We are going to be reading in Philippians Chapter 1. Last week, we looked at part of this verse, Chapter 1, Verse 9. We were stuck in the phrase, “This I pray.” There was a homework assignment—maybe not everybody here was there. The homework assignment was to try to pray for believers among us during the week.
So, we are going to ask for a raise of hands—not if you did it every day necessarily, but did you try it during the week, to pray for some of the saints? Raise your hand if you tried it. Wow, great. Okay.
Some stories I heard were people saying that they felt like they were being prayed for. They thought everybody picked them. But anyway, praise God.
This time, we are going to continue in this prayer. It is in Philippians Chapter 1, Verse 9. We are going to read Verses 9 through 11.
And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more
in full knowledge and all intelligence,
that ye may judge of and approve the things that are more excellent,
in order that ye may be pure and without offence for Christ’s day,
being complete as regards the fruit of righteousness
which is by Jesus Christ, to God’s glory and praise.
So, let’s pray together.
Lord, we have to confess this morning that You are our everything. We come and fix our eyes on You, turn away from all other things, and focus on Christ. We commit the Word to You also. We pray that You bring it to dwell richly in our hearts, to expound, take root, and bear fruit. We trust in You, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.
With some of the things we will look at today, I did some PowerPoint to show diagrams and pictures, and I must have saved it in the wrong format. I do not think I am going to be able to use it; they are all jumbled. So, I am not going to use that.
You are going to have to use your imagination today, and I will use my hands in a wide way when we get to the diagrams, okay?
When we are praying for others—what we tried this week, though probably many here have been doing that for years—something happens if it is a real prayer. You begin to get a burden from the Lord. You begin to get something specific.
Maybe from talking with them, or even hearing about things, but maybe just somehow intuitively, you begin to get a certain direction to pray for those for whom you are praying. Some of us may have experienced that this week. We are praying for a few people, and eventually we are not just praying generally; we begin to pray specifically. There may be something specific on our hearts to pray for that individual.
This happens in all kinds of realms of prayer. You may start out and say, “I do not have a burden for this.” But if your prayer is genuine, even as you begin to pray with reality before the Lord, He will share His burden with you.
So, we cannot all say, “I am not going to pray because I do not know what to pray, and I do not have the burden to pray.” We will never get the burden if we do not step in to begin praying.
Just like you will not learn how to play football unless you jump in the backyard and play. Then you begin to learn how to play.
Last week, we talked about how, when we are watching a game, we suddenly know everything and are yelling at the players. But when we are in the game, we are more compassionate. Somebody afterward told me that at an arena, there may be ten thousand people desperately needing exercise who are sitting down, while those on the field desperately need rest and are overexercised.
This is the case in the church. Sometimes it seems that there are a few desperately needing to rest because they are doing so much, and there is a crowd watching those few work and telling them every mistake they are making.
But if we all jump on the field—now, you have to expand the field, but in the church it is a big field—all of us can play this game. All of us can join in the church and be part of what God is doing in building the church.
As we join in this, we are on the Lord’s team, praying for the church. As we are involved in this, He will give us the burden to pray.
In these verses that we read, in this prayer of Paul for the Philippian church, the prayer is specific to the Philippian church’s case. He is telling them, “This is actually what I have been praying for you.”
Now, he is praying for them, and God gives him a burden for them that has to do with their case. This prayer is not a side comment in the book of Philippians. It is not something to be ignored. You can actually take this prayer as the heart of the book of Philippians.
As we read the letter, it expounds—or it is an outflow from—the burden of prayer that Paul had. Imagine him praying with Timothy and others who were with him. They were praying this way: for their love to abound more and more, in full knowledge and all intelligence.
As they pray, his burden is increasing, increasing. As he begins to write this letter to the Philippian church, for multiple reasons, that burden is expressed all the way throughout. You can go through every chapter and see that his prayer for this love to increase in discernment is found through each chapter.
Actually, today we are going to take this prayer, this burden of the Apostle Paul, and use some parts in the letter to the Philippians to show the expression of that prayer—to show what is on the heart of the prayer.
This happens in more than just the letter to the Philippians. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian church is different from this prayer. If you read his couple of prayers for the Ephesian church, you can match them with the whole letter to the Ephesians. The same is true in Colossians. This is a normal thing.
For those of us who are beginning to pray for the saints, or who have been praying for the saints, your prayer for that believer gets specific.
For example, if you come to a prayer meeting on a Wednesday night, there may be some topics for which you do not have the burden, because in your normal time maybe you are not praying for this or something like this. But if you join in with the team that is praying for that burden, you get swept up into that burden, and eventually it becomes your own.
You also may begin praying for the same subject at home. A burden can be caught, but we have to be active.
I feel there is a real important reason why last week we focused on the actual fact of praying. As we will read today, we do not want to just receive this information. We do not want to just understand what this love abounding in discernment is.
For us to go this way, we also need to have the burden for others to go this way. What we are going to talk about with this pursuit of love has to do with us individually and specifically, but we are stuck together as the body of Christ, and we are going to go along together.
To go along together, we have to be on this team with the Lord, praying for each other.
With the Philippian church, let’s start at the beginning of this prayer. In Verse 9, Paul says he is praying that their love would abound, that their love would grow.
The Philippian church had love. This is the love of God. This is first love. This is the love that can only be from God; it is real love.
This was not a church lacking love. Even at this moment, they had love. Paul was praying for it to overflow.
Remember the beginning of the Philippian church. Right when the first person is getting saved—Lydia, the seller of purple cloth there in Philippi—she is out with some other ladies praying by the waters. The Apostle Paul and his team come, and they share the good news with them.
