Well, good morning.

That window burns you up. I’ve got to get some blinds in there or something. My backside’s on fire right now. Oh, it’s hot. Hey, it’s good to be with you this morning. If you’re a guest, it’s good to have you with us as well. We are going to be in the book of Philippians.

Philippians chapter 1, verses 3 through 11. If you have your Bibles and want to turn with me there. There, Philippians chapter 1, verses 3 through 11.

And here’s what Paul says to the church at Philippi. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I’m sure of this, that He who began a good work in you, will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart. For you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge, and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, the glory and praise of God.

If I can count up all of the friends I have, and I think like real lifelong friends, probably can only do that on one hand. You know, if you think back over your life, you can probably remember, you know, that neighborhood kid you hung out with when you were young, and your grade school friends, and maybe people you were close to in college. But there are a lot of people that if it wasn’t for social media, you’d have no idea where they are and what they’re doing, and it wouldn’t affect your life at all. You probably would rarely think about them, and they would rarely think about you. And I think terms like Facebook friends does a great disservice to the word friend, doesn’t it? I can think of two. Two or three guys I know who I wonder every once in a while, I wonder how they’re doing. Man, that person was really there for me. That’s a real friend. And I imagine if you thought of it, you’d only have less than a few of those kinds of friends as well.

Paul is talking about what it looks like to live together as disciples. Last week we said if Jesus was in the room and you’re in the presence of Jesus, what would a true disciple want from him? What would you say? What would you say to him? What would you ask him? Well, in the same way, I think it’s a telltale sign. What do you look like? What do you live like around the other people that claim to be disciples? That says a lot about your Christian faith as well. And how authentic is it, the way that you do or don’t live in and with Christian community? So Paul has a lot to say all over the place, but certainly in Philippians about fellowship in Christ. What does it mean to be in the fellowship? What does it mean to be in the fellowship of Christ?

Verse 3 again, he says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I’m sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ.

So what is Philippi? Where is this? Well, Philippi, it’s a region of Macedonia, and Philippi is an important city. It’s a rich city. Paul writing to the Philippians, he’s writing to a bunch of people who have the privileged status of Roman citizen. So of the entire Roman Empire, Philippi, they got to experience all the privileges of being a Roman citizen. They weren’t just, you know, a slave state. So they love that. You were proud of your Roman citizenship. It gave you privileges in the empire. All together. So that’s who he’s writing. These people who have an identity as citizens of Philippi, and they’re proud of it. But Paul says, I’m writing all you saints in Philippi. So this is a letter to everybody and all you people in Philippi, you need to pay attention. It’s not a letter to just, you know, elders, deacons, because he says with. It just means alongside. So if you’re an elder deacon, great. This is something that everybody needs to hear in Rome.

We have the Roman citizenship. In Philippi. And Paul writes to them because he really expects these Philippian Christians to consider a certain bond that they have with Paul greater than that Roman citizenship. As much as they would have loved it, Paul expects, hey, we’ve got a bond that’s better than Roman citizenry. So much so, he says, this deep bond causes him every time he thinks about the Philippians, he’s got to go to the Lord in prayer. And in prayer, he’s thankful for him and he gets overwhelmed with joy when he thinks about the Philippians. These Philippian Christians. So it’s not a light bond. It’s a deep bond. It’s a meaningful bond. And really, if you want to think about it, it requires a great deal of Paul’s time. Because in their absence, he’s thinking of them. He’s thanking God for them. He’s overwhelmed with joy because of them. So what is this deep bond? Well, he says he’s got thankfulness and joy because of their partnership in the Gospel. Now, I don’t know. I don’t know what you think of when you think of partnership.

You can think of two entrepreneurs. They went into business together. They’re trying to make some money. You can think of a law firm and two lawyers or they’re partners in a law firm. You hear that? You can think of old school Bonnie and Clyde, you know, partners in crime trying to knock banks over. So I think you can get a lot of different images when you hear the word partner. But if we’re going to be really, really nuanced and to tell you what exactly does Paul mean to them when he says you’re partners with me. The word that it best translates to really for us is fellowship.

