How to Have Unfathomable Peace - Part A

Imagine having a peace that passes all understanding. Imagine having a peace that it doesn't really make sense that you should have it.

It's like, I have it, I don't quite get it because I really have every legitimate reason to be anxious right now, but I'm not. Skip shares how you can neutralize anxiety so God's peace can reign in your life. But first, we want to invite you to see the very places Jesus walked, taught, and performed miracles. Skip and his wife, Lenya, are taking a group to Israel in 2022, and you're invited on the journey. Visit places like Nazareth, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Garden Tomb. And that's just a quick look at the trip.

Find out more about the trip at inspirationcruises.com slash c-a-b-q. Now, we're in Philippians chapter 4 as we dive into our study with Skip Heitzig. There was a woman who for years couldn't get any sleep because she was always worried that a burglar would break in her house. And it was an irrational fear. Her husband tried to talk her out of it, but it just persisted. So she'd go to sleep at night or go to bed at night.

She goes, I just can't sleep. I know somebody's going to break in the house. So it never happened, but one night the husband heard a noise downstairs. So he gets up, goes down the stairs, and guess who he meets? It's a burglar. It's a genuine burglar. So after they kind of settled what was going to happen, the husband said, hey, would you mind coming upstairs to meet my wife?

She's been waiting to meet you for 10 years. And you know, here's the little thing behind that story. A burglar can steal from you once. The burglar of anxiety can steal from you for years. On a show of hands, how many of you have ever been worried?

Raise your hand. Okay. How many of you have ever been worried about something that never happened? Okay, so I did that because that's most of our worries. Huffington Post ran an article that said 85% of the things most people worry about are things that will never happen. The article went on to say 97% of what you worry about is just a fearful mind punishing you with exaggerations and misconceptions.

And typically this happens at night. You're alone, you're closing your eyes, you're trying to zone out, trying to get some sleep, and then those thoughts just come creeping in, assailing you, stealing your peace. Imagine having a peace that passes all understanding. Imagine having a peace that it doesn't really make sense that you should have it. It's like, I have it, I don't quite get it because I really have every legitimate reason to be anxious right now, but I'm not.

Imagine being able to live that way on a daily basis. Well, I'm calling this message how to have unfathomable peace, and that's what we're promised in Philippians chapter 4. Now let me just say that typically when most preachers treat this idea about peace, they go right to chapter 4 verse 6 and 7.

What I'm going to do is take you back to the beginning of the chapter because I think the whole thought begins there, the whole idea. So let's read some of these verses together. Chapter 4 of Philippians, I'm going to begin reading in verse 1. Therefore, my beloved and longed-for brethren, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, beloved.

I implore Yodia and I implore Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. And I urge you also, true companion, help these women who labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the book of life. Rejoice in the Lord always.

Again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. If you remember, our first message was on the promise that Jesus gave to his disciples in John 14 and John 16. A peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you, not as the world gives. Our second message, we talked about being a peacemaker. Blessed are the peacemakers.

We highlighted Jacob and Esau. And then last week we looked at when peace gets personal, that great promise in Isaiah 26. You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. Now I'm taking you to Philippians and what I'm going to do is take some of the principles we talked about and overlap them a little bit and bring it home and give you some building blocks that will help you and I develop a peace that passes all understanding in Paul's words. So here's the first building block. This is why I wanted to begin up in the first part of the chapter. The first building block is resolve controversy. Resolve controversy.

Make sure that as much as possible you are making peace and you are resolving things that hinder that peace. So I'm going to take you back to verse 1 where Paul begins. He's been writing several chapters now.

This is the last chapter so he's landing the plane. And so he says, Therefore my, now look at how he puts this, my beloved and longed for brethren, my joy and my crown. You are my crowning activity, experience, the joy and fellowship that I have with you. So stand fast in the Lord, my beloved. It's pretty evident that Paul had a special relationship with the Philippian church. He knew them to be mature. He knew them to be enduring. These are not the Corinthians he's writing to. He had a really good, solid relationship and respect for them. And I love how he begins in verse 1, this chapter, with gracious words representing a pastoral heart.

