I can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be locked up in a jail on death row. Not only wouldn’t I be free to come and go as I please but the certainty of imminent death hanging over my head, augh, can you imagine? Completely trapped, nowhere to go, no future, no hope, just fear and dread. It’s unimaginable. I’ve been reading a letter from a friend of mine, a guy called Paul, who spent quite a bit of time on death row, ultimately they killed him. He wrote this letter, not to me but to some mates of his at a place called Philippi and not this year, it was sometime in the first century AD.

I’ve read his letter so many times; he’s become quite a good friend to me. The crazy thing is that this letter from a dead man walking is so full of hope and joy. I thought we could spend some time, just a bit of time together this week, figuring out what a perfect salve for anyone who has ever felt trapped in a hopeless set of circumstances.

Ever felt all locked up? You know, it’s like being in a prison, there’s something about our circumstances or our situation, it gives us no ‘out’, there’s no hope, there’s no future, its like being on our own personal death row. It’s a funny thing but 95% of stuff in our life can be going just fine and then one thing goes off the rails.

Maybe it’s something in our marriage relationship, maybe it’s a difficult teenager. Maybe we’re just exhausted, or a work relationship or it’s just the drudgery and the grind or some money problems or loneliness or depression or anger or fear. Just one of those things, it’s like it wipes out the other 95% of life that’s going well. It’s like all that stuff that’s going well doesn’t matter, the one that dominates is that one that is dragging us down into the pits, the one that becomes our own personal death row.

I don’t know how it is for you but for me it’s like a dark, impenetrable hole. When you’re in a set of circumstances you can’t change and they’re weighing you down, this hole is an impenetrable blackness. Nobody else can get through, it doesn’t matter what they say, it doesn’t matter what they do, they just can’t penetrate, they can’t connect. No other good circumstance seems to be able to come into that space with me.

Maybe you’ve felt like that, I think I heard a couple of pennies dropping. The question is what do you do? How do you cope? Do you just live in that dark impenetrable hole all the time or is there something to draw on when you’re in that place? We all need hope and I remember a good decade ago now, when I was in the darkest place of my life and everything fell apart, the worst thing was that my hopes and dreams for the future were broken on the floor. You know all that stuff that we look forward to. When we feel we’ve lost it, when all those hopes and dreams are shot, oh man that is such a dark place.

We need a light to burn in that place, we need just a flicker of a candle to shine in the darkness and when we’re in that prison, (you know a prison is big concrete walls and big metal doors with locks on them and guards and towers), when you’re in that prison you can’t change it sometimes. You can’t escape. We can’t always change the circumstances that we find ourselves in. As much as we’d like to fly out of this prison cell, some days you’re in that prison cell buddy, and that’s where you’re staying just for the time being.

So what do we do on the inside? Pardon the pun. Well, my mate Paul, (he was one of Jesus’ Apostles), writes this most amazing letter to his buddies at Philippi. You can read this letter, it’s really quite short, it’s about 3 or 4 pages, you’ll find it in the New Testament part of the Bible, towards the end. It’s called, The Letter to the Philippians from Paul. Good read. Here’s this Paul on death row and he writes a letter of incredible joy and hope and there are four bits that we will unpack over the course of this week that really blow me away.

For a man who is in a dungeon, chained to a Roman guard, waiting to be executed, and execution in those days weren’t all this ‘have a quiet injection and just quietly die in your sleep’. Executions were brutal, any execution is awful but these were brutal executions, if you understand what I’m saying. And my buddy, Paul writes this incredible letter of joy and hope and the four key bits of advice that we’ll unpack during the course of the rest of this week on A Different Perspective is firstly – he starts with a heart of love. He writes to his buddies:

This is my prayer for you guys that your love will overflow more and more as you get to know Jesus better and better. (Philippians 1:9)

Hang on, Paul’s the guy on death row, Paul’s the guy that should need encouraging and he’s writing to these friends saying, ‘Oh Man, I hope God’s love will just overflow as you get to know him more.’ Yep, he has a deep concern for his friends, there’s a love relationship there. He takes the focus off him and puts it onto others. Hmm, we can get terribly self-absorbed and we’ll look at that cost of that self-absorption, if I can call it that, on tomorrow’s program.

The second thing is he comes at it with a heart of humility. The context is there’s a whole bunch of his competitors, or rivals I guess, Paul was a really well-known guy. He went and preached Jesus for over a decade in a whole bunch of different exotic places. And he’s locked up now in a dungeon, he’s no longer in the limelight and there’s a whole bunch of other people out there preaching and digging the knife into Paul a bit.

