‘The Future, the Past, the Present, and the Future”
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Sometimes when we come across a bit of Scripture, we realize that when we read that Scripture we have entered into the Holy of Holies. There are just some Scriptures out there that are just meant to bring us there. Now I am not saying that some Scriptures are better than others, but some Scriptures have different purposes and some lead us to the center of it all. I believe that the book of Philippians is that way. So this morning I want to read you a pretty good size piece of Philippians. I think it addresses some of the things we are talking about today, as we know are staying behind after the service and talking a little bit about our short and long range future. As we read Philippians today, I want you to remember a couple things. One, as Paul writes this, he is in prison. He has been there a long time. Yet, Philippians is one of the most joyful books, and the question is why? Well Paul deals with some ultimate issues right there in the first chapter and he knows the answers to them. So as we read it today, as you look at it on the screen and read it, notice the joy; but notice how Paul deals with some things, particularly in the past and the present and the future. (Philippians 1:3-27)
3I thank my God every time I remember you (Philippians). 4In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
7It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. 8God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
9And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.
12Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. 13As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. 14Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly.
15It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. 16The latter do so in love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. 17The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. 18But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.
Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, 19for I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. 20I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. 21For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. 22If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. 25Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, 26so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me.
27Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel.
Why is Paul joyful? Why is he so confident? Well, I believe he has dealt with some things. He has talked about some issues with others and within himself, in particularly he has dealt (and I have organized this because you see it maybe not quite in this way, but you see it here so clearly,) he has talked about his future and his past and he present and his future again.
First, the future. What would it be like to be on death row? What would it be like to be waiting day after day, waiting for that day that they are going to come and get you? In our day people stay on death row for years, maybe not even knowing if it is ever going to happen; but they are waiting and continuing to wait. This is Paul. Paul is in a Roman prison waiting to come before the emperor. He has appealed to Caesar in the past. He has been there over two years and he is waiting to see what happens. He could go to his death, and he does later, actually; he doesn’t this time; but he doesn’t know. What would it be like? Well you know there is a sense in which we are all on death row. We are all waiting for a day to come, aren’t we? Only, unlike Paul, we don’t like to talk about it. We like to think, maybe it will go away. Well, no, we know that; but it makes us feel better to put it back in the back corner. I want to be very clear; Paul is not just talking about escaping suffering.
I read about a man who asked the question, “I wonder what it would be like to be seasick?” He went on to say “I have never been seasick, but I have been told by others that it is absolutely one of the worst things you can experience.” Well he goes on to say that he read about a poor man who was on a boat, became dreadfully seasick. Well, a cheerful person came along who always seems to show up at these times, came over with a big smile, and said, “Cheer up man. Seasickness never killed anybody,” to which the man replied, “Don’t tell me that. It is the hope of dying that has kept me alive for this long.”
We have all kind of been there, haven’t we, whether we are seasick or not. But Paul isn’t talking about that. The word he uses is gain, advantage, profit. “It is to my profit that I go to be with Christ.” Paul would never be a person who goes up to another person and says, “It is better than the alternative,” because the alternative is better in his mind.
It is kind of like one of the great missionaries said. Her name was Amy Carmichael and she was visited by a woman and, during the course of the conversation, the woman told her that a doctor had said, “Don’t ever bend over suddenly. If you do, you might die on the spot,” to which Amy smiled and, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “However do you resist the temptation?” Now Amy wasn’t being jestful, really. She said later in her life when her body was growing even more frail, she said, “Whether she lived or died was not the point. Either way she would be with Christ. Either way she would be victorious.”
You know, I think we do each other a disservice because we don’t help each other die well. I read a story about a young woman dying of cancer. She believed in God and wanted God to heal her. Everyday people from the church gathered around her bed praying for her healing and telling her to claim it. They would say, “Look up to God and say ‘I’m healed,’” and she agreed. However later one day her pastor, who knew the family, ran into the husband and said, “How is she doing?” He said, “Not very well.” The pastor said, “May I come and visit her?” The man said that would be great. So the next day the pastor went into the room; the lady’s body was shrunken, her face was pale, her features caved in, the smell of death smothered the room. The pastor, thinking she was asleep, tiptoed to the bed and suddenly her eyes opened as she saw the pastor. She said, “Oh pastor, have you come to pray for my healing?” The pastor gently sat down on the bed and said, “No, I haven’t come to pray for your healing, I’ve come to help you die.” And she said, “Oh Pastor, thank you, that’s what I’ve needed all this time.”
