Loving Others in Thought

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0:00In the early days of new creation, before we launched, we were in the process of gathering people together, of praying, of planning, and on Sundays, our growing group would go around to other churches in our presbytery and worship with them on Sundays, because we didn't have our own service yet. It was encouraging to visit those other churches, to see friends, to introduce people to other people, and it was very helpful, too. Um, obviously different churches have different Sunday liturgies, different things that they do on Sunday when they gather.

0:38They have different music, they have different ministries, but I noticed that each church has its own feel, its own kind of personality, its own vibe, its own culture. So a mission statement is great. It tells you what a church is aiming for. A statement of faith is important. It tells you what a church believes. Those are really important, but they don't answer really another question that people have about a church, and that is, well, what's the church like?

1:13What does it feel like to be a part of this church? That's a church culture question. That's about the ethos of the church, the feel of the church. This is just as important, I feel, as a mission, a vision, value, statement of faith. All of those things are important. We have those things. But the culture of a church, the feel of a church is just as important, because that really impacts a person's experience in the church. And the primary factor that determines a church culture is how people treat each other.

1:49It's one of the biggest things that influences how a church feels, is how people treat each other. So it's no surprise that in the Bible, there are tons of instructions about how people should treat each other, especially in the New Testament, over and over and over, about how God's people specifically ought to relate to each other. So back in the early days of new creation, let me get back to that story. While we were planning, as I began to see this, I decided that it was time then to start cultivating our church culture, to not just let it drift wherever it landed, but to cast a vision, to call us to something, right?

2:30For how this church is going to feel. I thought we should begin to cultivate a healthy church culture together. And so I distilled the New Testament instructions about Christian relationships down to four behaviors. And then I taught through those four things at our monthly vision meetings over the course of four different months. So all of that is a long wind up here for the pitch. And that is for a little sermon series that we're going to be on in the next four weeks, because that was four years ago, teaching through those church values about Christian relationships.

3:05That was four years ago. We have many new people involved, praise God. And meanwhile, our church culture is still being formed, church. The clay is still pliable, right? God's fingerprints are still being put on this church. And it's still being formed and shaped. So we're going to review these four qualities of a healthy church culture and Christian relationships in a little four-week sermon series. Four weeks, just a little one. Last one was 27 weeks.

3:38This is four. This is called Loving Each Other. Four-week sermon series on Christian relationships to help form a healthy church culture. It's called Loving Each Other. Now, each week we're going to use a passage from Paul's letters. I hate to disappoint Heather, but this is the only week we're going to be on Philippians. Don't worry. I hope that we come back soon. Maybe even next year we'll go through Philippians. I would love to go through Philippians together.

4:07But today is going to be Philippians, and then we're going to hop around to different passages from Paul's letters for the next three weeks. But each of these four passages, I was looking through there, and I wanted to find the words that were in common. And would you, you know, lo and behold, just like I expected, there were two words in common in all four of the passages that I ended up picking based on these four qualities of Christian relationships.

4:32Agape and alelion. Alelon. I said that wrong. Alelon means one another. And agape, you probably know, means love. So love one another. But agape is a certain kind of love. Agape is a selfless love, a self-sacrificing love. Agape is the love that we all want to get. But when we think about giving it, we are suddenly confronted by our own self-concern, our own interests, our insecurity. In that moment, we have to look to God if we're going to move forward with agape love for each other.

5:18Agape love is inherently towards the other person. We have to look to God because we have to rest in God's love, and then we are empowered to love like Him. It can't be found on our own. We have to look to Him and be empowered by Him. So let's turn to Philippians 2.

5:38Go through these four principles together. The first one's today. This is God's Word for us. And I hope that this is just another drop in the bucket, another deposit into building a healthy church culture with you all together. Because each one of us influences the church culture. I hope you all know that. Each one of us has an influence. Okay, this is Philippians 2, 1-8. This is God's Word for us. Let's pay attention. If there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

6:29Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

7:13Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for your Word. We thank you that this is not just information that we hear, but, Lord, your Spirit is living and active, and when the Word goes forth, it is active in our hearts. By faith, Lord, you shape us and you mold us into new people, different kind of people. And we want this to be a different kind of community, Lord. This is not just some group of people joining together for some hobby or common interest. This is your church.

