3 Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.
To write the same things to you – It appears that Paul recognized some redundancy in his communications with the Philippian church. That recurring theme to the Philippians was for them to rejoice in the Lord.
That’s a strange emphasis to us moderns. What are people looking for in churches? Or, to get to my point, what do they think is missing? The usual suspects are “programs for the kids.” “Relevant preaching that affects my daily life.” “Inspiring worship.”
But who leaves a church with the critique, there was little rejoicing in the Lord?? That is, Jesus Christ wasn’t noticeable. Those times when his name was mentioned the sentences would have still made sense if his name weren’t mentioned. Jesus wasn’t…non-ignorable.
Or: Ok, Jesus was referred to, and properly, but there was a lack of associated energy. Instead there was a sloppiness, a triteness, an abundance of thoughtless jargon, of sentimentality – – – but no joy!
Paul says that re-iterating his charge to rejoice in the Lord isn’t merely good advice that keeps the church appealing. He says that it’s safe for you. I think of a young person growing up in a Christian community where there is a lack of rejoicing in Jesus Christ. There might be other things in its place: youth activities to Six Flags, excursions to the local rescue mission where the youth serve the homeless, a real nice, highly-spirited youth leader. But the Lord Christ is absent: that authoritative, on-the-move, personal, opinionated, demanding Lord isn’t seen. The youth leaders haven’t given themselves to knowing that Lord through the Spirit-inspired Scriptures and communicating…Him. There’s no struggle to present Him…fighting for joy in Him. Only busy-ness and fun… but with a Christian veneer.
What happens when a teen grows up in that kind of environment? Eventually the lack of reality catches up to him. In corners of the world, he comes to find more integrity, more honesty, less putting on airs. And so, he checks out of what he assumes is genuine Christianity! Yes, failing to rejoice in the Lord is unsafe.
So, we need to feel some urgency around this rejoice in the Lord. This isn’t a state of being for the Christian special forces, for the desert mystics, for the cloisters. This is a command for the saints! Look down at 4:4:
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
A crucial habit. A command. A command for all saints always. Just imagine Paul writing in his prison block…or dungeon? The scholars don’t know the condition of the prison but let’s throw in some rats for effect. As the rats scurry around, Paul is scratching out words laboriously on some parchment or something, and he writes this is no trouble for me – any pains in writing and then repeating what I wrote is a trifling thing compared to how consequential this is: REJOICE IN THE LORD.
Brothers and sisters, the Church should be known as, and indeed be, a community of rejoicing. Most Sundays we’re reviewing why rejoicing is a sensible attitude for a believer – how much good we’ve received, how much hope is in front of us, how the current reality is almost too good to be true. So, I’m not going to spend time explaining why to rejoice. Today is to emphasize that the Church should be known as, and indeed be, a community of rejoicing in the Lord.
We alluded to some of this last week, but it is possible for the Church to move from a stance and discipline (more on the need of that in a moment) of rejoicing in the Lord. Instead the Church can become a center of complaint and critique against the society. We become more about what we’re against than what we’re for….not exactly rejoicing.
A church culture can be awash with introspection and navel-gazing: always checking in with our psychological health and our feelings. Sermons commonly about the balanced life and wellbeing and getting clear of toxic people etc… The Church can become a place of victimization and weepiness – look at all our persecutions and see how severe our trials are.
Or how about the Church as the standard bearer for whatever is the celebrated cause of the day…perhaps there’s some energy there, you might even call it rejoicing… but it’s not about the Lord.
We should pause and note something important that’s a little paradoxical: a Church that rejoices in the Lord is also a Church who regularly laments to the Lord. (To lament is to grieve strongly.) We could think of rejoicing and lamenting as opposites, and perhaps sometimes they are. But rejoicing in the Lord and lamenting to the Lord are not opposites. Lamenting falls under the category of rejoicing.
Let me explain how they’re similar: To rejoice in the Lord is to take His Word seriously and exult in it – His gospel of grace and life. To lament to the Lord isn’t to grieve or complain, full stop: Look at how bad I’m feeling. But it’s to lament in view of God’s Word: God, you’ve made these spectacular promises… but where is their fulfillment? Look at the confusion and weakness surrounding me when You’ve promised blessing and salvation through Jesus Christ.
Where is the victory of Jesus Christ, where is evidence of His glory in a society that treats him indifferently, that uses him as a filler word?
A Church laments because she rejoices in the Lord. She expects much because God’s promises are great. She is dismayed when it appears on the ground that God’s great promises are not being fulfilled. And so, she laments.
There is nothing contrary to rejoicing in the Lord, and there is everything faithful, when a Church comes together and laments along the lines of: Christ is the light of the world and we, His Body, shine His light into the world. So why is there so much darkness, even in our own homes? Why do our neighbors think so little about eternity? Etc.
