Being of the Same Mind

I really like, as you mentioned the main service many times, I like Macaulay's outlines, he does for many books of scripture. So he has an outline that kind of encompasses back into chapter one, and then through part of chapter two. And he labels that, this part of the outline is exhortation to unity. firm in one spirit and one mind.

Can we move it over or something? It's just, I don't know. Okay. You know, I really can't because I didn't actually, could you ask, maybe Bill could come back. Yeah, I didn't actually, I didn't actually look at what was going on here. You're right, I missed part of the slides. He readjusted something and I don't know if I'm alive, that's not fully on the screen. Actually, for this slide, we'll be okay. They're on the left-hand side.

Okay, so, you know, and we've covered this in Chapter 1, basically, the Believer's Law, you know, basically the idea of conduct yourself, how the believer should conduct himself, and His Power is the Gospel of Christ. And Bob did a great job last week on that overview of Chapter 1.

And then So in the last part of chapter two, chapter one rather, it's a believer suffering. His privilege, you know, we talked about the fact that Bob mentioned it too again, we're appointed, we're destined to trials, appointed to trials, and that's a privilege. We're to suffer as Christ suffered. Our participation, the fellowship, we're in this fellowship of suffering.

Pretty amazing, amazing statements by Paul. So now today we get into chapter two, And the first thing we start with is this concept of the believer's unity. And just some really great verses here, we'll see them shortly. The incentive basically is we're gonna see that that's kind of the foundation, the foundation of our being in Christ is our foundation for unity, because every believer, whether he realizes it or not, is in a living union with the Savior, with the Lord Jesus Christ. So that's where he starts. And so the command is one of, well, since you're in this living union with the Savior, then you ought to be of one mind. You ought to think the same thing.

And Paul's gonna spend a lot of time telling us about that. So we're gonna see that today. And then in the coming weeks, we're gonna talk about humility and some examples. So that's coming down the road here. Okay, I'm hoping that he'll get here because actually my slide has a lot of cool things on the right-hand side. That's the very best part on the right-hand side. Okay, but I can do this. Okay, so here are the verses for today. Two verses. Notice it's one sentence. It's only one sentence, the comma. So they split it at the comma.

So it is, therefore, if there's any encouragement in Christ, if there's any consolation of love, If there is any fellowship of the spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind. And that word mind, we're going to see is a really important word. It's for now. We saw it actually, we covered it actually in Romans. So these are the verses for today. So we're gonna go through, so my next slide, actually, we could actually finish this class with one slide. My next slide, I decided to do a summary of this verse on one slide. So here we go. Okay, the core of the verse, let's go back.

If you look at, it has one sentence in the original, and the center of this is the idea to make my joy complete. So Paul's basically, he's talking about, And he had this expression before, make my joy complete. So what does that mean? He is joyous when other believers are thinking the way he thinks and ultimately thinking the way Christ thinks. That's kind of the bottom line. That's what it's about.

So the main part of this verse is make my joy complete. Or actually in the original, I flipped it around because make my is a verb. It's actually you make my joy complete. So anyway, so here we go. So the center part of the verse is you make my joy complete.

So the way that's possible is only because of the following. based on our unity with Christ. And that's actually, verse one is kind of like a resume, if you will. That's a believer's resume. That's why he can make his joy complete. So Paul delineates that first. He says, and we have the following from verse one.

We have the encouragement of Christ. Every single believer, whether he realizes it or not, has the encouragement of Christ. Every single believer has a consolation of love, He has the fellowship of the Spirit, and he has the affection and compassion. That's a term that I love in the King James, the vows of mercy. Sometimes the King James, you just can't get away from it. That's just a beautiful vows of mercy. Okay, so that's our resume. That's who we are in Christ. So based upon that, he says, make my joy complete based upon these four things.

Then he says, then there's a purpose word or a purpose statement, it's by or that, in the Greek, by, you think, you think the same thing, you think the same thing. So he says, that will, and he's gonna explain what he means, you think the same thing, okay?

And this word think, is to fix your mind upon, and it's this word we're going to see when we get into the text. It's this word freneo, which we saw in Romans 8, 5. Set your mind is another translation. Actually, our translation, we have mind rather than think. But to me, using the word think or thinking actually brings it to, makes it easier to grasp.