Fellowship is the word. The Philippians and Paul, they have this intimate, eternal sharing and something far greater than any two people could rally around. It’s a rich communion in a knowledge they share and an experience they share. What is it? So what’s this incredible bond fellowship in? Well, Paul says it’s in the Gospel. They together have a knowledge of this, this man, this God-man Jesus Christ who lived for them, who died for them, who rose over the grave for them and He’s taken away their sin, He’s taken away their shame. So they have this incredible knowledge of what Jesus did for them, but they also have the experience of being called into the Christian life to live for Jesus. So this is a very, very tight bond that they have together. They are, if you will, and Paul uses this phrase elsewhere in Philippians, they’re citizens of heaven, on earth. That’s what they are together. That’s what Christians are together. They’re knowing and they’re living for Jesus together now. It’s a deep, supernatural fellowship around the person of Jesus for the commission Christ has given to them. And Paul knows, hey, these Philippians, they’re not easy come, easy go Christians because he says, hey, I thank God for you from the first until now. So all the way back when Paul went there as a missionary, and he prayed, and he prayed, and he prayed, and he planted that church all the way up to the present time, and Paul’s sitting in prison. He said, you guys have always been faithful. You’ve always been so faithful to the gospel. You’ve always been so faithful to me in my struggle and in my imprisonment. So this is just a big, warm, ah, us kind of thing here that Paul has. But Paul says something after that that seems out of place and it’s not. And I want you to see why it’s not. Paul says, and I’m sure of this, he who began a good work in you is going to bring it to completion at the day of Jesus. So when Jesus comes back, I know that God’s going to do that. Well, what does that have to do with this? So we were talking about fellowship among believers, and now Paul just makes this statement, hey, God who saved you is going to finish that work and we’re all going to be happy and eternal together. That seems like two different things, and it’s not two different things at all. It’s very much the same thing. While that statement’s true, the huge inference here for Paul that we need to catch is this. God so often uses the fellowship as the means to bring us to completion. So there is no work of completion until the end if we’re outside of fellowship with believers. It’s very much so God’s intention for every Christian.

So true disciples are submitted to the Lordship of Christ, but true disciples are also in fellowship with other disciples. First thing I want us to see here is true disciples have strong affection for other disciples.

Strong affection for other disciples. Look at verse 7. He says, It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart for you are all partakers with me of grace both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.

For God is my witness, and it is how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.

So step back and think about the Roman Greco world in which Paul’s living and Paul’s writing this. A totally different world than you and I live in. So it’s the Roman Greco world because it’s Greek culture, but the Romans are in control. That’s the world Jesus lived in. And in this Roman Greco world, the Roman Empire demanded order and they demanded allegiance. That’s the problem. That’s the problem if you’re a Christian. It’s a problem because you would not bow the knee to Caesar to say, you’re one of my gods. That’s what you had to do. You could believe whatever you wanted to believe, but you also must submit to the deity of the emperor. Well, Christians can’t do that. Jesus is their king alone. Secondly, Roman culture valued pluralism in religion. They valued having many gods and fusing religions together. That was something that just, was done. So you see these Christians come along and they’re saying, hey, we’re not submitting to Caesar as God and also we got the one true God and all your gods are false. I mean, that’s what you’re doing in this Roman Empire that has an iron fist literally over the entire known world. And if you were subjected to a loyalty test, that would have been your life. One governor of a province, Pliny, he writes to the emperor Trajan, when an informant accuses him of a crime, he accuses people of being Christians. He questions the accused. He gives them three chances to deny their faith. If they still profess Christianity, Pliny says he would execute them.

So Christianity for Paul in writing to these Philippians, it’s not, hey, these are my personal beliefs. That’s kind of how we talk about religion today in America, don’t we? Well, this is just my beliefs. You know, religion is very private for me. People say things like that. There’s no such thing in Paul’s world. There really is no such thing at all. To identify, to identify with Christ was a public statement. Hey, I’ve got the one true God. So it was a self-imposed exile. It was a kind of expense, really, and the expense was friendliness with the empire and friendliness with the culture at large. You would have been persecuted socially, and if you made the wrong government official, it was your life.

I want you to kind of put yourself in that environment. If that’s the environment, if that’s the environment in which you live, and a lot of people do live today in our world, how much more does Christian fellowship mean?

And I think because we don’t live in that environment today, we can’t see fellowship for what it should be. But think about that. It means a lot to you, doesn’t it? A great deal. These are the only people who believe what you believe. These are the only people encouraging you to continue to believe it. These are the only people trying to give you hope to keep on. These are the only people there for you in your suffering, and you in theirs. So this is so much more than, hey, it’s my buddy from church. I see him on Sunday. These people are very much so like your lifeline every day. So it makes perfect sense that Paul would use this strong language, doesn’t it? These people were his family.

