Ridiculous Joy #8 - In Values
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the 'Ridiculous Joy' series looking at Philippians 3:1-11 teaching from Paul's value system explaining joy in the midst of suffering.
Message Transcript
There's something that I believe is nearly universally true, and that is most people prefer joy to sorrow. They prefer happiness to sadness. Now, I say it's nearly universally true that most people do that because there are some people who kind of enjoy when they're sad because they get to be the victim and get attention. But aside from those individuals, most people say, "If I had my choice, I'd rather be joyful than that sorrowful. I'd rather be happy than sad."
Well, we started a series earlier this summer that we called Ridiculous Joy, and what we're doing is we're working our way through the New Testament Book of Philippians. It's a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Philippi. And the reason we've called this Ridiculous Joy is Paul wrote this from prison. His circumstances were not to his liking, and yet this book is saturated with joy. He repeats the theme over and over again, where he talks about being joyful.
And when we come to chapter three verse one, we're looking at chapter three verses 1 through 11 today, you had heard this read, he starts by saying, "I want you to rejoice in the Lord. It's no trouble for me to write this to you again." He says, "But rejoice in the Lord." And in the original language, this is an imperative command. What jumps at me as soon as I read this is the idea of commanding joy or commanding rejoicing.
If you've had kids and you ever said to your kids, "Hey, you need to go clean your room," most of the time that and joy don't go hand in hand. And if you were to say to your children, "Go clean your room, and you better like it," that doesn't work. As a parent, you learn very quickly that you can ask them to clean their room, but you can't ask them to clean their room and like it. And sometimes when we hear this phrase, rejoice in the Lord, we think of it a little like God's saying, "Go clean your room and like it. Go live your life and rejoice, whether you have anything to rejoice about or not." The challenge that we have is we tend to think of our emotions as being something that just is not something that we can control, meaning, I am happy. I am sad. I just am. I don't have any control over it. But in the Bible emotions are commanded. 14 different emotions are commanded in the Bible, things like don't be anxious and rejoice in the Lord.
The fact that the Bible commands our emotions means we cannot just simply say, "My emotions are just my emotions," but we can do something about our emotions. That's what that means. And here's what is probably challenging, and that is for some of us, when we think about our emotions, we think, "Okay. If I'm being commanded to rejoice in the Lord, then that means that I just put on a happy face even if things aren't happy." But you know, as well as I do, that doesn't work.
I had an illustration of this in my life recently on a different level. In our house, we have gutters that are around the house. Most houses do in Pennsylvania. I called them ease troughs at an earlier service. I guess that's a Midwestern thing where I grew up. They're gutters. Right above our bathroom window, there's a gutter that has a seam in it. And a couple of years ago, I noticed that there was a leak. And what would happen is the water would pool in that gutter.
And then when it would stop raining, the water would still be there, and it would leak down onto the roofline that was below it. It would drain on the shingles there. Now, this on our house is on the second story. Our first story is elevated, and then the basement is exposed. This is three stories up. It's a big drop and our roof is pitched pretty severely. This isn't just something that I just quickly say, "I'll go up there and fix it."
I did what I have done many times as a homeowner, and that is I've looked at something and said, "I should fix that," and watched it for a long time. And then finally, one day I said, "Okay, I must fix this, whatever it is." So, I climb up on the roof and I get down to where this is. I clean it out. I had bought some of that flex spray, flex seal kind of stuff. You ever seen this on TV? You can take a boat that leaks and spray the edge, and then you can get back in the boat, and go about your business. I'm like, "This should work great."
I cleaned it out and I spray the stuff in, and then I go back, and I wait for the next rain to come. And sure enough, it continues to leak. This is not a testimonial for their product evidently and it leaked. I did what I do as a homeowner. I said, "I should fix that." And about a year later, I'm like, "Okay, I have to fix this or it's going to stain the shingles here. I have to do something with this." This time I said, "Okay, I'm not going to try to climb from up top," because it was probably a human error if I'm honest.
