Partners in the Gospel

If we are going to succeed at all as the church we’re called to be, it will have to be as partners in the gospel.

In the acclaimed film There Will Be Blood, there’s a quiet campfire monologue when the main character, a character named Daniel Plainview, explains what drives him inside. Now, if you haven’t seen the movie, all you need to know is that the main character is an oil baron who will stop at nothing to become famous and powerful just as much as he possibly can be. This has made him a very cold and calculated person, and for much of the movie, you don’t know what motivates him. Don’t worry, this is a spoiler free illustration. But near the middle of the movie, he’s sitting by this campfire. He turns to the man that is sitting next to him and he says, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed’. That’s a pretty great line, I got to say; that’s a pretty great line. He goes on to say that he hates pretty much everybody and he hopes to earn enough money someday to move away from everybody else and just be by himself completely. He would have loved Covid, I think. Actually, he’d like that. The rest of the movie shows just how destructive that view is. Which, by the way, I appreciate, because according to Scripture, that philosophy is the opposite of the Gospel. And I love it when Hollywood accidentally lines up with scripture. I love when that happens.

What we learn in the Bible is just how much God has designed us to need each other. There is not a single human being on this planet that was designed to be alone. And more than that, not only aren’t we designed to be alone, we are not designed to succeed on our own. We have a  tendency in our culture, especially, to focus on individual success, as if somehow that was what success is and what it should look like, that it should be individuals who succeed. But any successful person will tell you, if they’re humble enough, that they didn’t get this done by themselves at all. That there’s an army of people that always stands behind any successful endeavor. And usually the number of people behind that success are too numerous to name. And that’s because we are designed by our creator to need each other. That’s built right into who we are as people. If you’ve ever heard someone say, I don’t need anyone, that’s because they’ve been hurt by people. That’s why they’re saying, I don’t I don’t need anybody. They’ve been hurt by somebody. That’s not a statement of fact. That’s a statement of feeling. The fact is we do need each other because we’ve been designed to rely on each other, not just for our own personal welfare, but to accomplish anything in life. We’ve been designed to need each other. There’s no place this truth is more visible than within the mission of the church, which makes sense because the church is the community that is seeking to live out God’s design for us more so than any other community. We’ve been given the task of accomplishing the mission that Jesus gave to us. Last week we talked about what it means to be a servant in relationship with Jesus, to be to be a servant of Jesus. He commands, we obey. He sets the course, we raise the sail. He’s the head, we’re the body. We go where he tells us to go. Paul understood this community design very well. He recognized and he celebrated the idea that if the church was going to be a success in God’s eyes, it was going to require the strongest possible bonds of partnership.

And that’s where Paul opens up the body of his letter to the Philippians. He is incredibly grateful and happy that his ministry is intimately tied to the Philippian church partnership that he has. And I want us to explore and celebrate with him what it means for us to live in partnership with each other as a church this morning. If we’re going to succeed at all as a church that we’re called to be, it will be because we are partners in the gospel. I’m really excited to share this passage with you because I have been reading this passage for many years now on mornings when we accept new members into the church. I think this is one of the best places to go. I don’t know of a better place in Scripture to talk about God’s vision for gospel partnership.

So first, we’re going to see how Paul talks about his joy. He’s going to become very expressive with his joy. And then he looks at his relationship with the Philippians, which is the source of his joy. But he first looks backward into their history together, and then he looks forward to what will come. And so we’re going to do the same thing. Let’s let me read this passage to you:

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Now. That’s how you open a letter. If you got that letter, you’d be so excited. Wow. Paul is really happy. This is this is going to be a good letter. This is the first example of why this letter is called The Letter of Joy, Paul’s Letter of Joy. He just has this intense bond with this church that he planted in Philippi. Now, I’ve got to tell you, as a guy who has planted a church before, there is a bond there that is just uniquely personal. It’s really hard to describe the relationship you have with people when you plant a church with. If any of you have ever been involved in a church plant, you know what I’m talking about here. I think it’s because you work so hard together to create this community and you experience so many wins and so many losses together. Now, every church has these wins and losses, but there’s just something about starting a new ministry together that really creates an intimate relationship. And Paul clearly had that here with the Philippian church. What’s surprising about the way he opens this letter, though, is the circumstances under which he is writing it. Now, we’re going to have to keep reminding ourselves of this as we go through this, because throughout the letter he’s going to be talking about different things. We’ve got to remember the context. Paul is sitting in jail right now. He’s sitting in jail, probably a Roman jail. He’s waiting for his his trial. He’s not he’s got kicked back in an Adirondack chair, you know, sipping a big drink with a wedge, a pineapple in it, enjoying his retirement from ministry. That is not what he’s doing. He’s older now, but he’s not kicking back. His ministry is going to end with an execution at some point, probably pretty soon in his life. And he knows that. And yet here he is, beaming with joy at the thought of this church that he loves. And the way he expresses that joy is pretty important. ‘I thank my God in all my remembrance of you.’

