God created human beings for relationships. Even from the very beginning, before sin had spoiled the perfection of creation in the Garden of Eden, God identified only one thing that was not good: Adam’s solitude (Gen. 2:18). Our yearning for relationship runs so deep that sociologists and scientists have observed that we literally die without relational attachments.

But in what kind of relationships should we be seeking? How do we get them? Why do we always feel so lonely, and what should we do about it?

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the Apostle gives us a glimpse into the church with whom he was closest relationally. Although the Philippians have struggles and challenges that we will explore over the course of this sermon series, we begin in Philippians 1:1–11 with a peek into the way Paul approaches the people, partnerships, and prayer of his ministry.

We begin a new sermon series today in the letter to the Philippians, Paul's letter to the Philippians. We'll read together, Philippians 1:1-11. Hear now the word of the Lord.

1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 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. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
Philippians 1:1-11, ESV

This is the word of the Lord. Two years ago, in April, I got a phone call that my grandfather was dying. He was in Hastings at the time I was in Lincoln, so I quickly got in a car to drive to Hastings because my parents were gone, this is my mother's father. They were they were traveling away and they were coming back as quickly as they could, but they wanted someone to be with my grandmother as she sat with my grandfather for his last hours.

It was a particularly difficult time, not just with the loss of my grandfather, but because I came to recognize something that I had never thought about with my grandmother. As a child, you grow up and your grandparents are there and they spoil you and they play with you, and they do all kinds of things with you. You don't realize necessarily that they are people, that they married each other because they love each other, and they have grown through almost for them, sixty-five years of marriage to deeply one another. It was heart wrenching to listen to my grandmother in just absolute denial of what was happening before her. Telling me a story and then say, well, when this lug wakes up, he can tell you the rest of the story. I'm thinking, Grandma, he's not going to wake up. It's heartbreaking.

I had never until that point realized the depth of my grandmother's love for my grandfather. What's important to understand is that they weren't even able to live together at this point in their life. My grandfather's health had significantly declined so that he was in a very intensive nursing home situation where my grandmother was more in assisted living. So they had already drifted apart because of the situation that they had physically, yet she still loved him. What was even more heart wrenching was three months later when my grandmother, who seemingly had lost the will to live, died and we buried her too.

We were made for relationships, deep relationships, relationships characterized by the deepest kind of love. In fact, in the pristine, unbroken, untarnished time before sin entered the world in the Garden of Eden, God singled out only one thing in his good creation that was not good, namely that Adam was alone, that he didn't have someone as a companion to be with him. In fact, scientists have started to study the effect of the unraveling of our most intricate relationships. When children cannot bond with stable parents in their lives, that arrests their development in significant ways. They don't develop normally, mentally, socially, psychologically. In a marriage when two people start to drift apart, it feels like dying, because it actually is; stress levels rise, risk of heart disease, go through the roof, all kinds of things. Why? Because God created us for relationships.

Yet sometimes when we talk about relationships, we sort of have this fuzzy kind of vague sort of happy go lucky Kumbaya kind of idea of relationships. Largely informed by the fact that we have access to seeing little glimpses, staged glimpses nonetheless, but glimpses into other people's relationships. Anytime someone posts a selfie on Facebook, they're giving us a picture, a representation of what it's like to be their friend, of what it's like to be in their life. To be honest, if you knew the strife and the heartache of those relationships, you might be able to read between the lines of what's happening in the picture a little bit better. We look at those things and say, where are my relationships? How well am I aligning and coming together with people? Do I have what I see on all my Facebook feed or not?

Well, the letter of Paul to the Philippians, the one Bible commentator classified it sort of looking at ancient letters and trying to categorize this as a letter of friendship. Now there's some scholarly debate about whether that's actually accurate or whether you can go that far to classify this letter in this way. Everyone thinks that this letter reflects a very deep, deep kind of friendship between Paul and the Philippians. Paul and the Philippians are closer in relationship than any other church has with Paul. He starts off in the beginning of this, where he sort of reconnecting with them, introducing his letter rejoicing over them. We see a glimpse into that and Paul is essentially giving us advice, although that's not his primary point. Its primary point is to connect to these people with whom he loves. He's giving us advice about how to have the deep, real kind of relationships that we were created for that we yearn for. So he tells us about the kind of ministry interactions he's had with the Philippians, and it's characterized, he says, by three things; people, partnerships and prayer. We're going to look at those three things today.

