A People Marked with Rejoicing, Gentleness and God's Peace

Alright. Our reading today is from Philippians chapter four, verses four to seven, and I'm reading from the printed version. Philippians four, verse four. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice.

Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guide your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Life should be easy by now.

Right? We're in the twenty-first century. We've got electric, self-driving cars. We've got personal assistants in our pockets through our phones that can do things for us like call while we're driving. We have Amazon Express with next day delivery.

You don't even have to wait a week for anything anymore. It can be there tomorrow. We have big advertisement boards as we drive past the highway saying they sell a Happy Meal. You continually get bombarded with things saying if you get this phone, it will make you happy. If you get these glasses, your eyesight will be perfect.

If you get this, we promise happiness and an easy life in return. But is it true? We all know it's not true. We've all tried the Happy Meal and we've gone and gone, we need something else. We need something more.

We've tried what they've said would give us what we want. And we realise it doesn't quite add up. On top of that, we actually know that life isn't easy. We know from personal experience that life is hard. Today, again, I was talking with someone about COVID-19 and the way it just threw our world into turmoil.

Panic shopping, shelves being empty, people, whenever there's a cough going, what just happened in the shopping centre? Supply chains completely disrupted and prices shooting through the roof. Not only that, the Russian-Ukraine war is still going on. The Israel-Hamas conflict is still going on. The problems of suffering, pain, anxiety and stress isn't just out there in the world though.

It's here in this very room. Now I don't know your congregation as well as I know mine, but I think it's a safe bet to say that there are people here this morning who are worried about loan repayments or normal rent payments. There are people, probably here this morning, who are worried about their physical health. That's why we prayed for them in the congregational prayer. There are people here this morning struggling with broken relationships, either at work where things aren't really going as we would have planned, or at home, where we were hoping that would be the safe place where we have intimate relationship.

And above all these other anxieties that are out there, and that are within our little communities, our lives, there's the reality of living life under the curse. That laundry pile that you did last week is filling up again, and you have to wash it, you have to hang it up, you have to dry it, and you have to pack it away. All those things that just keep having to happen because sin has broken our world. No matter the product you buy, the idol, the ideology you buy into, or the holiday you go on, the reality is that suffering and anxiety is part of life.

And as Christians, we unfortunately don't get a get out of jail free card. We don't get a VIP card that says God gives us special grace to just remove the troubles from our Christian life. Even Charles Spurgeon, the great nineteenth century preacher dubbed the Prince of Preachers, struggled with crippling depression. And so all of this raises a question for us as Christians. How are we as followers of Christ to respond to the suffering, pain and anxieties of life?

And that's the beautiful thing. We might not have a card that we can play on suffering and go, not this one, I'm using the skip card God's given me. But we do have God's word, which clearly has a lot to say about pain, suffering and anxiety. And the reality is that this passage that was read for us just a second ago was penned while Paul was still sitting in prison, going through his own period of pain and suffering. And so let's get into the passage.

If you look at verse four, it says, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say it, rejoice. And that's our first point this morning. Paul calls us to always rejoice in the Lord. And he doesn't just say rejoice, he says I will say it again. He really draws a line under it and says this is important.

This is what a Christian life should be marked by. And I mean, there are many reasons why the Philippian church had reasons not to rejoice. Paul was in chains. Epaphroditus, one of their congregation members, nearly died going to visit Paul who was in prison. They experienced persecution outside of the church.

They experienced false teaching starting to come into the church. And so they were experiencing tension and anxiety from all fronts, outside and inside their church, and things were not easing up. In a sea of turmoil and hardship, you'd nearly expect that Paul, who saw himself as the spiritual father of this church, would be writing his most eloquent letter to send to Rome, so that the governor of Rome could go, let's get Paul out of prison. He's not meant to be in prison so that he could go and help a church that is in strife. And yet, what letters did Paul write?

He didn't write them to the Roman governor. He wrote them to the churches that were going through turmoil. He addressed the people who were sitting through the anxiety and that suffering. Why did Paul do this? It's not in this letter, but in another letter where Paul talks about being not a prisoner of Rome, but a prisoner of Christ.

And he truly believed that he was a prisoner of Christ. He believed that God ordains all things. And so he was willing to sit in prison and have that as the lot that God had given him for that season. I'm sure you as a church can think of reasons why you could grumble and complain and not rejoice. I'm sure there are many reasons.

But what God is instructing here through Paul is a lesson of saying it's easy to rejoice when the prison doors go open and an angel lets you out. It's easy to rejoice when the sun is shining. It's easy to rejoice when things are going the way that you thought they should go. But it's a lot harder to rejoice when the prison doors stay closed. It's a lot harder to rejoice when the sun doesn't shine.

