Philippians 1:18-26 (Unbreakable Joy)

We trace Paul’s deep, steady joy in Philippians 1:18–26 and ask why the gospel creates happiness that material success cannot sustain. We also wrestle with “to live is Christ, to die is gain” and let Jesus reframe how we think about work, community, and death itself. 
• Paul’s joy is anchored in Christ being proclaimed 
• The limits of the material pursuit of happiness 
• A framework for lasting Christian joy through the gospel and eternal life 
• “To Live Is Christ” as a practical way to live 
• “To Die Is Gain” as hope without fatalism 
• Why we need church community and real examples to emulate 
• How different cultures and modern sayings cope with death 
• Dependence on prayer and the Holy Spirit instead of self-effort 
• Personal reflection on what defines our success and happiness 

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Transcript

Paul’s Heart For Philippi

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What we have read up until this point is that Paul loves this church and the church loves him. He's writing this letter of concern and encouragement to the church in Philippi for some problems that they are they're having. We'll talk about those problems in detail later, but even in the very structure of the opening of this letter, Paul has laid out some Christian attitudes that he will use to address the problems that the Philippians church is facing and they're problems that we face as well, because they're human problems. But he's touched on unity, he's touched on service, um humility, and all of that stemming from an all-encompassing desire and passion for Jesus and the gospel at the center of who Paul is. And so just from that, he's going to address all the little problems that are propping up. Last week we saw the practicalities of a life lived for the gospel. When your life is aligned with Jesus, when you are connected to Jesus in a very real way, it redefines your experiences. Every experience you have when you're connected with Jesus is a little different than it would be if you didn't have Jesus. And for last week's sermon and for this week, what that really means is that in the good times and in the bad times, we can rejoice, we can have joy, we can have a peace, knowing that no matter what we are facing and no matter what we are going through, no matter the struggles that we are dealing with, that God is faithful and he's working and he's moving and we take joy and pleasure in that. And we we see more of this this week as we read Philippians chapter 1, verses 18 through 26. Verse 18. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice. For I know

Reading Philippians 1:18-26

SPEAKER_00 2:05

that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet yet which shall I choose? I cannot tell. I'm hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again. There's a lot here. This is a very rich scripture. I love every single line. And I honestly, I could take almost every single phrase in here and do an entire. I could preach on this for the next five months. I could break this down real good. I won't do that. But I can. It's rich, it's deep. And it's not deep in a way that there's some sort of hidden or secret meaning. That's not what I mean. When I say deep, I mean you have to imagine this like a tree, a great tree with great deep roots into the earth that stabilizes that tree in every phase of existence for that tree. So when I say deep, that's what I mean, and that's what's available here to us. If we get this into our heart and in our mind, we develop spiritual roots that run deep that help us be who God has made us to be. It's simple, it's natural, and it is available to you right now without any sort of preamble or special education or special process. Paul is a happy guy. He's a happy guy. Somehow, somehow, through everything he's gone through, he's happy. And I just think for our own lives and all of humanity, in general, people have a desire for happiness and for joy. In fact, uh one of the stalwart ideologies uh and underpinnings of the American way of life is

