God’s Proclamation among the Nations

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Transcript:

I preached just a few weeks ago on Philippians chapter 1 on a different part, but I want to look at this this morning. This is the, unless God shows me something else, this is the last installment in the series I’ve been preaching, the Lord of the Nations, about God’s sovereignty and how He works through sometimes the chaos that we see in our lives. And I hope that if you’re like me, as I’ve been studying this, I’ve known about the sovereignty of God for a long time.

I was raised in church, knew that God could do anything, knew that God knows everything. You know, all these things, known about the character of God, but as I’ve studied this a little more, things have begun to fall into place, begin to make sense a little more, in my own mind at least, about why things happen around us the way they do. That doesn’t mean I necessarily have specific answers for God.

Why did X, Y, and Z happen in my life today? But I can at least see a little more in the grand scheme of things, the grand scheme of things, God at work because of the principles that He works toward. And we’ve talked about those just to recap.

We’ve talked about God working for His own glory. We’ve talked about God working for our redemption. We’ve talked about God working for our chastisement.

Last week we talked about God working for our preservation. And this morning we’re going to talk about God working for the proclamation of His gospel. There are probably more that we can see in Scripture.

As a matter of fact, I challenge you to look through the Scriptures and see what you can find in there, things that God says, this is what I’m working toward, this is what I’m up to. I would challenge you to look for those things. But I’ve seen these five things as I’ve worked on this study, and things start to make a little more sense to me.

There’s a commercial at home for one of the talk radio stations. they have on Sunday mornings they have a preacher. I’ve not listened to the show because the commercial by itself irritates me.

But the commercial says it’s got the preacher coming on and he’s promoting his show and it says, what is God up to? Does he have something in mind or is the world a soap opera and God merely a spectator? He says, call in and we’ll talk.

And I don’t know. For all I know, the guy could be completely orthodox, completely correct in his thinking, and he’s just trying to put people in, and then when they listen to the show, he says, yeah, absolutely, God has something in mind. God has a plan here.

The commercial just drives me nuts. But I know there are a lot of people that think that way. Yeah, God’s just a spectator here.

Does God have something in mind? And we need to know, as we’ve covered the last few weeks and as we’ll cover them today, We may not ever understand the entirety of God’s plan, but we need to know that God has things in mind. God has plans that He’s working toward.

And when we begin to see some of the general principles that He’s working toward, the chaos of the world just makes so much more sense, that things are not happening by random chance. Some things are happening because God causes them. Some things are happening because God allows us to cause them, but God is always at work either through His direct action or through His dealing with our circumstances.

And Paul knew this in Philippians chapter 1. We’re going to look at verses 12 through 20 this morning. It says, But I would ye should understand, brethren, he’s telling the church at Philippi, he wants them to understand, I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel, so that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace and in all other places.

And many of the brethren in the Lord waxing confident by my bonds are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Some indeed preach Christ, even of envy and strife, and some also of goodwill. The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely supposing to add affliction to my bonds.

That comma is very important because it means the opposite, if you leave that comma out. Not sincerely supposing to add affliction to my bonds, but the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defense of the gospel. What then, notwithstanding in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached, and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.

For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, according to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death. And then in verse 21, he goes on in a passage I preached just a few weeks ago to talk about for me to live as Christ and to die as gain, and talks about giving up his life for the cause of Christ. But I want to stop there at verse 20 and talk to you this morning about God being at work to proclaim his gospel among the nations of the world. And we see this here that Paul talks about God having been at work already, the things which have happened.

And he says God is at work here. And this reminds me every time I read this passage, he says that the things which have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel. And it makes me think, if you remember the kids’ game, or it may not even be just a kids’ game, do you remember the game Yahtzee?

Sorry, that’s a little distracting while I’m talking. I used to love the game Yahtzee when I was a kid. And I brought this to, it’s not actually dice, I forgot to bring some and try finding dice in a church on a Sunday morning.

I remembered I needed some, and I went out looking. I flew down the hall, and the first person I saw was Michelle. I said, do you know where I can find some dice?

She kind of looked at me funny. She said, are we gambling this morning? No, we’re not gambling this morning.

I just kind of wanted to make you think about that game. I loved that game. I used to play with my mom when I was younger, but it’s been years since then.

You shake the dice up in the cup. It sounds just like that. You shake it up real good because I guess the harder you shake it, the better they fall out for you.

But then you throw them, and I’m not going to throw these, but you throw them out and different combinations of numbers are worth different points and you’ve got to figure out which one works the best way to get you the most points. And I used to love that. But when you’re playing it, it just feels so random.

