Partakers of Grace

The grace of Christ gives us the affection of Christ for each other.

Our time today in Scripture is going to be difficult at certain points. So let’s open in prayer. And so, Lord, we ask this morning as we head into your word, that You would open our hearts, keep us tender, hearing, willing to be challenged by your word. Build us up, Lord, and build us together, Lord, for your glory. In Christ. Amen.

Well, the apostle Paul who wrote the letter to the Philippians that we have been looking at together had me thinking a lot this week about what creates love between people. Now, I don’t mean the sort of romantic love between a husband and wife, although the kind of love that we’re going to talk about if a husband and wife will receive it, it will actually cause them to have a deeper relationship. But I’m talking about the kind of affection that people have when they really deeply love their friends, like brothers and sisters. Of course, we find that in the church, too. People who are bound by the Holy Spirit, who have this Spirit dwelling within them, will have a relationship that is stronger than any human relationship. But you can actually find the kind of love between people, between friends. You don’t have to go to the church to find that. You can find that in the world as well, outside of the church. I’ve found it in lots of different kinds of communities. You probably have to. I found it in theater communities. I found it on sports teams. Sometimes you’ll even find it among neighbors, people in a sort of a cul-de-sac or live on a street together. People you grew up around, people who live a long time. I know this is increasingly not the way people live anymore. People move around so much, but a lot of times you’ll find it between neighbors, too. Rachel and my kids grew a very special bond with the people who used to live across the street from us in Detroit. It was an older couple and they had a dog named Lucy, and Lucy was about this big. And my daughter actually had a job. She had a dog walking business for one customer – Lucy. That was it. And she walked. Lucy. My job was any time I was out in front of my house, if I saw Lucy get out and start running, I was to track them down because those people were never going to catch her. So I would run and I would go get Lucy. And over time, this bond between our family and theirs just grew surprisingly strong. The husband got sick while we were moving here to Rochester, and in the process, even when we were back selling our home, we found out about this and we were able to go over there. We got a chance to go over there and pray with her. Sammy actually led the way on praying for this woman in her moment of need. And when her husband passed just a few weeks ago, Rachel was able to call and to bring some comfort.

To me, that’s a surprising level of bonding with just some people that happen to live across the street. I’ve been thinking about this sort of bonding and love for each other this week, because in the passage that we’re going to look at this morning, Paul talks about where that sort of love comes from. He’s going to give us the gospel origins of this deep, brotherly and sisterly affection that forms between people. And I believe it is part of God’s common grace to all people, that this forms imperfectly outside of a relationship with Christ. But when you know Jesus, this sort of love is not only deeper, but its roots are in something far greater than just feelings. The grace of Christ gives us the affection of Christ for each other. Paul is going to show us that genuine brotherly love comes from the relationship we have with Jesus and also from the shared experience that we have together when we live and serve in this world for Jesus. As I said before, this can be experienced by people who don’t know Christ because we’re all built to need this. We all want this sort of relationship with other people, and so we create imperfect copies of that kind of love with others. But the genuine source of brotherly love and sisterly love is Jesus. He’s the source. And those of you who want to experience it will find it by being partakers of grace with your church family.

