Gratitude and Joy
Philippians 1:3–4
Philippians Lesson #006
May 26, 2022
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are indeed grateful that we can be together. We are grateful that we have freedom to come together to teach Your Word, to proclaim the truth of Your Word, to apply it in our lives. We know that those freedoms are under assault in subtle ways and overt ways.
“Father, we pray that You might give us the spiritual strength and courage to be able to discern what is going on around us, ways in which the culture, in fact, the government and others attempt to manipulate the population to conform to their world.
“Father, we need to be transformed. As we look at life and the details of life, there have always been more things to worry about and be concerned about than we had time to really focus on. Scripture says we are to cast all our cares upon You, but it seems like in these last few years, those things have multiplied and expanded geometrically.
“So Father, we pray that we might learn that it does not matter where there is one problem or one million problems. We have to cast them upon You and trust in You, and You will take care of us. And we need to recognize You are greater than any problem that we face in life.
“Father, we pray You would encourage us, strengthen us with what we study this evening. In Christ’s name, Amen.”
I ran across an article early this morning, and I did not bring it with me because I was saving it for Tuesday night. I will have the data and specifics on Tuesday night. It really fits there. It is distressing.
This article is talking about the fact that the federal government is going to tie lunch money aid to local school districts to their enforcement of gender policy. This is exactly the kind of thing I have been talking about on Tuesday night.
It is a war on Christians. It is a war on the Christians that are in the education system. Make no mistake about it. It is going to put them in a position where they become implicit in the validation of this worldview by working for such a school district.
We hope and pray that there will be Christians in communities, in school districts, people who are teaching, who will have the knowledge, the ability to go and have conversations with those in leadership. When it is tied to federal money, it is very hard for people to back away because they will not have that money to continue those federal programs. But that is what has to happen.
It is a real challenge because every Christian in every school district where this is an issue is being pressured to conform to a very pagan view of male and female. Historically, this really started much earlier than the 60s and 70s. It really has its seeds back in the mid-19th century, but it was not expressed quite as explicitly except in some backroom conversations.
So we need to be in prayer for this nation, and the pressures that come against Christians, and the way in which the world is seeking to pressure them into conformity. We will talk about this some more as we continue what we are talking about on Tuesday night. I have been thinking about this, happened to look at it as I was packing up my briefcase coming here. So that has been on my mind, and it needs to be on our mind.
Slide 2
Let us open our Bibles to Philippians 1. Tonight, what I want to do is look at something that may not jump out at you right away when you are looking at these verses that we are studying, Philippians 1:3–5, and that is the connection between gratitude and joy.
It is interesting—I made this point for years as a pastor—that the English word “gratitude” comes from the Latin word gratis. The Latin word gratis is connected to the Latin word gratia, which is where we get the English word “grace.” Grace and gratitude go hand in hand.
If you are not grace-oriented, you cannot really be grateful. If you are arrogant, you cannot be gracious. You are concerned about yourself more than you are others. You cannot be gracious to others. So, these things go together.
What is interesting is, you have this connection of gratitude with joy in these opening verses. What we are going to see is how this fits with the conclusion of this Epistle. This is not just something that is thrown together but is the way in which the Apostle Paul, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, connects these together.
Because we will come to the end of this Epistle in Philippians 4:4, where there is a series of commands that are applying what Paul has said in the Epistle previously. So, this connects it with joy and also with gratitude. It ties things together.
When we read the Scripture, that is one of the things that becomes apparent over time. We are always going to learn things like that. There is never going to be a time when we do not become awakened to certain things no matter how much time we have spent on any particular subject.
Slide 3
Let us review briefly our outline as we are beginning to build it in Philippians 1. The introduction covers Philippians 1:1–11. I got other things changed, but I did not change that.
The introduction is Philippians 1:1–11. There is the greeting in Philippians 1:1–2. Then there is the expression of Paul’s concern and his prayer for the Philippians in Philippians 1:3–8.
Then in Philippians 1:9–11, he is praying essentially for their spiritual growth. He says “… your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, [with the result] that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness ...” All of that talks about their spiritual life and their spiritual growth, and that that results in the glory and praise to God in Philippians 1:11.
That is what we are working our way through: understanding what Paul is praying, why he is praying it, and how that should impact our own prayer life and our own mental attitude. That is all part of the introduction.