I probably didn't clean it out well enough, get it dry enough, spray it well enough, and so I come from the bottom this time on a ladder. I got a ladder that was tall enough to get up there. I clean it all out, and I got flex tape this time. I put the flex tape down, flex seal tape, thinking that this would work. And so far, it has. But here's what I'm suspecting will happen. At some point, that's going to leak again. Here's why I believe this.
Here's what I know about this gutter, and that is the fact that the water is pooling somehow over the years, it's no longer draining completely correctly. To get this to really stop, what I need to do is take the gutter off, get it to have the correct trajectory, and reseal the actual seam that's there or it will leak again. In other words, I have put a band-aid on my leak in my gutter. Now, the reason I tell you this is because what many of us do when it comes to joy is we constantly put band-aids on something that has a deeper fix.
And what I think Paul is doing in Philippians 3 is he's not saying, "Rejoice in the Lord. Put a little something on that so that you feel better," but he's giving us something that will fix us at a level that will let us be truly joyful if we'll understand this. I know that it isn't readily obvious when you read this text. Because even when it was being read, my guess is many of us glossed over. We're like, "Paul's talking about being a Hebrew of Hebrews and being circumcised on the eighth day. What does this have to do with me and joy?"
And beyond that, when we read it, there are these kinds of obscure warnings that are in here. What I'd like to do is show you that I believe that what he's doing is he's showing us two values, that if we will embrace these values, can bring real joy to our lives. But they aren't the kind of things that feel like just putting a piece of Flex Tape on a real problem. These are structural things that may take some bigger work on your part and my part.
Here's the first, and that is when we can value knowing what justifies, then we can find a joy that transcends our circumstances. We see this in verses one through six, and then again in verse nine. I read and talked about verse one. Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. It's no trouble for me to write this to you again. And then he says this, verse two, watch out for those dogs or beware of those dogs, some translations say, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh.
In the original language, it is the word watch out or beware that's in the imperative and it appears three different times. For stylistic reasons, the NIV and some other modern translations just translate it once. So, it says, "Beware of the dogs, the evildoers, the mutilators of the flesh." But in the original, it's, "Beware of the dogs. Beware of evildoers. Beware of the mutilators of the flesh." Here's what he does. He says, "Rejoice in the Lord, but watch out for dogs, for evildoers, for mutilators of the flesh."
Now, again, it doesn't matter where you come from. You hear that and you're like, "That's just kind of bizarre. What's he talking about?" We tend to think of dogs as cuddly pets. But in that culture, dogs were generally mangy wild beasts that brought disease and were unwanted visitors to your home. When he says, watch out for dogs, he's not saying, watch out for your little pet that you love. He's saying, watch out for something that will bring an unwanted disease to your home, and then he says, these evildoers...
He says, beware of evildoers, he calls people evildoers, and then he says, mutilators of the flesh. Now that is a bizarre phrase. What's a mutilator of the flesh? In all likelihood, this is a play on words. Because in the next verse, he says, "We are of the circumcision." What was happening at that time is when people would come to faith in Jesus Christ, some of the Jewish believers would say, "That's good. But to really be a follower of Jesus Christ, you must be circumcised."
They were adding to faith in Jesus Christ along with this law about being circumcised. And what Paul is doing is he's saying, "I want you to be aware of the dogs who will bring an unwanted consequence, evildoers, the mutilators of the flesh, people who are insisting on something that isn't necessary for your salvation." And what he's doing I believe is he's showing us that one of the biggest thieves of joy is not understanding or not savoring what really justifies us. And then he goes, and he tells us his resume. This is the autobiographical thing.
He says in verse three, "For it is we who are the circumcision." The real circumcision isn't those who are physically circumcised it's those who believe at this point, who serve God by his Spirit, who boasts in Christ Jesus who put no confidence in the flesh. He says this, "Though I myself have reason to put confidence in the flesh. I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews in regard to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, persecuting the church, as for righteousness based on the law, faultless."
