Philippians 1:9-11 | Paul's Gospel-Centered Prayer
Today, we’re looking at Philippians 1:9-11. You may remember from last week’s sermon, Paul says in verse 4 that he joyfully prays for this Philippian church. What did he pray for them? We find out in verses 9-11.
You know, I’m not sure if the church—ours and the big “C” Church—has ever in our lifetime needed this prayer more than it does today. With so much against us—so much disagreement, so much tribalism, so much politicization of everything, even inside too many churches—this is the kind of prayer God can use to cut through all the mess and create the kind of radiant counter-culture Jesus’s Kingdom calls us to. This is a really important prayer. Let’s read it now.
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.
This letter is the result of a friendship between Paul and the church in Philippi. Paul is personal and emotional, and he’s not sorry about it. He said in verse 7, “It’s right for me to feel this way about you.” And in verse 8 he said he “yearns” for them. Why is it right? Why does he yearn? Because when he was in the toughest spots of his life, they stood by him. As he sat on death row, they still loved him and cared for him. As Pastor Matt Chandler said, “He considers the Philippians not just sheep in his care but friends in his heart.” They were not a perfect church. They had their problems, as we will see later on in our series. But they were a loving church, and they loved Paul.
Part of his love back to them was this prayer. It’s not a prayer for material needs or healing or a big decision or anything like that. It’s not wrong to pray about those things. Paul does so in other parts of scripture. But this prayer isn’t that. This prayer is about their Christianity, about their life together with Jesus. This is a gospel-centered prayer for spiritual vitality. He’s praying, as we often do here at Refuge, for God to grant a gospel culture formed from the gospel doctrine of Jesus Christ.
So, this is a prayer you can pray for Refuge. Yes, we need a long-term facility. We need to become fully financially self-sustaining. We desire to see more conversions. We have many needs. But is there a greater need than what we find in these verses? What if God saw fit to answer this prayer in us—that our love would abound to the glory of God? Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? We long for this kind of ever-increasing, ever-maturing, ever-abounding gospel culture. So, let’s pray for it!
But first, let’s think it through. The prayer comes to us in three movements.
The aim: abounding love (v. 9)
The hope: radiant beauty (v. 10)
The goal: God’s glory (v. 11)
The Aim: Abounding Love (v. 9)
“And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment.”
Acts 16 tells how this church started. The founding members were a rich fashionista, Lydia, and her family, a formerly demon-possessed girl, and a hardened prison guard and his family. Not exactly who I would think are the perfect union in which love would abound more and more. The truth is, they didn’t have any special makeup that made loving easy for them. They just had the gospel, and they let Jesus, through the gospel, transform their heart. They were very different people, but their church was a gospel culture.
A gospel culture is a culture of deeply shared love, created by and centered on Jesus, that beautifies a church. Remember how Jesus said people would know we are his disciples? John 13:35, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Not all churches have this. I’ve heard some say they learned church is the last place to ever open up. The judgment is too hard to bear. Relationships are too fragile. Sharing your real story is seen as a threat or a problem to be solved.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. When a church opens itself wholly to Jesus and rallies around him, it finds itself swept off its feet by his grace, and they find a new way to live together, a new reason to live together. When Jesus sweeps a church into his arms and his gospel becomes the soundtrack to all they are and do together, that church abounds in love more and more. That church becomes a place where people of all backgrounds can come and find Jesus. A place where he isn’t hard to find because barriers aren’t built but destroyed. Where everyone is so low before Jesus that he’s really easy to see. Where there is no competitive spirit other than outdoing one another in honor. Where there is no reason to not confess sin because no sin is shocking and no sin is unforgivable and Jesus is ready to cleanse us all. Where you don’t find a retracting hand but a warm embrace. Where the response to your confession is, “Dear one, Jesus can save you,” and real help and prayer follows. A place where others weep with you and rejoice with you. Where honesty is so common it’s shocking. Where true friendships blossom and grow, sustained by the Spirit. Where God’s glory is the goal and everyone is so happy in him they can barely stand it, and more and more people who are looking for Jesus are finding him and being rejoiced over and with. Who doesn’t need that place?