Then the first main point is Paul’s joy over the expansion of the gospel in Philippians 1:12–26. While I am here, I want to point out that in the introduction, the gospel is introduced when we look at Philippians 1:5, which we might get to at the end tonight, “for your fellowship in the gospel ...” That is one of the things he is thankful for, their fellowship, their partnership, their participation in the gospel, which is more than just telling people about how to receive eternal life.
I have taught for years, there is a narrow use of “the gospel,” which is the immediate information that you need to trust in Jesus Christ as the One who died on the Cross for you, and by trusting in Him, that He paid the penalty for sin, you are given the free gift of eternal life.
But in some ways, Paul uses the word “gospel” to refer to everything that comes as a result of that, the whole spiritual life. The good news is: Jesus came to give you life, and give you abundant life. That is a full gospel, not the blasphemous concept of the Pentecostals and their “full gospel” churches. We need to understand that this expansion of the gospel is more than just telling people how to get saved.
Then the third, which introduces a major section, covers Philippians 1:27–2:30, is a worthy walk. which is characterized by standing firm in one spirit, emphasizing this unity, which is going to bring in these ideas of joy and focusing on the Lord and not on problems.
That is as far as I have built that.
Slide 4
We looked at the salutation last time, the author “Paul [along with] Timothy, slaves of Jesus Christ ...” And then almost in every case his salutation, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father …”
What he is essentially saying is that he is asking and reminding them that they need to have more grace and more peace in order to face the problems of life. The only way to develop in grace and grace-orientation and peace, tranquility is to grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what he is inferring every time he writes that salutation, that we need more grace, more peace from God, the only source, so that we can handle the trials of life.
Slide 5
I pointed out last time that what he is doing is combining and modifying a little bit two common salutations. One in the Greco-Roman world, CHAIREIN is changed to CHARIS,
Slide 6
and EIRĒNĒ from shalom, peace, of the Jewish background. And pulling these together and saying, we only have them as a result of God.
Slide 7
That comes from God the Father.
Slide 8
Then we started in this first section in Philippians 1:3. Paul is joyfully giving thanks because of their partnership in the gospel, an excellent word for translating the word KOINŌNIA, which is normally thought of as fellowship. We use “fellowship” all the time.
It is like any other word. You use the word all the time, what happens? It loses its meaning, it loses its significance, and it no longer has quite the impact. It is a partnership. We will talk about that word when we get there.
Slide 9
In this opening section Paul says, “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ; just as it is right for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers …—that is another word that is KOINONIA, SUNKOINONIA—you all are partakers with me of grace.”
Slide 10
To work our way through what is Paul saying in all of these clauses and phrases: he starts off, his main idea is, “I thank my God.” That is the main idea. That is your main subject. He is thanking God. He immediately shifts the focus to God and his gratitude toward God and what he is thankful to God for, that He has done in the spiritual life of these Philippian believers.
Slide 11
Then I broke it down a little bit, color coded it. You have black for the main clause. Then Philippians 1:4–5 talks about why he is thanking God.
Then Philippians 1:6–7 are both shades of brown because they connect together. They are telling us again why he is thanking God.
The primary clause is, “I thank my God.” The secondary clause relates to “thanking my God.” The third clause is talking about the cause or the reason, the basis for that.
This phrase, “because I am confident” controls both Philippians 1:6 and Philippians 1:7. He is confident of this thing: “that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.” He is also confident that “it is right for me to think this way about you all, because ... you all are [partners], partakers—they are ‘fellowshippers,’ as it were—with me of grace.”
Slide 12
We looked at that clause last week. It should be translated not as “upon every remembrance”— that is an antiquated King James way of translating that preposition—
Slide 13
but “at every remembrance.” Every time they come to mind.
What this tells us is that we should be more conscious and conscientious about the thoughts that go through our head. When we think of people, we should pray for them in quick bullet prayers.
We cannot always do that, but we can do it more, I think, than we do. Because we are so wrapped up in our own lives and details, we think of people all the time, and we just move past it and go on, rather than taking just half a second and praying for them.
Paul is saying, “I thank my God at every remembrance of you.” I could not help but thinking as I kept reading through this, that you must remember, Paul is a trained rabbi, probably the most brilliant rabbi that there ever was, prior to his salvation.
One of the things that characterized the training of a rabbi, especially a Pharisee, was the massive amount of memory that they had. They memorized the entire Torah. They would memorize vast amounts of oral tradition of what the rabbis said. They were just phenomenal.
