Ridiculous Joy #1 - In Community
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund kicks off the new series in the book of Philippians called Ridiculous Joy. Teaching out of Philippians 1:1-8, Kurt describes how to find joy through participating in the community of a local church.
Message Transcript
Let's pray together. Father, I thank you for each person who's gathered here, who's gathered earlier this weekend at other services at Orchard Hill, in the Strip District, in Butler, the Chapel, and those online. God, I pray that right now you'd speak to each of us, and my words would reflect your word in content, tone, and in emphasis. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.
There was a band that was fairly well known in the early 2000's. They're still making music and because I like some of their music from a few years ago, I still pay attention to what they release. A couple years ago, they came out with a song that was called “The Happiest of Days.” And I listened to the song, and the song in the chorus has the lead singer singing, presumably to a friend or maybe a girlfriend or something, and his refrain is, "And you're struggling through the happiest of days." And for some reason, that line struck me a little bit, maybe because I've felt that way at times myself, like "Everything's good, why am I not happier?" And maybe because I've known a lot of people over the years who have a lot of things in their lives that are really good, and yet they are struggling through what anybody from the outside would say those are the happiest of days.
Now, it's true that none of us know the reality of what somebody else lives with. And certainly, there are some of us who have one thing that has happened that is so dominantly difficult that it's hard to experience joy. But over and over, I see people who are living in times in which they say, "This is basically what I've wanted, what I've worked for, what I've longed for, and yet I'm not really joyful, I'm not really happy." It starts to beg the question, well, why is that?
And sometimes we might think that it's just a simple choice that we make. I live in a neighborhood, and the neighborhood I live in, sometimes I'll run, sometimes I'll walk the dogs, my wife's dogs. And when I'm out in the neighborhood, you see the same people over and over again. If you get out in your neighborhood, you know how this is, and you just cross people's paths randomly from time to time. You don't really develop a relationship. You talk about really deep things like the weather. You're like, "Hey, nice day," and that's the extent of how you connect.
And there's one person that I cross paths with, in this context over and over, and predictably, we talk about the weather. But this person is one of the most negative people toward the weather I have ever met. You know, it could be 75 and sunny, and you're like, "It's a beautiful day," and they'll be like, "Yeah, it's going to rain next month." I'm thinking, "Next month? It's beautiful." And when it's a little bit of snow, it's like the sky is falling, and when it's humid, it's like, "Well, it's too hot today, it's too cold." I just want to say, "Move to San Diego, it's the only place in the country where it's always 72 and sunny. But if you live in Pittsburgh, it comes, it goes, and that's part of the beauty of living in Pittsburgh."
And so, I've made it my mission to always say something positive about the weather, like if it's rainy and nasty, I'm like, "It's going to be sunny tomorrow." And the issue is that we have a choice, but sometimes telling us that we have a choice for how we see the world or how we experience the world is a little bit like telling a kid who doesn't want to eat their vegetables that there's kids who would love their vegetables living in another part of the world. It doesn't always help us.
So, how do we find joy? Well, we're going to begin a series from the book of Philippians. And the reason that we've called this Ridiculous Joy is because Philippians was written by the apostle Paul when he was in prison. Hence, it's called one of the prison epistles. And what that means is that he was not experiencing something that he would go, "This is the happiest of days." And being in prison for Paul was the culmination of a lot of hardship. Paul, if you remember in the Bible, was Saul, he used to persecute the church, then he came to faith, then he became the first missionary in a sense. And what he did is he gave of himself over and over, and we're told in 2 Corinthians that he was shipwrecked and beaten and went through all kinds of hardship.
And now he goes, and he starts this church in Philippi, and he ends up in prison, and we're told in 2 Timothy that when he was on trial, that nobody came to his defense. So, not only is he in prison, but all of the people he thought would be with him and defend him and be part of his life, had abandoned him. And yet this book is saturated with the theme of joy. He's filled with joy, and it doesn't make sense, and that's why we're calling this Ridiculous Joy.
