Defiant Joy: A Study On PhilippiansUzorak

DAY 10: THE LEGACY OF DEFIANT JOY

For the last ten days we have studied Paul’s defiant joy. This joy is both our inheritance in Christ and our witness to the coming Kingdom of God. Sometimes we have to fight for it, but it is a treasure worth fighting for, because God created us for joy. 

He created us for more than that, too. 

The Bigger Story

On the first day of this study I mentioned that the church in Philippi was launched with the help of some key women. Today I want to tell you about one of them. 

In Acts 16 we meet Lydia, a successful businesswoman Paul encountered while visiting Philippi. She was a dealer in purple, which was one of the most costly substances in the ancient world. It was shortly after connecting with Paul that Lydia became a believer.

Once Lydia started following Christ, she became a gateway for the gospel to enter Philippi. She welcomed Paul and his co-laborers into her home, and she provided for their ministry. Lydia stewarded her influence for the sake of the gospel.

I have always loved this backstory about the Philippian church, because Lydia was such a faithful, intelligent, and entrepreneurial woman of God. Her life inspires me. I also love this backstory because it offers women, in particular, a very different narrative than we are often given.

Too often we are taught a small, human-centered gospel. Women are pelted with Christian messages about how special we are, how beautiful we are, and how happy Jesus wants us to be. This message is all over the place in books, blogs, and Instagram posts. After a while these messages begin to distort the gospel communicating the idea that Christ died mostly to help us like ourselves. These popular messages are thinly veiled self-help words whose greatest ideal is high self-esteem. “Joy in Christ” is about enjoying the lives we have, and not a whole lot more.

Enter Lydia. For both Lydia and Paul, the joy, hope, and freedom they found in Christ was the starting point, not the goal. It freed them from the captivity of self, and spurred them on to change the world. Their legacy was not “healthy self-esteem,” or even contentment in Christ; their legacy was bigger than that. 

Lydia’s and Paul’s legacy was a life lived radically and ruggedly for Christ with an abundant harvest to show for it. Their legacy was the spread of the gospel and the growth of the church.

This legacy is the natural result of true Christian joy: to spread it. Every now and then we need a reminder that the end point is larger than ourselves. 

God doesn’t give us joy to hoard and keep at home. He wants us to take it to the world.