Sermon preached by John A. Huffman, Jr.
November 19, 2006
Copyright © 2006, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, 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 your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

This cartoon captures the spirit of many contemporary men and women. Sometimes it reflects where I am in attitude.

Pictured is this checkout counter and window. The sign overhead reads: "Lost and Found." You see the sleepy-eyed attendant slouching against the counter. Behind him are boxes labeled: "Initiative," "Capacity To Change," "Perspective," "Innocence," "Taste for Simple Pleasures," "Sense of Humor," "The Old Zip" and "Strength To Go On."

The attendant continues to wait for customers, customers who should come to retrieve these lost articles. The attendant waits for customers who never seem to come.

I'm convinced that many of us today have lost some of the most important God-given qualities of life. We don't know where to find them. In exchange, we have been caught up in anxiety. Are you one of these persons? Is your life marked by a troubled spirit?

Let's see what God's Word, the Bible, has to say. It gives us an alternative outlook on life, one that does not deny reality but does bring a refreshing perspective to our human existence.

The New International Version of the Bible translates Philippians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything. . . ." The King James Version says, "Be careful for nothing. . . ." The Revised Standard Version translates this, "Have no anxiety about anything. . . ." And the New Revised Standard Version simply states, "Do not worry about anything. . . ."

Are you aware that, instead of anxiety or worry, your and my life can be marked by the qualities of joy and magnanimity?

The Apostle Paul wrote these words in Philippians 4:4, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."

This sounds like a pretty optimistic approach to life. Rejoice. Have a life full of joy.

You would think that Paul was writing a Thanksgiving message during a time of great personal prosperity. This was far from the case. Almost certain death awaited him, as he sat in prison dictating these words. And these words were addressed to his Philippian brothers and sisters, who were about to face bitter persecution. Paul was sharing an eternal invitation to joy--a joy that has its source in the personal presence of Jesus Christ.

Not only can your life be marked by joy. It can also be marked by the quality of magnanimity.

That is not the exact word that Paul used. He wrote, "Let your gentleness be known to everyone."

There is no word in English that fully captures what Paul is trying to say. Instead of using the word "gentleness," some of the translators have substituted "moderation," "patience," "softness," "honesty," "forbearance." One translates this, "Let all the world know that you will meet a man halfway."

The true meaning is that the Christian life is more than rules and regulations. This is not the final word. The final word is that Jesus Christ has transformed your life by the love of God. In the process, He wants to sensitize you in compassionate and tender love toward others. You and I are to understand who they are and why they are the way they are, relating to them the joyous, positive mercy Christ has shown to us.

William Barclay explains this quality of what he calls "gracious gentleness" in the following way. He describes a situation that every teacher faces almost every day. There are two students. You correct their examination papers. You apply justice and find that one has 80 percent and the other has 50 percent. From the point of justice, there's no question that these are the correct grades. One has done better than the other. As you go further into the situation, you find that the student who got 80 percent is able to do his homework under ideal conditions. He has books, leisure time and a quiet place to study. He has no worries or distractions. Every single thing is in his favor. On the other hand, you find that the young man who got the 50 percent comes from a poor home. His equipment is the bare minimum, or he may be ill and in pain. He may have recently experienced some great loss, which causes him to be distracted by an unrelenting grief. All the conditions work against him. Justice says that this man deserves 50 percent, no more. The spirit of magnanimity will value his paper higher than that, giving him a second chance to progress in education.

If you are a follower of Jesus, you are a person who knows that there is something beyond justice. God has forgiven you in Jesus Christ. He wants to release you from that petty bondage of negativistic, rule-book living to the positive upthrust of joy and magnanimity that gives another person the benefit of the doubt.

So you say, "This all sounds just great. But how can I rejoice with all of my problems? How can I have this magnanimity of life toward others, when I am caught up in such anxiety, such worry?

There is an antidote to anxiety.

There are many ways of expressing this cure. Paul expresses it in a twofold way.

Antidote to worry number one is the closeness of God.

Paul states it bluntly, "The Lord is near."

This simply means that you do not have to manufacture this joy or magnanimity all by yourself. Jesus is at hand. He is present every minute of your life. If you will but simply trust Him, you can benefit from His presence. He has given you His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, so that you can be in constant fellowship with Him. If Jesus Christ is this close, why worry? Life is too short. The problems that bog you down, that seem so big, will not last forever. Even more than this, Jesus Christ may return in bodily form at any moment. To put it bluntly, you are only one breath from eternity, an eternity spent in the presence of Jesus Christ. This is exciting, not fearsome.

Are you living as if the Lord is at hand? Or are you all alone, red-circled, walking through life, out of touch with the reality of His presence?

Antidote number two is the privilege of prayer.

Paul writes, "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God."