In this greeting you, if you've read any of the other New Testament letters, the greeting in verses one and two should sound pretty familiar to you. In fact, all ancient letters really followed a pretty set custom for how to introduce a letter. You would list the sender or the senders, you would list the recipients of the letter, and you would give some kind of greetings to the people to whom you were writing. Paul does all of those three things here in the first two verses. What's fascinating is the strategic way he does this, because he shapes this according to this specific kind of direction that he wants it to go.

So let's look at the sender first. Paul says that this comes not just from him, but from Paul and Timothy. Now that's significant. Why did Paul list, Timothy? It wasn't because this letter is sort of jointly written with Timothy. We know that pretty quickly as we look at verse three, for example, notice, "I thank my God, in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine." Then in verse seven, "it is right for me to feel this way." So I, my, me. This is a singular letter written from a single author, Paul. This is Paul's letter to the Philippians. So why then does Paul include Timothy in the center line? Well, a lot of speculation on this may be Timothy was simply with Paul when Paul was writing it. Well, that's probably true, but it's also true that there were other people with Paul when he wrote this. If you flip sort of a page over to Philippians 4:21 Paul at the very end of this letter says, "The brothers who are with me greet you." So there are other people with Paul when he writes this letter, but they didn't get their name included in the center line.

Well, the other suggestion goes, maybe Timothy transcribed what Paul dictated. We know that happens in the book of Romans. In Romans 16:22 suddenly, someone sort of stands up in a long chapter of greetings from different people in the church, we read, "I Tertius who wrote this letter greet you." So there was someone named Tertius who was dictating the letter of Paul to the Romans, which, by the way, must have been a remarkable job. Can you imagine that being able to stop the Apostle Paul in the midst of writing the letter to the Romans and say, can You clarify that stuff for me a little bit? That would've been really cool. Well, that may be the case, but we are told that. Again, Tertius didn't get his name until the very end of the Book of Romans. So we don't really know why Paul included Timothy in the beginning of this sender line part of the greeting.

If we stop trying to speculate and trying to figure out what's the threshold, who gets into the sender line and who doesn't, which a lot of scholarly ink has been spilled on this, believe it or not. I'm sure it sounds like a really thrilling question to ask. Yet if we step back from the speculation and just try to see what this reality reflects, we come upon something that we can be very confident about, namely that Timothy has a long standing, deep relationship with the Philippines. Not only Paul, but Timothy was there from the very beginning.

This letter was probably written in about 60 to 62 AD. The Philippine church was originally planted somewhere between 49 and 52 to A.D., so there's been about ten years between the planting of the church and when Paul writes this letter. If we look at Paul on the story of his second missionary journey and Acts chapter 16:1-15, we find that Timothy, wet behind the ears, inexperienced Timothy joins on to Paul as Paul and Silas are going on this missionary journey. One of the very first places they end up is in is Philippi. Timothy is there with Lydia, the seller of purple dyes, you might remember who comes to Christ. Timothy is there for that. Timothy is there when Paul casts the demon out of the fortune-telling slave girl. Timothy probably watches Paul and Silas carried off in shackles into the jail. He wasn't there in jail, we aren't told with Paul and Silas, but he would have known the Philippine jailer who converted and his household who was baptized with him. All of this happened. Timothy was there from the beginning.

Not only that, but Timothy is still there in their midst. Look at what Paul says in Philippians 2:19, he says, "I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you." Then skip down in verse twenty-two, "You know, Timothy proven worth how as a son with a father, He has served with me in the gospel." The Philippians know Timothy. There's a long standing, deep relationship, a relationship that may be about 10 or 13 years in length.

What that should do is adjust some of our expectations about relationships. Sometimes we despair that we don't have relationships that are fully functional and deep and filled with trust and love and joy. Yesterday, my wife and I, as we've had three kids in the infant stage, we often have joked to ourselves how it seems like when these babies wake up, they're often hungry. Because of that, they wake up just madder than a hornet's nest. I mean, they just wake up furious that someone hasn't anticipated their need and started feeding them before they woke up. Well, we kind of feel that way about relationships, right? Especially as we start comparing ourselves to the selfie wall on Facebook. We want those relationships right now. Why can't they be there?

Well, let's think what if we thought more along the lines of where could we be with people in 10 years? That totally changes our outlook. It says we're not waiting for something to instantly happening and frustrated and furious if it doesn't immediately, but we're looking over a long term to see, let's join with people in the gospel.