He brings up circumcision again. He says, "I was circumcised on the eighth day. I did it right. I am of the tribe of Benjamin, one of the preferred tribes. I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. I've been more Jewish than all the other Jewish people." And then he goes on and talks about being a Pharisee and persecuting the church and says, "I've kept the law perfectly." Gerald Hawthorne, who wrote a commentary on Philippians, put it this way. "He said not content to merely obey the law of Moses.
The Pharisees bound themselves also to observe every one of a myriad of commandments contained in the oral law. The interpretive traditions of the scribes. The most ardent of the Pharisees scrupulously avoided even accidental violations of the law and did more than they were commanded to do. Paul, a son of Pharisees, Acts 23:6, and a disciple of the Great Pharisee Gamaliel, Acts 5, chose to be a Pharisee himself and set himself to be the most earnest of the earnest observers of the Jewish law." Paul is saying, "You know what? I kept the law better than any of you."
And then he says this, verse nine, he says, "And be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but which comes from faith in Christ. The righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith." Here's ultimately what Paul's doing. He's saying, "I want you to rejoice in the Lord. Watch out for the dogs, the mutilators of the flesh. I had all kinds of reasons to put my confidence in the flesh, but my real confidence is in God, because it's God who justifies. I don't justify myself by keeping the law."
That's Paul's argument for joy. Now you may say, "What does this have to do with my joy? Even if I understand that, so what?" Well, here's what justification looks like for us. It's wanting to say, "I'm right. I'm in the right, and I know I'm in the right." And here's what modern spirituality is like in many places inside the church, outside the church, and that is we decide what's moral. We say, "Here's my morality. Here's the morality that matters to me," and then we say, "If I keep that morality, then I have the assumption that I'm really good. I have a moral code. I define morality. I keep it, and I assume I'm good."
Hey, here's how this works. Somebody will say, "Well, I'm a moral person because I decided that being moral means being honest. At work and in all my business dealings, I'm honest. Therefore, I'm good." Somebody else will say, "That's good. But for me, being really moral means being tolerant. I accept people wherever they are. Me and my friends, that's what's important to us, and so we accept people."
Somebody else may say, "Well, being moral means having a right sexual ethic," or somebody else may say, "Being moral means caring for the poor and taking care of the poor in my life." But let me just ask you, why does that not lead to joy? Even if your moral code is right, why does it not lead to joy? The reason it doesn't lead to joy, the reason that Paul says, "Beware of the dogs, the mutilators of the flesh," is because what you're doing is you're using your morality to justify yourself and to say, "I'm good."
What you can't know is if you've ever been moral enough, that you're certain, like if your morality is honesty, how many times do you have to shade the truth until you're no longer honest enough to be acceptable to God? If your morality is being tolerant, how many groups do you have to be intolerant of who don't practice the tolerance that you practice to say, "You know what? Maybe I'm not as tolerant as I think I am." How many times do you have to have a sexual thought that's outside the purview of sexual ethics to say, "I crossed the line one too many times.”?
Or if you're about caring for the poor, how many times do you go out to dinner and order something that's maybe just slightly more than you need when that money could have been given to the poor, and you say, "Even though I care about the poor and I've oriented a lot of my life around it, maybe I've spent too much on me." Do you see why that's a problem?
You can't be joyful as long as you're saying, "I'm justified based on what I do," because justification in the Bible is based on what Jesus Christ has done, righteousness that doesn't come from me following the law, verse nine, but from God through faith in Jesus Christ. And not only does it not bring us joy because we can't be certain, but it can't be sustained. All of us, whatever our morality is, will have moments where we fail. But beyond that, I also don't think it's joyful because what we end up doing is we end up creating a better than list.
In other words, what we'll do is we'll have a... Probably not in writing. If you have it in writing, that's a whole other level. But in our minds where we have a list where we say, "I'm not like the other people at work who aren't honest. I'm not like those people who are intolerant. They're the bad people. I'm good. I'm not like the people who don't care about the poor. I care. I'm not like the people who sexually will watch anything on Netflix. I'm different. I'm better than."
And the reason that saps our joy is that there's something in us that wants to cling to our own goodness instead of surrendering and saying, "It's the goodness of Jesus Christ that makes me right. It's not what I have done." Joy, real joy, isn't it simply saying, "Just be happy with your circumstances," but it's knowing to the core of our being that our justification is rooted not in what we've done, but what Jesus Christ has done.