I mean, when we’re talking about something being random or chance, we talk about it being a roll of the dice. because that just seems like random chance, doesn’t it? At Yahtzee or whatever, I don’t even know what else you play with dice.

She said something about gambling, and I was thinking, I don’t know offhand what games use dice. Anyway, I guess I’ve led a sheltered life. But you roll the dice, and it seems so random and so much chance when they fall out.

And when he talked about the things that have happened, he said these things have fallen out under the furtherance of the gospel. And from our human standpoint, yeah, it does seem random and chaotic. But even when you roll dice, there are things that philosophers argue over whether it’s true or not, but there’s a thing called the law of averages.

That even these combinations of the dice that are hard to make over so many throws of the dice, they say, on average, this combination will fall out so many times. And so it’s not really random chance. It’s just each throw, it’s random whether it’ll be that time or not, but you will eventually, the law of averages says, you will eventually get that.

And you’ll eventually get this and this and this in so many proportions. You’ve got a one-sixth of a chance of rolling a number one when you throw out a die. It’s not so random when you look at it that way.

There’s some order at work here. From our finite view, our human perspective, it looks like everything is completely random. But when you understand how all the math, and I don’t pretend to understand all the math, But when you understand how all of it works, there’s some order here.

And God is not bound by our finite perspective, is He? He’s not bound by our human limitations. And so Paul can say, just as we would, these things have fallen out, even understanding that to God they’ve not fallen out.

They were placed that way. And yet to Him and to us, in our limitation, it looks like these things have just happened by random chance. But they didn’t.

God was at work already. And so he says, I want you to understand, brethren, that the things which have happened unto me have fallen out, not just by random chance, but they’ve fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel. The things that have happened to me have happened in such a way that the gospel has been advanced.

And just by qualifying his statement here and saying, rather unto the furtherance of the gospel, we can see that God is actually at work in what he’s doing. We look back at some of the story, and I realize it’s a letter. There’s not much of a story because he’s teaching principles here.

But if we go back and look at the life of Paul and what led him to these things, as we’ve done with some of the Old Testament characters we’ve talked about. We can see God at work, and I want to take you back through that just real quick before we move on with the letter and let you know what is going on here. Because I’m a firm believer that we do ourselves a disservice if we just teach the Bible piecemeal. That doesn’t mean we have to go straight through verse by verse in order, but the Bible didn’t start making real sense to me.

Even though I was raised in church, I learned all the Bible stories, learned Jonah and the whale, Noah and the ark, Moses and the ark, Moses and the red sea. Learned all these things. David and Goliath.

Somebody asked that as a trick question at school one time, which came first, Moses and the ark or Noah and the ark? And they thought it was a trick question to answer Noah and the ark. Well, yeah, or no, which came second?

You say Moses and the ark. No, there was no Moses and the ark. Oh, yes, there was.

He was put in that Ark of Bullrushes, and also there was the Ark of the Covenant. So anyway, that has nothing to do with it. But I began to understand the Bible.

I began to understand the Bible so much more when he was our youth pastor at the time, but has grown to be a friend of mine over the years, took us through a study of an Old Testament survey and then a New Testament survey with it, not teaching every detail of the Bible, but showing how the stories fit together in what order. and suddenly when you begin to realize, oh, this is what was going on in Daniel’s world, he didn’t live at the same time as David, and this is what was going on in his world, it makes sense why people did the things that they did. And the Bible just starts to come alive because it’s not just a collection of fairy tale stories, it’s one seamless history of God at work.

And so rather than just tell you the, here’s what’s going on in Paul’s world, what led him up to this point? We left off last week talking about Esther and her being the queen of Persia, And the Persians had taken over the Babylonians during Daniel’s time period. So we left off with the Persians being in charge.

Well, eventually, God allowed and God caused the king of Persia to send the Jews back to Israel. They were allowed to go home from this 70 years of captivity. That’s what God had promised all along was that they’d get to go home, that this chastisement was not forever.

And so they went home, and we don’t ever see again that they turned to idolatry the way they had before so many times. Now, they did other wicked things, but we don’t see them turning to that. It’s like God finally got their attention in that regard.

But they go through the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah, Malachi being the last book of the Old Testament. He writes about they’d gone off into other sins. The priests were corrupt, and they were encouraging people to marry outside of the nation of Israel when God had said no, and they were being bought and sold.

They were just corrupt. Sometimes religious leaders get corrupt and have to be called to account, and that was one of these cases. That’s why I always tell you, don’t believe it just because I tell you.

Make sure it’s in here. And after that, God just stopped speaking through the prophets for 400 years. Stopped speaking to them.

