Plug into the Power of Joy!

One winter many years ago, heavy snows hit North Carolina. Following a wet, six-inch snowfall, it was interesting to see the effect along Interstate 40. Next to the highway stood several large groves of tall, young pine trees. The branches were bowed down with heavy snow—so low that branches from one tree were often leaning against the trunk or branches of another. Where trees stood alone, however, the effect of the heavy snow was different. The branches had become heavier, but without other trees to lean against, the branches snapped. They lay on the ground, dark and alone in the cold snow. 

That story is a reminder to me that when the storms of life hit, we need to be standing close to others. The closer we stand, the more we will be able to hold up. Good relationships are essential to life, and to our growth as Christians. I do not believe we can live full lives without a healthy relationship to God through his Son Jesus Christ, and healthy relationships with one another. As Mark Twain once said, “To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.” 

That leads to the major theme of the book of the Bible we are beginning to study today. That book is Paul’s letter to the Church at Philippi. The theme is joy. Let’s read the opening words of Paul’s letter to this group of people whom he came to love deeply… 

Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Fundamentally, I believe that Christianity is all about relationships. In this one sentence, Paul refers to four relationships that are essential to our lives as followers of Jesus. First, there is our relationship with other Christians. I call that the “channel for joy”. Then there is our relationship with Jesus himself; he is the source of our joy. Then there is our relationship to people outside the church; that is the place where our joy ought to overflow. Then finally there is the relationship of God the Father to God the Son; that relationship serves as the model of joy. 

The first thing I detect, in the opening of Philippians, is that God wants us to plug into the power of joy through relationships with our fellow believers. The very first relationship mentioned is Paul’s friendship with Timothy. Paul met Timothy on his second missionary journey, just before he and his companions took off for Philippi. Paul took this young disciple under his wing and took him along on the journey. Thus, Timothy was well known to the Church at Philippi from the start. Timothy later became Paul’s representative to various churches. The two men developed a father-son relationship in the faith. By the end of his life, there was no one whom the Apostle Paul felt closer to than Timothy. It is relationships like that which can really turn the world upside down for good. 

We also see reflected in this passage Paul’s relationship with the whole Church at Philippi. This was a church that began as a small group. When Paul arrived in Philippi, he was not able to follow his normal pattern of first visiting the synagogue. There was no synagogue in Philippi because there were not even ten Jewish men there. But Paul found out about a group of women who gathered by the riverside for prayer. So, he visited that group and told them the good news about Jesus. A wealthy woman named Lydia, who was a dealer in purple cloth, became a follower of Jesus. This prominent woman was, perhaps, the first convert to Christianity on the continent of Europe. 

Meeting in small groups for the purpose of prayer, teaching, worship, fellowship, and evangelism can have a powerful impact for good in the world. I have mentioned before William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Wilberforce became a Christian a few years after his election to Parliament at the age of 21. He was strongly influenced by John Newton, author of Amazing Grace. Under Newton’s influence, Wilberforce took up the cause of abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire. Wilberforce was also quite the evangelist. Gradually, he gathered around himself a growing number of political friends who were also committed Christians. Many of them even lived together or near one another in an area of London known as Clapham. Thus, this group came to be known as the Clapham Sect. Just a few days before Wilberforce’s death on August 6, 1833, he heard that the House of Commons had voted to emancipate all slaves in British dominions. The Clapham group changed the world for the better by God’s grace. 

C. S. Lewis was another great Christian who believed in the importance of a small group of friends meeting together on a regular basis to encourage one another. Lewis started a group in Oxford that came to be known as the Inklings. Lewis invited some of his closest friends, many of whom were Christian writers, to meet on a weekly basis. They would read their works in progress aloud to one another and critique them. Sometimes they would meet just for literary and theological discussion. It was to this group that J. R. R. Tolkien read drafts of The Hobbit and what would become The Lord of the Rings. The Inklings met together, as an informal group, for over thirty years, all because one man, Lewis, saw the value of small group fellowship. 

I wonder: with whom are you building relationships in the body of Christ? It is our vision as a church to shine the light of Christ through teaching, fellowship, worship, service and outreach. Fellowship is an essential part of our vision. And small groups are an essential part of fellowship. And so, I would encourage you to become involved in some kind of small group in our church. It might be a Bible study, or a book discussion group, or lunch bunch, or the knitting group, or choir. There are many opportunities to plug into fellowship at FCCY. 

The second relationship Paul mentions in his opening greeting is our relationship to Christ. Paul calls himself and Timothy servants of Christ Jesus. And Paul writes to the Philippians whom he calls holy people in Christ Jesus. Relationships in the church are a channel for God’s joy, but they are not the ultimate source of joy. So many people get frustrated with human relationships because they look to those relationships as the source of joy. No mere human being can be a permanent source of joy for anyone. We are all finite. We are all sinful. So, we need to change our expectations of relationships and not look to our partner, children, neighbors, co-workers, friends, pastor, or fellow church members as sources of joy. All these relationships will fail at some time in some way. We need to look to Jesus as the source of our joy. When we are in him then we can have joy. There is joy in being a servant of Christ. There is joy in being set apart to belong to him, which is what it means to be holy, to be a saint. 

Rusty Stevens tells the following story… 

As I feverishly pushed the lawn mower around our yard, I wondered if I’d finish before dinner. Mikey, our 6-year-old, walked up and, without even asking, stepped in front of me and placed his hands on the mower handle. Knowing that he wanted to help me, I quit pushing. The mower quickly slowed to a stop. Chuckling inwardly at his struggles, I resisted the urge to say, “Get out of here, kid. You’re in my way,” and said instead, “Here, Son. I’ll help you.” As I resumed pushing, I bowed my back and leaned forward and walked spread-legged to avoid colliding with Mikey. The grass cutting continued, but more slowly, and less efficiently than before because Mikey was “helping” me.

