Proclaiming Christ Without Fear

Your circumstances, no matter how wonderful or difficult, are part of God’s plan to advance his gospel.

Perhaps you’ve heard the very famous story of the very famous English missionary, Hudson Taylor. In 1853 at just 21 years old, Hudson Taylor sailed from London to Shanghai, China, to take the gospel to the people of China. He was a little different from the missionaries of his day. Most of the missionaries in Shanghai that had come from London dressed in English clothing and hung out with other English businessmen and acted as interpreters. That was sort of their translators and interpreters for the two cultures. Hudson Taylor started wearing Chinese clothing. He grew his hair out very long into a ponytail like Chinese men. And then he sailed down the river into the inland portion of China where there were no Christian missionaries. He had a reputation for being a hardworking, a bold and a little weird missionary. He was a little strange. But those attributes combined to form a movement called China Inland Mission that still exists under a different name today. Taylor’s style of leadership was challenging even for his own board of directors, who didn’t always know exactly what to do with them. But it gives us some insight into this mindset for why he worked so hard and demanded so much and was willing to endure suffering when he wrote this: ‘China is not to be won for Christ by quiet ease, loving men and women. The stamp of men and women we need is such as will put Jesus, China, and souls first and foremost in everything and at every time – even life itself must be secondary.’ Now, the way he carried out this philosophy can be debated. He struggled with burnout and depression. It’s possible that he could have approached this with a little healthier view of things. But the philosophy of ministry here, especially the prioritization of Christ above all else, is thoroughly biblical.

We are now entering into the part of the letter that Paul wrote to the Philippians, where he will share with us his philosophy of ministry. Specifically, he is going to share with us the mindset that he has that makes the joy in his heart, the joy that the Lord has given him impermeable, unbeatable and indestructible. You’ll remember several weeks ago, when we began our time in this letter that I raised the question ‘what would happen to my joy in Christ if all of the things in life that cause me to be joyful were taken away?”’ Remember that question? Well, how would we deal with it. If everything that brought us happiness and joy in life in this world were taken away from us? What would happen to our joy in Christ at that point? Would Christ be enough? Since Jesus never leaves us, I have a longing to have the kind of joy that never goes away, that is contingent on nothing else except Jesus. Now, that doesn’t mean, by the way, if you have that, that sorrow isn’t going to come. But when it comes, we still have joy that is rooted in Jesus that will never pass away. How do we get that kind of joy?

We don’t want to just talk about it. We just don’t want to say it exists. We want to have it. So how do we have that joy? At the time, I said that it was going to take a change in values, was going to need to be a values shift, particularly our view of suffering. And today, Paul is going to show us his values. He’s going to show us what he values. He’s going to talk to us about his own situation – and not only about his situation, about how he interprets it, about how he sees his own situation. There’s a favorite passage of mine. You might like it as well, it’s in Romans Chapter 12. And in this passage, Paul tells the Roman believers to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The implication there, of course, is that is where transformation starts. Transformation starts in your mind. God’s grace begins by changing what you think of Jesus and yourself. The Spirit convicts your mind over your sin. The Lord changes your mind about Jesus. And then what happens is when your mind changes, when you shift, when you’ve been transformed in your mind by the gospel, what you do is then you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, your mouth speaks the truth that has been transforming your mind.

You believe in your heart, which, by the way, was the seat of the intellect in the time that this was written, you believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. That’s a mental shift. That’s a transformation of mind. And then what follows is that you begin a life of transformation with your intellect constantly being molded and shaped to take on a more biblical view of the world all the time. So, of course, transformation starts in your mind. We have to think correctly about God. We’ve got to think correctly about ourselves and the world that we live in so that we know what to do with everything that we experience, everything that comes down the road and comes into our lives. What do we do with it? We need a transformed mind to show us what to do with this. And that includes our suffering, that includes when suffering comes into your life. Paul is going to show us how to change our minds, to make sense of our suffering through the lens of the Gospel so that joy in Christ will not be contingent on whether or not we are suffering. That joy will never end. Your circumstances, everything you’re going through right now, your circumstances, no matter how wonderful or how difficult, are part of God’s plan to advance the Gospel.