Gave Israel a little time to let the things soak in that they’d heard already. And Israel, even though they were back in their land, they were a puppet state. They were controlled by outside countries.

And along came somebody that we know from history named Alexander the Great. And he came swarming out of Greece and took over the entire known world. He was in charge of the Jews and in charge of Jerusalem, but through a series of events he did not attack them.

Now some of the things I’m telling you right here are not found in the Bible because they’re written in the 400 years that God did not speak through the prophets, but we know them from history. Alexander the Great took over, and Greek influence was all over the place, and many of the Greeks converted to Judaism, and many of the Jews kept their religion but took on Greek culture, and there was this mixing that took place in Israel and throughout the known world. And that’s important because Paul later on is a Jew, but he lives up in Turkey instead of Israel.

And part of that happened because of Alexander the Great and all the mixing that took place. Alexander dies, and his four generals split his empire. One general took Egypt, one general took Syria, another general here, another general here.

But the two that focused on Israel were Egypt and Syria. And the Egyptian general was in charge of Israel at first and took over. There was a war where the Syrian general Antiochus Epiphanes, or the descendant of him, he was the king, he came in and he took over Israel from the Egyptian Greeks.

He came and took it over. And the Jews didn’t like him because he had gotten rid of the priesthood God set up, and he basically sold it to the highest bidder and said, you can be the high priest. When he went off to war with the Egyptian Greeks, their word came back that he had been killed in battle, and the Jews were so excited they threw parties in the streets. And he heard this, and he got angry.

So he came back and did the worst thing he could do to the Jews. He came in, and he set himself up in the temple as God, and he sacrificed a pig on the altar. Just about the worst thing you could do to the Jews was to go into their holy temple, and this unclean animal slaughter it on the altar as an offering, and then to scatter pig residue on the entire temple so everything was defiled.

This caused them to rebel against Antiochus Epiphanes. And one of the leaders down the line of the Jewish rebellion said, we need some help here, and he saw a young up-and-coming nation in the west called Rome. And he got Roman support and alliance, and they gradually became more and more entangled with Rome because of what they had done until the Romans came in and took over.

And so we see Paul here as a Roman citizen and a Jew from Turkey who now comes to Jerusalem, meets with the apostles. We know who Paul is. That’s what led him to this point where suddenly he’s a Roman Jew from a Greek part of the world and he’s now in prison because the Christians had caused trouble with the Jews or the Jews claimed they did and the Romans, if anything, wanted order.

The Romans found the Jews hard to control anyway, and when the Christians came along and the Jews got upset, they said, okay, then we’re going to clamp down on the Christians. And so Paul, in the book of Philippians, is writing from prison, or from house arrest in one of the palaces in Rome. That’s a lot of time span to cover.

That’s about 500 years we’re talking about, but that kind of gives you a brief idea of why Paul is in the predicament that he’s in. So why is it important to go back through all that boring history? The reason it’s important is because Paul says the things that have happened have fallen out for the furtherance of the gospel.

The things that have happened unto him have fallen out for the furtherance of the gospel. The very fact that he is where he is, the very fact that he’s in prison, is related to all of these historical events that have gone on. And as a matter of fact, the gospel would never have spread the way it did in the early days if it had not been for all the events that transpired and caused the Roman Empire to come up.

Now, if I’d lived back then, I wouldn’t have been a fan of the Roman Empire. I’m sure Paul was not a fan of the Roman Empire, even though he was a Roman citizen. But the fact is, the gospel wouldn’t have been able to spread if it hadn’t been for the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire wouldn’t have come along if it hadn’t been for the Jewish revolt, which wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the war between the two generals. And that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Alexander the Great. So it all goes back.

the reason the gospel wouldn’t have spread is because back then, all the countries were constantly fighting and hated each other, and there was no real going between borders, at least not safely, and you were really in danger if you wanted to travel long distances. But when the Romans came in and set up order, and they set up roads, and they set up commerce, suddenly you could go from Baghdad to Spain in safety because the Romans had set it up that way. They had set up order.

So Christianity kind of used the Roman system against it. We use their roads and their common language and their security to operate within their borders. And as a result, people went out from Jerusalem in every which way, went out from Antioch in every which way.

And Paul was one of those people. And the gospel spread and spread and spread. And so Paul said, the things that have happened unto me have fallen out unto the furtherance of the gospel.

It seems so random that the Romans took over when they did, or that Paul would convert when he did. And yet God was at work making things possible. for the first time in history, for the ideas of the Christians to spread from continent to continent.

That would not have happened if Christ had come 500 years earlier. If Christ had come 600 years earlier, he could have still died on the cross for our sins, but the time was not right for the message of the gospel to spread like it did. You’d have had to deal with warring factions and fights and not being able to cross borders, and God worked it out that the gospel was able to spread at just the right time.