We’re going to look at just two verses this morning, Philippians 1:7-8. And as I read these, I want you to not only note how Paul feels, but why he feels this way. ‘It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the Gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.’ Now, this is an interesting argument that Paul makes. He makes a very interesting argument here. In verse 7, he’s not just telling the Philippians how he feels. He is telling them that it is right that he feels this way. You see that? He’s not just saying, this is how I feel. He’s saying this is right. He just got done talking about how they’ve been his partners in the gospel and how his joy is just overflowing at the thought of how thankful he is for them. And now he’s saying that he holds the Philippine church in his heart. Everywhere he goes, he carries this church around in his heart. And it says that he yearns for them, meaning he wants to be with them. He wants to be back. He’d love to be able to come and visit with them and be together again. And he doesn’t just say, this is how I feel about you guys. You’re my BFFs, right? He isn’t just saying something about his emotions. He’s saying it is objectively correct for me to feel this way about you. I don’t just love you. My love for you is completely correct. The capital of Minnesota is Saint Paul, correct? I love you in my heart.. It’s that kind of fact that he’s saying. Some of you unmarried guys are dating right now. And I want to recommend to you that you do not put it like this when you ask a girl out, please don’t do that. “I like you; and it’s correct that I like you” is not going to go the way you hope. All right. What is Paul saying? He’s saying that his feelings about this church that he loves, match up correctly with the gospel; he’s saying it matches up with the way it’s supposed to objectively look between brothers and sisters in Christ who are partnering together. His emotions match up perfectly with what partnership in the Gospel is supposed to be. See, partnering in God’s mission together should create a genuine love and deep affection with your brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said this to his disciples in John Chapter 13, he instructs them, and he says: ‘a new commandment I give to you that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ So, Jesus said that the mark that will distinguish a true disciple of Christ from anyone else who doesn’t follow Jesus or who falsely claims to follow Jesus but doesn’t actually follow him, is the love that that person will have for other disciples. In that sense, it’s the mark of discipleship authenticity. The love here is a command. But when you obey that command and love your fellow followers of Jesus, you’re not just emoting. You’re not just talking about your feelings. You are correctly displaying the spiritual bond that is between brothers and sisters in Christ. Deep, abiding love and genuine care for each other are the correct feelings that come from genuine unity in Christ. And if it’s not there, then there’s something wrong. If you don’t have it. There’s something wrong. It’s not just unfortunate when people in the church don’t get along. It’s unbiblical for them not to get along. Let me tease out what Paul is saying here in verse 7. Let me just sort of build this out a little bit.

If it is right for him to hold his partners in the Gospel close to his heart, then it is wrong for him not to. It would be wrong for him not to love this way. I’m pretty amazed at the lack of love that we often find between people who are supposed to be brothers and sisters in Christ. I’m shocked by it. Have you ever known two Christians who somehow missed the affection step? They got the gospel. They understand the gospel. They profess faith in Jesus. But somehow, other things were elevated above the deep, loving relationship that that gospel creates. That would exemplify that gospel. They missed that somehow. I’ve known people who seem to love Jesus, but who left the church and their brothers and sisters because they changed the music on Sunday morning. Imagine that. Walk away from relationships; loving, deep gospel, unifying relationships for something like that. There are some in the church who have simply adopted a worldly, secular way of viewing relationships. They’ve decided that they don’t have to be loving, or at least they can pick and choose whom they’re going to love. Paul is saying that being a partner with these Philippians, being in partnership with these Philippians means his affection for them correctly matches the objective truth that they are bonded by Christ. That’s why in chapter 4, when he speaks about the individuals in the church, he tells his friend, who he names true companion (something of a nickname), he says to him, to help these two ladies who are fighting, Euodia and Syntyche, he tells them, help them to agree in the Lord, he says.

He calls both these ladies out because even though they’re partners in the Lord, even though they have been bonded by the same Spirit, they don’t have the affection for each other that they’re supposed to have to match up with that partnership. And it is objectively sinfully wrong for them not to have that bond. More on this in a minute. Let’s look closely at this partnership. Paul says that this love he has for the Philippians comes from the fact that they are partakers of grace with him. They’re partakers of grace. That’s the phrase. Now, when we hear that word grace, usually what we immediately think of is the unmerited salvation that we have in Christ. Right? You hear grace. You think God’s grace for me. And that is certainly broadly in view here. Paul certainly sees himself and the Philippians as sharing the salvific grace of God that he has given to them. But the way he uses grace here is just a little bit more narrow than that, because he says that they partake of grace with him in his imprisonment, literally his chains. That’s what he that’s the actual word. They’re partakers of his chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. So Paul says when the Philippians share that with him those two things, that they are sharing God’s grace with him. They have a joint gift from God that they are sharing with each other.

