The Path to True Joy
Sermon Manuscript
This is a funny passage because Paul has been talking about unity and joy in the gospel and it feels like he’s wrapped things up, but then we get to chapter three and he says, “Finally my brothers, rejoice in the Lord.” and then writes for two more chapters? So, why would Paul do this? Some people have said, “Well, he’s a preacher. That’s what preachers do.” I actually think Paul knew that it’s good for us to hear the same thing multiple times and from different angles which is why he finished verse one with “To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.” He is wanting to come back to the main point of the letter: Joy. There is joy to be had in any circumstance if you understand some things about joy.
How many of you have gone to a high school reunion or a family get together and felt discouraged? Some people make more money than you. Some like their jobs more. Some seem to have better families. Some look younger or healthier or have more hair.
This game of comparison is never going to give us joy. It is only going to make us prideful if we win the comparison game and it is going to discourage us if we don’t. And however we measure up, it is going to wear us out and isolate us.
It doesn’t work because when we engage in this game, we are looking to our own accomplishments to bring us the joy that only God can. And instead of joy, we find only exhaustion, pride, and depression. And this is exactly what Paul is saying in our passage this morning. If we want to experience that joy, Paul says that we need to know two things. We need to know 1) The enemy of joy and 2) The source of joy.
- The Enemy of Joy
The enemy of joy is confidence in the flesh. The enemy is looking to our accomplishments to give us lasting joy. Look at verse 3: For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh - Phil 3:3 We need to understand what Paul is saying about circumcision to understand what confidence in the flesh is.
To understand this, we need to understand the point of circumcision in the Bible. In the Old Testament, it marked the males who were a part of God’s people. And how did you become a part of God’s people in the Old Covenant? You were born. So, that sign was generally given at birth.
But, clearly there was a problem in the Old Covenant or God would have never given us the new one. The problem wasn’t the covenant, but us. In the Old Covenant, you had a bunch of Israelites who had the external mark of the community of God, but their hearts were far from him. This why Jeremiah says, Circumcise yourselves to the LORD; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds." - Jeremiah 4:4
So, God says He is going to fix this problem by making sure His people are marked a different way. By circumcising our hearts. No longer is the mark of God’s people external and physical, but internal and spiritual. No longer is it at birth, but spiritual rebirth. The whole picture of Old Testament circumcision is pointing forward to a people of God marked by changed hearts. This is why Pauls says to the Romans, But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. - Romans 2:29
Ok, this has to be clear. The problem with the Old Covenant is that you had a remnant of believers inside a larger group of unbelievers who carried the mark of circumcision. And God didn’t like that His people would contain both unbelievers and believers. He wanted a people who would all be believers. And nowhere is this more clear that Jeremiah 31: 31 "Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,
32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. ...for they shall all know me, and I will remember their sin no more. - Jeremiah 31:31-34 (Highly edited) So, now we live in the new covenant where God’s people are marked by the circumcision of our hearts.
There were people in Paul’s day who followed Paul from city to city and told the Christians there that they weren’t really followers of Jesus unless they were fully Jewish first. And the main mark of a Jew was, of course, circumcision. So they told these gentile Christians that they had to be circumcised and follow various other Jewish laws and traditions if they really wanted to follow Jesus. If you obey these religious rules, then God will accept you.
This is why Paul says in verse two to Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. - Phil 3:2 These three things, dogs, evil doers and mutilators of the flesh are all talking about that same group. And Paul says, “They are evil doers!!!” They are no better than dogs which is what the Pharisees would have called the gentiles. In the Roman world, there were these packs of wild scavenging dogs that plagued the ancient world. They would travel in packs feeding on garbage and, occasionally, attacking humans. And Paul is turning this insult, usually reserved for pagan gentiles, back on the Jews who would have used it. He is saying, “Beware of those who call the gentiles dogs, but who, in reality, are dogs themselves. They are the ones outside of God’s will and they are just as dangerous to you. Paul very intentionally calls them the mutilators of the flesh and himself the circumcision. He’s playing on these words to say that joy is found in the heart, not in who checks more religious boxes.
And then Paul says, “Ok, you want to play this game of comparison, let’s play this game! You want to talk about confidence in the flesh? You want to compare accomplishments? Let’s go!” That’s a paraphrase by the way. In verses four through six Paul makes the case that, spiritually speaking, Paul is the guy at the class reunion with everything. He has the great job, the fancy car, the 2.5 beautiful, well behaved, accomplished kids, the vacation home, and the family name that will always make life easier for him.
He was not just circumcised….he wasn’t converted to Judaism, he was one from the beginning. He was of the nation of Israel. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, one of the two tribes who remained faithful to the house of David. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews. Unlike other Jews, he remained firmly committed to their languages, traditions, and customs. He studied under the best rabbis. As to the law, he was blameless. He had reached the pinnacle of devout, legalistic Judaism. He followed all the crazy extrabiblical laws that they made up to feel better about their law keeping. He kept the sabbath, he ate the right foods, he memorized the Old Testament. And as for his zeal, he murdered Christians before he himself followed Jesus.
Paul was racially pure, culturally privileged, religiously blameless, vocationally esteemed, and educationally elite. You know what Paul is doing? He’s giving us his resume. Pretty much the best resume you could have asked for in that day. Confidence in the flesh is the same thing as bringing a resume to God. A resume is what lets you in. It lets you into college, it lets you into a job, it even lets you into social circles. But, it can’t ever bring the kind of joy Paul is talking about. That’s what Paul discovered. He had the perfect resume, but didn’t have joy.
The reason Paul couldn’t find joy is because he was using that resume to earn his righteousness before God. Paul says that he was boasting in that resume. The word boasting in Greek doesn’t mean to merely brag, it means to find glory in something. Kind of like you would glory in your football team winning a national championship. We find glory in the things that make us feel successful, that make us feel valuable, and that us feel like somebody. I’m borrowing a graph from Paul Miller, but you can see here all the things on Paul’s resume he was boasting in. All the things that made him feel like he was someone. All the things he used to find glory in. And none of them are bad things, but they all fall short. None of them come close to the glory Paul desired.
Adam and Eve put fig leaves on, but what those really were were resumes. They covered their nakedness to essentially say, “this is why you should accept me.” But it didn’t work. There is no resume, whether religious, moral, or financial, that we can approach God with and expect that to earn his approval. It makes our relationship with God more like our relationship with the government. I pay my taxes, now why aren’t my roads fixed? I went to church, I gave money, why haven’t You answered this prayer? And that is going to lead to a miserable spiritual life that will not be able to find joy when life gets difficult.
It’s nice when we get the job we want. It’s great when our kids make us proud. It’s amazing when we are physically healthy. But, if we cling to these things for joy, when our ultimate hope is in these things, we will be let down. We will always feel like we are on a treadmill. Working hard to go nowhere. Run as fast as you want, put a tv in front of you to distract you, but aren’t moving closer to your destination of joy.
Confidence in the flesh will never gain us access to the joy we desire most. On the contrary, it’s going to suck the joy from us. When we think we have the resume, it will make us prideful, condescending people who don’t realize why no one wants to be friends with us. And it will create confusion and chaos when things get hard. Taking any kind of resume to God is what Paul means by taking confidence in the flesh and it doesn’t work because we are trying to be our own saviors. We are trying to arrogantly fix our own righteousness problem and this will only leave us worn out, depressed, and longing. So, where is this true joy found?
- The Source of Joy
The source of joy is boasting in Jesus. Finding glory not in ourselves and our resumes, but in Him. Our lives are hard. We have real problems. And I so appreciate that Paul isn’t saying ignore your problems or to think positive thoughts or just to look at those who have it worse and gain some perspective. He is pointing us to a joy that is significant enough to carry us through our difficult times.
If you look at the top self-help podcasts, the podcasts that are supposed to make you happier in life, the main thing they have in common is that the lion’s share focus on you. What you can do. Some talk about the perfect morning routine. Some the small changes that make a big difference. They all try and help us fix ourselves. And I don’t deny that there could be some short-term, short-lived successes in that. But they all miss our biggest problem. Our main problem is that God is holy and we are not. That He is righteous and we are not. And a holy God is not going to be in relationship with unrighteous people. It’s not that He’s like the Wicked Witch of the West and we are like water. It’s that He’s perfect and to allow our unrighteousness and His perfect love to exist together would make Him imperfect.
We have a righteousness problem and we have no ability to fix that on our own. Paul before he was a Christian and these evil doers in Philippi thought they could fix their righteousness problem on their own. But if the gap between our unrighteousness and God’s perfect righteousness is bigger than we could imagine, the trying to fix this problem through our own moral or religious effort is like putting a bandaid on a breaking dam. What Paul learned wasn’t to repent of his sin, but to repent of his self-righteousness. Not just repenting for the cracks, but the bandaids themselves.
And this came through an encounter with Jesus. One of the great misunderstandings about the gospel all over the world is this idea that through Jesus’s perfect life, He takes away God’s wrath toward us…and that’s it. Thinking that Jesus simply took the punishment we deserve. And He certainly did do that, but He did so much more! This is only half of the gospel. Jesus didn’t half way trade places with us, He fully traded places with us. Not only did He take on the punishment we all merit, we get the righteousness He merited. He gives us his perfect moral and spiritual resume as if it’s ours and that is now how God the Father sees us. As perfect sons and daughters because we are ‘in Christ.’
This is exactly what Paul is saying in verse 9 …that I may gainChrist 9 and be found in him, not having fa righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but gthat which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith - Phil 3:9 To only see the gospel as letting us off the hook is likening us to a criminal walking out of jail with nothing but the clothes on his back. Instead we are a prodigal son returning to an epic welcome home partly fully restored in every way.
Angela and I used to watch NCIS faithfully and there is this scene where a WWII veteran was found guilty of murder. The final scene was in the NCIS office where the criminal was in suit and tie handcuffed and about to be taken away when Gibbs, the lead special officer, said, “Stop!” He walked over to the veteran, pulled back his tie and underneath the tie was the congressional Medal of Honor. And every person in that room snapped into formation and saluted. Was that veteran a murderer? Yes, but he was legally entitled to all the rights and honors of the medal around his neck. I saw that I was like, “That’s the gospel!” We are entitled to all the rights and honors earned by Jesus Christ.
I had a buddy in high school and his mom was a very important person. One night he and some of our friends got pulled over (I wasn’t with them this night) and the police officer was giving them a hard time, taking their ID’s, and making fun of their weird names. Then, my friend flicked his ID at the officer’s chest, which then fell to the ground, and he said, “Make fun of my name.” The officer picked it up, saw his last name, and let them go. He got all the rights and privileges of his family name.
Well, what rights and privileges come with Jesus’ name? What inheritance comes to the sons and daughters of the Most High God? What blessings come with His perfect resume? What lies on the other side of this life if we are in the one who resurrected from the dead?
And more than all the gifts and blessings we get from being in Christ, we get the Giver. Pauls says that I may know him… That’s the profound joy of the Christian life. We get to know Jesus. There was a woman named Eliza Hewitt and she was a school teacher until a crippling spine accident that would leave her bedridden for much of the rest of her life. And during that time in bed, in the midst of terrible suffering and loss, she began to understand the joy of knowing Jesus. And the more she knew Jesus, the more she wanted to know him. She famously wrote these words in that season: “More about Jesus would I know, more of his grace to others show; More of his saving faith to see, More of his love who died for me. More, more about Jesus, More more about Jesus, More of his saving fullness to see, more of his love who died for me,”
And do you know how that reshaped the way Paul looked at his resume? It brought him so much joy that by comparison, his amazing resume felt like loss. Verse 7 7 But awhatever gain I had, bI countedas loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of cthe surpassing worth of dknowing Christ Jesus my Lord. - Phil 3:7,8a Paul worked his whole life trying to climb his way with bloody hands up an endless vertical mountain of rock to get to God. So when he realized that Jesus came down to him instead…that Jesus made that climb for him…that he never could have made that climb in the first place…of course the climb looked like loss in retrospect.
None of the things in Paul’s resume were bad. They were all actually quite good. But when they become the vehicle by which we earn our way to God, when they become vehicles of our own self-righteousness and our own self-glorification, then all these separate gains become one giant loss. This is why he goes on to say, For his sake I ehave suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him.. - Phil 3:8b Ok, I just have to say this. The word ‘rubbish’ is dung. Paul is literally saying, “I now count all those things on my resume as crap.” I’m just trying to be faithful to the Bible here.
If you are a numbers person. If you put together budgets. You have a profit column and a loss column. Paul spent years putting all these things on the profit side. Then he meets Jesus and compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Him, all those things in the profit column begin to fit more naturally in the loss column because they never gave him what he sought: Joy. A type of joy and love that instead of making us want to flick our family name at the chest of a police officer, it makes us want to honor our family name by giving that joy and love to other people.
And it isn’t like Paul met Jesus, got his bucket of joy filled and went on with his life carrying that bucket and drinking it down. He met Jesus, stayed close to Jesus, and sought to know Jesus more and more for the rest of his life swimming in an ocean of joy. Joy that can get us through even the hardest of circumstances. So, what are your difficult circumstances? How do you feel trapped, like Paul in prison? Whatever it is, the answer is to know Jesus more.
So, how do we know Jesus more? By dying to ourselves and living for Him. Sound familiar? Verses 10 and 11: 10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,
11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. - Philippians 3:10-11
The whole of the Christian life is dying to ourselves, this is the sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in his death. But then experiencing the resurrections in our hearts through the Holy Spirit over and over and over bringing us more and more joy. We can lose something now and not have it devastate us. It doesn’t mean we don’t weep. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about our children or career or what people think about us. We still hurt. We still weep, but do you know what? We aren’t destroyed. We aren’t crushed. Because our ultimate hope was never in those things.
There are so many shiny objects in our life enticing us in, promising us joy, but they can’t provide what they promise. Jesus, however, can. And as we know Him, those shiny objects seem less and less enticing.
And here is the crazy thing. When Jesus is the only thing in our profit column, then we are finally freed up to be able to enjoy all those shiny objects. We can enjoy financial security without it ruling over us. We can enjoy our kids without needing them to perform for our emotional well-being. And we can enjoy other people's successes without being jealous. Paul’s call isn’t to climb harder. It’s to rejoice in the Lord. To find our ultimate joy in Jesus alone, not our temporary circumstances.
