Peace with God

Rejoice in the Lord. Remember your story. Remember how Jesus has saved you. We just heard two amazing stories. Remember, in Christ, you have an amazing story and an amazing hope. And when you have nothing else to say, share the story of how he found you and asked you to follow him with someone. And rejoice because Jesus loves you, and he has joined himself to you, that his righteousness is your righteousness. Now when God sees you, he sees the perfect work of Jesus. Rejoice for you have been made a new creation that reflects the glory of God through your joy to those that God has placed near you.

CTK Sermons is a ministry of Christ the King Presbyterian Church. CTK is a community rooted in the depth of the gospel, refined by hard conversations, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh.

Good morning to this side of CTK as well and that is the light. There it is. Nice and bright. Again, my name is Paul Deschamps. I am a church planting resident here at CTK and you may be wondering what a church planting resident is. In short, I'm spending the rest of this year and into next year preparing, organizing, laying foundational plans to, by God's grace, plant a new church up in Rollesville, North Carolina. If you don't know where that is, it's just on the north side of Raleigh here about twenty-five minutes away.

And I just want to say thank you to so many of you who have reached out to me and given me encouraging words and prayers. I've really felt the support as we work on this exciting new phase of our life and the life and the extension and the growth of this church out into a new area. If you want to talk to me more about what I'm doing, I'd love to chat with you at any time and look forward to that.

But I'm here today because Jeff asked me if I could preach and he gave me great instructions. He said, preach from anything that you want. I said, great. So, if you've been coming regularly to CTK, you know that Jeff has been walking through a sermon series called The Redemption Cycle where he's unpacking gospel truths from the book of Judges and he's having so much fun. I don't want to touch that. And James has been preaching James on James and he's been having so much fun. I don't want to touch that. So, you get this morning for one week only: letters with Paul. And this is a sermon that is brought to you by the letter P. So, it is Paul's letter to the Philippians with Paul and it's about peace. So, there's a lot of Ps, lot of alliteration.

If you would be so kind as to turn with me in your Bibles, if you brought them, to Philippians 4. We're going to look at verses 4 through 9. If you didn't, you can join us in reading aloud together from God's word. It's all going to be up here on the screen. We haven't done this in a while and there's not a lot of strange Hebrew names in this one. So, we're going to read together as a congregation. Would you please join me in doing that?

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, rejoice. Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don't worry about anything, but in everything through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any moral excellence and if there is anything praiseworthy, dwell on these things. Do what you have learned and received and heard from me and seen in me and the God of peace will be with you. — Philippians 4:4-9

Father, would you send your Spirit to give us great peace this morning? Would we find peace in you, Jesus? And Lord, would you get all the glory in these words? I pray this in your name, amen.

Anxiety in Our Culture

So, this past Halloween, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a new Disney princess that topped all the others this year in the world of kid costumes. I'm not talking Elsa, not Moana, not the tried and true Cinderella. There was a new costume queen this year and she's cool and she's orange and she is nerve-racking. She is anxiety. Yeah, that's right.

Anxiety from the Disney Pixar film Inside Out Two was one of the top costumes this year for kids as they went around trick or treating. Now if you have not seen the film or if you have seen the film, then you've met her. She is a new emotion that shows up in the film series Inside Out. She shows up in the control center of the main character Riley's brain and she's a teenage girl who's dealing with all the changing emotions of being a teenager.

And you know a common misconception that I had even going into seeing the film was that joy was going to be the opposite of anxiety, that they were going to be at polar opposites with each other and if you've seen the movie you may have felt that tension too and the writers included it but really joy and sadness are the opposites. Sometimes joy and anxiety agree. They're both concerned with the safety, comfort and care of their girl Riley, but as anxiety takes more and more control of the control center of Riley's emotions, the result is that Riley becomes more and more anxious and less and less at peace.

So, the real opposite for anxiety is peace. Now, we feel this, don't we? In our worship service time, we include an intentional time that we just practiced called gospel hospitality where we greet one another with the peace of Christ. We seek out one another during our worship service of God to extend peace of Christ to one another. It's this reminder that the God of peace wishes us to know real peace with him and with one another.

