Welcome to our Collection in Philippians, which is in two series. Philippians is a very positive, very encouraging, and faith-building book. It is worth finding out more about the background before we look at the text. 

Phillipi 

At the beginning of this first episode, I am going to paint the picture for you so that you can understand the context in which Paul is writing. The city of Philippi was a coastal city, a port in the northern part of Greece, near modern day Turkey to the east, in a district known as Macedonia. It was the first place Paul visited in the continent of Europe, when he moved from Asia. The city of Philippi was a settled and rich city. It was known as a Roman colony. In other words, the city was developed especially to allow Roman citizens to settle in Greece, and particularly veterans from the Roman army. The Roman army had hundreds of thousands of soldiers at any one time. When they retired, they had a number of privileges, and one of them was the possibility of settling in a pleasant place somewhere in the Roman Empire. This was one of those places. Many of the citizens of Philippi were previously Roman soldiers or Roman civil servants. 

Paul’s Call to Philippi 

Paul started his mission from a city called Antioch, which is now in Southern Turkey near the Syrian border. Paul spent a long time travelling around the cities of southern and central Asia Minor planting churches. He considered that this was his main mission field. In fact, I think he imagined that he would spend the rest of his life in this area. But whilst he was travelling, something miraculous happened and Paul changed his mind and changed his focus. 

During the night, when he was staying at a place called Troas, Paul had a vision. In the vision, he saw a man speaking to him. The man spoke to him about Macedonia, the northern part of Greece. He was using the Greek language, which Paul understood and probably had an accent that reflected that area. According to the book of Acts, the message to Paul in that vision was, ‘Come over and help us.’ When Paul woke up that morning, he wondered what that vision was about. ‘Here I am in Asia Minor, working hard, planting churches and there are plenty of places I haven't visited yet, especially in the north’. Yet he suddenly felt he needed to go west across the sea, the Aegean Sea, which separates Greece and Macedonia in the west and Asia Minor, or Turkey in the east. He spoke to his friends, who were travelling with him and said, ‘I think we are going to have to change our plans. We need to go by ship over to Macedonia and then on to Greece.’ That is exactly what they did. Paul had a divine message to change direction. The first place that he came to, was the city of Philippi and so he considered that this was the place that he should go to. 

The Start of the Church in Phillipi 

He would normally go to the Jewish synagogue first, but he found there was no Jewish synagogue. So, he looked around for a place where people were praying or conducting religious ceremonies. He noticed that outside the city, by the river, there was a place designated for prayer. He started talking to the people there. He met a lady called Lydia, who was a tradeswoman - quite a wealthy lady, and he preached the gospel to her. She believed in Jesus, and then she and all her household were baptised. Paul had an amazing start; within a few short hours, he got his first convert - the influential lady called Lydia, who became a member of the church in Philippi later. She invited him to stay at her house. So, he and his group of companions stayed there and went down to the place of prayer day by day. They preached the gospel. 

Then something very difficult happened - a slave girl who had an evil spirit and was a fortune teller, started following Paul round, interrupting his message all the time. Clearly there was a spiritual force against him and so he prevented her doing that, by a word of command, which shut her up. She lost her power. Then her owners were very angry with Paul and a fight started there by the river. 
They took Paul to the magistrates in the city, and they said that this Jewish man had come and caused trouble in their peaceful city, and he had done something strange to the girl who belongs to us and now she has lost the power of fortune telling. The magistrate was worried that Paul was going to create a riot in the city and gave the order that, Paul, and his traveling companion should be beaten. So, they were publicly beaten and then sent to the prison. The jailer was told to look after the men, and make sure they don't escape, as there was something rather strange about them - they have got a strange power and have been influencing people. The jailer decided to put them in the inner cell and their feet in stocks so they can't move. During the middle of the night, whilst Paul was singing hymns, there was an earthquake in the prison and all the prison doors opened, and the stocks opened. The jailer rushed in and found that all the prisoners could escape at any moment. He was absolutely horrified by what was happening. Paul told him that God had done this to get his attention because he needed to repent and believe, just like Lydia and the other people in her household. And so, he believed.He might have been an ex-Roman soldier who had settled there for a quiet life in Philippi. Suddenly, he was confronted by the gospel and he and his family believed and were baptised.  

 The next day, Paul left the city. How about that for a dramatic start for a ministry? Paul moved along the coast and he preached in Thessalonica and Berea and then went further south. But in Philippi, from that very short visit, there were some remarkable converts, and they built a strong church. Lydia was an influential businesswoman with her own household. They were part of the church. The jailer was an influential civil servant, still a public servant working there. He and his extended family formed a part of the church, and many other people gathered around. That church grew quickly - it was absolutely astonishing how this happened, and it happened because of a vision, and Paul's willingness to do something really strange and risky. 

