strife. A letter where he calls them to be partners in the gospel with him, not just with the support they give but by living out and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A letter where Paul uses the word rejoice sixteen times to remind his readers and us that this partnership in the gospel, despite the struggle and hardship is a source of great joy. Joy that comes from unity, and in the chapter we are looking at today Joy that comes from knowing and being known by Jesus Christ. That the church and we should rejoice in your union with the Lord…

In this chapter, Paul warns the church against a group of false teachers, known as the Judiezers, a group going round and insisting that for gentiles to be true followers of Jesus they need to be circumcised and keep the Jewish law, all of it including the dietary requirements. They want to add these things that we can do, human endevour, to what God has done for us in Christ. This chapter is helpful for us today as church history is resplendent with groups at different times and places who would try and add something to what Christ has done for us. Add something extra to the gospel that we must do or have to be put right with God. That instead adds value, but really robs us of the joy of knowing and being known by Jesus Christ, the wonder of the gospel that we are saved by grace alone, by Christ alone.

 We meet this group in Acts 15:1 where they descend on the Church in Antioch, which was the first center of Gentile Christianity, and that the whole Church had a major meeting in Jerusalem, the first ever general Assembly, or council,  to discuss the issue and we read they, inspired by the Holy Spirit, decided that gentiles did not have to be circumcised or keep the law to be followers of Christ, to be saved, that was only through faith in Jesus Christ, as an outworking of that they did need to abstain from food sacrificed to idols and from sexual immorality. Paul had been an important speaker at that meeting and was asked to take those findings to the churches he had founded. But the judiazers kept trying to spread their message. Paul had to counter it in his letter to the Galatians and he is concerned that they are about to arrive in Philippi. He writes to safeguard the church against them.
And I want to look at what he has to say through the lens of three metaphors or illustrations, that come out of the text themselves.

The first is an inorganic rubbish collection.

I don’t think you have them in Whangarei… but I have vivid memories of them in Auckland. Once a year the city council would invite people to put all the rubbish that they couldn’t put in the normal rubbish collection out to be picked up. For a couple of weeks outside every home, along every street would be a pile of junk. Broken furniture, once treasured possessions now tarnished and broken, toys, abandoned projects that just never got finished, building material, broken appliances and electronics. They would sit there and eventually a truck would come and take it off to the dump. Not the most ecologically sound thing I know. There was some recycling that happened, out west we used to call it shopping. People would drive round and spot something they might find useful and grab it. I have friends who kitted out their house bus from the inorganic. More recently all the metal would miraculously disappear overnight, as people scrounged it to sell for scrap.

Paul uses the metaphor of wild dogs to talk of the judizers, who he writes about them you could imagine him banging his fist on the desk as he wrote… wild dogs… evil doers… mutilators of the flesh… in first century cities food scraps would be thrown out onto the street and wild dogs would fight over it.

Paul says that of anyone he had the right to have confidence in the flesh. More than the judizers he could have confidence in what the judizers were telling people. He had done the ceremony’s, he was circumcised on the eighth day, he had the whakapapa, he was of the tribe of benjimin, the tribe that had stayed loyal to the Davidic kings when Israel had split into the northern and southern kingdoms, after the reigh on King Solomon. In fact his birth name was Saul, after the first king of Israel, Saul, a benjimite. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, even though he had been born in the gentile city of tarsuas, his family had kept their language, and customs and strict religious observance. Unto the law he was a Pharisee, the strictest group within Judaism when it came to keeping the law, Paul says he had been stringent in keeping the law, faultless even, and as to zeal a persecutor of the Church. It’s like he is putting these things in a spread sheet, a ledger. Then Paul says all these things add up to nothing compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ, and being known by Christ. There is not profit in them.  They have no value compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. The righteousness I managed to achieve was negligible, nothing compared to the righteousness that I receive, that we receive from Christ, from God… This other stuff we’ll it rubbish you take it out to the curb and dump it.  The Judizers were scavenging this junk and trying to drag it back and make out it was treasurer, like dogs wagging their tail because they’ve found a bone in the leftovers.

In verse 10 and 11 Paul sums it up by saying he wants to know Christ, to know the power of his resurrection, to participate in his suffering become like him in his death and somehow attain ing to the resurrection from the dead. His life his purpose, his hope joy was in knowing Christ. His whole life says Paul is shaped and guided by Christ’s life and love for us. His suffering a reflection of the redeeming grace of Christ, his death a witness to Christ, his life now made possible because of the presence of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection hop of new life and creation we can know know, and that was his future hope, that he would be raised to life with Christ, because Jesus had been raised to life again.

