[0:00] ...size high school guys who might be able to help us move in. And my last church, we didn't really have many, if any, of those size guys. And so I didn't know what to expect. And so I said, well, no, but I got about six retired guys who are going to come help.
[0:15] And, you know, they outworked me completely. I mean, put me to shame. So thank you to you guys who've come over to the house to help us move in and unloading the two different loads at two different times, which was crazy.
[0:26] But thank you all so much for that. We're so excited to be here with you at First Baptist. Excited to see what God's going to do here through this church and through each of you as we minister together. I'm going to try to remember each of your names.
[0:39] So if I point at you and say your name, just don't be weirded out. I'm trying to remember names, okay? Yeah, so I'm looking through that directory. Okay, I'm going to memorize these people.
[0:49] So anyways, so we'll get there. You have it easy. Joe, Audrey, and then Jack. He's a little one, all right? But this morning, we're going to begin a study through the book of Philippians.
[1:04] And with that being said, I want to let you guys know something about me and preaching. I take preaching God's word very seriously. I think that this is a very, I mean, it's an honorable call that God's put on my life to preach his word.
[1:20] And I want to do that faithfully and I want to do it well. Because I take God's word, preaching God's word very seriously, I want each of you to take listening to God's word, hearing God's word, studying God's word very seriously with me.
[1:33] And so I'm not a stick in the mud, okay? I'm going to make some jokes. I'll tell some stories. I'll probably reference football. But the actual dividing of God's word and actually preaching the message and rightly representing what God has given to us is something that I take very, very seriously.
[1:50] And I want you to know that about me. Because of that, I'm going to be, the way that I'm going to preach is going to be line by line, verse by verse. Verse, which, if you're not used to that, you're going to be, like, thinking, that sounds kind of boring, okay?
[2:04] But it's not. It's not boring. I think it's actually the most exciting way that you can preach because you don't have to get bored with me coming up with creative stories and topics and things like that.
[2:16] Instead, we'll work through a book of the Bible and we'll study it and we'll get to know it. And by the end of the time that we study it, hopefully you've had time in that word here. You've had time in that word at home and you've just learned and soaked up so much more about God's word than you had expected.
[2:33] That's my hope. That's my hope. And so I believe that God's word is inerrant, meaning it's without error. I believe that God's word is infallible, meaning there's no mistakes.
[2:43] I believe that it's incapable of making mistakes. I believe that God's word is authoritative. God's word is the authority in the life of the believer. And because of those things, I'm going to take this really seriously.
[2:56] I'm going to preach through God's word and I'm going to commit to working hard to explain and exegete is the right word, to interpret, to explain what God's word is saying.
[3:09] And then I'm going to work really hard to apply it to the situations of your life. That's the hope is that God's word will come alive in you in a way that maybe it hasn't before and it will apply to you in a way that maybe it hasn't before.
[3:21] That's the hope. So I'll be preaching line by line, verse by verse. This is technically called expository preaching or text-driven preaching is another word. And so I have a slide for some reasons why I want to do this.
[3:32] First, context is important. We can't understand God's word and what God's word is saying without understanding what it's saying in the context that it's saying it.
[3:45] Okay? So what I mean by that is if your Bible study is, you know, your Bible study time at home is close your eyes, flip open the Bible to a random page, do one of these guys and say, looks like I'm reading Habakkuk.
[3:58] I've never heard of that. Okay. All right. Looks like I'm reading from Habakkuk today. Well, that's probably not going to get you the most, you know, the most out of your walk with Christ, the most out of your quiet time, your time in the word.
[4:11] But if you study God's word systematically through a book and understand the context and study not only in the text but also just finding out some different information, like where is this letter written to?
[4:23] And where was Paul when he wrote it? And what about, who's Peter? Where did Peter write this letter from? Who's he writing to? All those different things. What's the relationship there? Understanding the context deepens your understanding of Scripture and also encourages you and helps you grow in your walk with Christ.
