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SERMONCourageCourage encourages others to be courageous, exalts Christ, and displays God's supremacy.Mark Buchanan
Text: Philippians 1:12-30
Topic: What happens when we have courage in the face of fear.
From the editor:
Here's another great sermon from one of our featured preachers, Mark Buchanan. If you'd like to listen along to the sermon as you read, click here.
Introductory remarks from Mark Buchanan:
"Courage" was the third week in a 10-week series on Philippians entitled I Can Do Everything: Paul, Jesus, the Philippians, & Us. I began the series with a memory citation of the entire letter. The second week, I dealt with the first 11 verses. "Courage" is based in Philippians 1:12-30.
I had preached a shorter (5-week) series on Philippians a mere two-and-a-half years prior. I decided to preach it again because of a heightened focus on outreach in our church. Though outreach is hardly the letter's most conspicuous theme, three considerations led me to approach it in this way: one, the letter's robust call to unity and joy as a sign of the gospel's deep winsomeness and ultimate triumph; two, its emphasis on Christ-likeness as the heart of witness; three, its prophetic engagement with contemporary issues—fear of death, pride of accomplishment, preoccupation with the here and now, the fickleness of happiness, the equation of security with wealth. I wanted to frame the letter as a biblical critique of these popular but flawed values, and as an invitation to follow a more excellent way.
I also wanted to integrate the story of Paul's travels in Philippi recorded in Acts 16. This story (featuring a businesswoman, a slave girl, a jailer, and some prisoners) is a powerful confirmation that Paul lived the life he commends to others. In fact, we hung at the back of the sanctuary four black-and-white photos, enlarged to 4'x3', that depicted a rich socialite in Seattle, a modern-day slave girl in India, a Khmer prisoner in Cambodia, and a prison guard in Sudan (all photos my brother, a professional photographer, shot on assignment in those places). The idea was to create a visual link, with an international flavor, between then and now, here and there. Mostly, I wanted to depict people who we might think of as unlikely candidates for salvation to drive home the point that if the gospel reached such people in Paul's day, it can reach such people in ours.
"Courage" covers a lot of material. I took the theme that unites this long section of the letter, and then I structured the sermon as a response to the fear-mongering so prevalent in our culture. In essence, the sermon asks the question, "What should we do when the sky is falling?" and answers, "Be courageous." And here's why … .
I used a blend of contemporary, historical, and biblical illustrations to strengthen the message, but I wanted to do more than just illustrate; I wanted to inspire. I wanted to engender courage in peoples' hearts.
I had two possible endings, the Polycarp one and another one. The alternate ending was part of an interview with Brady Boyd (from the Summer 2008 issue of Leadership), where he tells about New Life Church in Colorado walking through healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness after the 2007 shooting deaths on their campus. I fully intended to use this story, but as I was closing in on the end of my sermon, I could see that the Polycarp story was a more natural fit, so I grabbed it and discarded the other.
The most satisfying thing about "Courage" was the number of people who came up in the weeks after I preached it and told me that it gave them courage to "stand down the tanks" in their life.
Introduction
The 20th century has been variously called the Age of Anxiety, the Age of Unbelief, and the Age of Depravity. Some pundits, not even a decade into the 21st century, have already named this century the Age of Fear. Fear increasingly defines our world on all fronts about all things, from Bangkok to Burnaby, Duncan to Delhi, New York to Newton: fear about local and national and international economies, climate change, the environment, the surge in gang- and drug-related violence, the diminishment of the food supply, the tainting of the blood supply, the population explosion, the reemergence of anti-Semitism (if it ever went away), the rise of militant Islam, the rise and resiliency of international terrorism, the breakdown of international diplomacy, the spread of cancer, the sweeping magnitude of the AIDS/HIV epidemic, the threat of a worldwide and untreatable contagion, the alarming growth in human trafficking. The list goes on.
Be afraid, the world says. Be very afraid.
On the morning I began to prepare this message, Wednesday, February 11, 2009, these were the headlines in the Times Colonist:
- Study links mold to aboriginal health woes
- Premier pledges to take on gangs
- Temperatures drop as winds lash Greater Victoria
- Activists vow to go to court
- Teen charged in fatal hit and run
- Baby's death stuns Nanaimo couple
- Woman dies after RCMP shoot alleged killer
- Dog stabber avoids jail time
- Stocks tank as U.S., Senate approves stimulus package
- Aussie fire toll climbs to 181
- Brace yourselves for a difficult year
- Gas prices inch higher
- Broadcast profits hit 13-year low
- Yahoo stock downgraded
- Canadian workers to feel GM's white-collar purge
- Mood darkens for metals bosses
- Economic slump could siphon jury pool
- Miller Western curtails production
- Kruger cuts back on coated paper
- Molson Coors earnings fizzle
- Muzack files for bankruptcy
- HarperCollins to lay off staff
- Unclear rescue plan causes market slide
- Global warming blamed as birds migrate north
- Windstorms batter France; UK on flood alert
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
That is, unless you know and trust the God and the Lord Jesus Christ, whom Paul and the Philippians knew and trusted. They, even more than we, had abundant reasons to be afraid.
They chose courage, and we'll see why.
God says we must be courageous in the face of fear.
In Philippians 1:12-30, God says be strong and courageous.
Later in this letter, tongue-in-cheek, Paul tells the Philippians, "If anyone else thinks he has reasons to boast, I have more." Then he lists all his bragging rights—born this, done that, been here, gone there—before saying all that now is rubbish to him.
Paul might well have begun this section, "If anyone else thinks he has reasons to be afraid, I have more: stuck in prison, sometimes half starving, not knowing whether I'll live or die, with even Christian brothers out making trouble for me, embedded in a culture openly disdainful of and sometimes violently opposed to what you and I have staked our entire lives upon."
If anyone had whining rights, quaking-in-their boots rights, Chicken Little screaming "the sky is falling" rights, it would be Paul, and next to him the economically impoverished and sociologically beset Philippians.
But Paul is downright cheerful, and what he says, mostly, is: be strong and courageous.
How do we achieve that? Let's glean this passage to discover what courage is and does and where it comes from. There are, according to this section of Philippians, three things courage does.
Courage encourages courage.
Paul says that "because of my chains"—because of, not in spite of—"because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly." My courage, he says, has given others courage to be courageous. A single act of courage can do that: create a firestorm of bravery.
Remember Tiananmen Square in 1989? A mere stick of a man, standing down a tank convoy dispatched from one of the most militaristic, repressive regimes in history. That single act of courage did more to embolden ordinary Chinese—and the world—to stand against brutality and tyranny than a thousand diplomatic speeches could ever have done.
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