Introduction of Philippians

Philippians Introduction

By Sean Kelly

So Philippians one seven talks about Paul's chains, referring to his imprisonment. It goes on a little bit further in the chapter, verses twelve through 14. Another reader, please, guys are out of practice.

Jonathan, go ahead. But I want you to know, brethren, that things which happened to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel that it has become evident to the whole charge. And most of the brethren in the Lord, having become confident by my chains, are much more bold to speak the word without me.

So here again, he mentions his chains a couple of times in these few verses. Here his chains are in Christ, but it's referring to actual physical chains, his imprisonment. So what is this? Well, this was probably the Roman imprisonment that was referred to at the end of Acts.

This would be where Paul was under house arrest. They had the freedom to send and receive letters, send and receive visitors and to share the Gospel. And the reason why we think that is let's compare some verses in Acts with some verses in Philippians.

So first of all we see Paul was guarded by soldiers in both these passages. Acts 20 816 we would like to read and now when he came to Rome and this corresponds with what we read in Philippians 113 14 has become evidence the whole palace guard and the rest of my chains are in Christ. Here he obviously has a relationship, a ministry to the palace guard and this would happen if he were permitted to dwell with the guards, as it talks about in Acts 28.

And also we'll talk about some other things here. So he was guarded by soldiers in both these passages. Paul was allowed to have visitors.

Acts 28 30 nice short one, Olivia, go ahead. In his own rented house and received all who came. So here he talks about he received all who came to him.

Philippians 418 who wants to read this one.

Go ahead, Nathan. Philippians 418 I have all and abound I am full, having received from Epaphroditis the things sent from you a sweet smelling aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well pleasing to God. Again, if he were in a Roman prison as we think about like the dungeon type prison with the guards, this would be much more difficult.

But Acts 28 talks about he received all who came to him and here talks about receiving Epaphroditis, who brought the things sent by the Church in Philippi. So it seems to correspond there. And then we see that Paul was also free to preach the Gospel while he was under this imprisonment.

Acts 28 31 go ahead, Joanna. Important there to see no one was forbidding him, it was freedom. He wasn't being restricted from doing this.

Philippians 112 through 14, we read this earlier. He says if I want you to know, brethren, that the things which happen to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel. In verse 14 he talks about, he's been much more bold to speak the word without fear.

So it seems to be a correspondence here between what's happening in Acts 28, that he's presenting the Gospel, he's sharing Christ with all confidence, and then Philippians, he's talking about in his imprisonment, he's able to do this. So this seems to be about when it was written, like I said, about 61 Ad. The place of writing is Rome.

The reason why I put this in here at this point is that as I read through commentaries, there's apparently a couple of other theories as to where Paul wrote this from. One's Ephesus. One is Caesarea.

And I'm not going to go into the details of why these are bad choices, but there's also a lot of evidences why these are wrong. If you want to talk about with me afterwards, we can do that at some point in time. I'd love to do that, but the commentaries go through pages and pages of some people think Ephesus, and here's the problems with Ephesus.

Some people think Caesarea, and here's the problem with Caesarea. And the reason being is he doesn't, in Philippians, actually give like, I'm in prison in Rome. Straightforward.

It's not like I'm in Rome here writing to you. But we can see from the passage a couple of places, it makes sense that it is in Rome. Philippians 422.

Another reader. Go ahead, Ryan. So where would Caesar's household be? They would be with Caesar, wouldn't they? Where would Caesar be? He would be at Little Caesar's, just down the road.

Now we're talking about big Caesar, the guy ruling the whole known world at this point. Where would he be? He's in Rome. That's where his house would be.

This household probably refers to, again, these soldiers and stuff. If you look at verse 13 again, which we've read a couple of times. So it has been come evidence to the whole palace guard.

Where is the palace guard at? They would be at the palace. Where's the palace? Not at Little Caesar's down the road, but in Rome. So there's a lot of good evidence that this is talking about this Roman imprisonment and talking about the one that we see at the end of Acts.

So onto page two here. So who is it written to? It's written to the church in Philippi. How do we see that? Let's go back to the first page.

Philippians. One. One to all the saints who are in Christ Jesus, who are in Philippi.