Now, to understand this, you need to know what prompted this letter in the first place. There’s a reason that Paul is writing. Paul just got a financial gift from the Philippian church. They sent a guy named Epaphroditus to come to him and bring him some money so that he could be cared for. Back then, if you were in jail and you didn’t have someone outside of prison supplying money for your needs, you just didn’t eat. And so Epaphroditus brings him this money. He’s going to be mentioned later in the letter, but I have to mention the context here so that you know why Paul is thanking God for them, and Paul gets this gift and he becomes very thankful. But notice he’s not thankful just to the Philippians. He’s thankful to his God for the Philippians.

This is an example of what I am going to call Weird Vertical Christian Thankfulness. It’s weird in the sense that this is just not the way people think people. We just don’t do this in our culture. We do not thank people this way. Most thanking happens person to person. And by the way, I’m not arguing against that. You should continue to thank people; don’t be like I don’t thank anybody anymore because Kyle said not to. Keep doing that, keep thanking other people. But there’s a weird second way that Christians are thankful and that only Christians can be thankful.

We go vertical with our thanks. We go higher than the person, to the God who designed that person, and we thank God for His goodness to us through that person. That’s how we thank people. This is what Jesus described when he told us to do our good works in such a way that people would see our good deeds and praise our father who is in heaven. What Paul is doing here is thanking God for bringing a church like the Philippians into his life. Thank you, God, that this church is a part of my life to care for my needs. And so when he remembers them, when he pictures their faces, when he’s thinking about their sacrifice, he praises their father for creating and calling them to such a wonderful group of Christian men and women. Thank you for forming this community who can care. I got a sense of that when I heard about the Children’s Heart Project again this morning. This community of people coming around and reaching out to God and praising God. That’s what we’re called to be. Why? Because God then gets the glory. God gets the glory. Paul knows their generous hearts are only generous, that the only reason these Philippians are the way that they are is because they are filled with grace that God has given to them. They’re changed by God. He knows that he’s been blessed through them because they were blessed by Jesus.

So when he prays for them, he also thanks God for them. Isn’t that weird? That’s a weird thing to do in our in our culture. Normal thankfulness requires just thanking the person. We give that person credit for what they’ve done. We do that. And again, keep doing that. Keep saying thank you. But because of our spiritual perspective, because we have a bigger worldview, a bigger perspective on what’s actually happening in the world, we can go beyond this surface level, thank you, to pray and thank God for that person. When you are consistently going to the Lord in prayer and in worship, thanking God for the blessings of the Christian community in your life, you know what happens? You’re filled with joy. You’re filled with joy.

Now what exactly is Paul thanking God for when he thanks God for the Philippians? Well, first he looks backward. Because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now, you can see where Paul is on his timeline. He’s looking back to the day that he came into town and he started making disciples. And he’s looking all the way to this point now in his life when he’s sitting in jail. It includes the time that Paul spent directly with the Philippians sharing the gospel and planting the church. But it spans all the way to their time apart and the continued prayer and support that that have been exchanged with him in his journeys. Now, that represents roughly 13 years of partnership. Roughly 49 to 62 AD. All of that time, Paul says that he has had a partnership in the Gospel with this church. He doesn’t call it a friendship, although clearly it is a friendship. It’s a partnership. And more than that, it’s a partnership in the Gospel. That sounds pretty formal, doesn’t it? The gospel is a message. It’s the good news of Jesus. It’s the news of the spiritual in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into this world. Those who are under the reign of sin can now trust in Jesus, be set free from the reign of sin, and can enter into the Kingdom of God. No longer a slave to sin, but sons and daughters of the God in God’s family – that’s the Gospel, that sacrifice of Jesus that brings God’s people into his family is incredible news.