Our lives are not just about healing and going on, because we have a better place. It is not just a phrase! That better place gives us strength to live. Paul dealt with this. It wasn’t an issue with him. So he dealt with that future that awaits all of us. He also dealt, and here is what he says, it’s amazing. “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” And then he goes on to deal with his past, the pain in his past.
He says. “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel”. Now, what had happened to Paul? Well, to get that information you need to go to the book of Acts, but I will give you a summary. He was falsely accused by his own fellow Jews and was nearly lynched by them, ended up in prison in front of the Gentile kings and authorities. He was the subject of mockery and shame and misrepresentation and deadly plot. As a matter of fact, some of the fellow Jews vowed that they would not eat or drink until they had killed Paul. It didn’t really work out for them, but that’s what happened at this moment. Even then the sufferings weren’t over. He finally went to Rome and had a huge shipwreck, almost died. Finally he arrived in Rome in chains and was put in prison for a long, long time. What would we have done if that had happened to us? All the frustration, all the heartache, all the suffering, you know, I don’t know how I would do. I get impatient when the light doesn’t turn green fast enough. And here he talks about it. It doesn’t bother him.
You know I really think and have said before that many people with the ultimate questions, the philosophical questions about whether there is God or not, or whatever, many of them are simply mad at God or mad at circumstance. They don’t want to deal with it. They are ticked off about life. It is not that their questions are not valid, but there is something else going on. They always ask that question: what’s the underlying question? I really believe for many people that is exactly what it is. It is kind of like Lieutenant Dan, in Forrest Gump, sitting on the mast of the ship, going, “I’m here. Is this all you can do?” Deep down inside a lot of people are just like that. They can’t deal with it.
Well, what are we to make of suffering? What are we to do with it? Well, I want to be very clear. Suffering does just happen. We live in a fallen world. The Bible gives us the unsatisfactory, at least to our hearts, answer that a lot of the stuff that happens in the world is because we live in a fallen world. Both the world and people are messed up right now. You can just be minding your own business and a rock my fall out of the sky and hit you. It has happened; anything can happen. But God isn’t out of control and he uses these things. He uses them. Sometimes suffering is corrective, like a child that puts his hand on a hot stove or continually disobeys his parents. We learn by those burned hands and sometimes God let’s us suffer our consequences. Sometimes suffering is instructive. God has something to teach us and unfortunately sometimes we don’t listen until we are hurting. As C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures and shouts at us in our pain.”
So many things happen and Paul says, “I want you to know …what has happened to me…” He has a perspective that his suffering is not about him. Now, I went to a conference this week. This man started talking about it and I put it up so you could read it so if I said it, you would know I said the right thing. “SHIFT happens.” So in other words you can’t go around and say “Did you hear what Pastor Chris said?” I will leave it to your imagination what that could be. He said, “Shift happens.” And he went on to talk about churches and he said, “You know, there is so much change going on in life that people in church see all this change and they get all upset. They want their church to be the place of sanctuary, where nothing bad happens. They want it to be a place the same, with no change. They want it just to be the same.” But he went on to say in talking about churches that it doesn’t matter, shift happens. Things change all around us and the message remains the same. God remains the same. But if the Church doesn’t adapt, maybe slowly, yes, but if the Church doesn’t adapt, it goes away after a while. There are churches that die. Shift does happen. You know, some of you know this better than, or at least you should. I still marvel at the fact that this church has been around 120 years and some of you were around nearly at the beginning. You are chronologically blessed. When I first got here a couple people came up and said, and they are in their nineties, at least, and said, “I was baptized here.” Praise God! And what are the changes Faith Church has seen over the years? Well, I can name a couple that had to be amazing, hard things to go through. One was Czech was spoken here until the forties. And when they went from…it had to be had to be hard, it just had to be. Then this church joined with Glen Lake in the sixties. Now, I don’t care, people are people and this had to be hard. I know some of you still kind of remember that, don’t you? It wasn’t terrible; but it is not easy to do that. And many other things…we won’t go into that. This church has gone up and down and up and down, just like any organization. And yes, we are suffering a bit now, aren’t we? I will tell you that my in-laws came about two, three weeks ago and they said, “You know, we would have never understood that this church is facing challenges. By all appearances things are going well.” And there are some things that are going really well here, but we are going to hear about some of the challenges in just a little bit. We shouldn’t shirk them, but we need to have faith, as well, because “shift happens” doesn’t it?