In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He’s our Christ. And now He’s at Your right hand, and His enemies are being placed under His feet. Then why are we so unwise? Why do we keep entering these marriages that are bound to fail or struggle? How can we own so little self-control? Where is the light of the Spirit that keeps us from falling into the hole of covetousness, of impatience?
So, our rejoicing sometimes…often?… drifts into streams of lament, strong lament, doubt. But lament doesn’t get the last word. As in the structure of the psalms, in walking with God there’s this trajectory of lament resolving into more and more pure rejoicing. Our laments are on their way to being resolved into Hallelujahs. Lament dots our path, but the sheer joy of Psalm 150 is our final destination: Can we all recite together:
Praise the LORD!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens!
2 Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his excellent greatness!
3 Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
4 Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
5 Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
6 Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!
Praise the LORD!
I want to pull a couple of things about a Church’s rejoicing in the Lord from that psalm. Look at v.2: Praise him for his mighty deeds/ praise him according to his excellent greatness. We rejoice in the Lord because we know what He has done and we know a little about His general… greatness, that greatness which excels all other instances of greatness. For who He is and what He does, we rejoice in the Lord. To rejoice in the Lord requires a growing or deepening knowledge of Him.
Very often you run into evidence of this: here is a long-time Christian that knows very little about God. His grasp of who God is, all that He rules over and how – is the same that he had when he was a child. Even as he’s become a stud in his career, become adept and knowledgeable regarding various interests and hobbies – he still can’t articulate anything interesting about what God has done, including in the gospel. How bored this person must be with God! Maybe, hopefully he keeps showing up at religious activities because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but for him it must all be kinda tedious. This person steeped in ignorance can’t properly rejoice in the Lord.
You see, when Paul says to rejoice in the Lord, he’s not sending us on a quick errand: he’s setting us out into a way of life. And that way of life is marked by the pursuit of a growing and deepening knowledge. Oh, Mothers and Grandmothers – don’t just say weepy and pretty things about Christ – become a theologian! Oh, young men, don’t only play video games; read C.S. Lewis too! Anti-intellectualism is killing the Church, it’s not safe, because without knowledge it’s not possible to rejoice in the Lord!
And one more observation from Psalm 100: looking at vv 3-5, you realize that though rejoicing in the LORD could start with immature and unskilled grunts of happiness about who God is and what He’s done . . . it should begin moving toward mature and layered and skillful expressions of praise.
For a Church to rejoice in the Lord is to take their praise seriously. Which will eventually involve skilled musicians. Which requires teachers and paying teachers. Which requires music lessons and paying for music lessons and salaries and such. This rejoicing in the Lord becomes a way of life, an enterprise, a culture. This isn’t something just to be done in the privacy of one’s soul but expressed in investment and theory and all kinds of craftsmanship.
We can say all we want that we’re rejoicing in the Lord and we can put a pious smile on our face while we’re saying it: but if there’s no work, financial investment and planning…infrastructure…behind our claim, it rings hollow.
One more thing to mention about a Church’s rejoicing in the Lord: the help of seekers and infant believers. It can happen that a Church becomes clubby and in-grown, and it stops rejoicing in the Lord because it forgets its first joy, its first love. An inoculation against this forgetfulness is the presence in the gatherings of non-Christians and new Christians and immature Christians. Having these souls around and teaching them the rudiments of Christ helps us hear again with new ears.
Hopefully without your feeling an ounce of insincerity or condescension: I want to encourage you who aren’t yet baptized, who are just starting to put two and two together in the Christian faith: you are a blessing and help to this body. We love having you among us for several reasons, not least because you’re a constant reminder to us about first principles.
And Church, let’s pray, even for our sake, that unbelievers and new believers and immature believers are constantly among us.
Churches can fail at rejoicing in the Lord. Christian families can fail at rejoicing in the Lord. Often that’s Dad’s fault. Dad isn’t setting the vision for loving the Lord, knowing the Lord, reaching out to others – especially his own family – in the name of the Lord. It’s all work and entertainment. There are no conversations about the Lord: the discourse of the family is all schedules and little jokes and little complaints and squabbles and financial consternation. Clamor is the biblical word. Come on, Dad! Get a vision for leading your family to rejoice in the Lord.
What is your family’s culture? You know how we’re supposed to fill some, or perhaps much, of our in-between moments with snatches of conversation with “Abba” or “setting the Lord at my right hand” or otherwise delighting in God? Well, there are plenty of Christian families where that practice of “checking in” has been replaced with a new referent: instead of looking to God it’s to the World Wide Web (as Mr Monk calls it). And so instead of the atmosphere of the family being continually renewed by the Presence of God, there’s this constant checking the phone, surfing the web. And this happens:
“…The internet is not a place of order but a boundless abyss that erases the contours of individual hours, swallows entire days, and inundates our lives with a vague sense of possibility never quite realized, leaving us, in the end, with that low-grade spiritual exhaustion for which “decision fatigue” is too weak a term.