After she is saved, out of the expression of Christ’s love constraining her, she has this specific, practical expression of love: hospitality. She says, “If you consider me a believer, you all need to come and stay in my house.” She opens up her home so they can all stay there.
This is a love church right from the beginning. Remember who was saved in the stories we read in Acts Chapter 16. Lydia was saved, though she was from Asia Minor. Then the slave girl was saved; she was a Greek slave girl. Then there was the Roman guard at the jail.
When the jail was shaken and the chains were broken, this man falls down on his knees, saying, “What must I do to be saved?” So, you have a Roman, a Greek, and a person from Asia Minor.
This church had the love of the brethren. They were stuck together. They did not see their backgrounds, where they were from, what they were like, their culture, or their social status.
The slave girl was in a completely different social status than the businesswoman who had a big enough house to hold all these people. Yet this church was full of love.
When the Apostle Paul was traveling around in other places, they were the ones sending him love gifts. They were the ones helping support him financially and by prayer. Even in Chapter 1, he says how they labored together with him in the gospel and had fellowship with him in the gospel.
Even when he went to another city and preached the gospel, he knew they were sharing with him in it. They had this love for the Apostle Paul, and they were praying for him out of genuine, real love. They cared for him.
They loved him so much that they did not just send him a gift. In Chapter 4, Paul is writing them a thank-you note back with this letter. They not only sent him a provision; they sent him a person.
Imagine a church seeing somebody in trouble who needs help, and they just grab one of the brothers and send him over there too. They sent Epaphroditus to help the Apostle Paul.
As he helped Paul, this was all out of love. This was a love offering. Paul was not paying this man to come and help. Instead, he came and brought finances with him.
The Apostle Paul was there in prison. We do not completely know all that might have been going on at that time, though we know there is some description at the end of Acts. But it says that Epaphroditus, for the sake of the Lord’s work and for the mission he was sent on, risked his life.
Maybe he had to join Paul in prison. Maybe it was rough in there. It says he ventured even unto death; he got close to death. The Apostle Paul sends Epaphroditus back to Philippi because he got so sick, almost dying.
The saints in Philippi, who had sent him there as an act of love, were so concerned about him. Paul says in Philippians Chapter 4 that he is sending him back because they were so distressed for him. He wanted them to see him so that their joy could abound.
Imagine this person whom we had sent to help, who was nearly dead, coming back. You see him radiant in his face. Even his burden for the church has increased because he has been praying daily with the Apostle Paul and his team for the Philippian church.
He can come back with such good news and such a good letter—the letter to the Philippians. So, this church has love. That is my point.
The background of the church is not that of a church without love or a cold church. Especially, they were not cold toward the Apostle Paul. This was a church with which he had a bond, an intimate care.
He loved them so much that he could share his heart. It is a letter like that. It is not overly doctrinal or overly corrective. It is more of a heart-to-heart sharing. There is some correction and help, but it is a letter full of love.
The expression of love is there from the Apostle Paul. You can see it in Philippians 4:1:
So then, my brethren beloved and longed for, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my beloved.
Do you see this? They had love.
For us as believers, by the very nature of being Christians, the love of God has come into our hearts. You cannot run from that.
If you have been born again, if you have received the Holy Spirit, if you have received eternal life, you have received the love of God inside of you.
Right at the beginning, there is this response that happens in a Christian. When the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, we respond back and love Him. This is natural. This is normal. This happens with Christians.
We call it first love. Especially right in the beginning, you love the Lord. Your love is there. The love of Christ constrains you, and you respond back to Him.
Now, a normal thing for a Christian is that when you respond back in love, you give your life completely over to the Lord. It is a free love offering: “I give myself to serve the Lord.” This is the normal way as a Christian, and it is the normal way of a church.
The Philippian church had that normal response of love. I believe probably everyone in here who is born again had an experience in the beginning, for sure, of first love. It may be different than others; it may look different.
Unfortunately, there are some abnormal births these days where somebody gets saved, but it is quasi. It seems like the expression of love was quickly squashed. But in some way or another, you touched the love of God. The love is there.
First love is not a teaching; it is an expression. It is not the fact of some future thing. The love of God that you have received is actually a life inside of you—a life of love.
So, it cannot stay still. It has to grow. First love has to grow.
If first love stays still, and you stay exactly like you were when you were first saved, you will lose your first love.
Now, the love deep inside of you will still be there—the fact of God’s love that you have received is true—but your response of love phases out if it does not grow.
So, the prayer here is that love would overflow, abound, and grow. The prayer for the Philippian church is that they would not stay where they have been. They have to grow.
What needs to grow is not merely their minds, intelligence, information, doctrine, skills, practices, or disciplines. What must grow in our hearts is first love.
The love that we have has to grow. It is a life that grows. But then there is a question: How does this life actually grow?
Paul’s prayer is so specific. When this love grows, it grows in a certain way. Because this is the love of God, if it grows differently than the way God ordained, it becomes a different type of love.
For many believers, love can start to grow in an odd way. It is no longer first love; it is some other love. It may be human love, false love, or fake love. But there is one way for love to grow: love grows in the realm of truth.
When there is the love of God, you cannot separate it from truth. So, Paul’s prayer is that love would grow. But how is it going to abound? It abounds more and more in full knowledge and all intelligence.
Now, watch my hands. I have to do the PowerPoint, right? No. Anyway, there is a path for love to grow.
Imagine love growing without reality, without truth, without discernment, without knowledge, without intelligence. If love grows in a sloppy way, it no longer matches the life of God.