So he says, you make my joy complete. for the purpose that you think the same thing, and here are the modifiers of that. Having the same love as joined in one's soul. Thinking one and the same thing. And this is kind of interesting. The thinking you think is a verb, and thinking down there in the last part, thinking one and the same, is participle, but it's the same core words for now. So he says that the way we think the same thing is, we have the same love, we have Christ's love, we're joined in one soul, we're the body of Christ, if you will, and we think one and the same. So, and I thought this is a really cool thing to ponder.

The reason that we have unity in the body of Christ is because we are thinking, ultimately we're thinking what God is thinking. We're thinking what our Savior's thinking. There's a verse that we're gonna see here shortly that says that explicitly, but that's the cool part. Believers have fellowship by thinking the same thing. So that's why knowing God's word, which is the source of our thinking, why it's so critical.

A couple of comments from a colleague. True unity of belief true unity is unity of belief or thought. Think about that. The world has the idea, well, we're in unity because we're all, we're an ethnic group, we're whatever, we all like cotton candy or whatever it might be, some kind of crazy thing. But the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ has unity because he thinks.

We're thinking the same thing, we're thinking what our Savior is thinking, ultimately. And then the last thing here, one more comment here is that if you look at it, it's kind of like a sandwich or a package. You think the same thing, and at the end, thinking one of the same. His argument begins and ends with the same thought. So that's actually, I can stop right here. We're done. That's why I say, if we got into a crunch, I can say, this is it. We're finished for today.

But anyway, any thoughts about this? We're going to jump in. I'm going to go through each one of the things we have in our union with the Savior. On the other side, I'm going to go through each one of these, having the same love joined in the soul, and so on. Any initial thoughts here?

Yeah, Roger. Consolation of love. I mean, we always look at the term consolation as maybe less than optimal, but still good, right? Oh, absolutely. So kind of the silver lining kind of comes up. We're going to see that. That's coming up right now. We're going to go through each of those those aspects of our union with Christ. Now, that's good. Thanks, Bob. OK, so we're going to we're just going to move ahead here and we're going to go through the verse one and starting in verse one. So it has there's four statements in here and we're just going to go through each one of those.

So it starts off with therefore, So you could translate that, certainly, now, then. It could be translated that way. So the first one, and so here's just, you know, there's, in the Greek, there's called conditional sentences. And so there's kind of a, if you listen to different people, I like to bring them across as, you're assuming that something is true. You can put sense in there. Some people are frowned at that.

Actually, I noticed Weiss will many times, he will do in view of the fact, for a conditional sentence that's assumed to be true, he will do in view of the fact. But then, like with this verse, if you look on the Weiss, he'll do in view of the fact, that there's encouragement in Christ, they don't come back and do sins in the following ones.

So I'm not gonna, you know, I don't know enough to really make a huge argument about this, but what the assumption is, this is a true statement, true statement about the believer. So it's assumed to be true that there's encouragement in Christ. It's assumed to be true that there's a consolation of love, that there's fellowship of the spirit, and there's affection and compassion.

So we have those four statements that are truthful statements about the believer. And any kind of that pronoun, it has the idea of certainty, a certain thing according to Weiss. So it kind of struck me, so it occurred to me, we like have a double emphasis on the certainty. We have a statement, an if statement that's assumed to be true, and then we have an any that's, even more certainty. So we have a double emphasis on the certainty of these four aspects of the believer.

And then one more thing with the construction here of the sentence, of this part of the sentence, is that the translators, in ASV, they've done there is. That's actually supplied. It's not there. But what's interesting is, and Casa points it out, that the NIV, which I don't use very often, it has, you have, And boy, I kind of like that because of the certainty of these statements.

So you could say, you have encouragement in Christ. There's no doubt about that. You have consolation of love. You have fellowship of the Spirit. You have affection and compassion. So that just really kind of tied that whole thing together. This is something that we have. It's not uncertainty. It's a statement of what we have. And Paul's going to use that as his launching pad, if you will, for saying, this is why we should have, we should be thinking the same thing because of these things. So now let's just look here at, go through each of these aspects.

