Words of encouragement (Sun Nov 20th).

Well, my name's Abbie. If we haven't met, one of the pastors here, I'm so excited. We are finishing up our series in Philippians today. I'm not excited that we're finished because Philippians is amazing, but I am excited to bring this word to you. This is a section in scripture that we see in Philippians 4 where Paul is giving some final encouragements to the church in Philippi. So hopefully today's message is going to be encouraging.

Sometimes you get those ones where it's like we're going to talk about how much we need Jesus and we need to change. And this is just one of those where you're like, let's be encouraged today. Thank you, Paul, for this. So we're going to be reading Philippians 4, verses 2 through 9.

Now I appeal to Euodia and Syntyche, please, because you belong to the Lord, settle your disagreement. And I ask you, my true partner, to help these two women, for they worked hard with me in telling others the good news. They worked along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers whose names are written in the book of life. Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again, rejoice. Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember the Lord is coming soon. Don't worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all that he has done. Then you will experience God's peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me, everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

Philippians 4:2-9

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word that is alive and active. We thank you for your Holy Spirit that is with us now, helping these words to not just be things that we read, but truly something that can lead to transformation in our lives. So God, we just ask for these next few moments that your Holy Spirit will continue to be so present with us. And would we hear your voice through every word that is spoken and leave this place encouraged and closer to you in your precious holy name we pray. Amen.

So every week we give you the so what and the now what. What is this message all about? The thing that we see here is peace and joy are available through Jesus. And what do we do with that? Well, we're going to talk about at the end of this message to practice, examine, and gratitude. So we're going to kind of break these down chunk by chunk.

Verse 2 and 3. In verse 3 he says, I ask you, my true partner, to help these two women, for they worked hard telling others the good news. They worked along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers whose names are written in the book of life. Verse 4 says, always be full of joy in the Lord. I will say it again, rejoice. Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember the Lord is coming soon.

What do we see as encouragement from Paul? When he's saying this, we see in the whole of these scriptures, he's showing us that peace and joy are available through Jesus and this command, this instruction, this invitation here to rejoice.

Finding joy in the Lord

Now I think a lot of times when I used to read the scripture, I used to think, how can I rejoice in the Lord? How can I always be full of joy? And I think it's because I separated those where I thought that the verse just said, always be full of joy. Always rejoice. And let's be honest here today. There's things that we encounter in life, there's moments that we have, circumstances that we have, relationships that we come into conflict with. And it's going, how am I supposed to have joy? How am I supposed to rejoice?

And maybe you've had a wonderful friend in your life like me, but I had a friend who every time I ever had a hard day, it was just the, well, choose joy. Choose joy. Which would not make me want to choose joy. When you just say, choose joy, this isn't saying just choose joy. It's saying find joy. Be joyful in the Lord always. Rejoice in the Lord always.

There is a difference there. You see, our circumstances will be painful at times. Our relationships will be hard and will fail us at times. They will not be constant. We can't always find joy in the people around us, even those who are nearest and dearest to us. We can't always find joy in our circumstances. And that's not what Paul is saying to do. Rather, he's saying, find joy in the Lord always. Rejoice in the Lord always.

So in those moments when your circumstances might not be going well, he's not saying, you know, just take a positive spin, just ignore the pain. But instead saying, there is still something that you can find joy in. And that's God. That's the Lord. That's Jesus. Because he is constant. He is faithful. He will never fail. He will never change. Everything else will fade away.

Don't worry, pray about everything

This next verse is where we're going to spend a lot of attention today. It says, don't worry about anything. Or most translations would say, do not be anxious about anything. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need. And thank him for all that he has done.

Don't worry or be anxious about anything. So really what Paul is saying is that we need to learn to give all our cares, all our worries, all our anxieties to the Lord. Now I also recognize today that whenever we say the word anxiety or we talk about anything with mental health, that I don't have to even say, raise your hand if you've struggled with this. Because I know from my own experience, I know just with where we're at as a culture and society, that anxiety is something that all of us at some point have probably experienced in some form, some way. Now it will all differ, it will all vary.

And so I want you to frame your mind as we work through this passage today with these verses. It's not saying that, okay, well, if I can't, if I've tried this and it doesn't heal my anxiety right away, that something's wrong with me. Because healing is a process and every situation is different for every person. But rather to frame your heart and your mind to see that we were created to have a hope and healing from Jesus. So every worry that we have, he wants. Every anxiety or struggle or doubt that we have, he wants. And he wants healing and he wants wholeness for us. And that there is hope in Jesus.