With God, there is love and truth at all times. With us, we are sometimes afraid of truth. I am not just talking about doctrines; let’s use the word discernment. Some translations use “discernment” here.
If love grows in discernment, what will happen?
You may think, “If I get discernment—discernment where I can actually tell the real situation of what is going on—if I get discernment about what is going on in the church, does that affect my love?”
Think about human discernment. You begin to see a problem with a certain believer. Yes, your love can grow cold, because this person is being lawless. You see how they are, how loose they are, how they are acting carnally, and you get upset at them.
You begin to condemn them in your heart. You begin to see them differently. If they open their mouth, you do not respect them at all. With this discernment, we feel that this is the opposite of love, right?
As human beings, when we see a situation, it can kill our love. So, we feel that we have to close our eyes and blind ourselves in order still to love people. There is some truth to saying, “Love is blind.”
Without the grace of God, we have to be blind in order to love. Once we see something going on, we stop the love.
But the love of God increases as discernment increases. Here is the reason: spiritual discernment, which comes from the Holy Spirit, is for the sake of loving that brother. It is for the sake of ministering to that brother. It is for the sake of helping you, but also for the sake of ministering to that brother.
As your love grows, you grow in a certain direction—toward Christ. We will look at that in a little bit in Philippians Chapter 3. Your love pursuit is after Christ.
The closer you get to Him, the more and more you realize what is of Christ and what is not of Christ.
In Philippians 1:10, Paul explains what this full knowledge and all intelligence are:
That ye may judge of and approve the things that are more excellent,
in order that ye may be pure and without offence for Christ’s day.
With love growing in discernment, you can tell the things that are more excellent. Your love is getting closer and closer to Christ. He is loving you more, you are experiencing more of His love, and you respond back with more love.
You are experiencing more grace and responding back. The more this happens, the closer you get to Christ. The closer you get to Christ, the more you can tell what is not of Christ.
So, you can say, “This is the thing that is more excellent, and this is the thing that is pretty good, but it is not Christ.”
For example, think of money—cash, dollar bills. If you spend a lot of time with dollar bills, look at them, look at the fine print, and look at the strange pictures on them, the more time you spend with money, the more you learn to recognize it.
I am not suggesting you spend time looking at your money. But people who work in a bank, or somewhere they need to distinguish counterfeit money from good money, study it and learn it.
Nowadays they have a pen they can write on it with, but back in the day, at least, you had to be able to tell with your eye. If you are watching money and getting closer and closer to it, when you see something fake, you know it is fake.
Now, if I wanted to bring something fake, I would not hand you a banana peel and say, “Here is five bucks.” Everybody knows that is not five bucks, right? It is not even worth anything.
But if I give you Monopoly money, we are closer. Then there is other money, better than Monopoly money, that is pretty close to real money. If I hand you that, and you do not look closely, if you are not careful, you can get faked out.
Some people have these terrible tracts that are like one-hundred-dollar bills. You fold them up, and some people use these in this room, I think. They are okay, but they are sitting on a bench looking like a hundred-dollar bill.
Then, when you grab it and open it, it says, “Thought this was a hundred dollars, didn’t you?” Then it says something about your disappointment and tells you the good news.
Now, it depends how you use it, but if you use it as a tip for a waitress, that is terrible, okay? But many people get tricked by this. It is fake money.
In the Christian life and in the church, the things that fake you out are good things that are not Christ. It is not bad things that trick you. It is not banana peels that trick us.
We do not go after banana peels and say, “I am pursuing Christ; I will go this way.” It is actually good stuff. It is good things, but there is something better. It is called the best.
They say to use the word “better” now, right? All right. Best is better than good. Best is things more excellent. The best is Christ.
There is a difference between good teaching and Christ. There is a difference between good singing times or good songs and Christ. It is a complete difference.
There is a difference between good blessings—even things that are not evil—and Christ. There may be two choices in front of you, and Christ is leading you one way and not the other.
Unless you are in communion with Christ, unless we actually know the Lord and have a love relationship with the Lord, it will not matter. When you choose one way, you are lost.
But if you have this growing love, where you are getting closer and closer to Christ, when the choice is in front of you, you go the way of Christ. You go the way of things that are more excellent.
The way of Christ is not the way of ourselves. It is a totally different way. It is a more excellent way.
With this concept of love growing and abounding, let’s look at Philippians Chapter 3. We will look at some verses here concerning this pursuit of love, this pursuit after Christ.
The Apostle Paul actually shares his own example. This is a big deal. If you are praying for others and receive a specific prayer for them, your prayer may first touch you.
You have to be in the reality of what you are praying. You are praying for somebody that their love would abound more and more in full knowledge and all intelligence, but is your love abounding more and more in full knowledge and all intelligence?
It really affects you. When you begin to pray for somebody and are real before God, He may send the prayer right back at you and expose you. In order for you to stand on two feet and pray, you must be right with God.
You must have these things going forward in yourself. You must be able to live the testimony of what you are praying.
Here, the Apostle Paul is sharing. Look at Verse 7:
What things were gain to me, these I counted, on account of Christ, loss.
This is Paul when he became a Christian. He had so much before he became a Christian. But when he got saved, he had the burst of expression of first love.
In that burst of first love, he dropped everything from the past. Jesus was his Lord, and he counted everything else as nothing if he could just have Christ.
He had a lot. He had good deeds. He had a good track record—not like us. He had a good background. He was raised in a good family and taught by a good teacher.
He had a lot to drop. He also had a high standing in Israel. He was in a high spot. He had much that he used to think was gain.