So, how is that place created? It’s created by prayer. John 3:27 says, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven.” We must pray this into existence. We might be a loving congregation right now, but so were the Philippians and Paul still prayed their love would abound more and more. Why? Because, for the Christian, there is no end to growth in love. As John Chrysostom said, “Paul desires that the debt of love should always be owing.” Romans 13:8, “Owe no one anything, except to love each other.” Love is the debt we’ll always owe and the one cost we’ll never regret paying.
It only makes sense that Christian love can continuously grow. I mean, think of the love of God. Deep in God’s heart is a love so big that it can never be exhausted. It can never be fully plumbed. Even as we spend all eternity with him we will, every day, find new oceans of his love we’ve never noticed before. Every moment of our eternal existence with him will be a new moment of such profound love that we will never not feel loved ever again. We will never, for one second in his presence think, “You know, I need more from you.”
Your future, by Christ’s grace and for his glory, is a future of the deepest possible felt experience of love that Almighty God has to offer. You are so loved right now and you will be so loved for forever. Jesus is proof. Who else has died for you? Jesus did. And he’s not sad about it. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2). And Paul is praying that present love and that future love comes crashing into our shared experience right now, moment by moment.
Now, this is not worldly love. It’s emotional but not only emotional. It’s not basically a feeling but a determination. This world places limits on love. Worldly love has a fine print. Once the feeling dies, it’s over. But God’s love in Christ isn’t like that. God’s love is covenantal. It’s forever and ever, amen. And when he joins us together, he infuses us with his sustaining love so that as we live together, outsiders look at our love and think, “Where in the world did that come from?” And we get to tell them the answer!
How does this love abound? Well, not by chance but in knowledge and discernment, as we see in verse 9. It’s not just feelings but informed feelings.
The word “knowledge” means a personal knowledge of God, a mature grasp of the gospel. As we grow closer to God personally, that has an impact corporately. The more we know God, the more reasons we find to love God, and that love pushes us closer to him, which also pushes closer to one another. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God and love your neighbor. The degree to which you love God is the degree to which you will love your neighbor. The second springs from the first. Have you ever noticed that the most godly people in your life are also the most loving people in your life? That’s no accident. When Jesus changes a heart and grows and cultivates a heart by his Spirit, he creates a love that can’t help but move toward others.
Along with knowledge, this love abounds by “discernment.” That’s a Greek word used only here in all the New Testament. But in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, it’s used 22 times in the book of Proverbs, which gives us good insight into what Paul means. He means love that is able to practically see what’s right and wrong, that gives positive improvement in our discipleship to Jesus, that knows how to love. It’s wise love.
What is wise love? Here’s an example. How do we deal with sin—the sins of others and of our own? How do you respond when someone sins against you? Is your first instinct to react out of your unfiltered thoughts and feelings or does it first consider what God has said in his Word about forgiveness and mercy? Does your love cover a multitude of sins or does it expose even more? When you sin, do you ignore it and downplay it or consider it as serious as when someone sins against you? Do you seek to make it right in humility and honesty?
Another example: disagreements. How do we disagree with one another? Can we disagree and remain brothers and sisters, or do our tribal allegiances run too deep?
Another example: encouragement. Do we do it? Do we look for reasons to encourage? Are our eyes open to catch one another doing good and honoring one another for it, as we give glory to God for the fruit?
We know we’re abounding in love more and more when we begin to look at each situation and think, “How does Jesus want me to move toward this person?” We abound in love more and more when we stop withholding love. How many of our problems result from withheld love? When is there not a reason to love? It’s always just a matter of how, not if. When we abound in love more and more, we find reason to come together, and in this world, that’s a counter-culture.
How do we get this kind of love? By praying for it in all humility. Only God can give it, and he will do so as we ask him, moment by moment.
So that’s the aim of Paul’s prayer: abounding love.
The Hope: Radiant Beauty (v. 10)
“So that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.”
There’s a hope attached to this prayer for abounding love: that they approve what is excellent and be pure and blameless. In other words, that they’ll become a radiantly beautiful community as they follow Jesus.
Again, this only comes from God. We pray this into existence. God alone is pure and blameless, and he alone makes us so and tells us what is truly excellent.
Paul prays the Philippians become profoundly Christian people. No half-hearted, hard-to-read people among them. Just full-bodied, Spirit-filled, real-deal Christians, pure and blameless for the day of Christ, by his grace alone.
