A Little Help from My Friends - Part A

The right kind of people can add to your joy. They can increase your joy. They can enhance your joy.

Why? Because they ease our burdens and they take the grind out of life. And I would add to that and say that as technology increases in our world and as personal touch decreases in our world that good friends, the right kind of people, are going to be an even greater demand. Tim Keller said, In nearly 40 years of expository teaching, I still love hearing that one of my messages spoke to someone personally, that it urged them on to know God better or become more like Him.

But that's not because of me. That's just the power of the Word of God doing the work of God in the hearts of the people. Get to know the God who knows you with Pastor Skip's Picks, a collection of some of Pastor Skip's most memorable teachings, including Is the Rapture Real?

and Overcoming an Anxious Mind. This four DVD collection is our thanks for your gift of $25 or more to help keep this ministry connecting more people to Jesus. Call now to request your copy of Pastor Skip's Picks, 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Okay, we're in Philippians chapter two today as we get into the teaching with Skip Heitziger. The great missionary to India, E. Stanley Jones said, When I met Christ, it was as though I had swallowed sunshine. Isn't that a great statement? He was speaking of the joy that he experienced in meeting Jesus Christ.

And then it was C.S. Lewis, a person that we've all probably read, that great British scholar, who said, Joy is the serious business of heaven. And while I like that, I have to say, it's the serious business of heaven, but it can be seriously challenged on earth. And the greatest challenge usually is from other people. People can challenge our joy. That's the way it was with Paul the Apostle.

He is in prison. But if you remember back in chapter one, he spoke about those people who stir up trouble and make his chains even worse, his incarceration worse than it was. However, the right kind of people can add to your joy. They can increase your joy. They can enhance your joy. Why? Because they ease our burdens and they take the grind out of life.

And I would add to that and say that as technology increases in our world, and as personal touch decreases in our world, that good friends, the right kind of people, are going to be in even greater demand. Now let me have you take a test this morning. I'm going to ask you six questions. You can just answer them in your own mind. Number one, name the five wealthiest people in the world.

Just see if you can. You might come up with the first one or two, but can you name the five wealthiest people on earth? Number two, name the last five Heisman Trophy winners.

I probably lost a lot of you right on that one. Number three, can you name the last five winners of the Miss America contest? Number four, name ten people who have won a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize. And number five, name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for Best Actor or Actress. And then finally, number six, test is not over. Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners. Now, I bet you didn't do very well on that test.

Even though these people represent the best in their fields, the truth is we forget yesterday's headliners. But there's more to the test. I'm going to ask you six more questions. You're going to do better on this part. Number one, list a few teachers who helped you in your journey through school. Number two, name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time. Number three, name five people who taught you something worthwhile. Number four, think of five people you enjoy spending time with. And number six, name some heroes whose stories have inspired you. I bet you did great on that last part, right?

You probably got all A's on that. Here's the point. The people who matter to us are not the ones with the most trophies or wealth or beauty. But those who make the most impact in our lives are those who have cared the most for us in our lives. You know, it's easy to forget that people like Paul the Apostle also needed friends. And Paul had friends.

Can you think of a few? I immediately think of Luke, who was a companion of Paul the Apostle. I think of Barnabas. I think of Silas.

I think of Aquila and Priscilla. Those were all Paul's friends. But here in the book of Philippians, he names two more friends, Timothy and Epaphroditus. I know you've heard of Timothy, Epaphroditus.

Some of you are a little sketchy on him. But you'll learn more about him next time. Timothy and Epaphroditus were both friends of Paul. They were both servants to Paul. And they both added enormous joy to Paul's life.

Now I'm going to bring you up to speed in this book before we jump into our text. Paul's theme is still humility, lowliness of mind, he called it, serving one another, loving and caring for one another. And he has given us two examples, the ultimate example, Jesus Christ. He said, Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, even though he was in very nature God, yet he humbled himself. So that's number one, Jesus, first example. Second example, Paul himself, who said, I am willing to pour my very life out on the sacrifice of your faith. However, it would be easy for a reader, like the Philippian church, to read his letter and look at those two examples and say, well, I could never be that. I can't be exactly like Jesus or even the great apostle Paul.

Those are lives that are out of reach for me. And so Paul puts the cookies down on the lowest shelf, so to speak. He says, Okay, let me give you two more examples. Timothy is one and Epaphroditus is another. So we're introduced in verse 19 to an ordinary guy named Timothy that Paul was sending to them. Verse 19 says, But I trust in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you shortly, that I also may be encouraged when I know your state.

For no one like-minded who will sincerely care for your state, for all seek their own, not the things which are of Christ Jesus. But you know his proven character, that as a son with his father, he served with me in the gospel. Therefore, I hope to send him at once as soon as I see how it goes with me.

But I trust in the Lord that I myself shall also come shortly. Let me give you a little bit of a background on Timothy. Timothy was a young man who became a protege to the apostle Paul. Paul met him on his first missionary journey. His first mission trip, he went through Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.

