The Pathway of Joy
August 31, 2025
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
Philippians 1:1-11
1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
This morning, we are beginning a new sermon series called Joy in the Living Jesus, going through the New Testament letter of Philippians. I’m super excited about this series because here at Community, we exist to see the weak, wounded, and wayward enjoy the living Jesus. And maybe the primary theme of this book of the Bible is how to find joy in the living Jesus. So if there’s any series we could go through that hits right at the bullseye of what we’re about as a church, this is it. So let’s come ready each week as the Lord teaches us what it means to enjoy him fully. Let’s pray as we get started and then get into it!
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
You and I are designed for joy. Every one of us here was created with a deep, unsatiable need to experience joy that is hardwired into the core of who we are. Our souls need joy like our bodies need water. If this is true, it seems very important that we know what joy is. Because while we all long for joy, it can actually be pretty tough to put our finger on what it really is. The closest we often get to defining joy is comparing it to happiness, but while often we lump joy and happiness together to mean basically the same thing, this isn’t actually the most helpful thing to do. Because happiness is an emotion that we feel based on our circumstances. When I have ice cream, I’m happy. When the Steelers win, I’m happy. When I’m sitting on the beach or hiking in Yosemite National Park, I’m happy. And on the flipside, when I get an unexpectedly large bill in the mail, I’m not happy. When I’m not good at something, I’m not happy. When I’m stuck in traffic, I’m not happy. But while happiness is an emotion that rises and falls with the circumstances we find ourselves in, joy is a feeling of settled happiness, contentedness, gratitude, peace, and satisfaction that is rooted in something deeper than our circumstances. Joy protects us from getting emotional whiplash from being tossed around by the circumstances in our lives. And we long for this kind of joy. We long to be able to feel a settled happiness, contentedness, gratitude, peace, and satisfaction even when we get big bills or find ourselves stuck in traffic. We long for a kind of happiness that our circumstances can’t touch. Everything in us screams for this. When we feel less joy, we feel less human. So, it seems a fair question to ask – how in the world do we get joy? If joy is something fundamental to human flourishing, where do we look for it? Well, that is what Philippians is all about.
A lot has changed in the 2,000 years since the apostle Paul wrote the letter to the Philippian church, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that people then and people now are desperate for joy, and we try to fill that hole in our hearts with anything and everything, often looking in all the wrong places. To put it another way, joy is a mystery that is meant to be unlocked using one particular key, but we often prefer to try to pick the lock on our own terms with the wrong tools.
Our passage today shows us the only pathway to true joy. To find true joy, we must look back, look forward, and then ultimately look to Christ.
LOOK BACK
On the pathway of true joy, we must first look back at all that God has done in the past. Look at verse 1 again with me.
1 Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons
As Paul shows us the pathway of joy, notice the way that what God has done changes our identity. When Paul writes who this letter is from, he says, “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus.” Paul doesn’t identify himself by the word “sinner” or “law keeper,” things that would have defined his life before Christ. Paul is no longer a slave to sin; his primary identity marker is no longer “sinner” but servant of Christ Jesus. It’s also important for us to know that Paul is writing this letter from prison. If there’s ever a place that threatens your identity and seeks to kill your joy, it would be prison. You’re told when you can do everything, you have no say or identity of your own. Yet Paul was grounded in his identity in Christ. He was not primarily a prisoner of Rome, but a servant of Christ Jesus.
And similarly, look at how he identifies the Philippians: as saints in Christ Jesus. Like Paul, the Philippians weren’t always Christians. In Acts 16, we learn of Paul arriving in Philippi. While there he meets a wealthy Gentile woman named Lydia who responds to the gospel, as well as a slave girl possessed by a demon, and then a jailer and his family, who seem to be among the first converts in Philippi. Yet when Paul writes this letter to the church in Philippi 10 or 15 years later, he doesn’t say “Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the wealthy women, demon possessed, and jailers in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi.” No, while those things were true at one point, or in some cases still are true, their primary identity marker is saint. And saint doesn’t mean some special kind of Christian. We can often hear saint and only think of the kinds of Christians we never seem to be able to live up to. No, saint just means someone who at one point was unholy, who has been made holy by Jesus.
