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Philippians 1:9-11

As always, let me invite you to take your copy of God’s Word and turn with me to Philippians 1. We’re in our third week of a new series, and we’ve finally made it to verse 9. This morning, we’re going to pray with Paul. We will get the sum and substance of Paul’s prayer for the church in Philippi.

Most people never associate prayer with pop music, but there’s an interesting country song that’s been around since 2010 by a guy named Jaron Lowenstein called Pray for You. It’s a song based on his bitter breakup with his girlfriend, and he puts an interesting twist on prayer. In a review for USA Today, writer and journalist Brian Mansfield called the song “a twisted novelty that combines country [music’s] fondness for spiritual themes and relational revenge.” Here are the lyrics for the first verse and chorus:

I haven’t been to church since I don’t remember when.
Things were going great ‘til they fell apart again.
So, I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do.
He said you can’t go hatin’ others who have done wrong to you.

Sometimes we get angry, but we must not condemn
Let the good Lord do His job, you just pray for them.

I pray your brakes go out runnin’ down a hill.
I pray a flower pot falls from a window sill.
And knocks you in the head like I’d like to.

I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls.
I pray you’re flyin’ high when your engine stalls.
I pray all your dreams never come true.
Just know wherever you are, honey, I pray for you.

I think we can do better than that, and so does Paul. In fact, last week we read these words from verses 3-4, “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy.” Let’s continue to read Paul’s prayer for the church in Philippi.

9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

“Again, our Father and our God, to You our hearts are open, our desires known, and from You no secrets are hidden. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love You, and worthily magnify Your holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Now, if you know anything about Paul, you know that in many of his letters he includes a prayer for his audience. For example, when he writes the book of the Ephesians, he includes a prayer. When he writes the book of Colossians, he includes a prayer. When he writes the book of Thessalonians, he includes a prayer in 1 Thessalonians. When he writes to his protégé, Timothy, he includes a prayer. When he writes his single chapter letter to Philemon, he includes a prayer. That’s just Paul’s life. He prayed for people, and he did it regularly, and he told them what he prayed for.

Interesting note of fact, when you read all of the various prayers that Paul wrote in his letters and epistles, you will never (once) read a prayer for anything physical. I’m not saying he never did. In fact, knowing Paul’s instruction and teaching regarding prayer – “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6) – I’m certain he did pray for physical concerns. I’m just saying that you’ll never read a prayer that’s recorded in the Bible (by Paul) where he prays for anyone’s physical ailments.

The things that were on Paul’s heart and mind in his prayers were more significant, spiritual, eternal matters. And in this case, we find out that he prays for love. Now why would Paul pray for their love? Well because it’s the hallmark of their faith, right? He said, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13, NIV). Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). So, he prays for the most important expression of their faith and that’s love.

Dwight L. Moody once said something interesting. He said, “a man can be a good doctor without loving his patients, or a good lawyer without loving his clients, or a good geologist without loving rocks or science, but a man cannot be a good Christian without love.”

What I want us to see today are four attributes of mature love. As we go through these four attributes, what I’d like you to do is compare your own expressions of love to what Paul prays for. The first attribute that Paul prays for is that…

Our Love Should Be Plentiful

Look at verse 9, “and it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more.” The word “abound” means to exceed the ordinary, to overflow a fixed measure. Now, it’s evident that they already loved one another because he says “more and more.” So, they were already loving, but he wants them to continue to do it, and to do it more. But how do you increase something that’s already overflowing? Well, it’s pretty easy. You just turn on the hose and walk away.

We’ve all made this mistake. We turned the water on to soak a new tree or water the lawn or fill a cattle trough, and forgot. (Okay, maybe you haven’t filled a cattle trough lately, but you get the point.) Two hours later it’s like, “Oh, my goodness! I forgot that I left the water on and now it’s running everywhere!” That’s the idea.

We’re quickly approaching the opportunity to fill shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child with Samaritan’s Purse. In fact, we just received the shoeboxes last week. And when you begin to read the testimonials from those that make deliveries all around the globe, it’s amazing that something so small can make such an impact. I was reading some of the marketing material that came in, and a few years ago one of the volunteers had flown to Baghdad, Iraq with over 20,000 shoeboxes. He wrote, “The most striking thing about that trip is what one of the Iraqi officials said to me. He said, ‘Up to this point, in my mind, I always thought, we always thought, that it was the Christian west that hated us. But I can see by this token of your love that it’s the Christians that love us.’”

Your simple shoebox expressions will be like overflowing love. But I wonder if Paul is praying for our love to abound more and more to people around the world, or if he’s being more specific – like loving those directly around us. It’s possible that Paul has a smaller focus in mind. Why do I say this? Because sometimes it’s easier to love the people you never see than people you live with. Right? It’s like a cartoon I once saw that said, “Oh I love the world. It’s just the people I can’t stand.” It’s easy to love people we never see, but loving the people we live with and work with, the people we go to school and church with, that’s another story.

