Humble Joy - Part 1

Bryan Chapell: What Jesus did when he suffered upon the cross was obey the will of the Father, to pay the penalty for my sin, for my selfishness so that ultimately I would recognize not only did he enter my pain, he was willing to do something about it. He was willing to suffer in my behalf to put that pain aside and the shame aside. It was what he was doing at the will of the Father, which must prove a love beyond some remote abstract God.
Narrator: So glad you joined us for today's Unlimited Grace, the audio broadcast ministry of Pastor and author Bryan Chapell. In today's episode, Pastor Brian shares a lesson from Philippians Chapter 2. Dr. Chapell investigates the hard question, how can God be good and yet allow us to endure suffering? You can find this lesson and many others when you visit unlimitedgrace.com. And while you're there, look for the many resources from Pastor Bryan Chapell, including a collection of short Bible studies called Seven Days to a More Joyful Life. As Dr. Chapell continues this series on joy from Philippians, these guided studies will help you encounter the joy that Jesus offers to you. A joy that leads to Thanksgiving for our gracious Heavenly Father, who gives us second chances. Let's hear now from Dr. Bryan Chapell as he shares the lesson, Humble Joy.
Bryan Chapell: I was raised in a Hindu home, writes Christian writer, author, Metali Perkins. She says, in that Hindu home, my dad taught that God was a divine spirit of love. I believed in this good God until high school. When a friend was killed in a car accident involving a drunk driver. My friend's death opened my adolescent eyes to a world of suffering. What kind of a God would allow this and then, according to my Hinduism, reincarnate us back into that same painful world? I grieved for my friend and put my questions and God aside for the rest of high school. During my mid-winter break of my junior year in college, however, a few student friends invited me to join them in Russia to study art history. I went believing that I would gain some objective perspective on Western religions by looking at a culture that had become atheistic, at least officially. The Russian tour led us through prisons, cemeteries, and churches with histories of massacres and torture, where ancient icons displayed the crucifixion over and over. I felt overwhelmed by evil. How could God, if God existed, leave humanity to suffer so much? One afternoon, we headed to the Hermitage, the world-renowned museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Again, many of the paintings depicted Jesus' life and death and resurrection. I stood on the edge of the group, not wanting to participate, but my mind racing with questions. As our group was about to leave, the museum official pulled me aside. "What are you thinking about so deeply?" he asked in a low voice. I was surprised into telling the truth. A loving God, human suffering. How can these two coexist? The museum official said, "You are at the intersection of choice. Either you decide that Jesus is the Son of God, or you turn your back on him. You must decide." But how can you choose a God? The same one who just wrote to us. It has been given to you, not only to believe, but also to suffer for Christ's sake. How can belief in a good God and suffering coexist? In order to answer that question, we would have to say, how can God be good and have a purpose in suffering? And at the same time, how can he give us help in enduring the suffering? Those questions are not questions the writers of the Bible shy away from. To the question of why does suffering endure? Even Jesus himself answered in Matthew 13, the parable of the wheat and the weeds, or if you're a King James person, the parable of the wheat and the tares. There, Jesus himself tells the story of what happened when sin entered our world and the corruptions and the evil and all the repercussions that followed. He said it's like an opponent who entered a field of wheat and began to spread seeds of weeds all through it. Spread the dandelion seeds. At some point, the seeds of the wheat and the weeds germinate together. Why wouldn't the farmer just pull up the weeds? Because to pull up the weeds, he would actually pull up the wheat before it was ready for harvest as well. And Jesus says, so is the action of God. Once sin has entered our world by the corruption of our first parents, by our own selfishness, it begins to affect other people. Why doesn't God just get rid of all the evil? Well, number one, it would get rid of all the helping professions, right? If all the evil were gone, no more police, no more doctors, no more nurses, no need of them. But if God were really to pull up all evil, also no need of you. We ourselves, sinful by nature, sinners by actions, we ourselves would be uprooted. And so God in his wisdom allows the evil and the good until the time of the harvest when Christ himself comes to teach our souls of our need of him and not uproot us too soon. I mean, it may make some logical sense, but I would confess to you, it strains credulity and faith itself to believe that the reason that we continue to exist in the world, despite our fallenness, despite our sin, is because of God's special love for each one of us. I mean, the message that Christ is saying is simply this, that the fact that you and I continue to exist in a world of suffering is in itself evidence of a God who is enduring in his affection for you, who continues to see a purpose for you upon this planet. The very fact that you continue is evidence of a God's undying love for you. But because it strains credulity and faith to believe that, we begin to say, what evidence do we have that a loving God is still operative through this suffering? And the answer that the Apostle Paul is giving us, the evidence in itself that God is still loving through the suffering, is that he entered the suffering. That God himself came into a world of pain. The words of verse five, "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not consider 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." That God in himself entered our world, being born, coming in the likeness of humanity. Because I'm a grandparent, I'm kind of attuned to grandparent stories these days. And one that caught my attention recently was of a grandpa who was distressed because his grandchild had been confined to a crib for throwing food. And as that child got more distressed and more upset and more angry, grandpa knew it was wrong to let the child out of the crib too early, but still was so upset that the child was crying in the crib that grandpa decided he would get in the crib. Jesus got in the manger. That what he was willing to do as God was to give up heavenly glory and come to the human painful world that you and I experience. And that in itself is some evidence of his not being remote, not being uncaring, not being abstract in his affection for us, but willing to enter, to show his affection is real and loving for us. He did not have to experience any of that. And it wasn't just that he began to experience what it meant not to be God in the manger itself, but the humiliations continued. Our reformation forefathers write it this way: Christ's humiliation consists in his being born, but that in a low condition, after all, it was among the animal stalls that the King of the Universe had his birth on this planet. Not only was he born in that in a low condition, he was made under the law. He followed the same rules that you and I are expected to follow. He underwent the miseries of this life, experienced the wrath of God on the cross, the death on the cross, in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time. Every dimension of that human suffering Christ experienced in our behalf to say, "I am willing to enter your world in all of its hardness, in all of its dimensions, so that you can't say, I don't care for you." That Christ's entry is part of the expression of that great care and it's the uniqueness of the Christian message.