And here's my question for you: Would you like to have a kind of a joy that transcends all of your circumstances, where you can be joyful even when things are not the happiest of days? Or would you rather be the kind of person who struggles through the happiest of days? I'm guessing that's not a hard question. Most of us would say, "I'd much rather be the kind of person who is joyful regardless of what's going on in my life." In fact, we'd like to be around people who are joyful more than we want to be around people who struggle to be joyful.
It was Mother Teresa who was once asked what was it that she looked for in somebody who would work with her in her work in Calcutta, and what she said, without missing a beat was, "I'd like somebody who's hardworking and somebody who's relentlessly positive, somebody who's filled with joy." In other words, the people that I want to work with are people who are willing to work hard and people who are joyful. And if you wonder why sometimes it's hard for people to be around you, maybe it's because there isn't a permeating joy that saturates your life.
Now, here's the challenge about joy, and that is, what is hard to do is to simply say, "Well, I'm going to be joyful and I'm going to pursue joy," because joy doesn't generally come through its pursuit, it comes as a byproduct of other choices. What I mean by that is we don't become joyful because we decide one day, "I'm going to be joyful and I'm going to do all these things that bring joy." We become joyful because of choices and things that we decide to do in our lives, and it grows out of that. I think we see this in Philippians 1:1-8 right away, because what we see is that Paul experiences joy in community, in the people. And we see this because right away, he says, "I thank God at every remembrance of you," so there's joy in the people that he has a relationship with.
And this year has probably taught a lot of us how important relationships are, and community is. Unless you're somebody who is an extreme introvert, and you were like, "I love the pandemic because I didn't have to go anywhere, see anybody, do anything at all," you had moments where you said, "I wish I could go here, I wish I could be with my family and friends, I wish that the world would be different." There's a joy in community, but there isn't just joy in people and community, there's joy in Christian community.
And this is what we see here because it says he writes to the saints, and that's a word that doesn't mean somebody who's got some kind of pious demeanor, it's a word that just simply means those set apart for Christ, in other words, believers in Jesus. And so, what he's doing is he's saying that there's a joy, in essence, in the people that I'm in Christian community with. And what's true is your faith is your own, it's personal, something you come to believe, but to be a Christian in community requires people. In other words, you and I can have a belief that's individual, but in order to Christian, we can't do it alone.
And then we see that this joy was in community, it was in Christian community, but it wasn't just Paul getting with his four friends and saying, "Here's my community, I don't need anything else." It was joy of Christian community in the local church. And the reason I say this is right at verse 2, it says that he wrote to all the saints "together with the overseers and deacons," and those are words that connote officeholders in the church. And so, what he's doing is he's not just simply saying, "I have joy in community," or just joy in Christian community. "I have joy in the Christian community that's expressed in the local church," because there's overseers and deacons who are part of it.
And for those of you who are graduating seniors and thinking about moving on, this is actually a significant topic, because one of the questions that you'll have to ask yourself is, "Will I engage in a church when I go to college?" And I hope that one of the things that you'll see here today is some of the reasons why. But it isn't just graduating seniors. This last year as the pandemic kind of hit, I'd have conversations with people who would say things to me like, "You know, I'm really loving church online. It's awesome to get up and do this at home." And I understand it. I mean, I thought about Zooming in today. I mean, there's something nice about, like, "We're just making breakfast, we got church on, we don't have to get dressed up, we don't have to drive anywhere, we don't have to deal with any crowds. I mean, we're just here, we got the waffles and church all in the same hour. Isn't that awesome?"
And then I had some people basically say to me, "As I experienced being away from physically going to church, I started to ask the question, 'Well, why do I need to go at all? I can dial up any church I want, any time I want, remotely, so why do I need to be a part of church?'" And it's a good question. It's a really good question.
Kevin Cotter, who's our CFO here at the church, writes a little summary about our finances every month for our church board meetings, and we just had a church board meeting this last week. And Kevin's little summary just said, you know, "The church's finances are okay, but they're not as strong as they were just a month ago," and so he was writing about this, and his conclusion was, we need to keep encouraging people, and these are his words, so if you don't like how I'm about to say this, these are Kevin's words, and his email is kevin@orchardhillchurch.com. Here's what he said. He said, "We need to keep encouraging people to come back from the Church of the Breakfast Buffet and the Church of the Sweet 7-Iron."