The Support of the Philippian Church. 

Two years later, Paul came back passing through very quickly. He was collecting money for poor churches in Judea and then he didn't see the Philippians again. He ended up in prison in Rome and ten years after his first visit. he was writing this letter back to the Philippians - ten years after those dramatic events and he only made one brief visit in those ten years. He had very little time with the Philippian church. Despite so much time passing, the Philippians had been following his work and supporting him. In the years in between, before he wrote this letter to the Philippians, Paul had had a very tough time. He spent two years in prison in Judea, in the city of Caesarea, after being arrested in Jerusalem. Then he went by ship to Rome under guard and nearly drowned because the ship nearly sank in a terrible storm. For at least two years Paul was under house arrest in Rome. He hadn't been free to go back to Philippi because he had been in jail. 

In Rome, under house arrest, he was paying for the rent of his house, and he needed people to bring food to him and meet all his needs because he was not allowed to leave the house. Although the Philippians hadn’t seen him for eight years, when they heard about these needs and that Paul was in a difficult situation in Rome which was a long way from Philippi, they took a collection of money because they thought about how he was going to pay his rent and his living costs. He couldn’t earn money because he was under house arrest. Paul had no family. He needed the churches to support him. So, they generously gathered some money for Paul, and they chose a reliable man from their congregation, with a long Greek name, Epaphroditus to go to Rome, to take all the money and to spend time with Paul, to look after him and support and encourage him. Isn't that amazing?  

 In the passage we are going to read, Paul wrote about partnership in the gospel, and this is what he meant. The church in Phillipi were helping him. He was so encouraged that Epaphroditus had come, and he was grateful for the money. He didn't know when his trial was going to be, or how long he had to keep paying the rent. No one was helping him except his Christian brothers and sisters. Paul was facing a very difficult situation because he was going to go on trial in the Imperial Court and the punishments were very severe. He could well be executed. The Romans didn't have long terms of imprisonment. If they were going to punish you, you would get a heavy beating, a big fine, be executed or be sold into slavery.Execution in Rome was unpleasant to say the least. It could be crucifixion, but in Paul's case it would probably have been being thrown off a 25 metre high rock, that they had in Rome. They bound people in ropes and then threw them off and killed them. Or they bound them and threw them in the river, and they drowned.This was what was in Paul's mind; that was what could have happened to him at any point. He was very vulnerable and needed his friends. The Philippians were really his friends. 

Paul is writing now because something rather sad had happened in Rome. Epaphroditus had become very ill - so ill that he nearly died. He recovered but Paul thought it was best that he should go back to Philippi. As he was sending him back, he wrote this letter and asked Epaphroditus to take the letter to his brothers and sisters in Philippi. This is the context of the verses we are going to read. 

Church Leadership 

This is a typical greeting that Paul gave to the churches but it is the only occasion where he mentions all the leaders very clearly. This church had ‘overseers.’ Another word for ‘overseers’ is ‘pastors’ or ‘elders.’ They had a team of elders or pastors leading the church and they also had a team of deacons - those who were running different ministries in the church and working under the overall leadership of the elders, or pastors, or overseers. This is the type of church that Paul wanted to develop wherever he went with different people in these different roles. He didn't always succeed, but in Philippi they had a strong leadership. This letter represented a strong church. It was secure, strong, stable, and it was partnering with Paul 

Partners in the Gospel 

 Here there is thanksgiving and joy. Paul deeply loved the Philippian church, and he loved the fact that they were partners with him. They had been working with him all the way through his ministry. When he came back to the church on his second visit, he asked them for money so that he could help the churches in Judea. He was collecting money from all sorts of different churches, and they made a generous donation. That was partnership. 

Finance is part of our partnership in mission when we support missionaries and mission endeavours. More recently, they had given money to him personally because he needed money. They had been partners. They were even willing to send one of their leaders, or their deacons, Epaphroditus, to spend maybe a year with him to support him. He absolutely loved this partnership, and it meant a great deal to Paul. Paul experienced continual separation from people he loved. This is one of the costs of Christian ministry. If you are planting churches, moving around to develop the Kingdom of God, you will always experience times of separation from people you love, which can be very painful. Paul found this painful; he was separated for long periods of time from his home church in Antioch, and he loved going back there, which he did on several occasions. It says in Acts 20: 37 - 38, when Paul was departing from the Ephesian elders, for the last time when he had spent some time with them, they were so upset that they all wept as they embraced each other, knowing that they would never see each other again. Paul was often in a time of separation from the people he loved, and he was separated from the Philippians. You get the feeling here that he wanted to spend more time with them. It was a lovely church. It was a kind, generous, and mature church. It was the place where Paul would love to have been, but he was separated from, and almost certainly he never went back there again. He was longing for his friends that he missed but he believed that he had planted the seed of the gospel there and God was going to make it fruitful. ‘He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion’. It didn't need Paul to be there for God to work. That is the amazing thing about the gospel. You plant the seed, but it grows whether you are around or not. It grows and develops. 