The Limits Of Material Happiness

SPEAKER_00 4:23

a pursuit of happiness. Raise your hand if you've heard that before. The pursuit of happiness. It was pinned by uh, well, I guess it's pinned by Thomas Jefferson, but he wasn't the one who necessarily came up with this. But we believe it as a part of our right as Americans that we have a pursuit for happiness. Now, the people who pinned this, and the people who were uh responsible for creating the United States, which this became a part of who we are, they were deeply Christian people for the most part. There are a few deists, but most of them were deeply Christian. Many of them were Puritans. And so, out of this phrase, you have to understand, they weren't just talking about the physical. Right? You have a right of happiness, and for them that meant spiritual liberty. Okay? And so it's irresponsible on a political science level to separate this pursuit of happiness term and ideology from the spiritual nature of the people who basically created this. We shouldn't do it, but we do. Maybe not we, but capital we, like a grand we. We do this. We want joy, we want happiness for our lives, and so often what we do is we turn this phrase into a pursuit of pers a pursuit of happiness and joy in a very particular and material way. You know what I mean? Right? The American dream has almost nothing to do in modern terms with spiritual stuff and almost everything to do with the right job, the house, the land, the stuff, okay? And somehow we equate this phrase with just that when it was meant to be much more. But I'm here to tell you, based on this scripture, this one and others, that framework, that pursuit of happiness based in simply the material, the physical, is not enough. It will not produce lasting happiness or joy. The simplest framework for lasting joy is a faith in the promises contained in the gospel, that that is eternal life. That's a connection with your creator. That is, that you are made whole and you are made new, that there is eternity waiting for you, and then that is connected with the desire to share that with other people. When you have those things combined and connected in your life, when that's your framework, then you have a joy that is undefeatable. That's a framework for joy that you can build on because nothing else will do that for you. Having no money can't stop your joy when that's your framework. No single person or group of people can stop your joy when Jesus is your framework for joy. When your practical dreams uh uh fall apart and you have failures, right? It still can't stop your joy because the base of your joy is Christ Jesus. And if you got Christ Jesus, no matter what's happening, you have everything you need. Everything you need. We think a job will produce lasting joy. I've been there. We think a certain relationship that we can get, even a good one, will bring lasting, surviving joy. Um, right? But listen, I'm I'm not old enough to forget my teenage, my teenage uh years and my crushes, thinking that, oh, if this girl just liked me, my life would be perfect, and then they like me, and I realize, oh, wait a second, and it doesn't really matter. I don't really like her. You get fixated on these relationships, thinking they will produce a certain result, and sometimes they are good and godly, but they can't produce lasting results. They're blessings, they're from God, but they rot, rust, they can be lost, people pass away, people move on. And so these good things, these blessings, cannot be the framework of joy for your life. Only life in Christ, only Jesus can give you access to a joy that is undefeatable. That's what Paul is talking about here in the past couple of verses, last week and this week. There is a joy in his life that supersedes the physical and the physical reality that he's walking through. He's got an undefeatable joy. He has rejoicing in Christ that supersedes all the periphery stuff that we go through in practical ways. This is how Paul is able to walk through these moments, which that's positivity and rejoicing. His framework starts with Jesus. His life is then laid out as a practical example for the church at Philippi and for us. We can look at him and see how his fixation on Jesus changes his existence, changes his framework for life, and we can basically adopt that for ourselves. Out of this process that Paul is walking through and he's explaining, Paul says some interesting things. As it is in my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that will, that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.

To Live Is Christ

SPEAKER_00 9:31

For to me to live is Christ, to die is gain. What are we talking about here? These are practical changes in our lives that go that go beyond joy. When you are aligned with Christ, it's more than just joy that's developed. When Christ is the center of who you are, there are practical changes in how we deal with things and view things. In life or death, God is going to be honored whenever you are a Christian. In life or death. We don't like thinking about death that way. We just don't. To live is a life proclaiming Christ, to die is to gain Christ in perfection. It's a win-win situation. We've got a runner, folks. Carrie, grab up, get to the keyboard. We'll go old school Pentecostal here if you want to. We need to align our lives with God so that Jesus is everything. And in that transformative position, even death itself is reframed for our lives. So excited. That's what Paul has done in this scripture. That's what Paul is doing. That's how he's living. And then as he's doing this, he presents this choice between life and service to Christ and death in fulfillment of who Christ made him to be. Living is good, but dying is better. I don't quite think we understand that. We're all in the midst of all kinds of things. Oh no. As parents, we're all listen, we're in the midst of things. We're in the midst of stuff. We're stuck watching our kids doing this and doing that. We're trying to make a living. It can be overwhelming. And so we get in our heads and we never ponder death. We never think about death until it until it's right in front of us. And the problem with that is that you're missing an opportunity to reframe your life around something. When you are saved, death is not the end. Death is a reward that grants you access to the most potent thing you're ever going to experience, which is a permanent connection to Christ. Death can't remain the same specter of desperation in our life when you are saved. Theologically, philosophically, relationally, death has to be transformed whenever you are connected with Jesus Christ. This is not fatalism, by the way. There is a threat here, I think, for some people to read this and turn this into some sort of like, well, since nothing can compare to what's next, to heaven, to new creation, to being with Christ, then right now is a waste of time. That's not what this is. That's not what Paul is saying. No, Paul knows the real goal, and he's simply stating a fact to be with Christ is the best thing that you will ever experience. It's better than marriage, it's better than having children, it's better than SEX, it's better than all of that. Christ is better than anything you will ever have here. He's simply stating a fact that we should believe and that we should hold on to. But we don't often, I don't remember this very often that Christ is the end goal. And of all the great things I've experienced in this life, he will trump all of it. So he's just simply stating a fact. But what he's not doing is saying, forget everything else because it can't compare, because he understands there's still good things and good work to be done here. We got to do things here. There's a job here. For him, it's wrapped up in supporting the churches that he has planted, specifically in this letter, the church at Philippi. For us right now, it's clearly we're in a phase where we've got useful and fruitful work to be done with our kids. We've got work to be done with our neighbors. We've got work to be done with our coworkers, we've got things to do that are good, that are fruitful. And so while Christ is the end goal and to die is not the end-all be-all that we want to think it is, we got to remember that there's work to do around us right now. Work is at hand. What does Jesus say? The the harvest is plenty, but the workers are few. There's work out there to be done, and it's good. So get out there, keep your eyes open, and let's get to work. That's what Paul is saying here. Death is amazing, but also living is amazing. Both serve God. Both are what Christ has ordained for us. Let that reframe how we do this. And then at the end of this verse here that we talked about, there is this call of encouragement and emulation. And again, we've already seen Paul do this in this letter. But one reason the church is a together thing and not an at-home thing is this we need to see others serving and loving God in action. We have to see it. I knew this, well, I didn't really know. I met them one time. My grandmother, my Mee Mall, as I call her.

