In his 2010 article, “America: Land of Loners?” Daniel Akst makes several helpful points to encourage people to build deeper friendships. How many “close social contacts” do you think the average American has? The answer is four, but only two of those are “friends only.”
Akst points out four barriers that typically prevent us from forming and maintaining friendships:
Time – we create busyness so we can feel important and mask our lack of meaningful relationships,
Place – we choose career and location over established relationships,
Divorce – divides more than the couple,
Self-sufficiency – it is reverenced.
He also argues for several advantages of friendship:
It can moderate behavior…friends help us establish and maintain norms,
It can prolong your life,
Lonely people have a harder time concentrating, are more likely to divorce, and get into more conflicts with neighbors and coworkers.
Philippians is one of the most important sources for understanding what Christian friendship should look like. Christian fellowship is about forming the kinds of bonds that increase our enjoyment of this life and strengthen our resolve for the life to come.
Philippians is not about after worship “fellowship”, you know when we grab coffee and snacks after the worship service in the “Fellowship Hall”. That might be a good starting point, but it is not sufficient to establish the kind of relationships that build godly communities.
Isolation and loneliness are bad for our spiritual, physical, and emotional well-being. If friendships are so good for us, why are we so bad at developing and maintaining them?
Read https://ref.ly/logosref/Bible.Php1.1-2 (Philippians 1:1-2).
Writing From Prison (1a)First, notice that Paul doesn’t refer to himself as an apostle. Philippians and Thessalonians are the only New Testament letters where he doesn’t mention his apostolic authority. Why? Because neither location challenged his position. They respected his role in the church.
Instead, Paul refers to himself and Timothy as “servants of Christ Jesus.” The term speaks of their utter commitment to Christ. They are completely at their master’s disposal. They are also committed to serving the church. Servant-leadership does not imply soft leadership, but it is self-sacrificial.
We also know that Paul was writing from prison (1:7, 13, 14). The outcome of his trial could lead to death or acquittal (1:19-20; 2:17). It seems most likely to have been his first imprisonment in Rome since he is more confident of his release than his final letter to Timothy (https://ref.ly/logosref/Bible.2Ti4.6-8 (2 Tim 4:6-8)).
This is the context. It is important to keep in mind as we repeatedly hear Paul’s references to joy. We need to know that he is not simply spouting shallow platitudes. His encouragement come from a place that is firmly grounded and established through decades of hardship—hardship he was still in the midst of enduring. Paul had overcome his circumstances in order to rejoice in God’s blessings.
In his sermon on this verse, Martyn Lloyd-Jones connects Paul’s imprisonment to all of us:
“Sooner or later in life we all meet untoward circumstances, and find ourselves in some sort of prison. It may be a sick bed, or a hospital; it may be an accident; it may be grief or sorrow. Something puts us there: we are in that prison and we cannot avoid it. The important thing for us is to know, before we get there, the secret of how to overcome it, how to have this joy in the Lord in spite of our circumstances, how to rise above them all; how to conquer and be supreme over them. We need to know this if only for our own peace and joy.”
Many of you feel like 2020 was a prison. Unfortunately, you doubt there will be any improvement in 2021. We may be looking at several challenging years ahead. But, Paul wants to teach us the secret of overcoming your trials with the deep...
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