I Want You to Know
“I Want You to Know” – January 26th, 2025 (Philippians 1:12-26)
Philippians 1:12-26 (NRSV) – “I want you to know, beloved, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brothers and sisters, having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear. Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill. These proclaim Christ out of love, knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel; the others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice. Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but that by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again.”
As we continue our series on Philippians: The Epistle of Suffering Matched by Joy, let’s remember that the Apostle Paul wrote this letter as a kind of series of friendly reminders to keep going. Our passage today opens with the phrase, “I want you to know.”
What is it that Paul wants us to know? Paul starts by telling them some information about himself. He mentions his imprisonment. We know from Acts 16 that he was not under some cushy house arrest. The reality is that Paul was in a very bad prison situation – he’d been stripped, severely flogged, and chained, with his feet in stocks. Paul underwent some serious suffering, and he was trying to work out his faith, just like everybody else. So, when he wrote this letter, he wrote with an understanding that those who would read it would be experiencing some tough stuff, too.
Paul could have written solely about his suffering, which would have been very understandable, given his circumstances. And yet, unexpectedly, he turns the attention away from himself and towards the Gospel. In 2 Timothy 2:8-9, Paul urges us to “remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained.” Paul wants us to know that even though he is chained, the good news is not!
Paul, who was born in Tarsus, Cilicia, the birthplace of Stoic philosophy, was undoubtedly influenced by the familiar Stoic distinction between things that matter and things that do not. In today’s passage, although Paul relates some details of his own life, including his imprisonment and his suffering, he clearly considers them things that do not matter. He is careful to always point us towards things that ultimately matter. I want to draw our attention today to the three most important things that Paul wants us to know:
- God loves you
- “What has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel” (v. 12)
- “Christ is proclaimed in every way” (v. 18)
- We are to love God
- “Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death” (v. 20)
- “Living is Christ and dying is gain” (v. 21)
- We are to love others as well as we love ourselves
- “I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith” (v. 25)
- “so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again” (v. 26)
What?
What is it that we want people in our lives to know? That is a big question. It’s important to sort out our priorities first, because if we just fly by the seat of our pants, we will probably err on the side of short-sightedness or self-centeredness.
Let’s do a simple exercise together. On the handout called “Priorities” you will see ten words in alphabetical order: church, family, friends, God, nation, neighbors, self, strangers, team, work. I want you to consider how you might arrange them in order of priority of what you believe to be God’s highest and best for a follower of Jesus. I’ve had conversations like this with many people over the years, and it’s interesting how much variation there is in the ordering of lists like this.
Even though that seemed like a pretty simple exercise, I’m guessing it was harder than we thought it would be. Life is rarely straightforward, and, although the big questions are very easy to ask, they are incredibly difficult to answer. (Anyone who claims otherwise is probably trying to sell you something!)
Let’s explore how to answer the question, “what is it that we want people in our lives to know” by starting with the three most important things that Paul wants us to know, from our scripture today.
The first basic is that God loves you! In other words, the one who is uncaused, immaterial, all-powerful, eternal, necessarily existing, non-contingent, non-physical, all-knowing, ever-present, Creator and Lord of the universe, this is the one who loves you! God is the one who sees you and knows you! God is the one who is with you and for you! God is the one who loves you perfectly and completely! God loves you!
God loves you so much that God came in human form, in Christ Jesus. Because of Jesus Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection, you and I and everyone can now live life the way God intended – a life of wholeness, flourishing, and delight, right here, right now, and forever, together with God and all of God’s good creation.
The second basic is that our proper response to God’s love is that we are to love God. Jesus described this as the first and greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30). The Message translation says it this way: “Love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.”
God is our number one priority! Specifically, we are to love God with all we got, through a life of worship and gratitude. In the Vineyard, the church denomination to which Liberty Vineyard belongs, one of our five core values is “Experiencing God.” Here’s how we describe that: “The experience of the kingdom of God (and thus, the experience of God’s presence) is central to our faith and Christian life. God is eager to be known and experienced by all. We believe that God is searching for lost humanity in order to draw us into intimate relationship with Himself. In response to God’s initiative, we value the life-changing power of the experience of His presence. The primary place where that relationship is nurtured and developed is in the act of worship – both private and corporate. So, experience-based worship is the central activity of all that we do in the Vineyard. It is worship that causes all else that we do to become an act of worship.” Many of the songs we sing each week here at Liberty Vineyard Church help us to express glory to God and gratitude for God’s grace and goodness to us.
The third basic is that we are to love others as well as we love ourselves. The way that God established for God’s love to be shown to the world is through the body of Christ. The good news that Jesus showed and told continues to be shown and told through the body of Christ, the church. Romans 12:4-5 – “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” Ephesians 3:5-6 – “In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”
Jesus called his command to love others as well as we love ourselves the second commandment, describing it as “like” the first and greatest commandment, emphasizing that “there is no other commandment that ranks with these.” The Message translation puts it this way: “Love others as well as you love yourself.” We get to tell others “I love you!” In other words, I am showing up for you right here, right now, to will your good, expecting nothing in return. What this means is that our priorities of “self” and “church” are very closely tied to our first priority, “God.” We show our love for God by the way we love others as well as we love ourselves. Even though God must necessarily have first place in our hearts, minds, and lives in all possible ways, we cannot separate love for self and love for church from love for God. Jesus said the command to love God and the command to love others as well as we love ourselves are like each other.