7:44This is an expression of your church, filled with the Spirit, and, Lord, moving forth in power on the mission that you've given us. Because of your great love for us, I cry out to you now and ask that you would form and shape us into the people that resemble you and the people that love each other. In Jesus' name we pray.

8:13Okay. Loving each other in thought. Graciousness among us begins with God's grace towards us. This sermon series really is an expansion of our core value of unity. You can go to our website and read about our core value of unity. These four weeks is really all about that one core value. Because in the church, unity is worked out by the practice of agape love. And we're going to see that there are stages to agape love. Each building on the one before.

8:51Each one getting a little bit more challenging than the one before. As we move through this. Okay. The first stage is this. We have to begin with this. How we think. How we think about ourselves and how we think about other people.

9:09Paul calls us to a mindset of graciousness. A mindset of graciousness. We have a lot of firefighters in the room, so they'll like this. Here's a firefighting tip in case you ever need to fight a fire. I hope you don't. If you're using a fire extinguisher or a hose, you have to aim at the base of the fire. People know this, right? I hope so. If not, you just learned something new. Don't aim up where the flames are. It's not going to do much. Aim at the base where the flames are coming from.

9:41You have to aim at the source of the fire. Down below. That's where you aim. And that's what Paul is doing here. He's aiming at the base of the fire. He planted this church in Philippi. You can read about it in Acts 16. Acts 16 tells you about the very beginnings of this church. He loves this church, but they've got a problem. Their problem is disunity. They're not united. So after his warm greetings, comes in chapter 2, the first big imperative of the letter.

10:15Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. He's aiming, you see, at the base of the fire, the source of the disunity. He's calling for unity, but it begins individually and internally in each one of them. He's calling each one of them to a new way of thinking. Do you see all the words here? Being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Have this mind among yourselves.

10:52It's all about one's thought life, one's mindset. He wants to change their thinking and he wants to change their thinking in two ways. The first is how they think about themselves. Do nothing from selfish ambition. Self-seeking, rivalry, hostility. You see, the problem is not ambition. The problem is not having goals. It's selfishness. The problem is not setting a goal for yourself. It's throwing elbows to get there. It seems like every year you hear about some at Christmas, through Christmas season, people lining up outside of Target or Walmart something that they want to get their kids, but there's a limited quantity and so they just rush in, knock each other down on the way there and it's covered on the news.

11:44Two people pulling and tugging over the same toy. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get a toy for your kids for Christmas. The problem comes in knocking somebody out so that you get yours. Selfish ambition. He also says do nothing from conceit. Conceit is self-obsession. It's narcissism. Now listen, self-obsession can come from high self-esteem or low self-esteem. Both of those, the result is often the same. Thinking of yourself first and often.

12:24The Greek word for conceit is literally translated empty glory. The word for empty and the word for glory put together. Empty glory. Which puts it well. My first concert ever was Willie Nelson at the Diamond up in Richmond. It's just soon going away. So I'm a part of history in some small way. I don't remember much of that concert, but I know he sang his classic song, Always On My Mind. And you can probably hear his reedy twang in your head now as I say this.

13:01He sings, Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could have. Maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should have. If I made you feel second best, I'm sorry I was blind. You were always on my mind. Now imagine someone singing that beautiful song while looking in the mirror.

13:25You were always on my mind. I'm sorry I treated you second best. That's empty glory. And friends, that's us. Looking in the mirror and crooning that song to ourselves. On our own, that's who we are. You were always on my mind. Self, I swear it will never happen again, but I'll forget you.

13:54God is calling us the complete opposite direction. He's calling us to humility. A modest understanding of ourselves. Humility is not self-deprecation, okay? It's not tearing yourself down. It's not saying you're the worst to yourself. It's not any of those things. It's just the end of self-obsession.