Now, maybe your church of choice isn't the breakfast buffet or the sweet 7-iron, but it's a legitimate question: Why church? But more than that, how does church bring about joy? And I think Paul answers that, and so I'd like to answer that, and I think there are three ways that we see joy coming to Paul from engagement in the church. Here's the first one: There's joy in the people of the church. We see this in verse 3, verse 7, and 8. Here's what it says, it says, "I thank my God every time I remember you." So, again, what he does, very simply, is he says, "I'm thankful when I remember all of you." And then verse 7, he says, "It's right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I'm in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus."
And so, what does he say? He says, "I'm thankful, I have you in my heart, and I long for you." Now, you don't have to be around church very long to have a mindset that when you hear this, you say, "Thankful for the people of the church? Church would be awesome if it weren't for all the people." In fact, you probably haven't been very involved in a church if you haven't yet gotten to a point where you didn't experience annoyance, irritation, and outright disdain for some other people in the church. And I know, some of you are going, "Well, you're not really selling it at the moment." And my point is this: There's a problem in every church, every organization, and do you know what it is? It's filled with people, and do you know what people are? People are sinners. And so, of course there's going to be some issues when you're engaged in a church.
But what happens is, in time, if you allow yourself to be engaged, your heart will grow to love and to care for people as you experience people loving and caring for you as well. And what happens when you long for somebody, when you become vulnerable enough to say, "I actually care for other people," is then you have an expanded capacity to love. I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote about this, and C.S. Lewis said this, in essence, about love. He said, "If you're afraid of being hurt," and I'm paraphrasing him, he said, "what you'll do is you'll tend to shut down. But when you shut down, what you'll do is you'll no longer put yourself out there."
And he says, "If you love anybody or anything," and he talks about a dog or a pet, he says, "if you love even a dog, an animal," he says, "you open yourself up to be hurt, because when that dog or that animal dies, you will be hurt." But he says, "If you start to shut yourself off from other people, what happens is you will shut yourself down to the capacity to love, and you'll create a hell within your own life, because what you'll do is you'll lose the capacity to love other people and to care about other people."
And the church is bigger than just your four friends who you have a little community with, because it's a group of people that comes together and together shares in something where you say, "I am known by people and cared about by people who hardly even know me." We have something here at Orchard Hill that we've done for years, and it's where we have a prayer team that prays for people who are going through hardship, and in a church this size, there are always a list, a long list of people going through really hard things. And what we have is a group of people who will pray for them, and then they often will send cards.
And I've known about this for years, and always thought it was a good thing, and then a few years ago, my father was sick, and so we moved my mother and my father to Pittsburgh, and then my father went through his sickness and last days of life and died. And I watched my mother, who had become established in this church community, receive cards and care from so many people that didn't know her. And you may say, "Well, that's because she has your name, and people will give you cards that they won't give..." People experience that all the time here.
And by the way, it's a great ministry, if you want to be involved in something as simple as saying a prayer for somebody and writing a card, because in that moment, you start to say, "I'm not alone, and I'm experiencing joy in the people of the church." And that's something you and I can't do virtually. We can't be in relationship purely virtually. I mean, we can to a degree, and we did, but there's something that happens when you gather and are connected to a group of people beyond yourself that you'll end up being thankful for.
I have another example of this, and this may strike some of you as being a little out of taste. So, again, the email is kevin@orchardhillchurch.com. This is a country song called “I Love This Bar”, and in this song, you might think, "Well, this guy's just singing about getting a little inebriated or something." But here's what he actually is doing: He's actually singing about the community that he experiences at the bar. And here's how a couple of the verses go. He says, "We got winners, we've got losers, chain-smokers, and boozers. We've got yuppies, we got bikers, we got thirsty hitchhikers. And the girls next door dress up like movie stars." In another verse, he says, "We've got cowboys, we got truckers, broken-hearted fools, and suckers. We got hustlers, we got fighters, early-birders, and all-nighters. And all the veterans talk about their battle scars."