Why Church Must Be Together

SPEAKER_00 14:54

Anyone else got a Mee Mall? No Memoles? What about a Mall? Memals are Mama's in the house. No? Okay. Well, that's okay. Yeah. I might be from the foothills of Appalachia if I've got a Memol and a Mama. My Mee Mall uh had some friends and they were they were believers. But somehow, some way they had developed this, I guess, contrary opinion about church where they thought they were okay by themselves. They didn't go to church ever. They believed in God. They talked about God to my grandmother all the time, but they were never plugged in. And that's just simply not how we were designed. We weren't designed that way. We were designed for togetherness. I gotta see it in action. Listen, growing up, I needed to see pastors and leaders and elders in my church do life. I had to be around them. I needed to see my friends' parents being faithful to God. I had to see that. I needed to see them be faithful. I needed to see them handle problems and failures and letdowns. I needed to see them bounce back when things weren't going right. I needed to hear their testimonies. I needed to see it in action. I still need to see it in you guys and in others that I place myself around. And I've got to be it for other people. Church is a together thing. Because emulation, like Paul is saying, is such a powerful tool. Your personal example following Jesus is going to be such a powerful tool for your family, for your friends, for your coworkers. And this becomes even more poignant when these examples are displayed when things aren't going well. Right? It's almost like whenever things are going wrong, God's work in your life and your ability to submit to him becomes amplified, it becomes magnified for other people to see. But we were designed for community. Adam was created. And soon after God recognized, and he knew beforehand, that it was not good for man to be alone. I have a sneaking suspicion that he let Adam go on his own for a while so that he would recognize he was not complete yet. And then God, at the proper moment, introduced the helper, Eve, the woman. We're not designed to do things alone. It's not an accident that the basis of all of humanity is the uh familial unit father, mother, child, children. And whenever you have a strong family, you can do more as a strong family. In the church world, we are a massive family. It is it's magnified. This is a together thing that we do. The church uh I guess mimics the biological reality of how God created us to be together, and it just sort of, I don't know, it's it's it's the family structure on steroids. We do this thing together, it makes things happen. We can do more together than we can as an individual. I'm gonna return very briefly to this reframing that we see in Paul's life. We're copying Paul, we're emulating Paul. We have to come to a place in our life where people are emulating us. And what we have to realize, again, I'm coming back to this death thing here. We don't like thinking about death, but we have to. And the world is full of all different kinds of ideas of how to deal with death. None of them are good. A lot of religions have come up with ways so that there is a connection to the material that you're carrying on to the next. You know what I'm talking about? Think

How The World Tries To Cope

SPEAKER_00 18:39

of think of the Egyptian pharaohs. Whenever uh Egyptian royalty or upper class people died, they were put in tombs, and in that tomb was filled with treasures that they would need in the afterlife. And so that's how they coped. Death wasn't really the end. It was just gonna be more of the same, and so you needed stuff. That's how they handled it.

unknown 18:57

Right?