It's a lot harder to rejoice when things don't go according to our plan and the way we want it to go. But it's important to realise that this passage in Philippians, we're already in chapter four, Paul's not just saying rejoice because Christians should rejoice. He's actually been building up throughout the letter reasons why Christians should rejoice and it's all gospel reasons. And so this is one that I was going to transition from one to the other. So just bear with me.

But oh, no, we can. Okay, I did do it right. My apologies again. But we can rejoice in prison.

Why? Because we have God's spirit and he is working all things together for good. Philippians 1:19. We can rejoice in the encouragement we receive from being united to Christ. We can rejoice in the comfort and love we have from Christ.

We can rejoice in the family of faith that God has given us. We can rejoice in the fact that God is working in our lives. We can rejoice in the service and sacrifice of our pastors and elders. And I do realise this might be one of the reasons today that you're going, is it? But this is what Paul writes to the Philippian church, a reason to rejoice, to remember the times that a faithful ministry was poured into the congregation.

We can rejoice that our boast is Christ and not our own perfection. We can rejoice that our citizenship is in heaven, and that we will receive glorified bodies. We will receive glorified bodies. And we can rejoice in Christ's finished work on the cross that cannot be nullified. These are all things that Paul points to as reasons for the Christian heart to rejoice. The reality is the gospel doesn't change our circumstances.

The beauty of the gospel is that it changes us in the midst of our circumstances. And it's a beautiful truth that God enables and empowers His people to endure through every situation. You see, as we go through life, God uses both His spirit and our lived experience, and as it intertwines with His truth and our lived experience, we are gradually, slowly, but surely moulded and conformed into the beautiful image of Christ as we walk through those valleys, as we go over the crests, the ups and the downs of life, make us more Christ-like through His word and His spirit. And so as Christians, we are to be marked with joy and rejoicing. But that's not all.

If you look at verse five, we see a second result of God's transformative work in our lives. It says, let your reasonableness, or if you look at the footnote, it says your gentleness be evident to all. We are also meant to be a people marked with reasonableness or gentleness. And this is a pretty extraordinary command if you think about it. You remember that list of reasons the Philippians could complain?

You can probably think of your own reasons why you could complain to God about what's happening in your life with hardship and suffering. In the midst of suffering under the curse of broken relationships that you might experience, even in the midst of maybe receiving persecution from outside and dealing with false teaching from inside, not saying that's here, but that's what they have there. Paul says they should be marked with reasonableness and gentleness, despite all those things crashing in on them. We know our human hearts, don't we?

We know when things start pressing and it gets a little bit too much, how easy it is for us to start getting that feeling of bitterness towards that brother or sister. To feel that vindictiveness starting to build up, to feel a need for revenge, but that's not fair. And yet Paul knows they're going through hardship. Paul knows they're being pushed on. And he says, be reasonable, be gentle.

Not only be that, be marked as people who bear these characteristics as they follow Christ, the suffering servant, the one who bears the mark of gentleness as He walks to the cross. How can we do this? I mean, that seems a little bit impossible when things just keep getting stacked on. How can we continue to persevere on top of our daily anxieties? Well, it's because at the end of verse five, we read, the Lord is at hand.

The Lord is at hand. And this is true in two ways. First, God is always present with us. During our struggles, we are never alone or by ourselves. Are you mocked at work for your faith?

For being childish and believing in Santa Claus and in Christ? God is there with you, as they mock you. Are you made redundant, and you can feel the sweat pour off your body as you're driving home because you don't know what to do? God is there with you as you drive home. Are you suffering from sickness, and day by day, your plea to the Lord is Lord, please take this away from me, please heal me?

God is with you in that distress. Are you commanded by God to go serve as a missionary at the front line where Christians are persecuted and God is not seen to be glorious and beautiful? God is even there with you in a foreign land, with a foreign tongue, and a foreign people. And the reality, brother, sister, is that God is with you now. Whatever you're struggling with, whatever your anxiety is, whatever the pain is that ails you, God is with you in that today.

And so that's the first way that Paul uses the saying, the Lord is at hand. It's that God is with you in every situation that you go into. But the second way that we can see this and that Paul refers to it is that the Lord is at hand refers to the fact that His return is near. The second coming of Christ is not that far off. We don't have to wait that much longer.

The sufferings that we bear now, in this season of our lives, even if the season is your whole life, is nothing compared to the eternity that will be spent united with Christ, where all of that pain, burden, suffering and anxieties will wash away as we get to experience the fullness of Christ and the beauty of His shalom and peace washing over us. And it might be easy for me as a fairly young preacher to stand up here and say your worries, your pain, your burden, that's nothing compared to what is to come. I don't quite feel like I have the authority to do that. But I'm referring to the words of Paul. And Paul has been beaten.

He's been bruised, he's been whipped to within an inch of his life. And it's the spirit of God speaking through Him as He writes these words. And it's the same Paul who writes in 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, we are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed. And so we can rejoice. And we can be gentle even in a hostile world because the Lord is at hand.