But in the Old Testament theology of memory, the importance of remembering something is not just something that you recall to mind, but you recall to mind with a consequent action. When it comes to mind, you do something.
When we remember Jesus at the Lord’s Table, we remember because that is to encourage us spiritually by remembering who Jesus is, and what He did, and how that should be a vital part in the way we think, and how it should change our lives and transform our lives. So, remembering here is connected to an action.
It is not just recalling them, but it is connected to the action of a prayer on their behalf.
Slide 14
What he is praying here is not about any specific intercession or supplication, but just on gratitude. This is his customary thing to do.
This is in the present tense. This sense or nuance of the present tense is, this is his customary or—there is a little bit of difference grammatically between a customary present and a habitual present, but they both have a very similar idea—this is something he normally did. It was just part of his everyday practice.
Slide 15
Then we went on to talk about what the Bible teaches about thankfulness to God and the importance of gratitude.
Slide 16
The first point was that Paul thought about them, something would remind him, and then he would pray for them. Ephesians 1:16, he told those in Ephesus, “I do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers.”
Slide 17
Then we looked at the foundational verses. 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “in everything—that means in whatever circumstances you are in, in whatever emotional state you are in, in whatever work situation, family situation, life situation you find yourself in—give thanks.” Be grateful.
We have no idea how God might be using that in either our lives and our spiritual growth, or the lives of those around us, or those who witness us. We are to have gratefulness toward God, “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus—positional truth—for you.”
People want to know, “What does God want me to do?” This is one thing God is very clear that He wants us to do. There is a number of other things related to specific will, “this is the will of God” statements in Scripture, which we will look at on Tuesday night when we get back into our study of Gideon.
Ephesians 5:20 uses a slightly different preposition. We are “giving thanks always for—that is, on behalf of—all things.”
You have these words “always,” and “all things,” “everything.” Always watch those terms because they are completely inclusive of everything there is. We are to “give thanks always on behalf of all things,” not just in, but “for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Slide 18
Then we looked at a whole series of things that Paul was thankful for, as we went through the different Epistles. I am not going to go through all of those again. We did that last week.
The point that I made was, in our prayers, we are usually not thankful for the things that Paul, Peter, John, and Jesus are expressing thanks for. We are thankful for lots of other things, but they do not have that spiritual focus that the prayers of Scripture have. That is a challenge to us to rethink our priorities and expressions in prayer.
Slide 19
He thanks God at every remembrance of them.
Slide 20
We have this connection then between the thanking of God and what comes up in Philippians 1:4 that continues the sentence, “I thank my God ... always in every prayer of mine making requests for you all accompanied—that is accompanied with, the preposition in the Greek is META—accompanied with joy.”
The gratitude motivates the prayer. And the gratitude and the prayer are accompanied alongside of joy.
We have to understand what joy is. Here we have the noun that is expressed.
Joy, in the Scripture, is a mental attitude. Jesus said in John 15, “My joy I give to you.” Jesus never lost His joy.
This is a difficult concept for people to think through because in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sorrowed. He was deeply troubled. He was so profoundly emotionally distraught that He sweated blood—hematidrosis. He sweated blood.
When you are under intense pressure, this is a known condition, where the blood in the tiny capillaries can be forced out through the pores. I wonder what their blood pressure is doing at that point.
Those are the emotions that are there. The emotions in and of themselves are not sinful because our Lord never sinned. Emotions, though, can be a test as to whether we are going to respond, react with those emotions. Are those emotions going to cause us to act in sinful ways?
The mental attitude is supposed to control the emotions. Joy is a mental attitude based on our stable focus on God, a focus on His character, on His promises, and on His providential care.
What we see here is this connection between gratitude and joy. Do we have another place where that happens? It just so happens, as he comes into his conclusion, he ties these two ideas together again.
That is important because the context of what Paul is doing is, that there have been personal conflicts within the congregation at Philippi. As a result of that, there is dissension, and people are not getting along. And there is not much of an expression or feeling of joy, and their unity has been disrupted.
He is bringing them back to the fact that they have to refocus their thinking on eternal things, and on God, and not on these secondary issues dealing with various details of life.
Slide 21
So we jump from Philippians 1 to Philippians 4:6–7. The place where we see this come together is a promise you often hear me recite.
“Be anxious for nothing.” It does not say “most things” or “for just a few things.”
