The Case for Joy: Joy in Life and Death -- Philippians 1:18b-26 • Geoff Bradford

All right. We're going to continue our series on the case for joy, reading from Philippians chapter one, verses 18b through verse 26. If you want to follow along as I read aloud.

Yes. And I will rejoice for I know that through your prayers and the help of the spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live as Christ and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose, I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ for that is far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith so that in me, you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus because of my coming to you again. — Philippians 1:18b-26

The Signature Statement

He was that great preacher, Charles Spurgeon, who once said, there are some texts in the Bible that are so big that if a preacher did nothing but just repeat the text the entire sermon over and over again, you'd have a great sermon. And I want to bring you one of those statements today. It's right here in verse 21, where Paul says:

For to me to live as Christ and to die is gain. — Philippians 1:21

If that sounds like a slogan to you, it sounds even more like that in the original language. In the Greek, there are no connecting verbs. There's no need for linking verbs. And so literally in Greek, it says for me, for to me, the life Christ and the death gain. It's almost as if Paul is stuttering to say what is the main thing of his life, the main banner or slogan that you could put over his life, what Jesus is to him.

These two clauses that he says hang over his life—here's the math for me. Here's the great equation of life. Life equals Christ. Death equals gain.

Paul: An Extraordinary Person

Now this is one of the signature statements of Paul's that I think makes him sound kind of weird to us. I don't know what you think of Paul. Some people love the apostle Paul. Some people really dislike the apostle Paul. But whatever you think of Paul, you have to admit that Paul was an extraordinary person. He was a person who God used in extraordinary ways for the launching of His church in the first century. Explosive growth came through Paul's ministry, and yet it came at a high cost.

We find out in Second Corinthians 11, Paul described some of the things that he went through in his life in laying down, paying that cost so the gospel could go ahead. So he says this:

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. One time I was stoned with rocks. Three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a day and a night out in the open sea, which I can't imagine. That is so frightening. On frequent journeys, I was in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers, in toil and hardship through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure, and apart from all these things, daily anxiety and pressure on me for the churches. — 2 Corinthians 11

So when Paul said, "To me to live as Christ, to die is gain," that wasn't a throwaway line. And the people who first received this letter, the church in Philippi, they would have known this guy has faced death over and over again. He's not being metaphorical. This is a man who suffered greatly.

Joy Despite Suffering

And yet—and yet I want you to see the incredible joy in his life. Twice in this passage, he uses the word joy. This is the letter of joy in the New Testament. And it's a joy despite suffering, a joy despite certain death, a quality of joy that I think often eludes people like you and me.

It's almost as if he's saying, "Hey, you know what? Down is up and in is out and hot is cold. I mean, it's so backwards from how we think. It's so opposite to how we think about life, our perspective on life."

And yet that faith conviction is the key to joy for Paul. And so today, I really want to just look at these two simple thoughts. How can life be Christ and how can death be gain? And then how does Paul get such joy out of that?

Let's look at these together. I'm going to break these down. So how is life Christ? What does it mean to live Christ? That's a strange statement. What does it mean to live Christ?

So three things. First of all, it means we have union with Christ. We are united with Him. I spoke of this two Sundays ago, being summarized in this little phrase "in Christ." It's all over the book of Philippians. He starts the letter with it. He's going to come back to it over and over.

And what it means that by faith, all that is Jesus' becomes mine. So to illustrate this, let me tell you a story.

There was once upon a time, a boy named Tom. And Tom made a little boat, a model boat, and he loved this model. He put all of his creative energy into it, and it was his favorite thing to take it out to the stream near his house and tie a string from the boat that he would hold in his hand and run up and down beside the stream and make the boat go.

One day as he's doing this, a storm blows in. There's a lot of wind, and the storm, the wind gusts blow up and the string flies out of Tom's hand, and suddenly the boat is gone. Tom was devastated, so upset by this. His precious boat gone.

Well, two days later, he's walking downtown and he passes a shop and he sees in the window his boat. He's overjoyed, but also perplexed by this. How did it get there? He goes into the shop and says to the owner, "That's my boat." And the shop owner said, "Well, I'm sorry, but I bought that boat. And if you want it, you can have it, but you have to pay me for it. It'll cost $20."

