Redeemer Fellowship Johnson County

Paul directs us to imitate him. He draws out that there are two types of people you can watch: people who walk according to his gospel and those who walk as enemies of the cross. Who will you watch? Who you watch will influence who you worship. Because God is the only one deserving of worship, who you worship determines your future. If you are an enemy of the cross, your future is destruction. But it doesn't have to be! Paul is inviting you to imitate him, worship Jesus, and become a citizen of heaven.

What is common for us today is we are giving mirrors to our peers and asking them to tell us who we should be. Giving them permission to dictate what is acceptable for our lives. We have run to the people in this world, who are just as broken as you are, to define us rather than allowing the Covenant-Creator of the universe to define us.

The world is doing an amazing job at drawing on the strings of our broken, sinful hearts to believe being resume builders is satisfying. The world tells us to seek achievement and success for our identity. But Paul would tell us otherwise, so much so that we should burn our resume.

The upmost importance in life is bowing down to Jesus Christ and confessing His name is above everything. Paul encourages us to willingly and joyfully burn our resume because he knows it is far more important to know Jesus and be found in Jesus than it is building a lifeless resume.

In Philippians 4:4-7, Paul gives a final exhortation to a body of believers who were absorbed with anxiety and burdened with fear. He's intimately aware of the turmoil haunting this community, but wants to remind them of the deep joy that they have in Jesus. As christians, we aren't immune to the realities of suffering, but we are called to a life of joyful endurance.

Humility is essential for the community of faith to flourish. We followers of Jesus are called to demonstrate this humility by reflecting on the beauty of the incarnation of Jesus. As followers of Jesus we are called to allow this truth to shape all of our relationships.

Here we see Paul as a spiritual Father is instructing Timothy in how to shepherd the people of God using real life examples of quarreling and false teaching. Paul says that fighting about words is intended to whet the appetite for argument and seeks the victory of the speaker, not the victory of truth. This is a massive issue in our modern culture, especially with social media, where suspicion and defensiveness are the default mode. Therefore we are called instead to have a listening posture, assuming the best of one another, and inviting each other into our lives.

Paul charges Timothy to do his best to handle the Scriptures rightly, like an approved and unashamed workman. We can imagine this as the faithful shepherd using a machete to create pathways through the jungle of worldly ideas and bad theology and lies from the enemy, to remove any obstacle to people seeing God clearly.

Paul moves on to use the visceral image of gangrene to illustrate the false teaching infiltrating the church, those saying that the resurrection already happened. This is a dualistic theology that comes from a belief that physical matter is intrinsically evil. This must be refuted because in denies the goodness of God in calling his creation "good", it denies the promise of God to restore all things physically, it removes hope from those suffering physically now, and most importantly, it denies the resurrection power of Jesus.

In the modern world the heresy we face more frequently is the opposite issue, saying that the material world is all that matters, to the neglect of spiritual realities.

Paul closes the section by reminding Timothy that the hope we have is in the Lord who knows his people, he is the firm foundation that keeps us safe from false teaching and disunity and will glorify himself in his people.

Amidst immense persecution and imprisonment in Rome, Paul addresses Timothy and his church as they experience increasing and impending suffering. Paul makes clear that the pathway of the Christian life is not the experience of one’s “best life now” — but the anchoring of one’s hopes in the glorious rule of Kingdom of God. Life in God’s kingdom now necessarily involves suffering, and Paul has encouraged Timothy to endure suffering (1.9; 2.3) and to be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus (2.1).

In 2.3-13, Paul offers three metaphors to explain what a life of wholehearted devotion to Christ and His Kingdom require: the focus of a soldier, the dutifulness of an athlete and the hard work of a farmer.

In this sermon, Kevin invites us to look at the particular glory around which Paul oriented his life — and the way in which this glory directed and invigorated Paul’s joyful, single-minded, wholehearted devotion to Jesus— even in the midst of his own suffering. In short, the grit that Paul encourages via the soldier, athlete and farmer are created by devotion to particular glory.

Kevin also invites us to consider how a life of contemplation and meditation on God’s Word brings not only the promised understanding from the Lord (2.7) but also conscripts our emotions and imaginations into the ultimate reality of God’s Kingdom— giving rise to the kind of community that can bless the city.