Well, that's the sender Paul and Timothy. What about the recipients? Well, Paul says this at the end of verse one, he outlines who they are. He says he's writing to all the saints in Christ Jesus, who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons. That word overseers is a word that's used interchangeably in the New Testament with the word elders. Overseers is a literal translation of the word it means to, to overlook or to oversee something. So he's talking about the elders and the deacons at this church. Paul never acknowledges the elders or the overseers and the deacons at any other church when he's writing a letter. He never does it. This is the only time where Paul does this, which is fascinating when you consider that Paul doesn't identify himself in the greeting here as an apostle, as he often does. Paul often identifies himself as an apostle, especially when he Has to straighten out a doctrinal issue or an ethical issue like in Galatians or in the letters to the Corinthians.

Here, instead of calling himself an apostle, which he is, he describes himself and Timothy, both as servants of Christ Jesus. As essentially slaves of Christ Jesus. Yet he holds up the overseers and the deacons while downplaying his own authority. He's pointing out and acknowledging specifically the leaders of this other church, while downplaying his own leadership authority.

What's fascinating here is the deference that Paul gives to the people in this church, he calls them saints to all the saints. Then particularly to their leaders those who are dedicated like the elders to the spiritual needs of the church, the ministry of the Word and prayer, sacraments, discipline. Also to those who labor in the physical needs of the church and ministries of mercy, caring for the poor, the sick, the needy. The elders and the deacons. He identifies them to say, look, I think what we see reflected here is that this is a healthy church, a church that is self-governing, a church that has good leadership In place, taking them in the right direction. He doesn't need to acknowledge his own authority because he's saying, look, you have a rise to the point of maturity where you are doing exactly what I planted you to do.

What's interesting here is that when we think about relationships very often, we think about relationships in terms of people's dependencies on us. We feel better when more people think that we are irreplaceable. Paul looks at this as a success, because I don't mean to flaunt my apostolic credentials, you have qualified overseers and deacons in your midst. The goal for Paul and his relationship with them from the very beginning, 10 years ago until now, has been for this very thing, for them to be established and in a healthy place. As we're going to see in this series, they have issues, they have problems and challenges, but they are a healthy church and Paul rejoices over that.

Well, so we got sender, we've got recipient, the final thing we have is a greeting. Typically, you're supposed to say just greetings to you, well, Paul doesn't say that. He says grace to you. Just Like in English greetings grace the word change in Greek is pretty slight from greetings to grace. Grace to you and peace from God our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you come often, you should recognize that line because I use it at the very beginning of every service. If you come often and don't recognize that line, you might want to get here a little bit earlier.

What Paul is saying by this Gordon Fee, I think really helpfully, he "Says, so when we're talking about grace, we're talking about the fuel, the foundation, what brings about the change in ministry that Paul is seeking. Peace then, is the result. Grace is what brings us to love Christ, to repent from our sins. To bring us into the way of saying sanctification and peace is the result of that. It's an idea really originally a Hebrew idea of shalom, of not just the absence of violence and conflict, but the presence of prosperity and flourishing." Grace to you and peace from God, our Father in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul takes this greeting and the gospel uses it.

So right away, right from the beginning, we see that these people are very dear to Paul, these people are very important to Paul. This relationship is incredibly critical to Paul, but not for the reasons that we might think, not in the way that we might think. He doesn't ask us to look at these relationships in the manner that we might think. Instead, what Paul says is we shouldn't look at relationships for their own sake. We should look at them really as means to our ultimate end.

When I was a little kid, maybe five or something like that, I remember one year we had planted pumpkins. The pumpkins were growing and they were blossoming, and then we had sort of a pumpkin form and it started to get a little bit bigger and bigger. I was really proud of this pumpkin. I loved this pumpkin. I was so excited for how big this pumpkin was going to be. I don't know if I had read the Berenstain Bears book about the Great Pumpkin thing or whatever, but I was really thinking that this was going to be the biggest pumpkin that ever pumpkined.

Well, I remember one day being so excited about this pumpkin. We had some people over to our home and I said, you've got to come see this pumpkin in the way that only young children can do pestering these people, I'm sure for a long time. I really vividly remember it, and it seemed very reasonable at the time. Now that I have my own kids, I have a different opinion of what that conversation must have been like. So they waited and waited, and I finally got so impatient that I went out and picked the pumpkin to bring it in to them and say, look at this pumpkin. Then I remember my mom's face falling like, Oh dear, that's not a good thing, that pumpkin can't grow anymore. Because I was so excited about something and so fixated on something I actually saw short circuited the process of having that grow into what it means to be.