Positives of the Philippian Church 

 Here is another example of how to pray for the church. There is a beautiful example in Ephesians, which I covered when we did the Collection on Ephesians in Word Online. You get such a feeling of Paul's heart being poured out when he was praying, and he was filled with thankfulness for the Philippians. 

 In fact, there are hardly any problems that he refers to in the Philippian church; there was just one issue of two women arguing with each other that he refers to briefly at the end of the letter. Everything else about the letter is positive. Isn't that a wonderful thing to say about a church? What a great goal for our churches that we are in - to be able to think that visitors could find that everything they see is positive about the church. That is very often not the case now, and it was very often not the case for Paul's churches in the New Testament. Some of the churches were in terrible difficulties as we see in the book of Galatians, or the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians, where there were difficult fundamental problems in the churches.  

God's will is that our churches should be secure and mature and we find there is a glimpse into that reality in Philippians, and there are a number of reasons for that. One of them is strong leaders. We see that settled team of leaders referred to in Philippians 1: 2, settled leaders pastoring the church, partnering in mission and building up the ministries of the church. That is what we should be aiming at in our local church context. Philippians is a great aspiration for us, to say how can our church be like this church? If we want to be like this church, we should be praying for the same things that Paul prays for here:  

One is that a knowledge of God grows; a church is mature through its understanding of God. The word of God is tremendously important: every time it is effectively preached people are changed in small ways and their lives are gradually transformed as they understand God's purposes better. 

Secondly, our love for fellow believers grows. Philippians was a church filled with love. We feel it in the text - a love for one another, a harmony together with one tiny exception and a love for Paul, the founder of the church and the missionary who was planting churches all over the Roman world. They had such a love for him that they wanted to do things for him. We need to pray for that love 
and to think of practical ways to love our brothers and sisters, looking out for their needs, finding ways of supporting and encouraging them, and helping them. 

The third thing that comes out is this: prayer is understanding God's priorities.What was God's will for the Philippian church? What was God's will for the individual members of the church? Paul doesn't know that, but he was praying that the Holy Spirit would make it clear. As you function in a local church, it is good to ask yourself the question, what is God's will for me to do in this church? How can I serve? I was talking to a friend recently who said that quite suddenly she felt the need, the desire, to serve for the first time in many years in the children's ministry. What is God calling you to do as an individual believer? 

Then Paul prayed for fruitfulness: that over time as they follow the Holy Spirit, they as a church would be fruitful and grow. What a wonderful prayer that is for the church and what a wonderful way to start this Collection and this first series, as we study Philippians, to think of all the positives about this amazing church and its amazing relationship with Paul. It is very refreshing because we don't find that in quite a few of the other New Testament churches where there are many difficult problems to deal with. 

Reflections 

First, Philippians is a letter filled with joy. Paul mentions joy on many occasions.For example, here in verse 4, ‘I always pray with joy’, with gladness, with happiness. Joy is a theme that comes back several times during the book, as we shall see - that is a wonderful reality. Do we have joy as we think of our churches and as we think of their ministries? I hope you do, but you may have sadness because things are not good. In which case we need to work hard to help our churches change to come into line with biblical priorities. 

My second reflection is that team leadership makes churches strong. There was a group of overseers, pastors or elders here. There was a group of deacons. Many churches need stronger teams to function in different ministries, and that is what makes them effective. Anything you can do to develop teams in your church, or be part of strong teams or leadership teams, should be done. 

The third reflection is the significance of financial giving in mission. Some churches are resource churches. It seems that the Philippian church had a number of people who were quite wealthy. It appears that they were generous. It was quite a wealthy city; some of the Christians were probably quite wealthy. We know that the jailer would have been well paid. We know that Lydia was trading at a high level in Asia Minor with fabrics. She would have been a wealthy businesswoman.There were probably others who had finance. The generous giving of finance towards mission is a great blessing to God and helps the Kingdom advance. 

Thank you for listening to this opening episode. I hope you will join us on this exciting journey through the book of Philippians.