And that scripture gives us a method and a model. In the same way that when we take medication or we see a counselor to help find healing, scripture, Paul here is giving us some practical ways that we can find healing and we can overcome our worries and our anxieties. And so hopefully this is going to be an encouragement to say that there's hope. And that's something that the Lord's really been speaking to me a lot lately on all sorts of different areas, that I don't have to be the same Abbie two months from now that I am today, that I don't have to experience the same pain that I experience now, even two weeks from now.

Now, I might still have pain. I probably will still have pain. But it doesn't have to be the same. That there is hope, that there is healing that Jesus came to bring. But a lot of times that healing is a process.

We see a famous story in Matthew 14 where Jesus is walking on the water. It says in Matthew 14, verses 22 through 32 you see all of this story. But it says that shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. Them being his disciples. It says when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified and said, it's a ghost. They said, and they cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them, take courage, it is I. Don't be afraid.

Lord, if it's you, Peter replied, tell me to come to you on the water. Come, he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and he began to sink and cry out, Lord, save me. Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. You of little faith, he said, why did you doubt? And when they climbed back into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, Truly you are the Son of God.

Matthew 14:28-33

There's a famous story and interaction between Peter and Jesus in the Bible here, where you see just the crippling effects of what happens when we let fear take over our minds and our body. That Peter literally started to sink into the water when he was walking on the water towards Jesus. Now here's what I want to see in this, is that Jesus told him to take courage, that there's courage available for us. Jesus is saying, you don't have to fear.

And we see that all throughout scripture. And then he said, come to me. Come to me. You see, the invitation for Peter was to step away from the fear, but stepping away from the fear was also stepping away from the boat of comfort and control and walking towards Jesus. Jesus wanted him to come.

And Paul is telling us the same thing, that we don't have to worry and be overcome by fear, that we don't have to be overcome by the things that hold on to us and the things that our mind can't stop thinking about. But then how do we do that?

When we see that Jesus models the way to overcome fear and worry and anxiety by saying, walk towards me, come towards me. And Paul encourages us with this model to walk through worry and anxiety when he says, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him. Be grateful. Now, again, I want you to see and I want to be sensitive here because I recognize that we all might struggle with these anxieties and worries in different areas of our lives to different levels or degrees. And so by saying this, I'm not just saying it's like when you're spiraling out and you're crippled by fear to just say, Lord, I thank you, and it's all going to get better like that. That's not what Paul is saying. That's not what I'm saying today.

It's a process. It's a practice. And Paul even leads us to that. But there's encouragement to say here that the more that we start to turn from our fear and turn towards God, that there can be healing that is found.

John Mark Comer talks a lot about this. And one of the things that he says that I love is that a lot of times the things that we're most anxious about are the areas of our lives where we cannot seek God. The things that we're the most anxious about are usually the very things or the areas in our lives that in that moment we cannot seem to see God. It's when we start to imagine a future without God in it. Without God in it.

You see, the West, where we live, is progressing. Economically, we're progressing. Medically, scientifically, we are progressing. We have longer lifespans now. We just reached 8 billion people. But we are regressing emotionally. We are regressing relationally. We're realizing that we're still human. We're still frail. That we all die. And that even before we had the COVID pandemic, data was showing us that there was this anxiety pandemic. There was this growing pandemic of people being stuck and overcome by fear and worry and anxiety. Those things that we can't see God in.

Edwin Friedman wrote a book called Non-Anxious Presence, and he does a lot of studies on family systems. And I wanted to kind of walk through this cycle of chaos or anxiety that he talks about, of things where it starts and where it leads. A Non-Anxious Presence is the name of his book and I highly recommend it because we all know that in my life I want to walk with a more non-anxious presence and overcome those things.

But the first thing that he talks about is that we are now a culture of reactivity. That we react to the external things that happen around us internally. And maybe you are still someone where you fall more on that side, where maybe you do have outward reactions, maybe you have anger or things. But a lot of times, often we deal with that internally. So something happens around us, and we might not respond visibly, but internally we become anxious. Internally our heart starts to pound. Our chest feels like it's going to come out of our bodies.

And what's even worse is that the media has started to make money over this. The media wants us to react. Wants us to have these strong reactions, emotional responses. The next thing that happens is herding. In a way, we're all just like social animals that kind of come together over these things and these fears. So we become afraid of something, and we all start finding other people that are afraid and have fear of the same thing.