He used to think, “This is what I am after. This is it.” He had such zeal, such a fight, and such a pursuit. We are always pursuing something.
In his pursuit, Paul was zealously pursuing the law. He was doing it even for the sake of God. In a sense, he thought he was innocent. He even persecuted Christians, but he did it for what he thought was the sake of God.
But when he saw Christ—when he saw Christ—he dropped it.
When we get saved and there is the first touch of God’s love, we drop it. Verse 8:
But I count also all things to be loss on account of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, on account of whom I have suffered the loss of all, and count them to be filth, that I may gain Christ.
This pursuit of first love is directly after Christ.
When we have first love, if our pursuit begins to become after other stuff, our first love leaks out and drops off. It may even be out of zeal for the things of God.
It may be that you become ambitious. At one point, you are seeking Christ, but now you are seeking some climbing in the church, or maybe seeking some climbing in information.
Maybe before you were reading Christian books because every time you read them, you were getting more of Christ. But now you are reading those books because you are looking for more information to add to your wealth of information, so that you can show off when somebody asks a question.
Before, you were going to the Bible study because when you were there, you heard something and received more of Christ. You heard fellowship, touched Christ, and thought, “I have to go to this time because I just met more of Christ.”
You were pursuing Christ. There was a hunger in your heart, but it was for the person of Christ—it was to know Him.
But now maybe you go to see whether there is anything new for you to hear, something that will tickle your ear or be fun. Or maybe you go to the Bible study to show off the information you have learned on a certain topic or chapter.
That is a whole different course. That is a whole different direction.
Here is Christ. We get saved, and we are pursuing after Christ to know Him directly. This is a major change in our mindset.
This mindset is basically that I capture the mind of God: He wants me to go all the way to be conformed to Christ. There is a pursuit all the way in that direction.
So, let’s read this pursuit, beginning in Verse 10.
To know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death,
if any way I arrive at the resurrection from among the dead.
This is Paul’s pursuit. This is our pursuit, and it is the church’s pursuit. Foundationally, the foundation of the whole pursuit is: “I want to know Him.”
If your love is going to abound in the direction of discernment, the way for your love to increase in truth—the way for your love actually to grow—is to go in this course of knowing Christ and wanting to know Him more and more.
The closer you get to Him, the more your discernment grows. But it is real discernment, full of love. It is discernment held in love.
It is like Ephesians 4, where Paul says, “Speaking truth in love,” depending on your translation. The truth is held in the case of love. Yet this love is growing in the direction of truth.
This is our path of pursuit. If you draw a big line toward Christ, which says, “To know Him,” this is your pursuit all the way through. As your love is growing, it is all to know Him.
There are some stages mentioned here. Paul says, “The power of His resurrection.” This is the first stage.
As you start on this path, you touch into this growth—this love growth—of the power of His resurrection. This matches many places in the Bible.
Even in the Song of Songs, in the first stage where the Shulamite is called onward in this pursuit of love, Solomon is leaping on the mountains in resurrection. He is saying, “Come away. Come on.” What he is calling her to is this power of resurrection.
In the Christian life, the life that we have is not death; it overcomes death. Resurrection means there has already been death.
Christ Himself is not death. He is the living One. When He walked on the earth, He was the resurrection. That is why, when He died on the cross, He rose right up: He Himself is the resurrection.
We are not after His work, but His work provides the way for us to touch Him and know Him. His work is the work of the cross, but His person is life—His resurrection.
Even in the New Testament, when it mentions the cross, it also mentions resurrection. Usually, the emphasis is on resurrection. Even our salvation is based on Christ raising from the dead.
If you believe that Christ died, you may or may not be saved. But if you believe He was raised from the dead, that is the thing. His raising from the dead shows that His whole death was approved by God.
It also shows that He is alive, ascended, and at the right hand of God. He is able to give us eternal life. So, our faith is based on resurrection.
In our Christian life, we might think the first thing we need to know is something more to do with death and then resurrection. But actually, resurrection includes death.
When we discover, in this love growth, more of Christ, we discover the power of His resurrection. Basically, it is this: we run into things, but the life of Christ in us overcomes.
We run into death, but life resurrects. We discover how to live by the life of Christ.
At the very beginning, as baby Christians, it may be very confusing how to live the Christian life. But if we are going to grow, we begin to discover the things that are more excellent.
We discover, “This is the life of Christ, and this is my selfish life.” We discover, “This is resurrection life, which can overcome this death that I keep failing in, versus me trying to overcome this death that I keep failing in.”
If there is a discovery of love, there is discernment. I begin to discern: “This is my carnality. This is me in the flesh. This is Christ in me.” I can choose to live by the life of Christ.
In the Philippian church, there was a need at this time for love to grow in discernment. Remember one problem that they had: two sisters whose names are mentioned in Philippians Chapter 4.
I do not know how to pronounce their names completely. I have heard a lot of different pronunciations. Dana Congdon actually called them “Sweetie” and “Lucky” because of the meanings of their names—one means sweet, and one means fortunate.
But anyway, Euodia and Syntyche, maybe. I do not know how to say it. Paul exhorts these two sisters in the beginning of Chapter 4 to be of the same mind. Not only that, he asks the others to help them.
Now, what was going on? You cannot always tell. We do not know all the details, but usually in these letters, you can tell something of what was going on from the rest of what was written. You can tell some of the negative from the positive that was written.
For example, Paul wrote Timothy at one time, telling him not to be timid. By logical deduction, we think Timothy probably had a timid problem. He was probably a timid guy. Do you see how that works?
