Philippians 1:1-2
Our reading from God’s Word today
is from Philippians chapter 1, verses 1 through 2. We’ll begin
a new series here in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. It’s one
of Paul’s prison epistles. It was written from a Roman prison
toward the end of his life. It was written to a church that
he dearly loved, one that he began on his second missionary
journey as he went preaching through the Mediterranean Sea
region. Philippians is often called the
epistle of joy. That’s one of its great themes. But what does the apostle Paul
really mean to do when he writes Philippians? He means to write
to a group of Christians that he dearly loves and to encourage
them in the gospel fellowship. And joy happens to be one of
those themes. This is also one of Paul’s kinder
letters. It’s not like Galatians. We’re
studying that on Wednesdays with our ladies, a Bible study where
he yells at the Galatians for their unbelief. This is a kinder
letter, a sweeter letter from the pen of the Apostle Paul.
So today we’ll look at the beginning of the letter, his greetings
and his salutations. Let’s give our attention now
to Philippians chapter one, verses one through two, where it says,
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus to all the saints
in Christ Jesus, who are at Philippi with the overseers and the deacons
grace to you. and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. This is God’s holy word.
Pray with me. Our great God, we know from your
scriptures that you write to us. You write your holy will,
the will of God for our salvation, the will of God for our obedience.
You write it to comfort us, to build us up, to nurture us and
to strengthen us, and even to convince and convert those who
are not yet of faith. And so we ask now that your word
and your spirit would do just those things. Would it convince
and convert? Would it comfort and build up?
Oh Lord, you know where we live, you know the enemies we face,
the struggles and hardships that are ours. And may your word give
us the tools we need to live life well in the world that you
have made and that you have put us in and that you have made
us little lords over. And we ask for that great grace
in Jesus, holy and precious name. Amen. This week, I think about
the communications that I had, most of them, if not all of them
through my smartphone. I text messaged back and forth
with a man who is from this area, but he had traveled to China
and to Sri Lanka. I think about just yesterday
with the little video FaceTime, we had a conversation with our
little nephew, Charlie, who lives in Washington, D.C., and we got
to talk back and forth. Well, we did a lot of talking
and he did a lot of smiling because he’s only a year and a half old.
There were emails received from missionaries around the world,
one from Chad, Africa, another from Nantes and France. There
were phone calls, there were text messages locally and from
around the country. And we think about how we communicate
today and we take for granted that in many of our lifetimes,
communication was not so easy and for sure not so instant. It’s been in our lifetime, it’s
been in recent years where communication has really been revolutionaryized.
We have lived in an era where we went from the Pony Express
to the U.S. snail mail to the telegraph and
the telephone. Now we have computers and emails,
we have Skype, we have FaceTime, we have text messaging and instant
messaging. The list could go on and on,
but it is amazing to see now how we communicate. Some of you
work in industries or fields where you’re communicating every
day with people all over the world and in all kinds of time
zones. And that was not possible in days recent gone by. But now we can communicate instantly. We can communicate live and directly
with others. And so there is a real question,
what does a letter in an ancient book written to a people in a
little town called Philippi, we know nothing about them, we
are 2,000 years after them, what in the world does a letter like
that have for us? Well, there’s a lot. But we first
recognize that it is the word of God for the people of God,
first and originally written to the church of the Philippians
from the pen of the apostle Paul, but through the ages has been
preserved for the good of God’s church. This letter to the church
at Philippi was written by Paul from a Roman prison with the
assistance and the collaboration of Timothy, his young servant.
It was sent back to them by a papyrus, a member of that church who returned
with the letter where it was read and probably sent around
to other churches. Philippians has many verses that
you probably know. Probably the greatest passage
in Philippians that you know is I can do all things through
Christ who strengthens me. Philippians 4 13. There are many
other verses which you have recalled in your minds and in your hearts.