Tom runs home and he scrapes together all his money, empties out his bank, and runs back to the shop. He hands the shopkeeper the money and goes home with his boat. And as he looks at his boat, he says this: "I bought that boat. Twice now I've owned you. First I made you and now I've bought you back."

That's exactly what God does with sinners. First, he makes us. He creates us. All the things that we do that are sort of automatic to us—breathing, eyes blinking, moving our hands—none of these things you would be able to do without God. Without the gift that your body is that God has given you. And these things are thoughtless for us. Involuntary motions in a lot of ways. God gave you every body part. He made you and he designed you for relationship with him. He called you to worship him and know him and serve him.

But we fell and we became sinners apart from God. And when Jesus came, he came to work in our hearts by his spirit and he bought us with his own blood. Not $20, but he pays the ultimate price. He lays down his life so he could purchase us back. And it's almost as if Jesus is saying to you and to me, "Look, twice now I've owned you. First, I made you and then I bought you."

See, this is what justification is. Jesus buys us. He redeems us with his blood. And so if you have been purchased by Jesus in this way, you are united to him by faith. You are his. He's done it with his own blood.

Living Christ

What does it mean to live Christ? It means first you're united to him. But second, it means you love him. You love Christ.

Now, of course, let's think about Paul. Paul did not always love Christ. If you study the book of Acts, it tells us about Paul's background. Originally as a Pharisee, he persecuted the early church. He killed Christians, and he would never have said "For me to live is Christ."

If you had said to Paul, "Okay, Paul, I want you to write this sentence. For me to live is blank. Put it down in one word. What would you say, Paul?" He would say, "For me to live is Moses. The Mosaic Law." He's a Pharisee. He's an expert in the Old Testament, in the first five books in particular, in following Moses' law and trying to do all of that. And he delighted. He gloried in his legalism. He gloried in how effective he was at trying to follow every bit of it. So effective that he hunted down early Christians because they were enemies—what he perceived—of this book.

One day on the road to Damascus, everything changed for Paul. A bright light shone from heaven. The earth trembled. Astonished and blinded, conquered by God, Paul falls to the ground. Some friends take him to the nearby city of Damascus. And for three days, there was nothing he could do. He couldn't see. He couldn't eat. He couldn't drink. The only thing he could do is pray.

And there, the Holy Spirit showed him who he really was in the mirror of the holy law. That really, if you could say at that point, "Summarize your life in one word, Paul," he would have said, "For me to live is sin. I am a sinner in the sight of God. I'm lost before a holy God. Without God, without Christ, a sinner, a stranger to grace in this world."

And that was something he didn't learn in all his Pharisaic training. He didn't learn that at the feet of his teacher, Gamaliel, the really famous teacher of the day. His proud heart had to be broken by God to see how he couldn't keep God's law. He was far away from God even as he thought he was following him.

And there too, the Holy Spirit led him to this realization: Christ. Christ. And Paul said later of this time, "It pleased God to reveal his Son to me." And again, just like Tom and the boat, God had made him and then he bought him back.

And so from that point forward in his life, Paul would say to me to live, Christ. Christ, what about you? If you were to look at this statement in verse 21, "for me to live is blank," how would you finish that sentence?

Now, you know, this is church and of course the right answer is Jesus. But if we're really honest with ourselves, we might fill that blank in a lot of ways. We might say "for me to live is pleasure." We might say "for me to live is finding joy in the delights of life" or "for me to live is being in control of my life." It's one of the things that we're seeing right now. How much of us love control?

"For me to live" — that is a more noble answer. "For me to live is my relationships, my children, my spouse, my parents, my significant other." There's a career answer to this. "For me to live is my progress." There are a thousand ways to answer this question. "For me to live is my exercise routine, my hobbies, my health, my financial stability, having a great home, having well behaved children, having a great ministry." All of those are ways that if we're really honest with ourselves, we every day fill in that statement: "For me to live is blank."

But I want you to be able to say, "For me to live is Christ" — with every ounce of who you are, with all of your being, that being your first and greatest love. The love of Christ is the one thing that cannot be taken away from you. It's the one thing that is of ultimate value in this life.