Paul would not write to Peter and say, “Brother, do not be timid.” Peter had no problem with timidity. So, by Paul’s encouragement to Timothy, we know Timothy was timid.
Reading the rest of the letter, especially the encouragement at the end of Chapter 1 and beginning of Chapter 2, Paul is telling people not to think of their own things, not to be all about their own opinions, but to consider others.
He is telling them basically to lay down their lives for each other, not to have ambition for their own interests, not to think that they are better than others, but to have this mind of humility.
Maybe, probably, what happened with these sisters was that they were spiritual sisters. Paul says in Chapter 4 that they had labored together with him in the gospel.
This may have been a ten-year-old church. These were sisters who had matured and were respected among the church. For them to have a conflict seems to have affected the whole church.
Paul exhorts them to be of the same mind. He wants them to have this love mind together, this brotherly love, this mind of humility where they are willing to lay down their lives for each other rather than have conflict.
The conflict does not seem necessarily to be doctrinal, because there is no real doctrinal correction here. The correction is that there were two personalities that had not abounded in love to the degree of discerning what was of themselves and what was of Christ.
Instead, they may have been increasing, but increasing in the wrong direction: through ambition, or through the way of merely gaining more information.
Maybe both had a lot of information and even a lot of experiences. But they also had ambition, and they had not gone in the direction of the cross. They had not gone in the direction of discerning the things that differ.
Instead, they were fighting each other. They were catfighting, you know—personality conflict.
If we have a personality conflict, it is because we have not both laid down our lives on the altar. We have not both given up our own opinions to seek the mind of the Lord and the face of the Lord.
Even in this church in Philippi, they needed this exhortation. If their love grew, it would solve this problem with these sisters.
If these sisters’ love had grown in the way of discernment instead of some other way—if it had grown in truth—they would know, when the conflict was going on, “This is just myself rising up and wanting to get angry at this person. This is just me. This is not Christ.” So, they could deny themselves and go on.
The same is true with the church. If the church in Philippi had more discernment, they would not all be so depressed and down about the situation. They would be able to help these sisters.
Imagine that there are two people you respect very much. Maybe you have been helped by them. Maybe when they share, you are always encouraged. Then suddenly, there is a big fight and a big conflict. You become disillusioned.
You are in amazement about what is going on in the church. “What happened? We were in such bubbly love and having such a fun time, and suddenly these two are seemingly hating each other. What is going on?”
Your joy starts leaking out because you are distressed, anxious, and worried about it. You do not know what to do, and you do not know how to help them because they are more mature than you.
But Paul’s burden in prayer was for the whole church to grow in discernment. If their love grew in discernment, they would be able to tell what was going on with these sisters.
They would say, “These two seem not to be willing to lay down their opinions.” Even others in the church would be able to help them.
Paul exhorts them, “I ask thee also, true yokefellow, help these women.” Help them go this way of one mind.
Now, back on target. The next stage, after the power of resurrection in Philippians 3:10, is the fellowship of His sufferings.
If our love is growing, there is a deeper closeness to Christ—a knowing of Christ Himself. Remember, this is not merely a growing in information. You get closer to Christ, and you share in His sufferings.
You have discovered resurrection life. You have discovered, “I can live by the life of Christ.” But now there is a deeper death: fellowship in His sufferings.
We cannot share His suffering that was for us on the cross. That is absolutely not possible. Only Christ could die for our sins.
But we can share—we can fellowship with, or know Him more in—His other sufferings: His suffering of being rejected, His suffering of going the way of the cross, and His suffering of being bound and limited.
He gave up all His rights and abilities as God to come down and be limited as a little human. That is very limited compared to what God can do.
But as a little human, He limited Himself even to be a bondservant. As a human, He would not do anything except what His Master told Him to do.
He said countless times in the Gospels, “What I speak, the Father has given Me those words. What I do, the Father told Me to do.” He was not His own. He was a bondservant of the Father.
Not only was He limited as a bondservant, but out of love for us He went all the way down to death on the cross. He not only died; He died the terrible death of the cross.
This suffering means that He denied Himself. He called us to take up our crosses, deny ourselves, and follow Him. This is the direction of suffering.
Here is the key to fellowshipping in His sufferings: you do not deserve this suffering. His sufferings were never deserved.
We all suffer, no matter what—baby Christians, maturing Christians, unbelievers. We are all suffering because this age is full of sin, the world is corrupt, and you are not going to have this world without corruption and suffering.
But there is a special suffering in which you can fellowship with the Lord. It is suffering that you do not deserve.
He did not deserve the cross. He did not deserve to be limited. He did not deserve to become a human or to become a bondservant. He did not deserve to be mocked, spat upon, or persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
He did not deserve to suffer for the sake of other people. But you can suffer for others and get to know the Lord more.
When you are suffering for the Lord’s sake, there is a closeness with Christ. There is fellowship with Christ.
This is why, when a believer suffers this way, their joy actually increases. Why would that happen?
A believer is suffering for the Lord’s sake, or for righteousness’ sake, going through a difficult time with the Lord—and the joy actually goes up. They are going down, but the joy is going up.
The reason is that the further down you go in this suffering, the closer you get to Christ. The closer you get to Christ, the more your joy increases.
Joy has to do with the presence of the Lord. As the Psalm says:
In Thy presence is fulness of joy.
If you want your joy to increase, you have to get closer to Christ. That is the secret.
If you suffer more and actually fellowship with Him in His sufferings, sharing it with Him, He becomes so close to you during that suffering. You begin to know Him even more in specific ways.