Do you remember when you were a kid and sometimes your parents would get you or a gift and it would have all you and all of your other siblings on the tag. Do you remember that? You get it? Like, I have just one brother. And so we would get like a movie or a video game or something and it would have both of our names on it. And the intention was, I don’t know why we did this. It been so easy just for one person to do it. But for some reason we both had to open at the same time. Do you remember this? You’d start on a corner. Like it’s this big, right? And you’re just like, I don’t know how to do this, right? And you’d unpack and you try to unwrap that gift together. One gift, one giver. Given to both of us to share together. So Paul says, Philippians, look what God gave us by his grace: my chains and the defense and confirmation of the Gospel. That’s our shared gift together from God. Now, if you wrestle with that like I do, you’re thinking, but how is that a gift? How is that a gift for anybody? The chains are cutting into Paul’s wrists when he moves. There’s a trial that’s going to happen at the end of those chains. He will drag those chains down before magistrates to both defend and give confirmation, give evidence for this gospel hope that he has.

And yet here’s Paul calling this imprisonment a gift. Isn’t Grace supposed to be a good thing? Isn’t God’s grace supposed to be good? I mean, even if we’re talking about a gift from God, that isn’t the saving grace of Christ, you’d still think that the grace that we’re talking about would be a good thing, right? Something that we would enjoy. And you hear Paul is calling imprisonment and trial a shared gift with his fellow Philippians. What’s going on?

Well, the answer to this is the key actually to the entire letter; it’s the reason I entitled this series to live is Christ. We’re going to revisit this theme over and over again. There’s a profound shift in values when you understand the gospel. When you grab hold of and embrace and begin to embody the gospel truth, there’s a shift in values when you put your faith in Christ. What you want for yourself, for your family and for the world is different now than it used to be before you knew Jesus. You want something different. Before Jesus, what I wanted more than anything was to be happy and fulfilled with stuff. To be rich with worldly things, to be honored by other people. That’s what I wanted. Before Jesus, I wanted the world to go my way. I wanted people to listen to me. I wanted everyone to think like me. I wanted everyone to do my bidding. I wanted everybody to make the choices that I would make or think that they should make. But after Jesus, after the recognition of my sinful heart and the salvation of Christ that He’s given me at the cost of His own life, that He came and He died so that I could live after that. I want new things. After Jesus, I still want to be happy and fulfilled, but that only comes for living for Christ. I still want things, but they’re the things above, as Colossians 3 puts it. Put your mind on the things above. After Jesus, I only want Christ to be honored. That’s where my honor has shifted. I still want honor, but not for me. I want honor for Christ. I desire honor, but it’s honor for my Savior. All my effort is to lift Him up because He’s greater than me. And I need to become less. So with that value change, I begin to look at problems differently. I now look at them through a lens asking the question, how, in this trial, with this problem, with this issue that has come up, how will Christ be honored and the Gospel proclaimed and God glorified and my heart changed through this trial? I don’t want just the trial to go away. I want to know how Christ will be honored in it and how I will be changed to be more like Jesus because of it. Because now that’s what I want. And increasingly, it’s all I want.

