Building A Community of Grace and Peace

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

  We celebrated my daughter's birthday recently, and my wife makes a wonderful chocolate cake, and I could always use another slice of that. We're beginning a new series walking through the letter of Philippians, which is Paul writing from prison in Rome to the Church of Philippi, which would sit in modern day Greece.

And he is writing to them to encourage them and to thank them. And the way he begins is he talks about how he prays constantly and is remembering them with joy. So the whole letter of Philippians is really about grace and peace. It's how he opens the letter and how he closes the letter.

And so what we're gonna talk about for the next six weeks is how to build a community of grace and peace. How do we do that for our church, for our families, for the world? And today, what I wanna look at specifically is the way Paul opens in chapter one. He offers us three things that I think are essential building blocks for building a community of grace and peace.

First is to pray with gratitude for one another. Second, to be confident in Christ's ability to bring growth. And third that we would want to overflow with what I call wise love.

So as Paul is writing, he says that every time he thinks of them, he prays. He's saying how he prays for them with great joy. And what happens there is that he's anchoring his relationship with the church at Philippi in Grace. Because he sees them as a gift in his life. And I think that what happens for us in our relationships in our day to day is we get sort of stuck. We get stuck in the annoying things people do. We get stuck because we see it in a more utilitarian kind of way. Like, Hey, I provide this and you provide that.

But when we take the moment to work on the practice of gratitude, what happens is we shift the relationship and we center it on grace. Because what happens there is we see how that person's a gift in our life and how we are a gift in their life, and how life itself is a gift.

You know, one of the things we do at my nine to five Monday to Friday job is we focus in on our values when we gather as a leadership team. One of our values is being heart driven, and so this past week we took some time to reflect on who is it that we work with that really embodies this value of heart driven. Heart driven meaning that they are passionate to serve the customer, passionate to serve one another- their colleagues and passionate to serve the community. That's the kind of people that we want to be and who we wanna work with.

And we all shared different names and then we took a moment and we sent them a quick email or teams message to say, Hey, I just want you to know we were talking about people who are heart driven. We were thinking of you, we talked about you and the leadership team Time and time again the notes that we got back where these notes of thankfulness these notes of, Hey, thanks for seeing me. Thanks for knowing me. And that's what happens when we pray for one another with a sense of gratitude. We shift our relationships to a place of grace. So if we want to build a community of grace and peace, we need to be able to pray with gratitude for one another.

So who might you begin praying for with a sense of gratitude? Maybe it's just a rhythm and habit you want to add for your family. Maybe there's someone at work or at church that is particularly difficult. Just by beginning to pray with a sense of giving thanks for who they are, what they bring to a community will shift the way you think and the way you see them.

And so encourage you to do that. To operate with a sense of gratitude.

The second idea that Paul sketches out in verse six of chapter one, he says, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. And so in this way, Paul is encouraging the church saying, Hey, I'm confident. I'm confident that God began this good work in you and that God will carry it to completion. And that confidence lends peace.

I don't know about you, but I can't have peace if I'm not confident. So for example, the Knicks are playing in the playoffs right now, and when they go up against the Boston Celtics, the Celtics have quite the team, and we had won two games, but the idea that we were gonna get three in a row from them seemed unlikely to me. So I entered the game with a lack of confidence. I was not peaceful.

On another side, I think when we have a sense of confidence, we're able to have a sense of peace. Now, one of the troubles for you and I is that we often place our confidence in things that don't justify it. And when that happens, we end up disappointed. And so we want to be thinking, am I putting my confidence in my ability? Am I putting my confidence in my wealth? Am I putting my confidence in luck or some sort of system? Because those will fail us and disappoint us. But what we can be confident in is that what God has revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is the true reality, and it gives us this sense of hope because it's not optimism and we don't have to succumb to fatalism, but instead, we can believe that what we see in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the trajectory of all of creation. That all of creation is going to have an ending and a resurrecting in which things will be set right and restored. And so let me ask you, as you're thinking about building a community of grace and peace here at the church or in your home or in your workplace, what are you placing your confidence in? And is it worthy of it? Can it stand up? Is it sturdy enough? To offer you that confidence and extend you that peace.

The last thing Paul does here in this first 11 verses of chapter one is he prays that their love would overflow with knowledge and insight. And here's the thing, when you think about a community, any community, for it to operate on grace and peace, it needs to be fueled by love.

I have a friend of mine who has a great story about accidentally filling his car with diesel fuel instead of unleaded gasoline, and it turns out his car didn't work so great on diesel fuel. The same thing is true for our communities. If we want a community of grace and peace, we have to have it be fueled by love.

And the way we do that is to center ourself in prayer, pray that we would grow in love. Whenever Paul's talking about love, he's always talking about something very specific. He's talking about a way of relating, a way of acting, a way of being, and it's a way of being kind and gentle and humble and meek, and offering forgiveness and enduring all things, and bearing all things.

That's always what Paul's talking about because that's what love has been revealed in the person of Christ. That's what love is. And so his prayer is that we would see that reality more than any other reality, that we would act out of that reality more than any other reality. And it would overflow in kindness and gentleness and self-control and a sense of hope and grace and mercy and faith and justice, and that if we wanna build this kind of community of grace and peace, that we need to allow to be fueled by love.

And so my last challenge to you is to ask yourself, what are you praying for? Are you praying that you would grow in love and that it would overflow to others? Are you praying for your family, for your work, for your church? That that would be the same? Because when we get there, then we have the building blocks complete in which we pray with gratitude, we're confident in Christ's ability to bring things to completion, to rescue, renew, and restore, and all of that's fueled by this overflow of love.

Hey, I hope that was helpful for you and I hope you have a great week. I'll see you soon. Take care.