Beyond those three highest priorities – God, self, church – we have freedom in the Holy Spirit to allow conscience to be our guide in ordering our other priorities. Instead of making unnecessarily hard and fast rules for yourself, I encourage you to think through your priorities as much as you can and search the Scriptures and rely on the Holy Spirit and lean into the wisdom of a multitude of counselors whenever you bump into inevitably difficult and complicated priority decisions in your life.
Who?
Wait, so the body of Christ is to have a higher priority even than family? This is a hard teaching of Jesus, precisely because we love and care about our families so very much. Jesus said that “whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). And in a verse that makes us very uncomfortable, Jesus uses hyperbole, an obvious and intentional exaggeration used a rhetorical device to emphasize where our priorities are to lie in the kingdom of God: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26). Jesus is telling us that our love for those in the new family that he began, the body of Christ, the church, is to exceed the huge and beautiful love that we have for our natural families.
Jesus wants us to know that God’s love is expansive and inclusive. It includes all people, not just people who are like us, not just people we are already related to, not just people who share our culture or ideas. God’s love encompasses everyone, even people who look and act and believe very differently from us.
Jesus ushered in a new social order in the kingdom of God, such that now “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Jesus’s kingdom project of reconciliation brings all people from all families on the earth together into one indivisible humanity, one united, diverse, messy, beautiful family. In the cross and in the suffering of Christ, people who look and act and believe differently are united into one family.
N. T. Wright unpacks the good news beautifully in Simply Good News, explaining that “the good news of Jesus was powerful in two senses: First, it carried intellectual conviction. It made a lot of sense, once people got over the initial shock of its big claims … Second, it carried spiritual power, the power to transform lives, to heal bodies, to reconcile enemies, to generate and sustain a new sort of family life in which all were welcome.”
Jesus’ command to us to love others as well as we love ourselves is his way of telling us to love expansively with the same kind of love with which God loves us. It’s the same kind of love which Jesus proclaimed and demonstrated. John 3:16-17 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Do you remember what God said in his covenant with Abraham way back in Genesis 12:2-3? “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.” Often when these verses are quoted, that’s where the reading ends. But God goes on to say that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It’s not just Abraham’s natural family that was to receive God’s blessing. God’s blessing and God’s love is expansive and inclusive. God has always intended that God’s blessing and love would be known and experienced in every family on the earth. God could have done that however God pleased. One of the great mysteries of life is that God chose and continues to choose to work through human agents. As we receive God’s good news, we become part of God’s good news that is for all the families of the earth. Our ultimate allegiance, as followers of Christ, must be to the God of “all families of the earth,” not to any particular nation, group, culture, or family. We love our nations, our groups, our cultures, and our families. God know that, and God calls us to a love that is even higher than that. God calls us to love like Jesus loves.
Beloved
So, when it comes to what it is we want people in our lives to know, who are these people, anyway? We might think of people who are very important to us, those we cannot imagine doing life without. We probably have many others in our lives with whom we have regular contact, some of whom we know well. And then there will be people unknown to us.
There are all kinds of people in our lives. There’s one word in the first word of our Philippians passage today that Paul uses to describe all of these people. Let’s read the first part of that verse again: “I want you to know, beloved …” Throughout Philippians, Paul reminds us to stand firm, reminds us to remember, and reminds us that we are beloved. When we know that we are beloved both of God and of one another, then we will be able to see others that same way. Each person on the planet is beloved of God. And we are to love them as Christ Jesus loves us. We do not need to treat others with apathy or disdain. We are to resist the currents of the world, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we remember that all people are beloved of God and, for that reason, are to be beloved to us.
If we care enough about others – if we love them – then there will be things we want them to know. Sometimes God will orchestrate divine encounters; sometimes it’s up to us to initiate conversations; often we won’t know what to say or how or when to say it. Our job is to be ready, willing, and attentive. We make ourselves ready through practicing the spiritual disciplines, such as prayer, fellowship, Communion, Bible reading, giving, and celebration. We make ourselves willing by choosing to say “yes” to God one choice at a time, asking God for the desire and the courage to do whatever God asks of us. We make ourselves attentive by removing the clutter of busyness and noise from our lives so that we can hear God speak and notice what God is doing. We can trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us and give us the words to say.
What is it we want others to know? May we be challenged to consider what we share with others, who we share with, and how we share. What could happen if we decided to speak less about things that don’t really matter and more about things that ultimately matter? As we go out from here, let’s make Paul’s message our own.
I want you to know: God loves you. We are to love God. We are to love others as well as we love ourselves.