Paul prays the Lord makes them the model home for the new neighborhood he is creating out of this broken world—not perfect and sinless but pure and blameless because of Christ, as they follow him.
As they follow, they are able to approve what is excellent because they’ve seen it in Jesus. Not only does this impact the big decisions of life but the small, every day decisions. It’s a whole new value system and set of priorities of the heart and mind that gets us moving in Jesus’s direction more and more. Where the priorities of our spiritual life no longer take a back seat because we know the true value. Where we actually live into our calling as Christians, our citizenship in heaven, our likeness to Christ. Where we stop skipping our Bible reading for a little extra sleep. Where we don’t see prayer as an impediment to productivity. Where we don’t miss church because something better came up. Now, the truth is we’re all a little spiritually lazy at time. That’s in all of us. Paul knows that, because it was in him too, and so he prays about it: that the Philippians would, day by day, shed more layers of worldliness that keeps them from following Jesus whole-heartedly. Don’t we all need that? I do. I wake up in the morning with a profound need for grace. You do too. And the good news of the gospel is that God has an abundance of grace for us every single day. Use up all you need. There’s always more.
We need grace to be able to approve what is excellent, but it also doesn’t just happen automatically any more than we wake up able to run a marathon one day. We must grow in Christ in love with knowledge and discernment to approve what is excellent. We must love and know excellence to approve it.
So Paul prays for right doctrine. A culture of love can only come from the Person of Love. So what do we believe about God? Where did we get those beliefs? Did they come from the Bible, or did we just pick them up along the way? A.W. Tozer said the most important thing about us is what comes into our minds when we think about God. Are our thoughts about God biblical? Is our truth the Bible’s truth or is it “our” truth. We need to be able to discern. When we hear something true about the God of the Bible, even when we don’t initially like it, we must learn to approve that excellency. Likewise, when we hear something that sounds good, we need to make sure it’s true according to God. We need to approve what is excellent.
So how do we get there? We choose Jesus time and time again. This week, someone asked the question on Twitter: “Tell me why you’re still a Christian in 5 words or less.” There were a lot of great responses, but the best came from my friend Jared who simply said, “Jesus.” In another tweet, he added this.
Sundar Singh [Indian Missionary] was once asked what it was he found in Christianity that he did not find in the Sikh religion of his upbringing. He said, ‘Jesus.’ His interviewer replied, ‘Yes, but what principle or concept in the religion?’ Singh replied, ‘What I have found is Jesus.’
When we find Jesus, we find what is excellent. When we learn from him, we learn to approve what is excellent, because we see it in him. And as we come to him, he changes us. The thing that transforms a group of people from a social club into a church is Jesus. When a whole church finds Jesus, that church becomes radiantly beautiful. They don’t become beautiful because they become all of a sudden perfect and sinless, but because they come to the One who is. They don’t become beautiful because they find new principles or concepts that make life suddenly manageable but because they find the One who overcame the world. The bigger Jesus gets in the church, the better the church gets. They’re transformed. They approve what is excellent because Excellence himself if with them.
It’s like when Moses went up the mountain to be with God. Do you remember that story? When he came down, the skin of his face shone (Exodus 34:29-35). But Moses didn’t know it. He wasn’t showing off; he was just transformed by glory. Everyone saw his face and knew he’d been with God. He was radiant—not because he made himself that way but because he was in the presence of God. We don’t manufacture this on our own. We can’t fake our way into a radiantly beautiful church. We can get it only by being with God. And he’s available right now. We only have to go—to whole-heartedly, by faith, open ourselves to God. That’s the kind of pure and blameless life Paul means.
“Pure” means unmixed, as in substances. Transparent purity. We follow Jesus and Jesus alone. We’re not hypocritical, saying we follow without following, imperfectly but truly. We affirm who he is, according to the Bible’s historical witness and the Spirit’s internal witness. We don’t mix our biblical doctrine with other ideas or philosophies, fashioning a Jesus of our liking. We want the real Jesus, and him alone. By praying for their purity, Paul prays the Philippians become and remain transparently pro-gospel, pro-grace, pro-Jesus, what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of folk. He wants the Philippians to not be hard to read, to be people of conviction, centered on Jesus.
“Blameless” literally means “without stumbling.” Paul wants them to stand tall, faithful, free in Christ. He wants them to look at the options of the world and look at Jesus and come to the conclusion, time after time, that Jesus is better. Here-I-Stand kind of people.
