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Philippians 3:10-11
April 12, 2009
Exordium: This is a chapter about joy, not a “put- on- face” of smiles but the joy that rises out of true religion- truly held.
Paul describes his own discovery of joy for us here; how he gave up everything important to him: career, heritage, theology because he found Christ to be the “Pearl of great price” and it was easy to let go of everything for Him.
Then his life centered on Jesus Christ. His ambition became “to gain Christ”, the way a runner gains the trophy and all that goes with it. His desire was to be found in Him, the way a man wants to be found in his own house. Christ was such a wonderful dwelling place for him that he never wanted to leave Him, be found outside of Him.
He tells us how he struggled to understand and produce a righteousness of his own all his adult life. He wanted to know what it was and what kind was pleasing to God. God showed him that it is not his human striving for it, the way he thought it was. True righteousness is from God and is given on the basis of faith.
Tasting that new life – and the righteousness with which God had clothed him – so excited him that he could not get enough of his new-found joy.
He therefore made it his ambition “to know Christ”, not merely about him. He knew that already from his studies in the Hebrew university, sitting at the feet of the famed and illustrious Gamaliel. Rather, he wanted to know Jesus personally and up close, even intimately the way a man knows his best friend.
Our text for today, Easter Sunday, 2009, is Paul’s summary of the great driving force of his life – his aim in life - “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection being made conformable to his death, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead.” This he desired with all his heart.
Christ is never known until He is desired that way!
November 23, 2008
Thanksgiving Sunday
Philippians 4:6
Exordium: How good it is that we have a week devoted to giving thanks! Of course, thanks are always to be given, but if we have a time for lifting it up especially, we grow in the grace of gratitude. May this be a week for you and your household of great thanks and of great feasting.
How appropriate that just now we should reflect on the teaching of the Word of God about this subject. What stands out there is that we have taken gratitude for granted as being optional and not really a necessary part of Christian living. Yet it was for the lack of this that God gave His early people up to uncleanness and the lusts of the flesh, even to perversion, showing that there is a connection between the lack of gratefulness and moral impurity. (Romans 1:21-24)
We have not yet seen how central and essential this grace is, but let us do so now.
Take Philippians 4: 6 for example. Here God is saying through Paul that the antidote for anxiety is prayer, and it must be prayer surrounded and permeated by the giving of thanks. “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”
This centrality was certainly sensed by the early pioneers of our land. Christopher Columbus knelt down on the shore of the newly discovered land and gave thanks to God. Likewise the pilgrims even before they left the deck of the Mayflower had prayers of thanks for the goodness of God in bringing them across the water, and preserving the lives of many of them for the work before them. During their first year 51 of the 102 people who arrived had been buried. Their life had been hard and there was little food, but they set apart a day of thanksgiving. Ninety Indian men joined them including Chief Massosoit. They were together feasting and getting acquainted for three days. That visit was also a providence of God because the Indians went into the woods and brought back five deer from their store of food. In 1623 after a drought had limited their crop they spent a day in fasting and prayer for God’s blessing in rain, and the heavens answered with welcome showers. They prayed for wisdom to plant well and to know how to fish in those waters. And God sent an Indian, Squanto, to teach them and to translate for them with the rest of the Indians. God had prepared Squanto as a slave in Europe and England for this particular work.
But not until 1777 was the “Infant Land” called to prayer officially (by the Continental Congress.) In 1789 President George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. During the Civil War, President Lincoln, in 1863, asked all the people of the land to acknowledge God’s gifts with one heart and one voice. In his proclamation, he touched on the important aspect of Thanksgiving in a corporate sense.
God wants us to do this together. It honors the Lord when God’s people corporately lift up their songs and prayers of gratitude with one heart and one mind. That is what we do in the Lord’s Supper. One of the most ancient names for this is Eucharist, a word which comes from the original Greek, meaning the “giving of thanks.” That is the heart-beat of the communion service, giving thanks as a body to the members of the Trinity, the One God, for the saving sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf.
What is it about gratitude that makes it front and center in the mind of God and the practice of His people?
