SERIES: Philippians: Cheerful Sounds from a Jail Cell
A Christian Perspective on Trouble and Troublemakers
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
Introduction: In our new series on Philippians entitled, “Cheerful Sounds from a Jail Cell,” we come today to Philippians 1:12-18 and the subject of “A Christian Perspective on Trouble and Troublemakers.”
No doubt some of you will recall that only six weeks ago I preached a message from 1 Samuel on trouble. In that sermon we indicated that if ever a person deserved to be treated well, it was David, but that if ever a person experienced trouble instead, it was also David. And finally, we pointed out that if ever a person prospered spiritually by experiencing trouble he didn’t deserve, it was David.
Those same three points could also be made of the Apostle Paul, for he is the outstanding NT counterpart to David. But rather than just preach the same sermon today using different names, I thought I’d approach the subject a bit differently. I’m going to treat it a little more methodologically, i.e., I’m going to focus on how to handle trouble, and how to handle troublemakers. David showed us the contemplative, meditative solution to trouble and talked about how to get strength from God when we’re hurting. But Paul deals more with the practical side of the issue, of how to deal with people when we’re hurting, and how to get the maximum benefit out of the situation.
One thing we can say for sure is that trouble is always tough to handle, whether it comes from things, events, circumstances, or people. But Paul had a fantastic perspective on trouble that should be of great profit and encouragement to us, as I’m sure it was to the Philippians.
Why, by the way, was he addressing this issue in his letter to the Philippians? It’s because they had written to him and expressed great concern about his welfare. For the previous three years of Paul’s life, he had been through trial after trial. He was illegally arrested in Jerusalem, incarcerated for two years in Caesarea, then sent to Rome in a ship which was wrecked on the way. He spent 3 months on the Island of Malta and finally made it to Rome, as a prisoner, awaiting trial before Caesar.
The Philippians were clearly discouraged because of the circumstances that had befallen their beloved Apostle. Some apparently thought that a person as committed as Paul should be exempt from personal suffering. Or perhaps since he was nearly 65 years of age, they were thinking that at least the latter years of his life should be free of trouble. So, to comfort and instruct the Philippians he wrote this section, showing that a sovereign God could bring good results from bad circumstances. In the process he will teach them and us how to handle trouble and troublemakers in their own lives.
Let’s read our text together, Philippians 1:12-18:
12 Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. 13 As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. 14 And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.
15 It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill. 16 The latter do so out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. 17 The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains. 18 But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.
Yes, and I will continue to rejoice.
How to handle trouble
There are different reasons why trouble comes into our lives.
1. Some trouble is corrective. That is, it can be the result of mistakes in our lives. If we waste our resources, we face the trouble of bankruptcy. If we are late getting to the airport, we face the trouble of missing our plane. If we hurt another person, we face the trouble of losing a friend. We often think of these as just the natural consequences of inappropriate behavior, but ultimately, I believe such troubles are God’s corrective measures, built into the universe to keep us from total self-destruction.
2. Some trouble is instructive. It can teach us to be sympathetic toward others who have trouble. I was unsympathetic toward people with depression, thinking them to be weak and undisciplined people who ought to suck it up and get on with life until I experienced a bout of it myself about five years ago. The same is true of back trouble. “O my aching back,” was a tiresome phrase to me until I experienced about 3 1/2 months of back trouble myself earlier this year.
There are other ways in which trouble can be instructive. We can learn obedience from it. We can learn maturity from it. We can learn to trust God from it.
3. Some is redemptive. By that I mean it is sometimes used by God as a means of deliverance, both physically and spiritually. The pain of childbirth is the redemptive means to the deliverance of a new life. The pain of heart surgery is the redemptive means to getting rid of chronic angina. Physical death itself is the troubling tunnel through which we must go in order to experience the redemption of the body.
In the spiritual realm too, trouble is sometimes redemptive. This is true when someone comes to know Christ at the funeral of a godly believer. And it was true in respect to Paul’s trouble in a Roman prison, from where he is writing this letter. There’s no indication that his incarceration is corrective for Paul, that he had any sin in his life for which God was disciplining him. It may have been instructive in some ways, but certainly the principal reason for this trouble was redemptive; i.e., the Gospel was being advanced in the highest echelons of government. Verse 12: “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel.”