And here's why I read that. The picture that he's giving is the reason that he loves the bar is because people from diverse backgrounds come together, and they share a drink, and there's a moment when all of a sudden, all of the pretense, all of the other stuff of the world fades away, and he says, "I feel this sense of community, this sense of oneness."
I hear that song, and there's a piece of me that says, well, that's nice, but isn't that ultimately, a group of people coming together to share a beer, still shallow compared to what a group of people can come together in the name of the God of the universe, saved by the grace of Jesus Christ to say, "We've got people from every end of the spectrum who are completely different, who have different takes on the world, different experiences that come together and are about something bigger than themselves"? You see, there's joy when you're part of something like that, and it's even better than coming together and saying, "We all have a beer together and we're different." This is "We're together on something that matters even more."
So, there's joy in the people of the church. There's also a joy, I'm going to say, in the shared mission of the church. And we see this in verse 4 and 5. It says this: "In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now." So, he says, "Part of my joy is that you share together with me in the proclamation of the gospel." And the word "partnership" here connotes having a unified goal or a mission.
And if you think about the times and places in your life where you've had some of your best experiences, my guess is many of us would talk about a team we were on, a band we were in, a group that we were part of that was doing something that we deemed important. And what we look back on fondly is that there was a group of people that said, "We're going to pull together for something that matters." And that's exactly what Paul is saying here. He's saying, "I'm so thankful because there's a group of you that have pulled together with me around something that matters," and there are a lot of things that matter in this world. There are a lot of causes that you can be excited about. When education is right, it lifts a generation. When economic reform is taken up, it lowers the floor in our communities. That's a good thing. When we get politics right, it makes a difference.
But none of those do what the church can do, because none of them address the heart. It's the church that God has given the mission to address the heart, to say people can get physically fit, financially fit, get their education, get their jobs, and it is all good things to give yourself to, but when somebody's heart is given to Jesus Christ, it not only secures their future, but it changes the present and the present of the community in which they live.
Paul says when you're part of that, that mission, then he says you will experience, at least he experienced, the joy of that community and that fellowship. And I'm so thankful for so many of you who this church has been part of your shared mission. I know so many of you pray on such a regular basis, and I know full well that so many of the great things, all of the great things that happen here, aren't because of the work of the staff and committed volunteers, but because of God choosing to work through the prayers of his people. I'm so thankful for so many of you who give on such a regular basis, who say, "We're going to take the first portion of our income, and we're going to give it to the local church that we're part of, because we know that the mission matters."
I'm so thankful for those of you who serve and take time to participate in what goes on. Every summer, you heard earlier about KidsFest, every summer I know there are people who will literally take days of vacation from their work to come here and serve, and to say, "I want to see families and kids have a chance to experience the joy of the gospel, and so I'm going to give of my time that I could be using to do something else, anything else, and this will be what I choose to do."
I'm so thankful for so many of you who invite people on a regular basis to experience what you experience here. I'm thankful for those of you who say, "I'm going to live my life in a distinct way that points to the reality of Jesus Christ," and I'm thankful for those of you who just make it your habit to attend, week after week. And I know that there are choices, but just in attending, what you do is you bring a public testimony to how God is working, and that's good in two ways: good for you, good for the church. Good for you in the sense that there's something that happens when you say, "I'm going to take a part of my day, and I'm going to come to a place where music and singing and worship is being offered to the God of heaven, and whether I know or like every song or not, I'm going to sing or participate in some way, saying, 'God, I give you worship and praise.'"
That is an act of saying, "My life is not all about me, it's not central to me, it's central to who God is," and there's something to sitting and saying in community, "I'm going to listen to the teaching and say, 'This is something that I'm affirming, we as a community believe these things,'" that's totally different than doing it remotely. I've done enough remote listening, I know, there's a fast-forward button, there's an exit button on the remote. There is something that you need to run to or do. There's something when you say, "I'm here to take what God has for me through the teaching," that is good for you, but the public testimony is also good. And when I say good for the church, what I mean is as other people just simply see you worshiping, saying, "I'm part of this community," it gives a testimony that's broader and is part of building the church. It's part of the partnership of the church. And so, I just encourage you to say, what is your way to participate? At this point of your life, in what ways can you say, "I'm part of the mission, the shared mission of the church"?