I want it to be said of my ministry at CTK: His ministry was about this — not building some great organization, but people rooted and founded their lives on Christ. "To me to live is Christ." I want more and more — my great desire for CTK is that you don't make much of CTK, but you make much of Christ. That you don't make much of me as your pastor, you make much of Christ. That your life is around Him and all about Him.

So here's the question: Do you love Him? That is maybe the most important question that you could ever ask yourself. Do you really love Him?

Suffering as a Gift

And to be honest, this is why in the odd trigonometry of the Bible, suffering is a gift. This is why suffering is a gift — it is making you like Christ. Suffering is like a financial report on your life. It tells you how your investments are going. It shows whether you have made your treasure what is of lasting value or whether you've made poor investments. It's like getting a financial statement which shows you whether you are rich or poor in the light of the great market that really matters — the one of eternity.

The Bible scholar Matthew Henry wrote a little commentary on this book, and he uses a funny turn of phrase to describe what he learns from God from this book. He says this: "God is an alchemist."

Now that's not a word we use very much. So let me explain. What is alchemy? Alchemy back in the eighteen hundreds was a particular field of science that was dedicated to find a chemical process to turn lead into gold. Now, of course, there's no equation that does that. There's nothing you can do to do that. Nobody was able to discover the secret chemical process for that. But he wrote here: God is an alchemist. God can turn lead into gold.

In fact, that's what God is doing all the time. Wouldn't you like God to turn your circumstances, which may feel like lead, into gold? Bad things, worthless things into great things.

But here's what we see in Paul's life. It's not that God turns lead circumstances into golden circumstances, that he always brings out the rainbow after the storm. Paul is not singing like little orphan Annie, "the sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar, the sun will come out tomorrow." That's not what Paul is saying.

The truth is, it's not that God is going to turn your circumstances from lead to gold if you just believe enough or practice the right spiritual exercises or follow the four principles for a victorious Christian living. God is not a puppet that we can control. He's not a radio controlled God. It's not that God is going to turn your circumstances from lead to gold. It's that through your circumstances, through suffering, God turns His people from lead to gold. He changes us. And that is the reason that Paul has here to rejoice. That's why he begins this whole section: Yes, I will rejoice.

Here's how I know this. Look at verse 19. Paul has said that he has hopes that all of this will turn out. He says here, for his deliverance. Now that's what it says in the ESV. It's not a great translation, though. Literally, the Greek says salvation — that he knows that through their prayers and with the help of the spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for his salvation.

See, he's not talking about being delivered from prison in this. He doesn't say, "In spite of what's happened, I know I'll be delivered." He says, "Because of all that's happened, I know I'll be delivered." Now hang in with me.

This is a little dense. Paul uses the present tense verb to talk about his salvation, not the past tense. And this is exactly the opposite of how we talk all the time. We talk about how God has saved me from my sins, referring back in history to Jesus at the cross. And that, of course, is correct. It's right for us to talk that way. But Paul is talking about something different here—that God is saving him. God is delivering him. He's talking about present tense delivering and salvation.

What does it mean? It means that just as God has saved him in the past from the reigning power of sin in his life, so in the present, God is saving him from the present presence of sin in his life. God is teaching him to depend on God. God is rooting these things more deeply in Paul's life. God is in the process of saving him from himself because of his imprisonment, because of his trials, because of his suffering, because of his pain—he is being saved.

It's not that God, through your circumstances, promises, "I'm gonna turn all your lead into gold." It's that God is going to, in your circumstances, even in your suffering, turn you and me from lead to gold. God is presently transforming us.

Think about those two elements: lead and gold. They're metal. What's required to melt metal or to bend metal? Heat. You have to have the presence of heat in order to bend metal. And if I can say something really personal right now, it's getting hot. The circumstances that we find ourselves in right now—the coronavirus, in many cases job insecurity, market insecurity, health insecurity—it's getting hot. And that's exactly where God works.

What Do We Really Want?