That’s how Paul can see his chains and his trial as an extension of God’s grace. That’s how he can see it that way. You can see it as an extension of grace into his own life and into the lives of his partner church. He’s thinking, God has given me the opportunity to suffer these chains so that I can stand before Roman officials and defend and confirm the gospel. Christ will be proclaimed and honored, and we get to partner together to share that gift, that gracious gift. Philippian Church. Paul’s not saying I have to do this, guys. It is terrible. I have to do this. I want you to know this is really, really tough on me, but I have to go through this. He’s not saying that. He’s saying, I get to do this with you by my side. Isn’t that a great gift, Church? And you might be thinking, Kyle, I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like God is near me and loves me when things are good. And I’m happy. And that’s when I feel God’s grace. But when things are bad, I think God has left me. Or that He’s mad at me because of my sin. And I would say to you two things, Christian. One, cut that out. There is no thinking more antithetical to the gospel than that sort of thinking. And two, the only way you’re ever going to escape that worldly way of seeing God is to have your values changed. You have to have your values changed. You need to see that suffering is one of the ways God accomplishes his mission. Let Jesus’ cross teach you that. That’s how he accomplishes his mission. The greatest act of grace ever was the willingness of Jesus to suffer. And I know this is counterintuitive, but here’s where God’s grace gets really sweet. This is where it gets really sweet. When you suffer in partnership with your fellow Christians, your love for them is going to increase too. That’s why Paul is so excited about the Philippians. They’re sharing the grace of this suffering with him. They sent him a support gift so that he could survive and stand trial. Because when he defends and declares the gospel, so will the Philippians. They’re defending and confirming the grace of God too. It’s amazing how when you go through trials with brothers and sisters with the same gospel values, you’re drawn closer to each other.

I’ll give you an example of this, but I warn you, right up in front, this example, even when I was thinking of it this week, makes me emotional. So bear with me on this. In March 2020, when COVID hit and the world shut down, pastors across the country really did not know what to do. Did you notice that? We really did not know. There was no playbook for U.S. churches that can’t meet together. There’s a lot other places around the world. They got this down because they often can’t meet together. But in the U.S., man, we didn’t know. 99% of what we do requires putting people into the same room. Seriously. Most ministries bringing people together into the same room to do something. What happens when you can’t do that? Well, I was leading a little church of about 100 with limited resources. Here’s the thing. I’m just a pastor with a bunch of books. That’s really all I am. I’m just a pastor with a bunch of books and a solid grasp of pneumatology was not going to get us through this. You know what I’m saying? But I had a buddy I had a buddy named John. John directed our worship. He also just happened to have a background in video development and a solid grasp of sound engineering. And every week he would faithfully set up everything necessary to record himself playing worship and reading scriptures. And he’d set it up so that I could do the announcements and preach a sermon. And he listened to my dumb jokes and he’d stay engaged with the sermons so that I wasn’t all alone in that room. And then he’d take it all home and he would spend hours editing, putting in slides so that people could sing while he played at home and he would render video. And together, by God’s grace, we produced what was necessary to keep our little church united through that.

It was a very hard time for churches, but it was a wonderful time for growing in Christ. And what I learned is what it means to have a brother in Christ side by side with me in partnership for the Gospel. That’s where brotherly affection comes from. That’s where it’s rooted. The purest form of community is the kind of community everybody longs for, and it comes from unity in Christ. If you’re looking for the antidote to the problem of hatred and lovelessness, you will find it here. Verse 8: ‘For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus’. It doesn’t get any stronger than that. I dare you to find another place in Scripture where love is stated so boldly and so plainly. If God Himself were to do a printout showing the level of affection that Paul has for this church, it would show a Jesus Christ level of affection. He is comparing his love for them to the level of love that Jesus Himself has shown to them, to the Philippians. He’s taking the same level of affection Christ showed to sinners who are saved by grace, the love that took Jesus to the cross, he’s taking that love, and he is equating it to the level of love that he has for this church.

