Count Others More † Philippians 2:1-4, 14-18 † Sunday, September 27, 2026

Shining in the Dark: What It Means to Love When the World Has Forgotten How

There is a verse tucked inside the Gospel of Matthew that has a way of stopping people cold when they truly hear it. In Matthew 24, Jesus describes the conditions of the last days, and among the familiar signs, wars, earthquakes, famines, he says something that cuts far closer to home than any natural disaster. He says that because lawlessness will increase, the love of many will grow cold.

Read that again slowly. The love of many will grow cold.

Not the love of a few. Not the love of the obviously wicked. The love of many.

When you hold that warning up against the world we are living in right now, it is difficult to argue that we are not watching it unfold in real time. A juror who refused to convict a guilty party is being publicly persecuted while the guilty walks free. In Canada, an elderly woman was euthanized against her will under laws designed for voluntary assisted suicide. In the Netherlands, legislation now permits the euthanizing of children from birth through age twelve, and when the first case was reported, a three-year-old child, the coverage described it with the words: everything went well.

The love of many is growing cold.

This is not meant to be a catalogue of despair. It is meant to be a wake-up call. Because if the love of many is growing cold, then something urgent is being asked of those who follow Jesus Christ. The question is not simply whether we notice the darkness. The question is whether we are willing to be the light.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Philippi from a prison cell, and yet his letter is one of the most joy-filled documents in all of Scripture. In the second chapter, he asks the believers there to consider something before they do anything else. He asks them to think about the encouragement they have found in Christ, the comfort they have received from love, the participation of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and the affection and sympathy they have experienced from one another. He is not asking rhetorical questions. He is building a foundation.

Because here is the truth that is easy to forget: love does not come from willpower. It does not come from trying harder or feeling more. It comes from being filled. It comes from remembering what has already been poured out on your behalf.

When you recall what Christ endured for you, when you sit with the reality of what the cross cost him and what it freely gave you, something happens inside. The motivation to love is not manufactured. It rises up from gratitude. It flows out of a heart that has been genuinely changed by grace.

Isaiah 53 describes a servant who was oppressed and afflicted, and yet did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to slaughter, silent. He did not argue. He did not grumble. He did not demand fairness or threaten those who wronged him. He simply endured, out of love for every person who would ever live.

The first letter of Peter echoes this, describing how he bore sin in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. And then come the words that carry the weight of everything: by his wounds you have been healed.

That is the motivation. That is where love comes from. Not from a feeling we generate on our own, but from a wound that healed us, a death that gave us life, a silence that spoke louder than any argument ever could.

The Apostle Paul goes on in Philippians 2 to describe what this love looks like when it is lived out in the world. He calls believers to do all things without grumbling or questioning. He calls them to be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish, in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation. And then he uses an image that is both simple and striking.

Among whom you shine as lights in the world.

Here is something worth thinking about. Darkness cannot be measured. There is no unit of measurement for the absence of light. But light can be measured precisely. Lumens. Candlepower. Watts. The moment light enters a dark room, the darkness does not negotiate. It simply retreats. It has no choice.

This is what believers are called to be in a world where love is growing cold. Not louder. Not angrier. Not more politically engaged or more culturally savvy. Lighter. Brighter. More distinctively different from the world around them in the ways that actually matter.

To love where love is absent. To tell the truth where truth has been abandoned. To remain faithful where faithfulness has become rare. To be honest in a culture that has made dishonesty a survival strategy. These are not small things. These are the lumens of a life that points toward Christ.

There is a tendency in the church to look at the state of the world and respond with anxiety, or worse, with a kind of spiritual paralysis. The signs are everywhere. Things are getting worse. What can one person, one congregation, one small community of believers possibly do?

But Paul's answer to that question is already written. He says he rejoiced even if he was poured out completely, depleted entirely, so that the faith of those he served might be strengthened. He was not waiting for the world to get better before he gave himself to it. He gave himself to it precisely because it was not better.

And his joy was not diminished by the darkness around him. It was, if anything, clarified by it. Because joy that depends on circumstances is not really joy. Joy that holds fast to the word of life, that keeps its eyes on the day of Christ, that knows the end of the story, that is something the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away.

The love of many is growing cold.

But it does not have to be yours. Turn on the light. Hold fast. Shine.

(Blog content generated by PulpitAI from sermon transcript)