Okay, well, what are saints? How do we know that? If I ask a Catholic, they're going to give me a different answer. Thanks. Greek word is Hagias.

It means holy ones. Who are holy ones? Christians. Why are Christians holy ones? Right.

Because not only did Jesus Christ die on the cross to pay for our sins, but he died on the cross so that we would receive his righteousness, that we would be holy in Him. Correct. So therefore, saints here as holy ones.

Now, interestingly enough, you have to the saints, the holy ones who are in Christ Jesus, who are in Philippi with the bishops and deacons. What are bishops and deacons? What's another word we use for bishops and then deacons? We know what deacons are, right? They're servants. But probably here referring to formal role, like, we have deacons in our church nowadays.

So you have the saints, the holy ones, the believers with the pastors and deacons of the church. So it's written to a church body, a group of believers organized with pastors and deacons. It's in the city of Philippi.

The city of Philippi is in northeastern Greece. I put on a map because I'm sure if before you look at this map, I ask you, where is Philippi? You guys would be like, somewhere. So if you could see it there just kind of on the north side of the Aegean Sea there by Thessalonica that's where Philippi is in 356 BC.

Philip of Macedonia. Who's Philip of Macedonia? I don't know. He's the father of Alexander the Great.

That's probably a guy you've heard of, right? Yeah, he established a city and named it after himself because that's what great men do. They name the city after themselves, and he established it as a military stronghold here. Now, in 42 BC.

A city was a location of a famous battle. John MacArthur calls this one of the most crucial battles in Roman history. It was known as the Battle of Philippi.

And here the forces of Augustus and Octavian, who's also Caesar Augustus from Luke 21. So same guy defeated the Republic forces of Brutus and Cassius. What does that mean? Well, you have a republic fighting against these two guys.

This guy becomes Caesar. So you can see that the battle marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire. Now, interestingly enough, I grew up all years I knew about the you know, a lot of what we do is kind of based loosely on some of the ideas there also knew about the Roman Empire.

I never knew how went from the Republic to the Empire until I started looking at this and this battle here. So Anthony and Octavian settled many of their army veterans in Philippi, and this gave the city the status of a Roman colony. And when we go through Acts, we're going to see it called a colony.

Now, what's a colony we think of probably. What do you think of when you think of the word colony? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Okay, the ant colony. That's something like that.

The American colonies. That's the first thing that comes to mind for me. And if you remember back to the American colonies, there was kind of like this second rate group of people, way across the ocean, who England didn't care a whole lot about.

Right. That's kind of the history I remember. I sure wasn't always that way.

Roman colony is a little different. Roman colony is a good thing. It gives a legal status.

That's the same as the Roman cities in Italy. So Philippi was basically this Roman city. It had Roman rights, it had Roman laws, it had Roman authority.

It was like a favored city of Rome outside of Italy. So Philippi was the empire's city here. After the Romans conquered it in 168 to 167 BC.

The city became modeled after Roman style and politics. So a lot of the buildings and stuff like that, they had Roman style and the way their architecture was also the politics. They wanted to be like Rome, so they did that.

And the citizens of Philippi were Roman citizens. In Paul's time, an important Roman road called the Via Ignatia ran through Philippi. This commanded the land route into Asia Minor.

So going Asia Minor is where you see Galatia on your map there. It's Ephesus, Colossi. All those places there.

So the major land route that went there went through Philippi, and so it became a major trade city. Also. The city was also in proximity to gold mines in the nearby mountains, and gold's an important thing.

Right. So in a lot of ways, the city is a Roman city. It's on a trade route, it has a lot of wealth nearby.

This is a very important city in the Roman Empire. Many pagan religions were practiced in Philippi, including both Roman being like their pantheon of gods. Also, Egyptian religions were practiced there, along with the imperial religion, which was the worship of the emperor as a god.

So all this was practiced in Philippi. It was a very diverse religious setting. It seems to have only a small Jewish contingent, and we're going to talk about why in a second.

There might have only been a small Jewish contingent there. So you got the map and then my note on the bottom there. Paul arrived with the Gospel in Philippi around 49 to 52 Ad on his second missionary journey.

And this was actually the first church that he was able to see people saved and started in Europe was in Philippi. This was 49 to 52 Ad. He writes this letter, 61 Ad.