We have no idea what is going on with people in this room. Many are suffering and fellowshipping with the Lord in their sufferings.
We may look and say, “This person is not smiling as much as before,” or, “They are not skipping and jumping like the rest of us.” You know what? They may have more joy than you.
If they are fellowshipping in the Lord’s suffering, their joy is deep and real because they are close to Christ.
Do not look outwardly at joy. It is not because we sing a loud song and clap hands that we have joy. It is because we are close to the presence of Christ that we have joy.
Our love in this pursuit is increasing in knowing Christ. Another stage is being conformed to His death.
What is happening here is that all that is of me is narrowing into nothing at that death. The death on the cross wiped out all that was not right.
He brought to death all the sinfulness of mankind, all the carnality, all the flesh, and all the old man.
As we are put into this form, think of this cup. You can make a popsicle out of one of these things. This would be a big one, but if you put a popsicle stick in it, pour juice inside, and put it in the freezer, it becomes a popsicle.
Imagine if this cup were a different shape. The popsicle would be a different shape, right? The juice freezes, and the popsicle is conformed to the image of the cup.
We are heading deeper and deeper into Christ. What is happening is that His death is wiping out more and more of the old man—of our experience of simply living in the flesh.
We are being conformed to be more and more like Christ.
This is like John 3:30, where John the Baptist says:
He must increase, but I must decrease.
At the beginning, when you are first saved, if you go in this pursuit of Christ, you are going in the direction of more and more of Christ. But at the beginning, you have this big, ugly me—and I mean the selfish me.
I do not mean that you are a human being and an individual. But you have this ugly self, while the life of Christ is barely there. Oh, but it is wonderful.
As you go on, the life of Christ is increasing. This big, ugly self gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
Now, actually, in truth, the old man stays as big as he is all the time. But in your experience, you are experiencing more and more living by the life of Christ and less and less living by your own life.
The closer we get to Christ, the more normal it becomes to live by the new life of Christ, and the less normal—abnormal—it becomes to live by our old, selfish ways.
This is the third stage mentioned here. It never stops in this present time. No one in this room has reached the spot of complete conformity to the image of Christ. No one has reached the full measure of all of this.
This is important in this love pursuit. You know what can happen? If you have reached up and touched into some maturity, experienced resurrection life, and begun to discern the difference between your life and the Lord’s life, there is a danger.
You may have gone through difficult times with the Lord, fellowshipping with Him in His sufferings. He may have been knocking off more and more of your carnality and your ways. You may be getting closer and closer to Christ as you grow.
The danger is that we can feel as though we have arrived somewhere. “I am mature. I am among the perfect”—scripturally, perfect meaning mature. “I am among the fathers in the faith. I am in this mature place.”
But remember: being in that place does not mean there is nowhere further to go.
The Apostle Paul, right here in Philippians Chapter 3, says in Verse 12—remember where he was and how mature he was at this point, and what letters he had already written. This was a mature man of God.
Not that I have already obtained the prize, or am already perfected; but I pursue, if also I may get possession of it, seeing that also I have been taken possession of by Christ Jesus.
Then, in Verse 13:
Brethren, I do not count to have got possession myself; but one thing: forgetting the things behind, and stretching out to the things before.
In the next verse, he says, “I pursue.” He is looking toward the goal. He is after this prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.
He is hungry. You can tell when you read this. He is hungry after more love. His love is hungry after more discernment. His love is hungry after more of knowing Christ.
The more you know Christ, the more your discernment grows, and your love grows in the proper way. He does not count himself to have reached it.
In 1 John Chapters 1 and 2, John mentions little children, young men, and fathers. There is really no rebuke for the fathers. He does not give them an obvious encouragement to do this or not do that.
But in my mind, there is something for the fathers in Chapter 1. John says that if we say we are walking in the light but are actually in darkness—if we have hidden things and are not having fellowship—we deceive ourselves.
If you say you do not have any sin—what that means in Verse 8 is that if you say you do not have this sin problem, sin as an entity or condition; if you say you do not have room to grow; if you say you have arrived—you are deceived.
Your mind has lost it. If you feel, “I am doing good. I just need to maintain my course,” you have lost your pursuit. You have lost your first-love pursuit.
Remember, first love grows, and it dies if you stop pursuing it. If you have that idea, you may continue to maintain where you are, but there is no life inside it. There is no love inside it.
The next thing you know, you are maintaining routines. You are doing things you have always done, but without first love. The motive behind everything changes. The feeling behind it all changes.
It is death because it is not growing. If we are the same today as we are a year from now, something is wrong.
All of us, however mature we are, must continue growing. If we are not growing, we are not in a pursuit. If we are not in the pursuit, we are not in first love. This becomes a problem. If our pursuit dies, we are off.
I have to confess that in my heart, when I think of Chapter 3, I think of growing up and increasing. I am always thinking of going up.
I draw a picture of Christ in all the fullness of Christ, like Christ in glory, and I picture myself reaching there with Him. Here I am when I am saved, and then I begin this path to know Him.
There are these stages: first, knowing the power of His resurrection; second, touching into the fellowship of His sufferings; third, being conformed to His death—all the way to Christ.
This was my original thought. Then someone pointed out in a Bible study, which helped me very much, to notice the words used in this pursuit.
Resurrection: that is life out of death. Fellowship of His sufferings. Conformed to His death. What direction are you going?
You are going down.
In Philippians Chapter 2, you can see the direction Christ went. If you start in Verse 5 and look onward, there is an encouragement for all of us:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
The encouragement is to have the same mindset, the same attitude, that Christ had. Have the mind of Christ.