Now, what can we learn from the greetings and the salutations
found in the first couple of verses of Philippians? These
might be verses we would ordinarily skip over and say, yeah, this
is the to and the from. We got that. This is standard
letter business. What can we learn from verses
one and two? Well, I want us to see that there
are three key phrases. three key things in this little
couple of verses that tell us about who we are in Christ Jesus. You see, we live in a world where
we are having an identity crisis. People are now deciding how they
want to identify. And we now identify not only
by race or gender, but we identify by sexual preference. We identify
by political sides. We identify by everything except
the way God says he identifies us. And wouldn’t it be good and
wise of us to say, how does Jesus, the creator, speak about us. What does the Bible say about
me? What does it say about me? And
how should I value that? And how should I live out of
those wonderful truths? Well, in the greetings and salutations
of Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, we have three significant
things that speak about our identity in Jesus Christ and will follow
Maybe you remember in your grammar school lessons what prepositions
are. We’ll follow those prepositions.
We are servants of Jesus Christ. We are saints in Jesus Christ. And then finally, we have salvation
from Jesus Christ. Let’s first speak of being servants
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Look, if you will, at the first
part of verse one, it says Paul and Timothy, servants of Jesus
In the Old Testament, if a household servant wanted to live in the
household of their master forever, there was a little ceremony where
that servant or that slave, that bond servant, could go to the
master and say, look, I love living here. I love what is provided
for me. There’s meaningful work, there’s
family life, there’s security, there’s income, there’s provision
for the rest of my family, I would like to be your servant forever.
And the Old Testament describes a process where that servant
would be taken to the door of the home of that master, and
there would be a hammer and an awl, and there would be a ring
placed in that servant’s ear. And that was a sign that that
servant wanted to enlist in a lifelong way with that master of that
household. That theme rides throughout the
scriptures and the Apostle Paul picks it up here. in Philippians
when he says of himself and Timothy, I Paul and Timothy. Now notice
he doesn’t say apostles. He doesn’t say preacher to the
Gentiles, or he doesn’t say what he says elsewhere of himself,
Hebrew of all Hebrews, Jew of all Jews, trained under the law,
served by the master Gamaliel. He doesn’t give any of those
credentials, which we might give in our world today, PhDs This
titles and that he simply says, Paul and Timothy, servants, bond
servants of the Lord Jesus. And so we have to have this imagery
in our minds when we think of Paul, the servant. He has enlisted
with Jesus, the master, and he willingly desires to lovingly
and joyfully serve Jesus as the king of kings. He has taken upon
his shoulders the yoke of Jesus and says, I will serve Jesus,
my master. I will be a servant of God for
God’s glory and for the good of all his neighbors. You see,
Paul, as well as Timothy, had signed on to be servants of the
living and true God and friends and brothers and sisters. That
is what happens to us when we come to faith in Jesus. Jesus
rescues us from our enslavement to sin and misery. It’s a greater
exodus than when Jesus brought Israel out of Egypt, for he brings
us out of an enslavement to sin and to misery and to the power
of the devil. And he brings us into his household. And we willingly say to Jesus,
we will serve you. We will serve you as our king
and our master and our Lord. And so, dear brothers and sisters
of the Lord Jesus, as the world tells you all kinds of things
about yourself, one thing for sure it does not say of you is
that you ought to be mastered by someone. You ought to become
a servant of someone else. No, the world says we ought to
be independent. We ought to be free spirited.
We live and exist to serve ourselves in our own desires. Pamper yourselves. splurge for yourselves, indulge
yourselves. But that is not the way of Jesus.
Jesus says, come to me and take my yoke upon you. My yoke is
easy. My burden is light. But we yoke
ourselves with Jesus. We take our ear to the door of
his house and say we will serve you joyfully and lovingly. And so the first question. For
us to answer this day is, have you willingly given your life
to serve Jesus, the great master over all? Is your desire to love
him and obey him and to serve him and to forsake all your loves
of this world and to say, Jesus, wherever you send, I will go.