[4:39] There's dangers to studying Scripture out of context, including poor interpretation and poor application. And a perfect example of this is right here in the book of Philippians. So everybody knows Philippians 4.13, right?
[4:52] I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Okay. You got football players and baseball players who take that verse, paint it on their eye black. And what they're saying is, I can hit a home run because God gave me the strength to do it.
[5:05] Or I can score a touchdown because God gave me the strength to do it. But if you look at the context of Philippians chapter 4, which we will, you'll see that Paul has been writing from a jail cell about the struggles that he's faced in life, the horrendous circumstances that he finds himself in, and that despite those circumstances, he's able to overcome it.
[5:25] He's able to have joy. He's able to know who Christ is despite all of the rough stuff that he's facing. And I think that's a little bit weightier than just I can score a touchdown because God gives me the strength to do it.
[5:39] I think it's a little bit more impactful than that. So studying Scripture out of context is dangerous. The other thing is Scripture is sufficient. I can't add anything that's going to make this any better.
[5:53] This is the Word of God. The Creator of the universe has given us a record of His Word to us so we can study it to know Him better. I can't make that any better than it already is.
[6:05] So it's sufficient. No picking favorites, meaning what you'll see is I'm not going to pick and choose the easy verses to preach on. If we preach line by line, verse by verse, that means I'm going to encounter some things that, like a good example would be something like predestination or not predestination.
[6:27] And if it's in the text, I've got to handle it. And some of you are going to be like, I wish you wouldn't talk about it. You know what I mean? I can't skip it. I have to. It's in the text. We're going to explain it. We're going to work through it. We're going to study it together. Can't pick favorites.
[6:38] The other thing is me preaching line by line, verse by verse, hopefully is a model for some of you to take and apply to your own quiet time and your own personal walk with Christ.
[6:50] Now, a lot of y'all have been studying the Bible daily since before I was alive, and that's awesome. Some of you have not really been consistent in your walk with Christ, and in terms of your personal quiet time, you haven't really been very consistent.
[7:05] And some of you have never really just studied the Scripture on your own. But hopefully what you'll see as we work through a book of the Bible, or books of the Bible, you'll see an example of how to do that.
[7:15] And then you can take it and apply it and work through Scripture on your own. And then lastly, I'm not a very creative person, and so you don't want to hear me come up with topics and, you know, creative titles because that'll get boring for everybody really quickly, okay?
[7:31] So for those reasons, I'm going to be preaching through the text line by line, verse by verse, okay? And here's the thing. You'll know what I'm going to preach next week because it's the next verse, okay?
[7:45] So when you go home today throughout the week, read the next verse. Read, study. We're here in Philippians. Let's get through this book and study it deeply as a church, okay?
[7:57] So now that we have that out of the way, let's go ahead and begin here in Philippians chapter 1. And I'm only looking at really verses 1 and 2, but we're going to read verses 1 through 11 of chapter 1.
[8:09] So would you stand with me to honor the reading of God's Word? Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, including the overseers and deacons, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
[8:30] I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you, always praying with joy for all of you in my every prayer because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. I'm sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
[8:47] Indeed, it is right for me to think this way about all of you because I have you in my heart, and you are all partners with me in grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.
[9:01] For God is my witness how deeply I miss all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And I pray this, that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things which are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
[9:26] Let's pray together. Dear God, thank you for your word. Bless this time of study now. Let us lift your name high and glorify you, Lord Jesus. It's in your name that we pray. Amen. All right.
[9:40] I was going to say be seated, but you got that. All right. Cool. So like I said, we read through verses 1 through 11, but we're really going to focus on verses 1 and 2.
[9:51] And the reason I want to do that is because I want to show you, to me, the importance of setting the scene and finding the context and understanding exactly what we're about to dive into. And to do that, there are some important questions that we have to ask.
[10:03] And these are basic questions that I'm sure as I ask them, you're going to be like, well, that's redundant. You don't have to ask. Fair enough. Just humor me. Okay? So we'll say the groundwork. First, who wrote this letter?