Narrator: You're listening to Unlimited Grace, the audio broadcast ministry of Pastor and author Bryan Chapell. Raising children to love the Lord can sometimes feel like a daunting task. The physical, mental, and emotional energy needed to engage with the child can also lead to feelings of inadequacy and doubt for parents. How then can you effectively talk with children about Jesus or demonstrate to them his love? Written by Pastor Bryan and his wife Cathy, "Anyway and Always" is a heartwarming children's book designed to help explain the love of Christ to a child. The Chapells present the promise of the covenants fulfilled by Christ in a personal and meaningful way for young children to understand. Page after page of beautiful illustrations complement Bryan and Cathy's captivating storytelling. Whether you read this as a bedtime story or share it around the family dinner table, this book is sure to become a favorite of children and parents alike. You can request your copy of "Anyway and Always" when you go online to unlimitedgrace.com, or by calling 844-41-GRACE. That's 844-414-7223. And now, more from Bryan Chapell on today's Unlimited Grace.
Bryan Chapell: I've told you before of a time that I was at a conference and being picked up at the airport by a long-term friend of mine, and as he picked me up and I got in his car and we were driving to the church, he began to ask me questions. He said, "Bryan, my oldest son who I adopted because I felt that was honoring to God, is now in prison. My church where you're going to be speaking is being torn apart by conflict. And the leaders and the pastor of that church, whom I've respected and loved, have themselves been guilty of such sin, I can respect them no more. We are hurting so much. How do we believe in a God of love?" I don't know about you, but when I'm asked questions that directly, I just get kind of tongue-tied. I don't know what to say. But somehow the Holy Spirit gave words to say, "My friend, if you just look at your circumstances, I do not know how you could believe in a God of love. But if you will look at the cross, I do not know how you could not believe in a God of love." He gave himself for you. It's the explanation ultimately that we need, that we have to have, not just people out there somewhere. Our own hearts will require it. John Stott, the great British evangelist, said this, "I could never myself believe in God were it not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as a God who would be on a cross. If he did not get on the cross, I don't know what to believe about him." I look at my world, my circumstances, my suffering. But when I say, "But he loved me enough to enter that world," it becomes the proof to me that the God that I would revere cares about me, even though the world is full of suffering because of the corruptions of our own hearts, because of the things that are here, we know it. But God shows me, "I cared enough about your pain to enter it." And he did not merely enter our pain. His design was to save us from that pain. He says clearly in verse 8, "Not only did God empty himself in the form of Jesus, but being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." He became obedient. He was obeying somebody. It was the will of the Father, says Isaiah, to crush him. It wasn't just a force of fate. He wasn't just the victim of circumstances. It was the will of God to crush him so that in his death, he might become an offering for our sin. That the corruptions of the world caused by our first parents' sin that began to spread all the selfishness. And we don't just need the explanation of what happened to Adam and Eve. I mean, we just look at our own lives. After all, so often we think the reason that I am hurt by somebody else, the reason I'm suffering, is somebody else's selfishness. They did what was good for them and did not bother to think about me. But then our deeper pain is the shame of recognizing. So often the pain of the people around me are because I thought of me more than of them. I wanted to satisfy my ambition, my pleasure, my anger, whatever it was, they are hurting because I put my priority above theirs. And what Jesus did when he suffered upon the cross was obey the will of the Father, to pay the penalty for my sin, for my selfishness so that ultimately I would recognize not only did he enter my pain, he was willing to do something about it. He was willing to suffer in my behalf to put that pain aside and the shame aside. It was what he was doing at the will of the Father, which must prove a love beyond some remote abstract God. Metali Perkins continues her personal account of moving from Hinduism to Christianity this way. When we returned to Vienna, I decided to go to the original source of the story in the New Testament. Soon I was encountering a Jew who had olive-colored skin, black hair, dark eyes like me. This Middle Eastern man healed foreign women. He knew what it was to feel lonely and rejected. He became like me. He entered my world. And then he enraged religious and political leaders by claiming divine authority. They killed him. He let them. I was stunned. If he were telling the truth, then this was God submitting to the four enemies of humanity: pain, grief, evil, and death. He submitted to them in order to destroy them on our behalf. The cross was where a loving God and the suffering of humanity could be reconciled. I finally made my decision. "I would follow Jesus," she wrote. It's what virtually every single person in this room who names Jesus as Lord has done. At some point we