Encouragement in Christ. Encouragement is a compound word for awe. Mythos, counsel, or advice. So the idea is exhortation, admonition, and encouragement. And in studying this, some people kind of thought that word has both the idea of exhortation and encouragement. Some kind of went off on the exhortation path, some went off on the encouragement path.

But we just kind of did both together. So I said, let's go with that. So I chose that path. So here's like a parallel verse, very parallel to what we're studying here. Now, may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement granted you to be of the same mind as Fresnel again, with one another according to Christ Jesus. So thinking is important. Christianity is a thinking person's religion. What do you think? That's Paul that says it over and over again. So we need to keep that in mind. Anyway, so Weiss has this, I like this statement by Weiss.

He says, Christ's wonderful life should be an admonition, exhortation, and encouragement to the Philippians to live in a state of harmony among themselves. And then it occurred to me that every believer, since he has the very life of Christ, That should make a difference in how we treat one another. But we know from our Romans encounter, Romans 6, 7, and 8, that we have this battle within ourselves. So even though we have the very life of Christ, we still have the Adamic nature. And so even though we should do this, sometimes we don't. But that's why Paul is going to give them this encouragement, this strong encouragement. So I'm just gonna kind of keep going here, guys, sorry.

So the second one is the idea of consolation of love, of God's love. The idea of comfort, tender, cheer. It's a word which comes, the idea of come to the side, it actually has the idea of like we think about the Holy Spirit, it comes from that word, I think. A word which comes to the side of one to stimulate, to comfort, with the element of tenderness. And the Weiss translation of this is, since there is a certain tender persuasion that comes from divine love. And this verse kind of occurred to me. We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us. We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

So I'm going to move kind of quickly here. Next if, fellowship in the spirit, kononia. I didn't do too much on this. And so this is pretty familiar term. A sharing in common. And here's a verse that kind of speaks to that, kind of shows the Trinity here, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit being with you all. Fellowship is an aspect that we have, really focuses on the Holy Spirit. And then here comes our, there's a couple of words here they use together.

Infection or bowels, splanchnine. The word even sounds kind of bowel-ish. Maybe that's just me. The ancients here, that's where it was happening as far as they were concerned. We would say, I have a bowel feeling for you, which sounds kind of gross today, but we would say tender heartedness for you. Then the other word that goes with that is compassion, pity, compassion, mercy of the believer, to show compassion for one another. And here's a verse that kind of puts them together.

Colossians 3.12, so as those chosen who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart or vows of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Okay, so that was a pretty, quick go through that verse one, but those four things are mentioned as a foundation for the statement he's gonna say at the start of verse two.

So here comes, here we go. Make my joy complete, or I flipped it around kind of. Use understood. You make complete my joy. Make complete is the idea to fill out, complete, accomplish, and it's a command. And actually, Vern Peeterman used to say it's a logical imperative. It makes sense based upon who you are in Christ, which I think is a good idea. It seems to fit here. And actually a couple of translations of the same word. Fill full my joy, fill up and complete my joy. So make complete my joy. Fill it up, bring it to the full.

That was Paul's desire for the Philippians. My joy, kera, joy, delight, comes from the word to rejoice. And we actually, this word has shown up a couple of times earlier, offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all. And 125 said, convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith.

So Paul really, as Merriman, listen Merriman a little bit on this verse, he had great joy in the Philippians. He was very joyful about their support for him. You think about it, he was in prison, so it was a real source of joy for him. And so next we're going to see He's gonna talk about how is Paul's, how did Paul want his joy to be complete? What brought completion to his joy? We've already kind of been on that path, but we're gonna get the details out. Okay. By being of the same mind.

So this is a word I mentioned earlier, hinah. It's a purpose word, for a purpose that. And same here is the idea of the same as opposed to different. And here's a verse we're gonna see down the road. Finally, my brethren, rejoicing the Lord to write the same thing again is no trouble for me.

And then here we have our word mind. This is the word for, oh, this is what I mentioned before, being of the same mind. And it's a thinking word to be minded in a certain way. And literally, it's the idea to think, and this is present tense, it's continuous action, and this is a verb. So we're gonna see the rest of this sentence is gonna modify this verb. This is the main verb in this part of the sentence. To be of the same mind or to think the same way. So a couple of amplifications. This is from Merriman.