He's with us and we will be with Him soon enough. The second point that Paul makes is don't be anxious about anything. I'm sure when you realised it was Philippians chapter four, verses four to six, you went, oh, yeah, I know that. Probably learned it as a memory verse. Don't be anxious about anything.

And so let's read it. Verse six says, do not be anxious about anything, but instead in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God. There is a clear correlation here in our actions. And Paul is saying, don't be anxious about anything. Instead, in every situation, bring your supplications to God with prayer and thanksgiving.

We are instructed to take trouble, stress, anxiety, all of those things in our life, we are to take it to God in prayer. We are, after all, His children. Are we not? He has adopted us into His household. We actually have direct access where we can walk into the throne room of God before our Father.

And we can place before Him the stresses and the anxieties of our lives. We don't have to carry those burdens alone. We can always remember the words of Christ that He spoke in Matthew 11:28, where He says, come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. I truly believe so often we sit in the suffering of pain and anxiety because we have shifted our focus from Christ back onto ourselves. We have stopped taking our burdens to God and we're trying to carry and figure it out by ourselves. And we forget that we have an almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing sovereign God, who is more than able to carry our burdens, who is more than able to walk with us.

And so brothers and sisters, I want to challenge you here this morning. You, I don't know, maybe you've gone to God in the last hour with your burdens and your struggles and you've laid it before Him, but maybe you've been here for months or years. And you used to take your burden to God. But you've actually been carrying it on your own. Respond to the words of Jesus this morning saying, come to Me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Go lay down your burden at the foot of the cross. You don't have to be in control anymore. The sovereign God of the universe already is, and you can trust Him. Now I do realise that there are still times when we might have our eyes fixed on Jesus. And even though our eyes are fixed on Him, we still experience anxiety, fear, and maybe even depression.

And this is not to say that when you experience these emotions, that you are not walking in faith. After all, our human emotions were created by God. Emotions are good. They become a problem when they become our measure of truth. That's when our emotions become a problem, when they become our measure of what is truth.

Emotions are ultimately a great servant, but a bad master. We are not called to be stoic men and women of God who face the world and just storm through without a care in the world. No, just think about the Psalms, where David cries out, why are you so downcast, O my soul? Think towards Mark 9, where the father of the demon-possessed boy said, Lord, I do believe, help me in my disbelief. Or even think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where He cries out and says, Father, take this cup away from Me in the middle of His distress.

The emotions that we experience are not necessarily a marker of our faith. Because we live in a broken world, things like mental health issues, depression, and chemical imbalances in our brain, these are all part of the way that sin has broken our world. And so our emotions, though created good, are broken as well. Here's the question that we continually need to ask ourselves. The question is what defines us?

What controls our thoughts and behaviours? Are we defined and controlled by emotions? Or are we defined and controlled by the gospel of Jesus Christ? Are we being transformed by our circumstances? Or are we being transformed by the grace of God at work in our lives?

Look at verse six with me. It says, do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. When we come to God, Paul says we are to present our requests before Him with thanksgiving. Yes, we can bring our petitions to God and our supplications to God, but that should always be accompanied with thanksgiving. And we have good reason to be thankful.

I've mentioned already the rejoicing that Paul has pointed to earlier in the letter. But it's not just the gospel truths that we can rejoice in. We can also rejoice in who God is. We can rejoice in the fact that God is both the Alpha and the Omega. He is the Lord Almighty.

He is our Saviour and our King. He is in us through His spirit. He is merciful, and yet He is mighty. He is kind, and yet He's just. He is generous, showing patience to sinners.

He is faithful to His promises and to His people. He is a God who sees your trials and pains. And He is a God who hears and answers your prayers. Not only do we rejoice in the gospel truths, but we can rejoice just looking back at who God is, how sweet and how beautiful Jesus is, how amazing it is that His spirit dwells in us. The final point of my message this morning is that we as God's people get to experience God's shalom.

When we rejoice in God and substitute our worries for prayers and thanksgiving, God promises us His peace. It's a conditional statement that takes place here. If we do A, then we will receive B. And if you rejoice in the Lord always, and you pray with petition and thanksgiving in every situation, well, in that case, then the supernatural peace of God will guard your heart and mind in Christ. But the inverse of this equation, I think, is just as helpful to look at.

And it says this: if you always grumble and complain in the Lord, and you're anxious and stressed in every situation, then it's no surprise that the peace of God will elude you. Christians are promised shalom, God's peace. This is one of my favourite words from the Old Testament, because it captures this complete, whole peace of God. It's not just the small bit of peace here in your life that you have, it's harmony of all things coming together, being the way God intended it to be. It's a peace that binds all things together and harmonises all things.