Friends, if you are in Christ here today, you need to know that the primary identity you have over your life is saint. Yes, we still wrestle against ongoing sin. But your identity is not sinner. You are a saint. Because of the work of Christ on your behalf, you are not seen by God as unholy but as holy. If you are in Christ, your past may haunt you, but there is no stain on your record, no sin that has plagued you or plagues you now, no addiction, no divorce, no shame because of something that has been done to you that is enough to cause your identity to revert back to “sinner” after you have been called “saint” by God. Do you believe that? God has changed your identity once and for all. And that is a source of true joy for us
Not only is looking back at our identity in Christ a foundation for our joy, but also we can look back at how the gospel has changed everything. Look at verse 2:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
When you think about the posture of God toward you right now, what do you think about? Would he have his arms crossed? What expression would be on his face? Would he want to draw near to you, the real you, or would he recoil away from you? Church, let’s get something absolutely clear. If you are a Christian, you are living under the smile of God. When he sees you in sin, he doesn’t stand far back until you get yourself figured out and cleaned up. Paul is reminding the Philippian church and you and I today that the good news of the gospel for you and I is that rather than wrath, you and I have nothing but grace and peace being ministered to us by God himself. That’s the gospel! That’s the good news! To paraphrase what one pastor said, Paul is talking about the bookends of the gospel here. Grace is the means; peace is the result.[1] And all of that is yours in Christ. That is on offer for all kinds of people here this morning, sinners and sufferers alike. If you are in sin right now, you have the offer of grace and peace. If you are suffering this morning, God isn’t waiting for you to get happy or giving you a long list of things to keep trying and he certainly isn’t heaping on shame for things far out of your control. He draws near to you with grace and peace in the midst of the chaos and the midst of the storm. Paul, writing behind bars while in chains is preaching to himself and to you and I in the midst of wherever we find ourselves, “look back at God’s faithfulness. Look back at his grace and his peace. He hasn’t changed. That grace and that peace is still for you right now.”
These first few verses also show us that looking back at the fruit that God has produced in us can be a helpful reminder of our source of joy. Look at verses 3-5.
3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.
If you’ve been with us over the past year or so, you’ll know that we recently finished a series going through 1 Corinthians. And while there is certainly encouragement in that letter, for the most part Paul is looking at a dumpster fire of a church and offering correction and guidance. The book of Philippians could not be more different. Paul is almost stumbling over his words, gushing at how thankful he is for this support system of a church. A church who has been with him in the good and in the bad. This is clearly a church where the gospel is at work and has changed lives.
And what Paul is doing here is encouraging these Philippian believers to see the way that their partnership with him in the gospel is a fruit of the way God has changed their lives. Even more, it is a source of Paul’s joy in the midst of adversity. Again, remember Paul is in prison! He is deeply grateful for these believers and is trying to help them see that the fruit God has produced in their lives is not random. It is a testimony to the fact that God is at work. He has not left them on their own, but his Spirit is at work in them, and that should produce in them a deep, settled joy. A happiness that can transcend their circumstances. Even in seasons where it is hard to see fruit in particular moments, this kind of holy nostalgia allows us to look back at the way God has worked to produce fruit in us in the past and give us hope that his Spirit has been at work and continues to be at work, even when we struggle to see it.
But while looking back at all God has done can produce so much joy in us, the reality is that so many of us look back on our lives looking from the wrong perspective and so we miss out on the joy that’s on offer for us. Some of us see the good in our lives as a direct result of our own effort, with little acknowledgement of the work of God. Others of us find the darkness in life far more real and true than the light, which clouds our vision. Others of us hide behind facades of false humility, refusing to see anygood in ourselves, robbing God of the opportunity to show himself good and strong and kind when he bears real fruit in your life.
Each of these misses the mark. Each of these misses something crucial on the pathway of joy. To find joy, we must look back and celebrate all that God has done. As you look back on your life, where have you seen God working in and through you? Where have you seen evidence of the fruit of being changed by Jesus? And don’t feel like you need to do this kind of evaluation on your own. Ask those closest to you where they see the Lord at work in you. As a family or as a community group, honor one another by encouraging each other in the particular areas you see the Spirit of God changing you. Let those examples of fruit be an encouragement to you that you can have joy in the gospel as you see glimpses of how slowly but surely you are being formed more and more into the image of Jesus.
LOOK FORWARD
So we’ve seen that on the pathway of joy we can look back at all God has done in giving us a new identity, meeting us in grace, blessing us with peace, and in producing fruit in us. But our next stop on the pathway of joy is to look forward to all that God promises to do. Pick up with me in verses 6-8.
