Embracing Joy in Our Divine Partnership with God

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We thank you for all that you've done and poured into our lives. Your grace and your mercy, your kindness, your adoption into your family, that forever family that not even the grave can shake. We thank you that you've prepared a place for us so that where you are we might be and that you seal us with your spirit so that we can work alongside you, proclaiming the good news in word and deed.

The Lord promises us the Holy Spirit and that will lead us into all truth. To all the places where you need truth, what to do, how to do it, where to do it, when to do it, he promises to guide us so that we would have clear direction. So for those places where we've wandered away, there's grace. He's got to turn that GPS on again, recalculate, and move forward. May he do that in you and me.

And when we get into understanding that partnership, we're left with joy. That someone would, that God himself, in Philippians 2, would become a humble servant in Christ Jesus and take a cross in order that we could be part of this partnership agreement. That Christ himself would raise out his hand to you and to me and to say, I want to be a partner with you.

And so Paul is trying to unpack all of this to the Philippian church, a church that he met in Riverside in Acts, and he began to share the gospel of this Jesus Christ, his death, his life, death, and resurrection, and the implications of it, the offer that's on the table. And some in that group were, were, were, early adopters. And they, they said yes.

And so when people began to hear the gospel and recognize that the goodness of the Lord Jesus Christ, as they shared about his life and his testimony, the people that he healed, the people that he ministered to, the people he took from very corrupted lives like the greedy tax collectors and the broken prostitutes and the fishermen who, who, who would not get into Yale or Harvard or UT, and he would take all of this team, and as he began to mentor them, he transformed them into a holy community full of life and joy and love, and they become living testimonies of the transforming work of this gospel partnership, and they were to go around and just share the good news, testimony of what God had done.

And he says there's this incredible guarantee once you receive the partnership, once you shake the hand, once you prayed the prayer with a humble and sincere prayer, he says that at that point, God is going to complete the work he started in you. The very fact that we can accept God's work, the partnership agreement, is the fact that the Holy Spirit has been waking us up to this possibility, has been pointing out the basically the the fruitlessness of every other option and then getting us to this one shining option his partnership agreement and so once we say yes to him and we accept the partnership paul is saying in the letter to philippians have great joy it can't be taken away from you.

And the second thing he says is that we have this incredible power to begin to go to God and to pray for God to do things in other people. And I love when he begins to say about this opportunity. He's thankful for the partnership of the church with him, but I'm praying for you. And there's this incredible prayer that he prays that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.

And so that was one of the first things that he says. And the second thing he says is that we have this incredible power to begin to go to God and to pray for God to do things in other people. And I love when he begins to say about this opportunity. He's thankful for the partnership of the church with him, but I'm praying for you.

And part of this partnership agreement is that we're just not, like, lame. But we're engaged. We're engaged. And then he says, you have to engage and part of this engagement and disengagement will happen in our faith. That there are times when the world, like, seeps in and the coronavirus of negative thinking gets into our hearts and the challenges that face us overwhelm us. And he says that when this is all going on, you need to rejoice in the Lord.

And so he wants to reground us and reframe us in that truth. And so when we're anxious, we go back into his presence and we get re -transformed with his truth as we're going to pour out our anxiety. And then we get the peace of God. The same very peace that God has. He's never worried about anything. He knows the outcome. He knows it all works. He knows the beginning, middle, and end of the book. And the peace that God has can be ours.

And the moment that we live it out, the moment that we actually become a partner with the Lord, when we begin to do what he's asking us to do and to become who he's calling us to be, that's the moment of great joy. And you know it. You know it. You know that when you pack up that little care package for the person, the neighbor, that may be extra grace, and you bring it to their door and you actually give it to them and you're gracious to them, what happens? You've got joy.

And I hope that as you grow, that you would, this is Paul's last letter to the Philippians, and he's trying to give them enough so that they can live a lifetime of joy. And I pray that you would have enough so that you too might have a lifetime of joy. That you would know what the gospel is and that you would live a life worthy of that gospel. That you would work out this partnership agreement in the presence of the Lord.

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