I think that if we could answer that question really honestly, America right now would be this: "For me to live is blank." What do I really, really want? Most of us would fill that statement in with this word: normal. I want normal again. I want to go back to the way things were.

But in a crisis, what is God showing us? The heat is cranked up in us. In a crisis, we see what's really critical for us. We see what really, really matters.

My prayer for you, my prayer for all of us as we walk through this, is that we're becoming more and more like the story I've heard about a little girl in front of her church. Her church had a program for young kids to memorize scripture. Every kid would pick a passage and recite it in front of the congregation. This one little girl picked Psalm 23. When the day came, she stood up and said:

The Lord is my shepherd. He's all I want.

Now, if you know Psalm 23, you know that's actually wrong. It's:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. — Psalm 23:1

But there's something about her words. For our purposes, I think she really got it right. The Lord is my shepherd. He's all I want. Can you allow this time of trial, of suffering, of challenge to shape you instead of fighting it? That's the gift of suffering. And I know it's the gift that nobody wants. It's the course that we'd rather audit. "Do I have to take this for credit? I'd really rather audit this course."

The Choice We Get to Make

Think with me about all the gifts that God offers us: forgiveness, yes, I will take some of that. Peace, yes, please. Blessings in my life. Confidence in God's love—yes, yes, yes. Suffering? No, thank you. No, thank you.

But suffering doesn't automatically make us mature. Just because you're a Christian and you're walking through suffering doesn't automatically mean you grow through it. It could just as much mean you become bitter.

Consider how you sharpen a knife. I have to confess this—I'm a terrible knife sharpener, but I know the science behind it. You take a wet stone and your knife and you draw the knife at a particular angle. If you do it at the right angle over and over again, it sharpens the blade. Of course, you can do it at the wrong angle, which is what I do. You do it the wrong angle and it doesn't sharpen the blade at all. It makes it dull.

Here's how this applies to you: your life is being drawn across the friction of the stone, like a knife across a stone. But here's what you get to do. You get to choose the angle. You get to choose right now if the things that you are going through sharpen you or if they make you more bitter. If they draw you to love Him and celebrate your union with Him and become more like Him, or if you become embittered and angry.

Really, the choice is up to you. Is it the case: the Lord is my shepherd. He's all I want.

To Die is Gain

Second point, more briefly. What about the second part? To die is gain. You know, again here, Paul sounds like a crazy person. It's like he's saying up is down and hot is cold and in is out. He's saying the opposite of how we speak. I mean, you ever hear someone who's lost a close family member, had someone die? Yeah, we write a note. You might call them up on the phone and you say this: "I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sorry for your loss." Or people might say, "I lost my mom this year. I lost my mom to cancer." See, we always view death as loss. But Paul views death as gain. How can he say this?

The Apostle Paul was reflecting on the realities of his own situation that he's facing when he wrote this. He's suffering. He's been suffering quite acutely. Actually, he's under arrest, house arrest in Rome. He's chained to a Praetorian guardsman, and he's quite sure that this suffering is going to end probably in his death, his martyrdom. That's a distinct possibility that he's facing. So he's modeling for the Philippians how to endure suffering while clinging to Christ, holding on to Christ.

Paul here is languishing in chains and overflowing with joy at the same time. He's excited because he knows he tells us in chapter four, he thinks that not only is this whole guard been hearing about Jesus from him, but even in chapter four tells us the household of Caesar has been hearing about Jesus because of Paul's suffering here. So Paul's in jail, and yet verse 18 tells us he's rejoicing. He's rejoicing. He says not only is he rejoicing in what's happening at the moment, he's supremely confident that there's even more joy yet to come for him. Yet to come. "I will rejoice," he says.

You know, there was a group of rebels in China against the Chinese government in the nineteenth century known as the Boxer Rebels. This is part of the Boxer Rebellion. They believed that after a hundred days training in martial arts, they would become bulletproof. And after three hundred days training, they would be able to fly. And yet none of them were able to get into the flying stage because none of them lifted past the bulletproof part. None of them made it past that. It was a false confidence. A Christian doesn't have false confidence. A Christian has real confidence.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, right before he died, he wrote this. He said, "This is the end for me, but it's the beginning of life."