6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.
Many of us are very familiar with verse 6, and for good reason. The promise found here is foundational to Christian hope. Paul speaks with confidence. He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. There is no question in his mind. There is no “eh, I’m like pretty sure God is going to finish what he started in you.” Not at all. He is banking all of his confidence on this.
And this really highlights the difference between what the Bible means by the word “hope” and what our culture means by the word “hope.” In our culture today, we might say, “man, I really hope there’s some pulled pork at the Labor Day get-together” or “I hope one of my kids grows up to be the President of the United States.” These are wishes that we have very little control over. But biblical hope is not wishful thinking. Biblical hope is rock solid assurance based on a promise of God. Some examples of biblical hope would be that Jesus Christ will return bodily, or that after we die in Christ, we will be in the presence of God, or that God will recreate all things and give you and I new bodies that death will not be able to touch. Those are rock solid promises from God. You could add to that list, if God has begun a work of grace in your life, he will bring it to completion. He will carry you to the end. He will sustain you.
And this is the best news we could possibly hope for, because if our standing before God were entirely based on our own performance, or our own perseverance in faith apart from Christ, or our own effort to kill our sin, or our own feelings toward God – if our standing before God were entirely based on all of that, we wouldn’t stand a chance and would be the most to be pitied. But he is a God whose entire economy works in the currency of doing what we cannot on our behalf. He paid the penalty we could not pay. He raised us to life from death when we could not resurrect ourselves. And he will surely pick us up and carry us to the finish line, because apart from him we can do nothing.
Yet in a similar way to our tendency to look back on things that won’t produce joy, we tend to look forward to things that won’t produce true joy either. Whether “working for the weekend” or planning a vacation that we feel like will fill the hole in our heart, or making sure we have enough money set aside for retirement, or the thought that if we could have the marriage or family we always dreamed of, or the wish that maybe our kids will fulfill the desires that were unfulfilled in our own childhood, or “once I get out of my parents’ house things will be so much better” or financial independence or purchasing a home or whatever it is that occupies your mind. Whatever fills the blank in your mind, “things would be so much better in my life if only ________,” that often reveals to us something or someone we are putting too much false hope in for satisfaction and joy. Even if they are good things! As the saying goes, good goods make bad gods.
Friends, you can wish away the life you have been given, and you can try to claw your way to the finish line, but you will find that this will feel like swimming across the ocean. You will fall far short, exhausted, angry, and bitter. In Christ we are offered something far better – you don’t have to ground your hope in the unknown, and you don’t have to rest your hope for joy on your own shoulders. Your shoulders were never meant to carry that weight.
The pathway of joy does not lead us to looking forward to the unknown but to the rock solid. And what we are promised in this passage is that God will bring to completion what he has begun. If you are in Christ here this morning, your future is sure. You may feel like each day of your Christian life is one step forward, fifteen steps back. But trust the one who will carry you through. Remember where you have been. Trust where you are promised to go.
LOOK TO CHRIST
This leads us to our final stop on the pathway of joy. To find true joy we must look back at what God has done, look forward to what God has promised he will do, and ultimately, we must look to Christ himself. Look with me at verses 9-11.
9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.
First thing to notice. Look at verse 9. Paul prays that this seemingly super healthy church would love each other more. Health in a church does not mean we can coast or be okay with the status quo. We must press on. We must continue to seek unity and pursue one another in love.
I think is something we can learn from. As a church, the Lord has blessed us, and by his grace we are a relatively healthy place. We certainly have places to grow and ground to take, but at this church, we preach the gospel, we partake of the Lord’s Supper, people are baptized, we care for one another and our community, we have a biblical structure of, in Paul’s words from earlier in the passage, “saints… overseers (or elders) and deacons.” And yet, we need the prayer to constantly be on our lips that our love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment. We will grow complacent and flounder as a church without God-honoring, Christ-exemplifying, Spirit-wrought love for one another abounding more and more.
Another thing to notice here is the phrase “pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” Why is this something that Paul prays for? Well, it helps to know what he means by “the day of Christ.” Throughout the Old Testament, the biblical authors often used the phrase, “the day of the Lord” to indicate a coming day when God would bring about justice and judgment and deal with sin and evil once and for all. And while Jesus has come, his first coming was for the purpose of preaching good news and calling people to himself. It was to bring about the day of salvation, a day that Paul says elsewhere is still ongoing today. But there will be a day when Christ returns, and when he does, he will not be coming to call people to himself but to bring justice and judgment once and for all. And on that day, judgement is coming to everyone and everything that is not pure and blameless. More to say on this in a minute.