It says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” That is the New King James Version.
What is the context here? That is a well-known passage, Philippians 4:6–7.
Slide 22
That paragraph actually begins in Philippians 4:4 with the command to rejoice. This word “rejoice” is important. It is connected.
It is a command, and it is repeated twice in Philippians 4:4. It is connected contextually to what is really the third command—because Philippians 4:5 has a command also, but it is different because it is an aorist imperative, but this is a present imperative—“Be anxious for nothing” is a present imperative. So these two things are juxtaposed to one another.
“Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!” Then, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything …” What is the contrast there? The contrast is between “nothing” and “everything.”
So, “Be anxious for [not one thing on the one hand], but in [every single thing] by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God.”
Slide 23
It starts with that command to rejoice, which is from the verb of CHARA. CHARA is joy, that is the noun. And CHAIRŌ is the cognate verb. And it is a present active imperative.
In Greek, a present imperative is describing something that should be the normal standard operating procedure in the Christian life. It should be a normative characteristic of somebody’s Christian life. And it does not mean that it is never a priority. The grammar is just saying that in this situation and circumstance, he is reminding them that having joy, rejoicing, is to be normative in their Christian life.
So, he twice says that, “Rejoice in the Lord always.” Notice these words, “always,” “nothing,” then “everything,” (just the opposite of nothing whatsoever) “always.” These are broad terms that have no exceptions. “Rejoice in the Lord always.”
Emotions cannot be commanded. If you are in a situation … I can think of a situation right now where somebody I know has had a big loss, a big defeat. Something that they anticipated, something they expected, something that they thought was going to happen just completely blew up in their face. And after months and months and months of work and anticipation, it is gone.
That is tough to handle for any of us, and we have a lot of emotions related to loss, related to grief. It could be the death of a person, death of a child. We can think of the parents of those kids whose lives were taken in Uvalde, and the heartache that can be there.
“You can’t walk up to somebody like that and say, ‘Have joy.’ ”
Yes, you can! Because what they are experiencing are emotions. You can’t command emotions.
Joy is not an emotion. Joy is a mental attitude.
Did Jesus ever lose His joy? No. Did he go through emotional distress? Yes.
We want to say that if you have joy, you can’t have emotional distress. The Scripture is saying, “No, that is not true.” Because joy is a mental attitude, and it is the focus of your thinking. You can have joy at the same time that you are under emotional duress, emotional distress, emotional sorrow and grief.
This is what Paul is getting at in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, when he is talking about grief over the death of a loved one. That we grieve, yes, but not like those who have no hope. Hope, again, is that confident expectation.
It is a mental attitude, that on the one hand, we have a mental attitude that wraps around that which brings grief or sorrow, sadness, distress, but it does not overwhelm us. It is different.
On the one hand we have that emotional reaction, but we are not going to act upon it in a sinful way. And it is not going to become that which moves us to sin in various ways to try to somehow get rid of it.
Grief and sorrow in difficult circumstances cannot be rushed. I think it can be slowed down, but it cannot be rushed. We just go through a process. And in that process, we have to learn to trust God and walk through that situation.
That is what our Lord did in the Garden of Gethsemane. That is what He did as He faced all of the physical torments and tortures that came His way. He felt in an extreme way, I think in His perfect humanity, the horrors of what He was observing and what He was anticipating, which was that He would bear our sins on the Cross. That all of our sins would be imputed to Him.
And the pain, in one sense of Him bearing our sins on the Cross far outweighed any physical distress. The physical distress, He uttered not a word.
But under the spiritual distress of bearing our sins, He cried out, “My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me?” But He never loses His joy.
In our finite thinking, what we say is, it is either one or the other. But we have two categories. You have an emotion, and you have a mental attitude. The mental attitude has to dominate the emotion.
But we live in a culture that, since the late 1700s and into the early 1800s, because of the way the culture shifted away from Scripture and in their understanding of the makeup of humanity, their anthropology, they separated the intellectual from the emotion.
Intellect could not bring you hope. Intellect could not bring you knowledge or stability because they created this divorce between the two. So, you have the rise of what eventually turns into religious liberalism, political liberalism, progressivism, and everything else, where everything is defined, evaluated, and determined by emotion. Emotion becomes the governor of the soul rather than the intellect.
There was a great term that was coined for this. It is called “the emotional revolt of the soul.” You just can’t clarify it any better than that.
