"For me, to die is gain": Really?... No Seriously, Really??

REFLECTION QUOTES

“…these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness, it’s either blessed or unblessed. As the Bible says, ‘Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.’ Now, that must be a happy man. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be – that’s much more important than just being happy.”

~Bob Dylan in a Rolling Stone interview (1991)

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“[Americans] are a drifting and aimless people—awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.”

~U.S. Senator Ben Sasse in his book The Vanishing American Adult

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”

~Rollo May (1909-1994), psychologist and author

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today…. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites….”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address 1978

“Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.”

~James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“When saints sin, they know they are not sinning against law, but against love.”

~D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1980), Welsh minister and medial doctor

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

~Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

SERMON PASSAGE

Philippians 1:1-11 (ESV)

1 Paul and Timothy, servantsof Christ Jesus,

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseersand deacons:

2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, 4 always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.