[10:15] Paul. The apostle Paul wrote this letter. Second, when did he write this letter? That one's a little bit harder. When did Paul write this letter? You have to kind of study the book of Acts and different things and find. But this was probably written at some point in the early 60s A.D.
[10:30] Okay? Some point in there. Where did Paul write the letter from is another question. Because, you know, if you read the book of Acts, studied the missionary journeys of Paul, he kind of went all over the place, right?
[10:42] He was in Corinth for 18 months. He was in Ephesus for like three years. He was in, let's see here, Galatia and that whole region, Lystra, Derbe, all those places. He was in Jerusalem.
[10:53] He was in Antioch. He was all over the place. So where did he write this letter from? Well, you find out through this letter and through others like it that he wrote this from prison.
[11:04] And most likely, I think, I believe, that he wrote this from his prison in Rome in particular. And I have a reason for that. It's in the text. We'll get to it in a couple weeks. But Paul wrote this from a Roman prison while he was awaiting his trial before Caesar.
[11:19] If you remember Paul's life, he was in Jerusalem. There was a coup that came to get him. They were going to try to kill him. And then he appealed to Caesar. And as a Roman citizen, he had that right, to appeal to stand before Caesar and plead his case.
[11:31] And so since he appealed to Caesar, eventually he went through all of these different people, Felix and all of this. And then eventually he made his way to Rome. There was a shipwreck in between there too, okay?
[11:42] But Paul was in Rome, and he was waiting for his trial before Caesar. The Caesar at the time was Nero. And this was before Nero blamed Christians for burning down Rome and started martyring Christians.
[11:56] So by the time Paul finally heard him, he was probably released. You see in Philippians and in the book of Philemon, he expected to be released from prison to go see people again. But Philippians is one of four letters that are grouped together known as the prison epistles, the prison letters.
[12:13] So you have Philippians, you have Ephesians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. Okay? So Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Those four letters Paul wrote from his prison cell.
[12:25] All right? And that kind of helps us understand some of the things that he says to these Gentile churches about his imprisonment because you see the Gentiles thought that Paul was in jail because of them, and they felt super guilty about it.
[12:38] So if you read Ephesians, you'll see he's like, look, don't worry about it. And Philippians is like, look, this is actually a good thing that I'm in prison. Don't feel bad about this. You know, Christ's name is being magnified even more.
[12:49] So that's where Paul wrote this from. And what we'll see through, too, as we kind of go through this, and in chapter 2 in particular of Philippians, you see that Paul was visited by somebody sent from Philippi, a man named Epaphroditus.
[13:04] And Epaphroditus came with a gift from the church in Philippi to support Paul, to give him, you know, like a care basket, right? That he would feel supported while he was in prison.
[13:15] Epaphroditus got sick, and we'll talk about that. But at this point, he wrote this letter with Timothy, who was there with him in Rome, and probably Epaphroditus, who was still there, okay? Because Epaphroditus took the letter back.
[13:27] All right. So that's who wrote it. That's where he wrote it. And that's, well, now why did he write it? We're going to kind of look into that. But let's look first. We have two things that we want to talk about.
[13:38] Paul and Timothy, they're together, like I said. It says that they're servants of Christ Jesus. Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus. So you're familiar with Paul's relationship with Timothy, right?
[13:52] Paul was the older apostle. There was the younger man, Timothy, who was his disciple. He taught him. He trained him. He sent him out to preach. If you look in Acts chapter 16, and that's kind of where we're going to go to a lot today.
[14:05] So Acts chapter 16, because Acts chapter 16 helps us a ton with the book of Philippians. All right? First things first, you have Paul and Timothy meeting each other. So you guys remember that scene in the book of Acts where Paul and Barnabas, they had gone on a missionary journey together, and then they had a breakup.
[14:23] You remember that? It was nasty. They couldn't stay together. They had to separate. And so Paul and Silas went out, and they were in Lystra and Derbe, and they were there, and they met this young disciple named Timothy.