If you want the mind of Christ, this is it. He was equal with God and did not have to grasp at it, but He let go of all the privileges of glory. He let go of position and fame.
He was still God, but He did not hold onto all His rights as God. As God, He deserved everything. He is God.
But for the sake of love for the brethren, for us, for the sake of love for His Father and accomplishing the Father’s will, He emptied Himself of that glory and became a man. That is stage one.
He emptied Himself. Stage two: He took bondservant’s form.
He was so limited. Not only did He not take hold of all the glory that was His as God, but here, as a human, He was obedient to the Father. He was a bondservant of God.
Stage three: He was obedient all the way to death—even death on a cross.
Do you see that? The direction is downward. He was already high in glory. When we are saved, we start down here, right? But He was already in glory.
Here is glory. He was already there. Yet for our sake, what was His direction? What was His way? It was the way of the cross.
Down at the very bottom is the cross. His path was to empty Himself, become not only human but a bondservant, be limited to doing only what His Father would have Him do, and be obedient to the Father all the way to death—the death of the cross.
What happened after that cross? What happened after stage three?
God highly exalted Him. He lifted Him up, raised Him up, gave Him the highest name that exists.
At the name of Jesus every knee must bow. Every tongue must confess that Jesus is Lord. This is the exaltation.
Remember the end of those three stages in Philippians Chapter 3: “If any way I arrive at the resurrection from among the dead.” There is also exaltation there.
So, let’s redo our picture. You are saved, and there is this glorious place to which you are called: the height of knowing Christ. You want to know Him. You want to go that way.
But you have to add something else. It is not just, “I want to go toward the mind of Christ, to know Christ, and I am going to be completely conformed to the image of Christ.”
Down here is the cross. If you want to get there, to the height of glory, you have to go down here. Once you get to the cross, it springboards you up to the top.
That is the way it works. That is the way it worked with Christ, and we have to go the same path. If anyone is going to be His disciple, they have to follow Him. They have to go His way. We are not going to be different from our Teacher.
The way is the power of His resurrection, because death is going on. The way is fellowship in His sufferings. The way is conformity to His death.
If any way, we arrive at the out-resurrection from among the dead. There is a reward resurrection. Revelation calls it the first resurrection.
As believers, we all have resurrection. I do not want to get into this much, because it is not the point. But do not think this pursuit is so that you can arrive at salvation. You are saved; that puts you in the race.
But there is a resurrection that has to do with overcomers. There is a resurrection that has to do with those who hear, “Well done, good and faithful bondservant.”
That is this resurrection. Darby says, “resurrection from among the dead,” as though there are believers who have fallen asleep, and from among those believers who are dead, there is a resurrection from among them.
Some are taken. Technically, I looked up the connection with the word. There is a word attached to resurrection there: ek, or ex, meaning “out”—an out-resurrection.
Not many translations use that, but it is there. It says out-resurrection, technically. There is a resurrection from among the dead, and this is what we are arriving at.
As we go on this path of love, it is the way of the cross. You are going down, down, down; then you touch it, and you reach the height.
But what about us? The question is: Are we in this pursuit of love, or is our first love growing stale? Is our first love not there? Are we in a different pursuit?
For different reasons, people fall out of first love. In Philippians Chapter 3, Verse 18, Paul says that many are walking as enemies of the cross of Christ.
Whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.
They do not mind the things of Christ. This has to do with believers.
Are we believers whose god is our belly? Is our mind all for earthly things?
One reason we are not in a pursuit is that we do not care. We have not dropped everything for the sake of knowing Christ. We may have been there before, but somehow we got here.
The pursuit of wealth, business, and life on the earth has caught our attention. Instead of the pursuit of Christ swallowing everything else up, the pursuit of other things has caused us to put our minds down here.
We do not see our calling upward to Christ. We see our life here on the earth.
If this is our case, we have to repent. If our case is that we have become entangled in the cares of the world, we have to remember that first love is not meant merely to be first in time.
It is meant to be first in quality. It stays with us. It is the premium love, the best love, the ultimate love. It is first love. That is the love of God.
If we can look at ourselves before God and say, “The one controlling me, the one who is my boss now, is myself. My belly is my god. I am just living for myself,” then we need to weep for ourselves, repent, and come back to Christ.
We need to put Him as our God, pursue after Christ, and not pursue other things.
There is another thing that can happen. Paul says that whoever is mature should have this mindset—the mindset of pursuing to know Him.
He says that if you are otherwise minded, God will reveal it to you. But you have to walk in the steps that you have attained. Walk where you have gotten to.
Here is something that can happen: somewhere along the line, whether by accident or not, whether knowingly or unknowingly, we may have left off some steps that we had attained.
We may have dropped doing things that the Lord showed us in the past. It may be physical things, disciplines, or ways. It may not be that. It may be that we left off our focus on knowing Christ and became occupied with other focuses.
But in either case, just as the Ephesian church in Revelation 2 was told, “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen,” we have to remember.
If we have fallen from a place, whether in inward love or in some specific things God speaks to us, we should repent and bring them back. Walk in the steps that we have gotten to.
Some people do not know how to ignite this pursuit of love after Christ. One thing to ask is, “Am I walking in everything that the Lord has shown me?”
Ask that before the Lord. Some experience is that if I just come back to the basics of all that the Lord has shown me, somehow that pursuit comes back.
We need to know that the pursuit is for the Person and not for other stuff. That is essential. But you cannot just stomp your own feet and make yourself run.
