Love, Discern, and Be Filled

Philippians 1:9-11

A couple weeks before Easter, some of us made a wonderful trip to the desert of Merzouga. It was a wonderful Lenten retreat and I hope some of you will be able to make this trip with us next year.

As we made our way we looked out the window to see the season change from spring in Rabat, to winter in Azrou, and then summer in Merzouga. Every once in a while we stopped to take in the beauty and wonder of what we were seeing.

This is what we will do this morning as we move through the last part of Paul’s introduction to his letter to the church in Philippi. I will comment on the passage as we move through and make some stops to take a closer look.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, letter writing was taken seriously in the world of Paul and although he established some new precedents, Paul generally followed the established pattern of letter writing in the Greco-Roman world.

He began by saying who the letter was from, Paul and Timothy, to whom the letter was addressed, the church in Philippi, and then a blessing on the church in Philippi. This is followed by a prologue to the letter in which the themes of the letter are introduced. Elliot preached last week from the first part of this, verses 3-8 and this morning I will preach from the second part of this prologue, verses 9-11.

In this second part of the prologue Paul tells the church in Philippi about his heartfelt prayer for them.
And this is my prayer.

Paul was a man of prayer. Throughout his letters and in the book of Acts we see Paul praying.
In 2 Corinthians 11:28 after Paul listed all the ways in which he suffered – beatings, floggings, stoned and left for dead, all kinds of deprivations and dangers – he adds
Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.

How did Paul deal with this concern for all the churches?

In the opening to this prologue Paul wrote:
I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy

He wrote to the church in Ephesus (Ephesians 1:16)
I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

To the church in Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 1:2)
We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers.

To Timothy (2 Timothy 1:3)
I thank God, whom I serve, as my ancestors did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.

To Philemon (Philemon 4)
I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers,

This is a challenge to me. Am I praying for the people God has put on my heart? It is easy to get caught up in the work of ministry and I am challenged to pray more regularly for the people of RIC and others God has put on my heart.

Are you praying for the people God has put on your heart? Are you praying for the people in your small group, bible study, your classmates, the people with whom you work, your friends, your family? Prayer is not easy. On June 3 we will have a seminar on prayer that will help us to be women and men of prayer. I hope you will be able to come. Accept this challenge from Philippians and let it motivate you to bring the people on your heart to God.

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound

Love is a word that is too easily used. In 1967, at the height of the love and peace movement that transformed Western culture, there was a live, international, satellite television production called “Our World.” Creative artists, including The Beatles, opera singer Maria Callas, and painter Pablo Picasso—representing nineteen nations—were invited to perform or appear in separate segments featuring their respective countries. The two-and-half-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that date: an estimated 400 to 700 million people around the globe watched the broadcast.

The Beatles were asked to provide a song with a message that could be easily understood by everyone and wrote “All You Need Is Love.” Brian Epstein, the band’s manager, said “It was an inspired song and they really wanted to give the world a message. The nice thing about it is that it cannot be misinterpreted. It is a clear message saying that love is everything.” The chorus proclaims the answer to all the world’s problems.

It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.
Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.

And then the Beatles could not resolve their relational problems and broke up. They were not able to be faithful to their spouses and had multiple divorces. It is not easy. If love is all you need, then the Beatles did not have it. We need to define love.

The love Paul is writing about to the church in Philippi is not a “feel-good” love. It is not simply an emotion.

In verse 8 Paul writes “God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.” Paul felt great emotional love for the people in the church at Philippi but the affection of Christ Jesus is far more than an emotion. The love Paul is talking about is love that is so powerful it is expressed in sacrificial behavior.

In 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 Paul talks about the love he prays will abound in the church at Philippi.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I can tell you that I love you but is that love expressed when it becomes difficult to love you? Will I love you when it costs me to love you? The love Paul is talking about is a sacrificial love that considers others as more important than ourselves. Patient, not irritable. Not envious of the success of someone else. Not proud. Not self-seeking. Not easily angered. Love forgives and does not keep a record of wrongs.

If you take time to consider each of these characteristics of love, you realize how difficult it is to love the way Paul is talking about. Love is not easy; it is costly. Consider the ultimate model of this kind of love. (Romans 5:6–8)
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This is the kind of love that Paul prays will abound. This love is not at all easy. It is difficult. It requires self-sacrifice, putting the needs of others above our own needs. How can we do that? How can we love others at great cost to ourselves? Paul continues:

that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight,

Paul is aware that the church in Philippi already has this kind of love but he wants it to grow. He prays that it will abound “more and more” and this is because the church at Philippi is struggling with conflict between two of its leaders. Paul wants them to put into practice the love they have experienced. He wants them to forgive and not keep a record of wrongs. He wants them to sacrifice for the other person in the relationship.