And yes, there is a now and not yet sense where this peace will be fully realised when we are with God. But God promises us shalom. And so we can come to God with those prayers and petitions, lay them before Him, and His promise, if we do this, He will provide His peace for us and will guard our hearts and minds in Christ. In one of my favourite books, The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom shares her and her sister Betsy's experience of the hardships of living in Nazi-occupied Germany during the Second World War. During this time, they saw friends and family captured by the Nazis, killed by the Nazis, and they themselves were caught for hiding Jews in their house and they were taken off to a concentration camp.

And Corrie says this in the book. After being caught for hiding Jews, they were taken and moved at one stage to Barracks 28 in a concentration camp. And while they were there, they discovered that the place was completely infested by fleas. There were fleas in the beds, fleas in the corridors and fleas in their clothes. They were absolutely everywhere. So horrified, Corrie cried out to Betsy.

How can we live in such a place? Betsy replied, we already have the answer, Corrie. In the Bible we read this morning, what did it say again, Corrie? Corrie flicked through the Bible. Ah, here it is.

See that none of you repay evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:15-18.

That's it, Corrie cried. That's God's answer in this horrid situation. Give thanks in every circumstance.

That's what we can do. We can start right now and thank God for everything about this new barracks. Corrie stared hard and long at Betsy. And then back at the foul-aired room. Such as she inquired?

Well, such as being here together. Corrie bit her lip. Yes. Thank You, Lord Jesus for that. Such as what you're holding in your hands.

Corrie looked down at the Bible. Thank You, Father, for the Bible, and that it wasn't confiscated. She continued, thank You for the women in this room who will meet with Jesus through those pages. Betsy continued, thank You, Father, for being very crowded in here. Since we're packed so close, so many more women will hear Your word.

Betsy looked at Corrie. And Corrie said, oh, all right. Thank You for the jam-cram, stuff-packed, suffocating crowds. Yes, Betsy continued. Thank You for the fleas.

The fleas, Corrie exclaimed. That's too much, Betsy. There's no way even God can make me grateful for a flea. Give thanks in all circumstances, Betsy quoted. It doesn't say in pleasant circumstances.

Fleas are part of the place where God has put us. And so we should continue to give thanks for the fleas. But this time, I was sure Betsy was wrong. It's a beautiful little account. And what's really amazing is in the later pages, Betsy and Corrie realised that their barracks wasn't inspected by the officers.

They didn't come into their barracks. And they realised it was because of the fleas. The guards didn't want to catch the fleas. And they had the beauty of seeing how God worked things together for their good. You see, it's ultimately in this situation where the peace of God guarded Corrie and Betsy's hearts and minds and allowed them to pray for their oppressors and give thanks for all circumstances.

It is the peace of God that helped guard Paul and Silas and their minds and allowed them to sing even though they were sitting in prison. And it's the peace of God that will guard your hearts and minds in Christ to the end, regardless of the situation that you're struggling with. In any and every situation, God is able to guard our hearts and our minds in Christ, who has already paid the price in full. And so yes, the reality is life is hard. There is just no denying it.

Life can be unfair when we really hope it would be fair. It can be overwhelming and overbearing. And life can knock us back and life can lock us down sometimes. And we can often feel over-wearied and overburdened by all of this. And yet hope emerges like a ray of sunlight that cuts through a cold and gloomy day.

Because the God of peace is near. He did not forsake us at the cross, and neither will He forsake you now. He will walk with you through the valley of the shadow of death and bring you out to the other side. And therefore, let us be a people marked with rejoicing, with gentleness, and with God's peace. I will say it again, let us be a people marked with rejoicing, gentleness and God's peace as we go into a broken world this coming week.

Let me pray. Father, Your word is so rich. Lord, Your message is so rich. You are so rich to us. Father, in You we have all these promises, we have all these blessings in Christ.

Lord, help us to hold on to Christ this week. I pray for this church, for each and every person here, Lord, who are struggling in their own way, Lord, with the brokenness of this world, with the brokenness of sin operating in their own life, in their own heart. Lord, You know their suffering, You know their anxiety. And Lord, I pray that they, this morning, this week, as they lay it before the cross with prayer and thanksgiving, Lord, I pray that You lift our burdens, Lord, that You free us to enjoy Your peace, Your shalom, that You free us, Lord, to enjoy Christ, our all in all.

Lord, help us. Help us to be people who are truly and genuinely marked with rejoicing. That our friends and family can say that of us, that we are people who rejoice regularly in You. Help us to be marked with gentleness where people go, man, their lives are hard, but they aren't becoming rough on the edges. They're becoming softer as the pressure builds.

Lord, help us to be people marked with Your peace. That when the whole world seems to go up in flames, we, Your people, Your church, are the first people they go to because they know that we are people of peace who experience peace even in turmoil. Father, we pray these things in the mighty name of Christ our Lord. Amen.