Deeper than blood does obedience run. For the long haul, they were in league with Paul. Paul says, I hold you in my heart. You don’t say that to people that you’re like, eh, right? He says, I hold you in my heart. I yearn for you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And he gives the reason why he feels this way. He just says it a different way. He sandwiches it in between those two affectionate statements. I hold you in my heart. I yearn for you with the affection of Christ Jesus. In between, he says, because you are partakers of grace with me. Well, what grace?

Well, the grace to believe that truth that’s difficult to believe, and the grace to suffer for it when necessary.

Someone once asked D.L. Moody, hey, D.L. Moody, do you have what it takes to be martyred? And he said, I don’t, but I can only hope in the moment the Lord would give me a martyr’s grace. A martyr’s grace. So these people were living by God’s grace in that kind of environment together.

So I want to say this to you this morning. Truly, when we come to the Gospel, if we truly come to the Gospel, it’s all we have.

We’ve said, say goodbye to the world. Truly, when you come to the Gospel, the people of the Gospel, they are all you have. They are all you have left.

Becoming like Jesus, the fight to live for Jesus in the midst of a hostile world, it is eased by and made possible by the gift of fellowship. You cannot go it alone. You cannot do the Lone Ranger thing in Christianity. It’s an impossibility. So yes, is it God’s grace that saves you? And is it God’s grace that grows you? And is it God’s grace that’s going to get you to eternity? Absolutely it is. But you’ve got to see the practical means that God says, hey, this is what I’m using to get you there. Don’t ignore it. These people, these affections, their suffering, your suffering, the Spirit uses us to keep one another faithful in the fight. We are a gracious gift to one another to do what’s impossible. And it is impossible, right? Live like heaven on earth. And it’s hard. Anyone says that the Christian life isn’t hard, they’re lying or they don’t know what the Christian life is. The Christian life is hard. It’s very hard. Your flesh, every moment of every day pulling you away from Jesus, the world speaking against it, the enemy hot on your face. It’s very difficult to live like that. The world aggressively doesn’t want the truth of the Gospel to flourish. And so often they don’t want the people to flourish. Propagate it.

Paul lived in a very, very difficult environment. I think we would all have to say, wouldn’t we? In which you had to share the Gospel and live for Christ. But he’s not the only one. Church history is littered with stories of incredible trials of faith. Incredible trials of faith, but also of genuine fellowship that saw people through those great trials. So it’s not the story of a godly person. It’s the story of God’s people. And in a, in a great variety of ways, I think sharing the Gospel, loving the Gospel, being the people of God, it does mean you suffer. Will you and I suffer physically in our time? I don’t know. I think it’d be foolish to say that we never would. But I think you at least look at our context and I think we could easily say orthodox, historic Christianity is very much so under scrutiny and has been for a very long time. From the exclusivity of Jesus, believing Jesus is God and He’s the only way to Heaven. From believing in the Holy Spirit. From believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. This truly is God’s Word. From the sanctity of life to morals, to marriage, all the way to literally gender, the literal definition of what you and I are as God has created us. I mean, all these things are constantly, constantly, constantly under attack. And friends, I want to say to you, when you live outside of fellowship, you are so vulnerable to do one of two things. Abandon the Gospel altogether. Or do what a lot of churches are doing today. Let’s just redefine what the fellowship stands for. Let’s just do that. Let’s just change what we’re about and try to make people happy. This is nothing other than bending the knee to Caesar and it ruins and destroys the community.

But genuine Christian fellowship, if we’re in it, it will mean that we’re affectionate for one another. We’re affectionate for one another. Because we know, hey, these people, they’re committed to the same difficult truths that I am. And these people, they’re willing to suffer with me and for me because of this Gospel. I see what Paul’s saying. I need to live in this kind of community. I don’t need to go to church. Like, church is good. I’m glad you’re here. Keep coming. But it’s more than a service. It’s more than just throwing money at stuff. It’s more than passively agreeing. It’s being committed to Christ and being committed to God. And if we’re committed to Christ, you know what a real commitment to Christ is? It’s a commitment to His church. Don’t you think if Jesus spilled His blood for the people of God, they would mean more than these passive people you should keep at arm’s length? Of course. A commitment to Christ without a commitment to the church is no commitment at all. You must take on the people of God when you come and surrender to Jesus.

Paul’s yearnings, his holding them in his heart, his affection, those are genuine marks of authentic Christian fellowship. And what it is, is this. It’s a radical, selfless community concerned with other people thriving, other people doing well. It’s a commitment to bear up their suffering so they make it as they will do for you just as much. It’s real fellowship. Real fellowship.