14:18It's the end of being the constant focus of our own thoughts. God's calling us to something greater. Do you know what happened to Narcissus? That old Greek story when he saw himself in the puddle and he was so beautiful he stopped what he was doing and he stared. He died of starvation staring in the mirror. That's us. That's the empty glory that we're headed towards that God is trying to rescue us from.

14:48And humility is the pivot word here because now he describes the other part of the new mindset. A new view of other people. In humility, count others more significant than yourselves. To count means to consider, to regard, to value. We look at others and we see their values and their needs. And if we don't see that right away, we think about it some more until we do see it. Their value and their needs. And we keep thinking about it until we regard it as greater than our own.

15:25Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. I was brainstorming and working on this sermon while sitting on our back porch looking out at our hummingbird feeder that Nikki has filled up. And I kept watching and there were several hummingbirds around. There was enough spouts for several of them to drink. And Lord knows there was enough sugar water in that thing for each one of them to be full several times over.

15:57They could have all drowned in that amount of sugar water, right? There was so much. But one hummingbird kept chasing off all of the others. I saw it over and over and over. Sometimes when he wasn't even drinking anything, he would just be nearby and another hummingbird would come and he would swoop in and then off they would fly. And he would chase them away. Whatever energy that hummingbird got from the feeder, he was wasting by chasing away all the other hummingbirds.

16:30So it is with us. Why do we do these things? It sounds so silly when we describe it out loud, right? Chasing other people away from a full hummingbird feeder. Looking at ourselves in the mirror and singing, You are always on my mind. It sounds so silly. Why do we do it?

16:51Well, I don't know about you, but for me, it's hearing a voice inside that says, If you don't look out for yourself, no one else will. If you don't muscle your way to the front, the stuff you need, you want, is going to be gone.

17:11We're all still struggling with some insecurity. Maybe we do need to throw an elbow or two to make sure we get what we want. That's what we tell ourselves. Our needs just loom large in our sights and other people's needs begin to recede. Other people are either obstacles or means to our own ends. That's the end result of conceit and selfish ambition. That's why Paul had to bring this up because do you see how all of this stands opposed to agape love?

17:49Agape love is never going to flourish in the community of God with these things in our minds, with this mindset. We have to begin thinking differently. But Paul knows that he can't just tell us what to do. He also has to give us the fuel to do it. And that's in this passage too. So let's keep going. Let's talk about the practice of graciousness. Now, I'll admit I'm stretching the word graciousness here to wrap around a whole lot of different things.

18:23So let me unpack this for you. This includes all kinds of inward thought love towards other people. There's a lot to cover. But as I see it, there's two basic categories of graciousness that God's love shows us and empowers us to do. The first one is this. The first is proactive graciousness. Proactive graciousness. When I'm doing premarital counseling, I pass along a piece of advice that Nikki and I got long ago when we were in premarital counseling.

19:02Here's the advice. You ready for it? Put your spouse first and never be second. Put your spouse first and never be second. Meaning, if each spouse puts the other ahead of themselves, they will both be cared for. They're both going to be taken care of. They're both going to be elevated and lifted up. And that's why it's phrased like this. It pushes both of them to not wait for the other one to start doing it.

19:34If both spouses are waiting for the other one to put them first before they start loving the other person ahead of themselves, it turns into a game of chicken. And that game is poisonous for a marriage.

19:50No one moves. No one takes the initiative. They're both looking at the other one, waiting for the other one to take the first step of selfless love. And the marriage deteriorates. With agape love, someone has got to take the initiative. Someone has got to move first to serve the other person. In this way, graciousness in a community, it depends on the proactive impulse within each one of you to take that step and love the other person first. To love without waiting for the other.

20:32That's agape love. And it has to start in your mind. It's a choice, first of all, to allow someone else to take up room in your mind. You begin to think about them. You begin to wish them well on the inside. To want good for them. You adopt a disposition of blessing.