Paul’s hope is that they approve excellence in purity and blamelessness “for the day of Christ.” More literally, “with a view to the day of Christ.” In verse 6, we saw Paul’s confidence that the One who began a good work in them would complete it. He maintains that confidence here. Because they will stand pure and blameless before Jesus on that great and final day, they can live like those people right now. He’s not threatening them, he’s encouraging them. “You’re already seated in the heavenlies with Christ! You have access to divine love, so act like it! Show this tired, broken world how beautiful the Savior is. Live wide open to him. Let him transform your life, moment by moment. Choose him time and time again. Come to Jesus. He will make you radiantly beautiful.”
This is a prayer for revival. We never outgrow this prayer; we can only grow into it. It’s that big.
The Goal: God’s Glory (v. 11)
“Filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”
Here’s the goal of Paul’s prayer: the glory and praise of God. How is God glorified and praised in this world? John 15:5, 8, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit…By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”
Your life in Christ is the fruit by which God is glorified in this world. Isn’t that crazy? When you live open before God, following the Lamb wherever he goes, you live a life of radiant beauty in his eyes. Your life—slowly, perhaps, but surely enough—becomes filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ. What is that fruit? It’s outward acts of kindness and service. The “good works” of Ephesians 2:10 “which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” It the things Jesus does in and through you.
Paul is saying that when Christ returns, he wants the Philippians to be like fruit trees at harvest-time. Their branches full. Their good deeds overflowing for Christ. Their whole life a witness to the grace of God, to what only God can do.
In the end, Paul is praying for a God-glorifying life for his people. What a prayer! Is there anything greater?
It’s easy, I think, to read this and think, “Ok, so how do I glorify God?” Here’s one way you can: learn to pray this prayer and depend on God to bring about what he wants. Open your life completely to him.
Paul wrote this in a letter, but we read it as Holy Scripture. You know what that means? It means this prayer isn’t only what Paul wanted for the Philippians; it’s what God wants for every church. He had Paul write it down and preserved it over the centuries so that we, today, could read it and begin to pray it so that he could do this miracle in little old us. Isn’t that amazing?
We might not be great pray-ers. I’m not. God isn’t asking us to be. I mean, he’s given us the words to pray. All he’s asking us to do is repeat after him. He’s got the power if we’ll just open up. James Montgomery Boice illustrated it this way.
When Lawrence of Arabia was in Paris after World War I with some of his Arab friends, he took some time to show them the sights of the city: the Louvre, the Arch of Triumph, Napoleon’s tomb. They found little interest in these things. The thing that really interested them was the faucet in the bathtub of their hotel room. They spent much time there turning it on and off; they thought it was wonderful. All they had to do was turn the handle, and they could get all the water they wanted.
When they were ready to leave Paris and return to the East, Lawrence found them in the bathroom trying to detach the faucet. “You see,” they said, “it is very dry in Arabia. What we need are faucets. If we have them, we will have all the water we want.” Lawrence had to explain that the effectiveness of the faucets did not lie in themselves but in the immense system of water works to which they were attached.
This prayer is the faucet attached to the immense system making our lives together effective. All we have to do is open it and let him flow through. God is glorified in that.
Conclusion
What might God do if we learned to pray this prayer? What kind of people might he make us? What kind of church might he make us? What abounding love would we have? What radiant beauty? What purity of heart and blamelessness in Christ? What fruit of righteousness?
If you pray this and find your love lacking and someone pops into your mind that maybe you haven’t loved as you ought, reach out to them. Love them. Let your love abound more and more.
If you pray this and find a renewed desire to grow in your knowledge of Christ, we have Bible studies available. It’s never been easier to get involved. You don’t even have to leave your house. It’s all on Zoom, thanks to the pandemic.
If you pray this and find a need for discernment so you may approve what is excellent, we have community groups that meet all nights of the week. There are people there who’ve walked with Jesus for a long time. You can learn from them, as they learn from Jesus.
If you start praying this and find a renewed desire for God’s glory, well, you will have become the answer to Paul’s prayer.
The life we long for together—that we’ve tasted already—is not hard to get. All we have to do is ask. All we have to do is open the faucets.
So, let’s pray.
Father, it is our prayer that our love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that we may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. Amen.