So approximately ten to twelve years later, he's writing to the Philippian church. Yes. You can see Rome on the map.

Yeah, Rome is in that corner there distances? I'm not sure. I never measured it. Yeah, there's two things.

You can sail there, which means you go around Italy, you go around Greece and up to Philippi, which is probably a relatively fast way in that day and time. Or you could take a land route there, but you'd have to go north around and come back around, and there's a lot of mountains there north of Philippi and stuff. How much 800 miles.

It's a pretty good distance. And like I said, there's no direct way to go straight from Rome to Philippi. So you take a boat and that will take you probably a couple of weeks.

Or you could try a land route and have to go through mountains and stuff. It's nicer than half an hour drive. That is amazing.

I can't do that. Okay, so we're going to be in Acts 16 for a little while here. So if you have your Bibles, and I hope you do, I was originally going to put an act 16 on the paper, and then I realized how much of this paper would take up, and I said, well, no, we can use our Bibles.

That's good. So, act 16, and this is looking at Paul when he first comes to the city of Philippi on his second missionary journey. So what we're going to do is each of these six points here have a list of verses.

We're just going to read the verses within those points and talk about them a little bit. So the first section we're going to read is verses nine through twelve of chapter 16. So I need a reader who would like to read verses nine through twelve.

Abigail, go ahead. And vision appeared in Paul the night a man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying, come over to Macedonia and help us. Now, after we had seen the vision, immediately we stopped to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the Gospel to them.

Therefore, sailing from Troas, we ran a straight course to the most race, and the next day came to diocese, and from there to Philippi, which is the foremost city of that part of Macedonia, a college. And we remain in that city for continue. So we see that what brought Paul to Philippi was a divine call.

He sees a vision and they see a Macedonian man. And he must have been distinct enough that they recognize that that's what it was, either by his dress or by his accent maybe, or something like that. But they figured out this guy's from Macedonia, and God's giving them direction.

Go into Macedonia. Go into Europe. Bring the gospel there.

It's ripe for you to be there. So they decide, this is what God wants us to do. Let's get in a boat and we're going to go.

And so they get in a boat from Troys and they go out there, and the first place they land is Philippi. And that's what brought Paul to the Philippians. Let's go on and read .2.

We're going to spend a little more time on the rest of these points. Verses 13 through 15. Who would like to read? Nathan, go ahead.

And on the Sabbath day, we went out of the city to the riverside where prayer was customarily made, and we sat down and spoke to the women who met there. Now a certain woman named Lydia heard of us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira who worshiped God.

The Lord opened her heart to eat the things spoken by Paul. And when she and her household were baptized, she begged us, saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and say. So she persuaded us.

Okay. So earlier in the lesson, I made the point that there's probably a small Jewish contingent there not really a large one. This is where we kind of get that from, because they go on the Sabbath.

And where do they go on the Sabbath? To preach the gospel. They usually do that. Where did they go in this passage? They went to the riverside where there was a prayer meeting.

Why was there a prayer meeting at the riverside? There probably wasn't enough Jews in the city to have a synagogue. So it's probably a very small Jewish contingent. That's why they had to meet at the riverside instead of the synagogue where Paul normally goes on the Sabbath.

You have to have ten men in order to have so that tells you that there's really fewer than ten men. And in fact, in this passage here, you see who's the main characters? Well, it's a bunch of women, right? So that's probably likely that there were fewer than ten men. They couldn't have a synagogue in Philippi.

So very small Jewish contingent here. Thank you. It's good to have a professor with you to give you all this extra stuff.

So looking at this so they come here and they meet this lady, Lydia. And Lydia, you can see some things about her. She was a faithful prayer.

She was there at the Saturday prayer service that they were having at the river. That seems likely that she came there regularly. And it's not just that Paul and her happened to meet on the one day she was there.

She was probably there faithfully doing that, and Paul met her there. She is also a faithful worshiper. If you look at her.

She was a seller of purple from the city. By the way, what is a seller of purple? Purple was a royal color. Royalty was identified with the color purple.

So somebody who was selling purple was selling probably purple cloth, which was expensive and probably one of the reasons why it represented royalty and maybe hard to come by. And so that's what she did. She sold that an interesting occupation.