[14:35] And everybody spoke really highly of Timothy. So Acts 16, 1 through 5 is kind of where Paul meets Timothy. All right? So while he's there, he meets Timothy, and then he takes Timothy and brings him with him into his ministry, into his missionary ministry to go around and to encourage churches, and then eventually to start new churches.
[14:59] And so it says, Paul wanted Timothy to go with him, so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places. Since they all knew that his father was a Greek, as they traveled through the towns, they discovered the decisions reached by the apostles and the elders at Jerusalem for the people to observe.
[15:15] So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers. So Paul met this young disciple, and he brought him with him, took him in with him to the ministry. And so he goes through, and then eventually, as you keep reading through Acts chapter 16, what you'll find is that Paul and Timothy would soon make their way to Philippi.
[15:36] Okay? And so Acts chapter 16, we're going to kind of continue on, and it says in verses 6 through 12 that they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, and then there's these really interesting verses here.
[15:48] We'll have to get into this another time. But they were, let's see here, where am I? Yes, they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.
[15:59] So God told them, don't go there to preach. Well, that's interesting. God said, don't, don't go. This isn't where you need to go. Okay? So instead, they kept going. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go to Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them to go there.
[16:13] So Jesus now, the Holy Spirit, God, has now told Paul, don't go preach the gospel to these places, which is really kind of hard to understand. But really what it is is God had other plans for them.
[16:25] God had other plans. So he closed those doors of ministry. By the way, those doors would be open later. Other people would go. But Paul and Timothy and Silas and Luke, they had to go somewhere else.
[16:36] God had another plan for them. And so during the night, Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, cross over to Macedonia and help us.
[16:47] After he had seen the vision, we immediately made efforts to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. From Troas, we put out the sea and sailed straight through Samothrace.
[16:57] The next day to Neapolis. From there to Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of the district of Macedonia. We stayed in that city for several days. So Paul and Timothy were led by God, very clearly led by God.
[17:09] God told them don't go certain places and then open the doors to go somewhere else into this place, Macedonia, and specifically into Philippi. This was the first ministry that would be done by the apostles especially, but the first ministry that would be done in Europe, in Macedonia, all right?
[17:29] And the city that they went to was Philippi. Philippi was a well-known city. This was actually the location of, what is it, Mark Antony and I think Brutus, if I remember correctly from history.
[17:41] I'm not the best at Roman history. But anyways, they had this huge battle there and Mark Antony won. This is a Caesar's kind of get going and Rome has this power. But everybody in Philippi, because of that, well, not everybody, most everybody, they were Roman citizens.
[17:58] They were kind of naturalized Roman citizens. So they had certain rights. They weren't taxed by Rome. They had all this different thing. It was pretty cool. But Philippi, because of those things, became a prominent city, all right?
[18:09] And so they go there and this is where God has led them and now they're gonna do ministry because that's what they do. So it's no surprise that Timothy's name is mentioned at the beginning of this letter because the church in Philippi knew Timothy well.
[18:25] Timothy was with Paul when he went into Philippi. Timothy actually stayed behind when Paul and Silas got sent out. So Timothy was known really well by this church. In fact, the church asked if Timothy could come to them and Paul says not yet, but eventually.
[18:38] And so they love Timothy and so it's no surprise that Timothy's listed here, included with Paul at the beginning of this. That's not surprising. What is surprising though is that instead of Paul calling himself an apostle, like he does at the beginning of most of his letters, he says that he and Timothy are servants of Christ Jesus.
[18:57] That is interesting. Most of the time, Paul says, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus and Silas, or Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus and Timothy, or whoever wrote the letter or was with him when he wrote the letter.
[19:08] But in this case, and in three other places in the New Testament, he doesn't call himself an apostle to start the letter. In this case, he calls himself a servant. In the letters to the church in Thessalonica, he didn't give himself a title at all.
[19:27] And in the letter to Philemon, he called himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus. But here in Philippians, he called himself and Timothy servants of Christ Jesus. That's really significant.
[19:41] Paul did not, in this letter, start it by exerting his apostolic authority. He didn't say, I'm an apostle, so you have to listen to what I'm about to say next.