And here's why this is important. Here's Paul, and I just love the way he talks, is God is invisible. Love makes God visible. God is invisible to the world, but our love takes an invisible God and makes Him visible in that sense. In 1 John chapter 4 verse 12, that's what Paul, that's what John said. John said, No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us and His love has been brought to full expression through us.

And I've always believed that if the world can see a loving, caring, nurturing community of people who love each other across barriers, across social and economic and racial barriers, can really show love to each other, it will make a great impact. So, with that statement of love that Paul begins with, he's going to turn up the heat a little bit. Now if you know this chapter, you might think, Paul's buttering them up for the kill.

He's not doing that, but he's going to turn up the heat on his language a little bit. He is now going to appeal to two people in the community that are mentioned here to resolve a conflict, to resolve a controversy. So in verse 2, here he goes, I implore, it's a strong word, I'll get to that in a minute, I implore Yodia, and I implore Syntyche.

Okay, not great names, but back then I guess they were great names, and they're important names, to be of the same mind in the Lord. Now the word implore is where Paul is turning up the heat a little bit. The word implore, it's not a harsh word, but it's a more intense word. When you implore somebody, it's when you really want them to get what you're saying, so you kind of get up in their space a little bit.

You go, hey listen, I got to talk to you about this. And notice that Paul doesn't say, I implore Yodia and Syntyche, he says, I implore Yodia and I implore, he uses it twice. He is an equal opportunity exhorter. He wants to make sure that these two gals, that he is not going on one person's side versus the other person's side, so he uses equal language. I just think this is a very tactful way to approach it.

I implore you, and I implore you to be of the same mind in the Lord. Now, the name Yodia is a Greek name that means good journey, good journey. So let's call her Mrs. Good Trip.

Okay, because that's kind of the literal translation. So you've got Mrs. Good Trip over here, then you've got Syntyche, which means fortunate or fortunate one, so let's call her Miss Lucky. So you've got Miss Good Trip and Miss Lucky, and they're arguing about something. Whoever they were, they were prominent members of the church at Philippi, because in verse 3, notice what he says, I urge you also, true companion, help these women who labored with me in the gospel. So at one point, they worked with Paul the Apostle.

How did you like that on your resume? Oh yeah, Paul and I, we're like this, we do stuff together. We go on mission trips together. So they were pretty prominent, and here's my guess, they may have been among the first women at that first prayer meeting in Philippi when Paul went to go visit that city. If you remember the story in Acts 16, it says that Paul went to Philippi, went down to a riverside where women were gathering, and it was customary for them to have prayer by this riverside. Now what most of us don't know when we read that is that Jewish law said if you can't find 10 Jewish males in a town, you can't have a synagogue.

You have to have at least 10 males to form a synagogue, a community. The fact that Paul went down to a river and there were a group of women praying, Jewish women praying, shows that it was a very, very small Jewish community in that town, not even enough to have a synagogue. But there were women there and Paul spoke to them, and the church was probably birthed out of those women gathering at the riverside so that these two gals were probably among the founding mothers of the church. But they were prominent.

They were important. They had gone on mission trips with Paul. Now I'm making a point with this, and that is that sometimes even the most faithful servants of the Lord get sideways.

I've seen this for years. I've worked with all sorts of people on this staff, and sometimes you get people who are mature in the Lord and they seem to be really grown and seem to be really good, but something happens and they get a little weird or a little sideways or a little angry, and evidently that is the case here. What amazes me, I don't know if you caught this when you read through Philippians, but it's amazed me that Paul mentions them in his letter by name. He's like calling them out. He didn't say, hey, you know, you've got a couple of gals in that church, I won't say their names, but they need to get their act together. He like says their names, writes it in the Bible, so that forever they will go down as the two chicks who didn't get along in church.