Paul is urging you to pray. The Christian life is not a spiritual narcotic. It is an active, responsive, assertive lifestyle. You and I are to pray about everything. You can talk to God about every aspect of your life. Let your requests be made known unto Him. Imagine that He is a loving parent close at hand. He is listening to you. Prayer is your thrilling privilege. Take advantage of it!

The only problem with prayer is that sometimes you and I begin to question whether or not God is really listening.

Little Bobby's grandmother was in the hospital. He found her and said, "Nana, we prayed to God last night for you to come home, but He must not have been listening very good." We chuckle at a child's reaction. Amusing, isn't it? Yes, but is it really? Bobby's childish reaction may directly parallel your and my response. We pray, but somehow God doesn't seem to be listening. The prayers don't seem to be answered. The reason may be that you are trying to twist God around your finger instead of allowing Him to mold you according to His will. When it comes to prayer, I must have the confidence that God is what He claims to be--a father, a good father, who will hear you and will answer.

Have you ever had an accident-prone toddler? Remember when that child fell in the street and cut open her chin? She didn't run to someone else. She came straight to you, blood dripping from her cut. She was looking for comfort. As those big tears rolled down her cheeks, what did you do? You gave her precisely the opposite of what she wanted. You gave her more pain, for you rushed her straight to the emergency room. Granted, you kept your arm around her all the way, trying to comfort her. That didn't do any good, did it? The pain was more apparent than your enveloping arm.

The doctor applied some astringent that smarted. His anesthetic needle scared even you. He laced the gaping wound, pulling the skin together. You winced as he caused more pain in his endeavor to lessen both the immediate discomfort and the long-range scar. Today it is healed because of the additional pain. The scar is less. You loved your little one so much that you would do anything for her, even if in the process it hurt.

I know, because I've been there with my children. In particular, I remember rushing Suzanne to the emergency room and having to help hold her head steady, comforting her with my words as the doctor caused more pain, so as to minimize future disfigurement.

Remember that Jesus is at hand. Talk to Him in prayer about everything, no matter how large or how small. He will be with you. He will help you and provide an antidote to your anxiety and worry. How can you be anxious when you know that the God who created you stands right by your side in personal love and tenderness?

Not only does Paul call you to a spirit of joy and magnanimity. Not only does he remind you that Jesus Christ is near and wants your prayers.

In addition, he urges you to allow your whole lifestyle to be one of thanks!

Paul writes, "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." Allow your whole lifestyle to be one of thanks.

The Christian is to be thankful in everything.

This implies a total submission to Jesus Christ. This is the essence of Christianity. The Bible alerts us that we should be ". . .giving thanks to God the father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Ephesians 5:20).

In 1 Thessalonians 5:18, the Bible says, ". . .give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you."

Are you thankful in everything? Am I thankful in everything?

This means being thankful in all the good things.

Are you concentrating on them? We will do it this coming Thursday on Thanksgiving Day. This sanctuary will be filled with men, women and children singing Thanksgiving hymns and expressing personal testimonies of appreciation to what God has done in our lives. It will be a teary time, as some of us will recount painful experiences, while acknowledging the fact that God has walked through those tough times with us. It will be a time of excitement and joy, as we celebrate the good things God has brought into our lives. The Bible tells us to be thankful 365 days a year. We are to be thankful for family, friends, health, God and all the material blessings we have. I know it's not hard to be thankful for these good things, although we sometimes forget to express our appreciation.

Let me suggest another type of Thanksgiving. This is an attitude of thankfulness for the lack of bad things.

I have a tendency toward sprained ankles. Every several years, I, once again, severely sprain an ankle. Each time, all I can think about is the pain. I would give anything for relief.

Years ago, I was jogging on a Florida beach and came down on a buried two-by-four. A rusty spike went right through my bare foot. I would have given anything to have been spared the pain.

Once I sustained many hours of prolonged pain giving birth to a kidney stone. I can't remember anything that hurt so much.

You know what? In spite of the immediate severity of pain of my occasional sprained ankles, the puncture wound of my foot and my kidney stone, situations of great pain, it is hard for me to, at this moment, be thankful that I'm free from any excess physical pain. I have to remind myself of those particular circumstances.

Do you get my point? Remember that last cold you had, that last crisis in finance, that marital upset, that loss of a job, that death of a loved one? Perhaps you now have one or two of these things bogging you down, but you cannot have everything wrong at once. Thank God for the lack of bad things in your life instead of spending all your time fretting about one or two or three negatives, when most of the other aspects of your life are in pretty good shape.

"Being thankful in everything. . ." doesn't mean just the good or the lack of bad. It also means being thankful for those things that are not so good.