I like that word, “advance,” a term that was also used to speak of the advance of an army or an expedition. Paul’s imprisonment was not a failure, but a victory. It was not a barrier to the Gospel, but an opportunity for the Gospel. It was not a closed door but an open door. Later Paul wrote, “I suffer hardship even to imprisonment as a criminal—but the Word of God is not imprisoned.” Of course, redemption wasn’t an automatic result of Paul’s trouble. The Gospel wasn’t advanced simply because Paul was in jail; it was Paul’s willingness to serve God in his imprisonment that resulted in the redemption of many.
There’s another way in which Paul’s trouble was redemptive. It was redemptive in the lives of the Christians in Rome. It says in verse 14, “Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly.” What this indicates is that the church at Rome was under a general siege mentality. Christians were being persecuted and everyone was retrenching, afraid to do anything that might get the attention of the authorities. But when Paul took the opposite approach and began to openly proclaim the Gospel even while he was imprisoned, the rest of the believers became bold, too. Paul’s troubles became redemptive for their spirits.
Before leaving this discussion about various reasons for trouble, I think it is important to honestly recognize that …
4. Some trouble is unknown as to its purpose. I can’t see where Job ever understood the reason for his trials. Troubles like tornadoes, fires, floods, sunburn, and auto accidents are often not corrective in their intent, perhaps only minimally instructive, and little of redemptive value ever seems to come out of them. But even believers are not exempt from such troubles.
Sometimes I think Christians tend to be a little too introspective. A wheel bearing goes out on the car, like it did on mine this week, and the natural inclination is to ask, “Why did God allow this and what is He trying to teach me?” It may just be that God isn’t trying to teach you anything; your car is just getting old. Now if you’ve done something rebellious and disobedient and immediately afterward your house burns down, I think it might be worthwhile to consider a connection between the two events. But if your life is clean before the Lord, it may not be useful to always search for esoteric reasons for the normal troubles of life.
Having looked at the possible sources of trouble, let’s turn our attention to how people react to it.
There are different reactions to trouble.
1. Some are overwhelmed by it. Every suicide one hears about and nearly every divorce that is filed is the result of someone being overwhelmed by trouble. They can’t deal with it anymore and decide to bail out. But the same is true for many who haven’t taken such drastic steps; instead, they just suffer silently, overwhelmed by depression, self-pity, negativism, and usually loneliness. Many of the friendless, irritable, nasty people you meet in the normal course of life are friendless, irritable and nasty because they are overwhelmed by trouble.
2. Some stoically tolerate it. These don’t fall apart or fight back. Instead, they grit their teeth and bear it. The poem “Invictus” by William Henley is a classic example of this approach to trouble:
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced, nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade;
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.”
Not a very biblical philosophy of life, in my estimation, and not very helpful either, but also not terribly uncommon.
3. Some accept it. This is different from the previous category in that these people admit they deserve it (if it is corrective) and they try to learn from it (if it is instructive). They don’t get bitter at God, nor do they keep it all inside and fatalistically assume that it’s just part of the package.
The attitude of acceptance is a significant improvement on the first two options, but there is yet another step that a wise Christian may take, and that is …
4. Some look for opportunities in it. That’s what Paul did. He didn’t just accept the fact that he was in chains and spend his time meditating, praying, and trusting, as good as that might be. Rather he asked himself, “What opportunities does this trouble bring my way that I wouldn’t have if I weren’t in trouble?” And he found a fertile field among the very soldiers who were guarding him, the Praetorian Guard, consisting of 9,000 crack troops. Talk about a captive audience!
A person on the street can walk away from you. A guy on the seat next to you on the airplane can put his headphones on. A neighbor lady can avoid your witness by just not coming around. But a soldier who is chained to you cannot avoid hearing you share your faith. Paul didn’t consider the soldiers as guards at all, but rather souls for whom Christ died. And some came to personal faith in Christ, as indicated in 4:22.
God has always specialized in bringing good out of bad circumstances. The same God who used Moses’ rod and David’s sling also used Paul’s chains. Everyone has heard of the great British preacher, Charles Spurgeon, but few know that his wife, Susannah, was rendered an invalid early in their life together. God gave her a burden to share her husband’s books with pastors who were unable to purchase any. Her burden led to the founding of Book Fund Work of Faith, which provided books for thousands of pastors, which she supervised from her home.
Whatever the unhappy circumstances in your life, consecrate them to the Lord. Ask God to use them, that others might know of Christ through your difficulty.