Our passage this morning is Philippians 1:12-18. Go ahead and turn there if you’d like. I’ll also have it up on the screen. By describing his own situation to us, by showing us what’s going on in his life, Paul is going to show us three mental shifts that we need to make to see our circumstances correctly. So, I’m going to show you three ways that we need to think differently about the world and about what we are going through. These are three ways I need to think differently so that my joy remains tied to Jesus, even when my circumstances become difficult and life doesn’t go the way that I want, or the way that I expect.

Here’s the first shift, the first mental shift we have to make. We need a missions mindset for personal circumstances. Paul writes, ‘I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel.’ This, by the way, is the broadest and clearest value shift. If you take nothing else away this morning, I want you to take this away. This one shift. This is the biggest one of all. You say, here’s what’s happening in my life. Here’s what’s really happening. This is what you can see. This is what I feel, what I experienced. This is what’s actually going on. The first shift requires us to see something more than the pain or the happiness of our personal circumstances. Something else is happening when we go through these things. I would say it’s the value jump that will be the first and the farthest for you. If you can make this jump, if you can make this shift in your mind, if you can think about life in this biblical way, the other shifts are going to be easier. But this is the big one. If you can’t, if you can’t make this jump, well, then you’ll just be stuck the way the world is. You’re going to just live and think the way the rest of the world does, looking only at what you get, caring about only what you feel. But if you can make the jump from ‘what happens to me’ to ‘what is God doing in the world through this’, if you can make that jump, you’ll be well on your way. Paul says, “What has happened to me? Now what he’s talking about there, of course, is his imprisonment and his trial that’s coming up. And his chains, he says. ‘What has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel.’ He’s not just emphasizing with the word ‘really’, he’s contrasting. It looks like imprisonment. It’s actually gospel advancement. That’s what he’s saying. It looks like this. Don’t be fooled. It’s actually gospel advancement. And he’s going to tell us how it is here in just a second. But we can’t skip this. For Paul, his personal circumstances have to be considered in light of what God is doing.

In other words, his Christian worldview tells him that even his own miserable conditions right now, what he’s going through, his pain, his torment, his difficulty, all of that is really part of the mission of God advancing the gospel in the world. Paul looks at himself in prison and he says, this isn’t what it looks like. This isn’t just poor little me sitting in prison. This is actually God’s chess move for the Kingdom of God. He has done this for a purpose, and it is a good purpose that He has done this with me. That, by the way, is a big jump. I know you can see it here. It’s pretty plain that he’s saying it, but it is a big jump for you and me. That is a hard place for us to get to. I don’t know about you, but most of the time when I’m thinking about what I’m going through, I am thinking particularly about the way that it affects me. I’m thinking about me 95% of the time. It’s very hard to move past my personal view and feelings about my own experience to see from the proper perspective. How do we do that? Well, if you know that the power of God is sovereign in the world, that everything that happens is under His divine control and that nothing happens outside of His decree, if you know that, and if you know that God is on a mission to redeem and renew His creation through the transforming grace of Christ, that He is gathering His people from every corner of the Earth and He’s bringing them into his kingdom. If you know those two things, then you’ll see that everything that we encounter is God at work. Everything we encounter is God doing what God does. This experience that I may not really like, this thing that I’m going through in my life that I do not enjoy is actually God making a move for the kingdom, for His glory and my ultimate good. If you embrace those truths from Scripture, it changes everything. It’ll change everything inside of you. It will change your attitude, the way you suffer, your joy in the midst of pain, even what you hope the outcome will be of what you’re going through. Things are still painful, but in the midst of it you can trust that God is at work, and you can even be looking for how God is at work. That’s the first mental shift. Make that one. The rest of these are going to make sense. Don’t make that one. The rest of these will not. You just won’t be able to process it.