From the city of Thyatira who worshiped God. It says she worshiped God. So she was a faithful worshiper.

She already knew of God. She was worshiping him. Obviously had not heard the gospel because Paul's first bringing it here.

But she's also a faithful hearer. If you look there, the Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. So when Paul spoke the gospel, she listened.

She wanted to know what Paul was saying she wanted to know the truth of the thing. She was faithful at listening and hearing the gospel, and she ends up, it seems like, here, trusting the Lord. It doesn't say that in this passage, I was saved.

But we can see by her actions that that's probably true here. Actually, it says she was baptized. So I guess Paul wouldn't baptize her unless she was saved.

So I'll take that back. I'll step back from that. She was saved because we see that she was faithful in action.

She followed in believers baptism, and she was baptized there. And then she also followed through in hospitality. Paul's new to the city.

He hasn't been here before. And she says, Come stay with us if nothing prevents you, we'll take care of you. And so just a very faithful and godly woman, even from being first saved.

So we see the ministry to the Jews there, especially to this Lydia. We also see a ministry to a slave girl, verses 16 to 18. Who's who wants to read here? Okay.

Now it happened as women of financial met us much prophets. Okay, the verse 18 too. Yeah, I was going to say I think there's one more verse.

Oh, okay. Just a verse 18. And the new King James is but Paul, greatly annoyed, turned and said to the Spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.

And he came out that very hour. So that was added on there. So we see this slave girl comes and she starts following Paul around.

The slave girl is described as she had the power of divination. This is kind of like predicting the future type of type of thing, kind of knowing what most people don't know. And probably the bigger thing than that is that she brought her masters in much profit.

So in the end, the masters didn't seem to care about her. They didn't care about what she believed, what she was doing. They cared that she was filling their pocketbooks.

A lot of times they know when you want to find out where somebody's heart is, you look at where their money is being spent or where they're getting their money. And that's kind of true here also. So she had the power of divination, but she brought her master's prophet.

So she follows Paul around and she cries out, these men are servants of the most high God who proclaimed the way of salvation. That sounds like a good thing to be crying out right here's. Someone crying out, hey, these guys know the way of salvation.

They're servants of God. Isn't that the kind of advertisement you want? Well, in this case, it's probably not. It's probably hindering what Paul's trying to do because she's sitting and crying this out over and over.

It probably doesn't give Paul the chance to actually explain the gospel to anybody, because this girl is causing a distraction right? So Paul's having difficulty trying to do what God wants him to do because there's this distraction here. There's this person that's causing issues, causing people not to listen to Paul because she's constantly being loud and crying out here. So Paul, after many days, the Bible says he's greatly annoyed, he's getting fed up with this.

And he turns to the Spirit and we find out that she actually here is demon possessed. And Paul cast out the demon here and he came out that very hour. So the big issue with her in Paul's eyes is that she has this demon possession that needs to be taken care of.

He takes care of that. Now, we don't know what happens to her afterwards. It doesn't talk about if she's saved or not.

I would like to think, and I'm glad that there's no opportunity for me to have this now, but if I were demon possessed, at some point somebody cast it out that I'd be like, okay, I need to get right with God so I don't get back in this situation again. We don't know that for sure. It doesn't say in the scripture here.

I'd like to think that she did trust Christ as her Savior, but I don't know for sure. So we run into a problem. Now, Paul's doing what's best for this girl.

He's helping her out, but not everybody's going to appreciate it. So we're going to have a long passage here, verses 19 through 34, which leads into our next section. Ted, go ahead.

But when her master saw that their hope of prophet was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. And they brought them to the magistrates and said, these men, being Jews, exceedingly trouble our city, and they teach customs which are not lawful for us, being Romans, to receive or observe. Then the multitude rose up together against them, and the magistrates tore off their clothes and commanded them to be beaten.

Rod. And when they laid many stripes on them, they threw them into prison, commanding the jailer to keep them securely. Having received such a charge, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet and the socks.

But at midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were open and everyone's chains were loose.

The keeper of the prison awakening from sleep and seeing the prison doors open supposing the prisoners had fled, drew his sword and was about to kill himself. But Paul called with a loud voice saying, do yourself no harm, for we are all here. Then he called for a light, ran in and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas.

