1. PHILIPPIANS
CHAPTER 3
Verse 10
March 11, 2012
FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI
Announcements!
GOING DEEPER with GOD CONFERENCE
When: Sunday, March 25th and Monday, March 26th
Where: On Sunday, March 25th ALL ADULTS will meet in Fellowship Hall East.
This will take the place of our Sunday School class on March 25 th at 9 am.
Led by: Dr. Greg Frizzell
Greg Frizzell said on page 73 of his book: How to Develop a Powerful Prayer Life “that
in 1981, God led him to begin praying daily through all nine fruit of the Spirit. To this
day, he has never found anything that comes close to the power of daily praying
these character words for his own spiritual growth.”
"Praying For Our Jerusalem" Acts 1:8
Praying For Our Jerusalem is a prayer effort by which we attempt to go into every
home of our church family for the sole purpose of praying with the people in that
home. No gimmicks, no signing up for something, just to pray. Prayer Warriors will visit
up to four homes and pray with our church family from April 1-30.
If you know someone willing to serve as a Prayer Warrior, who will be going into 4
homes during April 1-30 and pray with our church families, please call Trish Jenkins at
(601) 949-1941 or e-mail her at: pjenkins@fbcj.org.
BREATH OF LIFE
What: A Sunday School Class for those with a chronic cough.
When: Sunday, April 15th @ 8 a.m.
Where: At FBCJ in ROOM E423
Thank You for Serving
What: A banquet to honor waiters & waitresses.
When: Monday, April 23rd from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Where: The South, 627 East Silas Brown, Jackson, MS 39201
3. “that I may know Him”:
Personally (intimately)
Powerfully (resurrection)
Passionately (sufferings)!
Philippians 3:10c
“and the fellowship of His sufferings,” Philippians 3:10c
(know Him passionately).
The deepest moments of spiritual fellowship with the living Christ are at times of
intense suffering; suffering drives us to Him.
Thomas à Kempis:
“If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?”
Stefan Salmonsson:
“Self pity comes when you lose the intimacy with Jesus.”
Elisabeth Elliot: Elisabeth Elliot's Website
“Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in
protection from suffering.... The love of God did not protect His own Son....
He will not necessarily protect us either - not from anything it takes to make us like His
Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the
process.”
David Wilkerson: World Challenge, Inc. Online
“Jesus didn't save you so you could cruise to heaven in a luxury liner. He wants you to
be useful in His kingdom! The moment you got saved, He enrolled you in His school -
the school of suffering and affliction.”
Paul Billheimer:
“All born-again people are in training for rulership. Since the supreme law of that
future social order, called the kingdom of God, is agape love, therefore their
apprenticeship and training is for the learning of deep dimensions of this love. But
deep dimensions of this love are only learned in the school of suffering. Purity is one
thing, and maturity is another. The latter comes only through years of suffering. If we
suffer, we shall also reign - because where there is little suffering, there is little love; no
suffering, no love; no love, no rulership.”
2 Timothy 2:12 KJV
“If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him” 2 Timothy 2:12 KJV
4. Lee Strobel:
"The universe is a soul making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing,
and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of
our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity."
Joy is not the absence of suffering.
It is the presence of God.
Joni Eareckson Tada: Joni and Friends
"Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the
wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text.
But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to
suffer alone, but to suffer with Him."
Joni Eareckson Tada: Joni and Friends
“Even though I have rough moments in my wheelchair, for the most part I consider
my paralysis a gift. Just as Jesus exchanged the meaning of the Cross from a symbol
of torture to one of hope and salvation, He gives me the grace to do the same with
my wheelchair. If a cross can become a blessing, so can a wheelchair. The
wheelchair, in a sense, is behind me now. The despair is over. There are now other
crosses to bear, other "wheelchairs" in my life to be exchanged into gifts.”
Rev. John Howe:
"God loves you enough , trusts you enough, to let affliction come into your life to see
whether you will exercise the muscles of faith while your physical muscles begin to
atrophy."
Vance Havner said that we need:
“to comfort the afflicted & to afflict the comfortable.”
Spurgeon:
"There are no crown bearers in heaven that were not cross bearers on earth."
C. S. Lewis:
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in
our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Unknown:
Our problems are opportunities to discover God’s solutions.
Corrie Ten Boom:
“You may never know that Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have.”
5. Sadhu Sundar Singh: Short Biography
“Should pain and suffering, sorrow, and grief, rise up like clouds and overshadow for a
time the Sun of Righteousness and hide Him from your view, do not be dismayed, for
in the end this cloud of woe will descend as showers of blessing on your head, and
the Sun of Righteousness rise upon you to set no more for ever.” Malachi 4:2
C. S. Lewis:
“The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an
illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.”
Oswald Chambers: My Utmost for His Highest
“God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of
the minute.”
Walter A. Maier:
“This is the purpose of pain for the redeemed: it is one of your Father's ways of
speaking to you; it is the evidence of His limitless love, by which He would draw you
farther from evil and closer to Him, the divine remedy which can cure you of pride
and help you lean more trustingly on the Lord.”
Peter Marshall:
“It is a fact of Christian experience that life is a series of troughs and peaks. In His
efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, God relies on the troughs more than the
peaks. And some of his special favourites have gone through longer and deeper
troughs than anyone else.”
Sadhu Sundar Singh:
“During an earthquake it sometimes happens that fresh springs break out in dry
places with water which quickens the land so that plants can grow. In the same way
the shattering experiences of suffering can cause the living water to well up in a
human heart.”
Brother Lawrence:
“The sorest afflictions never appear intolerable, except when we see them in the
wrong light: when we see them in the hand of God, Who dispenses them; when
we know that it is our loving Father Who abases and distresses us; our sufferings will
lose their bitterness and become even a matter of consolation.”
Billy Graham: Billy Graham Organization
“Even if we may not always understand why God allows certain things to happen to
us, we can know He is able to bring good out of evil, and triumph out of suffering.”
Peter Kreeft: Website
“The greatest Christians in history seem to say that their sufferings ended up bringing
them the closest to God - so this is the best thing that could happen, not the worst.”