Whatever you command, I will do. Whatever you ask, I will
freely give. You see, that’s what the Apostle
Paul and Timothy and many others have done. And as we’ll see throughout
our study of Philippians, we will understand that Paul’s sacrifice,
his service, his labor in the kingdom in service to the master
King Jesus. Was such a great benefit and
blessing to the church of the Lord Jesus, and it even benefits
us to this day as we have this wonderful letter of Paul to the
Philippians. And so the first thing this Greeting
in the salutation tells us is that we are servants of Jesus,
just like Paul. We serve Jesus and we serve at
his disposal for his glory and for the good of others. The second
thing that we find in this passage that tells us who we are is that
we are saints in Jesus Christ. We see that at the second part
of verse two, it says, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus
to the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi together
with the overseers and the deacons. Now the question every Christian
wants to know is, am I a sinner or a saint? And the answer, guess
what, is both. You are a sinner, but you are
also a saint. The Bible says we all have sinned
and have fallen short of the glory of God. But God sees you
When you have faith in Jesus and you trust in him alone for
your salvation, he does not see you as a sinner. He sees you
as a saint. And he does that for two reasons.
One is because of the perfect obedience and sinlessness and
righteousness of Jesus is yours. We say that in justification,
it’s just as if we’ve never sinned. And it’s just as if we have always
obeyed. And so when we come to faith
in Jesus, we have the perfect righteousness of Christ. But
there’s another reality. And it’s that Jesus, by virtue
of his death and resurrection, when we come to faith in him,
he washes us and cleanses us and makes us holy. He makes you
a saint. Now in the tradition of the Roman
Catholic Church, there’s a process to sainthood. It requires all
sorts of hoops to jump through. It requires centuries of reflection. And over time, the church recognizes
a person as a saint. Well, that’s all well and good. And that’s for the Roman Catholic
Church. But that’s what Jesus does in the Bible. He calls every
one of you who has faith in Jesus and puts their hope and trust
in him. He calls you a saint. He calls you a holy one. He calls
you one who is set apart out of this world. What is the church
literally? The church is a collection of
saints. We are the ones called out of the world, set apart for
God. And you see, God has been doing
this in the history of his people forever. He called Abraham out
of Ur of the Chaldeans and said, Abraham, quit your idolatry and
follow me. He did that with his disciples.
Put down your fishing nets and come follow me. And God in Christ
has done that with each of you who truly have faith in him.
He’s come to you and said, follow me. And God has called a people
unto himself. He has formed a people for himself.
He gathers them in the church and by his word and spirit and
through fellowship and suffering and other means, God is making
saints. and he’s making saints more holy.
And so when the apostle Paul calls the church at Philippi
saints, he’s teaching us something about who we really are in Christ
Jesus. Notice it says servants of Jesus
Christ, but it says here, we are saints in Christ Jesus. We are the new covenant people
of God. Yes, together with the elders
and deacons as it lists, we’re the people of God at First ARP
Church in Burlington on Saddle Club Road. They were the people
of God at Philippi, an ancient Roman city. We’ll learn more
and more about that city as it helps us unpack what the meaning
of the letter to the Philippians is. But they were largely a group
of Roman expatriates, a lot of military retirees. And Paul is
gonna say to them, you’re citizens of heaven and not of this earth.
But he calls them saints. He calls them the holy ones.
And so do you see yourself as a holy one? Oh yes, you still
sin. Oh yes, you still come into the
church of God and repent, but do you see yourself as God sees
you? You see, that’s what’s critical
here. Do you identify yourself the way God identifies you? You
see, that’s the bankruptcy that we see in our culture. We are
told we can identify however we want to identify ourselves.
We can be whoever we wanna be, and we ignore what our creator
has made us to be. Just think about how God made
us in his image. He made us in the image of God
and knowledge and in righteousness and in holiness. He’s given us
dominion over the creatures. He’s given us to rule over the
earth. And when Adam and Eve sinned and fell short of God’s
glory, that image was bent. It was broken. It was shattered.