Of course you and I would never do that but they’re doing that, right? Paul’s in jail and he turns around in the face of that and he says, ‘My buddies in Philippi, don’t do anything out of selfish ambition but consider others being better than yourselves.’ He comes at it with a heart of humility in the middle of these circumstances.

The third one is he has a heart of rejoicing. He says, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I tell you – rejoice.’ Now that is bizarre and he says, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Be gentle, Jesus is in this place.’ Can you imagine being on death row and writing, ‘Hey friends, rejoice, be glad. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice.’ So in the middle of these dark circumstances, this relationship he has with Jesus, he found enough in that to rejoice.

And the last one of the four points in this letter, there are a few more but these were the ones that really jumped out at me, is he had a real heart of contentment. He said:

I have learnt to be content with whatever I have, wherever I am. I know what it’s like to have not much and I know what it’s like to have plenty. I’ve learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry. He said, ‘Look, I can do anything in Jesus who strengthens me.’ (Philippians 4:11-13)

Now I have to tell you, going hungry is not really high on my list of things I want to do, I know there are plenty of people in this world that do go hungry but we men, in particular, don’t focus very well, at all on anything when there’s a rumbling in our tummy. And yet Paul has said, ‘You know, it doesn’t really matter if I’ve got a little or a lot, I’ve been in both places and well, you know, if I’m not getting enough food or if I am getting enough food, it doesn’t really matter. I have learnt to be content because I can do all things in this Jesus who strengthens me.’

Here is this man on death row and he’s talking about love and humility and rejoicing and contentment, which we’ll unpack through the remainder of this week on the program. If you miss any of those you can listen to the programs online at our website. I will tell you later on how to do that.

I want to encourage you in your prison and your death row the things that are eating away at your life at the moment, what are they? Put a name to them, confront them, look at them and say, ‘That is exactly my prison, that is exactly my death row’.

It is time for a radical change of focus to something that actually works. So stick with us over the next week as we explore that dark place from A Different Perspective.

We all have times in our lives when we feel like we’re in our own personal solitary confinement cell. Something’s getting us down, doesn’t matter what or how or how big or how small it is … something, and it’s like a prison. One of the things that we can feel in that little cell is, well, it’s not fair, why me? I mean look at her she doesn’t have this problem, look at him he’s doing just fine, but me, me, my life is a mess, we love to compare, don’t we?

It’s like we have a scorecard on life, his is at an 8, hers is at a 7 ½ and mine, mine’s a 2 at best. Let me get right in your face here, that scorecard has a name and it’s called pride. And pride is like the reinforcement in the concrete of our prison cell, pride just makes things worse. Whatever the issues are in your life or mine pride is like a hardening of the arteries; eventually you have a heart attack.

We’re talking about a letter that my mate Paul wrote, it was written in the first century AD. And the reason I call Paul my buddy is because I’ve read his stuff over and over again, and I really relate to the guy. And this letter we’re looking at is a letter he wrote to his friends at a place called Philippi, now Paul wrote this while he was on death row in Rome. He was political prisoner; he was there because of his faith. I mean he was a really well know guy, he’s spent a decade across Asia Minor preaching and planting churches.

This guy has made it, he’s had huge rallies, he’s planted all these churches, he’s got all these friends, he is on the map, he’s a celebrity. But now he’s in a dark, dark prison cell on death row. And there are some other guys out there preaching, well they’re getting stuck into Paul. Listen to what he has to say about it, I’m reading this from his letter to the church at Philippi. He says:

I want you to know friends, that what’s happened to me, well, it’s actually helped spread the gospel so that its become known through the whole Imperial Guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is because of my faith in Jesus. And most of my brothers and sisters here have been made confident in God by my imprisonment and they’re daring to speak out the word with much greater boldness and without fear.

Some of them, well, some of them proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will, these proclaim Christ out of love knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel of Jesus. The others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition not sincerely but intending to increase my suffering in my imprisonment. Oh what does it matter, just this, that Christ is being proclaimed in every way whether out of false motives or true, and in that I rejoice. (Philippians 1: 12-18)

Isn’t that amazing, here’s this guy on death row and he doesn’t compare, no Paul doesn’t want to do that. He could have been in that dungeon consumed with envy. “It’s not fair, why me, I’m in here, they’re out there, they’re getting all the limelight, and to make things worse they’re doing it just to upset me.” Comparison and pride, would they have made things better or worse for Paul?

If he’d been sitting in there with his pride comparing his situation to the situation of those people out there it would have seemed so unfair, wouldn’t it? And quite clearly that comparison and pride would have made things much worse for him. Would’ve ruined his day, would’ve ruined his life, wouldn’t it? Would have eaten away at him in that dark cell. He could’ve become bitter and twisted.

