Grace And Peace
- Details
- Sunday Morning Service
- Pastor Jeremy Richards
- Copalis Community Church
- 11 January 2026
- Philippians 4:19-23
Philippians, and we're maybe at the last time that I share out of Philippians. And I have been really looking forward to starting Hebrews, and I'm terrified. But the thought of looking closely at Christ's priestly ministry fills me with a lot of excitement. And I have a lot of desire to go there. And in some ways I feel that that might be my last ministry.
If we can it through the book of Hebrews, by the time I die, we'll be really, really on track. And if that is so, if we could look carefully at that book and gain something back, it would be worth it. It would be worth it. That is a good life's ministry to have. But finishing Philippians, we basically have just a greeting to finalize this book.
But I want to go back into two verses prior to the greeting, just given an overview of Paul's feelings and his desire to leave something of importance with the Philippians, Right? When you write a letter, sure, you have an introduction and a main body, but you try to bring this last, final, powerful statement to leave them with something to impact them in whatever way you were hoping to. So we're going to start in verse 19, chapter 4, verse 19 of Philippians, and work through to the end of the chapter.
So chapter four of Philippians, verse 19. And this is one of those great, easy to remember, often repeated verses that we're going to focus on. But I think we need to kind of dig a little deeper into it. And so that's what I have been doing in my travels and thinking is looking at verse 19. But we'll start there.
And my God shall supply all your need according to his riches and glory by Christ Jesus. Now to our God and Father be glory forever and ever. Amen. And then we're seeing in this final greeting and blessing, greet every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren who are with me greet you.
All the saints greet you, but especially those of Caesar's household. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. And so to work kind of backwards. First of all, this greeting.
Paul has a desire that these Philippians, these individuals, if you remember, he had received a Macedonian call, right? He had been prevented by the Spirit. He had been hindered by the devil to enter those mission fields for which he desired to go. But then he had a dream, and. And in that dream, there's a Macedonian man calling, come over and help us.
And so Paul made the transition, feeling this is where God is directing me, went in and entered Macedonia. And there he started his ministry in Philippi, one of the cities of Macedonia. These Philippians, along with the other Macedonians had become instrumental in Paul's missionary activity. Wherever you see individuals sharing with Paul in his ministry, you will almost as, as far as I know, see the word. The Macedonians, they had sent aid to him once and again.
This last time they had sent it through the hands of Epaphroditus that had reached Paul. Paul was full having received that gift that came through Epaphroditus. But it appears that Paul is sending greetings back to the Philippians from Rome. The individuals of Caesar's household are greeting the Philippians. Just interesting.
So Paul it may be, if I understand things correctly, Paul had made his trip to Jerusalem as promised, even though he knew that you're going to go bound to Jerusalem. Whoever owns this belt, they're going to put in chains, basically. And Paul had done that. He had spent time in jail, not only in Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem Caesarea, but had finally been sent to Rome. If you remember as we talked this morning, his goal on going to Rome was to eventually go and be sent from Rome to Spain.
To Spain. Now I think it's a matter of conjecture as far as I know whether Paul eventually made it to Spain or not. I don't think anyone really knows, but that was his goal. Whether or not he made it to Spain and has returned and then there dies in Rome, we don't know, or that he just died before coming to Rome. But anyways, it appears that he is there and that he is sending greetings back to this group of people who had helped him on his journey so much by providing for his resources.
And so he greets them in all of Paul's letters. The final conclusion is grace to you. As the start of his letters is almost universally grace and peace. Grace and peace. The thing that introduces Paul's gospel is grace and peace.
This is the thing that comes from God towards every believer. And he concludes his letter to the Philippians with the same the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. If you want to know God's heart for you as a person, it is God's grace to be filled, to be poured out into your life more than anything else. That is, if you need to remember one thing, remember that God loves you and he wants to fill your life to overflowing.
He's not so much cared about the clothes you wear or the car you drive or all these other things that we're concerned about. He wants to fill your person with his goodness. Amen. Okay, well, we're going to go back. So that's the final thing.
But we're going to go to verse 19. I'm going to focus there for a little bit.
Verse 19 says, and my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. He starts off and my God. It's interesting. Jesus on the cross, he cries out, he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He has a relationship with the Father and he calls out, my God.
You see, we have a little bit of a misunderstanding here when we say my God. There is a little bit of a different. A conflict in ideas, a conflict in understanding. You know, there is. What needs to be understood is there is a matter of priority.