You have to understand what this means. Letters, when they were sent by Paul the Apostle, were read publicly in church. Let's say it's Sunday morning in Philippi, AD 50 or so, it's 10 o'clock in the morning, or let's say 9 o'clock service, and the elder comes up to the pulp and says, I got a letter from Paul. What's everybody going to say? Tell me.

Read it! He goes, okay, here goes. So he starts reading chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, good stuff, joy in the Lord, you know, I reached for the prize, the mark, the high calling in Christ Jesus, talked about his testimony.

It's so filled with love, so filled with encouragement. Now we're in chapter 4, he's going to land the plane, and he says, okay, Yodia. Okay, if you're Yodia in church, right? Syntheke!

Talk this through, resolve the conflict, this has been going on too long. It's amazing to me. Michael Bentley wrote this, if in 100 years time your name was to be discovered in an old document, what one thing would you like the finder to learn? Would it be recorded that you were a kind and loving person? A mature Christian? Now I can't tell you what these two ladies were arguing about, Paul doesn't mention it, but let me take a stab at it. I don't think it was a doctrinal issue, and the reason I don't think it was a doctrinal issue is because if you know Paul's writings, whenever there was a doctrinal issue, he got the doctrine out on the table and said, this is what the Bible says about that, here's the truth, this is what I learned from the Lord, or this is what the prophets say, he spelled it out pretty clearly. So I don't think it was a doctrinal issue, I don't think it was a behavioral issue, because again, from the writings of Paul, when there were behavioral issues, like with the Corinthian church, they were suing each other, they had weird ideas about marriage and divorce, he would bring those to the forefront, tell them to stop doing that, and do this. So I don't think it was doctrinal, I don't think it was behavioral, what I think it was, was trivial. I think it was just some personal little thing that got into one of these gals' heads or hearts, and they made mountains out of molehills. It's sort of like what Solomon talked about in the Song of Solomon, when he said, it's the little foxes that spoil the grapes. How many of you have discovered that small, dumb stuff divides people?

Have you found that to be true? And if you want to see how that works, graphically, at any point in time, get on social media for five minutes, and just read posts that people say to each other, and it's like keyboard courage, right? These keyboard pirates, they don't want you to know who they are, but they just want to spout stuff off. So what is the solution? Well, he says, I implore, I beg, Yodia, and I beg you, Syntyche, be of the same mind, but notice this, in the Lord. That's how you do it, in the Lord. That's the one person they forgot in their argument, was the Lord. So what Paul does in calling them out and saying this the way he said it, he takes a social issue and places it on spiritual ground. In effect, he's saying, women, here's how you resolve the conflict. Aim for the glory of God. Aim for God's glory. Notice this, too, in verse 3, I urge you also, true companion, I don't have time to really go through all the meanings of that, but let's get to the end part.

Help these women. Help these women who labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and the rest of my fellow workers, look at this, whose names are in the book of life. Do you realize that when you have a disagreement with another believer, if you can but realize their names are in the book of life, it might change the atmosphere? Yeah, well, we don't see eye to eye, but their names are in the book of life. Yeah, but you're going to be in heaven forever. Yeah, but right now, you see, it's like, but your names are in the book of life. So, when there's a conflict, when it arises, ask yourself this, is this something of eternal importance? Is this really a heaven or hell issue? Is this, in a hundred years time, going to be really important? Now, sometimes it is, sometimes it's eternal, sometimes it'll separate a person from God, so that's huge.

But maybe it's just personal, maybe it's just trivial. So, the first building block to develop peace is resolve controversy. The second one is to rejoice frequently. Verse 4, rejoice in the Lord always.

Again, I will say, rejoice. Now, if you know anything about Philippians, Paul is writing this book from a prison cell in Rome. Paul does not know if he's going to live or die. He knows he's going to stand trial soon, but he doesn't know if he's going to live or die. This could be the end, he writes in chapter 2.