And he brought them out and said, sir, what must we do to be saved? So he said, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your household. Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. And he took them with the same hour of the night and watched the stripes.

And they immediately, he said and immediately he and all the family were baptized. Now, when he had brought them into the house, he set food before them, rejoiced having believed in God with all. Okay, so we see this slave girl is freed from this demonic influence, and the masters, instead of saying, wow, that's great, you helped her, now she's in better condition.

Their concern is that they've just lost their profits. Their business is going out of business, they're bankrupt, and they're probably not getting the $100,000 a week or month or whatever it was that Trump got. So they're upset.

They go to the magistrates and they brought them to the magistrates and said, these men being Jews again, remember how many Jews are in the city? Very little. Yeah, very little. So this is not brought as like we're just explaining who they are.

This is an insult to them. These are Jews. These are people that are foreign to our city.

These are people that don't belong here. These are people that believe differently than we believe. These Jews are causing a problem, they say, exceedingly trouble, our city.

Why? Because we can't make money, that's why. They're troubling our city. And they teach customs which are not lawful for us, being Romans.

Remember, this is a premier Roman city. This is outside of Italy. This is like one of the best Roman cities in the world.

And we're proud of that. We're Romans and we being Romans here, they teach customs that are not lawful for us. And the multitude rose up together against them.

The magistrates tore off their clothes. Everybody's upset about this whole situation. And so the first thing that they do is they have Paul and Silas here beaten, and that's going to be important as we talk about this later.

So they go ahead and beat them and then they throw him in prison. And they charge the keeper of the prison, the jailer here, to keep them secure. And so he does everything he can.

He puts their feet in stocks. That makes it very hard to escape when you can't move your feet anywhere. Yeah, so he's doing everything he can to keep these men safe in the prison.

So we go on and see that Paul and Silas. What did they do in prison? How could this have happened to us? Why did God let this happen? This is terrible. This is awful.

This was unfair. No, what do they do? They're praying and singing. How many people go to prison? And again, this is falsely.

I'm not talking about like real people that deserve prison, but people that go to prison falsely go there and pray and sing. Well, Paul and Silas did. That's the attitude we ought to have through hardships and trials, that we're giving glory to God, we're praying, we're singing, we're praising him, we're doing what we can.

So Paul was doing that. And about midnight, we have this miraculous event, this earthquake that shakes loose everything, frees their bonds. Really miraculous.

The jailer, I'm sure he has no idea what's going on. I don't know if he was even awake. He has everybody secure, but he wasn't paying close attention because he finds out about the earthquake.

He kind of knows what happened, and his response is he's going to kill himself. Why would he do that? Yeah, the Roman law was, if you're in charge of prisoners and the prisoners escape, guess who gets their punishment? The person was in charge of keeping them safe in prison. And so he has what he thinks.

The whole prison is gone. They've left, and now he's going to get the punishment of every single prisoner that escaped. And instead of doing that, he figures that the easiest way is I'll just kill myself quick and get it done with.

Right. Because Romans were good at torturing. They came up with the crucifixion.

That's a torturous way to die. You saw Paul and Silas here were beaten. He's going to go through all of this kind of stuff because the prisoners escaped.

So he's ready to do this. Thankfully, Paul realizes this. He speaks up and he gives them the situation.

Hey, we're all still here. We haven't left. And when that happens, I don't think the guard really believes this because he gets a light and just wants to check and make sure.

And he looks around and sure enough, that's what happens here. Right? And his first question or his first response isn't, wow, what a great thing to happen. I'm safe now.

Good. He asks, what must I do to be saved? One of the most clear questions of how do I respond to the gospel? What must I do to be saved? Now, why would he say this? What would bring up this response? Yeah, he's heard all night, Paul and Silas singing and praying and giving glory to God. And this is probably very strange to him.

I don't think he's ever had a prisoner who's probably ever done this before. And so he's paying attention even though he hadn't responded before this point, he's following along. He's seeing what's going on.

What's up with these guys? Why are they different? Why are they singing? Why are they praying? It's the first Peter three. When you suffer through trials, you get the opportunity that people ask you for the reason of the hope that is in you. That's basically where it's gotten to.