Matthew 12, verse 46.

It says, While He, as Jesus, was still speaking to the people, behold, His mother and His brother stood outside asking to speak to Him. But He replied to the man who told Him, Who is My mother and who are My brothers? And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, Here are My mother and My brothers. Now, was Jesus trying to embarrass His biological mother and His family? His half-brothers? Was that what Jesus was trying to do? No, He wasn’t doing that. He was making a point for the crowds that true fellowship, true family is found in living with, suffering with those people who are on their way to heaven like you. It’s a difficult path and it requires that kind of love and affection to help one another get there. It’s God’s design. You know, during World War II, the enemy tried to find the most effective way to, to weaken the allies and to extract information. And do you know what the most effective tool was?

Solitary confinement.

They found that only after a few days of solitary confinement, most men would give up everything.

I want you to consider this in yourself.

The suffering that God chooses to bring to pass in your life and mine, can we say that we have, genuine Christian fellowship to help us weather it?

Do you have acquaintances? Or do you have joy-inducing Christians at your side?

You know, and I’m not trying to be overbearing and overblown, but I really do believe when you live outside of meaningful Christian fellowship, I think you illegitimize your Christian faith simply because if you took the Bible serious, you would see it as a people, not a person. Immediately after Pentecost, what do you see? It says, and they come together and they sell everything and they give all their stuff to one another and they’re helping the poor and they’re in one another’s houses all the time and they’re eating together and they’re learning together. Like, they literally became this weird spiritual family that was unexplainable. So I do very much so think it’s illegitimate to live outside of fellowship if you’re going to claim to be a Christian. So what do you do? Step outside of yourself. See the people in your church as cherished family that you need. And I feel grateful. I’m not saying this to a bunch of people who are terrible at it. I’m grateful for our church. I’m grateful that we are and we’re becoming a Christ-centered community. I’m thankful for so many of us. I’m thankful for the affection, but it’s something to guard. If you don’t guard it, that’s the kind of thing that easily you lose. Like, I’m busy and I got my own things and I got work and I got this. And I just need to get home and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you end up living this very insulated life and that seems okay until you realize, oh my gosh, life’s difficult and hard and there is an enemy and there is a world and now I’m isolated away from the people of God when I need them the most. So fellowship is something we’re going to constantly talk about. Like living in community, bearing with one another. 59 one another’s in the New Testament. I think that the Bible is trying to say to you, you can’t live in isolation. It will kill your Christian faith. Right?

And just on a super practical level, you know, like we do gather on Sunday mornings and I believe it’s real. That’s real fellowship. We gather throughout the weeks to do stuff. That’s real. Nothing’s stopping you from walking up to somebody else after church and say, hey, you want to start meeting on Wednesday mornings and just check in on one another and pray together and go deeper together. Like nothing’s stopping you from doing that. So I really believe if you pray, Lord, I want this kind of biblical fellowship you’re talking about so I’ll grow. Like the Lord will show you what that looks like. He’s not trying to keep it away from you. You know, it’s just it’s a willingness on your part to surrender to that truth.

All right, verse 9.

Paul goes on to say, and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more

with knowledge and all discernment so that you may approve what is excellent

and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.

So Paul’s got this deep love. I think we’ve established that this affection for all these Philippian Christians. But let’s understand what it’s not. It’s not just nostalgia. Like, oh, those Philippians, those were the golden years when I was in Philippi. You know, like, that’s not what he’s doing. I mean, it’s there and I think he cherishes that. But it also causes him to be forward thinking.