Interesting, one of the early church fathers, a guy named Tertullian, made mention in his writings that when the church started growing rapidly in the Roman Empire, that the government sent spies into different congregations because they were afraid that this new group of citizens, these Christians, would be very disloyal to the Roman government. So, one of the spies went into a church and came back and wrote this report: “These Christians are very strange people. They meet together in an empty room to worship. They do not have an image. They speak of One by the name of Jesus, who is absent, but whom they seem to be expecting at any time. And my, how they love Him and how they love one another.”

If spies came to Mountain Hill, what would they say? Would they go back and report how well we love each other? Does your own love abound, does it overflow, does it exceed the norm for the person in front of you or behind you or beside you? Think about your marriage. Is your love toward your spouse an abounding love? Or in your home toward your children, or toward your parents, or among your friends? Would you say that “abounding more and more” is a good description of the love that you know and share? Are you the kind of person whose love just keeps growing and growing and abounding more and more?

You ask, “Is that even possible?” Well, yes, it is possible. It’s possible because in Romans 5:5 Paul said, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” The love of God has been poured out. It gushes out. There’s no limit to it at all. What that means is that we have an unlimited capacity to love. And if God’s love flows into your life, it ought to what? (Flow out.) If God flows in, it must flow through you to others.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist who once wrote, “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis or any other disease, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, and deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love. That terrible indifference toward one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty, and disease.”

What all of this tells me is that if I have such a capacity that the Bible tells me that I have to love people, then nobody around me should ever feel love starved. Rather, they should feel love saturated, love soaked, but not love starved. Our love then should be plentiful. That’s the first attribute of a mature love.

Our Love Should Be Perceptive

Now watch what Paul does. He could have just said, “I pray that your love may abound still more and more” period. But he doesn’t do that. He goes on to say, “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment.” Paul is now qualifying this overflowing love. He’s adding these parameters of knowledge and discernment. You see, Paul is not naive. He’s not throwing love out like some cliché that tolerates and accepts everything.

He says, “No, the overflowing love that I’m speaking about needs riverbanks. One riverbank is called knowledge, and the other riverbank is discernment.” Love needs to flow within certain boundaries to be safe. See, overflowing love sounds really great, but it’s like a river. If that water has the ability to flow freely without any direction or discretion, then it can kill people.

We have a new water feature on the mountain because of water that was out of control. The landslide from a few months ago was due to water not staying within its proper boundaries. Water is a blessing, but that much water that just flows wherever it wants to, can destroy people’s lives. And so too with love. If our love is just pure emotion without discretion or direction it can bring devastation. It needs the riverbanks of knowledge and discernment. Let’s consider them (quickly).

“That your love may still abound more and more in knowledge…” The Greek word epignosis is the word Paul used for knowledge, and it means an expert knowledge, a mature knowledge, a knowledge brought on by experience. If you know anything about Paul’s writing, you know that Paul will often take love and knowledge and combine them. Sometimes he’ll oppose them. He’ll show the difference between them.

For example, in 1 Corinthians 8:1, he says, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” He’s contrasting love and knowledge. Or 1 Corinthians 13:1-2, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” So, he says, knowledge needs love. But he also says, love needs knowledge for that love to be responsible.

Remember when Paul spoke about a zealous group of religious Israelites? He said, “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). He said, “It’s pure emotion but no knowledge.” And there are a lot of people that look at love this way. It’s pure emotion. No knowledge. Nothing guiding it. Nothing directing it. And that kind of love can become a little reckless.

Why do I say that? Well, you can feel out of love with your spouse and feel in love with somebody else. A parent can feel like they have to give their child whatever they want, because they feel that’s the loving thing to do. Well, that could be the worst thing to do. You may feel that love is letting another Christian do whatever he/she wants. That’s where we need knowledge. The knowledge of Matthew 18 where Jesus said, “sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to confront another brother or sister” (vss. 15-18, paraphrased).

So mature love is not sentimentality, nor is it emotion. It has banks and the first bank is knowledge. There’s another bank I want you to notice, also in verse 9, and that’s discernment. “That your love may abounds still more and more in knowledge and all discernment.” Discernment is insight. It’s a sensitive moral perception. Allow me to explain.

We might have an affection for somebody else, but that doesn’t mean we have the right to express that affection any way we see fit. We need to bring discernment to bear. Every parent knows this. Love is expressed in different ways at different times to the same child. One day a parent will give a gift to a child. Another day a parent will spank a child. Both are legitimate expressions of love.

Another example is Jesus. Sometimes He’d heal a person, another day He would overturn the tables in the temple and drive out the money changers. Both are expressions of love but in two different contexts. One day Jesus would say to the crowd, “Blessed are you.” Another day He’d look at another crowd filled with Pharisees and say, you whitewashed tombs. Both are expressions of love from the One who is the author of love Himself (Matthew 21, Matthew 5, Matthew 23).

Our love should be abounding and plentiful, but it should also be perceptive – running within the banks of knowledge and discernment. The third aspect of a mature Christian love is…

Our Love Should Be Pure

Look at verse 10: “So that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” See how the sentence begins with the words “so that”? Everything that follows is a purpose clause. Paul is saying, “Here’s the reason you need these two riverbanks of knowledge and discernment. Here’s why. Here’s the purpose for it. It’s so that you can approve the things that are excellent.”