Well, so these relationships that we need, that we die without, that we were created to have, without which it is not a good situation. God says we can't look directly to those. We can't look at those or they will not be able to carry the weight with which we freight them if relationships are our only hope. What Paul says, rather, is that rather than thinking just about relationships, we need to look at what he calls a partnership. It's not just people, and we just spend all of our time with them and love them and whatever else. He says, actually, what we're talking about, the reason the Paul and the Philippians are so close is because of the partnership that they shared.

Look at what he says in verses three through five. Notice the effusive love and joy that Paul says with every instance of all or every, those are related words in Greek.
I think my God, in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for You all making my prayer with joy." But then in verse five, it's not quite what we think. He turns a corner, he says, not just because I think your awesome people, but because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

It wasn't just these were the coolest kids on the block. Paul had a partnership with them. The word here for partnership is the idea of a fellowship, a commonality. It's the idea of a shared goal and desire. It wasn't that these people were looking at each other face to face. It was these people were standing side by side, laboring toward a different common goal on the horizon, namely for the gospel. For the spread and flourishing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Philippi and around the world. Paul says, you have had this partnership with me.

Now what does that mean? Well, probably it means lots of things. The partnership began when the people of Philippi believed the gospel, trusted in the shed blood of Jesus Christ to cover their sins. It continued as the Philippians probably gossiped the Gospel all around town. It probably continued when the people of Philippi, as we're going to discover, financially supported Paul in his ministry. They had a partnership with him. They labored alongside of him because they wanted the same thing Paul wanted. For Jesus Christ to be proclaimed and magnified as the only hope for sinners.

It wasn't a hope that's in vain. He says he has reason for it in verse seven, "It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart for you are all part takers with me of grace." You are all fellowshipers was with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and bad times and in the defense, in the preaching, the gospel and confirmation of the gospel when we've seen it lived out in our midst. He said I had this right to feel this way about you. Not only that, but one day someday when Jesus returns, all of this is going to be wrapped up and completed. We're not laboring in vain. We're not playing for the losing team. This is not just something to bide our time, but one day on the last day on the day of Jesus Christ, when the judge of all the Earth comes to judge the world and to bring his people home into glory, he says in verse six, "I am sure of this that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ."

The people that Paul focuses on are beloved. Not because they were more attractive, not because they had fewer problems, not because there was less brokenness, not because they came from wealthier backgrounds and had a lot to offer to Paul. He wasn't looking at their gifts or their talents. He was looking at the partnership, the fellowship, the commonality that they enjoyed in seeking to spread the glory of Jesus Christ in their city and to the ends of the Earth.

As we think about our relationships here at Harvest, we want to go deep. We want deep relationships. You know, often in any church one of the ongoing repeated themes of discontent is, well, I just don't know many people. I just don't feel connected. I just feel lonely. It's not just us, it's every church. We again, want these deep, deep, deep relationships, especially the ones that we see on the selfie wall on Facebook that we think are real, but we don't quite feel that everything is there. The way Paul says to do this is not merely through spending more time with each other, although it's not less than that. It's not merely through breaking bread together, although it's not less than that. The way that Paul in the Philippine church, the way that we come together is through a partnership in the gospel is by laboring together. Arcand Hughes has this great line, "It's you want to grow deep in your relationships. It's not just about having coffee with somebody. Serve together in the Women's Bible study or in the nursery. Serve the poor together. Why don't you come together to encourage one another and pray or pray with one another? This is the way with a partnership not focused on ourselves, but on the glory of Jesus that we are standing side by side in a band of brotherhood, become closer together than the world could even imagine."

The way we get to know people is through partnerships, but ultimately, Paul says through prayer. In verses nine through eleven, and this is a common structure to the opening of a letter to end with a thanksgiving prayer here, look at what Paul writes in verse nine. He says, "and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment" or in knowledge and all discernment. He's saying, look, I'm praying that your love is going to grow. When he says this, he's acknowledging something important. That love is not natural. Now there is a natural kind of love God by his common grace, gives all people everywhere a general ability to love one another; to love our spouses, our children, our friends, things like that. The love that Paul is talking about here is not a normal kind of love. It is not a natural kind of love. It is a supernatural kind of love that requires the grace of God.