Maybe he'll be let go. He didn't know. But what's remarkable is even though he doesn't know if he'll live or die, he talks more about joy in Philippians than just about anywhere else. It's filled with joy, joy, joy, joy. So, when you read Philippians and you realize here's a guy in jail talking about being joyful, you're thinking either he's high on something, he's lost his mind, or he's onto something. He's tapped into something that I need to tap into.

And the first two are not true, by the way. He wasn't high on anything and he didn't lose his mind. He tapped into the presence and fellowship of God. And so, he talks about rejoicing.

And don't you love how verse 4 is written? Rejoice in the Lord always, period, again. I'm going to say that again.

Rejoice. You can tell he's a preacher. Preachers love to do this. They will say something and then they will repeat themselves. Let me say that again.

Right? I mean, if it's something important, they will say it again because they want to make sure that the audience gets it. So, the word rejoice is the verbal form of joy. That's what rejoicing is. It's the actioning of joy. If you have joy, you will rejoice.

In other words, to rejoice is to put joy on display. When I think of rejoicing, I think of one person immediately, and that is my mom. She's in heaven now, but my mom was a rejoicing woman. Every time I talked to her on the phone, every time I'd see her face to face, she'd always smile, she'd laugh a lot. I mean, she had these lines on her face from years of just laughter and happiness and, oh, thank you, and oh, that's so great. She was just delightful. And aren't delightful people just delightful? Right? It's so good to be around people like that, rejoicing people. And on the other end of the spectrum, aren't grumpy people worrying? Right? It's like, oh, do I have to talk to him again?

It's so draining. Now, look back at the text, because this is a Paul thing. Notice that he is not exhorting them to have general optimism not tied to anything at all.

He didn't say, hey, don't worry, be happy. What he says is, rejoice what? In the Lord. There it is again.

It's like with those two gals. Fix this in the Lord. Be of the same mind in the Lord. Now it's rejoice in the Lord. Rejoice in the Lord. In other words, I'll put it this way, life is tough, but God is good. We all know the first part, life is tough, but God is good. Do we know that part?

When you know that part, you rejoice. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from his series, Give Peace a Chance. Right now, we want to share about a great resource that gives you incredible insight into what's going on in the Middle East and why it matters for you. The beating heart of Bible prophecy is the land of Israel and the Middle East. Joel Rosenberg has his finger on the pulse of the world-shaking changes happening right now. And he unveils them in his new nonfiction book, Enemies and Allies. This is the first book of its kind that takes you inside the Oval Office, inside the palaces of the kings and crown princes, the presidents and the prime ministers, in Israel and in the Arab world, as we ask them, what do you think about religious freedom, about making peace with Israel, about the threat from Iran, about U.S.-Arab relations, U.S.-Israel relations? Enemies and Allies, from multiple New York Times bestselling author Joel Rosenberg, takes you on an unforgettable journey inside the turbulent Middle East.

You'll go behind closed doors to hear from the very kings and crown princes, presidents and prime ministers who are leading the charge. Enemies and Allies includes exclusive, never-before-published quotes, insights and analysis from the author's conversations with some of the world's most controversial leaders. Your hardcover copy of Enemies and Allies is our thanks for your generous gift of $35 or more today. To give, call 800-922-1888 or visit connectwithskip.com. The worldwide outreach of Connect with Skip Heitzig is only possible because of listeners like you. Your generous support keeps the Bible teachings you love on the air. So please consider partnering with this ministry today with your gift to take God's word to even more people around the world. Give today at connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate.

Or you can call 800-922-1888, 800-922-1888. Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig talks about the path you can take to live with an unfathomable peace of mind. Look at the birds. God takes pretty good care of them. You're a lot more valuable than they are. He's going to take care of you. Which of you by worrying is going to grow a little bit? Very, very profound. So don't let anxious over-concern about life divide your mind. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times. .