That is what we have seen in Western Civilization gradually increasing, until we have a culture that is completely characterized by the emotional revolt of the soul, where people want emotion to be in the driver seat rather than the mind. Because the worldview that developed, that goes into secular humanism, that goes into postmodernism, that goes into everything that we are today, was a worldview that rejected rationality and the intellect as a way to discern truth and to find joy and happiness.
Because they rejected the Bible as not being true, they put all their hope on autonomous reason rather than reason that was in conformity to the revelation of God. That gets into some real heavy thoughts.
That is why we think the way we think in our culture. The worldview started to shift in the early 1800s, and as it shifted, it is like a snowball. It picked up more and more speed, and got bigger and bigger and bigger, until we get to this absolute monstrosity today, where we are about to self-implode as a culture.
Slide 24
Rejoicing is addressing the mental attitude. Then you have another command that comes up in Philippians 4:6, that is to “be anxious for nothing.”
We look at some of the problems in life. I got a text today from someone, and I don’t know if they were thinking about sending their kids to this camp or not. You know when you send your kids off to a Christian camp, you are hoping that the environment there will be positive and not negative, and there won’t be anything that is going to be harmful for them.
This camp is a well-known camp. I knew some kids who went there back in the 70s, and they have an office down on I-10. I just saw it the other day as I drove by an office building. It is a well-known, affluent camp. Their camps are four or five weeks, and they are up in Missouri.
Several reports have come out that the kids have reported abuse. Then there is another article that alleges that this abuse has gone on for a long, long time. And it has been covered up.
Campers were not allowed to call home to talk to their parents about this abuse. I don’t know what kind of abuse it was. But this is a horrible, horrible thing. This is the kind of thing that is happening today.
We have to recognize that only the Word of God can give us the tools we need to truly deal with this kind of thing. The world has tools that will help you manage stress or try to manage the kind of thing that happened in Uvalde, this horrible incident. But the Bible tells us that we can solve that problem.
That does not mean we do not feel the emotions that go with it, but we can dominate that. But our culture has just gone into this meltdown that impacts everything.
So parents are concerned. If I were a parent today, I would feel sorry for my kids in some ways. I would not have a TV. They would not have an electronic device until they were 25.
I know a lot of parents that are doing a great job because they are very, very restrictive and very, very much supervising the environment their kids are in, so that the kids can grow up with a biblical worldview and understand what that means. They can still participate in a lot of things, but they are going to be monitored.
So many bad things can happen out there. We do not live in anything like the world that any of us grew up in. We have to understand that the structures that were there, that were safe for us—may not have been as safe as we thought they were—they don’t exist anymore, probably have not existed for a good 20 years.
We have so many things we can worry about. But the Scripture is just as true today as it was when it was written. It does not matter whether you have a thousand things to be worried about, a million things to be worried about, or five things to be worried about. Scripture says, “Be anxious for nothing.”
This is the Greek word MERIMNAŌ, which means “to care, to be anxious, or troubled, to be apprehensive.” This is the stuff that when you wake up at 2:00 in the morning, and all of a sudden you think of certain things, that is what keeps you awake at night. The solution is not Ambien. The solution is not melatonin. The solution is that you cast your care upon the Lord.
We have a contrast. God does not say, “Don’t worry about it.”
He says, “Don’t worry about it—on the one hand, but on the other hand—‘in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.’ ”
Slide 25
What is interesting is this verb for “care.” The noun form is used in 1 Peter 5:6–7, where Peter wrote, “Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time,— and then you have it translated loosely as a participle—casting all your care upon Him …” Actually, it should be considered a participle of means, “by casting.”
Slide 26
How do you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God? By casting your cares upon Him, by not trying to take them into your hand.
I know that you don’t just say this and immediately do it. Anybody that has been around Christian life for any length of time knows that we have a tug-of-war with God. “Lord, I’m going to put this in Your hand. No, I’m not. Yeah, I am. I’m going to give this over to You. No, I’m not.”
We throw it on God’s back, and then we pull it back. It takes time to learn to put it in God’s hand, and just relax.
We have this word, “care.” It goes to MERIMNA, which is the cognate of MERIMNAŌ. MERIMNA, MERIMNAŌ.
Slide 24
MERIMNAŌ is the verb for “do not be anxious or troubled.” The noun is MERIMNA. Don’t be anxious. Don’t worry. Don’t be overly concerned. Don’t stay awake at night worrying about things.
