For Starters

I’ve shared this with you before, but I think it bears repeating. For grandparent’s generation had one primary goal for their children. If you asked them what they most wanted for their children, they would have told you that they wanted them to have a better life than they did. That showed in the work ethic they instilled in their children. It showed in their push for education. It wasn’t always for a college education, but they wanted their children to have more education that they had. And the reason they wanted their children to get that education was so that they could get a good job. A job that would provide for a family and could earn a decent living. The bottom line was, “I want my kids to have a better life than I did.” Does that sound familiar? But things changed with my parent’s generation. Their goals for their kids changed. By and large, boomers did have it better than their parents. They had better education. They had better jobs. They had more money. But that still wasn’t enough. Whether consciously or not, they saw that even though they had those things, they still weren’t happy and content. They weren’t fulfilled. So that led them to have different goals for their children. Education was still a priority. But the goal of education had changed. Instead of getting an education so you could get a good job, you needed to get an education so that you could discover yourself. So that you could figure out what made you really happy. It was no longer the goal to find a good career somewhere and stay there till retirement. No, now the goal is to find somewhere that you will feel fulfilled. The bottom line is, instead of wanting your kids to have a better life than you did, the primary goal of parents for the past couple of generations has been for them to be happy. Go to school to figure out who you really are. Get a job that makes you happy. Get in relationships that build you up and make you happy. Everything is centered on self-gratification. But have you noticed what’s happened? Has all of that pursuit of happiness made people any happier? Judging by all the commercials for antidepressants on TV, I would say that people today are far less happy. So why is that? Why is it that the very thing we have raised our kids and grandkids to chase after… why can most people not find it? I think that Paul found the answer to that question in a Roman prison. And under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he shared that answer with us in this letter he wrote to the church at Philippi. We’re going to spend the next several Sunday nights looking through this book. It’s only four chapters, but it is filled with some of the richest teaching of the whole Bible. It’s not an overly doctrinal book, but it does have one of the greatest doctrinal statements of the deity of Christ in all the Bible. I have wanted to do this study ever since I came here to Brushfork, but for some reason just wasn’t able to. I believe that means that we weren’t ready for it yet. But now we are. I don’t have any idea how long it’s going to take us to finish, but I do know that we’ll be blessed by the journey. For tonight, all that we’re going to get to is the first two verses. These first two verses are really the