Then he talks about blame displacement, one of the next things in the cycle. So we don't take responsibility for any of our reactions or our emotions or see that we're the ones that could possibly hold the key to unlocking that healing. But instead we start blaming why we have these fears or these anxieties on other people. We take on that victim mentality.

Then it goes the quick fix mentality, which is even what I talked about. Sometimes if we're not careful, we can use scripture and God as that quick fix of saying, well, I'm just going to, you know, pray God heal me. And I am a firm believer just on healing that God can heal you in a moment. But you still have to retrain sometimes your body how to walk in that healing and wholeness. So God can come in and he can heal you of anxiety. But it doesn't mean the next time you're in a situation that used to make you anxious, you might be triggered still. And now you have to continue to train yourself how to walk in that healing.

But we want this quick fix, right? The same thing, how it's like we still all can't stop using Amazon, even though we know that Jeff Bezos is not a good person. But we love the quick fix. We want it fast, and that comes with our healing sometimes too.

And then finally, it's the lack of well-differentiated leadership and self-leadership. And so I want to talk about that last one for just a second because that might be the one that's hard to understand. So a key theme for Friedman is this idea that we need to be self-differentiated. So this means in short that leaders can't be overly identified with the groups that they lead or else they won't have the needed perspective to make hard decisions.

So he says, in other words, leaders need to have clearly defined boundaries. They need to be in touch with the ideas and emotions of others, but not dominated by them. So the opposite then of being self-differentiated is a leader who tries to make everyone happy and has a hard time making unpopular decisions. Now maybe I'm the only one who has been there, but that is a struggle where all of a sudden you start identifying with everybody else around you, their feelings, their emotions, and you can't make hard decisions.

So, the beauty though is that when you become a differentiated self-leader and person, you can start to act as an immune system for organizations, where you can start to see, okay, if somebody is unhealthy, you don't just become unhealthy now, but you're able to point it out and help find healing and help that unhealthiness from spreading.

So how do we get there? Well, how do we change this cycle of chaos and anxiety in our lives? How do we become non-anxious people, which I believe Jesus was someone who modeled this well for us as a non-anxious presence wherever he went. Where he was able to go into situations, even with the disciples where they're all terrified and afraid, and he's saying, take courage, come on out. He's not all of a sudden going, wait, is there something I should be scared of?

So here a few things that Friedman talks about. He says one, we need to learn to be calm. Do we make room in our lives to be calm, to have moments of rest? We need wisdom. We need to be wise. Where's a great place that we can find wisdom? The scriptures. We need to be active. We need to be moving somewhere, part of something. We need to have a firm foundation and be people that are firm and grounded. And then the fifth thing is that we need a clear sense of boundaries.

Now, I'm sure we can all agree that we need more people that carry this non-anxious presence in our world. So, how can we continue to be calm? Pray, and Paul even says that. Pray. Talk to God about everything. Where do we find wisdom? Our Bibles. How can we be active and firm? We can follow Jesus and continue to be rooted in him as our firm foundation.

But this verse gives us really some practical steps in Philippians where he says pray. And I just love this so much. The reason I keep repeating it is I want us to hear this. If he says talk to God about everything. Like take it to God everything.

Then you will experience God's peace which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:7

I love that word, the peace. It's gonna guard our hearts and minds. So the more that we pray, that we talk to God about everything, the more that we will start to receive that peace, and that peace then will guard us from going back to the same cycles of worry that we were caught in before.

Fix your thoughts on what is true

Verse 8 says, And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. One of the best ways that we can overcome an anxious presence and overcome our worry is through grounding our thoughts and our minds. We need to redirect our thoughts.

At the Global Leadership Summit this year, there was one of the speakers, John Acuff. He has this book called The Soundtrack of Your Mind. Another book recommendation for you today. The Soundtrack of Your Mind. And he talks about how we all have these soundtracks. We all have these things. And not just literal songs, although I definitely do. I definitely feel like my life is a movie, and when I'm walking downtown, there's certain songs that are playing in my head. It depends on where I'm at.

But he's talking more about those thought patterns, those soundtracks that just keep coming on, right? So those, maybe those things that trigger you and you start having those same fears, those same worries, those same anxieties. And so he talks about in this book, the soundtrack of your mind, that we have to retrain our brains to have new soundtracks. That we have to teach our brains and our thought patterns new songs.