So, there's a joy in the people of the church, there's a joy in the shared mission of the church, and then I would say there's a joy in seeing lives changed. We see this in verse 6. It says, "Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ." And this is clearly a statement about how God works in people's lives, and that it's God that brings about his end, but when he says, "I'm confident of this," what he's doing is he's saying, "I can see that God has worked in your life in a way that without the participation in the gospel, I'm not sure it would've happened."
And here's what the joy of seeing lives changed is, and that is, whether it's in your own family or in other people's lives, that from time to time, you're going to get a glimpse into how God has worked in some other people's lives, and you're going to be able to stand back and say, "I had a chance to see that and to be a part of that in some small way."
Here's how Paul saw it. When Paul started the church in Philippi, he went to Philippi, we're told about this in Acts 16. And the first convert that we learned of there was a woman named Lydia who was a wealthy businesswoman, who was converted because she came to a place to understand, or believe based on reasoning, the message. Then, right after that in Acts 16, we're told about this woman who was a fortune-teller, who was making money for her handlers, and so some people would say she was involved in the demonic, or maybe that she was on the low end of the economic spectrum, even being exploited by her handlers. And she followed Paul around and kept saying, "These men are speaking for the God of heaven," and Paul got so annoyed that at one point, he turned around and he just said, "The demon, come out of her," and she was delivered, and she could no longer make money for the handlers that she had, and so those people wanted Paul thrown in prison.
So, Paul ends up in prison. And when he gets to prison, he speaks about Jesus, and the jailer is converted. And this is the list of the founding members of the church at Philippi: the wealthy woman who was just simply going about her business, being successful, taking care of her life, who became convinced of the truthfulness of Jesus Christ; the person who was on the low end of the economic spectrum, maybe involved in the occult, in difficult things, who came to say, "I'm delivered, I'm freed by who God is"; and then the military man who says, "I've got it all together, I don't need any help, I don't need any support, I know how to do things," who came to see his need for a Savior. And these were the lives that Paul saw changed and had a chance to be a part of. And you may say, "Well, I don't get to see that all the time." But if you have a chance to step deeper into the church, what you'll see is that God is still working and changing lives all the time in our midst.
Now, how does Paul experience this? I mentioned that it's a byproduct, not something that we get by simply trying to get it. I think the key is this. In the very beginning, it says Paul and Timothy, and in the NIV it says, "servants of the Lord Jesus Christ." And the word "servants" is used when the Greek word is probably better translated as "slaves," in part because in our American context, we assign some things to the word "slavery" that are right for us to assign to it but don't always capture the biblical word. To be a servant, to be a slave, for Paul and Timothy, meant that they were basically saying, "We're doing the bidding of another. We're going to do what somebody else tells us to do, regardless of what we think about it."
So, how Paul experienced the joy of community, of church, if you will, was that he became humble enough to say, "I don't have to have my way, and I'm willing to do another's bidding." In other words, it was by moving past any kind of a consumer mindset into a mindset of saying, "I'm a servant."
Here's one of the things that's happened in the last year or so in church, churches in general. And that is, we've become even more consumeristic in our mindset and approach to church than we were before. Now, there's always been some consumerism, and what I mean when I say "consumerism" is, we say, "Well, is the music good, is the teaching good? Do I like what's going on enough that it's worth being part of?" And when you're a consumer, the way that you approach it is, as long as whatever you're getting back is commensurate with what you put in, you continue to go. So, for example, if you go to a particular grocery store, and the produce is good, the prices are good, you keep going. But if a new grocery store opens up that has better prices and better food, then you say, "Well, I'm a consumer here, I go to the other store."
And the consumer mindset allows us to sit as critics, and when we sit as critics, then we don't have to be engaged in our own mind, and what happens in that context is we don't experience the joy. And here's what I mean. Just if we take an issue like COVID and the masks, and I've had these conversations, I've had people say, "You know what, it's really hard for me to want to go back to church because the church was way ahead of where I think they should've been on masks and on COVID, and I just don't know if I can go back." And on the other hand, I've had people say to me, "You know, I don't know if I can continue at the church, because you ask people to wear masks, so you're obviously a part of a vast left-wing conspiracy."