If I were to put it like this if God's standard were to stand on this stage and jump and touch the ceiling here above my head... I probably should have measured this. This is probably 40 or 50 feet above my head. Here's what would be true. If we said, "Okay, everybody, take your turn and come up here and jump for the ceiling. No trampolines are allowed. No extra apparatus. Just jump. And if you touch the ceiling, then you've met God's standard today." Some of us would come up here and our jumps would be really embarrassing.
We'd be like, "I haven't jumped in a long time. That's not real." Some of us might come up here and have a surprisingly good jump, but you're still not jumping 40 or 50 feet in the air. LeBron and Giannis aren't jumping 40 or 50 feet and touching the ceiling. And that's the point of joy, is it's not being able to compare distances and say, "Look at how much better I am than the next person." Our joy comes from saying, "I have my standing, my status in Jesus, not in my performance." It will change fundamentally where you get joy.
But here's the second thing, and that is not only will we find joy in knowing what justifies, but also, I would say in knowing what satisfies. We see this in verses 7 through 11. Here's how Paul puts it. He says, "For whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage that I may gain Christ."
Paul talks about loss and gain, and then he goes so far in verse eight as to say, "I consider everything that I had before to be garbage." If you ever read the old King James Bible, it said, "I consider it to be dung." D-U-N-G. Dung is what he considered it to be, and that's probably a better translation. The word means anything that the body eliminates that's not useful. There's not really a polite word for that. That's why the NIV says, "Oh, it's garbage." The King James version tried the slightly more politically correct word dung.
I'm not even going to try to find a good English word for it, because it's a little weird to say any of the words that I could say are a good translation. Paul though is saying, "Everything that my life had, I consider loss. I consider it dung; garbage compared to the greatness of knowing Christ." His life before as a Pharisee man, he had great social standing. He had economic well-being. He had comfort. And now he's saying, compared to that, knowing Christ is better.
And then in verses 10 and 11, he says, "That I may know Christ in the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering." Now not only does he say, "I came to faith," but he says, "Even suffering is better than what I had before." He doesn't say, "I came to Jesus and now I'm living my best life." He says, "I came to Jesus and I want to know that the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering, that's gain to me." Unless you think that just being in prison was all that Paul experienced.
In 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, we see him talking about his suffering. Here's what he says, verse 23, "Are they servants of Christ? I'm out of my mind to talk like this. I am more. I've worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged, more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I've been constantly on the move.
I've been in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea, and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; and I've been hungry or had known hunger and thirst and I have often gone without food; and I've been cold and naked. And besides everything else, I faced the daily pressure of my concern for all the churches."
What Paul does is he says, "All of this is way better than everything I had before because it's tied to my knowledge of Christ." And I say, what? What he's doing is he's saying, "When I let go of one thing, even if it doesn't seem better in the moment, I know that there's something truer and more satisfying that's beyond. This week I was thinking about the Olympics that are happening. There's a young man who grew up here at this church who's competing in the Olympics in Tokyo this week.
He grew up, kind of his family around here, and he's on the rowing team. He was a contemporary of one of my sons, and so I knew him and his family as they were growing up. And here's what I know about his life, but not as much just about his Olympic athletes in general. To become an Olympic athlete, most athletes have to give up a lot of normal things in life to compete at that level.
And for this particular young man, he chose rowing early on and it meant going to rowing practice often at 5:00 in the morning, working out around the clock, not playing football, not eating certain things, eating other things that were intended to help his body be at peak condition so that he can compete at the highest level. He gave up things in college, in high school, and after college to compete. And all the time, what he was doing is just letting go and saying, "This is a loss to me so that I can gain that."
Now, I don't know how it will end for him in the Olympics, but here's what I know about Olympic athletes. Some Olympic athletes train and don't make the team. Some Olympic athletes train and they get hurt and don't get to compete. But what Paul does here is he says, "When you let go of something, you have the guarantee from the scripture that this is gain, even if it doesn't seem like it today. Now, let me give you just another analogy because maybe that one lands a little off.