SPEAKER_00 18:58

You had you have some philosophies, whether it be uh atheism or stoicism, where it basically you just sort of grit your teeth and bear it. It's gonna, it's just a thing you've got to get through, get over it. Okay, and then you've got other religions. You've got Islam and and and uh uh Shintoism in Japan, where they glorify certain types of death. There are honorable deaths, and that's how they frame it. You're in your life, you're working for an honorable death so that you can be uh glorified if you're uh in Shintoism by your ancestors in Islam. You can you know go get those those uh you know 60 grapes. So that's a fun thing. Uh the same the translation is very confusing. It could be 60 virgins or 60 grapes. Um either way, you know, win-win, I guess. Whatever. Right? And then you have all of these philosophies and more that sort of combine in our Western United States world. Listen, even in the church world, we got people, and I see it every time I have a funeral, and they say when someone dies, oh, angel's gonna go get their wings today. No, that's justn't made up. That's a coping mechanism that's less than what Christianity already offers you. You're not transformed into something you necessarily weren't, you're transformed into the fullness of who you were designed to be. And so we we deal with this, and then we have the atheists who they're they're coping hard. They either cope in negativity or complete blissful positivity, thinking that, well, this is it, some's gonna have a blast, or this is it, some's gonna be a miserable person because there's no way around it. And all of this is encapsulated in how we deal with death. And yet, with Paul, we see this example where Jesus Christ on the inside of him transforms this death. And let me tell you, Christianity offers the best functional response to Christianity that we have. Don't waste it. Don't waste it. Don't spend your life being terrified and anxious about death. I'm not saying you've got to enjoy it. I'm not saying you've got to be a crazy person, but there's no reason not to give God glory in every circumstance, including the toughest one we can face physically, which is death of ourselves and death of a loved one. Paul is living that out as an example. We've got to follow it, which is why we've got to do this thing together, because we've got to pay attention to one another. Paul is calling out to the Philippian church, pay attention to what I'm going through. Pay attention to how I'm acting, how I'm behaving, what I'm saying. See it and follow my lead. Follow my example. I think later in Philippians we'll talk about this. He basically says, follow me as I follow Christ. And it's the same call that we have. Isn't scripture great? Like, that's this is God's living word. We've got it. We're not starting from scratch like the Philippian church is. We can follow this written example. I describe this, I would much rather my kid obey the first time. Here's what I mean by that. We all know that children learn. Through doing sometimes. I wouldn't much rather them learn certain things, like not to run into the road by listening than experience that that's a bad thing to do. I'd rather them know when I say, Don't touch that, that's hot. I'd rather them just listen and not do it. It's the same way sometimes with scripture. I feel like God looks at us and says, You don't have to get wisdom by experiencing things. You can just read my word and follow my word, and you don't have to go through that mess. Anybody know what I'm talking about? God or listen, God creates wisdom out of our negativity and our failures. His grace is great. But the ideal situation is that we read God's word and we just don't do that. Right? We are God's children. I just know he looks at me sometimes and like, I told you, I told you that was a bad idea. Come on. Follow his example. Almost finished. We don't have enough time to do it justice, and we'll come back to this next week, actually. Um, because towards the end there, I was playing around with the sermon, I was doing this, doing that, and I thought, well, I've got to break this thing up, but I did it in reverse order. But in verses 19 and 20, before Paul even starts expressing this hope and this joy, this confidence that he's gonna make it through rejoicing to do the right thing, that he's gonna make it to a positive finish, Paul speaks of basically desiring the prayers of the Philippian church, and he speaks of having the help of the Holy