There are two more. Here’s the second. The second mental shift is that we are uniquely positioned for gospel spread here. Paul explains specifically how he sees God at work in his imprisonment. The Gospel is advancing, first of all, because the whole Imperial Guard knows – let’s read that – “so that it has become known throughout the whole Imperial Guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.” (Philippians 1:13).  The whole Imperial Guard (the Imperial means Empire, the Roman Empire), all the people that are guarding him, all the people that are working in the jail. All of these people are now hearing that Paul is in prison because of his faith in Christ and the preaching of Christ. He says all the rest here, which probably just means everyone in and around the jail who are not guards. So everyone who has heard about his imprisonment in the community, he’s basically saying this thing is spreading. Paul is bound by chains in a small cell. But do you know what is not bound? The gospel. The gospel is not bound. You can’t tie Paul down to the crown solidly enough to get the gospel to stop spreading. And that is enormous. We see the Lord do this throughout Scripture, by the way. He moves His people into specific, often uncomfortable positions all the time for unique purposes, all the time. Abraham was told to pick up his entire family and move them to a different land. Joseph was sent down to Egypt in slavery. He puts Moses and his whole nation in the wilderness. He puts Esther into the King’s house as a forced wife. He puts Ruth into Boaz Field. He puts Daniel into a lion’s den. He puts Jesus in the garden, on trial, on the cross, and into a grave.

In every one of these examples, there is a specific kingdom purpose for the placement of these individuals into those difficult circumstances. Have you ever noticed that reading Scripture? It’s all over the place, isn’t it? It’s constantly happening. You think there’s a chance that Paul is in prison accidentally because God wasn’t paying attention? Is that a biblical worldview? Could that ever possibly happen based on what Scripture describes; that there was some failure, or that things didn’t go as God planned or as Paul planned or as the church planned? Not a chance. Not a chance. Paul says, if I’m in prison, I must be here to suffer for Christ, to spread the gospel of Christ and to represent my Lord and Savior in this unique position. The mental shift we have to make is to recognize when we are in hard and terrible circumstances, that is not a lack of God’s care. That is a tactical move. God is creating an avenue for the spread of the gospel that wasn’t open before. He’s putting you in proximity to other people who need to hear the Lord, that need your influence. If you lose your job and have to shift to a new one, that is a difficult experience. I know many people who’ve gone through that. They thought they were on one path. Suddenly they’ve lost their job. They’re on a completely different, uncomfortable path that they never thought they would be on. But a biblical perspective includes saying, ‘all right, God, what new field of ministry are you opening for me as you shift me into another position?’ We do this all the time, by the way, with good experiences. This is really easy with good experiences. We do it all the time, right? Two people get married. They both love Jesus. What are they going to do? They’re going to want to embark on a ministry together to serve the Lord. Right? That’s always the language we put those good experiences into. Well, God is doing some great things with me. This is a great future ahead of me. I’m going to serve the Lord in new ways, new open doors, but Church, the same holds true for everything that we don’t like. It’s the same exact thing. Everything that we don’t want is also God’s unique positioning. When Job’s wife told him to curse God and die because of his losses, he said, ‘shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil’? He knew it was both, both coming from the Lord. Is God at work only when you’re in a position that you want to be in. Or is he at work at all times? Of course he’s at work at all times. Always. What we need to do, or to do better, is recognize the unique opportunity of every position in which God has placed us. I can’t tell you the number of times that I have heard Christians who have told me that their unexpected sickness or injury has given them an opportunity to share the gospel with their doctors or with other people who are going through the same experience in life. And they’re struggling because they don’t know the Lord, but this person does, and they got the same exact experience and one is able to tell the other why they have hope and joy through this. I’ve known people who struggle in their marriage because they go through this difficult season. And what happens is God brings them through that season and then they become counselors for other people who are going through that season as well. God’s grace in their marriage resulted in the opportunity to share God’s grace with others. When I first got here to Rochester, I was hoping that the Lord would fairly soon open up an opportunity for me to get to know people outside of the church in the Rochester community. But, you know, in a light and easy sort of manner, that was what I wanted. That’s what I prayed for. God, make it really easy for me to meet some folks. So we signed Sammy up for baseball and he made it onto the team. And I thought to myself, Great, this is wonderful. We all get to meet all these families. We used to do this in Detroit. Now I’ll get to meet all these other families. It’ll be good. I’ll grill some burgers. It’ll be great. Except this coach didn’t, this team didn’t have a coach. How do you have a team without a coach? Who starts that? Who says we have a team? Would you like to join? Sure, I’d like to join. Oh, by the way, we have no coach for this team. You know what that is? That’s a group of children. It’s not a team. And so they start sending all these heavy handed emails, you know. Just won’t be a team without a coach. Well, hey, I’ve been here three months. I live in an Airbnb out of a suitcase. Last time I played baseball, we were hitting it off a tee. I must be the perfect coach. So here I am, coach of the 13 new Rochester Tornadoes. Yeah, I’m a very reluctant coach. But God has opened up a door for me to meet ten other families in this community. We are not always going to like the position that we’re in. We’re not. But we need to constantly be asking the Lord, what would you have me do with this unique position that you’ve put me in, that I did not expect to be in, that is difficult for me to be in? God, you have placed me here. What would you have me do? I’d like to say that we will always get to see the incredible results of what God is doing. Like Paul got to see the gospel spread through the guards, but the fact is we often won’t be able to see it. God is doing far more than we can see. Our job is simply to be faithful in the place that he’s put us. That’s the second mental shift.