But along with all of this, notice the phrase, “filled with the fruit of righteousness.” Paul prays that the Philippians would be filled with the fruit of righteousness. In another one of Paul’s letters, Galatians, Paul writes about the fruit of the Spirit. This fruit is a set of virtues that come uniquely from the Holy Spirit growing them in you. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Similarly here, Paul asks that they would be filled with the fruit of righteousness. And while he prays that they would be pure and blameless for the future day of Christ, they can be filled with the fruit of righteousness now. They, and we, don’t need to wait for that experience.
So the important question we must address here is this: where does this abounding love and purity and blamelessness and fruit of righteousness come from? Another way to get at the answer is to ask, do we have the resources within ourselves to abound in love, to be pure and blameless before God, and to grow the fruit of righteousness? No, we need something outside of ourselves for all of this. It all comes through Jesus Christ. Where do we get love? From the one who said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), and then lived that out, laying down his life in love for his people forever. How do we become pure and blameless? By the pure and blameless one standing in our place, taking all of our sin upon himself and giving us his clean, perfect record so that when God looks on us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. And when Jesus returns, he will find a pure and blameless people. Not because we have lived perfectly – far from that, but because we bear the purity and blamelessness of Christ himself. And how do we grow the fruit of righteousness and the fruit of the Spirit? By being gifted the righteousness and the Spirit of Christ that produces in us all kinds of fruit like trees in full bloom. And all of this is a gift to receive with open hands.
If you are not a Christian here this morning, receive this gift today! The heart inside you was made for joy. And that joy can only be found in receiving a purity and blamelessness that you didn’t have to work for.
If you are in Christ, this is your reality. And that is reason for joy. We look back at what God has done, we look forward to what he will do, and we look to Christ, where we receive purity and blamelessness and all kinds of things we could never earn on our own, and things that can never ever be taken from you. And that is unshakable joy.
All of this should deeply affect the way we worship. If all of this is your reality, how can we respond with indifference or boredom or lack of engagement? We can’t! Our worship should be borne out of our joy in Jesus. One pastor said it this way:
Praising God, the highest calling of humanity and our eternal vocation, did not involve the renunciation, but rather the consummation of the joy I so desired. My old effort to achieve worship with no self-interest in it proved to be a contradiction in terms. God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed. Praise is not an alternative to joy, but the expression of joy. Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him. To say to Him that something else satisfies you more is the opposite of worship.[2]
Friends, this morning let’s worship the Lord with joy. For the Christian, Jesus is the one that satisfies more than anything and anyone else. To worship him without joy is to say that he doesn’t truly satisfy. Remember how he’s worked in the past, hope in what he’s promised for the future, and look to him as the source of all joy. Let that fuel your worship this morning.
As I close in prayer, I’ll invite you to turn with me to Psalm 16. I’m going to pray this Psalm, an ancient Hebrew song declaring that it is in the Lord we find fullness of joy. I would love it if you would join me silently. Let’s pray.
PRAYER - PSALM 16
1 Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
2 I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.”
3 As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight.
4 The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply;
their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names on my lips.
5 The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
6 The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
7 I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
8 I have set the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;
my flesh also dwells secure.
10 For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,
or let your holy one see corruption.
11 You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Heavenly Father…
[1] This was an insight from Jeremy Treat’s sermon, “Strengthened by Adversity”
[2] John Piper, Desiring God, 22.
Sermon Discussion Questions
Noah talked about the difference between biblical joy and the way our culture uses the word “happiness.” Have you experienced each of these? Describe how your experiences of joy and happiness were alike and different.
Paul calls both himself and the Philippians “servants” and “saints.” How does seeing your identity in Christ as “saint” rather than “sinner” affect how you view your past and present struggles?
Noah said, “If you are in Christ, you are living under the smile of God.” How does this truth challenge the way you imagine God’s posture toward you in your weakness or sin?
Read Philippians 1:6. How does this promise give you hope in seasons when your spiritual growth feels slow or stagnant?
The sermon warned about putting our hope in things like vacations, money, or relationships (“good goods make bad gods”). What are some areas in your life where you’re tempted to look for joy outside of Christ?