One of our confessional documents as a church, the Westminster Shorter Catechism sums up Paul's statement, "death is gain" this way. It's a question and answer. Here's the question: What benefits do believers receive from Christ at death? And here's the answer: The soul of believers are at death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory. And their bodies being still united to Christ do sleep in their graves until the resurrection. Their bodies will one day be made perfect and rise imperishable and reunited to their souls to dwell in a new heavens and a new earth at the last day.

Until that day dawns, Paul says, the confession says, this is what we see. Death is gain. Death is gain because the souls of believers do immediately pass into the presence of the Lord. When you close your eyes in death, you open them to the presence of your savior. When you close your eyes in death, you open them to stare your Redeemer in the face. This is the Christian's hope. This is why Jesus said to the thief on the cross:

"Today you will be with me in paradise." — Luke 23:43

Today, death is gain. See, if death is gain because I have uninterrupted communion with Jesus, with the Christ who for me is all satisfying and all valuable, valuable above all else, he is all in all for me. That's what Paul is saying. All in all. And so in death, I have nothing to fear and nothing to interrupt the sweetness of being face to face with him. No sin gets in the way. No regrets. No worries. No sadness. No bad dreams forever with the Lord. Death is gain.

See, this is why Paul is saying, "Look, I am not discouraged. I am not beaten down even if I die tomorrow. You know why? Because my treasure is unstoppable. My bottom line is unshakable. My source is untouchable." That's what I have in Jesus.

Do you know the name Horatio Spafford? Horatio Spafford was a lawyer in Chicago that lived in the nineteenth century. During his later life, he experienced a lot of personal tragedies. The Spaffords were pretty well known in the 1860s—one for his law practice, but two because they were good friends. He and his wife Anna were good friends and supporters of the itinerant evangelist Dwight Moody, and they supported his ministry. During the eighteen seventies though, things began to go very wrong for them. First, their only son died of scarlet fever at age four. Second, in 1871, they were ruined by the great fire of Chicago.

And afterward, Spafford realized that his family needed a break. They needed some kind of rest, and he prepared for them to go on a trip to England. So he put his wife and his four daughters on a boat ahead of him to go from New York Harbor to England. But in 1873, when they began this journey, the ship that they were traveling on struck another ship and sunk, killing all four daughters and his wife alone of the family was left.

Nine days after the ship left the harbor of New York, he received a telegram with two words on it: "Saved alone" from his wife. Horatio Spafford upon hearing the news left for England to join his wife. As the ship he was on passed the place where his daughters had perished, the captain, knowing his plight, called him up to the bridge and he said these words: "A careful reckoning has been made, and I believe we are now passing the place where the ship was wrecked. The water here is three miles deep."

That night in his cabin, Horatio Spafford penned the lyrics to one of the most famous hymns of all time: "It Is Well."

It is well, it is well, he penned. It is well even though grief is great. It is well even though their four year old son would not come back. It is well even though all their fortune was lost. It is well even though they lost their daughters. It is well. He's saying over and over again: Christ the King, this is my hope.

Not just that we can sing it as well and mean it, but that your life and my life sing it as well every day. That every day there's a deeper and deeper conviction that there is joy in the present even in the midst of suffering because God loves you. He's joined you to Jesus and He's making you like Him in suffering.

And that there's an expectation of even greater joy yet to come. That no matter what you face in this life, there's an unbelievable expectation and hope that we are just scraping the surface. We're just scratching the surface of what the full treasury of joy that is to come with being with Him.

I pray that your life more and more sings this song. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We're going to close with singing that song, "It Is Well," and as we do so, I want to invite you to offer yourself to the Lord. You know, every week in our service when we're gathered, we take an offering and it's really not about collecting money. We know most of you give online. We know lots of you send in checks and you're free to continue to do that. We hope you will. But it's really about offering ourselves to the Lord and taking your life and all those things—all those other things that you would put in the blank for "me to live is"—and holding them up to Him.

They're not bad things. And the Word certainly doesn't want to crush all those things. But surrendering them to Him means that He gets the glory and the choice of how more and more He roots your joy in Him. Can you offer yourself to Him today as we sing this song together?