Here’s the third: ” Others are emboldened by our faithful suffering. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the Gospel. The former proclaimed Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment (Philippians 1:12-17). This is one of the more ironic passages of Scripture. How could something like Paul’s chains inspire other believers to become bold in proclaiming Christ? After all, being bold and proclaiming Christ is what put Paul into the chains. Wouldn’t that just make his imprisonment a deterrent from this sort of behavior and this sort of activity? That’s probably the hope of the Roman Empire. That’s why they did this. They put Paul in prison to stop his ministry, to stop the spread of what the ancient Roman officials call the spread of false gods. That’s how they referred to Christians. Strange and foreign divinities. This was a means to shut him up and to shut him down. In the persecution under Nero, Christians were actually thrown to the wild animals for entertainment in the Coliseum. They were lit on fire after being crucified in the streets to light the night in the city. This is supposed to be the way to get rid of Christianity in the Empire. But it actually spread Christianity. Christians became more confident, not less confident. The people became less fearful, not more fearful. How could that be? How is that possible? Well, it depends on which group you’re talking about. Paul says that there are two groups of people who are motivated to preach the gospel by him. One group is bold and preaches the gospel because they’re motivated by goodwill. These people love Paul, and they know that he’s been put here because of his defense and his preaching of the gospel. These are people who that I believe Paul is referring to in verse 14 when he says, “Most of the brothers”, I think this is the majority of the church. Most of the brothers and sisters in the church are preaching the gospel from this perspective. These people are looking at Paul, they’re looking at the effect of his ministry, and even they’re looking at the impact of his imprisonment on the spread of the gospel. And they’re seeing inspiration. They’re saying, look, the gospel can’t be stopped. Even if you put Paul, Paul, in prison, you cannot stop the gospel. You can cut the head off the hydra. There’s just more that come out, right? There’s an advancement of the gospel. There’s a boldness that comes. Look what God can do, even if we’re in prison.

The other group, Paul says, is preaching the gospel out of envy and rivalry, which is always been a little bit perplexing to me. These aren’t false gospel teachers, he’s not saying there’s wolves out there because he actually says he’s fine with what they’re doing in verse 18. I think this is probably a group of Christians who were jealous of Paul’s influence in the Christian community and took advantage of his imprisonment to become the prominent leaders of the church. This might be one of the first early instances of pastoral rivalry, which is the most oxymoronic thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. Pastors and preachers competing to be the best preacher. What? Sounds like a show on Bravo, doesn’t it? It’s weird. Yet it happens. It says they were trying to cause Paul trouble while he was in prison, which we don’t know exactly what that trouble was, because Paul doesn’t explain it. It could either be that they were trying to stir the authorities so that that they would treat Paul in prison badly, that the guards would treat him badly because of the spread of the gospel that was going on. Or they might have just been trying to take Paul’s place and cause him the mental anguish of having lost out on his ministry. If I had to guess on this, I’d say that they were trying to take Paul’s place. They were trying to make Paul feel the loss of his influence. Mainly, I believe that because of the use of the words selfish ambition and rivalry, they seem to want something. They see Paul as a rival, and they want something from him. But whatever is the motive, whatever their motives are, even if they were impure, the gospel they preached was accurate. And Paul actually doesn’t care too much about why the people are emboldened by his imprisonment, only that they spread the gospel and we shouldn’t be too worried about their motives as well.