He prays that their love will abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.

This is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge. This is not knowing the Bible so you can pass a Bible quiz. “How many times are dogs and cats mentioned in the Bible?” Answer – Dogs are mentioned 41 times in the Bible, cats are never mentioned. Ostriches are mentioned twice and elephants are never mentioned, although ivory is mentioned 15 times. Green is the first color mentioned in the Bible. Of the colors of the rainbow, only indigo is not mentioned in the Bible.

You may be able to impress someone with all you know about the Bible, but the knowledge and depth of insight Paul wants love to abound in is not facts, not Bible trivia, not even memorizing verses of the Bible. Paul wants love to abound in an intimate, relational knowledge. It is knowledge of the experience of being loved by God.

In Genesis 4:1 we read that “Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.” In older translations of the Bible, this reads, “Adam knew Eve, and she conceived, and bore Cain.” Knowing is a deeply intimate knowing.

Our relationship with God is an intimate knowing. The church is the bride of Jesus. Our relationship is not a sexual one but it is a deeply intimate relationship, made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

In Ephesians 1:17–19 Paul prayed in his prayer for the churches in the region of Ephesus:
I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe.

In John 10:14–15 Jesus talked about his relationship with his church in intimate terms.
I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.

Later in Philippians 3:10–11 Paul writes:
I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

In Colossians 1:9-10
For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, 10 so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God,

Do you know Jesus? Or do you know about Jesus? Are you a Christian or a follower of Jesus? Many people in the world call themselves Christians. Their religious identity is that they are Christians. But how many of those who call themselves Christians are followers of Jesus? There is the institution of Christianity which does not have a very good reputation. There is a much smaller number of people who are in a growing relationship with Jesus and are following him.

Followers of Jesus read their Bible. They talk about what they read in small groups. They spend time reflecting on what they read. They pray. They spend time in silence with Jesus, listening to what he has to say to them. They learn to recognize his voice.

Why do followers of Jesus do these things? We have been loved and so we love. We are drawn to Jesus because of his love for us. But Paul also gives a practical reason for what we do.
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ

When our love abounds more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, we are able to discern what is best.

Life is full of choices and some options are better than others but there are options that are best.

Annie and I watched a good film last week, The Light Between Oceans. This is a film about an Australian man who survived four years of fighting in WWI in France. After his horrific experiences, he takes a position as lightkeeper of a lighthouse on an island off the Western coast of Australia. He meets a young woman who lost two brothers in the war. They marry and she brings life and healing to him as they love each other. They look forward to having children but then she has two miscarriages in three years and she grieves for the two children they buried. As she grieves after the burial of her second child, a rowboat washes up on the shore with a dead man and a baby.

She takes the baby girl and cares for her. Her husband tells her he needs to report this but she pleads with him not to report it and to say that the baby girl is theirs.

He struggles with the morality of this but she has brought him life and he cannot break her heart that is so attached to this baby girl. She has lost two brothers and then two babies and cannot let go of the baby girl. So they choose. He buries the man, pushes the rowboat out to sea, and telegraphs the town to tell them their baby was born early.

They made a choice, but was it the best choice for them to make? They saved the baby girl’s life by bringing her from the rowboat to the island. It gave them a girl to love and the girl thrived under their care. For six years it was a good life, but then it was discovered that she was the daughter of another woman in the town. The little girl was taken away from the only parents she had ever known and the lightkeeper and his wife were put in jail.

As I watched this movie I grieved for the choice they made. I knew it was going to poison their life. This is what happens to us when we compromise and settle for less than the best choice.

I understand why they made this choice. I understand how much the woman wanted a child. But the painful consequence of their choice became increasingly painful with time. If they had sent word that they had found the baby in the beginning, they would still have been childless and the wife would still have suffered the pain of having lost her two children. But six years later the pain of losing their daughter was much more painful for them and much more painful for the little girl who lost the only parents she had ever known and had to learn to be loved by her birth mother.

It makes a difference what choices we make and when we choose unwisely, the consequences of the decision become worse with time. I know a man who chose to marry a woman who did not share his heart for the world and who has had to settle for a suburban life in a small town. His heart is still for the world but he is trapped. I know a man who made a woman pregnant, married her, and entered into a life that made neither of them happy. The consequences of their choice has had a long-lasting effect.