And he went to a little town called Lystra and then another one called Derby. It was probably in that first town that he met Timothy. Timothy was the son of a Jewish woman and the son of an unbelieving father. But on Paul's first mission trip, young Timothy gave his life to Christ. Later on, he will become part of Paul's mission team. On the second missionary journey, when he comes through town, he invites Timothy to join the greater Paul the Apostle evangelistic organization.

And he starts traveling now with Paul the Apostle. So over time, this young man matures spiritually. And because friendship, like Rome, is not built in a day, it takes time to cultivate a mature love and a mature friendship. So what I want to show you out of our text are four qualities of a good friend or four qualities of mature friendship.

Now as we're going through this, here's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping that as we process this together, you're not thinking, man, I need to find somebody like that who will be that kind of a friend to me. But I'm hoping you'll say, I need to learn how I can be that kind of a friend to somebody else. So let's consider now these four qualities of mature friendship.

Number one, a good friend, a mature friend, is reliable. He's reliable. Verse 19, Paul says, So Paul makes the announcement that he plans to send Timothy on a journey to them.

Why? Why Timothy? Simply because Timothy is reliable. Timothy is the first person on a two-person list of exemplary, faithful friends of Paul.

I want you to think about that. I bet when it comes to your friends, you can count on one hand those who are reliable friends. I bet it's a very short list. You might have a lot of friends on Facebook, but Facebook friends are different from faithful friends. Timothy was faithful to Paul. He was reliable.

I found a little interesting tidbit in the Journal of National Academy of Sciences that said most people tend to have between five and eight close friends. So here's Paul's short list, and first on the list is Timothy. Timothy was reliable. It was Timothy that was sent by Paul from Athens to Thessalonica, 1 Thessalonians chapter 3. He was also sent from Ephesus to Corinth, 1 Corinthians chapter 4. He was sent from Ephesus to Macedonia, Acts chapter 19. Now he's sending him again on an errand to go all the way from Rome to Philippi, which is about 800 miles.

It takes somebody reliable to pull that off. Now go to verse 22 and notice something. Look at the very end of that verse, verse 22. It says, He served with me in the gospel.

Now watch this. Therefore, I hope to send him at once that I may, as soon as I see how it goes with me. I want you to get that therefore. I want you to get the thought here. What Paul is saying is because Timothy has been so reliable, Timothy has therefore become more valuable.

He is valuable because he is reliable. Now Paul wanted to go himself to Philippi. He announces that. I want to come if I get out of here basically, if I see how it goes with me. If it goes well, I'll come. But if I can't come, the next best to me actually going to see you is to send Timothy.

Now how much of an honor is that? To go from Paul's son in the faith, to Paul's servant in the faith, to Paul's substitute as he is being sent from Rome to Philippi. Now there's a principle in that I want you to get. Faithfulness is what will open the door to more fruitfulness. The more faithful you are, you just stay at it, stay at it, stay at it.

That will open the door to more fruitfulness. Now that's a servant's reward, by the way. A servant's reward is getting to serve more. If you're not a servant, that is not a reward. People who are not servant-hearted, when they get asked to serve, they go, oh, again? You want me to, I've already done stuff. Do I have to volunteer?

Get somebody else. A servant says, I get to do more? Awesome. And they're in it to win it. And they'll see that as something that is a blessing, not a curse. There are two parables that Jesus gave in the Gospel of Matthew about this. Matthew 24 and Matthew 25. In Matthew 24, it's a parable called the Parable of the Two Servants. And Jesus makes this remark, Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find so doing. I say to you that he will make him ruler over all his goods.

Faithfulness leads to fruitfulness. The second parable in the next chapter, Matthew 25, is about the parable of the talents. Now don't think of talents as the ability to sing and dance or something like that.

We're talking about monetary commissions. So he gave five talents to one, two talents to another, one talent to another. This is money, bags of silver or gold. Jesus said, Well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.

You remember that? Enter into the joy of your Lord. Most people think that means heaven. But I think what it means is you've been faithful, so now you're going to be more fruitful, and the joy of your Lord is expanded service.

That's the joy of your Lord. You get to do more. So the principle is the more reliable you are, the more valuable you become, and faithfulness will lead to fruitfulness. So then, the first quality of a mature friend is a good friend, a mature friend is reliable. Second, a mature friend is compatible. In verse 20, Paul says, For I have no one like-minded, mark that word, like-minded, who will sincerely care or naturally care for your state. In friendships, in fact, in any relationship, we talk about compatibility.

Are they compatible? What we mean is they're personalities that are better suited to other personalities, and some personalities that just aren't suited to different ones. Even Aristotle, the great Greek thinker, noticed that there is what he called a natural affinity in friendship. That people will get together or gravitate toward other people who like the same thing they like.

There's a compatibility of interest or a compatibility of goal. So Paul uses the word, notice, like-minded. And the reason I'm having you notice the word is because the only single time it appears in the New Testament is here. It's never used anywhere else, the Greek word, isopsukas.