The idea is to think, to fix your mind upon, to think with interest and reflection. So if you think about this, consider this, that's what we're about when we spend time in God's word. That's what we think about, we reflect upon, we focus upon what he's saying.

So Paul is putting the stress on the mental dynamics And so this is, I thought this was an interesting thought. So Paul, you know, this is just, this will bring him great joy. Paul has something in his mind he wants to be in their minds, a brethren. And you think, the first thought is, well, that sounds kind of arrogant. You have something in your mind that I want to be, you know, here's Paul, I want something that's in my mind to be in your mind.

Well, it would be arrogant if it was just the things of the world, but this is the things of Christ, right? So he wants, the things of Christ that he understands to be in their minds. And that will make his joy complete. Kind of interesting thought, sir.

Okay, so now, okay, so that sets the stage. By being of the same mind, or basically thinking the same, fixing your mind upon, now he's gonna have three aspects of that that are gonna amplify that point. So the first one, Paul will now tell us how we are to think the same thing.

This is more of the details. And actually, this is going to extend, looking ahead a little bit, verses three and four are going to amplify this even a bit more. We want the first two or three, depending on how you count these. And then next week we're going to see, not next week, the following week after Resurrection Sunday, we're going to see a couple more that come in verses three and four. So here's the first one.

By maintaining or having the same love. So he says, you will help your thing. What did I say here? The love of Christ has the objective, as the objective would be to focus on the same love. We're to focus on Christ's love, that's our focus. Maintaining the same love, Christ's love. So it occurred to me that we have first the thinking, first the same thinking, then the same love. Second, we have united in spirit, fellow soul spirit or fellow soul minded. It's like together type souls. So we have the same love, we're united in spirit, together type souls. And Zodiaty had a comment here, joined together in soul or sentiment. Unanimous, it signifies a community of life and love.

So the third one, and there's a little bit of discussion I found between, is the third one that stands alone by itself, or is it one that connects with number two here? So it seems to connect with two, so we'll see. See what you think here. So we've got the first and the second, maintaining the same love, united in spirit. The third one is intent on one purpose.

And what's kind of hidden here, with that translation, you can't see this minded or thinkingness. It doesn't pop out as easily. So one is the word hes, one the same, that's kind of emphatic, one. And I thought, this is just a tremendous verse here. If you take that definition of hes, and you think about this verse right here, Galatians 3.28, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there's neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ. So I take that definition, we are one and the same in Christ. Boy, it's just so beautiful.

We are one and the same in Christ. There's no distinction. Every believer is one in the same in Christ. We can't make a distinction. We can't say, well, I'm this, I'm that. I have this background, that background. No, there's nothing like that. We're one in the same in Christ. It's just beautiful. And then here's our word.

So they translated it purpose, intent on one purpose. And it's to be minded, it's literally thinking. That's why I didn't, earlier I translated thinking. And it's a participle here with the same core for now. So the interlinear has it thinking the one thing. That's why I was saying, you know, the verb at the top was you think, and then it's modified by thinking the one thing. You think, thinking the one thing.

Seems redundant, but. So you could say, so here I'm going to combine two and three together. This is from Merriman. Together type souls, that's what we have, that united in spirit. Together type souls, thinking we want them the same. Boy, that just was so, seemed to just speak so well to what a body of believers should be about. Together type souls, thinking the one thing.

Okay, so this is coming to you. So actually, I put in here at the end, Weiss had a delineation of this too, and he separated the last two, but let's just go through it really quick, then I have my one last verse for you here. And then we have time for a few questions, I think, at the end. Okay, so this is Weiss. So he's doing King James, be like-minded.

So you're gonna see the same core words here, literally, thinking the same thing, referring to the general concord that should exist among them, the brethren. This is defined and shown to be in three constituent elements. Having the same love, unity of affection, being of one accord, literally soul with soul, unity of sentiment. And third, one mind, literally thinking the one thing. So he has all the same core words, but I think Boy, combining two and three just really spoke to me. The last expression he says, being repetitious in stronger terms.

So just a few of my thoughts here. Boy, we have a parallel verse coming up in probably, you know, three weeks now. The parallel verse is, and this is from the Interlinear, let this thinking, for now, and its continuous, its present tense, be continually in you which was also in Christ Jesus.