recognize responsibility for the pain and the shame. And we recognize we were not going to reconcile ourselves to God in that because of that cause. God had to do something in our behalf. And what he did was, he not only entered this world of our pain to say, "I love you enough to come to you," but he loved us enough to pay the price that our sins deserved. And in doing so, he was reconciling his love to our brokenness, to our broken world, to our pain, to our suffering, to our evil. And even that's not the end of the story, because he wasn't just providing reconciliation. Ultimately he was providing a rescue from that world of pain as well. It's what this account is saying as well. God doesn't just enter our world, he doesn't just save us from its shame. But ultimately he is promising to deliver his people to a better world. Verse nine, "God has highly exalted him, that is, Jesus, bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." What is God doing to deliver us? He first exalts Jesus. The word that the Apostle uses in verse nine to say God has highly exalted Christ, is a word that simply means to raise up. But the Apostle puts a special prefix on it to mean very highly raise up. And it's an intentional pun, a recognition of what God has done in Christ Jesus. Do some of you remember when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, he said, "Even as Moses raised up, lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." He must be raised. He was raised upon a cross. That was that raising, that was exalting Christ. But that was not the end of the raising. He was buried and on the third day he rose again. And it's that understanding that here is the proof that the shame, the pain, the penalty has been crushed, that the consequences of the sin has been crushed as well, and Jesus had victory over death. He has victory over my sin and your sin. There was new life in him. And that high exaltation results in something that is this. He has the name that is above every name. It's speaking of the crowning of Jesus. You know, in our tradition, we don't talk so much about the ascension of Jesus, his enthronement after his resurrection. We talk about the crucifixion and we talk about resurrection, and we talk about ultimate consummation when Jesus returns. But we forget the importance of the ascension. God gave past tense, Jesus the name that is above every name. In the book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul in the first chapter explains exactly what that means. God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places. Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but in the age to come. Already Christ has the name that is above every power, above every authority. In this world, in the heavenly kingdom, in this age, and in the age to come, he is already the king. And because he is already the king, not only do you and I have an advocate with the Father in our time of suffering, but even now, all things are being worked together for good until that great day of the final harvest in which Jesus says, "It's time now. The wheat is ripe. It is time to pull up the weeds with the wheat." But even now everything has been coordinated until the timing of that great day so that our hearts are turning toward him. The hearts of those that we love are seeing our witness before him until everything has been arranged for Christ's coming. But he's doing the arranging now. He is our advocate in our suffering, and he is the king of glory even now. And for that reason, all things are being worked together for good. God is exalting him. He is the name that is above every name. And because he is working toward the grand conclusion, what should that be? It is verse 10 and 11. Ultimately at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. There is a day coming when there will be nothing that hinders his rule anymore. No more weeds, no more darkness, nothing anymore. But he will be the absolute king with none of the hindrances of the earth, none of the corruptions and evidence anymore. Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And that means ultimately the deed is done. The harvest is in, and Christ is ruler over all in every way. Friends, before you continue with your day, I'd love the opportunity to pray for you. Let's do that together now. Lord, thank you for delivering us from slavery to sin. Help us really to believe in that deliverance so that we continue through this day presenting ourselves to you as ones who have been brought from death to life in Christ. May the privileges of grace grant us the power of love to live for you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Narrator: That's Pastor Bryan Chapell, and you've been listening to Unlimited Grace. If you've missed anything that you'd like to hear once again, just visit unlimitedgrace.com. And when you do so, you can sign up for Pastor Bryan's daily devotional, sent right to your inbox. While you're there, also be sure to request a copy of the book from Dr. Brian Chapell and his wife Cathy, called "Anyway and Always." We'll send you a copy right away as our way of saying thank you for your most generous financial support. Once again, go to unlimitedgrace.com, or you can give by calling 844-41-GRACE. That's 844-414-7223. Please be sure to join us next time as once again, we endeavor to put Christ at the center of our efforts so that lives might be transformed by His Unlimited Grace. This ministry is brought to you by Unlimited Grace Media and continues to be made possible with your generous financial support.