Tag: Series Introduction

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Introduction to Philippians

A person’s story tells us a lot about who they are. As we go into the book of Philippians, it is wise to understand the story around the city, the church Paul is writing to and Paul’s relationship with them.

Philippi was originally named Crenides, which means “fountains” because of all the natural springs in the fertile plains. It was originally settled by the Thasians who also discovered gold and silver nearby, making it a wealthy colony. When the city came under pressure from Thrace, they went to Philip of Macedon for protection, which is how it got its name. Philip built a mint there, and it remained as an autonomous city within Macedon under Alexander the Great.

Eventually Rome conquered Macedon, and when Julius Caesar was assassinated, Brutus and Cassius fled to Philippi, and the Battle of Philippi was fought on the plains nearby. Octavian (eventually Augustus) won the battle, and eventually integrated Philippi more directly into the new empire. It became a “miniature Rome” under the municipal law of Rome, with comparable rights and nearly identical culture to Rome. It was tightly connected to Rome, along the Via Egnatia, and their Roman identity was core to their self image and culture.

It was also the first place in Europe that Paul preached, as described in Acts 16, and the first convert there was Lydia, a wealthy merchant. It is a dramatic story of dreams, prayer, demons, trials, imprisonment, earthquakes and vindication.

The story closes with the Philippian church set on a solid foundation. They would go on to be one of the most generous churches mentioned in the Bible, sending Paul gifts at multiple times, including when he is imprisoned in Rome, which is when the epistle to the Philippians was written.

The book is basically a thank you note to the Philippians, combined with strong encouragement founded in deep theology. It contains some of the most well-known verses is Scripture, and is seen largely as a book about joy in the midst of hardship, with the word used 16 times.

But a more careful study shows that this is a sub theme, a byproduct of the grander theme. Other sub themes include community and hospitality, unity in Christ, gospel participation, humility, self-sacrifice and warnings against Judaizers.

The overall theme, though, is the source of all that joy, unity and humility – namely, the theme is death to self and life in Christ. Even the opening calls out Paul and Timothy as servants of Christ and specifically highlights all the other leaders with him as servants in Christ.

Paul wants the lives of the Philippians to be so intertwined with the life of Christ that it is impossible to tell the two apart.

There are four ways we may struggle with Paul’s words in Philippians. The first is a mindset of independence and isolation, rather than living in community. Another is believing that joy comes from our circumstances. Third, a prioritization of the things of earth rather than those of heaven. And most notably, our tendency to put our comfort and desires ahead of the life in Christ that we are called to.

It is easy to say “death to self and life in Christ,” but it is difficult to actually live it out. The second half sounds good, but the first is very difficult. But true living only happens when we do this, we’ve that will be our focus over the next few weeks.

– Sermon Notes, Jeff Krabach, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, July 15, 2018

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Suffering and Comfort – 2 Corinthians 1:1-11

Paul wrote four letters to the Corinthians, two of which survive. Paul planted the Corinthian church and stayed with them for 18 months before moving on to more ministry. Shortly after this, all hell broke loose, and, after writing his first two letters, Paul has to head back to Corinth to deal with them.

They rebuff him and he leaves for Ephesus, writing what is called the “Severe Letter”. This letter shakes them into some form of response, including church discipline on the most egregious offenders.

Paul begins writing Second Corinthians, and midway through gets news from Titus about more bad news – a group has infiltrated the church and is undermining Paul’s teaching and very position as an apostle.

So the letter here is largely Paul validating his apostleship by way of his sufferings. The two key words as he opens his letter are “suffering” and “comfort.”

In that instruction, Paul takes a very Old Testament, monotheistic tack, with God as the source of all mercy and compassion. This is in contrast to the popular religion of the day (and ours) where the power of a god is seen in the material successes of its followers.

God divinely encourages Paul who suffers on behalf of the Son, so that he can be a conduit of comfort for others who suffer on behalf of the Son. There’s a whole lot of comforting going on. God meets Paul with sufficient sustainment to meet his level of suffering. The greater the suffering, the greater the comfort – and the greater comfort he can then provide to others.

What does all this mean for the Corinthians, though? As a result of what is happening in Paul, the Corinthians can take encouragement from it as they also suffer in their own way, and be built up and sharpened more and more into the image of God.

Most of us (probably none of us) will not suffer in the specific ways Paul did (shipwrecks, 30 lashes, imprisonment), but if Jesus is as worthy as God says He is, then we must suffer on His behalf.

Paul then shifts from the general to the specific, recounting what he had Jay endured. God undermined Paul’s confidence in himself in order to build up his confidence in Christ. Just as Christ was led to the cross in order that he might be raised from the dead, so good led Paul to within inches of his life so that his self reliance might be left in the grave and he be raised in himself from the dead.