What Paul desires and hopes for the Philippians, he prays for them. You understand? His prayers aren’t that they’ll just be sustained in their adversity now, which that’s a lot and we do need those prayers. He prays for their future. It’s a future-looking objective. Here’s what Paul knows and he’s talking about this. How you and I live our lives and day-to-day now is small and insignificant as we think it may be. It’s not insignificant. What you read, keep you so. So how we are living well or not living well for the Lord, it is tied to eternity. It is tied to the day of judgment. But for Paul, he’s hoping and praying, I want that to come for all of you to a glorious end. Or as Paul says it here, not that you would live your life well, Paul’s saying that you would love well because to live the Christian life well is to love well, right? So how do I love well and what is love? Well, here’s what love is not and we’ve talked about this a little bit before. Love is not just a feeling. Love is first and foremost a commitment to truth. It’s a commitment to a person. It’s a commitment to a relationship. It’s a commitment to a body of doctrine. It’s a commitment to a way of life. No matter what, when love is just feelings, the object of your love will lose your love because you know what? Inevitably, your feelings are going to change. So that’s just not the kind of love the Bible talks about. It’s not the kind of love Paul talks about and certainly it’s not the kind of love that God would define. So Paul prays this. Hey, let your Christian love grow up. If you’re going to make it to that great glorious end, your love, it’s got to abound. It’s got to grow more and more. And how does Paul say your love grows as Christians? He says through knowledge and discernment. That’s how your love grows. So I just want us to connect these dots. Paul’s just making this big windy logical argument here. Think about knowledge with me for a second. The gospel is first of all knowledge. It’s a message. It’s news, right? It’s just news. It’s news that Jesus, who is God, chose to leave heaven and live a perfect sinless life for you and I. He chose to die on the cross for our sins. By the power of God, He was raised up victorious. And if we would place faith in Jesus, the Spirit of God would come in us and give us a new life too. That’s the gospel in a nutshell. So that’s first and foremost, that’s just information you’ve got to process. It’s knowledge. It’s knowledge. You can acknowledge it’s true or you can say it’s false and you blow it off. But if you say, hold on, that’s knowledge and that’s true. That’s good. I need that in my life. That’s immediately going to do what? It’s going to change the way you live. You’re all of a sudden going to start living like, hold on, I can’t live wherever I want to live. There’s this God and He has these eternal laws and only if I’m in His Son Jesus living according to the Spirit will I come out in the end of my life. I’m going to be in an eternity not under God’s judgment. But here’s the thing. If you truly love someone, do you say, here’s what I want to do. I want to know as little about this person as possible. No, that would make for a terrible relationship. Imagine if you and your marriage are like, I love you, honey. And on my wedding day, I’m going to confess to you that I’m going to know you as little as possible. Like that would be horrible, right? So the things you love, you want to grow in your knowledge of. So Paul’s saying, hey, if you want to love people and you want to love God, duh, grow in your knowledge of God. Grow in your knowledge of who He is and what He’s about. So the more you have knowledge, the more you’ll know what it looks like to please Him and not please Him. That’s one piece of the puzzle. Paul says, knowledge by itself, it puffs up, doesn’t build up. In other words, if I just have a body of truths, that’s not necessarily useful unless I know how to weaponize it, which is what? Discernment. So Paul says, all the knowledge you could ever gain in life, it’s useless if you don’t have the Spirit given you and you discernment to know how to apply it to your life, right? There’s a great variety of situations in life which you and I, we’re not going to have the answers. They’re going to be difficult. They’re going to be complex. And I’m not always going to be able just to quote a verse and all my problems go away. I’m going to need like a great spiritual wisdom to know what’s God’s will in this situation. This is a weird one, right? We get in those kind of situations all the time. So when you combine

godly knowledge with godly discernment, it’ll show up. Shape your life to look like Christ, which means you’ll love God and love people. Well, that’s how you abound in love. Does that make sense? It’s a lot, but I think it’s really good if you get to the bottom of it. D.A. Carson, he’s a theologian, he writes this in his book Praying with Paul. He says, Paul’s thought is that there are countless decisions in life where it is not a question of making a straightforward decision between right and wrong. What you need is the extraordinary discernment that helps you perceive how things differ and then make the best possible choice. Love that is shaped and honed by knowledge and moral insight is the absolute requirement for testing and approving what’s best, what’s vital spiritually.

Okay? So work it backwards. How do we become pure and blameless on the day of Christ? Paul said by approving of what’s excellent. How do we approve of what’s excellent? By growing in our love. How do you grow in your love? More godly knowledge, more godly discernment together as a faith family, as a fellowship. That’s how it works.

That’s a lot to pray for yourself every day, isn’t it? And you should be praying that for yourself every day. But let me say this just as well. Don’t be so selfish to pray it for yourself only every day. We’re a fellowship. And the fellowship requires radical selflessness to pray, for one another. We’re not in a club, folks. The people sitting next to you, you’re stuck with them forever. Like we’re going to be together forever. I mean, I think you should think more about that. You know, like his personality, her personality, this or that or whatever. No, like this is your family. Obedience is thicker than blood to the people of God. You get to help home and you get to help them home. And Paul says, hey, one of the most effective ways to really love people well is to pray that they know God. They know God in their head and that trickles down to their heart and the Spirit shows them how to live for Jesus.