You cannot beat your chest enough to create a burst of pursuing feeling. But we can decide to pursue. We can decide to repent.
We cannot always make ourselves weep, but we can decide to repent.
There is a feeling where you want to be in first love. You want to be pursuing, but you are just not doing it.
Your heart cries out, “Lord, I want to pursue You. I want to love You. I want to be in this race. I want my love to abound in the direction of Christ. I want all of this.”
There is a heart cry deep inside many of our hearts: “Lord, bring us to first love. Bring me, myself, and bring us as a church to first love.”
Something we need to know is that God has started this with us, and God will finish it. God began a good work in us; He is going to finish it.
God is after you being in first love. God is praying for us. God is the One walking among the lampstands, helping them, praying for them, and bringing us on.
God is on our side. He is not against us. He is so willing to draw us.
All we have to do, like the Shulamite in Song of Solomon 1, is say:
Draw me; we will run after Thee.
It is a heart cry. The heart cry is good. Do not think we need an instant change. We need an instant change of heart willingness, but it may take time.
Our habits may have changed somehow through the years. We may have stopped doing things we should be doing. It may have taken us months to get out of some habits.
It is going to be a daily determination to go the way of Christ. It is a fight, but it is a fight for Christ.
Another thing is this heart cry as a church. This is a prayer for the Philippian church.
As individuals, we somewhat know what we need to do. We at least know in some way. But as a church, we have to join with the Lord for the whole church to get swept up into first love.
Consider Revelation Chapters 2 and 3. There is a church there that is in first love: the church in Philadelphia. What is their mark? It is the mark of brotherly love.
If you are feeling, “I am trying to go this direction. The Lord has touched my heart,” then take up the burden for the church to be in first love.
What I mean is: pray for the church. Care for the church. Love the brethren. Actually, it grows us closer to Christ.
If we want to know Christ more, we want to fellowship with Him in His burden for the saints. We get His burden, we travail for the saints, and we get to know Him more in this way.
It is like we were saying with the prayer here in Philippians: you join in praying for others this way, and it brings you into that way.
If you feel, “I wonder if I am in first love,” be praying for others. You will find yourself swept up into it.
If you have been caught up into this pursuit of love and go off as an individual, the whole church loses, and your love will decrease.
But if you bring it into the church and pray for the saints, you know what you are going to do? You are going to care about the saints.
As you are praying for the saints and caring about the saints, you are going to share some love of Christ with them. There is going to be an abounding of that love. It is overflowing.
When someone in first love is with you and shares something with you, you catch it. First love can be caught.
As you see somebody in first love and fellowship with them, you touch the heart of first love—the pursuit that says, “I just want more of Christ.” It catches you. It touches the whole church.
For example, we come and hear a message. Someone in first love is sitting there saying, “I want more of Christ. What is Christ sharing with me?”
But when I am out of first love, I am sitting there asking, “Is there any new information here?” You can go to a conference, hear a big time of messages, listen to something, or read a book and say, “I already knew all of that.”
Even if you know everything, most people know everything shared today. But if your heart is pursuing the person of Christ—not merely the knowledge of Christ, but the Person of Christ—you will get something.
It completely changes. The heart is melted before God because it loves Him. The heart is melted before Christ.
You go to a Bible study not to get headified, but to get edified. You are there to grow in Christ.
In a sense, you pull fellowship out of others because you are so hungry for fellowship. Why do you hunger for fellowship? Because you hunger for Christ. You want to know Christ more.
If I sit at lunch with somebody—or somebody sits at lunch with you—there is a difference between just coasting along and pursuing Christ.
I do not mean you have to be extra hyped like I am right now. Somebody said, “You are a hype when you preach,” or something. Okay, I do not mean that pursuing always looks like this.
Your demeanor may stay calm and peaceful. That may actually be more normal than what I am sometimes. But inwardly, there is a high hunger. There is the pursuit of Christ.
You may be calm and peaceful outwardly. It does not matter how that is; that may have to do with temperament. But inside your heart, there is something always looking for more of Christ.
Think even of a message where something is wrong, or a Bible study where somebody shares something wrong. That can be one of the most edifying things.
You are there in the presence of Christ, fellowshipping with Him. Someone shares something wrong, and inside your heart that love abounding in discernment picks it out and realizes, “That is not Christ.”
Because you have experienced the love inside of you discerning what was not of Christ, you experience more of Christ. Because of the wrongness of what somebody shares, you may get the rightness in your heart and understand it even better.
You may even be able to share something better. Either way, even the bad in the church can bring you to grow more in Christ if you are pursuing after Christ.
Even when somebody does you wrong in the church, you can fellowship in His sufferings. No one can affect your pursuit.
I feel that many of us are crying out in our hearts, “Lord, bring me into first love. Lord, I want this pursuit of love. I want to be in the reality of what I should be.”
We are crying out to God, and I feel the Lord hears that cry.
May we cast our lives onto the Lord who cares about us, and care about each other as well. Let us stick together and go this direction together.
There is nothing that stops us except ourselves. If we are willing, the Lord will take us this way. So, let’s pray together.
Lord, we have to confess that we are not as we ought to be, and we have further to go.
Lord, we pray for each other that we can all be swept up into first love, that our love would abound more and more, and that we would not be stuck where we have been, but would increase.
Lord, we pray for ourselves also. Things that are hindering us, things where we have slipped in or gotten loose with, or just gotten lazy—expose them right now in our hearts.
By Your grace, may we repent and come back to pursuing after You. Lord, clear all things from our minds that are not Christ.
Bring us to be about Your purpose and not our own purpose. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.