And so in what sense can you partner in that? That’s the gospel, that’s the gospel. What does it mean to be a partner in the gospel? Well, news requires messengers. News requires messengers. News that doesn’t travel isn’t really news at all. From the beginning of Jesus time with His disciples, He was preparing them to be ambassadors of His good news and soldiers who were going to storm the gates of hell. So you’re going to be ambassadors of my good news. You’re going to be soldiers who are going to storm the gates of hell. That’s how he described his church. These two images describe the same activity, but from two different angles. Ambassadors are people who go to foreign lands and they represent the interests of their homeland. That’s what an ambassador does. Soldiers, on the other hand, are warriors who go into a place and they take ground and they defeat an enemy. So if you think about our communities, it’s just kind of think about Rochester right now. If you think about our community as people living in a in a secular and sinful kingdom without knowledge of Jesus, what do we? We’re ambassadors. We go and we represent a different kind of kingdom, a different place. We represent Jesus and His reign and His kingdom. But if you think about our community as a place heavily influenced by demonic presence and evil, with an enemy that’s prowling around like a lion, looking for someone to devour, to bring destruction into the lives of people, well, then we share the gospel as soldiers, don’t we? We’re rescuing people and we’re defeating the lives of Satan with the truth of God’s word. That’s our weaponry. The truth of God’s word. Both of those images are very biblical ways of understanding the church. Both of those images we find in the writings throughout Scripture. And they both require the church to think strategically. Both of them do. We have to think about how to partner together to use our resources to accomplish the spread of the gospel. You are not all by yourself going to represent Jesus to the world.

You can do it on your own, but you will not do it all by yourself. And you are certainly not all by yourself to storm the gates of hell and win, I tell you that. You’re not. This is why that quote from Daniel Plainview that I mentioned earlier doesn’t work for the church. We need everyone in the church to succeed, to do what we’re called to do. We want the success of every single person who loves Jesus to go into this world and to do what we’re called to do. Partnership in the gospel requires each of us to recognize just how impossible the task of spreading the gospel and making disciples would be if we didn’t rely on each other, if we didn’t have each other. Now, I brought up the timeline that Paul has in mind here, because I want you to see what he’s calling a partnership. What is it that he means when he when he says that word? What is he calling partnership? I want you to see that it includes their time together and it includes their time apart. From the first day means when they were in the same city, thinking strategically together about how to make disciples. That’s us right now, Calvary. That’s us. That’s us working together; we’re in this city. Our inclusion in this church is a partnership. Being part of this church means we are partnering together for the sake of the spread of the Gospel of Jesus.

Some of you think I just wanted to come to church today. I didn’t know I was signing up for a partnership. Right. Well, I’m glad you’re here. But you should know that there is no description anywhere in Scripture of a church community that isn’t a team of soldiers and ambassadors sent by Jesus to the world. There is no picture of the church in any other way. Church communities are united around a shared mission from Jesus. That’s what we’re on. If they’re less than that, then they really aren’t churches in a biblical sense. Here at Calvary, we’re thinking about everything from the perspective of team dynamics. I can tell you leadership at many levels is thinking about the team. We want to interlace the gifts of all our members of this church to mobilize us for the purpose of filling one kingdom while we empty the other. That’s what we’re doing here at Calvary. From the first day until now, Paul says, and until now includes when Paul left Philippi and traveled to plant churches all over the ancient world, including places like Corinth and Thessalonica and all those other letters you see him write in the New Testament. He was still in partnership with the Philippines during that time. Partnering together doesn’t mean that we’re always together.

In fact, Jesus said that to fulfill his mandate, we’re going to be required to go to new places and to send other people out from those places. That’s the only way the news of the gospel will spread. Missions Ministry has changed a lot over the last 2000 years because of technology advancing. We’ve seen the establishment of churches in more places around the world. But let me tell you, what has not changed is the global connectedness that we must have with each other if we’re going to accomplish our common mission. We must have a global vision, a partnership that goes around the world. On one of the trips that my family and I took last fall here to Rochester, I believe it was the one, the secret one you weren’t supposed to know about. When we were coming in that time on that on that trip, we got a flight from Detroit to Minneapolis, but then we caught another flight from Minneapolis to Rochester. It was like an hour and a half layover for a 15 minute flight. I could have ridden my bike down here faster. Anyway, during that trip, I felt like I got to see a lot of the city because they took us around and they showed us a lot of the city. And I felt like, okay, I’m getting a sense for this place. But then we boarded our flight home and on the ascent I looked around and I realized just how much I hadn’t seen, how much bigger it all was.