Here’s the mental shift that we have to make. Courage in Christ creates more courage in Christ. Courage begets courage; when we have a missions mindset for our own personal suffering and when we see our circumstances as a unique position from which to glorify Jesus and do good ministry, other people will be emboldened by us. You ever watch someone persevere in Christ when they go through some terrible trial? You know what it does in you? It emboldens you to be able to go through some terrible trial as well. When your world falls apart, you remember the courage of others, it gives you the courage and the confidence. It’s a display of courageous faith that builds up your courage. When I hear about other people sharing their faith with unbelieving friends and family members and neighbors, and I hear how that is going. And I get updates and I get to see the spiritual transformation and the doors open up over time. You know what it does? It encourages me to share the gospel with my friends and my family and my neighbors. When I see someone lose a loved one in their lives, have a loved one pass away. And they are still glorifying God. They are still giving God the glory in the situation. You know what that does? It emboldens me to help me to have the confidence to stand for Christ when I have loss. Think about this. This is kind of a wild thought. The reason God uniquely places you in your circumstances may have more to do with the building up of others than it does with your individual spiritual growth. Now, I’m not saying that God is not at work in you, but the mental shift that we need to make is that our faithfulness is meant to build up the whole Christian community, not just ourselves. Not just us. We need to move away from this idea of individual spiritual identity as if it’s just me and Jesus. It is not. It is not just you and Jesus. We are interconnected members of the Body of Christ. We are responsible to each other. We are influences on each other. And what we experience is meant to build up the whole body. So your faithfulness, especially in the face of trials that come from living in this world, is meant to build up your brothers and sisters so that they will be faithful too.

And here’s the result of all this church. Our joy is rooted in what God accomplishes. That’s the result. What then? Paul writes. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. And in that, I rejoice. Paul says, ‘look, I don’t care why they’re preaching the gospel, only that they’re preaching the gospel. That’s all I care about’. At the end of the day, the only thing Paul cares about is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is still going forward. He. That’s all he cares about. God is accomplishing exactly what God intends to accomplish. He will use faithful people with the right motivations. He will. He will use those people. But do you know who else he will use? He will use accurate people with the wrong motivations. Paul says, You know what? That’s fine. My imprisonment is worth it either way, no matter what people are doing. Because his joy isn’t found in going free. His joy isn’t found in going free. His joy isn’t found in feeling happy. His joy is found in only one place. It’s only found in Christ. It is only found in the fulfilment of the Christ mission. See Church, when you have a missions mindset for your own experiences and when you see yourself uniquely placed in a strategic position by God, no matter where He puts you, and when you consider the broader impact of your experience on the rest of the body of Christ, your joy isn’t solely rooted in your happiness anymore.

You’ve moved it. It doesn’t ebb and flow with how you personally feel. It isn’t contingent anymore on whether or not you get what you’re hoping for. Your joy now comes from Jesus and his mission, not your circumstances and experiences. So you start to look for different things within your circumstances, and you start asking things like, Alright, Lord, what are you going to do with this? What are you going to do with this? All right, Lord, you’ve decided that it’s cancer for me. How are you going to spread your gospel and glorify yourself through this? All right, Lord, my children have rejected the gospel of the home they grew up in. How will this bring courage to the people in my church who are in the same situation? All right, Lord, you’ve taken away some good things. You brought pain into my life. Show me how to be faithful in this season of pain. If Jesus and His mission become foremost in your mind and heart, even life itself becomes secondary. Hudson Taylor’s words were very challenging to a worldly way of thinking, but they align very well with the mind that has been renewed with the values of the Gospel. Church, let’s strive to bathe our minds in the Gospel so that when we can press each other on in Christ’s mission, no matter what the Lord brings into our lives. Would you pray with me?