Feb 18 2010
A New Heart (Series on Philippians)
I heard recently that while the percentage of people who currently reach the age of 100 is about 5% of the population, nearly 50% of those who are now teenagers will live beyond a hundred years. There’s no doubt that our life span is increasing. We’re all likely to live longer than our parents or grandparents. That then raises the question, “Will our lives be worth living?”
Paul never thought that the prolonging of life was a great advantage. In fact the opposite: he saw death as bringing a far greater reward than anything in this life. Yet at the same time, he saw that Jesus Christ had made this life eminently worth living. There is an amazing sense of joy overflowing through the pages of this letter, even though it’s written from a goal cell as Paul awaits trial and possible execution over false charges brought against him by his opponents. He wants his readers to enjoy life in Christ, despite their external circumstances, to grow in their knowledge of him, and in holiness, and in the fruit of righteousness.
Our focus today is on the new heart that Christ brings into our life.
- A Heart of confidence
- A heart of compassion, and
- A Heart of concern for Christian growth
Let me tell you the story of Alma and Steve. They were a couple from England who had settled in South Africa, in Benoni, in fact. They were not married to each other. Steve had never married and Alma was widowed with 3 boys in their late twenties. Steve and Alma had a daughter of their own – she was 4 years old.
They owned a pet shop specializing in aquarium fish. Alma also grew medicinal herbs on their small holding and operated as a kind of medicine woman in the area.
One day Alma walked into the school hall where we were having a church service. She had a kind of glum look on her face, and smelled of tobacco smoke and human sweat. Her hair was untidy and her clothes needed a good wash.
She didn’t have a clue about church. She didn’t know when to sit and when to stand. She was uncomfortable singing – and we sang a lot, and with gusto. But she listened with deep intent to the sermon. After the service she shot out before anyone could talk to her.
The next week she was back and again she left in a hurry. This carried on for a couple of weeks, then she brought Steve with her and the little girl went to Sunday school. They stayed afterwards and she pounced on me. “Tell me more about this God stuff” she said. We went to her house and after scooting the 7 huge Alsatians off the lounge furniture and gingerly taking my seat amidst the mounds of dog hair and an overpowering doggy smell, we began to talk.
To cut a long story short, their life, like their personal hygiene, garden and house, was in a mess. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. They were in huge financial difficulties. Although the house and car was paid off and they had thousands of valuable tropical fish – they had barely enough money from their shop takings to buy dog food, cigarettes and bread – in that order.
I spoke to them about Jesus and the Christian life. They hung onto every word – they had never heard it before.
In the end they gave their lives to Jesus, were baptized in their swimming pool (once it had been cleaned) and were rid of the demons that had come into their life through their involvement in an occultic organisation.
It was the most amazing transformation that I had ever seen. They cleaned themselves up, tidied their garden and house and seemed to have permanent smiles on their faces. And, oh yes, they also got married and little Emma was baptized.
It was an extraordinary display of God’s power. We can have A Heart of confidence in the power of God to change lives.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians he greets the church in the customary way and tells them of his thankfulness to God for their life as Christians. He says: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.”
The founding of the Church in Philippi is a great story of God’s power at work. Paul and Silas, with Timothy and Luke tagging along, came to Philippi after Paul had seen a vision of a man of Macedonia begging them to come and help them. Philippi was a Roman colony, perched in the mountain pass that linked Asia and Europe, so it was quite a strategic city. But because it was primarily a Roman colony there was no synagogue there. So on the Sabbath they went outside the city to the river where they thought there might have been a place of prayer. There they found a group of women gathered, one of them being Lydia, a wealthy merchant woman from Thyatira, who was a worshipper of God. We’re told in Acts 16 that the Lord opened her heart to the message of the gospel and she became a Christian. She then invited them to her house, and effectively began the first Church there in Philippi. So here was a wealthy Greek woman who became one of the first Church planters. But then as they started moving around the city, a slave girl began to follow them. She had an evil spirit by which she predicted the future. She wasn’t your modern day fortune teller. She really could tell the future. And she started following Paul and the rest around shouting out “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you how to be saved.” Well, eventually Paul got so sick of this that he turned around and commanded the evil spirit to come out of her. And she was healed. So there was now a rich merchant woman and a slave girl who had been touched by the gospel.
But then the owners of the slave girl, who’d been charging people to have their fortunes told started a riot and had Paul and Silas arrested for throwing the city into an uproar and for advocating customs unlawful for Romans to accept or practice. So Paul and Silas were thrown into prison.
Well, in prison with their feet in stocks, they began praying and singing hymns to God. They’d seen God’s power change the direction of Lydia’s life, they’d seen the slave girl freed from her bondage to an evil spirit and, like Steve and Alma, nothing was going to stop them praising God, not even being chained up in a dungeon. But there was more of God’s power at work for them to experience. As they were singing an earthquake began to shake the very foundations of their prison. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose. The jailer was about to commit suicide rather than risk being thrown into jail in the place of his escaped charges, but Paul chose to stay and help him, rather than escape and take his freedom. The response of the jailer was immediate: “What must I do to be saved?” Paul told him “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, along with your whole household.” And so he and his whole family were baptized. So the Church in Philippi had begun, with a rich merchant woman, a poor slave and a middle class prison officer who all experienced the power of God in different but equally effective ways.