This is where the rub comes. Isn't it a bit idealistic for the Word of God to instruct you and me to be thankful in everything, even the bad things of life?

Walk through a pediatric neurological ward, and you'll see sights you wish you never would have to see.

Determine not to turn away from the television the next time a car bomb goes off in Bagdad, and you'll see what you wish you would never have to see.

Travel on a mission trip to Malawi and sit in a mud hut holding the hand of a thirty-two-year-old mother of three whose body is wasting away with AIDS. It's not a pleasant experience.

Or talk to the man who has lost his job, is maxed out on credit card debt and can't make his house payments and has to go home and tell his wife and kids that they're facing foreclosure. Not very pleasant, is it?

Does this "thankful-in-everything. . ." concept mean that I am to blind my eyes to that which is evil and destructive in this world, crying out in an utterance of denial my thanks for Jesus? No! Not for a moment! God hates that which is destructive every bit as much as do you and I. However, God wants to walk through that pain with you and me. He is with us in our suffering, enabling us to be thankful in everything.

Let me add a footnote to this point during our prolonged suffering surrounding the death of our daughter Suzanne fifteen years ago. We, as a family, could not help but experience our own daily torture. We had our questions. No parent can blithely smile as they observe their daughter fighting for her life against the malignancy of cancer, seeing her body bloated by the steroids, her stomach nauseated by the chemotherapy, those night-long gasps for breath, when the phlegm-lined air channel of the trachea is reduced to less than the diameter of a straw. There are those extended times when thanksgiving gets lost by the wayside.

I remember my wife Anne, in that time of her greatest torture, making a profound theological observation about the fact that the Bible says that no one can see the face of God. She noted that our inclination is to think that we can't look at the face of God because of His glory, grandeur, beauty, dazzling beyond any human comprehension. She articulated a possible alternative reason. It could be that God's face is so gnarled by the pain He himself has experienced and with His identity for us and the hideousness of our pain, that we could not stand to look into the face of this One so tortured by that which brings such discomfort to us.

It all seems so unfair, doesn't it? I find myself helped by an article written by David Egner titled "When Life Isn't Fair."

"It just doesn't seem fair!" said an anguished mother whose lovely daughter had died a few weeks before. "Life was just beginning for her. Why couldn't God have let her live?"

I was asking myself the same questions. It didn't seem fair. This young woman believed in God. She was filled with joy and compassion. She had so much to offer. And now she was gone.

Gone. Gone while other girls with what seemed far less to offer continued to live. Girls who had broken God's moral laws a thousand times and laughed in His face. It just didn't seem fair at all.

It never does when we lose a loved one, or when we see our children go astray. Or when we are faced with severe financial hardship. Or when we hear the word cancer.

People of our society look for someone to blame when life treats them unfairly. They demand that wrongs be made right immediately--or they will sue for all they can get.

Sometimes we treat God like that, and it's because we are judging Him on human terms. We do not see Him as the God who is absolutely, totally, completely incapable of evil. He cannot be unfair.

All wrongs were made right, all unfairnesses made fair, at the cross, where God's moral rectitude was revealed to a sinning, grinning, unworthy humanity. Through that act, which was itself unfair in human terms, we were redeemed. Wrong is made right through redemption.

But God does not always enact justice when we want it. Sometimes the Judge of all the earth chooses to make us wait to show us that He is infinitely good and fair. We do not have the right to demand that He immediately make right the wrong someone has done to us. The episodes of life do not always leave us smiling like the characters at the end of a shallow TV sitcom.

Yes, we must sometimes wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. But the day of God's revealing will surely come, and all wrongs will be rectified. At the judgment seat of Christ, buried, hidden wrongs will be brought out to the light of day (1 Corinthians 3:13). There the terrible injustices of a fickle, cruel, and unjust age will be made right (Romans 2:2). And there the patient, worthy victims will be given their just reward (1 Corinthians 3:12-15; 2 Corinthians 5:10).

And there, in God's own good time, we will learn the truth of this basic principle: God is fair with us; it's people who are not fair with Him.

If we really believe that the sovereign God is in charge, we have the privilege of having our lives revolutionized by His spirit of thanksgiving, for in the most difficult of circumstances, God walks with us, helps us, teaches us, and even has His unique ways of bringing some good out of that which is so bad.

Perhaps it is poor health that is strangling you. In your gloomy disposition of life, how can you be thankful?

I will never forget Dr. V. Raymond Edman, the president of Wheaton College, my alma mater. He was a close personal confidante of Billy Graham. This man was, at the same time, a scholar, administrator and deeply spiritual man of God. In the latter years of his life, he was plagued by physical blindness. While serving as a college president, he would have to be absent sometimes for weeks at a time, immobile in a Boston hospital bed. His head was cushioned in sandbags, as he recovered from surgery for detached retinas. After recovering, Dr. Edman would come back to campus and, in the chapel, share with us that, even in those long periods of physical darkness, thanksgiving was possible because the Lord was close at hand.