And he has a whole book talking about this. And I think back to myself of how many moments that I am caught up in the same thought process, the same cycles of worry and anxiety. And if you start to notice what those soundtracks are and name those things and take it to God and talk to God about it, and ask the Lord, invite the Holy Spirit to come and say, what do you say about this thing? What do you say about this thing? That's a common thing that I started practicing about a year ago.

Of when I find myself having moments of worry and anxiety, of writing it down and saying, God, this is what I'm hearing right now. These are the thoughts in my mind, the soundtrack in my mind. God, what are you saying? What song are you singing over me in this moment?

Keep putting it into practice

And then finally, verse nine, and it says, Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me, everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

He says, keep putting. He doesn't just say, put it into practice. Like, it's going to be one and done. Like, once you do these things, you're one and done. But he says, keep putting into practice these things. You see, in this process of us becoming more like Jesus, it is a process that is so focused on practice, not perfection.

And in the same way that I shared earlier, like there's healing that I truly believe can be found today in this room and in these scriptures. If we start to look at what Paul's saying about rejoice in the Lord, not your circumstances, I think that that right there could unlock so much healing for some of us here today that maybe we've been stuck on saying, well, I can only find joy if everything around me is going the way that I think it needs to be.

But what if we started to practice that of saying, I'm going to find ways to be grateful and have joy in the Lord in all circumstances. What if we started to get ourselves in a place where we truly, every time that we have these anxious thoughts or we worry, that we can look and say, okay, we can be calm, that we can rest in the Lord, that we can ask him to come and give us a new soundtrack, that we can talk to God about anything when we pray and there's peace available to us.

Even sometimes just knowing that there's peace and that there's hope and that there's healing can be a key that unlocks so much healing in our lives. Now, I was diagnosed with anxiety for the first time in 2018 and started taking medication for that. And I remember that being such a hard time in my life.

And my story isn't your story, so I share this not to compare or say that it was the right way, but to share with you that you're not alone in this. And clearly all throughout scripture, there's verses and things that talk about not being afraid. So we're not the first ones to walk through this.

But when I started to take this medication, I remember asking the Lord to come and to be with me in this process because I truly believed that as I was doing this, that he was healing me every step of the way. And there's still moments where I struggle. But I haven't been on medication for about two years now.

And what I've learned through this process is that there's so much healing to be found in counseling. There's so much healing to be found in medication. But then there's healing that only Jesus can do of retraining you how to live healed and whole. And this process can take moments. It can take months. It can take a lifetime.

But Paul is telling us here that there's peace that we can have access to. And so the scripture is telling us that there's joy, that there is peace, and that Jesus died on the cross that we can experience it here and now. And so I want you to be encouraged today that wherever you are at on the journey of maybe you are someone that there's a lot of worries and there's a lot of things that are going on in your heart and your mind and your soul, that there's healing available to you today, that there's hope, that there's joy available to you today.

And maybe you're in the middle of it. Maybe you are someone that you're saying, I'm doing, you know, all the things I'm supposed to do with medication and I'm seeing, you know, therapists and doctors and all of this and I still don't know what's happening.

Can I encourage you as hard as it may be to not just choose joy, but to rejoice in the Lord, to go back to who he is, to follow what Paul is saying, and to practice, to keep practicing over and over again, and know that in those moments where you don't see God in it, and you are overcome by anxiety and fear, to picture Jesus on that water saying, come. You can still come. He wants you to come with it all and he wants to walk with you on the journey of healing.

I want to read just a few more verses in chapter 4. In verse 10, Paul says,

I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed you were concerned but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need. For I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation. Whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want, I can do all things through him who gives me strength.

Philippians 4:10-13

Let me encourage you today, church, that peace and joy, they're available through Jesus. It might not happen over time. It might take time. But Paul is encouraging us to keep practicing the things that we see in Scripture, to keep going back to what we know until that healing comes and we experience that peace. Paul is giving us a picture of what that can look like. Paul had so many struggles with so many things, and he's giving us this glimpse that we can learn to be content in all circumstances, that we can rejoice in the Lord in all circumstances, that we can do all things when we learn to let Jesus come and be our strength.

He says to rejoice. He says to pray. He says to redirect your thoughts to what is holy, what is true. Redirect those thoughts and to practice.