I got the sense for the immensity. I’ve had that experience in New York and London and Detroit and Dubai and in cities around the world. When you think about the Earth, when you think about the size of the Earth and the over 7.5 billion people who live here, you realize that the task of the gospel is impossible unless we partner together. It’s impossible unless we’re working together. Unless millions of local churches are partnering together, interlacing their resources across the globe in a selfless way to see the success of others, there’s no chance that we will ever accomplish the mission that Jesus requires of us unless we are partnering together. Thankfully through the work of the one Holy Spirit that fills all of God’s people, we have the joy of working in partnership with one another. I have had the privilege when I served as a mission pastor for a while, about five and a half years or so, I had the privilege of getting to travel to several places in the world and partnering together with pastors and missionaries on the ground doing really, really good work. I got to have lunch last week, in fact, with Pastor Antonio to hear about the great work of church planting in Mozambique. That’s come about because of partnering with Calvary and some other churches. I got to hear this last week. On Monday, I was at the North Central District Conference and I got to hear about a new foundation that our district is putting together in order to gather monies that can be targeted specifically toward church multiplication and church planting in our district. It’s phenomenal.

Paul looks back and thanks the Lord that these Philippians, these brothers and sisters in Christ have been his partners throughout his ministry. Whether they were together or whether they were a part. And then he looks forward. He looks forward, and I am sure of this that “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ”. Now, I know a lot of times when we read that verse, we apply it as individuals. We say, well, God has started a work in me so that I become more like Jesus and he won’t give up on that work until I am like Jesus. Until that work is done, God is not going to stop working in me. And you can kind of make the case that one of the implications of this verse is individual. You will be a different person when God is done in His work in you. But. I have to burst your bubble just a little bit here. Just a little bit. Gear up. It’s not going to be the last time I do this in this book. I’m looking at you, Mr. Philippians 413, as my life verse. Kyle, you do not mess with Philippians 413. You already took Jonah and the whale from us. Do not mess with Philippians 413. The ‘you’ in the verse is plural. If we were down south, it’d be y’all.

Paul is saying that the work that God began in this church community will not end until God has accomplished everything that God has set out to accomplish. Now that includes individual transformation because this church is made up of individuals. And yes, the partnering together does shape and form individual people. But the good work he’s talking about here is clearly the work of the church in partnership with each other and with Paul himself. That work will be complete when Jesus returns in the day of Jesus Christ. When Jesus comes back and the church gathers as one people, we will be singing one song with Jesus. And you know what? We will not have to pool our valuable resources to take the gospel to the ends of the Earth at great cost to our lives and to our well-being, because the mission of Jesus Church will be over. The mission part. The Kingdom of God will be consummated. The Kingdom of darkness will be vanquished, and all there will be left to do is to worship the Lord and enjoy Him forever. He who began this good work in His church is going to bring that work to completion. Here’s what that means for you individually. If you’re going to experience all that God can do in and through you, you must be in partnership with his church, embarked on his mission. If you’re going to be part of the work, you need to be interlaced. You need to take your gifts and your life and interlace them with the disciple-making gifts of other people in the church so that they can build you up, and so that you can use your gifts to build them up, so that together we can accomplish the mission that God has called us t do.

When I started off in Ministry, church, I didn’t understand this at all. Everything I’m saying to you now, I did not understand this. I thought ministry was something individuals did, specifically this individual. I thought it was something I did. I thought success was assigned to people. And you know what? That is exhausting. That is exhausting, and it’s disappointing. But maybe worse. It pulls the glory away from Christ. Now I know that the Holy Spirit works through the Body of Christ functioning locally and globally in tandem with God’s people. We get the joy of working alongside brothers and sisters in Christ from across the globe and across the street. And when we do, God accomplishes more. God executes his plan. We get to see it in the success of others, in our collective success together. And we give God the glory when we see God’s accomplishment through His body. He receives all the praise and all the things.

Would you pray with me?