He's like, These guys are different. They're in prison, they've just been beaten. I've locked them up, as Lynn says, probably a little bit uncomfortable.

And they're singing and worshiping what is going on? And then it comes to this point of decision. He realizes, I need to know why. I need to know what's going on here.

I need to know how I can be saved. I need to know how I can have what these guys have. And so he asks this very clear question sirs, what must I do to be saved? Now, Paul has great opportunity to go here.

Well, you got to get baptized. You got to participate in communion. There's seven sacraments you got to do.

He has a very clear opportunity to give a concise answer. And his answer is, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Salvation is a very simple message.

You just need to look at what Jesus Christ has done, his death, burial and resurrection, and believe on that. God makes it very simple. It's his grace towards us because there's nothing we can do.

We can't be good enough, we can't do enough actions. We can't do anything that makes us worthy of the Gospel. And so the Gospel doesn't have to be hard.

It's all on God. It's all on what Christ has done for so he gives that very clear, concise answer to the Gospel, what must I do to be saved? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved, you and your household. Basically, some people take this as the Philippian jailer gets saved and his whole family is saved.

No, it's that your family has the same opportunity. It's you, your household. If they believe on Jesus Christ, they're going to be saved too.

It doesn't matter if you're man, woman, child. Belief is what saves you. So they spoke the word of the Lord to Him.

They explained a little bit more probably here, and he becomes saved. And we know that because later on it talks about that. He and his family were all baptized, so they trusted Christ as their Savior.

So what does he do? How does he respond? Then he goes and cares for Paul. He's like, Excuse me, these guys just gave me the greatest blessing, telling me about Jesus Christ, about how to be saved. I'm going to take care of these guys.

So he washes their wounds, he feeds them, brings them into his house. Again, here's a response that shows a gratitude of thankfulness for what God's done for Him. And we see a changed person, this jailer's response.

So then this isn't the end of the story in Philippi. A few more verses 35 through 39. Who wants to read? Okay, Jonathan, go ahead.

And when it was day, the magistrate sent the sergeant saying, let those men go. And the keeper of the prison told this saying to Paul, the magistrate have sent to let go now, therefore depart and go to peace. But Paul said to them, they have beaten us openly, uncondemned being Romans, and have kept us from the prison.

And now do they thrust us out privately many barely let them come themselves and fetch us. And the sergeants told these words to the magistrates, and they feared when they heard that they were Romans and they came and besought them and brought them out and desired them to depart out of the city. Okay? So at this point, it's the next day.

The Romans are like, okay, let's just get rid of these guys. Go tell the jailer to let them go. We'll get them out of prison, we'll be done with them.

So the jailer comes to Paul and Silas and says, hey, they're going to let you go. Go in peace. You're good.

Get out of here. How many of us would take that and say, yep, bye. See ya? I think I would be gone.

I would be like, okay, yep, I've had enough of this jail life. I'm out of here. Paul says, uh uh, not so fast.

There's a problem here. See, Silas and I, we're roman citizens. They didn't give us a trial.

They beat us. They threw us in prison. They need to come and deal with this and do what's right.

And so the jailer goes back to them and says, hey, by the way, these guys you threw in prison, they're Roman citizens. Now, remember, this is a Roman city. They follow Roman customs.

They follow Roman laws. They're like little Rome. Sometimes people call Des Moines Little Chicago because of our affiliation with all the sports teams in Chicago.

We have the I-cubs and all that. So we're like a little Chicago. They're like a little Rome.

They're proud of that. They know what the law is. They know what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do.

And they realize they've made a huge mistake here. And so they have to go back to Paul and Silas. And it says here that they beg them to go in, know, it's like, we're sorry, we made a mistake.

Please don't hold it against us. We'll get in trouble. Just please don't do this.

And so they have to go before Paul and plead for him to depart the city. So they're asking him, just please overlook this. We didn't know.

You should have known. You should have asked. But they didn't.

So they have to confront their mistake, and they're humbled before Paul. Then one more verse here. Verse 40.

Olivia, go ahead. So they went out of the prison and entered the house of Lydia. And when they had seen the Brethren, they encouraged them and departed.

Okay, so this ends their time in Philippi. They go back to the house of Lydia. Why Lydia? Well, she's already opened her house to them.