It’s amazing to think about that. Think about the spread of the gospel in our own country. If Arkansas and Oklahoma and Texas and Missouri, if we all hated each other outside of the football field, and you couldn’t cross state lines, or you’d be in danger of arrest and torture, and just because I came from Oklahoma, the police would not want me here, and I couldn’t come and preach to you this morning.

Some of you may think, oh, that’d be nice enough. I couldn’t come over here and preach to you. It would be, if it was like those times, it would be a suicide mission.

And yet we’ve got the federal government, which with all of its problems that it has, has one thing going for it. The states all work together to some extent, all get along. And we’re able to go across borders and share ideas and trade with each other and all these things.

That was what the Roman Empire was to the ancient world. And so Paul says, all these things that have happened, they’re not random. They’re for the furtherance of the gospel.

In verse 13, he says, So that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace and in all other places. I want us to look at these first two verses real quick. He says his bonds are made manifest in the palace and in all other places.

First thing I want us to see about God working for the proclamation of his gospel is that God places us to proclaim his gospel in unexpected places and to unexpected people. By this time, even though the Roman Empire had made it possible to spread the gospel, they still didn’t like it. And it was possible, you know, the other countries wouldn’t have liked it either.

But now you could cross borders and travel freely to do what they didn’t like instead of having to fight your way through. But God places us in order to spread his gospel, to proclaim his gospel to unexpected people in unexpected places. Here Paul is in a palace of one of the governors of the Roman Empire.

And he’s taken this message that they hate, that the Roman government hates and doesn’t want to hear, and he’s taken it into one of their seats of power. See, it may seem random that, or by chance, that God would, or I’m sorry, that he would get arrested, that he would be set to go on trial, and fearing the outcome, he would say, as a Roman citizen, I demand to go and speak to Caesar, and being told, we would have let you go if you hadn’t made this appeal, but now you’ve made the appeal, we have to send you to talk to Caesar. That sounds like bad luck, doesn’t it?

We would have just let you go. But now he’s being sent off to Rome into trial where eventually he will, history tells us, he will be beheaded. Sounds like bad luck, bad circumstances.

And yet he was placed under house arrest in one of the palaces in Rome. And we know from history that some of the people that worked there, some of the people that worked for the highest people in the Roman government trusted Christ. That wouldn’t have happened if God hadn’t placed Paul to spread the gospel someplace unexpected. Nobody would expect the gospel to be heard in the halls of the royal palaces, the imperial palaces.

Nobody would expect the members of the guard. Nobody would expect the house servants of the emperor to become Christians. That could never happen because the Roman Empire was so anti-Christian.

That could never happen unless God put Paul there. And yet he said these things so that my bonds in Christ, not just the fact that he’s bound there, but he’s bound there because of Christ, are manifest, are shown in all the palace and in all other places. God puts us, God places us to share the gospel with unexpected people in unexpected places.

I remember back in school, ninth grade as a matter of fact, there was a kid that I had sort of been friends with earlier years. He came back from summer vacation and told people he was a Wiccan. You know what a Wiccan is?

It’s a witchcraft, different kinds of it, but it’s basically a witchcraft belief that worships nature. And he didn’t come back and said, I’m a Wiccan. Got to be kidding.

Some people just, not all of them. I know there are some people who really believe those things, but especially teenagers and kids, they’ll sometimes do that as a way to rebel, as a way to get attention. And I thought, surely that’s what.

Well, he really was one who believed it, even though I don’t think he minded the attention too, because he was kind of on the fringes of not everybody liked him, not everybody talked to him. But he came and said, I’m a Wiccan. My goodness, hearing him talk about Wicca and talking about the goddess and the goddess made me do this, I was at my wits end, especially when my science teacher sat me next to the kid.

God forbid I should talk about Jesus in science class. God forbid I should talk about, well, God wouldn’t forbid it, but it’s an expression. Forbid it that I should talk about the book of Genesis in science class, but I got to hear all about the goddess.

It drove me crazy. I wanted to strangle the kid. Is that un-Christian to say?

That’s probably un-Christian to say. but it’s the truth. I wanted to strangle him.

I wanted to strangle him with his wick of beads. Another friend of mine who was not necessarily always prone to spiritual insight pulled me aside one day and said, Do you think it’s by accident that you are sitting next to him? I said, What do you mean?

I knew what she meant, and I didn’t want to understand what she meant because I knew what my responsibility was. I said, What do you mean? She said, well, you’re only the leader of such.

. . I was in charge of one of the Christian groups on campus, and everybody knew it.