So as Paul writes to the Philippians he can say with great assurance: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” He remembers the way God’s work in them began, in the changed lives, the changed hearts of those first few believers, and he continues to have confidence that God will bring the work he began in them to a conclusion on the day when Christ returns.
Before Steve and Alma became Christians they had no concept of the love of God. They hadn’t known anything of the work of Jesus Christ. But God touched their heart in a real and decisive way. They came to discover that God has the power to change lives. It was a real privilege for me to see it happen. It was exciting to see them coming to know Christ in a real and personal way. And it was all due to the work of God in their life changing them and making them new.
That’s the sort of experience that Paul is looking back on as he writes of his confidence that God will bring his work in them to its completion.
This new life also creates in us A heart of compassion
The experience Paul had in sharing the gospel with the church in Philippi left him with a deep affection for them, and vice versa. He says “I long for you with the affection of Christ Jesus.” Paul was no softie. He was as tough as anything when it came to facing opposition to the gospel. In fact in Philippi, when the authorities released him, he didn’t just walk away as you or I might have. No, he pointed out to them that he and Silas were both Roman citizens who had been publicly beaten without trial, quite illegally, and demanded what amounted to a public apology from the magistrates. So he could be tough when the occasion warranted it. But he also had a softer side – he showed affection for this church.
Jesus also was hard when it came to those who refused to listen to God speaking through him. Some of the harshest words in the New Testament in fact appear on the lips of Jesus. But he also loved those he came to save with a life-giving love. Paul exhorts us to have the mind of Christ in the way we relate to others, but he shows us here right at the start that he has that mindset himself.
He longs for them with the compassion, or affection, of Christ Jesus. And what is it he longs for? That their love “may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” He wants their love to overflow the way his love for them is overflowing.
This isn’t some gushy, sentimental sort of love. The love he’s talking about overflows with knowledge and insight.
A knowledge of God perhaps. A knowledge born out of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. A knowledge that, ultimately, comes from God’s Holy Spirit. A knowledge of what pleases God.
And how do we find on that knowledge? By being students of God’s word so we grow in our grasp of the truth, in our grasp of the gospel. But it is also a knowledge of humanity. Of the weaknesses and foibles of our fellow Christians.
A knowledge that helps us to empathise with one another, to make allowances for the failings of our fellow mortals. A knowledge of what might be helpful to another person in a given situation.
That seems to be the idea behind the word insight. Insight is that faculty which allows our love to be directed in a way that’s right for a particular situation, or for a particular person. Insight allows us to see through the obvious or the superficial to the deeper significance of what’s below the surface, to get to the root of the matter, so we can know how to act in the most loving way. Again this is something the Holy Spirit gives us as we ask him for it.
Finally then, this new life gives us a Heart of concern for Christian growth
Paul’s prayer is that their love would overflow in knowledge and insight in both the personal and global sphere.
It’s personal because his aim is that they might each be found to be pure and blameless in the day of Christ. That their overflowing love for God will result in lives that are kept pure and without sin. But it’s also global, because the result of such purity of life will be that they’ll reap a great harvest of righteousness.
It seems to me that when Paul talks about a harvest of righteousness, he’s looking beyond our personal righteousness, to the righteousness that will spring up in the hearts of others who see us and are drawn to the gospel like a moth to a flame. It’s as though the love we show becomes a seed that’s planted in the hearts of those around us.
It’s like a contagious disease. The sort of life he’s talking about, you see … a life characterised by love overflowing in knowledge and insight and purity and righteousness, is a very attractive thing. People love being near people whose character exhibits that sort of love. Just think how effective we’d be in spreading the gospel if our whole life was characterised by that sort of love!
Do you ever pray that sort of prayer for the people of Merredin? Do you ever pray that sort of prayer for me, or the other leaders of the congregation? Let me suggest that it would be a great thing to pray every day for those named on the front cover of the Newsletter. And for those named on the Joys and Concerns page and for those celebrating birthdays and wedding anniversaries and for the two families that we pray for anyway each week.
Pray that their love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help them determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ they may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
Paul prays with confidence and joy because he knows that in the end, it’s God who determines our future, not our outward circumstances or the various schemes of human beings. He knows that our place in God’s family has come about by God’s grace alone and that God’s grace is sufficient to keep us there, that God can be trusted to see us through. He prays out of the love he has for them, that the same love, the love of Christ would flow out of their hearts and fill them to overflowing. And he prays in confidence because he knows that the harvest of righteousness that he’s asking for itself comes through Jesus Christ by the grace of God.
We too are recipients of God’s saving grace. Each one of us is here because God has worked a miracle in our lives. None of us would have chosen Christ if God hadn’t first chosen us.
So let Paul’s prayer be ours as well: that our love would overflow in knowledge and full insight so we’d be able to determine what’s best, so we might be found pure and blameless in the day of Christ and so our lives might bear a harvest of righteousness, not only in our own lives but in the lives of those we influence by our love, for the glory and praise of God.