Prayer And The Spirit’s Help

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Spirit. We'll talk about this next week, but but none of what we have talked about today, this attitude that supersedes the physical, this reframing of even death, this uh any of these positive things of discipleship that we have, none of it is born out of your own ability. You are not enough. You are not good enough. Let me let me rip you down for a second so that God can build you back up. You are sinful, you are broken, you will not do the right thing as hard as you try, you will not be perfectly righteous, you will not be perfectly holy, you do not have what it takes to be who God needs you to be. It all starts with Jesus Christ's salvefic experience in your life and the infilling of the Holy Spirit in your life. So everything we talked about is not on your shoulders so much as it is your ability and willing or your ability and your willingness to say, God, I can't do this, you've got to do it for me. You're not doing this alone. Paul needed the prayer of the Philippian church. He needed the Holy Spirit for what he was about to go through. We need help, and it starts with your relationship with God, it starts with sacrifice, it starts with who Jesus is in your life. You don't have to be born stoic or strong. There are plenty of stoic and strong people who have been through a lot of horrible things, and they did it without Christ. So that's not what we need. You don't have to be born that way. You don't have to be born an optimist by nature. All of it comes from Christ's work in our lives, which is a burden off my shoulders because I am so readily aware sometimes of how much I fall short of being able to do what God has called me to do, and that's okay because that's why He has sent the Holy Spirit for us to work in our lives. You're not in this thing alone. You've got the help you need. God does not ask you to do something, he's also not going to provide the tools to do it. I want to end just by making sure we recognize the power of what Paul is saying here. What is in your life? What is in your life, whenever you have your quiet moments and you're evaluating things, what is in your life that you use to sort of judge, are you happy? Are you successful? Are you thriving? Are you sad? What are the things that are there? How do you how do you view it? Is it family stuff?

What Really Defines Your Joy

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Is it material stuff? Is it this? Is there that? Right now, as I'm I'm talking, zone out for 30 seconds, not 30 seconds, zone out for 10 seconds. And just think about the things that you care about in your life, because I guarantee you it's that those things that end up defining your happiness, they end up defining your version of success, they end up defining uh whether you think that you are being a good person or not. List those things that you judge yourself by. And then be honest with yourself if Christ isn't at the very top. And in fact, if Christ isn't the biggest part of that first, we're getting it wrong. We're getting it wrong. I'm not saying you're getting it wrong right now, but I'm sure some of us have gotten that wrong in the past. And there might be moments, even if you're you're saved and your relationship with God is good, there might be moments in your life where we slip up and we start letting things become more important than they need to be. And we just simply got to reverse this thing back a little bit sometimes and say, I got to get back to the basics. That is, I am a sinner, wretched, broken, messed up, and I am who I am. My joy is wrapped up in who God is, what Jesus did for me, and my hope for the future is wrapped up in what he's doing and my future connection to him in living and in death. Be reframed this morning. And uh at the end of the little papers I gave you, there's some questions. So you can go home and look at those and reflect on those. I think if you do that, it'll help stuff stick in your mind. But we just we just need to let God reframe our lives. In a Western society that is material, in a Western society that doesn't like to talk about death.

unknown 27:49

Right?

SPEAKER_00 27:49

It used to. Here's a little history sociology, sociology lesson, if I can say that word correctly. We live in a world where we shelter people, shelter ourselves from the experience of death. Okay? Back in the day when you had multiple generations living in the same house, it was incredibly common for everybody to experience death in a very real way. And if you're a Christian, it gives framework to what we actually believe. And so now in this day and age, in the framework that we protect ourselves from death, we keep ourselves from experiencing part of what Christianity is all about, that this specter that hangs over humanity's head doesn't have the same impact that it needs to have. I have been blessed, and I say blessed, to have watched my grandmother die in person. I was blessed to, I just missed seeing my dad before he passed away, but I was blessed to see his mortal body where it was. It was a blessing to see that. Was it sad? Yes, but it was a blessing to see it. I was blessed to be able to see and experience and grief my brother. It's a blessing. It's a blessing. Let Christ reframe even the worst thing that we can go through in your life. And when you do that, anything else you go through, you will have a confidence that I'm struggling right now, I'm hurting right now, I don't know how I'm gonna make it. But if I can make it through that, and God can do something through that, what can he do with this? Okay, be encouraged this morning. You're not doing this alone. You have a purpose for your life. Let God reframe everything for you and see what God does with that reframing. He will do something with it. Amen. Can we pray? Heavenly Father, we love you. We thank you. You are great and good and mighty. There is absolutely nothing like you in all of existence. And Lord, I just pray that we submit ourselves to you. That you would be all that we care about. And in that process, we would pick up other preparary cares along the way that are actually magnified

Closing Prayer And Send Off

SPEAKER_00 29:54

because of correct order in our life. And Lord, I pray right now that you would be with each and every one of us and through your Holy Spirit that you would start reframing our life experiences and that you would be glorified through our life experiences. So that in living and in death, it's a win win situation for our lives. We love you, Lord. In Jesus' mighty name we pray. We all said together Amen.