The word “approve” was a word used in ancient times to test metals, to examine metals, to take a coin and determine how much real metal was in it. You would examine it, you would test it, you would approve it. We need to carefully examine every expression of our love in the light of God’s Word. No longer is it an issue of how do I feel, but it becomes an issue of what does the Bible say about how I feel? Does the Bible say this is a legitimate expression or not? Does the Bible prohibit this? Does the Bible encourage this?

The other day, a mom I know took her three-year old daughter to Walmart with her. Poor little girl was screaming and throwing stuff and complaining and yelling, and the volume just kept going up and up. This mom was feeling the urge to express her love with a spanking on the back side, right there in public. But instead, she said out loud, “Calm down, Lauren. It’ll be all right, Lauren. You’ll be home soon, Lauren.”

When she got up to the clerk, the clerk said, “Ma’am, I’ve just got to congratulate you on how patient you are with little Lauren.” And the mom turned to her and said, “I’m Lauren.” See, she was testing what’s the proper expression of her love. She was talking herself through. So, our love should be plentiful but it should also be perceptive.

Also in verse 10, “…and so be pure [sincere] and blameless for the day of Christ.” Look at that word “pure.” Your Bible might also translate it as “sincere.” You know what that is. When we say a person is sincere, usually we’re paying them a compliment. The word “sincere” comes from two Latin words: sine (“without”) cera (“wax”). That’s where we get the word “sincere.”

Now, let me explain the imagery behind what Paul is saying. In ancient times, a potter who was making a jar, or a bowl, or a plate, or a dish would turn it on his wheel; and then when it was completed, he would take it and fire it, bake it. Sometimes, because of some impurity in the clay, or some error in the temperature of the kiln, or whatever, it would come out with a crack. But, of course, a cracked jar, or pot, or bowl, or dish, would be useless. But because of the time and money invested in it, the potter would try to cover up the crack, and they would take a hard wax, and they would fill the crack with wax. Then they would cover it with whatever they were using to coat or to paint the pot or the bowl.

So, when a wise shopper went into the marketplace to buy a piece of pottery, they would typically hold the pottery up to the sunlight and rotate it to see if it was without wax, because the sunlight could shine through the crack and reveal the wax – which, of course, the first time anything hot was put in it, would melt, and render it useless.

A life, then, needs to be held up to the sunlight to determine whether it’s got any flaws that are being falsely covered over by the wax of hypocrisy. That’s the idea. Don’t let your love be phony. Don’t let it be mixed. Don’t let it have an impure motive. Sometimes our life, sometimes our love, sometimes our prayers can be insincere. There’s wax inside. Romans 12:9 says “let love be without hypocrisy.” Don’t just pretend to love, but really love.

The best example of insincere love is Judas Iscariot. Remember him? He betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and what was the sign, what was the signal to those arresting Jesus? A what? (Kiss – the supreme expression of our love for one another.) Jesus even said, “Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Matthew Henry, the great British minister and biblical commentator said, “Hypocrisy is to do the devil’s work in God’s uniform.”

Our Love Should Be Purposeful

We’ll close with this. Verse 11 concludes, “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” Paul basically says, “Look, a life of love, a life of excellence, a life of integrity, a life of good works – these things should be characteristic of every believer.” The fruit of our life is good works.

Don’t misunderstand me. We know that we aren’t saved by our good deeds. We aren’t redeemed by our good behavior. Our standing and relationship with God aren’t established by our works. But we ARE called and expected to show forth our new life in Christ by our good works and deeds. Jesus said, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). In Ephesians 2:10, Paul writes, “For we are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Verse 11 is the ultimate test to know if our expression of love is approved or not. And it’s simple. Does it glorify Jesus Christ? If it does, then everyone around us is going to be loved. We’re going to be like that early church where the spy came back and said, “My, how they love Jesus and my how they love one another.” Because people just don’t do that. When we love with a responsible kind of mature love, people feel loved, people are cared for, people are invested in, they feel secure, and God gets the glory.

Can I challenge us to pray for our love towards one another? There are observable realities in our physical world. We call them physical laws. For example, what goes up must come down. That’s a physical law. Well, the second law of thermodynamics is one of those observable realities and it basically says that all matter and all energy is subject to and in a constant state of entropy. We’re continually degrading, deteriorating and decaying.

There’s a parallel in our spiritual lives, as well. There’s a form of spiritual entropy that pulls us backwards. We call it sin. As we go through the day and through the week, we get pulled back to the values of this world, the ideologies of this world expressed in their music, their news articles, their messaging along the freeway, our friends. The only way to counteract that spiritual entropy is to be infusing ourselves with the love of God by prayer.

So, I’m praying for you. But I’m not praying for you like Jaron Lowenstein’s song. I’m praying for the long haul. That your love, that your expressions toward one another would be plentiful, perceptive, pure, and purposeful.