Isopsukas literally means equal-sold, or like-sold. We are of one soul, Paul is saying of Timothy. It's sort of like David and Jonathan. You remember in the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 18, we're told the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David. They were like-sold, equal-sold.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, true friends don't spend time just gazing into each other's eyes, but they face the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals, and above all, toward a common Lord. So get this, Timothy and Paul had the same goal. Their goal was to serve God and to serve God's people.

But here's what's remarkable. There were hundreds of Christians at this time in the city of Rome. And Paul probably knew a bunch of them. In fact, at the end of his letter to the Romans, Romans 16, Paul lists personal friends, personal names, 27 personal names.

So he must have known a lot of them. But what he's saying is, of all the ones that I know at Rome, there is only one person who shares the same soul that I do. We are soul mates, in that he has the same interests and the same goal for Christ that I do. 1 Corinthians 16, 10, Paul describes Timothy, he does the work of the Lord as I do also. Twice in the very last letter Paul ever wrote in his life, 2 Timothy, he writes to Timothy saying twice, you have carefully followed my doctrine, my manner of life, purpose, faith, long-suffering, love, and perseverance. Those guys are like-souled, like-minded.

So, find someone who pursues Jesus Christ as much as you do and walk into the future with that person. That's what I did with my wife. My wife Lenny and I, we're very similar in certain respects, but very, very different in others. But of all the differences that we have, and I remember at first in our marriage there were things that we did that sort of irritated us, now we sort of laugh at them and we enjoy them. We've learned to accommodate. But one thing we agree on, one thing we are like-minded on, and that is our pursuit of Christ. We are like-souled.

So, a mature friend is reliable, a mature friend is compatible, here's the third, a good friend, a mature friend is thoughtful. Thoughtful. In verse 20 he says, I have no one like-minded who will sincerely care for your state, verse 21, for all seek their own, not the things which are of Christ Jesus. Now we're back to that servant thing again, and Paul's been harping on that for several verses.

And perhaps just when you thought it was over and you could move on, you were thinking, skip, I remember we had a couple weeks of telling us we had to serve one another and love one another and be humble with each other and all that stuff, and I'm just so glad we're done with that, we can move on to real life. Well, evidently to Paul you're not done, because he keeps bringing it up and using example after example and application after application. And so he said, let this mind be in you which is also in Christ Jesus, but he said as his premise, let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility or lowliness of mind, let each of us esteem others better than himself. That's a wonderful passage, trouble is, it's hard. That's difficult to actually esteem, prefer others more than ourselves.

Well, one who did that was Timothy. He will sincerely care for your state. In other words, he genuinely cares for your welfare. The word sincerely simply means he's the real deal. There's nothing fake about him, there's nothing phony about him, there's nothing hypocritical, he actually cares. Timothy didn't plaster a fake smile on him so that he could sell you something or that he'd get a bigger tip.

He actually genuinely cared. I think you can tell if somebody's sincere in their care. I mean, animals can. I found this funny little study, a scientific journal, where they took dogs and put them in MRI scanners with something to read brain waves. And they noted dogs care about what we say and how we say it. I found it fascinating that they can process word meaning and intonation. They don't have a big vocabulary, but they get the basic rudimentary commands and things that you say. But they listen to the words they're familiar with, but also how you say them.

Now, this has nothing at all to do with my study, I just thought it was fascinating. Except for this, I think if animals know and they can tell if we're sincere or not, certainly human beings can. And Paul knew that of Timothy, that he esteems others better than himself. He's not self-centered. He's not thinking, what about me?

He's thinking, what about them? That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series Technicolor Joy. Right now, a trip to Israel is a life changer. Your Bible study will never be the same. Skip has lived in Israel and led tours many, many times. Here he is to invite you on his next tour. You know, there's always something new to see and experience in Israel. And I'm so excited to let you know that I'm taking another tour group to Israel next spring in 2022. You're in for an incredible time as we travel throughout Israel and experience the culture that's so unique to that country. We'll start on the Mediterranean Sea and head north, seeing places like Caesarea and Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River. We'll spend several days in and around Jerusalem and see the Temple Mount, Calvary, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Mount of Olives, and much more. This remarkable itinerary is made richer with times of worship, Bible study, and lots of fellowship. Now, I've been to Israel a number of times over the years, and I can honestly say that visiting the places where the events of the Scriptures unfolded, where Jesus lived, taught, and healed, it just never gets old. I can't wait to see you in Israel. Start planning and saving now to tour Israel with Skip Heitzig. Information at inspirationcruises.com slash C-A-B-Q.

That's inspirationcruises.com slash C-A-B-Q. Coming up tomorrow, Skip Heitzig shares from Paul's epistle how you can be a true and loyal friend. All of us live in one of two places. We either live in Philippians 1-21 or Philippians 2-21. Philippians 1-21 reads, For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Philippians 2-21, you just read it, all seek their own, not the things which are of Christ Jesus. You either live in 1-21 or 2-21. Think of it this way. You're turning 21. Which 21 are you turning?

1-21 or 2-21? Seeking your own, not Jesus? Or for me to live is Christ and to die is gain?

We all live in one of two camps. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on His word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.