Slide 26
Instead, trust God. Turn it over to God. He knows more about it, and He is more powerful than you are. As Jesus said, how can you increase your security at all by worrying about it? You can’t add one millimeter of growth to your stature by worrying about it.
The word “casting” is the word on the right, EPIRIPTŌ, which is an aorist participle. It means “to throw something, to cast it, to pick something and toss it on top of something else.”
It is the idea that we are to completely transfer our worries, our cares, our concerns, our anxieties onto the Lord. Turn it over to Him because He is omniscient, He is omnipotent, and He is omnipresent. And we are not.
He can handle it, and we just need to relax. The trouble is, when we do that, we are left in a circumstance where we don’t know what is going to happen, and we don’t like that.
I was thinking about this yesterday because I had to talk a little bit about what went on in Ukraine. When I awakened that morning and heard the explosions, read the news reports, realized we are under attack, I’m thinking, “I don’t have a car.”
As Americans, we don’t realize that when there is something serious and we don’t have a car, that is a crisis. Because there are all kinds of things that can happen here.
I hear it on the news. There is a hurricane coming in. It can pop up like that. Hurricane Alicia popped up. Yeah, Alicia back in 1983 popped up.
I was on the way to the airport, had church that morning. I was flying up to Oklahoma City to see Tommy that night. Out of nowhere, there was a hurricane. I’m in my car, there is a hurricane. I can just drive out of here.
But I didn’t think it would come in, and it didn’t come in until I was just going up for overnight. But, you know, things just pop up like that. So we have to make a decision.
But I had a car. I had a plan. I could do many things. But when I was in Ukraine, I don’t have a car. I don’t speak the language. What am I going to do?
Well, there is only one alternative, and that is just to trust God. I’m not going to worry about it because there is absolutely nothing I could do. I just had to sit there and think, “If something comes up, then I better be prepared. So I’m going to pack all my bags and set them by the door. I’ll be ready to go.
“But other than that, I will just sit here, read my Bible, work on some other projects that I have to work on, and just put it in the Lord’s hands.” That is what this is talking about.
But you know, it’s funny, in the little situations we are in, we have trouble doing that. When you hit a big situation like what I was in, in Ukraine, it is so big and overwhelming, you really don’t have that much trouble just saying, “I have just got to turn it over to the Lord because there is absolutely nothing I can do.”
It is with the smaller things that you think, ‘There’s a little something I can do. I can make some phone calls, I can go do this, or I can go do that.’
But it reaches a point where something is so overwhelming that there is nothing you can do. You just have to trust the Lord.
That is what is going on here. You are casting, we are throwing the weight of our concerns, our cares, our worry on the Lord because He cares for us.
Slide 27
This is the word MÉLEI in the lower left. He is interested in us. He is concerned about us. He is focused on us.
God is not so concerned about trying to solve the problems in the Middle East, or Iran getting nuclear weapons, or the Russian attack into Ukraine that He is not equally concerned with every detail of our lives. He can multitask in ways that are infinite.
He is just as deeply and profoundly involved in your life as He is in every other believer’s life, in everything that is going on. Because of that, we know we can trust Him with our problems, and just relax, and do what God wants us to do, and focus on our priorities.
Slide 28
We are to “be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication ...” We have two different words here that we are going to have at the beginning and the first chapter.
“Prayer” is the word PROSEUCHĒ, which is not used in the first chapter, but that is the more general word for prayer. It is in the dative case. “By means of prayer.” Prayer is the instrument God has given us, in order to deal with anxiety, worry, care, and concerns.
“Supplication” will be the next word that we use. This is a word that has the idea of acting as an advocate or making intercession or supplication for something. It covers that. It is used in the Septuagint to translate the most common word for prayer, which is a form of tipȃlal.
You have heard, the things that the Jews wear wrapped around their hands and their forehead. Those are called the “tefillin.” That is from this word because they represent that which is a basis for prayer in their life.
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We are to pray. And supplication is making a request, an entreaty. It is an urgent request to meet a need.
But it is also used like it is in the first part of Philippians when Paul says that every time he thinks about them, he prays for them. That is the same word. It covers a range of different kinds of prayers.
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We are not to be anxious for anything, but in contrast, we are to pray, and we are to entreat God with thanksgiving. Not apart from thanksgiving, but with thanksgiving.