Now in conclusion of this first half of our text, I would like to share a divine principle on trouble:
There is a divine principle on trouble: it cannot prevent us from serving God, only discourage us.
The roadblocks set up by Satan to hinder and stop the progress of the Gospel can just as easily become stepping-stones to more fruitful ministry. Joseph was cast into a pit and sold into slavery, Daniel was cast into a den of lions, the three Hebrew children were tossed into a fiery furnace, Jeremiah was thrown into a muddy cistern, and Peter and John were imprisoned, but in every case their trials ended up furthering the work of God because they refused to be defeated by discouragement. There is no kind of trouble you can mention that will prevent you from serving God. The whole question is your perspective.
These first three verses have given us some good advice on how to handle trouble. Now I want us to consider Paul’s second point, namely, ….
How to handle troublemakers
Our focus here is going to be upon verses 15-18, but first I want to state the obvious, namely that …
There are different kinds of troublemakers. And I’m concerned here principally about troublemakers in the church, for that is the kind Paul is concerned about.
Some troublemakers are apostates. That is, they are people who have fallen away from the faith, those who no longer believe in the fundamental truths of the Christian religion. Liberal churches are full of apostates, but it is not impossible for them to be found in conservative churches too.
Some are heretics. The difference between an apostate and a heretic is significant. Both have false beliefs, but an apostate is an unbeliever whereas a heretic is, by definition, a believer. The apostate denies fundamentals of the faith, while a heretic has strange views on things not essential to the faith. Bishop Pike of the Episcopalian church, well-known in the 60’s, was an apostate in my estimation, denying many essential truths of the faith and searching for truth through seances and other demonic means. Rev. Kenneth Copeland, on the other hand, I would classify as a heretic, a believer whose views on the Holy Spirit and health-wealth theology are out of synch with Scripture.
Some are immoral. The Church is, from time to time, troubled by immoral people. The church at Corinth had this happen in their midst and it has happened again and again in every era of church history and in every geographical location.
Some simply have bad attitudes. This is the situation we face in our text. Notice the description Paul uses of these particular troublemakers: their ministry is characterized by envy and rivalry. They are infected with selfish ambition, insincerity and opposition to the Apostle Paul himself. Are they apostates? Absolutely not. Heretics? There’s no indication of it; they do preach Christ, which I would take to mean that they preach Him accurately as to His Virgin Birth, sinless life, sacrificial death, resurrection, exaltation, and coming again. Are they immoral? Not in the strict sense of that term.
No, the problem with these people is that they have a bad attitude. Why? Well, after all, they had been preaching in Rome long before Paul arrived, and perhaps they were jealous that this bigshot from Jerusalem would show up and try to add his two cents to their ministry. They were glad enough to see him in prison and may even have offered to testify against him. Some commentators have presented a fairly strong argument that Paul actually lost his life as the result of the jealousy and strife that existed among the Roman Christians.
Knowing that there are different kinds of troublemakers, it is important that we understand also that …
Different reactions are appropriate for different kinds of troublemakers.
The apostate needs to be denounced. The fact is some of the most negative language that ever came from the mouth of Christ or His apostles was reserved for apostates—those religious leaders who were bent on leading people astray from the truth. Jesus called them whitewashed graves, blind guides of the blind. Paul said regarding the apostate legalists in Galatia that if they preached any other Gospel than the one he preached, they were accursed (damned to hell). Later he says regarding those demanding circumcision for every Gentile convert, “Let them emasculate themselves!”
The Apostle Jude wrote this about apostates in his day:
These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm–shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted–twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever. (Jude 12-13)
The apostate needs to be denounced.
The heretic needs to be corrected. Much of the NT consists of instruction to prevent or correct heresy in the early churches. The church in Corinth had a number of heretics, and Paul addressed them systematically on such subjects as marriage and divorce, tongues, the resurrection of believers, etc. The church was to be a teaching agency to prevent heresy and correct it when it occurred.
The immoral person needs to be disciplined, perhaps even excommunicated. There is a tendency to overlook immorality in the church. Some are known to say, “What’s in a person’s private life is no one else’s business. I’m more concerned about what people believe than how they behave.” But Paul rebukes the church at Corinth for such a lackadaisical attitude toward immorality and demands that they deal openly and severely with an immoral person in the church:
“I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people–not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat. . . Expel the wicked man from among you!” (1 Cor. 5:9-13)
The apostate need to be denounced, the heretical corrected, and the immoral disciplined. But …
Those with bad attitudes must be tolerated and, if their view of Christ is correct, even rejoiced over. That’s exactly what Paul does here. He acknowledges that some of the Christians in the Roman church had misinterpreted his motives and were trying to make life more difficult for him rather than easier. But in effect he asks himself an important question: “whose side are these people on, anyway?”