The Stoics called this feeling stultitia – “fickleness and boredom and a continuing shifting of purpose,” as Seneca put it. It describes this never-ending hunger for novelty; the inability to stick to commitments; the will’s imprisonment by competing desires. St. Benedict describes something along these lines in his Rule, denouncing itinerant monks who “never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.” – Meghan O’Gieblyn
Tell a Christian family to rejoice in the Lord who is entangled in this habit of web browsing or…
…that has at its heart a culture of flippancy – the constantly joking, looking down on any family member attempting to introduce seriousness, especially things of the Spirit into conversation –
tell that family to rejoice in the Lord and – even though they probably want to – they’re stuck. They’re mired in cynicism and flippancy and the fear of being called ‘holier than thou.’
I read those psalms about being enmired in a sinking pit or the psalmist shouting to God for help against strong enemies and I don’t think of the libs or the commies: I think of habits that are killing us spiritually! Families who have experienced the big Exodus from guilt and death need a thousand more deliverances from habits of bickering, inattention, flippancy, procrastination, complaint – habits that culminate in NOT rejoicing in the LORD.
Oh, Most High God – deliver the families of SBC from a failure to rejoice in the Lord. Perhaps as never before, we’re living in a society engineered to steal our attention from the permanent things, from the heavenly things, and to set our minds on things of the earth. Some of the smartest people in the world backed by some of the craziest funding are after our attention. We can’t help but see dark principalities behind this. In short, we’re outgunned. Will you not save us from these real enemies!? Does your steadfast love take into account our growing unease and unhappiness coming out of our unhealthy relationship with technology? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you? Amen.
To rejoice in the Lord involves discipline. Habits of attention. Or, instead of habits, I like the word “liturgy” because it implies habits that are meant for worship, for attending to God.
Fathers and mothers, think about the merits of:
- No technology at the table
- Making your prayer before the meals a little more involved
- Reading the Scripture and praying together at least once/week, on Saturday evening
- Not having the TV on in the background all day
- No podcasts or music or web browsing for the first three hours/day
- Dad, take your kids out individually… and bring up Christ
- Spouses, pray together every day
Finally…in carrying out this command to rejoice in the Lord, I’ve wanted to focus on the Church and families. Obviously, though, this command applies to individual Christians as individual Christians.
Let me say something emphatically to individual Christians: You are permitted to be an extrovert or an introvert. The Church should welcome and enjoy eccentrics of all types, even the kind that wears camel skins and eats locusts and constantly challenges the status quo. In this society I see no reason why men couldn’t choose to wear their hair long like Vikings of yore – that’s no longer a feminine trait. You can question capitalism. You can wonder about democracy. If you won’t hurt your mom in doing it, I see nothing unlawful in getting a tattoo. I believe that you can be a Young Earth or Old Earth Creationist. If you choose to be a teetotaler, more power to you. If you choose to imbibe alcohol, you can do so with a clear conscience, as long as you’re not becoming intoxicated or doing spiritual harm to others. You can make lots of money or go after the simple life. You might be a Dispensationalist or have a Reformed Eschatology or something else beside – you’re going to be ok.
So…you have options! But you have to…have to…have to…rejoice in Jesus Christ. All that I’ve already said about it applies to you, including that it sometimes entails lament, that it always involves a growing knowledge, that it wilts amid flippancy and silliness and bickering and inattention.
As individuals, how to become more proficient in rejoicing in the Lord?
- Sing your way into prayer
- Read the Word into prayer
This is one of the application questions for coming to Somers Baptist Church: Explain a time when you have felt pushed beyond your capabilities as a leader, and how you overcame this difficulty.
Here was and is still my answer: A few times in our ministry in Boston I was at a point of depletion and perhaps even despair: my go-to is to take time alone to read the Word and pray and sing. I know that answer might seem overly pious and yet it is my answer.
- Read theology into prayer. (Not Christian psychology books! Not devotional books!)
- PRAY EXHAUSTIVELY WITH THANKSGIVING
- Stay current in prayer and particularly confession of sin
- Get together with believers to talk about the Lord. Think about questions or passages beforehand.
- Mind carefully your influences. Especially your diet, your exercise, and your entertainment consumption. Paul says our interior resting state should be a “sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” Keep your spirit open and tender toward Him. Find out what moves you toward and away from Him and make adjustments.
Church, rejoice in the Lord. Families, rejoice in the Lord. Christian, rejoice in the Lord.
And next week we can move on from Philippians 3:1!
Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?
Amen
Amen!!!! So true