They made choices but they were not the best choices.

God can make good come out of bad and there has been good that has come out of these relationships, but each of these men could have lived a far richer and more fulfilling life.

Having sex before you are married can be satisfying, enjoyable, pleasant, but there are long-term consequences that can come back to haunt you. It is not God’s best choice for you to make.

Politicians in the US get into trouble, not just for the things they have done, but for trying to cover up what they have done. If you hit someone with your car and drive away, you may think that you have avoided the consequences for your action. But later, when you are found out, the consequence for your action is much worse than if you had stayed at the scene. We have to choose what is best at the beginning, regardless of how difficult the choice is at the time.

When I was in business I sometimes had to make difficult phone calls. There were occasions when we had produced the product but the shipping department made a mistake and sent it to the wrong address. This meant that the customer would be late in fulfilling the order his customer had made. I wanted to avoid, avoid, avoid making this phone call.

So I looked up at a sign I had on my desk. “If your task is to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long before you take the first bite.” I would look at the sign and then make the phone call I dreaded having to make.

In the movie, the longer the husband delayed in sending word that a rowboat had washed ashore with a dead man and a baby, the more difficult and then impossible it was to tell the truth.

If you lie, the longer you live with the lie, the more difficulty it will be to tell the truth.

When you are dating, the more time you spend alone, the more difficult it will be to restrain from doing what raging hormones are telling you to do. The more physically intimate your relationship is, the more difficult it will be to resist going all the way. It will be more and more difficult to make the best choice.

If you don’t want to go to Casablanca, then don’t get on the bus. Once you are on the bus, every minute will take you closer to where you don’t want to go.

We are so good at rationalizing our way to get what we want, to do what we know we should not do.

This is not easy. This is why you need more than good feelings of love. You need a living relationship with Jesus that will feed you and draw you into intimacy with him. Then you will be able to discern what is best.

I know that some of you have made choices that were not the best. I grieve for you. I wish you could go back in time and make a better choice.  I wish I could go back in time and make better choices. I know some of you will make choices that are not the best. We all make choices sometimes that are not the best. We are human. Sin is alive and at work in us. Our bad choices will make our life more difficult. We have to live with the choices we make, but the good news is that Jesus can create life even out of bad choices we have made.

Jesus can create life out of our bad choices, but we have to turn and repent. If you are suffering from not having chosen God’s best for you, today is a good time to turn. Today is a good time to repent. And today is a good day to ask Jesus to help you choose in the future what is best.

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ

Elliot views this passage as a tree with the roots being love that abound in knowledge and depth of insight. From the roots the tree grows and flourishes, making us pure and blameless for the day of Christ when the branches will be filled with the fruit of righteousness.

I have known people in their last years whose life is filled with bitterness and anger. I have known people in their last years who live a lonely life, cut off from family. I have known people in their last years who are still trying to live out unfulfilled fantasies. The actions of our lives shape us and determine how we live.

I have also known people in their last years who bring life to all who visit them. The fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ has shaped them and everyone wants to be with them, spend time with them. They bring life to all who come to them.

When I wrote this on Friday, I stopped and called a couple living in the US whose branches are filled with the fruit of righteousness. They are not perfect. They have not always chosen what is best. But they have consistently, over their years, grown more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. When I have stayed with them, no matter how early in the morning I get up, I find them at their table, reading their Bibles, and then praying with each other.

They have what the world most wants, peace. But they experience peace by doing what the world does not want to do, they surrender to Jesus and seek him, day after day.

Most of you are relatively young and have many years ahead of you. You have many choices facing you and I pray, along with Paul, that you will grow in knowledge and depth of insight so that you will be able to discern what is best. Don’t settle for second-best. Don’t settle for anything less than God’s best.

When you are faced with a frog to eat, don’t stare at it too long before you take the first bite. Do what is right, even when that seems difficult and unpleasant. Resist the easy path of giving in to temptation. Hold on to what you believe and what you know is right. Don’t surrender to rationalization, trying to make a lesser choice seem to be a better choice.

Love is all you need. That is true. But love is not just emotion. It is the intimate love of Jesus that will lead you through life that you need. Work hard at drawing near to Jesus and let that help you navigate through all the choices you will have to make. Your choices now will determine your future. I plead with you to resist what seems the easy path and choose what is best so you will have peace in this life and be pure and blameless for the day of Christ – to the glory and praise of God.