[19:53] Paul had a relationship with this church, a close relationship with this church, and we'll get into that next week. They'd supported him in ministry throughout the years that they'd known him. And so Paul didn't have to start off by saying, I'm an apostle, listen to me.
[20:08] Instead, he was able to approach this as a friend, writing a letter of thanks to friends. And in doing so, when he wrote this, when he called himself a servant, he also kind of shows something that's gonna be worked out through the rest of this letter, which is that humility is pretty important to God.
[20:26] Paul had every right as an apostle to call himself an apostle, to think of himself as an apostle, to exert the authority of an apostle. But Paul took this humble approach as he wrote this letter to this church.
[20:38] And I think it's because it matches the tone of the letter as a whole, as we'll see as we go through. But Paul and Timothy were servants. They were servants. And so there's a few things I wanna consider real quick.
[20:50] What does it mean to be a servant? Right? What does it mean to be a servant? I've heard since I came here in June till we moved up here a week ago, whatever it was, we have heard so many different times from multiple people how many people in this church have stepped up and served and done amazing things.
[21:12] And that's awesome. That's encouraging. I'm coming in, I'm like, man, a church who wants to help out? Like, oh, thank God, right? That's so encouraging. And so there's a lot of people here who have served, but what does it mean to be a servant?
[21:27] What does it mean to be a servant? There's a few things that I want you to consider. First thing, servants are obedient. Servants are obedient. Paul and Timothy were obedient to go where God led them, but also they were obedient to not go where God didn't lead.
[21:47] I guess I'm bad at making PowerPoint. That's on me. That's on me. Don't blame the people up there. That's my fault. I made this. So for us, when God opens a door for ministry, and he opens that door, go through it.
[22:00] Like, if God opens that door and tells you to go to serve, you better go and serve. Whatever it means, whatever it looks like, it can be different for everybody, but go and serve. Be obedient. Servants are obedient.
[22:11] The next thing is servants are faithful. Paul and Timothy weren't servants to anyone or anything else. They were servants of Christ Jesus. They weren't servants to culture.
[22:24] They weren't servants to people. They didn't preach for men. They preached for God. They were faithful in their calling as servants.
[22:38] In fact, both of them would die because of their countercultural life in Christ. They were faithful servants all the way to the end. Paul was probably beheaded in Rome, and Timothy was killed by a coup in Ephesus because they were faithful followers of Jesus.
[22:57] They were faithful. Servants are faithful. And servants are humble. All right, servants are humble. So the word here, servants, really, it means slave.
[23:08] But in America, we don't translate it as slave because we have a hard time separating what the slavery was then to what slavery was in the United States, and so we use the word servants instead.
[23:21] But the word slave, what Paul's meaning here, this is a humble title. He is a slave. He and Timothy are slaves to Christ, meaning their life was completely devoted to doing the will of Jesus Christ.
[23:37] Whatever their master told them to do, they did. That's humility. To get to a point where you're willing to be that obedient to your master is humility.
[23:48] And also, it's a humble title. To be called a servant, I don't know if you guys know who Tim Hawkins is. He's a Christian comedian. He's pretty funny.
[23:59] He's got this one skit where he stands up and he says that if somebody tells you you have a servant's heart, it's kind of actually like an offense because that means you have to stack chairs. He's like, yeah, you have a servant's heart.
[24:10] He's like, yeah, so does your mom. That's his joke. But really, that's a humble title. To be called a servant. And Paul and Timothy, they were humble men, but don't lose sight of the fact that in Paul and Timothy, two individuals who were just imitating Christ.
[24:44] Christ Jesus was the most, is the most humble servant to ever walk this earth. He left the glories of heaven. Philippians 2, 5 through 11, that's what I preached on in June, actually, when I came.
[24:55] He left the glories of heaven. He lived on this earth with his fallen creation, lived a perfect life. He died on the cross so that we could have life in him. That's unbelievable.
