Philippians #4: Four Keys To Having The Joy Of The Lord Rule Our Lives

In my first article from the book of Philippians, we talked about what is the source of the joy in our life, and does your joy come from this world or from your relationship with Christ. We saw that the main theme in the book is the joy of the Lord, and that the joy of the Lord comes up continually in the book. Preachers often preach to their people about things they ought to be doing, but they don’t always tell them how to do the things that they ought to do. People need to know how to do the things they ought to do. Chapter 4 of the book, where we find ourselves in this article, is sort of the “how to” chapter of the book. It shows us how we can have the joy of the Lord in our life and thus be blessed and be a great witness for the Lord. I will present to you the four keys that Paul gives us.

The apostle Paul, the author of the book, reiterates this theme of joy and writes in verse 4 of chapter 4, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” Then, Paul exhorts us to not worry: “Be anxious for nothing…” What keeps us from having the joy of the Lord is worry and being anxious. Paul admonishes the reader to not worry or be anxious about a single thing. But, how can we as believers in Christ extinguish worry in our lives? Is it really our responsibility to do this? Are we even able to not worry or be anxious? I think that secular psychiatrists today would tell us that this is impossible for many. Yet, Paul tells us how to achieve these things in this chapter. Now, I’m not saying that there are not medical problems which can keep us from being complete as people and having the joy that some have. I also do not think that we should judge others as being less spiritual who suffer from depression, and some people are much more prone to it than others, and life can throw any of us a curve at times and set us off in into the mire of depression. Most people have had some experience with it. Likewise, there are many physical conditions which produce a tendency towards varying levels and types of depression. We must remember that the scripture tells us to “weep with those who weep,” so we do need to be compassionate and empathetic to others who suffer with depression.

I see here in chapter 4 of Philippians that Paul tells us what we can do, what is our part, towards having the joy of the Lord in our life. And, I have to tell you that Paul assumes that we who are in Christ have the ability to do some things, such as: pray, give thanks to God, control what sorts of things we dwell upon, and trust God and the promises of His word.

So, lets look at what Paul says is the first key to having the joy of the Lord in our life instead worry and being anxious: “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 comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7). Paul tells the reader to turn all of his/her cares into prayers, prayers with thanksgiving to God (grumbling and complaining in unbelief is what kept the Israelites from walking in faith and obtaining the blessings of God—Paul says “Do all things without grumbling and complaining,” Philippians 2:14).

The promise here is that if you will turn all of your cares into prayers, prayers with thanksgiving, that you will have the ‘peace of God which surpasses all comprehension’. What a great relief it is when you quit trying to carry your own burdens and lay them on the shoulders of one who is so fully capable of carrying them and sustaining us, and scripture says, “Cast your burdens upon the Lord and He will sustain you” (Psalm 55:22). Worry and being anxious cannot exist where the ‘joy of the Lord’ and the ‘peace of God’ reign, for they are contradictory. Likewise, we as Christians can and do have ‘the peace of God’ in our hearts in situations where this should not be a possibility, and thus this is something that ‘surpasses all comprehension’ beyond the miraculous and supernatural presence and activity of God. I could tell you many stories of people, including myself, having the ‘peace of God’ when this should have been the last thing that we experienced. For instance, once I attended the funeral of a friend, a man with a wife and young kids who had been killed in a tragic work incident, and at the receiving line at the conclusion of the funeral, as person after person walked by thinking they would comfort the widowed wife, what they experienced instead was having her comfort them with ‘the peace of God’ in her life. What a testimony to God’s power to give us ‘the peace of God that surpasses all comprehension’.

One point here I want to make is to point you to the fact that Paul speaks of the ‘joy of the Lord’ being like a mighty divine soldier who will ‘guard your hearts and your minds’ in Christ Jesus, as you turn your cares into prayers, with thanksgiving. Why would our ‘heart’ and our ‘mind’ need to be guarded, even when we are praying about everything with thanksgiving? I think Paul must be thinking that there are demonic principalities and powers all over the world who enslave unbelievers with fear and blind them to the truth, and thus our hearts and minds need to be protected from such as these. It is ‘the peace of God’ who is the divine sentinel guarding our hearts and minds.

The second key to having the joy of the Lord, and the peace of God, in our lives is found in verse 8 and it has to do with our having a responsibility to direct our minds regarding the things that we think about: ‘Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things’. Again, this verse assumes that the believer in Christ has the ability to determine what things his mind “dwells” upon. What a person’s mind dwells upon has a huge effect upon his/her mind and heart. The struggles and trials of the Christian life are all struggles of the mind. The key to having victory over temptation largely hinges upon guarding what we think about, and thus Jesus told His disciples that if a man lusts after a woman that he has committed adultery with her in his heart, or if he becomes angry with his brother he has committed murder. Thus, Paul also wrote how that we as Christians need to learn to take captive our every thought to the obedience of Christ: “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

How many of us have watched a scary movie and then went to bed only to have nightmares? We watch a comedy show or movie, and this helps us to relax and not take life too seriously. Again, what we think about has a great effect on our lives. Notice the things that we are to dwell upon with our minds, they are things that are worthy of our time, things that please the Lord: the things that are true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, and it anything is worthy of praise. Dwelling upon these things, and rejecting the dwelling upon those things that are unworthy, will cause us to have the joy of the Lord and the peace of God in our life. Besides that, since the scripture tells us that our bodies are a temple of the Lord, if we let our mind dwell upon unworthy and sinful objects, then we are defiling the temple of the Lord by our thoughts. And, if we allow garbage to go into our minds, we should expect garbage to come out of it also. We must protect where our mind “dwells,” and passing sinful thoughts are the experience of all of us. It is not a sin to be tempted in our thoughts, but if we let a sinful thought take root, then it becomes sin in us.