Now, what's curious I think is that as we celebrate this time of gospel hospitality with each other, it's sometimes a bit awkward, isn't it? I mean, we pause our service, we get up, which is nice. We look around the room, maybe make eye contact with someone, hopefully, move to them, say maybe something like peace be with you or something like that. And then we maybe awkwardly chat for a few minutes. Don't really know whether or not the music's going to start playing. Don't really know if I can honestly answer the question, how are you doing? Maybe I met this person last week and I'm worried that they're going to remember my name but I cannot remember theirs. Possibly you're an introvert in this room and this is the time that you just get up and go to the bathroom. It's an awkward practice of greeting one another in the name of Jesus and offering each other peace. Yet for many of us it's actually producing anxiety and that's super ironic. We're offering peace and sometimes we feel panic.

The Epistle of Joy

As we take this quick look this morning at the book of Philippians, this book is known as the epistle of joy. Some 13 times over four little chapters, Paul instructs this church to be the kind of Jesus community that is filled with joy and can rejoice. Twice in these few verses, Paul repeats these instructions to rejoice in the Lord but this isn't just a cheap platitude, a charge to cheer up. There is real reason to be people who can rejoice.

In Acts 16, we read the story about how Paul and his missionary friends are on this journey and they end up in the Macedonian city of Philippi where they would make a massive impact for the gospel. They share the good news of Jesus with many people. They establish a church. This community that's celebrating the goodness of Jesus and what he's doing in their lives right there.

Now, Philippi was like this Roman outpost city. It was pretty hostile to Christians. Christian culture was not welcome. It was judged and it was oppressed. Now, adding to this, Paul is writing this letter to them not from the comfort of a squashy armchair but from jail. He had been put under arrest and is sending them this super encouraging letter reminding them to be joyful from jail.

It feels almost tongue in cheek for Paul to instruct the Philippian church not to worry or be anxious for nothing. It's like, are you serious? The joy we're supposed to have doesn't require us to have a bootstrap theology. What I mean by that is we're not called to just pull ourselves up by the bootstraps to dust ourselves off, put on a happy face. No. This requires the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit to sow into the anxious waters of our hearts peace. And in God, we have peace. And from God, we can have peace.

So those are the two points I really wanted you to hear today that in God we have peace and that from God we have peace.

In God We Have Peace

In verses four through seven, Paul has some delightful things to say to us. We can be a people who rejoice in the Lord because he is near and he offers us a supernatural peace that goes beyond our understanding and will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.

Friends, God cares about you. He knows you and he loves you. His word tells us that he made you in his image, that he desires for you to know him and to love him and that we can be a people who rejoice in the Lord because he has taken care of the problem that prevents us from being in relationship with him in the first place.

We all sin. There's not one of us here that is perfect. There is not one person in this room who can stand on their own goodness and say, I deserve to stand with God this morning. The longer I follow Jesus, the more I grow in knowing both the depths of my own sinfulness but also the greatness of God's holiness.

That distance between us, that gap it feels like is always growing between what I know about myself and what I know about God. He is always more wonderful and I am increasingly insufferable. God is a holy God and he can't tolerate being near sin. How could he tolerate being near me? And yet that's the good news. I didn't have to make myself tolerable.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. — Romans 5:8

The way to close the distance between our growing self-awareness of our sinfulness and our growing knowledge of God's holiness is to see that our need for a cross demonstrates the depth of God's love for us. We're called to be people who remember God's love for us and rejoice through our faith in Jesus that we have received forgiveness but also we've received oneness. He invites us to rejoice in him, not just about him but in him.

Being in God

What does it mean to be in God? Being in God means that we have been united to him, joined to him through Jesus and that we can live in close relationship to him defined by his presence and his love and his direction in ways that shape our life. This isn't as abstract as we think. It sounds kind of weird and abstract but if we think about it, we're all in something. Paul Miller on his Seeing Jesus podcast says, we do life through the lens of union. That which we worship, we are in and that stings for a little bit but think about this.

Let's try out a few things to see what we find ourselves in. We could be in college or in sports. We could be in success, in work, in politics, we could be in love, we could even be in ministry. We're in all sorts of things. This is the way we do life. If you've been to college, if you got your acceptance letter—for me the first thing that I did was I went out and I bought a hat from the University of Maryland and I wore that hat every day and would still if it was not just disintegrated and falling apart. We buy the hat, we buy the sweatshirt, that branding stays with us as a part of our life. These are the things that we feel give us identity and community and connection and value and purpose. And these are not bad things, right? It's not bad to be in these things. These can be really good loves. These can be really wonderful and amazing things that help shape us, but they will always be lesser things. There will always be lesser loves than our being in Jesus.

