Philippians 1:1-11 (Participation in the Gospel)

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So I started a sermon series up there on Paul's letter to the church in Philippi, and Kendall and Derek are gracious enough to allow me to deliver that sermon here today. I'm finding the letter to the Philippians very rich, and so I'm pleased to share that with you today.

I'm going to be covering the first 11 verses of Philippians. It's actually combining two sermons that I gave in Brandon, but since we tend to go longer here, I thought I'd... The first 11 verses include the salutation from Paul to the Philippians, and also includes his introduction to the letter and beginning his topic.

This section might seem like the least interesting part of the letter in a sense, in that we tend to gloss over introductions to things and jump right into the meat of things. But when this letter was authored by the Holy Spirit working through the Apostle Paul, we can be assured that every letter, every word, is holy and perfect and more valuable than all the words of every author you've ever read or admired.

It's certainly more valuable and perfect than anything I've ever said. So I look forward with you to looking into that. One of the things that is valuable in expository preaching is the fact that we get a chance to look at some of these passages that we might not pay close attention to as we read ourselves.

So it was a pleasure for me to go through this. So let's start with the salutation. From Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the overseers and deacons, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So you should recognize that structure, right? That's the same structure that we see in an email, right? There's from, there's to, and there's the subject. So that helps you to get context for what's coming, right?

You know where the person is coming from, what your relationship is with that person. And then usually it's, you'd provide some sort of greeting, right? And that's exactly what we see here. The greeting sets the tone, the emotional tone of the letter.

Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it personal? Is it business? It also suggests the author's understanding of the relationship with the recipient. There's some implied context for the relationship. And lastly, it provides a hint at least to the subject of the letter and what's to come.

And so if the letter stopped there, right, and we treated this as like a text message, it would basically be, Hey brothers, Paul and Timothy here. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

And our response to that would be, Hey Paul, thank you. What's up? Because that's a nice positive introduction, right? Grace and peace to you from God our Father. If Paul had said death and destruction to you from God our Father, we probably wouldn't message right back.

In fact, we might say, Hey Paul, sorry I missed that message. I don't know what happened. But this message isn't like this, which is good. So before we get ahead of ourselves, let's go back to the beginning and look at the author and the recipients and see who they are.

So Paul and Timothy, well, we kind of know a lot about them, right? Paul was the last Apostle, an Apostle being somebody who was discipled directly by Christ. Paul says in Galatians chapter 1, For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to men, for I neither received it from man nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

So Paul received the gospel that he was teaching to the church directly from Christ. He is an Apostle. Paul began his relationship with the church by persecuting it, right? He was overseeing the murder of the saints.

He was running the coat check station for the people who stoned Stephen, standing and holding the coats while Stephen was stoned. But he was also clearly a born leader. We see his strength in engaging in zeal to persecute the church.

And we see in some of his letters him going through his credentials as a Pharisee and as a teacher of the law. So Paul was a motivated young man at the time of Stephen's stoning. He was educated, he was headstrong, and he was aggressive, and he was fervent and energetic and he took initiative.

He was the kind of person that we expect to be a leader in the church or in the world. And then in Acts 9, we see him confronted by Jesus in dramatic fashion on his road to Damascus and ultimately called to bring the gospel to the Gentiles.

Later in Acts chapter 16, Paul's on his first missionary journey and he recruits Timothy while he's in Lystra, which would be modern Turkey. Timothy was another young man of great promise and Paul, the Scriptures include several letters to Timothy from Paul that record Paul's instructions to Timothy about his leadership and about leading the church and about how the church should function.

So I think it's safe to say that both Paul and Timothy were strong, aggressive men who believed in their mission and their calling. So it's fairly remarkable then when we read the next sentence, which says slaves of Jesus Christ.

Right. He is not presenting himself as Paul, an apostle of God or Paul, the founder of your church. He says, Paul and Timothy, slaves of Jesus Christ. That's a very different tone from what we might expect of what we know from Paul.

When we read that now, slaves of Jesus Christ, if you've been a Christian for a while, you've heard that term. And so you tend to go past it as, yeah, yeah, of course, of course, we're all slaves of Jesus Christ.