So here's what we're going to do today, is we're going to practice the examine together and end in a time of gratitude. Now this is a part of our rule of life, which is a set of practices that we practice as a church. And what I think is so powerful that this really follows along with what Paul is talking about here, is that when we learn to go back and identify and name what are those things that we're worrying about, what are the things that are causing us to panic, that are causing us to spiral, right?

And even I'll give you a quick recent example for me. I ended up having a moment, a complete breakdown and panic attack just when I was in New York City about a week ago, where I couldn't breathe and I found myself in the corner of a train station. And this was one of those where I even say it out loud. I'm like, this was so small. Like, it's embarrassing that this even happened. But this is how things happen to us sometimes where I missed a train and I knew that it was going to cost me 120 dollars to take this Uber.

So one, my body was tired, so that probably played into it. And the idea of the money just triggered so much in me that I found myself sobbing in a corner after I had ran in the rain and literally taking a minute to have to get myself together and call someone to pray for me because I didn't know if I was going to be able to get on a flight home.

And those moments happen and I realize and I'm able to name what was the thing that caused me to have so much fear. Well, it was the money that I did have. But I recognize that there's a stronghold for me in my life of always worrying that I'm going to have enough. That sometimes I struggle to see that God's going to provide and where I can't see God, that's where I worry and that's where I fear.

So when I can learn to name those things and reflect on those moments and say, God, where are you? Show me where you're at, and choose to be grateful and choose to go back and say, God, I know you're bigger than this. So I'm going to choose right now in this moment to ask you to come in and will you be with me and redirect my thoughts to say you're my provider. God, you are my strength. God, you are my source. You sustain me. You've been faithful. You always will. And to continue to go back to that.

And so this idea of examine is something that we suggest you end your night with every single day. And the first step to examine is to replay. To think over your day like a movie, like replaying in your head, and to start noticing the things that you're noticing. What made you happy? What made you anxious? What made you angry? And then where did you see God? Think over your day.

The next thing is to, after that, rejoice. To thank God for the things that are obvious. So the easy things, start with the easy things. But also thank him for the non-obvious things, which sometimes we can forget about. Those random acts of kindness. The positive song, the good song we heard on the radio. A meal that we had. We can thank God for the food we enjoyed. Savor those moments. Practice gratitude.

The next is to repent. To say sorry to God for the moments that come into your mind. To start to go back throughout your day and think, where did I fall short? Where did I gossip today? Where did I react in a way that wasn't holy and pleasing to God? Where did I lack compassion? All of those things.

And then four, to reboot. To make a decision in your heart to live for Jesus and ask for grace to see his presence more clearly.

And so I'm going to invite you to stand with me. And just as a practice today together, because I truly believe that so much healing can be found with this practice of just going back, and a lot of this is following Paul's steps. And so I'm going to ask you to just close your eyes, and I'm just going to guide us through this practice today.

So we're going to start by just inviting the Holy Spirit to come. Holy Spirit, would you come? Now I want you to just take a minute, and I want you to replay this day. I want you to think about the things that you did, the people you saw, the things that you felt, the emotions. And then I want you to think about where did you see God?

The next thing that I want you to do is I just want you to rejoice. I want you to think of what are those simple things that you can be grateful for. The food that you had, the people around you. What are you thanking and rejoicing in the Lord for?

The next is repent. To take a minute and think of, were there any moments today that you didn't react in a way that was representing Jesus? Is there anything that you need to ask him to come and forgive you for? Any thought, any action, any unkind word?

And then finally to just reboot, to say, Jesus, I surrender all of this to you. I surrender all of it to you, God.

So Lord, right now, I just thank you for the words in Philippians that we can rejoice not because everything is perfect around us, but because you are good and you are constant and you are faithful. God, I thank you that there is hope, that there is joy available through Jesus, that we don't have to live overcome by worry or fear, that we can receive healing and wholeness through you. That there are so many ways that you want to give that to us.

And we thank you for the gift and the examples and the pathway set out in this scripture to keep coming back and thanking you, to keep coming back and redirecting our thoughts on who you are, and keep coming back to you in surrendering everything. So we thank you, Jesus, for meeting us here today. And I pray, God, that you would help us. This truly is a moment that's gonna unlock so much healing in our lives. For that next time that we're worried or we're filled with anxiety and fear, that we can come to you, that we can give it to you and say, God, where are you in this moment? I surrender it to you.

We thank you, Jesus. We ask this in your name. Amen.