I'm not kidding, okay? And here's my point in just calling this out and saying this, and that is, it breaks my heart in this sense, and that is, it becomes so consumeristic that it says, "If the church doesn't do things the way I want them to do it, then I'm not sure I can be a part." Now, there is a time to say, "Look, I'm annoyed with how this church is doing it, I'm going to find a new church." And if you find yourself constantly there, then maybe that's the answer. But my point is, you won't find joy in that, because what you'll end up doing most likely is being a consumer here, a consumer there, and a consumer at the next place, and you'll go through life always going, "Ah, there's just no church good enough." Of course, there's no church good enough. Why? A church is filled with people, and what are people? Sinners.
The way the church becomes joyful is when you say, "I'm going to be a servant, not a consumer. I'm going to plug in and invest my life in people and in a shared mission, and I'll get the joy of being part of it." And here's how you actually get there. It's not by simply saying, "Oh, I'm going to do this because I want joy," because here's what'll happen. Take KidsFest as an example. If you say, "Okay, okay, I heard the message, I'm going to take two days off work and I'm going to volunteer at KidsFest," I can almost guarantee what will happen. You'll go volunteer at KidsFest, and you're not going to go home going, "Woohoo, that was awesome." You're going to go home going, "Those kids are tough. I have a sunburn. One of those kids threw up, it was gross." You're not going to be like, "Wow, that was awesome." But what will happen is if you do that, and then you stay at it over time, you'll start to have the joy of the shared mission of saying, "I'm part of something bigger than myself."
And the motivation for it isn't to go, "Oh, I do this, and I get joy," it's to say, "There's a God who has served me in Jesus Christ." And here's how we know this: Philippians 2 says that "Jesus didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped but took on the form of a servant and became obedient to the point of death, death on a cross." Jesus gave up what he didn't have to give up making a way for you and a way for me as a servant. And when you and I say, "I am taken by his service of me, I can serve his purposes through his church," that's when we start to experience the joy.
There's a man who was one of the founders of Orchard Hill, one of the founding members. He's older now, it's harder for him to get out and be at services. But I get to talk to him on a somewhat regular basis still, and one of the things that he'll say, and this is a man who's had a lot of business, economic success, he's had great trips and vacations, he's got a great family. He's got a lot of things going his way. One of the things he'll say, though, almost every time that I talk to him, is he'll say, "One of the greatest joys of my life is my participation in Orchard Hill Church." And every time he says it to me, it strikes me, because I look at his life from the outside, I'm like, "Really? I mean, you got a lot of stuff that..." "One of the greatest joys of my life is my participation in Orchard Hill Church because I've got to see thousands of people come to encounter Jesus Christ through the life of the church, and I feel like it's one of the greatest things that I've been a part of in my life."
And sometimes, just to be really honest, I've been here a long time at this point as your pastor, I love this church, I love what's going on, but there are days when I'm like, "I don't know if anything good's happening around here." And it helps me to be reminded from somebody who's ahead of me to say, "If I had to do it all over again, I would give everything that I gave to the life of the church, because this is one of the most important and joy-giving things that I've done."
And so, here's my question now. Again, do you want to have joy that can transcend circumstances in life, or just struggle through the happiest of days? One of the ways that you can cultivate joy as a byproduct is by saying, "I'm going to be about something bigger than myself." And that something bigger is God's invitation to engagement in the local church and a shared mission. It doesn't happen quickly, but over time, what will happen is you'll be able to look back and say, "That is a place where I have encountered great people, shared mission, and I've seen God change lives, and it's one of the joys of my life."
Father, I pray today that you would help all of us, those of us who say, "I'm not sure that church has been that for me, or I want it to be that for me," just to be drawn to the possibility of what can be when we simply put ourselves in a place where we participate in what you've called your bride on earth, the church, and, God, that through it, we would encounter the joy of people and shared mission. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.
Thanks for being here. Have a great day.