 

Suddenly, tears came to my eyes as it hit me: This is the way my heavenly Father allows me to “help” him build his kingdom! I pictured my heavenly Father at work, seeking, saving, and transforming the lost, and there I was, with my weak hands “helping.” My Father could do the work by himself, but he doesn’t. He chooses to stoop gracefully to allow me to co-labor with him. Why? For my sake, because he wants me to have the privilege of ministering with him. 

Wow! What a picture of what it means to be Christ’s servant. And what a privilege and joy it is for us to serve Jesus and his purposes. 

The third relationship that Paul talks about here is the relationship of Christians to their community. Paul writes to the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi. In each of his letters Paul writes to people who live within a certain geography. Christians are always related to a place, and quite often in Paul’s letters, they are related to a particular city. 

The church in Philippi was not only born through a small group ministry, the church grew through small group ministry. Sometime after Lydia’s conversion, Paul and his friends were on their way to the place of prayer when a slave girl who was possessed by a demon, and who told fortunes, started following them and shouting, “These men are servants of the ‘Most High’ God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” Now, you would think that Paul would be grateful for the publicity, but apparently the way this woman was talking became very irritating to Paul. So, he turned to the woman and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” And at that moment the demon left her. Now, the owners of this slave girl realized that their hope of making money through her fortune-telling was gone. So, they seized Paul and one of his companions, Silas, and brought them before the authorities. Their charge against Paul and Silas was that they were Jews and that they were advocating customs unlawful for Romans to practice. In other words, Paul and Silas were telling people to worship Jesus instead of Caesar. The authorities then beat Paul and Silas and threw them into prison. So far, Paul’s mission to Philippi does not sound very successful. But here is the rest of the story… 

While Paul and Silas were in prison, they sang hymns to God and the other prisoners were listening. Once again, God uses a small group ministry to reach people with the good news of Jesus! And that’s not all. God sends an earthquake, and all the prisoners’ chains are loosed. The jailer wakes up, thinking that his prisoners have escaped. But Paul cries out to the jailer through the darkness and says, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!” The jailer, startled by all these events, and overwhelmed by Paul’s compassion, falls trembling before Paul and Silas and asks, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And Paul replies, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household.” So, the jailer becomes the third convert in Philippi that we know about, after Lydia and the slave girl. 

I believe Jesus wants us to have a vision for our community. I believe he wants us to love people in our community to Jesus. One way we can do that is by inviting people to worship with us, inviting them to a place where they can hear the good news of Jesus. But we can love people to Jesus through small groups as well. I have seen this happen many times in many different places. 

I have told you before the story of the Bible study group for teens that I led in North Carolina many years ago. The group started with three boys: John, Tim, and Robby. We met once a week and began with a study of the Gospel of John, followed by the book of Revelation (which was the boys’ choice). Each week, Tim especially, invited friends to come to our Bible study group. Some of them did and became believers. But Tim was always disappointed he could not get more of his friends to join us. Just before school let out for the summer, we studied Revelation 4 together and talked a lot about heaven. At the end of our study Tim said, “I can’t wait to get there.” The following week, Tim was out of town, visiting his grandparents in Asheville. One day I got a call informing me that Tim was in the hospital with meningitis. I drove from Charlotte to Asheville to be with Tim and his family, but Tim was unconscious. One of the nurses told me of a conversation she had with Tim when he was admitted. He asked her if he was going to die. And she said, “No, we are doing everything we can for you.” And Tim said, “It’s alright, even if I die, because I know where I’m going.” Sadly, Tim did die. But he got his wish in the end. The next week at our Bible study, all Tim’s friends and family showed up. And many of Tim’s friends gave their lives to Christ and spent that summer with us in Bible study. 

The circumstances were unusual, but that experience taught me a lot about the power of small groups to reach people for Christ. I believe that God can do the same kind of work here in our midst. 

So, even from these brief opening words in Philippians, we learn a lot. The Lord wants us to plug into the power of joy in relationship with other believers, he wants us to find the source of our joy in him, and the Lord wants us to overflow with joy to our community. But how do we do it? How do we choose joy, find joy, and overflow joy? I believe the only way is by God’s grace. 

Paul wrote to the Philippians, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace is the key that unlocks joy. And as we saw in our study of Galatians… Grace is God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. God loves us so much that he gave what was most valuable to him, his Son, so that we can experience joy. Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead so that we can be forgiven of our sins. And sin is the thing that will steal joy every time, because sin is basically self-centeredness. Sin has a big “I” in the center. We can never know true joy so long as we are living for ourselves. But joy is a choice that we can make as we receive God’s gift of grace. 

The Greek word for grace is Χάρις and the Greek word for joy is χαρᾶ. The two words may in fact come from the same root, meaning “a gift”. Joy is a gift of God’s grace. It comes from God the Father and from his Son, Jesus Christ, as does God’s peace, which means health in the fullest sense of the word, health in all our relationships. 

I believe the perfect model for joyful relationships is seen in God the Father and God the Son. St. Augustine talked about God the Father as the Lover, Jesus the Son as the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the love between them. In the Trinity there is modeled the perfect relationship of love. And God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) want to bring us into that relationship of love and joy. 

Gregory of Nazianzus emphasized the idea of perichoresis, which is a Greek word that means “dancing around”. St. Gregory pictured Father, Son and Holy Spirit as, sort of, holding hands in a circle, engaged in an eternal dance. The good news is that we are invited to enter that dance of joy!