There is a matter of. Of who controls who. Jesus calls out my God, My God, having fully given himself to his last breath, to all of his resources, to the God he belonged to, he is calling out my God as an indicator that he belongs totally to. To this person. Oftentimes we call out my God in a little bit of an opposite idea that that God belongs to us.
There's a very big difference here. It's interesting. In a relationship, in a marriage relationship, the husband is called to sanctify the wife and he sanctifies her actively, passively, right? So actively the husband sanctifies the wife through the washing of the water of the word, right? That the husband is called to be the spiritual leader of the house and actively lead his wife and family in the things of God.
That is an active. The way he actively takes part in God's sanctification passively. He is an instrument of sanctification by being such a jerk, right? And God uses his ugliness to sanctify the wife by her committing to the Lord in spite of the ugliness of her husband. That is two different ways that women are sanctified by their husband.
But in some ways, we all try to take an idea of sanctification that is not biblical, that ends up leading to idolatry, right? We read a. Isaiah read a scripture today about this. Taking this thing and making it, fashioning it, carving it, shaping it, trying to make it, mold it into something that fits or suits us. But as Isaiah wrote out a psalm, this thing that we make doesn't have eyes or ears or hands. It can't talk, it can't speak, it can't do anything for us.
In a similar way, you and I at times reverse the priority here. And instead of us belonging completely to God, becoming fully responsible to him, Having him as our authority, having him as the one who tells us what to do, we attempt to reverse the role, excuse me, And try to make God into something we want him to be. Has anyone ever been frustrated with a spouse before, like maybe last year or something like that, at one point in your life, right? And you, when that happens, they act in a certain way that irritates you or something of that nature, right? And your attempt is to take out carving tools, right?
And you use sharpened tools to sculpt that person. You think sometimes you take a religious attitude. Well, I'm actually sanctifying. I'm trying to make her into a more godly person here. And we take out our tools, right, and put them on the lathe and we turn them and we chip off those irritating edges off of them the best we can, right?
We are trying to build them into something. We're trying to form them based on some idea that we have. Now, I don't think that works well, even in a marriage relationship. Okay? I'm not trying to justify that, though.
We've all tried it lots. But it works even less well when you try it with God. When something he does frustrates us and we react with a type of anxiety, a rebellion, it is intent to chisel him into the kind of being that we want our God to be. We want him to look a certain way, we want him to act a certain way towards us. And so we get out our tools and we put him on the lathe and we begin to manipulate him into a being that we want him to be.
Some of us have tried that with our spouses before, and we figured out it doesn't work well on them.
God is not made into an idol that if we have something that we are manipulating, that we have control over, that we can make look and act how we want. You have set up for yourself an idol. You are a God maker. God is not manipulated. He has existed in heaven.
His will is entirely at his disposal. He is a person. He has a will and a mind. He has self determination. He directs the course of events as he wants.
He is all powerful. He knows everything, all creation, all the whole universe, from beginning to end, from infinity to infinity, is subject and is entirely at the disposal of the one individual who created them all out of nothing. At his word. He has no neighbor. He has no competition.
There is no one on earth or in heaven beside Him. He says, is there any God I know of? None. No other. He is the only one.
And you and I are subject to that. Individual. If there is an individual, a God who created everything. Not the same type of gods of the Roman gods or the north gods fighting amongst each other. No one individual controlling everything.
If that individual has created us, he has the ability to institute laws over us. He has the right to expect that you and I are held accountable to these laws. This is the individual when he says, my God. Not the God that you make out of your own imagination, not the God that you want, not the God that you think is appropriate in 2026 in America. No, the real God, the only God, the one God to that one alone.
Paul says, my God. If we're to expect the rest of the scripture here in chapter verse 19, we have to understand that the provision only comes from this one source. We have to have our foundation right. All roads don't lead to Rome. Not every person who worships something, even actively, even passionately, if it's going to be right.
There is one only God. If we're to follow scripture, if we're to understand it correctly, he is the only one cognizant having a will, having a plan.
It says in verse 1019, excuse me. And my God shall supply all your need. This God has made a decision that he wants to supply. His goal is to give. This is not a trading post.
This is not a store. This is his desire to provide out of his own resources, something for his people. He has made a commitment. And the strongest word in the English language here is shall. This is a commitment that this God has made with his creation.