21:01You set your mind on knowing their interests, their hopes, their story, their needs. Their good becomes your concern, even if your good is not their concern. you welcome thoughts of them that come into your mind. Even though it means thinking of yourself less. You fan the flames of this line of thought and you begin to imagine what you might do to bless them. And then it doesn't take much time before you begin to grapple with the costs. You begin to imagine what it might cost you to put that love into practice.

21:45You realize that to really care for their good means you'll have to spend even less time and thought on yourself. Even less energy and resources going after your good. You're going to have to redirect your energy and your resources and your time from pursuing your own good to pursuing theirs. This thought enters your mind and then you have another choice. Am I going to keep thinking about them? Keep imagining them and blessing them? Or is that where it stops?

22:14Because I've just realized what it's going to cost me and you say no, Holy Spirit I'm not going to stop. Help me keep going. Help me keep going and get my mind wrapped around what it's going to cost me to love this person ahead of myself.

22:32Because then comes the question am I actually going to step into self-sacrifice? Will I let go of what I have for them? Will I give up what I want even what I deserve for the sake of the other person? And with the Spirit of God's power working in you child of God you will say yes to that. That's the wonderful power of the Holy Spirit working in you to help you say yes to that crazy question. The question you would never say yes to on your own in your natural state without God working in you.

23:05You would never say yes to that if God weren't working in you but He is. He is working in you. He's getting you ready to say yes to that question. That is proactive graciousness. And this is exactly what God has done for us. We had rejected God. We had chosen our own way a way to destruction. If we had any thoughts about Him it was not to serve Him. It was to avoid Him.

23:43And yet God thought of us first. He took the first step. Jesus had it all. The eternal Son of God. The passage says He was equal in glory to God. He was with the triune God. He was a part one of the three persons of the Trinity. Equal in power and honor and glory with the Father and the Spirit. But He knew that people needed salvation. That people were languishing in sin and in misery that they had no help. And for them to have any hope He had to do something.

24:24Right? He thought of us and He thought about the cost. Right? He moved forward and He thought and He said, I'm going to do it. He saw our need, our helplessness, our sin and our misery and He emptied Himself like a king renouncing the throne for the sake of love. He gave it up. He set it aside. The Lord took on the form of a servant. The Creator took on the likeness of the people that He had made.

25:00Then He went further and He went lower. Became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. He took the very punishment that He had imposed on the people that had rebelled against Him. Though it was a shameful death. All of this was an act, a successive act of proactive graciousness. God making the first move. He didn't wait until we got our act together. That never would have happened, by the way.

25:38He didn't wait until we took the first step of love. That was never going to happen. We love Him because He first loved us. We can never duplicate that level of graciousness, but we can imitate it. But we can only imitate it if we embrace it and rest in it. If you want to imitate it, if you've heard what's described here in this passage and you say, I want to do that. It sounds hard, but I want to do it more and more. Then embrace God's love for you and rest in it because His was a proactive graciousness towards you.

26:20I already see so many examples of proactive graciousness here at New Creation. It's happening all the time. It's wonderful. Let's keep going because there's no scarcity of grace, right? That hummingbird feeder of grace, it is infinitely full. We don't have to chase anyone off, right?

26:46It will never run out because God thought of you first, you can think of others first and think of them as more significant than yourself. Now the other category of graciousness is reactive graciousness.

27:05Every day, friends, you and I, we encounter dozens of opportunities to be offended, to have a grievance against someone, to get frustrated, to be critical. It will probably happen before you get home today.

27:28We live in a time where tolerance is like one of the highest virtues in society, except when it comes to other people. Then we're not so tolerant. We don't tolerate others very much. That's why there's a thing called cancel culture.

27:52Any relationship in our life could be so easily severed if we wanted it to. When someone makes a mistake, break off contact. They're not doing that again.

28:06We get offended at comments, at microaggressions, at perceived slights. It's so easy, isn't it, to make negative assumptions about people's motivations and intent? It's so easy to take that assumption about what we think is going on in their hearts and then to run with it. Maybe not even talk about it with them.

28:33Lord, help us. The impulse is just right there. The hair trigger is so easy to reach for. Agape love means taking a different path with the people in your life. Agape love means that when you're bumped or inconvenienced or hurt, it's choosing to forbear with them, to be patient. When other people rub you the wrong way with their quirks, their idiosyncrasies, agape love is patient.

29:10Being gracious means assuming the best of others' intentions and the worst in your own instead of the other way around. And when someone offends us or sins against us, reactive graciousness means that sometimes we make the choice to just quietly forgive them. Sometimes without even needing a conversation. We just make the choice to forgive them. Agape love doesn't bring up every single grievance. Wouldn't life be exhausting if we did that all the time?

29:52Every single thing we brought up all the time. Selfless love, agape love, graciousness means that we just forgive and we just let some of those things go. Whenever possible, it just lets those things go and it extends peace. It forgives them in our heart. Sometimes we do have to bring things up. And we're going to get to that in this series. And even then we're called to graciousness, to forgiveness. But sometimes reactive graciousness is just forgiving someone in your heart and moving on.

30:35This is reactive graciousness and I can tell you feel how hard this is. I feel it too. We're faced dozens of times every day with this choice. Let me call you to make that choice. To react with graciousness. Why? Because this too is how God loves you. Do you think that you repent of every single sin that you ever do? No, you're probably not even aware of half of them, right? Do you think God forgives you of those sins even though you haven't repented of them?

31:13If you're in Christ, he does. he does. I feel like you don't believe me. He does. If you know you sinned, repent to God. But God is not holding up a clipboard saying, you forgot about 20 of them. Keep going.

31:39If you are trusting in Christ, you're forgiven of all of your sins, even the ones that you have forgotten that you don't even know that you have going on. The reactive graciousness of God, we depend on it all the time. That's what I'm telling you right now. When our sin bumps up against God, what comes out of him is not frustration, it's not resentment, what comes out of him is grace. He doesn't respond to us on the basis of our indwelling sin. He responds to us out of his agape love for us.

32:12His selfless, ongoing, multiplying grace. Grace greater than our sin. He responds because we belong to him. That's what he focuses on. The fact that we are adopted children. And so he blesses us. That's what we read about. That's what Cadence read to us from Psalm 103. He's gracious and he's merciful, abounding in steadfast love. Paul began this passage by reminding us of our blessings. In Christ, God encourages us. We are weak so often, but he doesn't come around to us and cross his arms and say, get it together.

32:59I'm tired of telling you. He encourages us. He never ever gets tired of lifting up our spirits. He comforts us from his love. Even though we don't worship him like we ought to, even on our best day, we're not worshiping him with everything that we ought to. Nevertheless, he comforts us with his love. We have participation in the spirit. We have his affection and his sympathy in our valleys and our trials. He is not tired of how long you have felt needy.

33:38He is not tired of how long you have grieved something that's been done to you. He's not tired of how you can't seem to get over something that happened to you in the past. He's not tired of your wounds. He will never tell you, just get over it already. Every last person on earth may get to the point where they tell you to get over it. God never will. That's how much graciousness he has we can respond with grace when we're irritated when we're hurt.

34:23We can find a way to be gracious instead of harsh because that's always how God responds to us. Always. Always. Right in the middle of this passage Paul says something that's tremendously important and I'm going to end on this. Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus. Paul is saying this mindset of graciousness it comes from your union with Christ. If you're a Christian you have already taken the humble posture. You just need to be reminded of it.

35:04That's one of the things I'm here for. You have already admitted your need. So be who you claim to be and do nothing out of selfish ambition. That's how you came to Christ. That's how you resting in Christ. Be who you are. This mind is yours in Christ Jesus. And if you're a Christian you've also aligned yourself with the one who put others first. You said I am his and he is mine. So be like him. Be like the one that you're attached to. Consider others more significant than yourself.

35:45You've already huddled up next to Jesus and said I'm with him. I'm going to do things his way. Loving others in thought this is the first step of agape love. The first step towards loving others. And friends brothers sisters in Christ this mind is yours in Christ Jesus.