But now it is being remade as we are being conformed to the
image of the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to remember who we are.
because who God tells us that we are. And he says that we are
saints. We are holy ones. And God is
constantly at work in each of our lives, making us more like
himself, making us more saintly, so to speak. What’s a third thing
that he speaks of in this passage? Not only are we servants of Jesus
Christ, We’re also saints in Christ Jesus. But finally, we
have salvation from Christ Jesus. And we find that in verse two
as he greets them. He’s speaking of God’s ongoing
grace to them, but also of God’s first act of grace. He says,
grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus
Christ. One of the things that we forget
as Christians We forget as a church, we forget as gospel ministers
and proclaimers, is that God hates sin and that a person who
is a sinner cannot have fellowship with God. Now, you know what
it is to not be on speaking terms with someone, I’m sure. You know
what it is to have a, what do we say in the South, a falling
out, to be at odds with another person. We know what it is to
be alienated from them. There’s separation because there’s
no peace. And when Paul makes this statement,
grace to you and peace from God, our father and the Lord Jesus
Christ, he is reminding them that God through Jesus has made
peace with them. And that peace was not just an
initiation of a renewed relationship. But there is a sense of ongoing
grace and peace from God to the Philippian church that as they
live life in that crazy, wacky Roman world where the culture
is bent and broken and messed up as our own, just without the
internet, that they have God’s grace and mercy and peace. And so this last little section
speaks of salvation from Jesus. He greets them and reminds them
that they have been reconciled to almighty God. Grace reminds
us of God’s unmerited favor, but that’s what grace is. It’s
something we don’t deserve. Remember, we deserve God’s wrath. We deserve his curse. We deserve
death. We deserve eternal alienation
from almighty God because he gave us one simple rule in the
garden. Don’t eat from the tree. And the day you eat of it, you
will surely die. And Adam is our representative.
Ed ate from that tree. And so in Adam, we all die. But in Jesus, we have peace with
Almighty God. And so he reminds us in this
salutation that God in Christ has brought grace to us. It’s something we didn’t earn,
something we didn’t deserve, but it is for sure something
we needed. And God, in his steadfast love
and kindness, has freely given us his grace. And grace leads
to peace. Without grace, you have no peace.
Without grace, you have chaos. Without grace, we have alienation. We have damnation. Without grace, we are lost. We
are dead in our sins and trespasses. But thanks be to God for Christ
that through his grace, we have peace with God. Remember, after
the flood, after Adam or Noah and his family had spent over
a year in the ark, The waters of the flood subsided. Death
was no more. Destruction was gone. The sun
was out. And God put his rainbow in the sky as a covenant promise
to Noah and to us who live after him and said, I have hung my
bow up in the air. Never again will I destroy the
entire face of the earth as I have done in this case. And so we
see a rainbow in the sky and it’s a reminder that there is
peace between ourselves and God. And it’s come through the death
of Jesus. All the wrath and anger and curse of God was put on Jesus
so that it would not be put upon us. And so do you have this grace? And has that led to peace? This is the day of salvation,
and God is saying to you, do you have my grace? Have you recognized
yourself to be a sinner in the sight of God? And do you know
that without Jesus, you have no hope, no mercy and no peace? But if you lay hold of Jesus
and receive him and rest in him alone for your salvation, you
will have peace not only in this life, but in the life which is
to come. And you will have peace with
God where the lion will dwell with the lamb. and where God
and his beloved people will dwell together forever and ever. Think about these few words,
servants of Jesus, saints in Christ and salvation from Jesus. We are recipients of these wonderful
gifts of God, just like the people at the church at Philippi. So
who do you think you are? Now, the real question is, who
do you know you are because of what the Bible says about you? Do you see yourself as God sees
you? For if you do, what a wonderful
position, what a wonderful privilege that is to know and understand
all that we are in him. Pray with me. Our great God,
we thank you that we do not have to listen to the words of the
world. We do not have to wonder about
who we are. We don’t have to make up identities.
We don’t have to dream up what we’d like to be. For you tell
us exactly who we are and what is possible in Christ Jesus.
We thank you that we are new creations in him. And we thank
you that we will have a rich life on this earth, but especially
in the earth to come when you make all things new. Help us
to see this and to know this and to believe this. And we give
you thanks for Jesus, our great savior, who has died and granted
us these precious gifts that we might be his children both
now and forevermore. And we pray all this in the name
of Jesus, our great savior. Let us stand and respond to God’s
holy word as we sing together from the hymnal when we all get
to heaven.