But I think it's worth looking at what that meant to the Philippians when he introduced the letter as slaves of Jesus Christ. Is there any context that the Philippians would have to understand what Paul's talking about?

So let's look a bit at the story in Acts about Paul and Timothy's trip to Philippi and see if there's some context for that introduction. So in Acts 16, Paul and Timothy are in Lystra for a little while and then they decide to head northeast to Asia.

But the Holy Spirit stopped them. Now when they had gone through Phrygia, the region of Galatia, they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the Word in Asia. So then they decided to go north. Can't go northeast, we'll go north to Bithynia.

And after they came to Mycenae, they tried to go to Bithynia, but the Spirit did not permit them. Finally, Paul had a vision that they were to go west to Macedonia, which was northwest into modern Greece where Philippi is located.

So if we pick up the story again in Acts, Philippi, which is the northernmost city in the part of Macedonia, a colony, and that's a colony of Rome, and we were staying in that city for some days, and on the Sabbath day, we went out of the city to the riverside, where prayer was customarily made, and we sat down and we spoke to the women who met there.

Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshipped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken of Paul, and when she and her household were baptized, she begged us, saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.

And so she persuaded us. That's from Acts 16, 12 through 15. Then, pretty quickly after that, a slave girl begins following them around. She was possessed of a spirit, and she's following them around, saying, these men are slaves of the God Most High, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.

And she continued to do this for many days, but Paul became greatly annoyed and turned and said to the spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And it came out of her at once.

But when her owners saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, these men are throwing our city into confusion.

These are Jews and are advocating customs which are not lawful for us to practice, since we are Romans. The crowd joined the attack against them, and the magistrates tore the clothes off Paul and Silas and ordered them to be beaten with rods.

After they had been beaten savagely, they threw them into prison and commanded the jailer to guard them securely. Receiving such orders, he threw them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

So, Paul and Silas and Timothy have arrived in Philippi. They've begun to establish a church and immediately they're persecuted. So while they're in the prison, singing hymns in the dark and praising God, there was an earthquake which opened all the prison doors and broke all their chains.

And the prison keeper thought all the prisoners had escaped, and he was about to kill himself because he knew the consequences of losing the prisoners. And Paul called out, we're still here, we're still here.

And the prison keeper believed in the gospel, and his entire household was saved and baptized. And Paul and Silas were freed the next day, went back to Lydia's house to say goodbye to the church, and they left and continued on to Thessalonica.

So that's kind of the story in Acts, the history of how Paul and Silas and Timothy, what their experience was in Philippi. So throughout this entire story of the founding of the church in Philippi, I want you to notice that absolutely none of the decisions were made by Paul and Timothy.

They were basically herded by the Holy Spirit to Philippi. And once they arrived, they really had no idea what to do. There was no synagogue for the Jews, which is where Paul would normally start to build his case.

So, they went to the beach. They went down to the river, and there they met Lydia, chance encounter. She came to faith and invited them to stay in her house, and that was the founding of the church in Philippi.

God orchestrated everything, from the arrival in Philippi to the meeting of Lydia, to the slave girl outing them in public, to their arrest, and then the jailer believing, and the church being established in Philippi through all of those things.

So that is who Paul and Timothy were to the church in Philippi, strange foreigners who showed up and through whom God exploded their whole world. We often think of Paul as this mastermind missionary, but this was all God.

And God even arranged for a possessed woman to announce them as slaves of the Most High God. The Greek word for slave in this case, sometimes it's translated bond servant, but pretty much throughout Greek literature, this word means someone who has no will of their own, somebody who is enacting the will of somebody else, and that's who Paul is declaring that he and Timothy were in the introduction to this letter.

So that would speak volumes to the church in Philippi, because that's who they saw, is somebody who God was just opening the doors and paving the way. As I ponder this introduction to Philippians, it's comforting, and it's also intimidating.

When we think about our role in Brandon coming up, we don't have to strategize about how to bring the gospel to Brandon and Vermont and New England, and the same for shepherds. We can trust God to take us where we need to be and simply proclaim what he has revealed to us as believers, without fear or without self-consciousness.

He has proclaimed us to be his children and adopted us into his family with riches beyond comprehension in the heavenly places, but when it comes to spreading the gospel, we don't call the shots. God does.

So if you fast forward now to the time of Paul writing this letter, why is Paul reminding the Philippian church that he is merely a slave? Because he's still only a slave while he's writing this letter.

His salutation reminds us that this letter is not from Paul. This letter is from God himself. This has been revealed to Paul for the benefit of the church in Philippi. Paul is still a slave as he's writing this letter.

So now we know who this letter is from in the salutation. So who is it to? Well, we've already learned a lot about the church in Philippi from what we've just gone through. The saints in Philippi are a people chosen by God clearly, by the sovereign God, to hear and believe the gospel.

They've seen some dramatic miracles and confirmation from God that the salvation is powerful. That he will build his church and nothing can stand against him. They have dramatic examples of Paul and Silas being thrown in prison.

That an understanding that being saints and being Christians is not an easy life to worldly fame and fortune. Being a believer in Philippi is to be a minority with a different alliance, different allegiance and values than the culture around you.

Look at what the magistrates said about Paul and Silas. These men are throwing our city into confusion. They are Jews advocating customs that are not lawful for us to accept or practice since we're Romans.

Was this a true accusation? Well, there's no doubt that the accusation was made because they were losing money. So it's not an accusation in good faith. But it's basically true. The gospel when it reaches the heart of a new believer does throw things into confusion.

When people are reborn and begin to live by the Holy Spirit, they no longer live according to the flesh and that throws society into disarray. There's a famous story, probably true. It's legendary at some level.

During the Great Awakenings in Scotland, there's a certain point at which the church was growing rapidly. The mining industry ground to a halt and it was because the donkeys couldn't understand what they were being told to do because the people had stopped swearing.

So they had to retrain the donkeys before they could continue the mining operations. Whether that's literally true or not, it's a great illustration of the fact that when our hearts are changed and our characters change and our behaviors change through the Holy Spirit, it changes the circumstances around us and it throws our circumstances into chaos at some level.

How would our community here act if a bunch of people trapped in gender dysphoria and sexual identity confusion suddenly caught a glimpse of their identity in Christ? What if people suddenly stopped putting their hope in government or lottery tickets or their jobs or their children?

How many clicks their postings or podcasts receive and instead put their hope in the Son of the Living God? And what if people found out that those things were happening because of something going on here at Shepherds Church?

Don't you think we would be accused of being disruptive and perhaps even unlawful? We still have a social and political framework that protects us from most of those types of repercussions, but the Philippian Church was alone in a Roman outpost surrounded by a Greek culture.

So the Philippians are a church of believers who have been saved out of a pagan culture and who know the cost of their discipleship. So that's who the letter is to. So finally, we notice that it doesn't just say to the saints in Philippi, but it says to the saints in Christ Jesus with the extra clause, with the overseers and deacons.

So this letter is not intended to individual Christians, but to the corporate church. This is a letter to the church with its leadership. We've all heard Christians say that they believe in Jesus, but they don't believe in organized religion.

They feel closer to God in the woods or out on a boat fishing or taking a lovely nap on a Sunday morning. And I get that. Sometimes being in nature does make us feel closer to God, but we're not closer to God.

We're closer to God when we're with believers, fellowshipping, and where Christ will be with us as two or more are gathered in his name. And some Christians come to church on Sunday to be encouraged and inspired in their individual faith, and they don't view the elders and deacons as overseers, but as service providers.

The congregation has spiritual needs, and the job of the church leader is to meet those spiritual needs. Philippians isn't written to those people. It is written to the saints with their overseers and deacons.

So as we read Philippians, it's important to keep in mind that this book is a message from God through his servants, not to individual saints, but to the organized church of saints with their overseers and deacons.

So that's the salutation. And the subject is grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what Paul wants to talk about to the Philippian church. Grace and peace. Not human grace and human peace, but grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So this isn't just a feeling of grace and peace. This is about grace and peace from God, the author of truth. It means it's not subjective grace and peace. It's not experiential, and it's not optional.

What is grace? Unmerited favor. What unmerited favor has the church received? The good news of Jesus Christ, of course. Paul is proclaiming in his introduction a blessing over the church, that they might receive the grace of God through Jesus Christ, that they might know and understand that God has chosen them, that Jesus has truly fulfilled the law's righteousness, living the perfect life that they could not, and dying to take the very real punishment for the sinful life that they have lived, and risen from the dead to defeat death itself and win for us eternal life.

That is the grace of God through Jesus Christ that Paul is blessing the church with. Grace to you from God is the greatest blessing, the greatest prayer that you can offer another person. It should be the daily prayer of every believer for one another, that God would complete the good work that he has begun in us, and that we would fully receive and live in the grace that we've been given.

And peace. Having received God's grace, our hearts can finally be in perfect peace. The peace that Jesus had with the Father before the foundation of the world is ours through his grace. We are at peace with our maker, with the truth incarnate, with his every plan and purpose.

God has included us in his eternal truth as believers, and bids us to live in peace as permanent members of his family. This world and all the philosophies of men will pass away into dust and be forgotten, but those who have received God's grace and peace will not.

Jesus has accomplished our salvation on the cross and sits at the right hand of the Father, and entered into his rest beside the Father, interceding on our behalf. And he says that where he goes, he is preparing a place for us, a place of perfect peace.

This is the subject and the context of the letter from Paul and Timothy to the saints in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons. Grace and peace to the church. The local church. With its overseers and deacons, and its weaknesses and its warts, the rest of the letter will elaborate on this theme and will teach us what the church is and what God's purposes are for her.

We don't put our faith in the organized church, but neither can we dismiss her as not being relevant when God himself announces grace and peace to her. God organized her. He appointed elders and deacons, overseers, teachers, secretaries, janitors.

It is to that organized church that God delivered his word of grace and peace to his glory forever. So that's just the salutation to the letter. That's just the first two verses. Going on to Paul's introduction, which is beautiful.

This is one of my favorite passages in scripture. I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine, making request for you with all joy for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that he who begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Just as it is right for me to think all of this because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense of the confirmation of the gospel, you are all partakers with me of grace.

For God is my witness how I greatly long for all of you with the affection of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and discernment, that you may be able to approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense until the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

All of Paul's epistles contain a similar section to this section after the salutation, where Paul reflects on what he knows about the church, his relationship with them, his prayer for their growth. When the structures of the comments are similar across the epistles and the love he expresses for the church is consistent, what he has to say to the churches in that introductory section is quite different.

So if we look at Romans and Ephesians, it's clear that Paul's writing to a church based on their reputation. He may not have much personal experience with that church, and those letters are heavily doctrinal, forming the theological bedrock of our understanding of God's plan for salvation, what Christ has accomplished and the nature of the Spirit's work in our lives.

The personal epistles, as I'm calling them, like Philippians, Paul has a direct relationship with those churches. He either founded it or he's preached there, but he's deeply involved in their lives. They tend to have less deep doctrine and more practical instruction based on Paul's knowledge of how they're conducting themselves and what's going on in the church.

Philippians is one of the most personal. Paul has deeply personal comments and relationship with his church, very positive words to say. Galatians and 1 Corinthians are also very personal with personal knowledge.

But while Paul begins in Philippians saying, I thank my God every remembrance of you, Paul's comments to the Galatian church are critical and confrontational and even exasperated with statements like, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all.

And in 1 Corinthians, while less confrontational, Paul also immediately addresses an error that the church is falling into. But the Philippians, the Philippians are doing well. And so I think it's instructive to look at what Paul praises for the Philippian church and what he criticizes in Galatia and Corinthians in order to understand some of God's purpose by contrasting the letters.

Before we get to that though, I do want to take a little bit of a side trip to kind of observe Paul as he's delivering this message. We get a little glimpse into Paul's heart because this is such a personal letter.

And we can see in some ways the way the Holy Spirit is shaping Paul and teaching him and changing his priorities. Building into his every thought, Christ Jesus and preparing him actually for his death and to be with Christ.

This letter includes a lot of self-reflection from Paul thinking about his life and about his death and about what he's done that will last and what he's done that won't last. And he talks about resurrection from death, not like in a teaching mode, but wondering and hoping.

In Philippians, we see a very human vulnerable Paul. When Paul says, I thank my God every time I remember you, the first words in the greeting are, I thank my God. For Paul, every aspect of his life is in the context of God's reality.

Paul is writing this in prison and prison is not a new experience for him. He's been there before. When Paul and Silas were imprisoned in Philippi, as we read earlier, they were praying and singing hymns in the dark.

And I have to think that perhaps Psalm 139, which we sing as one of our songs, would have been a natural song for them to be singing when it says, if I say surely the darkness will overwhelm me and the light and the light around me will be night.

Even the darkness is not dark to you and the day is as bright as the day and the night is the bright as the day and darkness and light are alike to you. So it's no surprise as he remembers the Philippians God's presence permeates Paul's mind and speech and his thankfulness acknowledges God's authority over all circumstances and relationships Paul continues by saying, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you.

Paul's natural context for his relationship with the Philippians and with the church is prayer. Paul is telling them how he prays, not that he prays. That he prays is a given. Paul is not trying to teach us that we should pray.

He doesn't believe in the power of prayer. He prays because God is real and present. When we are in someone's presence, we relate to them. If we don't talk to somebody in our presence, we're giving them the silent treatment.

Paul has learned that he is always in God's presence. So he is always praying. That's why he says, in all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy. Paul teaches this in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 when he says, rejoice always and pray without ceasing.

But we get to observe it in Paul's life in the letter to the Philippians. Now if Paul were here, he might start to get annoyed with me that I'm not getting to the point of his letter. And so I'll just point out that sometimes we can see in scripture the author of the scriptures working through the writer of the scriptures.

And this is a great opportunity to see that. God's presence and constant prayer that the Holy Spirit was at work sanctifying Paul's mind is consistent with Paul's teaching in other parts of the scriptures.

But to avoid annoying Paul any further, I'll move on. Participation in the gospel. In the prayer, Paul says he prays with joy. Why does he pray with joy? Because of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now.

Paul is filled with joy because the Philippian church is truly engaged in the gospel. That may seem like a silly question, but what does it mean for a church to participate in the gospel? I think there are three elements that come out of this path, this section.

Staying true to the gospel of grace, loving one another, and making disciples. So let's see how those manifest in this scripture. It starts by recognizing that it is God who is doing the work. Paul says in this section that I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

This is the gospel of grace. This is the gospel that says that it is God who has chosen you. It is God who has saved you and it is God who will complete the work in your life. If we look at the letter to the Galatians, we see that they had lost that understanding.

When he says, I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all. Instead of resting in the sufficiency of Jesus's work, the Galatians were adding requirements back in such as circumcision.

Paul tells them that they are deserting the Holy Spirit for a different gospel. When Paul talks to the Corinthian church, it's a different deviation from the gospel. My brothers and sisters, he says, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there were quarrels among you.

What I mean is, one of you says, I follow Paul. Another one says, I follow Apollos. Another one, I follow Cephas. And still another, I follow Christ. And later in verse 17,. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. The Corinthian church was turning from the gospel to worldly wisdom and enlightened philosophy and debating over who was the wisest and who was the highest in the church.

But the Philippian church stayed true to the gospel of grace, trusting in God's work in them and not in their performance like the Galatians or in their self-image like the Corinthians. That is the first way that a church participates in the gospel, by resting in the gospel of grace.

Grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, revealed in scripture alone. We must resist every temptation to measure ourselves by our virtue or by our superior philosophy and insight.

That is stealing a little bit of God's glory for ourselves, and it has no place in God's church. The woke world right now is eating itself alive trying to achieve justification through virtue. However, virtue happens to be defined today.

The conservative world, including much of the church, is busy trying to achieve justification through superior logic and wisdom. But neither of these belong in the church that has been bought by the blood of the crucified lamb.

Brothers and sisters, let's not make the mistake of thinking that we are not tempted by these traps. The church has tripped up over them time and time again since Paul was writing these epistles. We must cling to the body and blood of Jesus Christ for our righteousness and violently hurl away from ourselves any claim of righteousness on our own.

Another way that the Philippians are participating in the gospel is in their heart's response to God's work. Paul says in verse 7,. For it is only right for me to feel this way about you, because I have you in my heart.

And in verse 8, he says, God is my witness how I long for you with the affection of Jesus Christ. The Philippians share a deep bond of love and commitment with Paul and presumably with one another. They appear to epitomize Jesus's statement about the church, right, that by this everyone will know that you're my disciples because you love one another and John.

When the Galatian church was judging each other regarding their adherence to the law and the Corinthian church was busy asserting who was smartest and wisest, the Philippian church was sacrificially loving and giving.

So the second way a church participates in the gospel is safeguarding, expressing, and fanning the flames of their love for their fellow believers in the church. The last piece of this we see in the last half of verse 7.

Whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. The Philippian church poured out their service and their money for the proclamation of the gospel.

Paul and Timothy were largely sending this letter as a thank you note for all of the support that they had received from the Philippian church from the very first day they arrived. In chapter 4, Paul practically gushes about their support.

He says,. Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles. Moreover, as you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving except you only.

For even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid more than once when I was in need. Not that I desire gifts. What I desire more is that it be credited to your account. I am amply received full payment and have more than enough.

I am amply supplied now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts that you sent. Not only did the Philippians support Paul, they sent helpers. And they did all this in the face of persecution, starting with Paul and Silas being thrown in prison right before their eyes and throughout his entire life of ministry.

Beyond the evidence of service to Paul, there's also strong indication that the Philippian church was growing on its own. If we look back in Acts 16, remember we read, after Paul and Silas got out of prison, they went to Lydia's house where they met with their brothers and sisters and encouraged them, and then they left.

Well, since they were all at Lydia's house, unless she had a really big place, it probably wasn't a very big group. That was the founding of the church. It was small. But in this salutation, Paul says to all of God's holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons, more than one overseer, more than one deacon, all the brethren, strongly suggest that this church has grown.

This church has multiplied. It's probably safe to infer that the Philippian believers were actively sharing the gospel and discipling new believers. So that's the third way the church participates in the gospel, by investing their time and their money and their resources in making disciples of the gospel of grace.

So the very next section is Paul's prayer, and in Paul's prayer, it reflects those three things very strongly. So Paul says, and this is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Christ Jesus to the glory and praise of God.

What a prayer. Having seen all that God is doing, Paul says more, more, more love, abounding love, more knowledge and insight, discerning the best, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory of God.

Amen. But there's still one topic that we haven't covered in this. In verse 6, when Paul says he's confident that God will carry the work out, complete the work that he began in the Philippian church, he says that God will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.

In his prayer, he comes back to that thought, and in fact, his prayer is describing the work that God will complete on the day of Christ, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight so that you may be able to discern what is best and be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

What is Paul describing here? This is sanctification of the church. This is the perfecting of the church. But it isn't the perfecting of the church to have a righteousness of her own. We know from earlier discussion, this is not about the church increasing in virtue.

This is about the church increasing in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. This is the righteousness of Christ imputed to sinful men when he died in our place. That is being born again. That is election.

That is salvation. So Paul is praying that the Philippian church will abound in love that is grounded in the gospel of grace, such that they will be filled with the fruit of Christ's righteousness. What is the fruit of Christ's righteousness?

What is the fruit of his righteousness imputed to men? New disciples. That is what the fruit of Christ's righteousness is in the church. Paul is praying for the fulfillment of the Great Commission by means of the church abounding in love and commitment to the gospel.

So we see the same three elements that he talked about before, staying true to the gospel of grace, loving one another and abounding love, and making disciples the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

I think we often think about the fruit of righteousness as good works, but I don't, if put in context of the rest of this book, Paul is clearly talking about the proclamation of the gospel and the fruit of the righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ are disciples.