Boy, just an incredible thing. We're thinking, we're thinking, you know, it says we have the mind of Christ. We're thinking what our Savior thought. I mean, it just, it kind of, you think that's impossible. How can I, as a creature, be doing that? But he says, let us, that's an encouragement by Paul. Let us, let this thinking be continuing in you that was also in Christ Jesus. Pretty amazing stuff. Okay. I got through it in time. Okay. Do we have time for questions or thoughts? Maybe I went too fast or anything. I thought it was really cool. Some cool thoughts. Say, Roger? Sure, go ahead.

I noticed when I was looking at that this week, that verse 1, talks about our position in Christ. I like that. And all four of those things we have, no matter what we do. Exactly. We are in Christ. But then I wrote this down. Those four ifs are true of every believer positionally, but not necessarily in our experience. Okay. And so verse two, tells us verse one is true, now verse two, we need to start acting like that.

Good. No, I like that. Excellent, Bob. Excellent. I didn't mention position there, but I agree with you. I think that's exactly, and it takes a while, you know, when they start off with the if statements, you think if-ish, right? It's a maybe. Well, no, it's not maybe. I can't remember all the Greek texts. When I took Greek in college, I was terrible at it, because I didn't know my grammar. But the tense is there. It's not if. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But if it is actually true, that's the tense that's used there. Right. That's good. Excellent, thank you.

Other thoughts? Roger? Yeah, go ahead, Roy. Just a thought, in the margin here, there are some nice cross-references, you know? Okay. And on that one area that we just covered, cross-references to Chapter 4, Shannon talked about the two ladies. Yes, yes. In Chapter 4, you have the key of one mind. in this parallel way, to put aside your own personal interests, like Christ did, and like each of us should be in that nature, having that nature, we should look at each other in the same way, for the benefit of each other, rather than the benefit of ourselves.

Any thoughts out there in Zoom land? I had a thought, Roger. Go ahead. I think it's cool. how having, you know, we're having the same thoughts, we're having the same love, and yet God can use that in a way where he ministers to the rest of the body as we have these thoughts of love. And I've seen it in two ways.

One, when I was growing up in Sterling, the church there, You know, it's common in farming communities that people come together and they see different needs and everybody tries to be aware of what's going on in another person's life. But as a child, I would watch how Violet Lindstrom would do a certain thing for somebody and Ruth Lynch would do another thing and it was so cool because it wasn't one person having to minister to all the needs of the body.

It was the spirit would move that woman to do that or that man to go and help with that physical need. And the second place that I've seen that is during this five-year, almost five years now, of challenge. How God has moved different people to encourage us in different ways, with cards. Sometimes people would bring stuff by. Sometimes someone would help us with what we needed, some yard work needed to be done. And It's that concrete action of people being sensitive to what the Spirit says, this is something you need to go do, and they do it.

And that card that showed up in the mail would encourage me. Or Jim's burden would be lessened when Isaiah came and did certain things, or Cateman came over and did certain things, or Phil came over and did certain things. And I love that about the body of Christ, that there are many being Jesus' hands and feet, reaching out and helping others.

So, sorry, that was a little long, but... Sorry, I said you were getting on, and I wasn't listening. I knew your voice after you started talking more. I apologize. Oh, that's okay. I have a little bit of a... I don't know, I think it's allergies, sinus drainage, and so it sounds funny. No, that's great. Well, thanks for sharing that. I think that's very, very appropriate. Thanks so much. Yeah, and we've learned a lot, too, being with you through these years, too. Yeah.

Okay, well, I think we should close, probably. Okay, well, thanks for all the comments, and if you want to come, if you want to stay home and help your wife, I'm talking to the guys here. If it's a big day and a lot's going on, wife really appreciates it, do that. If you don't have that responsibility, please come and join Mike in his class.

Okay, so let's close in prayer. We thank you, Father. We thank you so much for today, Lord. We thank you for the blessings we have, knowing that we are your child, that you desire that we think like you think. Wow, pretty amazing. We thank you for that closeness that you desire in your children. We thank you for these verses today. In Christ's name, Amen.