And she said, you’re only the leader of such and such group. You’re only one of the most well-known Christians in this school, and you think it’s by accident that you’re sitting next to him. You’re right.

As much as I hated it, as much as God had put me there to talk to him about Christ. Now, I wish I had the opportunity to go back and do it differently. I might have done it a little bit differently. Because I’ve told you before, my approach used to be to try to argue people to Christ. It doesn’t work.

But I tried to talk to him about Christ, and hopefully someday some of the seeds that I and some others planted will come to fruition. But I should have realized up front, God placed me there to talk to him about Christ. That was not by accident that I was set next to that annoying kid. God did that.

God puts us where we can, God puts us around people all the time. Unexpected places, unexpected people for what? For the furtherance of the gospel.

Tell people about Christ who loved and died for them. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The second thing that I see in this passage that we need to realize is that God opens doors for us to proclaim his gospel.

He doesn’t just put us near the people. He doesn’t just put us in proximity and say, there you go, it’s all you now. Verse 12, it says, but I would, you should understand, brethren, that the things which have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel.

Like I said, God was already at work making it possible for Paul to do the things he did. God was already at work hundreds of years before, not just for Paul but for all Christians, making it possible to further the gospel. God had been at work in Paul’s life for many years leading up to that fateful day on the road to Damascus when he called Saul at the time who was persecuting the Christians and basically told him in a roundabout way, your mind.

And Saul converted, trusted Christ. And God worked in his heart, and God just seemed to open doors for Paul wherever he went to talk to people. God will not just put us in proximity to the people. God will not just put us in odd situations, odd places, odd people.

God will lead us to odd people. But he will make an opening. If we are looking for it, if we’re alert to it, God will make an opening where we’ll be able to share the gospel.

His bonds in Christ were manifest to these people. You want to see an opening to the gospel. Look at the life of Paul sometimes when he’s sitting in chains.

He’s sitting in these dungeons, these Roman dungeons, under threat of execution, and you see the spirit that he has about him. There are stories about him singing songs, praising God in chains, about him refusing to run away when he had the chance to escape. You want to see an opening to the gospel.

Let people see the effect that the gospel has had your life. Because more than one person talked to Paul about his God and about his Savior as a result of the way that Paul lived. God created those opportunities.

God opened those doors for Saul to talk about it, for Paul to talk about it, and he took it. God didn’t just put him in the prison and say, share the gospel with people. He gave Paul the opportunity to escape, and Paul didn’t.

And Paul led the jailer to Christ just as he was about to fall on his sword. God created an opening. God’s not just going to put you next to somebody and say, there you go.

If we’re looking for it and we’re expecting it and we’re praying for it, God will give us an opening to talk to people about Christ. We don’t have to be car salesmen and figure out. . .

nothing against car salesmen, by the way. Is anybody here a car salesman or was a car salesman? Okay.

I’ve said that at other churches and I need to find another metaphor. We don’t need to be. .

. but we don’t have to be people who know how to read everybody’s wants and needs and figure out how we’re going to sell it to them. What’s it going to take to get you into the gospel today?

What’s it going to take to get you to trust Christ today? I’m going to write down a figure. We don’t have to do that.

We look for the opportunities God presents. We don’t have to force it. We pray for the opportunities, pray for God to send us people, and then watch because God will open doors for us to proclaim his gospel.

The third thing is that God allows us to sacrifice in order to proclaim his gospel. Oh, goody, God allows us to sacrifice. Yeah, God allows us to sacrifice.

Sometimes we think as Christians we are exempt from trouble, that because we’re following God, everything should be wonderful and easy and there should be no problems at all. We’ve done people a greater disservice by telling them, come to Christ and your life will be perfect than by anything else, I think, that we could teach. Because we tell people, come to Christ, your life will be perfect, you’ll be happy from that point on, And they come to Christ and a crisis comes up and they say, well, it must not be real. Christ must not be real because they told me I’ll trust Christ and it’ll be fine.

And it’s not. No, we’re allowed to suffer for the furtherance of the gospel. Not just we suffer and we suffer as a result of going and telling people.

Edna handed me a booklet today. I hope you don’t mind me telling that. It was a booklet from Voice of the Martyrs.

And I’d never seen this particular booklet, but I’m very familiar with Voice of the Martyrs. I look forward to looking at it. But there are Christians today that are dying, that are being tortured, that are being separated from their families just because they go and tell somebody about Jesus Christ. God allows them to suffer for the furtherance of the gospel.

And you know what? So many of those people willingly suffer. They know what they sign up for.

God doesn’t do it to be mean. God doesn’t torture us. But God allows us to sacrifice some t

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