In the Psalms, David sometimes expressed depressing thoughts, and yet we see that he would then encourage himself to trust in God to come out of them: “Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him For the help of His presence” Psalm 42:5. Whenever we lose our perspective and our hope as Christians, we need to plant our mind in the promises of God and remember all the things that He has promised to us. When we are focusing on God and His promises, our circumstances get smaller and smaller and our God gets bigger and bigger. Likewise, when we focus on our circumstances our God gets smaller and smaller. We need to take responsibility for what we are thinking.

The third key to having the joy of the Lord, and the peace of God, in our lives is learning to be content in our life, regardless of our circumstances: “Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need” (Phil. 4:11-12). You might think that if everything were going as well in your life as they did for the apostle, that you too might be content in every circumstance. But, I would point out to you that Paul wrote this book as one of his prison epistles, for he was living in a horrible Roman prison at this time. Not only so, listen to what he says about the many difficulties he had gone through in his life: : “Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (2 Corinthians 11:24-27). No, you can learn to become content in your circumstances, regardless of what they are. I doubt any of us have suffered in this life to the extent of the apostle Paul, I know I haven’t. Paul was content in every circumstance because his contentment was not controlled by his circumstances, just as should be with our contentment.

Note, that Paul says that being content was something that he had learned to become. Contentment is a great key to having the joy of the Lord and the peace of God in our hearts, but it is something that takes time to learn. The good and the bad circumstances, and in fact all that we do, is working together in our lives for good according to Romans 8:28, and in each and every one we are learning that we can trust our life more with God, trust in the reliability of His promises, trust that He is in control of this world and has a plan that He is working out, even if many times we don’t know why things happen and what He is doing. Believers in Christ are all being taught by God to be content in whatever circumstance we are in, and we can learn this lesson just as Paul learned it.

The fourth key to having the joy of the Lord, and the peace of God, in our lives is found in verse 13 of chapter 4: “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Paul tells us that he realized that God would always give him the ability to do every single thing that God wanted him to do. Through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, Paul tells us that he can do these things. Most of us pray for tasks relative to the strength that we have, but Paul prayed for the strength to do all of the things that God wanted him to do. Paul was willing to allow the Lord to stretch him well beyond what he in the power of his flesh and will power was able to do, and this was because he knew that the Holy Spirit will always give you the strength to do whatever God wants you to do in each and every circumstance. Paul has been called “the most successful Christian ever,” and he described his own ministry as being a “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4), and when we consider all of the churches he planted, all of the people he won to Christ, and the fact that he wrote more epistles than any other apostle, we are in awe of how God can work through a man’s life that is completely consecrated to Him.

If you are a person who has suffered a lot from depression, then you might think that Paul must have never faced depression such as you have faced, and thus that what he wrote about how to have the joy of the Lord doesn’t apply to everyone. This is not the case, depression seems to often have been a companion of Paul’s, and many great men of God throughout history have struggled at times with depression. In the book of 2 Corinthians, Paul mentions several times being depressed. He for instance says, “But God, who comforts the depressed…” (2 Corinthians 7:6). He says also that he and those with him were so depressed that they despaired even of life: “For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life” (2 Corinthians 1:8). But then Paul speaks in every case about how God ‘comforts’ us in all of our afflictions, and he even calls God, ‘the God of all comfort’. Paul mentions how that God uses us because of that ‘comfort’ He gives us: “…who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4). Now today, doctors would probably proscribe anti-depressants or neurotransmitter drugs for Paul, and maybe that would be the right and humanitarian thing to do for him. But, drugs can only help the tiny electrical processes and transmissions in our brain, they can’t make us come to right conclusions and think right thoughts. Though these drugs help many, they just mask problems if we are not applying these four keys to having the joy of the Lord and the peace of God in our life. We still need to apply these keys if we are to do our part, and I hope that anyone who takes these types of drugs does not stop short of doing their part in applying these keys.

Finally, you may ask me what this topic has to do with the realm of and participation in sports. Well, I would say to you that first of all as a person, and especially as a Christian, you should want to have the joy of the Lord as your strength and know the great blessing of the peace of God in your life. Plus, in Philippians we are commanded to not worry and be anxious, and to apply ourselves to these keys. Also, sports are games that are won by the one who has the greatest control of his/her mind. Have we not heard of guys who ‘willed themselves’ or ‘willed their team’ to victory? Have you not heard of someone that, ‘he took over the game’. Learning to control our thought life has great benefits in all that we attempt to do. As Christians we should realize we have a head start over others in this area because we are already learning to take our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ.

Again, the four keys are: always turning all of our cares to prayers with thanksgiving, letting our minds dwell only upon worthy objects, learning to be content in every circumstance, and believing that you can do all things through Him who strengthens you. If you do your part and apply yourself to these keys, you will begin to experience the joy of the Lord and the peace of God that surpasses comprehension.