A personal friend of our family, Dr. Paul E. Parker, told a similar story of how prolonged illness caused his anxiety and depression, told how the Lord helped him cope with these problems. Early one morning, he awoke with a slight fever, sore throat, runny nose, all the symptoms of a cold or, at the worst, a slight touch of the flu. But, for three weeks, these symptoms continued with no appreciable change for the better. Finally, he submitted himself to the same test that he had often prescribed for others. His doctor took one look at the results: hepatitis. Nothing but bed rest for several months at least.

Feelings of frustration swept over him. He had heard that many of life's greatest lessons could come in the crucible of suffering. In the past, this had been simply a pious platitude. Now it became a ringing reality.

Parker, set aside from his active practice for months, reached out to the Bible. He recalled the scriptural command, "In everything give thanks." Really? In everything? That's what it said. So he began to practice. It didn't come easy. "God, thank you for the hepatitis. I don't enjoy it. I don't like it. But there must be a purpose in it--your purpose for me--so thank you for it." And so on down the line. "God, thank you for the nausea. Thank you for the severe headaches. Thank you for the fever." But each step of faith seemed traumatic.

He described an anxiety and depression that swept over him. Instead of feeling guilty, he accepted the fact that these were normal reactions at the time. He began to treat every period of anxiety and depression as an object. Then he turned these objects over to the Lord. For years, he had lamented his lack of time for prayer. Now he had it. His busy schedule had not given him enough time for reading the Bible. Now he could become saturated in God's Word. Granted, there were times when he was too tired to pray or study. When the strength began to return, he walked a few short blocks to the city library, having leisure time to do some historical study. Finally, he learned to laugh at the clock. "Clock," he would say in mock disdain, "I don't have to pay any attention to you today!" For a busy physician, that is a priceless luxury, even at the cost of one's health for a period.

It was by developing a spirit of thankfulness, even for the bad experiences, that Dr. Paul Parker validated God's faithfulness.

I've been toying around with the prepositions in the Greek. Most references of this sort in the Bible use the preposition "in" instead of "for." This convinces me that, although ultimately we may even be thankful for even the worst thing that happens to us because of the good that comes, if there is something we cannot now thank God for, at least we can thank Him "in" that experience.

This is not just fatalistic thankfulness. This is a buoyant confidence that God is at work and will never let you and me down.

The result of this whole business is peace. What do you and I want more than peace?

God's promise reads as follows: "And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:7).

When I, in the past, would make sermonic statements like this one which I have made this morning, I would add a defensive word. It would be something like this: "What do you, a young minister leading a charmed life know about peace in the midst of suffering?" I would probably respond to that rhetorical question with words similar to these: "Probably not as much as I will someday. Life's pressures tend to compound more and more each year. But I can say from my modest years of experience, marked with its own share of troubles, that God is faithful. His peace does pass all understanding." And I would add some statement that fortunately the authority of this message does not rest on the experience of a young preacher. It rests on the authority of God's Word, the Bible, and finds its ultimate vindication in the long-haul, personal experience of suffering as you, day in and day out, discover that Jesus Christ is all that He claims to be.

Now, forty-two years have passed since I first preached from this text of Scripture. I no longer apologize for being young and inexperienced. I am now sixty-six years of age and have shed many a tear. I have gone through torture that can match any you are experiencing, and I can declare emphatically that it is possible to give thanks in everything and to experience the peace of God which does pass all human understanding.

That's not denial. That's spiritual reality! God is who He claims to be. I don't understand everything. There are some things I hate and cannot accept from my human perspective. But in this Thanksgiving season and hopefully each day, I will put my trust in Him, giving thanks and, in the process, validating the authenticity of His instructions.

And, in those moments when I may revert to self-pity and complaint, I will remind myself of the Amish parents of those five school girls that were killed last month. How could they forgive such a thing? Was it a genuine gesture or just a gimmick? You and I know that their forgiveness was more than words. The blood was barely dry on the floor of that school when those parents sent words of forgiveness to the family of the one who had slain their children. Fresh from the funerals where they buried their own children, grieving Amish families attended the October 7 burial of the thirty-two-year-old, non-Amish killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV. Out of the seventy-five in attendance, at least half were Amish. These families greeted Mrs. Roberts and her three children with forgiveness that was more than just a grave-side presence. They also helped to establish a fund for the assassin's family.

This is what it is to flesh out the reality of these words, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, 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 your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:4-7).

Do you believe this? What promises God directs our way! One of the biggest is the promise of His peace. How wonderful is the reality that His peace will set guard over our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus!