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Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the 'Ridiculous Joy' series looking at Philippians 1:9-11 and shares how to prioritize God's joy above the plans we make for ourselves.

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Hey, welcome Orchard Hill. Let's take a moment and pray together. Father, I thank you just for each person who's gathered this weekend at Orchard Hill online, Wexford, Wexford Chapel, Strip District, and Butler. Father, I pray that you would speak to each of us. God, if I've prepared things that don't reflect your truth, I pray you would keep me from saying them. And Father, if there are things that would be beneficial for those of us who are gathered this weekend that I haven't prepared, I pray that you would prompt me, and I would follow that prompting. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. 

Last weekend, we began a new series that we called Ridiculous Joy. We're looking at the Book of Philippians which Paul wrote from prison, and yet the book is saturated with joy. And so, we're examining how joy interacts with our lives in different ways. But before we jump into the text, I wanted to search some other well-known sources of information about how to find joy. And so, this is from an infallible source, the internet, and this is how to be joyful, wikiHow. Here are some of the things that they say, "First if you want to cultivate joy, determine why you don't feel joyful. You may realize that you find it difficult to feel joy. You may even frequently feel sad. If this is the case, take some time to figure out what's causing you not to feel joyful, and then make some changes." Okay, it's easy enough, not bad. 

"Navigate the relationships that sap you of joy. You may realize that personal and professional relationships contribute to you not feeling joyful. The individuals with whom we interact regularly can impact our attitudes, including our ability to feel joy. Limiting and removing anyone who saps you of joy can help you recapture your joy." What if you're married to the person, or it's your mom or your dad or your brother or your sister, or maybe the boss that you can't get away from? I don't know, I just thought that was an interesting thing. "Find joy in difficult times." And then they gave us these hot tips. "Avoid embracing anger or rage that you may feel." So just decide that you're not going to be angry or that you're not going to be irritated with somebody. "Surround yourself with supportive individuals." There's their theme again. Then they say, here's another idea, "List what gives you joy?" 

"Start your day off on the right foot," is another thing they say. "Wake up to soothing sounds instead of a jarring alarm, sounds of the ocean, something like that." And then one of the other articles that I saw said, "Make your wildest dreams come true. If you can do that, then you will have joy." Now, the reason I take a moment just to cite this is there is no shortage of ideas around what will bring you joy. The ideas are so plentiful that you can find just about anything to support what it is that you want to do. But there does seem to be a consensus in the literature that you read, whether it's a serious book or article online. And even among Christians, there's just a slight difference, and that is if you will set the right priorities and follow through on those priorities in your life, then you will find joy. The Christian version of this is often to say, "Well, there's a Christianized version." So, in the general world, people will say things like you just heard, "Get enough sleep. Get the right people in your life. Do things you love. Make sure that you're eliminating the joy killers. Get enough exercise," these kinds of things, "Eat healthy and joy will follow." 

And there is truth to that. The Christian version is, "Read your Bible. Pray. Spend time in community. Live for something important." That these things will bring you joy. Again, there is truth to that, but the problem is this, and that is in many ways, this is the essence of religion. What I mean when I say that is the essence of religion is this idea that says in more or less, any sense of the word, "I'm going to do right things and get good results." And so, whether you see this as being distinctly Christian or tied to faith, or it's just a way that you live your life, chances are, if you say, "I'm following a list of priorities with the hope that it will bring me joy down the road or joy in the very short term," that either way there's a sense of religion for this. 

This idea was noted very clearly in an article from The Atlantic recently by Marina Koren. The article was called “The False Promise of Morning Routines.” In it, she talks about how in the quest for self-help, so many people today are talking about their morning routines. So, you can hear celebrities talk about how they get up and eat a raw egg or do yoga or something like that, and it's the key to their success in life. And then she says this, she says, "In essence, morning routines have been repackaged as sacred rituals, safeguarded from the cursed bits of the rest of the day. As a label, routine doesn't quite capture the essence of spirituality that imbues self-care behaviors." And here's what she's arguing, she's arguing that what has happened is people have said, "In order to be productive and joyful, I have to have me-time," and that they've repackaged it into a morning routine, and it's taken on a religious or a spiritual fervor. In other words, do these things, and you will be joyful. You will have a good life. 

She quotes another author at one point and says this: "In a culture obsessed with self-optimization, we're being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves all at once, including the parts of us that we didn't even know needed to be upgraded." Here's again why I read this or point this out, and that is what happens is everywhere you turn, there's somebody or something that will say, "Do this, and this will bring you joy. This will make you happy. This is what you need. Lose a few pounds. Get a little more muscle. Hike in some great trail. Take some phenomenal trip. Drink a little more wine. Drink a little less wine." I mean, there's all kinds of ideas. And if you do these things, then you will be good. And the Christian version again of it is just adding some other stuff to it. 

And here's why we like this, especially the Christianized version. Because it makes us feel like we can control what's happening, and if we just put in enough effort, then we will get a good result. Again, I'm not suggesting that these things aren't helpful. I'm not saying that there isn't a good result. But what I'm saying is that ultimately the message of Christianity, the message of the gospel, is the opposite of do these things, and you get. The message of the gospel is Jesus has done for you, for me. And therefore, it isn't about what we do, it's about what he has done. 

Now, with that in mind, we come to Philippians 1:9-11. This is a prayer that Paul prays for the Philippians. And you heard it read in verses 9-11. When he prays, you could say that this is one of those prayers where he says, "And this is my prayer for the Philippians." Have you ever had somebody pray for you, and they're not really praying for you, they're telling you what they want you to do? "God, I pray that my friend here will realize the error of their ways and start to do... " It could be that kind of a prayer. It could be that this is in a sense a model for how to pray for people. But most likely, what it really shows us is the priorities that he wants for his friends at Philippi. And where he's found joy, where he knows that they'll find joy. 

And so, here's what he says initially, and that is that if they will have their love grow in knowledge, that then they'll be pure and blameless and have the fruit of righteousness. Now, when you read this, in fact, let me just reread this for a second just so it's in our minds, it says, "And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may 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." 

When you read that, at least when I first read that, my first thought is, "This is more of the same." This is Paul, and this is, in fact, part of why I named this Finding Ridiculous Joy: In Our Priorities because you might say, "Well, what I need to do is I need to decide to love more. In order to love more, I need to get better knowledge, better insight, better discernment. And then I'll become pure and blameless and filled with the fruit of righteousness." In other words, if I just give more effort, more of my knowledge, and everything else, then I will be able to, in a sense, move more fully toward joy. But let's really look at this. Verse nine, he says, "And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more." The word that's used here for love is the well-known Greek word, agape, meaning it's a love that's of God for people, it's a divine love. 

Paul here could be referencing love for God, love for others, love in general. But what at minimum he's doing is he saying, "If you are going to experience what God has for you, including ridiculous joy, one of the things that will have to be true is that your love will have to be growing and abounding more and more." And here's what I believe is true, and that is we don't love when we're suspicious that God is not for us. Here's why this is important, here's my guess when we talk about priorities, that many of us have an idea of what the Bible says. Some of it might be right, some of it might be wrong, depending on how much we've studied. But there are parts of the Bible that no matter how much you've studied it, read it, appreciated it, that you probably say, "I don't know about that part. I don't like that part." 

Now, you may not say that out loud, but there are some parts where you say, "I know it says that, but I don't care for that. I would rather this be true. I would rather choose this." Because down deep there's a part of us that says, "How do I know that God is for me, and if I do what the Bible says in that area, then there's no way that I'll be happy or joyful completely?" Just takes something very simple. In Ephesians 4:29 it says, "Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth." So, the Bible says, "Don't say anything that isn't profitable for somebody else. Don't say anything that isn't wholesome." Okay, that's pretty straightforward. And for some people, that may be a pretty easy command. For most people, we go, "Well, that's a really high standard. Every now and then, I need to say something that's catty, sarcastic, derogatory, mean-spirited, or I won't have any fun in life." You may not go through all of that. The suspicion is that if I take out at His word, then my life will be less joyful. 

And so, what we do is we say, "I am not sure that God and His Word can be taken literally and still find my way to joy or happiness." And so, it's hard to love God, love people, which by the way, are the two great commandments that Jesus talks about, it's hard to do that when you said, "But I don't know if God is for me. I don't know if His Word really is what's best." But here's what you know whether, again, you're a long-time believer, follower of Jesus, or new, still trying to decide where you are, the more your heart is filled with love for people, the more joyful you are. You stop keeping score. You stop being annoyed. Love for people doesn't mean a mindless approval. It doesn't mean that we simply say, "Oh, I'm for you and everything that you ever think about." Love is sometimes challenging to people. 

If you knew that one of your friends was about to go drive their car when the car had a tire that was so bald that it was about to explode and could cause an accident on the road, you wouldn't be loving to just be like, "Hey, you do you. Your tire is your tire." What you would do if you were loving is you would say, "Look, I love you too much to not tell you this." Now, at the same time, love will step back and say, "If you want to drive on that, I mean, it's your deal." But I'm not going to not say something. And so, our notion sometimes that love just means blanket acceptance isn't necessarily right. So, what does Paul do here? He says, "Here's my prayer for you: that your love will grow, will abound more and more." And then he says that this will be based basically on insight or knowledge. Verse 9 and 10, it says, "That your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best." 

And when you hear this, when I hear this, our natural way of hearing this is to say, "Well, knowledge and depth of insight just means more content, more Bible. There is a need for Bible study and content. I'm a big fan of it as you might expect. But here's something that I've also come to understand and see, and that is most people who are part of a church have way more knowledge than they do obedience. They have way more insight or a sense of knowing what is true than they do a sense of saying, "This is guiding my life." And again, back to the suspicion idea. Because what we'll tend to do is we'll tend to sit in judgment on the knowledge that we get and say, "Do I agree with this, or do I not agree with this?" 

Most of us think that we have the capacity to be the ultimate arbiter of what is true and best and right, but the knowledge, the depth of insight, and the understanding that comes from discerning what is best is all ultimately something where we come from a place of saying, "I'll bend my knee to what it is that I see in the Bible," rather than to say, "Hey, I have a better way of seeing it." And part of how we see is by expanding our heart, which means the depth of insight or the knowledge, the ability to discern in part is coming to embrace what Paul is writing about when he talks about the partnership of the gospel, verse four and five, where he says that, "This is what my joy is, that you're part of this with me." 

And here's the issue with this, and that is the real depth of insight doesn't just mean you notched up more Bible knowledge, but it means you have the capacity to discern what is best. That sometimes will be tied to Bible knowledge, but sometimes what that means is that it will be the ability to not argue with what is revealed and what is seen. 

There was a film that came out a couple of years ago called 127 Hours. Even if you never saw the film, you might be familiar with the story, at least remotely. A man named Aron Ralston went canyoneering in Utah, and it was something he often did. In 2003, he went out, and as was his custom, he didn't tell anybody where he went, because that was part of how he thought he added to the adventure. And as he was out in a canyon, he slipped and his arm got wedged between some rocks, and he couldn't move. For 127 hours, he was stuck there, no ability to let anybody know, he was out of range of anything, but he had his phone or a little camcorder with him. He was in a spot where basically nobody would know to look for him. 

So, he runs out of food, he runs out of water, and he starts to chronicle his experience. And he records a message to his family saying goodbye and talking about just how, in a sense, foolish it was to go out on his own, not telling anybody where he was. And then he finally decides to try to amputate his own arm. And so, he cuts his arm off with a dull knife, literally. This whole thing, he's intermittently giving updates on his little camcorder thing. And then he starts to walk out, not knowing exactly at this point because he hasn't eaten for 127 hours or barely, he ran out of food early into it. He hasn't had water, and he's looking for any kind of help that he can get. The whole time the film is showing this with a little bit of distortion. He finally comes out and he sees some other trackers, and he says, "Help, help. I need help," and suddenly the blurry cinematography becomes crystal clear, and you see his face, and he says, "I need help. I need help." 

In this moment, in a sense, without maybe even realizing that what they're doing they're showing, in a sense, the arc of the Christian message, "I can do it on my own. I don't need anybody. I'm sufficient," to, "I need help." The crystal clarity of the picture was the moment of complete clarity. This is what the depth of insight and the knowledge and the discerning what is best is ultimately about. I'm not saying that there aren't other parts of it, but what I'm saying is this, and that is the way that your love will come to abound more and more is not by you getting more and more knowledge so you feel more and more superior to other people, but it will come to abound more and more because you come to say, "There is a God who has offered me help when I was desperate, when I was in complete need." 

This is the narrative story of the whole Bible, from Genesis 3 onward when Adam and Eve had the fruit and thought that they could become like God. The struggle that we constantly have is, "I'm like God, I have knowledge." In fact, it's not ironic that the tree that they ate from was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, they had this sense that said, "We have enough." In 1 John 4, we read about where and how this love comes to us. 1 John 4:7 puts it like this, seven and following, it says, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent His one and only son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." 

This is loving that God came to help us. And when we acknowledge our need for help, that's when we will become more loving. Another way to put this would be to say that when our heart and our head come together around this, that then that will lead us to the actions of our hands. And this is what we see in exactly what follows when he says that you can discern what it is best being pure and blameless. Pure, speaking of inward character. In other words, the inner parts of our lives that are unseen. And blamelessness, it really speaks about our reputation. New Testament scholar, Gordon Fee said that this word refers to not offending or not causing anyone else to stumble. 

So, our love, which is part of and comes from our knowledge and our depth of insight, will lead us to a life that says, "Inwardly and outwardly, I am living without a sense of having to perform, even though performance, in a sense, becomes part of what I want to do, because I don't want anyone else to stumble." And then he talks about this fruit of righteousness. Often again, when people read this, think about it, what they do is they say, "Well, the fruit of righteousness means that I live, and because I'm righteous, my life has fruit, it bears fruit." But the fruit that comes from righteousness, that's one way that you could interpret this grammatically. The righteousness is God's imputed righteousness, Jesus imputed righteousness to us. The righteousness isn't that we do everything right. In fact, Paul says this in Philippians 3, he says, "It's not that I've already attained perfection. I'm not blameless. I'm not pure completely. I'm not righteous." That's what he says in chapter three. 

In Philippi, there were a group of people who thought that they could attain perfection, thought they had already attained perfection. And so, Paul, in a sense, is shooting across this, and he's saying, "No, it's the fruit of Christ's righteousness. It's the fruit or the result of your love and your knowledge that will lead you to live differently." There are two ways, generally, that we approach issues. This comes back to where we started. The one way is saying, "I need to get a handle on this. I need to decide what will bring me joy, where I want to live." And then we make a choice, and we say, "I'm going this way." Or we come at it the other way and say, "If God loves me and His word says it, then that settles it. What I really need to do is soak in the love of God so that my love for God and for people is bigger, then I'll live differently." 

Let me show you how this works. So, one of The Ten Commandments is thou shalt not covet. Pretty straightforward. It means when you look at somebody else's life, you don't say, "I wish I had what they had. They have it better than me." So, it might be that you look at somebody's relationships, their family, that you might look at somebody's home. You might look at their job or how easy they've had it. You might look at something and say, "I wish I had what they have." I choose this one because this is just pretty universal. I don't know very many people who don't at some point, have a moment of saying, "I wish I had it like they have it. I wish I had their experience." So, on the one hand, the way that you can approach this is you can say, "Oh, that's bad. Envy's bad. It will take away joy. I need to stop envy. And so, what I need to do is I need to focus on the good things that I have, and I need to change my patterns and everything else and get envy out." 

Now, again, I'm not suggesting that there isn't a time and a place for that. But the other way, and this is the way that I think Paul is talking about here, and this is the way that will lead to joy, is to instead of being suspicious that God has somehow held out on you because you don't have what somebody else has to say, "If God loves me enough to send His son to die on my behalf, can I not trust that God loves me enough to know what is best and that if I don't have something that I think that I need right now, perhaps in some way, in some way that God is working, this is actually working for my good." And so, instead of being suspicious that somehow God is holding out on me, I can say, "You know what? I know that God's love for me is solid because of the cross. Therefore, I can move forward without coveting or envying, or being jealous of what somebody else has here and now." 

Take an issue like money and giving. Bible from my vantage point is fairly clear that if you're a follower of Jesus, that you take the first portion of your income, and you give it away to God's work. Some people call it the tithe. Some people argue the exact percentage amount, but it's a pretty clear idea. If you're not a follower of Jesus, the Bible doesn't maybe instruct you to do the same thing, but it certainly talks about caring for the poor and giving your resources to those who have less. These are clear ideas. But here's what happens, sometimes on the one side we say, "Yeah, I should do that." But if we're suspicious that we won't have enough, then what we do is we say, "I can't have a joyful life if I give away as much as the Bible seems to indicate I could. I won't have enough security. I won't have enough stuff that brings me joy and fun. Therefore, I can't trust God in this." 