[25:06] That is an example of humility worthy of being followed. And Paul and Timothy did that well. And because of that, we can look to them as examples for ourselves of what it looks like to be humble servants.
[25:19] The next group of people we need to look at is the believers in Philippi. All right? So who is receiving this letter? It's the church in Philippi. And he specifically addressed it to the saints in Philippi.
[25:33] And then that's a large group. You have these subgroups, overseers and deacons. So those two groups, overseers and deacons, by the way, in case you're wondering, that would be the pastor or the pastors and the deacons of the church.
[25:49] Important roles. Important roles in the church. Okay? Overseer is the guardian of the doctrine of the church and needs to teach the doctrine of the church.
[26:02] The deacons are servants, servant leadership in the church. Important groups, but don't lose sight of the fact that those two groups are made up of the other one, the larger one, which is saints. You're not qualified to be a deacon if you aren't a saint first.
[26:16] You're not qualified, I'm not qualified to be an overseer unless I'm a saint first. Okay? So he writes this to the saints in Philippi. And who are the saints in Philippi? Well, we know a few of them for sure.
[26:26] If you go to Acts chapter 16 again, verses 13 through 15, you'll see Lydia, who Paul met there, Paul and Timothy met there. It says, On the Sabbath day, we went outside the city by the city gate, by the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer.
[26:43] We sat down and spoke to the women gathered there. A God-fearing woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, was listening. The Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying.
[26:57] And don't miss that. None of us are saved unless the Lord opens our heart to receive his word. The Lord opened Lydia's heart. She received. She responded. And after she and her household were baptized, she urged us, If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my house.
[27:14] And she persuaded us. So then you keep working through Acts chapter 16, and you see that Paul then delivers by the power of Christ, delivers a slave girl who has a spirit that's causing her to kind of see the future, make predictions that made some people money.
[27:31] Paul freed her. And then it's very likely that she became a believer in Jesus after that experience of being liberated from that oppression. And then you have the Philippian jailer. And I'm sure we're familiar with the Philippian jailer, right?
[27:43] Paul and Silas are in jail, and they were singing, I don't know, what's the Baptist hymn of all time? Like, victory in Jesus. They were singing victory in Jesus, probably. And then the earthquake hit, and the doors opened, and then they were, the jailer thought that everybody left, and so they are like, Paul said, wait, don't hurt yourself.
[28:04] We're here. We're here. And then the guy saw that example and said, well, how can I be saved? And believed in Jesus. Believed in Jesus. He repented, and he believed in Jesus. And so you have those individuals.
[28:17] You also see a few other people through this letter, a guy named Clement, two women named Euodia and Syntyche. And then a lot of people actually suggest that Luke, the author of Luke and Acts, was from Philippi.
[28:29] That may or may not be true, but it looks a lot like he stayed in Philippi there for a few years after Paul. So these individuals were people who had been saved after hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
[28:39] They were saints. And from the humble beginnings of the small group that Paul led to the Lord, Paul and Silas and Timothy led to the Lord, God blessed and the church grew.
[28:52] And then how did they get to the point where they had this kind of established body with deacons and overseers? Well, like I said, Luke, it seems like Luke stayed there in Philippi for about five years.
[29:03] And so they learned and they grew and they had this established church. And all of this was because of who they were in Christ, not because of anything special from Paul or Timothy or Lydia or anyone.
[29:18] So what does it mean to be a saint? What does it mean to be a saint? One, saints have been made holy. We've been made holy by putting our faith in Jesus Christ. This word saint, it means holy, essentially.
[29:32] One who's been made holy, set apart, consecrated. It has these kind of Old Testament, you know, feelings to it. Consecrated to the Lord, set apart. And so saints have been made holy through faith in Jesus Christ.
[29:46] Number two, saints are set apart from the world, which means we should not look like the world around us. We should look different, distinct. We should look pure. We are holy.
[29:57] We're set apart. And then finally, saints are set apart to Christ, both now on earth and in eternity will be set apart to Jesus Christ. Christ. So, we are saints.