Does that seem a little bit over the top? It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. That should sound right to you. That kind of love for one another, that should sound correct. The level of love for every person in this church should sound to our ears perfectly right and normal when we say it’s the level of Christ Jesus. Because think about it. If following our master Jesus means becoming more like Him every single day, which it does, of course, that’s where we’re growing. With the Holy Spirit changing our heart to be conformed to His. Then, of course, our level of affection for each other is going to look more and more like Jesus all the time, right? It’s always going to look more and more every day like Jesus. You should be more in love with your fellow brothers and sisters in Christ today than you were last year. You should be more in love with your fellow followers of Jesus here at Calvary Church today than you were last week. That’s how we grow. There should be an ever increasing yearning in your heart to love each other, so sacrificially it begins to seem like you would die for each other. Jesus said greater love has no one than this. That someone lay down his life for his friends. So who do we have to love like that? Who do we have to love like that? You might be drawing a very small circle in your life going, yeah, these people, definitely, absolutely. But who do we have to love? Because I think you would agree that not everyone is equally lovable. Some people are just more loveable than others. Surely there is an inner circle where we love intensity with the intensity of Jesus, and then there’s an outer ring of people we sort of love, but not that much, right? Remember when they used to make you give a valentine to everybody in the class? Remember that? Right? Some people got a message. Some people just got your name right? It’s got to be like that. There’s a little word Paul keeps repeating here. He repeats it three times in two verses. Any time you see this much repetition, you know that the Scripture is trying to tell you something. It’s teaching. He’s making a point. Do you see the word? It’s the word all. Do you see it? It’s right for me to feel this way about you all. You are all partakers with me of grace. I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. Without distinction, without preference, without sorting the ones who are easy to love from those who are difficult, without elevating leaders over everyone else, without focusing on those who have things in common with me, Paul says, my affection for everyone in this church is at Christ Jesus levels.

I love you all. They are all his partners in the Gospel. They are all partakers with him in this gracious gift of suffering for the sake of Christ. Church, you know what we have to have to offer the world. Do you know what it is that we have to offer the world? We have the answer to the question “How do I really love someone?”. That’s the question that everyone is asking that we have the answer to: how can I build a bond of affection that will overcome the sinfulness of this world? And then this world just tells me to divide from everyone. How do I do that? The answer: trust in the one who came to secure unbreakable love. We find the answer to that need in the one who came and demonstrated perfect, unbreakable love. And so you look to that one. You learn from that when you are filled with a spirit who will change your heart every day, degree by degree, to emulate that kind of Christ love. With your brothers and sisters in Christ, you’re going to achieve a level of affection that will surpass every other type of love on Earth. And with those you love who don’t know Jesus, who you look at in the world and you say, I don’t have that bond with them. I am not united with them in Christ. It might just be this level of sacrificial, unbreakable affection that will be the tool that God will use to open that person’s eyes so that they will come to know your Savior, too. They will see a level of affection they can’t find anywhere else because it doesn’t exist anywhere else. And they will know that we are disciples because of our love for one another. And because of the one who loved us first.

I said we’d return to the question of what to do if we find that our level of affection for our brothers and sisters in Christ is incorrect. If we find out that it’s wrong. That it doesn’t match the gospel and reflect the love of Christ. What do we do if our affection is limited and doesn’t encompass all? Can a church community continue to do its work? Can a church community continue to do its work if it’s not functioning with affection that matches the gospel? Not well. And not obediently. It’s clear. God knows that problems are always going to arise. But it’s also just as clear, just as clear in Scripture that when those problems arise, it is on the church to make sure that they do not continue, so that Christ’s love will continue to mark his church out from the world. Salt that loses its saltiness isn’t good anymore. A church that loses its love isn’t good anymore.

I know this church went through a season of pain. Followed by a season of COVID. And I know that even before that old hurts and petty differences and difficult relationships have been allowed to continue. The love everyone here has for every member of this church must be borne of the affection that Jesus has for us. Not the model set by the world with its inviting, and with its bitterness, and with its talking past each other and not talking to each other. It is my hope and my goal that when the people of Rochester mentions Calvary, and when they speak the name of our church, my hope is the first thing that they think of on their mind is, boy do those people sure love each other. I might not agree with anything they believe, but they sure love each other. And they sure do love us. And so Church, if as I have been speaking today, the Lord has brought to mind some relationship that you know does not have the level of affection that matches the gospel we profess. You need to stop at nothing to correct that problem. You need to correct it. Passive approaches to bitterness are not available to us. We have not been given license to approach these things however we want. Christ took sin and salvation seriously. He actively came. He actively came and died that we would be reconciled to God. That’s what love looks like. You need to go actively and do whatever it takes to make your love for your brother or your sister, correct. And if you need my help doing that, come find me. Let’s pray.