The second illustration is that of an Olympic athlete, 

There whole life is focused and geared towards one goal, one prize, winning the Olympic gold medal. In fact I saw a usain Bolt quote this week where he says “ I trained for nine years, nine years  so I could run under 10 seconds, and people give up after two months because they don’t see reults” which sums up that dedication. And  in a race if you are always concerned about what is behind you and turning your head to look at it, you are not going to be concentrating on doing your best and winning the prize. This is the metaphor behind what Paul says in verse 12-15.

Paul must have been a sports fan because he often uses that analogy with people. I can imagine Him and Timothy going to the games when they were in Corinth… So here Paul talks of his own life and says that knowing Christ is the prize, the goal, and he is aware that he has a long way to go in that relationship, so he forgets what is behind him and strives to attain the goal. Not to earn his salvation, but to grasp hold of Christ because Christ has got hold of him, It is in response to the saving grace of Jesus Christ, that Paul says he and we should focus our lives on knowing and being known by Christ.  There is that cheesy cliché in romantic comedies, when the two lovers spot each other, maybe at a train station as one is about to walk away, or at the airport or across a crowded room, and they run towards each other. Their eyes fixed on each other… Paul says his life is like that.

He encourages his readers at Philippi and us to do the same thing. To focus our lives on Christ like an athlete. To live up to what we have already obtained. Not to get distracted or side tracked by other things. It’s easy to do… As the writer to Hebrews says “let us run the race with our eyes fixed onn Jesus Christ the author and perfecter of our faith.”

The third illustration come from the world of art.

I don’t know if many of you will know the name Karl Sim. He is a well-known New Zealand artist who died in 2013 at the age of 89. When I say well known I don’t mean famous rather infamous. You see Carl Sim is possibly New Zealand most well known art forger.

In one interview he gave there was a list of well over fifty famous painters whose work he had forged. They were the ones he could remember.  He came to notoriety in the mid 1980’s when he was convicted on forty charges of forging Goldie and Petrus van der Veldun paintings. He was fined $1,000 and made to paint the Foxton town hall and public toilets as part of his 200 hours community service. Not paint a picture of them but paint the buildings physically themselves. He changed his name to Carl Feodore Goldie so he could legitimately sign his Goldie paintings without fear of prosecution. When he moved up to Orewa an antique dealer bought his Foxton flat and made it into an antique shop called Goldie’s Junk n’ disorderly so that Goldies memory would live on in the town. In one of his last Orewa shows there was a rather well-done Mona Lisa signed by C F Goldie.

It’s interesting that copying great artists and their works wasn’t considered a crime until art work became such an expensive commodity. It was rather seen as a way for budding artists to learn their craft. To learn the technique and brush strokes of the masters and so get better. When they tried to  pass off their copies as the real thing  it stopped being learning and became fraud. However George Bernard Shaw says “imitation is not just the greatest form of flattery it’s the sincerest form of learning”. In the last section of Chapter three Paul tells his readers new believers in a fledgling church to imitate him as the way to forge ahead to Maturity in Christ.  To join together in following his example…his model.  AS he clarifies in 1 Corinthians 11:1 you should imitate me as I imitate Christ…

Paul sets his life out not as an example of being perfect, he is the first to acknowledge that he hasn’t yet made it, he has not yet obtained. But rather that his life was focused on Christ, and was lived out of the Hope that Christ was at work in him, and focused on the Kingdom of God, now and in its future fulfillment, not on earthly things. He calls us to do the same.

We tend to think of Paul as this great spiritual giant, but you have to realise at this stage he wasn’t really seen as a great success, He was in prison in Rome, he was facing possible death, he was having to be supported by the churches, and he was also under attack from people like the judisers, who were trying to discredit him. His example is hat faithful adherence to the gospel, to the hope that can be found in Christ alone.

The judisers may look like they are successful, but putting their faith in their own achievements and religiosity and what they do rather than in what Christ has done for us, may bring them some measure of prosperity and success in this world, but in the long run it will lead them to destruction. Paul rather focuses on Christ trusting that we are citizens of his Kingdom know amidst the suffering and hardship and that he can be trusted to transform us and bring everything under his control.

People let us rejoice in the Lord. It is because of Jesus Christ, his life death and resurrection that our sins are forgiven and that we have been bought into a new relationship with God. It is Christ alone. People let us rejoice in the Lord, let us find our meaning and purpose and goal and prize in the surpassing greatness of knowing and being known by Christ. Let us rejoice in the lord, by forging ahead to spiritual maturity, allowing Christ to do his work in us… lets pray.

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