So let me get back in your face again and ask you, its obvious isn’t it that it’s a dumb thing to do, comparison and pride? So why do we do that? What is it about ourselves that we look at our situation and the situations of other people and we have to compare, and we have to complain and we have to say, “Oh its just not fair, it’s not fair that I’ve got a husband like this, it’s not fair that he got promoted over me at work.”

Come on, that stuff is like cancer, it saps the life out of us, it makes life so much worse. The opposite to that is humility. And humility is about not comparing, and humility is about making a decision that sounds something like this, it says, “You know something, no matter what’s going on, I’m just going to enjoy my life. I’m not going to compare my lot with theirs, I’m just going to enjoy.”

Paul goes on to write a little bit more about humility just a few paragraphs later in this letter. You can pick it up in Philippians, Chapter 2 verses 3 to 11. He says this, he says:

Look, don’t do anything out of selfish ambition or conceit but be humble, think of others as better than yourself. Let each of you look not at your own interests but the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus, even though he’s in the form of God he didn’t regard equality with God as something to be exploited but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born as a human being.

Being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a gruesome cross. And because of that God exalted him highly and gave him a name that is above every other name; so that at the name of Jesus every knee would bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue one day will confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2: 3-11)

That loss of Jesus on the cross, you know when they arrested him and they tried him and they, they beat him and they spat on him and they nailed him to a cross and he hung there for hours and died. Isn’t that a big loss? What a loser! That loss is the biggest victory in all history, it turns out. That loss of Jesus is your victory and my victory, as He suffered there for you and me He purchased eternal life.

In our circumstances we might be losing but with our Jesus in our hearts we have a huge, huge, huge win. It’s like a get out of jail free card, our circumstances may well be a prison for us. It may well be that we cannot change that one thing that’s hurting us, but inside that prison cell we can be free as a bird. We can live life to the full no matter what. And when we do that people notice.

Paul goes on to say:

Work out this salvation with fear and trembling because it’s God who’s working in you enabling you to will and to work for His good pleasure. Do everything without murmuring and whinging and arguing so you’ll be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of this crooked and perverse generation in which you shine like stars in the world. (Philippians 2: 13-15)

Pride is one of the hardest things to let go of, are you dealing with that today? “Father I pray for anyone today who is dealing with pride, who’s looking at their circumstances and comparing themselves to someone else, and father we know that pride is hard to let go of. But Father I pray in the name of Jesus that you would place your spirit into the heart of anyone who is struggling with this at the moment and set them free. I pray that is Jesus’ name, Amen.”

You know when Jesus puts His Spirit, His hand on our heart we have a security and a safety and a future and a hope and a joy and a peace no matter what. I’m enjoying my journey. I’m on a road that Jesus has put there just for me. And you’re on a road, you’re on a journey that he’s put there just for you. And even though my journey’s not perfect. You know maybe I’d have some things different on my journey, I wouldn’t have your journey for quids.

I love the journey that He has put me on, and the stupid thing is when we compare our journeys we only look at the bad things in our journey and compare them with the good things of other people’s journeys, don’t we? You think that’s a good idea? Does it make sense?

This Jesus kind of humility helps us to let go of that stuff.

Sometimes in life things aren’t quite right – a situation, a relationship, a job, a feeling, a concern. Something is not quite right and it gets us down. Pretty normal. But the question often is, well is that thing, that something, a thing or something that I can change or is it something that I should just accept? I think we have all heard that prayer, “Dear Lord, give me the peace to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s a good prayer. If we just accept things that we can change, that’s silly, what a waste of a life, but if we spend all our energies trying to change something that we can’t change, that’s silly too. What a waste of effort. Sometimes we need real wisdom to know the difference.

There are a whole bunch of things in life we can change, have a think about them, our own attitude to things. Maybe we’re overweight and we need to eat differently and exercise. Maybe it’s a work/life balance, maybe it’s a career choice, maybe it’s the friends that we choose to hang around with who are getting us down. Maybe it’s how we spend our money, maybe it’s our debt levels.

There are a whole bunch of things in our lives that we can change and sometimes we try to abdicate from those. Sometimes we say, “Well I’m not in control of that, I can’t help how I spend my money. I saw this thing and I just wanted to buy it and now my credit card has got me into debt over my head, it’s not my fault.” Well, we can try to abdicate it but actually in those areas we are responsible.

On the other hand there are a whole bunch of things we can’t change. The past is number one. It doesn’t matter how much we wish we could undo what we did yesterday or the day before or last year, we can’t, the past is the past and I can’t change it and you can’t change it.