He promises that there is nothing in his creation created physically or spiritual, that can prevent his hand from providing for his people. He says he shall supply. It is not something that is paid for. It is not a store where you can take of your resources and trade them for His. It is a free gift that he has made the decision to give of his own to his people.
He wants to give even so much so. And he says, for God so loved the world that he chose to give his only begotten Son. How much of his resources does he want to give? What is the limit to which he would provide? How much if you had a need, if mankind had a need, would he go to provide for the resources of the people?
It says all the way to his own son. There is nothing that he would hold back of his own possession to supply the needs of his people. In verse 19 it says, and my God shall supply all your need. Now in America there are needs and wants. And sometimes those things are convoluted, sometimes they're thinking, you know, it's funny seeing young people saying they love another young person.
And there may be some truth in it, but oftentimes they lust the other young person. It's not really love. There are some needs we have that. There are some wants we have that we think are need. God here says that he will provide all of our needs.
That may seem like a bad deal, right to you. Like, oh great, I want all these things. This is my want list. This is my needs list, right? And God just basically says, you know, what you want is important, but I'll provide your needs.
And I'm just like, you know, before I went to friendships in Honduras, I didn't even like beans, you know, but I needed beans in Honduras and so I ate them and learned to live with them, right? So like, okay, God's going to provide beans for me. He's going to meet my needs, right? And sometimes we think that's a bad deal, a bad deal. And we have all these other guys getting what they want.
But the truth is, is no one ever gets what they want. If you chase what you want, you can never obtain it. They're never has been a person who chased what they wanted and has ever obtained it. There's never been a rich person, there's never been a satisfied person. According to their lust, they always want more.
They are never satisfied with what they have. Proverbs uses the example of an eagle flying towards heaven. Is the one who chases after riches. Eagle may be there on the beach. You think, I can get it right and you start moving towards it.
Well, what happens to the eagle the closer you get to flies away faster than you can chase it. The more you put in, set your sights on what you want, the further they travel away from you. The most unsatisfied people are the stuffedest people.
They're the ones killing themselves. Everyone got to track on me. Sometimes we think it would be better if we got to chase our wants than our needs. But the truth is, is those people are the most unsatisfied people. They're the loneliest, they are the emptiest, they are the brokenness type of people.
I want to understand that everyone to understand that God here, the God of the Bible, chooses to meet our needs. It is so much better to find yourself in the position of having your needs met than chasing having your wants met. It's a blessed position. Some of us might think, oh no, that's nothing, I don't have much needs.
That might be true, but that's not necessarily Where God wants you. Yeah. David started off not having much need, but where he ended up was a place of tremendous need. You know, baal, Jerub, Gideon, right, didn't need much when he was just the lowest member of his clan. But when God was, when he started to walk in obedience and that night took and cut down baal, his father's idol, he had a lot more needs than he did the day before.
You see that you and I as individuals, if all you need is beans, it's probably because you have not stepped out and walked in obedience to God. God, if we follow him, you're going to see that the positions he places us in have tremendous need. With Gideon, he took that step of obedience and realized he had a bigger need than he anticipated. And God, one step by step, provided and filled that need. In every example of a biblical man of faith, biblical man or woman of faith, they recognized their need, and God supernaturally filled it.
God promises out of his own resources to meet the needs of individuals who will serve him, who will walk by faith with him. It says, and my God shall supply all your need. According to his riches, God is rich. He is so rich that he can meet all the needs of every person on earth. But his riches have a unique capacity.
If you and I were to take riches and we were to take that money and try to make an exchange for God's riches for our riches, is there an exchange rate between heaven and earth where dollars can be converted into spiritual currency?
If all the money could be compiled into a pile and one person could have authority over all the riches on the earth, could they make a trade? Would there be a transaction made between heaven and Earth? Could they buy some of the riches that belong to heaven with all of the resources that belong on Earth? How much could they afford? Would God sell a quarter of Heaven?
No. Maybe he's a dealer. Maybe he's like not a quarter, but let's. How about an 8? Would you give me an 8?
Would he deal with with a king of the earth? No. They would utterly be despised. There is not any amount of physical resources that could purchase the spiritual resources God has. Okay?
This is important.
God provides for the needs of his people through spiritual resources, not physical. Everyone tracking with me there. It is not physical resources that God meets the needs of his people with. It is spiritual ones that do not have any type of exchange rate between earthly ones. What he provides our needs with are spiritual ones.