After all, there are only two sides in the battle for men’s souls. So long as these troublemakers are preaching a clear Gospel, Paul is willing to overlook their bad attitudes toward him personally and even rejoice in their work. If Jesus Christ was preached accurately, Paul didn’t care who received the credit. Of course, he didn’t rejoice that they had bad attitudes; it was the preaching of Christ that brought him joy.
It’s really tragic that there is so much strife, jealousy and partisanship among Christians. About the only thing most evangelicals can get together for is an evangelistic crusade. And even then, there are some who will not lend support. Over the last four decades Billy Graham has consistently been attacked by certain fundamentalists for his cooperative evangelism. These people have faulted him for having liberals on the platform with him, for meeting with the Pope, for refusing to practice separation as they practice it, etc.
Some of these attacks have been quite vicious and I imagine hurt him deeply. How did he respond? Did he ever fight back? Did he ever blast these people in his Decision magazine? Did he ever try to undermine their ministries? Never, to my knowledge. He tolerated them because their attacks were on him, not on His Lord, and my suspicion is that he has even rejoiced over the fact that the truth about Christ was being preached from their pulpits.
Let me bring the matter a little closer to home. We rent this facility from a school which is largely controlled by members and churches that belong to the denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. Those who founded the school had some questionable attitudes, in my humble opinion, toward some of the rest of us in the Body of Christ, and thus they wrote the By-Laws to prohibit teachers, administrative staff, or board members from the school from attending our churches. While most in the P.C.A. today would disagree with that attitude, there are still some who argue that attending our church would be a dangerous thing for W.C.A. teachers. I don’t know their motive; my suspicion is that it’s not terribly different from the motives Paul spoke of here in verses 15-17.
So, what should be our response? Should we denounce them, fight them, write them off as hairbrained troublemakers? No, they believe in Christ and they preach Christ. We’re on the same team and members of the same spiritual family. Let us rejoice in the truth that is emanating from their pulpits. If our attitude toward them is correct, God is quite capable of changing their hearts and minds toward us in due time.
There’s an interesting story I have told before about George Whitfield and John Wesley, the two greatest evangelists of the colonial period. Knowing that there was a certain rivalry between Whitfield the Calvinist and Wesley the Arminian, someone asked the latter if he expected to see Whitfield in Heaven. “No, I do not,” he replied rather forcefully. “Then you do not think Whitfield is a converted man?” “Of course, he is a converted man,” Wesley said, “but I do not expect to see him in Heaven because he will be so close to the throne of God and I so far away that I will not be able to see him!”
Let me conclude this second point with a divine principle on troublemakers.
There is a divine principle on troublemakers: they cannot prevent us from serving God, only discourage us. You say, that’s the same principle you gave us on trouble. Yes, and it’s just as true about troublemakers. We often want to excuse ourselves for not accomplishing more for the cause of Christ because a spouse or a pastor or a church leader or a boss or a child or whoever has been a roadblock in our path. It won’t work. Paul had many troublemakers putting him down, badmouthing him, keeping him in prison, undermining his character. But he continued to serve and continued to rejoice.
Conclusion: My overall conclusion from our passage is this: trouble and troublemakers are merely opportunities, brilliantly disguised as intolerable situations, for the power of God and the joy of the Lord to be displayed in our lives.
Think about the trouble you’re facing today, whether health, finances, employment, wheel bearings, family, emotions, teenagers. Think about the troublemakers you’re facing today—a former friend, an agitator, a boss, a family member, a neighbor. Chances are there is at least one trouble (and at least one troublemaker) in everyone’s life that seems like an intolerable situation. It’s not. That’s a disguise it’s wearing. Your trouble is really an opportunity to see the power of God at work and to display the joy of the Lord.
Perhaps, however, the greatest trouble you are facing today does not come from things, or events, or circumstances, or people, but from sin in your own life. Perhaps you have been rebellious toward God and have violated His commandments. What is your solution? It’s repentance, friend. God has offered as payment for your sin the death of His Son. Turn to Him and receive His forgiveness.
DATE: June 12, 1988
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