A key word in this passage is “rely” which has its roots in “persuade” – Paul is no longer persuaded of his own abilities. Meanwhile, the Corinthians saw persuasion as a key value, and the infiltrators sought to persuade them of his unfitness, but the persuasion Paul relied upon was that of Christ, not his own abilities.

Like Paul, we are called to make much of Christ in our American-Corinthian culture, to suffer and be comforted by Christ as we seek to live out the Great Commission. The world does not value the sufferings of Christ, but as we follow and suffer with Him, His sufficiency is revealed in our lives, revealing Him to that world.

– Sermon Notes, Brian Bailey, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, January 14, 2017

2 Corinthians 1:1-11

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Introduction to First Seattleites

Paul had grown up upper-middle class in Tarsus, a center of tent-making, where he learned that trade. He also studied religious law under Gameliel and was a Roman citizen, so this gave him notable status in the community. He was among the many Jewish leaders concerned about the followers of this Jesus – from his perspective, one in a long line of false messiahs who was twisting the scriptures and putting all of God’s people at risk.

So he became essentially a bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing Christians for execution. At one point he asks for dispensation from the high priest to go up to Damascus and bring the Christians back to Jerusalem to face justice. On the way, he is confronted with the living Christ and blinded. When he is healed, he becomes a zealous follower of Christ, and his preaching causes a riot. From there he went briefly to Jerusalem, where he causes trouble once again, and has to be smuggled out. He returns to Taursus and spends ten years there. We don’t know exactly what happened in those years, but presumably they were spent largely in contemplation of the implications of Christ’s coming. Eventually, a man named Barnabas is sent out to find Paul. Paul comes back to Jerusalem, meets with the apostles, and is sent out again, becoming a missionary for the church.

Eventually, he comes to Corinth, where he partners with Priscilla and Aquila and eventually shifts his focus from preaching to the Jews to preaching up the gentiles. He spent a year and a half there building the church, which he then left in the hands of co-pastors Priscilla and Aquila. This letter was written a number of years later to that church.

Corinth was a center of trade, located on an isthmus where ships went overland rather than sailing around Asia is. It was a center of entertainment, hosting the Isthmian Games every two years. It was a center of religion and sex, as the temple of Aphrodite also served as a city-wide prostitution business. The city naturally had a pretty significant underbelly, and had become a Roman byword for debauchery and dissolution. So the church in Corinth had a lot of baked-in issues, issues Paul would not have been able to deal with in his short time there. This meant that the church there was probably the most dysfunctional church that Paul wrote to, riven by factions, infighting, selfishness, and not a little of its own debauchery and dissolution.

Because of these issues, people were actively leaving the faith. The central message of this book, then, was the reminder that a diverse church can only survive and thrive when it is centered around the simplicity of Christ. The thinking of the people of Corinth is remarkably parallel to that of the average Seattleite, so we have much to learn from this book. (It does mean that going through it is not going to push against legalism, but against license).

Like Seattle, Corinth was regionally proud and technologically advanced – they had Corinthian bronze, we have Amazon and Microsoft. They took pride in their sports and sports culture. They were proud of their intelligence and education. They were proud of their wealth and strong economy. They overall felt superior to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Aristotle himself wrote about this superiority complex. There are a few similarities here.

And when this sort of superiority complex enters the church, we get significant problems. Factions, boasting, judgmentalism – even judging Paul (who, naturally, responded with great heaping piles of sarcasm). This intellectual elitism led to an elevation of their own reason over the truth of scripture. Paul continually has to remind them that the message of Christ was specifically built to be foolishness when looked at with cold reason. Corinth also had an overall distrust of authority, including church leaders, leading to treating of Paul with extreme disrespect, because he’s not treating others with enough respect.

Corinth was more concerned with individual rights than with love. They were more concerned with spiritual experience than with sound teaching and doctrine. They preferred Greek rhetoric to preaching (TED Talks vs. sermons). They preferred unfettered tolerance to holiness and gospel. All these issues are mirrored in Seattle and constantly validated by everyone around us. Rather than self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of legalism, we get self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of license. Paul usually writes against legalism, but here he writes against license.

There are a number of controversies in this book, mostly stemming from the existence of another letter sent before this one that we do not have (called “Corinthians A”), and another one after this one but before 2nd Corinthians (called “Corinthians B”). These letters are not included in the canon and were clearly not inspired or meant by the Holy Spirit to be passed down. It does help explain some of the very specific-seeming instructions Paul gives.

Overall, the letter is a call to incarnational unity, shedding the divisions and factions created by intellectual elitism and pride in favor of the unity that Christ calls us to and gives us the power to attain.

–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 1:1-3

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