It says, and my God shall supply all your needs according to his riches. He has riches stored up that he wants to supply your need from. I would have some sort of idea based on my own carnal lust that sometimes when we feel short and our needs are not being met, you might be looking for a different kind of resources.
Does anyone hear me on that? We have a job that we did and a substantial amount of money was supposed to be paid for that job and was supposed to be sent for that job and it was supposed to be there to pay people for that job. And I'm looking for resources. Where do you think those resources are from? Physical ones.
Right. But God says he will provide for our needs according to riches that he has in heaven. He has riches. These things are spiritual. It's interesting.
One of the things that I think of when I think of this idea, Jesus, when he was approached by John the Baptist's disciples, are you the one who is to come or should we wait for another? Jesus gave them an answer. Are you the Messiah or should we be looking for another person? Jesus said, what do you see? He says, the eyes of the blind are opened, the eyes of the ear are unstopped, they can hear, the maimed can walk.
And then he puts something into so much perspective. The poor have the gospel preached to them. The absolute solution for blindness is having your eyes open. The cure for being deaf now I know we don't have a cure necessarily is to have your ears unstopped. A maimed person to be cured would have the use of their legs again.
And the poor, what's the cure for poverty?
That's not what it said. Trump is, well, this is what we got to do to raise everybody above the poverty line in America is possible. Everyone know that to raise everybody above the poverty line this year in America, all you have to do is stop paying the government for the people who give out those resources and give that money to the people instead. And every single person in America will be raised immediately above the poverty line and we would be done with poorness forever.
Is that true? Just give everyone a trump check and there'll be no more poverty. No, it didn't say that money was the cure for poverty. It said the gospel was. When the gospel is preached to a person, they have the availability to access resources that are spiritual in nature, not physical.
That spiritual resources cures poverty. There never has been a person filled with the holy Spirit and walking with Christ who has ever been poor.
Every spirit filled believer always is a put in position where they have an abundance and have the ability to share with those people who are in need. People in jail they find themselves willing to give and to share. They're not poor. They have riches to share with those people. And so with also those people who come into access of God's resources, they have riches.
Poverty is gone. It doesn't matter whether you live under a bridge or in a fancy house, when Christ impacts your life, you always have things to share with those around you. These resources does God give? How does he give them? It says in verse 19 and my God shall supply all your needs according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
These riches are not just thrown onto a street as pearls before swine. They are accessed only through the legal work of Jesus Christ. These riches, if you want to be an individual who is satisfied in your person, full and rich, having every need met, where you are content with what you have, then you must come to Jesus Christ. There is no other avenue to access the riches, the spiritual riches found in the Father than through the person of Jesus Christ. Because of his work, legal work, on the cross, because of his payment, he has made available to every person the disposal, the Father's resources.
Because of Christ's work. There is, he says, I am the only way to the Father. There is no other way to access these resources. This in you should produce something out of the verse 20. Now to our God and Father be glory forever and ever.
Amen. It says in another spot now unto the King, immortal, invisible, the only wise God be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. There are many things which glorify God, his creation. His provision is an astonishing thing.
But there is something that glorifies him more than these things. When he is able to take his own resources and entrust them to an individual like you and I, when He is able to do that, that brings him glory. He wants to find a person. He is looking for somebody who would trust him, who would depend upon him, receive from him and put in practice this thing. It says his eyes look from the east to the west to see if there are any.
Any. Would somebody trust me for their needs? And he promises he will provide them. I hope for you there is an encouragement. I have to give one more warning just to make this up.
As Americans, we are filled with lust. We feel we deserve lots of. If you're serving physical, you will never be satisfied in your soul. I just have to tell you that if you are looking for those things, you will continually be empty. But if you look to your Father's face for the provision for his need, you will find yourself, even though you may be low in your neighbor's eyes that you will possess riches that no one could purchase though they were the kings of the earth.
A satisfied soul is of more value than any riches you could obtain. A joyful heart, a home filled with happiness. Don't look to the things of the world they're a fleeting flower they're a mist that vanishes. But there are real riches at your disposable through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that he wants to pour out on you and I abundantly. Amen.
And that brings God glory. Let's pray then we're going to have Tim come back up and then remember potluck to share together so let's pray Father. Thank you Lord. You don't give less Lord, you give more. Thank you for providing for the needs of your children.
Thank you for being a giving heart. Thank you for opening a way through the ministry of Christ to make that possible and thank you for glorifying yourself when this happens. In Jesus name amen.