12th May 2025

12th May 2025


Pray (ACts)


Read (Philippians 1:12-18a focus 12-14)


Message (Alan Burke) 


It’s three o’clock in the morning and someone rings your doorbell. You’re sleeping so you kinda hear it but aren’t sure and after all it’s three o’clock who would be at your door so you roll over and close your eyes. But the doorbell goes again and again and again and it’s getting faster and faster so you scrape yourself out of your pit, lift the rolling pin just in case and go to the door. You get there and it some lady who has been out at the pub and she’s barely able to stand, the car is still running and she wants to use your loo. How would you respond? 


You finally got an appointment with the Dr because you’ve been feeling under the weather, you get sent to the nurse on the way out to get your bloods taken and head home with an iron prescription because he thinks you’re low in iron and that’s why you’re feeling under the weather. Then on Wednesday you get a phone call from the practice to say you need to come in to see the doctor, but there is no appointments until the beginning of next week. You have a restless weekend you can barely sleep, the results of your blood work are in and you have been red flagged for further tests. Those tests reveal you’re not long left. How would you respond?


How we respond in the situations we find ourselves says a lot about us, how we respond in the situations we find ourselves in can be used by the Lord to advance the gospel. Here Paul wants the Church to know, that what has happened to him has served to advanced the gospel. Imagine you’re in Philippi, yes it’s a Roman Provence but it is miles away from Rome and things are fairly safe for you as a believer and Paul says this. You might have thought he off his trolly but he wasn’t because God was at work in his circumstances and he could see it. If we were in the shoes of the church in Philippi we would have no doubt been perplexed by this, wondering how it would be so, but his imprisonment had really served to advance the gospel and v13, ‘As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ’. 


Paul in his circumstances was sharing the hope he had in the gospel with the prisoners and with the palace guard. They would have seen a man who is unlike the rest of the prisoners, a man who prayed with joy, and amongst men who were there because of their criminality and lamenting their imprisonment there was Paul, someone who was speaking of his joy and the good news of the gospel. Paul was a man like no other in prison. Paul was a man who was willing to suffer for the sake of Christ Jesus, he was willing to suffer because of his Lord. Because of how he has responded to his circumstances it caused others to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly. 


Have you ever thought that in what you face, the circumstances that you find yourself, even when they are those circumstances are tough, circumstances that you can't make sense off them and you are left crying out to God, wanting to know why that how you respond can serve to advance the gospel. Have you ever thought that maybe the Lord in those things is shaping us, showing us to be steadfast under trial so that we would receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. The Lord uses us where we are and in what we face for his glory and how we respond impacts those around us from those closest to us, our families, our fiends, or neighbours and even those whom we do not know. We can trust God’s purposes in what we face and God uses them for his glory (Jn 13:7).


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q81 What is forbidden in the tenth commandment?
A. The tenth commandment forbiddeth all discontentment with our own estate, envying or grieving at the good of our neighbor, and all inordinate motions and affections to anything that is his.
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