How do you get in Jesus? For so many of our lesser unions, we are in them because of some sort of merit, some sort of accomplishment that we have found in and of ourselves. Our application was accepted. We have the skills to perform a certain type of work. She thinks I'm cute. For these lesser things, we stand on our own record but to be in Jesus, this is impossible because it's not my record. It's Jesus's record. It's his finished work that we claim, not our own.

Last spring when the Wolfpack won the ACC tournament and all y'all celebrated and everyone was like, we won. The funny thing is I didn't see anybody from here on the court. None of y'all shot the shot, made the layup, but you all still went down to the Bell Tower and you could rejoice in the victory. How much more can we rejoice in the victory that we have in Jesus? We rejoice through the victory and the union that we have in Christ because our vertical relationship, our relationship with God, our creator, is restored in him. We can rejoice in the Lord because we are in the Lord that through Jesus, he is near because he has come near to us and has made it so.

Peace with Others

Because of the proximity that we have with God, because of our union with him, not only do we have this restored peace with God but we are empowered to live out of that peace, the peace that we have from God. We're empowered to live it out with others. Gospel hospitality calls us to a life of peace from God but it also calls us to extend peace to our neighbors.

Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don't worry about anything but in everything through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. — Philippians 4:5-6

As we live amongst one another, we're called to live out the peace that we have with Jesus and to let our graciousness be known. When you look at the Greek word here used to describe graciousness and see how it's used in other places in the New Testament, we see that a better translation might be the word gentleness. Like Jesus, we are to let our gentleness be known. There are a lot of stories that have come to the front of the headlines about Christians being anything but gentle. There have been a lot of people who have had Christianity weaponized against them and have felt the church acting in ways that can be described as anything but gentle. Hostile, abrasive, combative, complacent, fearful, judgmental, perhaps.

There are many people who have been hurt—maybe some of you in this room—by people who claim to love Jesus and yet have failed to be gentle towards one another.

There's this book that's out now called The Great De Churching, written by Jim Davis and Michael Graham. It explores what they say is the greatest shift in religious life in American Christian history. This shift, they say, is greater than the first and second great awakenings combined, but in the opposite direction. Tens of millions of people are deciding they no longer wish to be part of a church. These are bleak stats, particularly for someone who is praying and hoping to plant a church. I want people coming in, not going out. But we're not without hope on this.

According to their findings, of the millions of people that have walked away from the church, only a small handful have done so because of experiencing the things occurring in salacious headlines that drive our news feeds. Do you know that the overwhelming number of people who have left the church and left their faith have done so for really simple and normal reasons? They moved to a new town and couldn't find a church. They took a new job. The pandemic shook their rhythm of life. They had kids and they didn't really know how to do this anymore. Maybe they no longer felt welcome because of some of their own political views and they just slipped quietly into the background to not rock the boat. These are just some of the reasons why so many people have left.

And so why is this hopeful news? Because the book explains that the overwhelming majority of the people who have walked away from the church would walk back if only they were invited. If only they felt welcomed, needed, seen, loved. Friends, this is the practice of gospel hospitality.

Now I know you may be thinking that's all well and good inside this building, but what about out there? What about out there in the real world? I don't know if you've noticed, Paul, but it's not so great out there. How are we supposed to reflect this kind of gentleness and meekness and reasonableness in a world that doesn't seem to value those traits anymore?

Living at Peace in an Anxious World

CTK, I know that every single one of you has great cause to feel anxiety these days. We're on the doorstep of the holiday season where we roll real aggressive through Thanksgiving right into Christmas, into the New Year. There's so much gathering and celebrating, seeing family and friends. It's marked by words like thankful, peace, joy, wonder, behold, new. And yet it does not feel like that. Some of us are probably starting to feel a sense of panic welling up inside our chest right now just thinking about what's coming down the pipeline for us.

And on top of that, we've just been through an incredibly divisive and disruptive election season. I'm so glad the text messages have finally stopped, right? Some of you feel like celebrating. Some of you feel a real sense of fear about the direction that our country is heading. Some of us have experienced painful loss this year. We've had broken relationships. Our marriages are in hard places. We've lost loved ones. We have fears about the economy and finances. We have fears about whether we're raising our kids right. Are we relating to and caring for our aging parents well? There's so much fuel for anxiety to try and undermine the peace that we have in Christ.

And we ask, where are you, Lord? How do I access this peace?