So, he says the way this is going to happen is with knowledge. Through knowledge, God will cause your love to abound. The knowledge he's talking about is a Bible knowledge. It is sitting under the word of God being instructed by it, trained to understand what is good and what is not, what is evil and what is not. Trained to understand what God wants and what he doesn't, what he loves and what he hates. We have to be a Bible people, a Bible saturated people trained in the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ through his word.

Not only that, but he also says discernment. Again, this isn't just a normal thing. Anybody can study the Bible, but to relate rightly to God through the Bible is a spiritual gift. The same thing is true for discernment. The Bible doesn't address absolutely every issue we have in our lives. It doesn't help us to make every decision in a direct kind of a way. Well, you should choose this job over that job. You should choose this spouse over that person as a potential spouse. It doesn't work that way. Instead, God gives us his Spirit so that we have discernment in our lives and in trying to make right choices in the situations we find ourselves with.

So, Paul says, as this grows, as you sit under the word, as you hear the preaching of the word, as you study the word on a daily basis. "I pray", Paul says, "that your love may abound more and more." This gives us hope. I'm not saying a magic incantation as I preach to you, that's magically going to cause love to bubble up in your hearts. But as Paul teaches us, the learning and the knowledge is not different from love. It's not like those are two things, well, I'm good to love and you're good at knowledge. Well, it's more like God causes both of those things to work together that as we study his word, he causes love to grow in us as he reorients our thinking and our heart to want what is good.

Which is where he goes next. At the very end here in verse 10, "so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God." Where all of this is going, where all this is looking, is this fruit of righteousness. That we will love what's good, what's pure or what's excellent. That we will approve what's excellent and be pure and blameless for the day of Christ as this fruit grows in our lives. This requires God to give the growth. That's why Paul is praying for it. It's not just getting people and organizing them effectively, that kind of a partnership. It's not just trying for us to focus on people. At the end of the day, Paul says, we have to be diligent in prayer because only God can give this kind of thing. I hope you're praying for the growth of love in our congregation.

You know, I've been thinking this week, especially as we've had the Colombian pastors, that this kind of a partnership between two churches is really forming. It has been forming, there are a lot of people who some people who have been here been down to Colombia to visit with these pastors for for many years, certainly before I got there. There's this incredible relationship as I got to talk with Edison and Rafael. There was this wonderful partnership where I mean, they wanted to learn a little bit about some of what we did, but I was learning so much from them about ministry, about life in the body. We have this mutual affection that's starting to blossom. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen after one visit here to Omaha or the ones that have happened or even another visit down to Columbia. This partnership is growing and what could happen over 10 years or 20 years as our churches integrate with one another? What could happen in our community as we continue to partner with Coram Deo and City Light and some of the other churches in our area that are Good gospel preaching churches?

What could happen if we have these partnerships, can we grow in love or will we keep people at an arm's length? What about in here? Can we grow in love here? Oh, God, I pray that we would. Think about this. Do you not know someone and so that's causing you to not talk to them this morning? You know, maybe one of those things where you've already asked their name three times, and that's definitely the official cutoff for asking again what their name might be. We've all been there. It's OK. Suck it up, swallow your pride and just go remind me your name. Just be humble.

It's not going to happen overnight. These deep, loving relationships will not just happen like that. Yet God is calling us into this kind of relationship, the deep relationship that we yearn for with the affection of Christ Jesus. He's calling us into that. Until we're there, let's keep making those just little steps. As we pray that God will do the work to bind us together in Christ.

Pray with me. Father, we live in a world that is filled with chasms, divisions. All kinds of standoffish illnesses. We either don't want to go talk to other people, to partner with them, to love them, to get to know them, to be involved with them in ministry. Or maybe we don't know how or maybe we were afraid. God, this is at the end of the day, your work. That you've said that you are going to save a people from every tribe, language, tongue and people. Father you're going to bring us together, unite us in Christ. That we are not a whole bunch of people gathered in a whole bunch of different congregations, but that you actually are integrating us into one body through the gospel, as together we repent from our sins and believe. We pray, Father, that you would do this here in our midst with our partnership with other churches in town. With our partnership with the Colombian churches. God all of this is a gift from you and we ask that you would cause it to abound with wisdom and with knowledge and all discernment, that it would issue forth into the full fruit of righteousness that you expect, that you will bring to completion of the day of Christ Jesus. It's in your son's name, we pray. Amen.