Sometimes we have sickness in our own bodies or friends and family and we live in a world where sickness happens and the last time I checked, one out of one of us is going to die unless Jesus comes back first. So sickness happens. Sometimes we wish we could change that other person, that difficult kid or that husband or wife or that person at work or the boss, we wish we could change them.

Get a revelation, we can’t change other people and yet we try and control those areas, we try to change other people, we try to ram things down their throat and that’s disastrous too. It’s just as disastrous as abdicating our responsibilities in the areas that we can change in life, so we do need wisdom – wisdom to approach the things that we don’t like that we can change, and the things that we don’t like that we can’t change, with a ‘right heart’ attitude.

We’re not meant to play the victim and we’re not meant to be a bull at a gate and I think that, that heart attitude that brings wisdom is a heart of contentment.

All this week, on the program, we’ve been looking at a letter from a very good friend of mine. He died a few years back, Paul the apostle, he wrote this letter in the first century AD. I call him a good friend because I’ve read his letters over and over again and the guy just flicks my switch, I just relate to this bloke Paul. Anyway this letter is called the Letter to the Church at Philippi, you can find it in the New Testament in the Bible. And Paul is in prison on death row.

He spent over a decade preaching at big rallies and planting Churches right across Asia Minor. And he finds himself on death row, just in the same way we sometimes, as we’ve been looking this week on the program, find ourselves in our own personal prisons. But we can do some stuff and we saw how he expresses concern for others, he gets the focus off himself, he has humility, he has rejoicing and today we’re going to look at his heart of contentment. If you missed any of those programs, go to our website www.adifferentperspective.org and you can order the CD’s or listen to the programs online.

Now let’s read to see what Paul writes about contentment because, I don’t know for me, for someone to be content on death row is kind of a bit bizarre. He was ultimately killed, he was executed we understand and yet he is sitting on death row expressing his heart of contentment. Let’s see what he writes, if you have a Bible you can grab it now or later, it’s in Philippians, Chapter 4, begins at verse 10. And here’s what he says:

I rejoice in the Lord greatly but now at last you (that is the people he is writing to in Philippi) have revived your concern for me, indeed you were concerned for me the whole time but you didn’t have the opportunity to show it. Not that I am really in need because I’ve learnt to be content with whatever I have. I know what it’s like not to have much and I know what it’s like to have lots, in fact, in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need ’cause you see, I can do anything through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4: 10-13)

Hmm, now here’s Paul writing a letter to his friends and Paul had real needs. He had need of money, of food and clothing because when you’re in jail in the first century it wasn’t a taxpayer funded exercise by and large. If you ate well in jail it’s because you were provided for by your friends and family. If you starved in jail it’s because you weren’t provided for by your friends and family. There were no prison uniforms, your friends and family had to provide you with clothes to wear and when it got cold, don’t imagine that there was double insulated glass in the windows. In the first century, when it got cold, if they didn’t give you blankets, your friends and family, you froze.

So Paul had real needs of money and food and clothing, not to mention moral support and prayer and just the concern of his friends. You know what it’s like when you’re on your own, it helps if other people care about you and there is Paul, no emails, weeks and months and he said, “You know something, I’ve discovered I can be content anywhere. I’m full to overflowing. For me, I have this relationship with Jesus.”

And I know what that’s like because before I had that relationship, my heart was never content. I needed recognition and money and wealth and status and jobs and career and my heart needed filling and it was never content. The things I could change, well I changed those with the wrong motivation, with greed. And the things I couldn’t, they would gnaw away at me like a cancer. I was never satisfied. I was never contented.

Today is a different story. Today I have a deep contentment in my heart, in my life, in my journey, in my family. Things are never perfect in life. There’s always things we’d like to change, some of them we can, some of them we can’t but I am happy with who I am and who I’m not and I am happy with what I have and what I don’t. And that’s not from me, that’s from God, that’s from Jesus. That deep security and contentment comes from him and now I can look at the world from a different perspective.

The things I can change, I look at them with right motives. This Ministry, what we’re doing right now, my motive is to let Jesus change your heart. That’s what it’s all about for me and the things I can’t, I have this gentle peace about. I pray, I leave them with God. There are some people in my life I’d love to see them change, some things in their lives. But I can’t change them so instead of reacting against them, instead of pulling them down and fighting with them and being angry with them like I used to, I just take it to the Lord and have a deep peace about them.

I could never have done that stuff by myself and you know, Paul on death row could never have expressed that sort of contentment by himself. He talked about love and concern for his friends, he talked about humility, he talked about rejoicing, he talked about contentment – on death row.

He had something that a lot of people on this planet don’t. He had a light, a candle burning in his heart, a fire, a flame, it was like a get out of jail free card and that card has a name – Jesus.