And the text is really clear. It doesn't say forget it. It doesn't say stuff it down inside and slap on a happy face. It says, come to me through prayer. Through prayer, we go to the Lord. God does not ask us to be people who are blind to the suffering around us. The text says he's near to us, remember? God is not an aloof God with zero care for the suffering his people are experiencing. But his solution to being people who live at peace, who are marked by gospel gentleness, is to go to him in prayer and cast our cares on him. He invites us to be in relationship with him, to speak with him, to cry with him, to vent with him, to lay all the worries that come on him.

Jesus says this in Matthew 11:

Come to me all of you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. — Matthew 11

We become like the people that we spend our time with. When we come to Jesus, we lay our anxieties and our burdens at his feet. We experience his rest. Jesus is gentle, and as we spend time with him, we find ourselves being known increasingly as people who are gentle. We can practice humility in the hard places. We don't have to be right in all of our conversations, and we can do this because the God of peace goes with us.

And in closing today, I want to give you guys something really practical.

And so I have five really direct applications from this text that will draw us closer to Jesus over these next few weeks.

First, rejoice. Rejoice in the Lord. Remember your story. Remember how Jesus has saved you. We just heard two amazing stories. In Christ, you have an amazing story and an amazing hope. And when you have nothing else to say, share the story of how he found you and asked you to follow him with someone. And rejoice because Jesus loves you. And he has joined himself to you. That his righteousness is your righteousness. That when God sees you, he sees the perfect work of Jesus. Rejoice for you have been made a new creation that reflects the glory of God through your joy to those that God has placed near you.

Second, pray. Really pray. Prayer is one of the hardest spiritual disciplines. And if you struggle with your prayer life, you struggle to pray for people in your life. I want to give you a very old school, very practical tip. Create prayer cards. I mean a literal card, like a three by five index card, real old school. You could use an app. You could use it on your phone if you like, but I think there's something about pen and paper. Take a card, write down the name of a person that you are struggling with, somebody that you care about, somebody that you want to see your relationship change with. Write down their name. Write down a prayer for them. And then search God's word to find a Bible verse that you love, that you know, that's meaningful and commit to praying that scripture over that person. Try it. See what happens to your heart and your relationship.

Third, dwell on good things. Paul tells us:

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any moral excellence and if there is anything praiseworthy, dwell on these things.

We are people who are drawn to see terrible things. We fill ourselves with a bad news cycle. If we allow ourselves to see all these things and dwell on these things, we start to believe the lie. You know, when you're learning how to drive, they say, don't look at the tree that's off on the side of the road. Look to where you want to be going. If you look at the tree, you're going to hit the tree. But if you look further ahead down the road, you dwell on where you want to go. That's where the car is going to go. It's the same thing with our life. God has put so much beauty around us and yet all we focus on is the noise.

Fourth, be gentle. You're not the only one who's hurting. You're not the only one who's scared or sad or nervous. Have you ever noticed how hurting people are the ones that tend to hurt other people? Practice empathy. Be slow to speak. Be quick to listen. Be gentle with others, but also be gentle with yourself. They matter and you matter. They are loved and you are loved.

Fifth, find community. When we read these verses in English, they don't really convey the plurality that this passage is speaking as well as the Greek text does. These are verses that are not like you be a rejoicing person. These are all y'all verses. All y'all be rejoicing people. Who is God placed in your life that you can practice these things with? Find somebody to rejoice with you. Find someone to pray with you. Celebrate together what God has done in your life and what he's doing. Reflect on the beauty and the hope you see in the world around you and encourage one another to gentleness. Help bear each other's burdens when this is hard.

Lastly, this is more of a half announcement, half invitation. You heard Ben invite us to the Thanksgiving service next Monday, the twenty-fifth. Come and share in the stories of what God's been up to. There's going to be some really powerful things to hear. Come and share with all thanksgiving what God has been doing in your life this year. We are part of a big family. Your story is part of our family story and we want to be a church that rejoices together.

Let me pray. Father, would these words be true? Would we be people who are so filled with your peace, with your love, with your grace, with your gentleness, that we are aware of the deep love that you have for us all and the price that you paid for that love in Jesus? Would we find our identity in you and would we live out of the knowledge of the grace that we've been given to serve you and to serve others in your name? I pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Gospel, refined by hard conversations. CTK, fueled by meaningful relationships, and committed to redemptive work in Raleigh. If you have questions about our sermon content or about our church in general, please visit our website at ctkrally.org.