When my kids were growing up, sometimes we would go through a fast-food drive-through or stop at a fast-food place. And my kids, like a lot of kids, would say, "Can we have the Happy Meal?" You remember the Happy Meal, right? I think they still have it. The Happy Meal is where they upcharge you a couple of dollars and they put a cheap little 30 cent plastic toy in the thing that's supposed to make the child happy. And therefore, you pay the extra money, get the cheap toy. Well, I was one of those parents who were like, "You're getting the nuggets and ice water."
You can ask my kids. That's real. And now and then they'd be like, "Come on, Dad, can we get the Happy Meal?" I had four kids. You pay $3, $4 extra dollars for a Happy Meal, you're spending $15 you don't have to spend for fast food. So, I'm like, "Okay, this time we'll get the Happy Meal." I get the Happy Meal now and then but let me let you in on a little secret. There's not a single Happy Meal that I bought my kids that helped them gain lasting happiness. Because what would happen is they'd get the Happy Meal and they go like, "This is awesome."
And 30 minutes later, they'd be fighting over the toy, or the toy would break, and they wouldn't be happy anymore. And not only that, not only that, but the next time also we would go, they would say, "Can I have a Happy Meal?" It's brilliant marketing, by the way. Here's what a lot of us do with our souls, and that is we constantly think, if I can just get a Happy Meal, then I'll be really happy.
And what we'll do is we'll say, "If I can date this person, if I can get this job, if I can retire, if I can have enough money, if we can get into this school, if only this would work out, then I'll be happy." And we keep grabbing for things that can’t fill the depth of need within us thinking, "This will bring me happiness." And all we're doing is we're covering the leak with Flex Tape or buying a Happy Meal and saying, "This is going to satisfy me."
When what we really need to do is say, "My real satisfaction is found in knowing the God of the universe, the one who created my soul and made me for a higher purpose than simply to exist and buy another Happy Meal for myself." But the challenge is when we're going through the drive-through, metaphorically speaking, we think, I need the Happy Meal right now. And I know that some of us who are here would probably say, "You know what? I tried this God thing before. I tried to say I'm all in, and I wasn't happy. I wasn't content. I didn't find the joy and satisfaction you're talking about." And I understand that.
But let me just simply say, there's a chance that like the Olympic athlete or the Happy Meal purchaser, you gave up way too early and said, "I'll just buy the Happy Meal, or I'm not going to train," because the satisfaction that Paul talks about that Jesus gives is not satisfaction that you look and say, "Oh, the leak is taken care of. It's a process of rebuilding the gutter."
But when it's rebuilt, what happens is we can say, "Because I'm justified by God, because God is the satisfier of my soul, then I can have real joy, real happiness, and ridiculous joy in the face of things in my life, things in the world that don't seem to add up." I know that probably most of us would say, "That's what I prefer." I'm guessing that today some of us who are participating in Orchard Hill, here online would say, "I am not sure that this is where real joy is found."
But I also want to encourage you to say maybe today is a day for you just to say to God, "I've tried to justify myself through my behavior, my own beliefs." And today might be your day just to say, "God, let Jesus be the one who makes me righteous based on faith, not by my works." You can do that by just saying, "God, I trust you," or maybe you're here and you say, "I believe that but there's a piece of me that's gone back to the ‘I'm better than’ list." Savor the justification of God. Let that be a joy to you.
But maybe you've also been somebody who says, I believe that, but my satisfaction has been constantly kind of trying to find a new Happy Meal. And maybe today is just a day to say, "God, not that those Happy Meals are unimportant, but God, I want to find my truest satisfaction in you and not in the trinkets and the tape jobs that I put over the things that are deeper in my life." You can just say, "God, I'm giving this to you again and asking you to bring a deeper, more abiding joy into my heart." God, we thank you that you do offer joy.
God, I pray for me and for each person whose part of Orchard Hill this weekend. That you would help us to find the deeper truer joy that you offer. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week.