She's there. She's like, if you need anything, you come here. I'll take care of you.

And so he goes back there, and it says, they went into the house of Lydia. And when they had seen the Brethren, how many people were saved before Paul got to Philippi? Zero. This is the first time the Gospel goes into Europe, right? So now it goes from zero to this short period of time.

There's brethren. There's a group of believers. We know the Philippian jailer in his household, they believe, right? We know.

Lydia believes. We know probably a number of the women that were at the prayer ceremony believes. So there's a larger group of people here.

There's the starting of a church here. And Paul encourages them. And then he does eventually depart to the city.

And it doesn't say how long if he was there, a couple of days, a couple of weeks, or whatever it was. But it doesn't seem like he spent a long time in Philippi. So that's Paul's time in Philippi.

That's how he brought the Gospel to this city. Now remember, this is ten to twelve years later. He's writing them back.

This has grown into a church. This has grown into a real congregation, not only with saints, but they have pastors. Remember verse one? It's the pastors, plural and deacons.

And so there's a body here now, and Paul's writing them to encourage them. And that's what we're going to look at. And Paul again, once again, is in prison, this time in Rome.

But you can already see that Paul knows how to respond to being in prison, right? He spent time in prison in Philippi. And we can see his character. We can see that he worshiped and trusted God through that.

And so even in this time, now, he's writing to Philippians. Yeah, I'm in prison again. But you know what? This is okay.

God's in control, god's good. God's taking care of this. And so a lot of things, a lot of parallels here between Paul's situation there and Paul's situation now as he's writing Philippians.

Look at the time here. We're actually good on time, but I put in an outline from Philippians. I took this from MacArthur.

So I'm giving credit where credit's due here. I think it's a pretty good outline. You can see it.

I'm not going to read through it because you guys can read through and look through it. We're probably not going to stick to the outline because I'm probably going to go a little bit slower through than just taking each of these points in Philippians. And we're going to work our way through and just kind of look at what the message is here, what Paul is trying to teach and understand a little bit more about this book.

So any thoughts or questions at this point? That's kind of my brief overview. Again. I have one commentary that has about 20 pages of introduction to Philippians.

I didn't give you that. A lot of it is dealing with, of course, what different people think of the place of writing, who wrote it, that kind of stuff. And so here's what they argue.

Here's why their arguments are not very good, that kind of thing. I didn't think most of us really wanted that. I'd like to have the answers.

Here's the answer. So I gave you the answers. If you want to talk about that, we can do that sometime.

But any thoughts, questions, comments on this? Yes, Ryan? I don't think they had little Caesars. I think they only had Big Caesars. So, yeah, Philippians is not a book I've taught out of a study before.

So I'm looking forward to this because I think that, as always, when I start studying something, I learn a lot more than I think I'm ever going to learn, and hopefully I'll be able to share that with you, what I'm learning and stuff, and it'll be profitable in this. I'm looking forward to it. I think to me, when I read it, it's a very encouraging book.

Like, the Church of Philippi seems to be doing what's right for the most part. They seem to be following the Lord, and this is a book that Paul encourages them, keep doing that gives them some warnings and stuff, but it's not like First Corinthians where you go in there and go, okay, here, you're doing this wrong. Oh, wait, now let's deal with this.

That you're doing wrong. Oh, wait, you're doing this wrong. No, you misunderstand this.

First Corinthians kind of has that tone. Philippians seems to have you a more encouraging tone. So I'm looking forward to that.

I think it'll be very enjoyable, hopefully. So no comments. I'll close in prayer, and then I'll give you the rest of the time back today.

Heavenly Father, we praise you Lord, we thank you for this time today. We thank you for this short introduction, Lord. I know there's probably so much more we could talk about and different things that we could see in this book, Lord.

And hopefully, as we go ahead and study it, Lord, you reveal Your will and Your words to us that we may understand who you are better, that we may understand what Your will is for us better, and we may understand how we should act towards you and towards each other better. Lord, give us wisdom as we study. Help us to really seek out Your Word and seek Your face.

Lord, we thank you for your word. Thank you for your spirit which guides us and directs us in your word. And we just ask that you would again bless this study coming up in Jesus name, amen.