Now suffering can be corrective. It can be instructive. But the kind of suffering Paul is talking about, he actually describes as a privilege. No, he is not crazy. He basically says that he has had the privilege to suffer for Christ. Because he is in prison some people who would have never heard the gospel have heard it—the praetorian guard—we have no idea what effect that had in Rome or in any other place; we will find out when we get to heaven. But Paul’s perspective is this: Because I have been here some people have heard the gospel who never would have heard it before. And it was a privilege for him. He has been through the fire. He suffered, but he looks at the bigger picture. We need to look at the bigger picture in our own lives, and as a church.
Which leads to the third point: God has not saved us just to save us! Notice what Paul says. I have another scripture, but he says: what should I choose? Should I go and be with Jesus, I’d like that. That would be better. But I am stuck with you… No, he didn’t quite say it that way. He says, because of you, I am going to stay. I know I will stay. He has a purpose. He is dealing with his present. He talked about the future, he talked about the past, and now he is dealing with his present. He talks about the Christian life. He prays for them: “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 (not just what is good but what is best) and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness …to the glory and praise of God.” Paul knew his purpose.
I sometimes believe that we don’t really know what life is from the Christian point of view. A Presbyterian author named Bruce Larson says that one of his favorite verses is John 10:10, where Jesus tells us that he came, Jesus came, that we might have life and have it abundantly. The Greek word for life is zoe, which means life pressed down, heaped together, running over. He really didn’t understand the image until he and some friends broke down in Kenya. They went to the market and people there don’t get their stuff by measuring it, by weights and measures. What they do is they bring a container, and when they go to the market, people fill that container and then press it down and then put some more in until it is running over. And that is what Jesus is saying, that “life is to be in me.” But I am afraid most of us just want to survive. We spend most of our time running around trying our hardest to “not be voted off the island.” That’s the goal—to not be voted off—when we know that getting off the island is where we want to go. We want to live as long as possible, as comfortably as possible; but God wants you to live and live well.
Someone wrote this about this. He said, “If survival is all you are looking for, don’t waste your time with Jesus. But if you want life, press down, heap together, running over. There is only one place that such a life can be found and that is in him, and it requires risk.”
If personally all we are interested in is survival, we will not have life. If as a church we are only interested in survival, we will not have life. Jesus calls that being lukewarm or half-dead. And he wants us to be hot. Well how are we to do all this? Well, the answer is the Sunday school answer, isn’t it? You can’t do it by yourself. God is the answer; because God will finish what he started. It is not up to us. Yes, we have to do our part, we have to; but God finishes what he started. I have said before that it really depends on what kind of God we believe in. Do we believe in the biblical God or not? The biblical God we know is everywhere. If we go to the bottom of the sea, if we go to the top of the highest peak, God is there. If we go to Mars, God is there. If we beam over to the other side of the galaxy, God is there, or the thousands or millions of galaxies. But it is not just spatial. God is also the God of time. God doesn’t just see your future, he lives in it. He is already there. When you get there, he’s been there. I don’t know how that works, but, he does.
God will finish what he started with you, and, with Faith Church. I will close with a story about three men who met together and they were talking about the most exciting things of their life. One man said, “Oh, I just got back from Africa and I had the most exciting event. I was out on safari and we were attacked by a lion. He was coming right at me and I got out my gun right at the moment and I shot as many shots as I could and the lion fell dead right there. That is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me.” Another man said, “Yeah, a similar thing happened to me. I was in Alaska and I found myself faced with the biggest grizzly bear you could ever imagine and I poured all the bullets I could into him and he fell dead right in front of me. That was the most exciting adventure of my life.” Well the third man had become a Christian without telling the other two. He said, “I wish I could tell you about my most exciting experience but it hasn’t happened yet.” “Well tell us. When is that going to be?” And the man said, “Well the first is after I die and the second will be when I stand face-to-face in the presence of Jesus Christ.”
I want to add something to that. It is beginning now until then, and then when we get to see Jesus. You see, if the most exciting event of our lives is behind us, we are lost. But if the most exciting event of our lives is still in front of us, we are saved. It is as simple as that. And it begins now, and goes on forever. Think about where your life is with Jesus right now. Think about where our church is and ask yourself what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.