[30:07] If you believe in Jesus Christ, you're a saint. You don't have to be venerated in the Catholic Church. You are a saint because of the work of Jesus, not because of anything you've done. Okay? You haven't earned sainthood.
[30:19] You can't earn sainthood. You are a saint because of who Jesus is. He earned it for you. And so the believers in Philippi, they were saints.
[30:30] And that's an encouraging message to us. This is a reminder if you believe in Christ. Like, we're saints. We're holy. We've been made pure. We've been made right. Jesus gave us his holiness so that we could be holy and he took our sin from us.
[30:43] What an amazing gift of grace that is. So if you believe in Jesus, your hope rests in nothing else but Jesus Christ. He has given you his holiness and he's wiped away your sin.
[30:57] The last thing that I want to look at real quick is just this second verse. That's all the first verse, by the way. The second verse, it says, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
[31:11] This greeting is super common in Paul's letters. Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Very, very common in Paul's letters. It's 1 and 2 Timothy. He adds the word mercy in there.
[31:22] But beyond that, it's grace and peace. And this would have been a very warm greeting to this church, to these saints. Grace. And it would have been a warm greeting because something is really interesting here.
[31:34] This word grace is not the standard Greco-Roman word that's used in a greeting for a letter. They would usually write the word greetings. But Paul always changed it to grace.
[31:45] And why would he do that? Well, grace is the expression of the Christian faith. Grace is our hope.
[31:55] God's grace toward us. It carries a lot of weight for Christ followers. Grace is the means by which we're saved.
[32:09] Grace is undeserved and unearned by its nature. That's what it is. An unmerited favor. Unmerited kindness. Unearned favor. There's not a day that goes by that any of us don't need to be reminded about how good God's grace is to us.
[32:27] We need that reminder daily. And then peace, this other word that he uses here, that's a pretty important word too. It carries the idea from the Hebrew word shalom of welfare, well-being, of this encouragement, tranquility, being tranquil, being at peace.
[32:49] peace. That peace is unknown to individuals who don't know Christ. In fact, later in Philippians, Paul describes the peace of God as a peace that passes all understanding.
[33:00] It doesn't make any sense how much peace those who are in Christ are able to experience through the hardest, most difficult situations in life.
[33:12] This peace is an encouragement. It's a peace that doesn't make any sense. And so, as we close, I just want to encourage you, you may be here and this greeting may be a very warm and inviting greeting to you as well, grace and peace, because you know the grace of Jesus and you've been saved.
[33:32] And you know the peace that passes all understanding. You've experienced, you know, pain in life and been able to not only make it through it, but to persevere, to endure on the other side because of this peace that's overwhelming, it's comforting in affliction.
[33:48] If that's you, if you've experienced God's grace and you know the peace that's offered in Christ Jesus, then as we close, we have this time of invitation, I want you to just pray and thank God for His grace, for His goodness.
[34:02] The grace of Jesus is undeserved. The fact that Jesus Christ left the glories of heaven and died on the cross for your sins and you know Him as Savior, thank God. Spend time thanking God for that today. But some of you may be here today and this greeting of grace and peace, it sounds like I'm speaking another language altogether.
[34:20] You don't know the grace of God. You've never understood the kindness that God has shown us, His creation. You don't know peace. You don't experience peace in your life.
[34:32] You haven't ever experienced peace. If that's you, let me just, as we have this time of invitation, encourage you, like, come up and talk. I'd love to talk with you about the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, the peace that is available to you through faith in Jesus.
[34:49] See, Jesus Christ, He died on the cross so that you could have an unbelievable amount of grace that you'll never fully comprehend this side of heaven and peace in life's most horrendous and even life's great circumstances, you'll have this peace that you just can't explain, but you know that you're safe and you're secure in Christ.
[35:13] And so if you don't know Jesus today, I'm going to invite you to come up and talk with me or come after the service. Let's talk. I want to explain to you this grace that's available to you. The Bible says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you'll be saved and let today be the day that you put your faith in Jesus.
[35:33] with your grace