You got to recapture the heart of love. What’s the heart of love?

I think you say the heart of love is fear and not like fear, like I’m going to kill you. Fear of like a deep reverence for who God is. It’s knowledge of the holy. Like, oh, that’s who God is. Yet He saved me. Like, I want to know this God and live for this God. Like, that’s love. To be truly surrendered to this great God who could have executed me, but He didn’t. It’s something to live for together as a fellowship.

John Fawcett, he was an influential 18th century theologian, pastor, poet, and hymn writer.

But his first call to a church, it was this poor,

small Baptist church out in the countryside. He and his wife were just in poverty from it. But they just had a fellowship that they loved so much. But he was a great preacher and he was a great theologian in a very, very influential church, Carter’s Lane Church in London. They called Fawcett to come there. So here he’s got his big break, right? And he goes and he preaches his sermon there and they confirm it. And he preaches his farewell address back home at this small country church.

And so that’s the day of and they’re packing up that truck and they’re packing all the stuff up and his wife is weeping and he’s weeping and the people are weeping and he says, unload the truck. We’re staying here. This fellowship is too good for us to abandon it. Now that is an understanding of fellowship, right? That looks very different, I think, from 21st century church context. Like, what’s bigger and better? Like, give me that bigger, better place. Whether that’s just, you know, in life. And it’s not always wrong to advance. But I think if we’re looking with the eyes of God, certainly in terms of the church, like, what is success in God’s eyes? Is it, hey, more people, bigger audience, more fame, more prestige? Or is it, no, we just, it’s like there’s probably not that many Philippians. You know, like there’s not that many there. Like the Bible’s not interested in saying there were 43,000 Philippian Christians. There probably were just a few. You know, so it’s like the Bible says success is just, even if it’s just two of us, like just living together well, like that success is just loving one another well. And it was from that experience that he wrote his most famous hymn, Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.

And I’ll read you a little of it. He says, Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love. The fellowship of kindred minds is light to that above. Before our Father’s throne, we pour out ardent prayers. Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, our comforts and our cares.

Super practical. Super practical. It’s Monday morning and it’s, Lord, I don’t know what Richard’s got going on today, but I’m just praying you’d give him like a desire for knowledge. He’d grow in you. And I don’t know what situations he faces. I don’t even know what he does when he tries to explain it to me, but you know what he does. So I’m just praying that he would have wisdom to look like Jesus today. Like give him some discernment. And, you know, shame. And he’s, you know, being a police officer today, he’s going to be going through some stuff. So I just pray, like, his knowledge would grow and his discernment would grow. Like, how can he look like Jesus like in all of that? And you just pray what Paul prayed. And it’s just like the Spirit testifying in you. Like, this is the stuff we should be doing for him. Like, praying that we grow in our love so we approve of what’s excellent. When you approve of what’s excellent, you’re pure in blameless for the day of Christ.

You’re going to pray.

Are you going to be selfish? You know? And I think you can be unintentionally selfish. But don’t be unintentionally selfish either. Just pray. Ask God to grow your love. And I think if it’s true, it’s true. Like, Lord, I don’t love people like that. Well, pray for God to give you love like that. And He’ll give it to you so that we can be the fellowship He desires us to be.

Verse 11.

He says, If you do all this, you’ll be filled with the fruit of righteousness

that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.

So it means this. If we’re truly in Christian fellowship, friends, there’s going to be an affection there that keeps us going. There’s going to be a certain willingness to suffer together when it’s difficult. There’s a certain pushing there. There’s a love. There’s a loving there that keeps us. There’s a prayer there. There’s a fight in the Spirit there for one another. And it doesn’t mean that you or I saved one another. It means that God was gracious enough to use us in one another’s life to remind us of, keep us looking towards that Jesus who did save us, that Jesus who is righteous. So friends, if you and I will live in this fellowship of Christ together, the promise of the Scriptures is that we will experience the fullness of Christ together. The great day when Christ returns and He separates the goats from the sheep and He judges us. He’ll say, ah, I find these faithful. They were so faithful to push one another to look at me, to be remembered of me, to suffer for me, to believe when it was difficult. Oh, see how they’re full of my righteousness.

Man, this is a great privilege to know this Christ. But how is it a great privilege to fight for and with the other people? If we’re sons and daughters that the Father sent His Son to bleed and die for, if we’re going to be a fellowship together, it means we’ll be full of Christ together. And that’s the great end of following Jesus, isn’t it? God glorified in eternity because all of Jesus’ people look like Jesus.