And so, we try then to kind of jury rig our heart to say, "Let me do some things to move toward it." Or we say, "You know what? There's a God who loved me so much that He sent His Son to the cross. And He asked me to give a portion of what He's provided for me back to Him, why would I not trust this God?" Take the issue of sexual ethics. Probably one of the areas where people are most suspicious that God is against them is in this area of our sexuality, where we say, "There's no way that I can have a joyful life if I don't do what I think makes sense to me here and now." And so, we're suspicious that God is somehow against us. And again, the way of trying to manage joy even from a spiritual standpoint in this is to say, "Well, you need to do this. Here's all the consequences." The other way is to say, "Maybe there's a God who has full love for me. And I know this because of what Jesus did on the cross. Therefore, I can trust that what He says about my sexuality actually makes sense and is something that I can trust even when it doesn't seem like it's going to bring me joy. You see how love and discernment can actually lead to pure, blameless, fruit of righteousness into the praise and glory of God? 

There's another issue. One of the things the Bible talks about is that the commission, the calling for any Christ follower is to be about making disciples. This is what's sometimes called the great commission Matthew 28, "Go into all the world. Or as you go into all the world, make disciples, make followers of Jesus." In other words, your life, if you are a follower of Jesus, should be about helping people find and follow Jesus Christ. What happens sometimes is if we're suspicious, we're like, "Yeah, but if I do that, then there's going to be people who think at work that I'm one of those religious zealots, one of those people who's a little weird, one of those people who... " And we'd go down a path and then we try to trick ourselves into something. Or, once again, what we can do is we can say, "If God has loved me so much to make a way, then Him calling me, inviting me to be part of the process in other people's lives, even if it doesn't seem like joy today will ultimately bring joy. 

And so, the question for probably most of us is, really, are you suspicious that God isn't really for you or calling you toward himself? I love how Psalm 84 puts it, it says, "No good thing will He withhold. Will God withhold from the people who, in essence, pursue Him." 

There's a story about a child who was an orphan and was taken into a home. What the parents found when he was adopted into this new home was that the child would often take food from dinner and lunch and breakfast, and he would take it to his room, and he would hide it. He would leave it there, and the food would actually start to rot and get stale in the room and attract some critters. But he had had such a shortage of food early in his life that anytime there was food, he would try to take it and keep it so that he would have some if he needed it. The parents, the adoptive parents, would try to explain, "There will be food. We will feed you. You will always have enough." But the boy kept taking the food to his room. When I heard the story I had that moment of thinking, "Sometimes the way that we think of God and sin is that God is this angry God who is just out to kill any joy that we have." 

To be fair, there are passages of the Bible that indicate that God can be angry at sin and does get angry at sin. But there's also a part in which He's a grieving God, probably more like these parents saying, "I'm so angry that you would take food from the kitchen and put it in your room, but I'm so grieved that you're so broken and so hurt that you think that's the best way when we're providing for you a better way." What a gospel understanding does is, is it helps us to discern what is best and say, "I'm going to let my love for God grow more and more because I know that God wants my best. And therefore, I can live in accordance with anything that He has because He is for me, relentlessly for me." 

And when you and I understand that, then we'll live out what Paul prays here, and it will be our priority to say, "God, I want what you want because it makes the most sense." And I believe that that is one of the places that we will find ridiculous joy. Ridiculous, because it won't make sense to the people around us sometimes. I mean, just take some of the issues that we just talked about. You give away a portion of money and people who don't understand would be like, "Why would you do that? How would that make you joyful?" You choose to say, "I'm making my life from a sexual standpoint not about what I can get today, but about a bigger set of values." And there'll be people who say, "Yeah, that's ridiculous." You give yourself to a different cause than just your own ends. It will seem ridiculous, but that is a result of seeing the goodness of God towards you and what He has in His heart for you. We love because He first loved us. 

Well, let me just say this, if you're here, you're listening online, one of our campuses, you may be saying, "I'm not sure God loves me. I'm not sure if God can love me. I don't know how I know that God loves me." Well, the way that we know is that Jesus went to the cross for you, for me, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's Romans 5. And that knowledge tells us how loved we are. And because of that, our love can abound more and more. Father, thanks for loving us even when the things that we sometimes do or think or consider, things we love, don't reflect back to you, our love. And God, I pray that you would help me help each person to move past our suspicion that you're not for us and know to the core of our being how for us you are because of what Jesus Christ has done on our behalf. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.