That is our word that we have, the verb in the beginning, “I give thanks.” That is EUCHARISTEŌ, and this is the noun EUCHARISTIA. It means thankfulness, gratitude. That we have a mentality of gratitude.
We are grateful for what? For what has happened. We are grateful for what worries us. We are grateful for what has brought anxiety into life. We are grateful for whatever the crisis is. Because we are to be thankful in all things and for all things. So that envelops this supplication to God in this situation.
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We are to then—there is the command—“let your requests be made known to God.” The word “request” is the same word for “supplication.” That is what we find over and over again, because it is the broad word for different forms of prayer.
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Then the result is the peace of God. That takes us back to Ephesians 1:2 when Paul says, “Grace and peace to you.” It is basically shorthand for “May God’s grace and peace be extended to you, because without God’s grace and peace, we cannot surmount the problems of life.”
“… the peace of God which surpasses all understanding …” It is not something you can rationally explain. It is not something that autonomous reason can come up with because it is that which envelops us as a result of the Spirit of God.
“… the peace of God, which surpasses all [rational explanation], will guard …” That is the word PHROUREO. It has the idea of guarding or protecting, keeping. I like to use the word “defending.” It defends us from the onslaughts of worry, preserves us, safeguards us, shields us.
It reminds us of all those different metaphors used in the psalms. God is our fortress, our shield. He is our bulwark, He is our rock, all of those things. We are encapsulated within God, and He protects us.
He guards our hearts and minds—speaking of the soul in terms of using this as a repetitive thing. It affects our emotions. This is one place where I think “heart” can relate to emotion, as opposed to minds, because there is a slightly different emphasis here.
What it is saying is, in the midst of all of your worries and anxieties, God guards you. He protects you.
The key to that is getting rid of the anxiety. Retrain your focal point to God and His attributes. Think through His omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence in relationship to what you are facing.
The fact that God is omniscient is—He has known about this for eternity, and it is no surprise to Him. He knows what He is doing, and what is going on in your life. It “will guard our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” because we are in Christ.
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That takes us back to what is going on in the introduction. Paul says, “always in every prayer of mine making intercession for you all with joy.” We find the same words we have back in Philippians 4.
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“Always in every prayer of mine.” This is the word DEĒSIS, the same word we saw in Philippians 4. It refers to an entreaty, a supplication, a prayer, something exclusively addressed to God.
Then, “making request.” The participle there probably expresses the result of his gratitude, that he is thankful to God. The result of that is, he is praying for the Philippians “with all joy.”
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He is praying for them, making intercession for them with all joy. Then he explains why in Philippians 1:5.
He says, “For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now.” The word KOINŌNÍA, which relates to fellowship—our fellowship with God—is a word that has the idea of a partnership. It applies to two or more people who are walking together in the same direction.
I think that is such a great definition. It is not original with me. I got it out of an article published in 1931, a word study. Because that is the image of walking by the Spirit. You are walking together in the same direction.
What happens when we decide to walk by the sin nature is, we drop the Holy Spirit’s hand, we turn around, and we go in the other direction.
What is going to reverse it? The only thing that can reverse it is confession.
There are people out there that say, “No, you don’t need to do that because we are already forgiven in Christ.” Yeah, we are positionally, but this is experientially.
They fail to recognize the distinctions, that we have intentionally let go of the Holy Spirit’s hand, and we have turned in another direction, and we are holding hands with our sin nature.
Before we can walk by the Spirit again, we have got to let go of the sin nature and grab hold of the Holy Spirit’s hand again. That is the idea in KOINŌNÍA. It is that partnership.
That takes us down through Philippians 1:5. I will clean up a couple of things next time when we come back. Then we will get into Philippians 1:6–7, which are very important verses theologically to understand the background, the basis for Paul’s prayers, his confidence in God.
Closing Prayer
“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to study through what it means to have joy, what it means to rejoice, what it means to cast our care upon You.
“How we are to be anxious for nothing, is by turning to You in prayer, casting our care upon You, being thankful throughout the whole process for what seems to us to be some tragedy, some overwhelming crushing event, some loss, some scary things that might happen.
“Yet we are to be relaxed and calm, trusting in You, and not manufacturing that which causes us to be unsettled and unstable.
“Father, we pray that You would strengthen us and encourage us in our study this evening and what we have learned.
“In Christ’s name. Amen.”