The Fellowship of His Sufferings (Phil. 3:7-11)

The point: Rather than merely enduring suffering as part of the 'not yet,' believers are called to see their sufferings through the lens of union with Christ — a deeper and more transforming perspective than mere resignation or fut…

Over twenty years before the sermon, Donnelly looked into the face of a young mother whose Down's syndrome baby had been told by another Christian woman that the child's condition was due to the mother's lack of faith. Donnelly had to help heal the spiritual scars inflicted by this cruel application of the health-and-wealth gospel.

Do we feel guilty because of our suffering?

5:30 - 5:33 Read in full sermon

Driving home: let us look at four ways in which our sufferings are linked with our union with Christ and in the first place they are linked because our sufferings are evidence of our identity in Christ

A pastor's favorite humorous story: a man visits a psychiatrist complaining he can't get along with people, addressing the psychiatrist as 'fat face.' Used to illustrate that some Christians are genuinely offensive and obnoxious without realizing it — in contrast to the genuine world-hatred believers face for Christ's sake.

there between the people of Adam and the people of Christ and it always will be there enmity towards Christ the world hates him and because we are in Christ because we are joined to Christ the enmity directed at him is directed at us also because we are identified with him and we are part of his body and so our sufferings are evidence of our identity with Christ we suffer because we are one with him and are seen to be

14:14 - 14:55 Read in full sermon

The point: If a believer faces no opposition or suffering from the world, they should ask whether the hated Christ is actually visible in them. Worldly popularity may signal compromise rather than blessing.

In Great Britain, every minority and religion receives legal protection from offense, but evangelical Christianity is openly lampooned and mocked. Donnelly calls this a 'venomous, hellish hatred' bubbling beneath the surface of civilized society — evidence of the cosmic enmity of Genesis 3:15.

In my own country of Great Britain, there is a tremendous sensitivity towards minorities. I have no quarrel with that. And people of all sorts of strange, weird views, people of every religion under the sun, they're shown great sensitivity and tolerance. It will soon be a legal offense to hurt their feelings.

17:33 - 17:56 Read in full sermon

The point: If a believer faces no opposition or suffering from the world, they should ask whether the hated Christ is actually visible in them. Worldly popularity may signal compromise rather than blessing.

Donnelly explains that the Greek word translated 'off-scouring' in 1 Corinthians 4:13 referred to the dirt, sweat, and grease scraped from the body in Roman baths — a visceral picture of how the world regards believers.

But there is one exception, and that is evangelical Christianity. And it is lampooned and ridiculed and mocked. And evangelical Christians are a fair game for everybody.

17:56 - 18:09 Read in full sermon

The point: Suffering for Christ is not a mark of shame or spiritual failure but a badge of honor — evidence of identification with a Savior the world hates. It should be embraced with that dignity rather than endured with embarrass…

A lawyer friend and his wife, a total abstainer, attended a non-Christian law firm reception. When the wife took orange juice instead of wine, men at the drinks table began sniggering at her. The Irish husband, seeing this, put down his wine and demanded orange juice, saying 'Give me a glass of orange — and there'll be two for you to laugh at.' Donnelly applies this as a picture of the believer's identification with a mocked Savior.

It's evidence of our identity with Christ. Of our union with Christ. That's why we can rejoice in the fellowship of His sufferings. Because we're in excellent company.

20:08 - 20:22 Read in full sermon

The point: Suffering for Christ is not a mark of shame or spiritual failure but a badge of honor — evidence of identification with a Savior the world hates. It should be embraced with that dignity rather than endured with embarrass…

Paul's five floggings of 39 stripes, three beatings with rods, and one stoning (2 Corinthians 11) are cited as proof that Paul knew suffering for Christ firsthand. His scars were not marks of shame but a badge of honor and evidence of identity with Christ.

For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

20:30 - 20:34 Read in full sermon

The point: Suffering for Christ is not a mark of shame or spiritual failure but a badge of honor — evidence of identification with a Savior the world hates. It should be embraced with that dignity rather than endured with embarrass…

Secret Service agents must be willing to take a bullet for the President. If they survive doing so, the scar is a mark of honor. Donnelly applies this — imperfectly, since Christ is not vulnerable — to ask whether believers are willing to suffer for the reigning King of glory while 'the bullets are flying.'

Suffering for Christ is proof of our identity. As Christians.

20:36 - 20:41 Read in full sermon

Driving home: The basic pattern of our salvation could be described as a downward parabola. Salvation is likeness to Christ.

Salvation follows a downward parabola: Christ descended from heaven, died, rose, and ascended to glory. Believers hooked to Christ's belt must follow the same path — down into suffering and up into glory. This image structures the entire second point and is extended to physical aging as the body's own descent before resurrection.

And my friend was offered a glass of wine, and he took it. His wife asked for orange juice. There wasn't any orange juice easily at hand, but eventually they obtained some and gave it to her. She was the only person in the room not drinking alcohol.

22:24 - 22:38 Read in full sermon

The point: When praying for specific graces — forgiveness, meekness, patience, love, faith — believers should expect God to answer by sending trials that require those graces to be exercised, not by granting them apart from sufferi…

John Calvin, in his Institutes: 'Whoever the Lord has adopted ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil. Beginning with Christ, his firstborn, he follows this plan with all his children.' Used to ground the downward parabola in Reformed theology.

We're at the cocktail party of the world. And they're snickering at our Savior. And they're pointing at our Savior. And they're making fun of him.

23:43 - 23:54 Read in full sermon

The point: When praying for specific graces — forgiveness, meekness, patience, love, faith — believers should expect God to answer by sending trials that require those graces to be exercised, not by granting them apart from sufferi…

A series of brief analogies: pray to be forgiving — God sends people who break your heart; pray to be meek — God sends slaps across the face; pray for patience — God makes you wait; pray to be more loving — God sends an unlovable person; pray for more faith — God knocks away the props. The point: virtues are not learned in an armchair but by being made to exercise them in suffering.

If you don't want him, you don't want me. Because I'm united with him. That's the fellowship of his sufferings. And I would say that man and wife were never closer than when they stood together against the world and shared in the fellowship of suffering together.

24:07 - 24:32 Read in full sermon

The point: Physical aging, weakness, and bodily deterioration should be received not with despair but with gratitude: each step down the parabola is a step closer to resurrection glory. 'The nearer I get to the bottom, the nearer I…

Two women in their early eighties — one a believer, one not — appear identical outwardly: gray hair, difficulty walking, aches and pains. But the unbeliever is aging for hell and destruction, while the Christian is near the bottom of the parabola and is aging toward youth, beauty, splendor, vigor, and everlasting resurrection because she is united to Christ.

And we are his followers. And that is the pattern of our conformity to Christ. Down and up again. That's how we're saved.

28:04 - 28:13 Read in full sermon

Driving home: And the paradox of the gospel is that naked, agonized, suffering, abandoned man hanging on the cross, He was winning. And He was victorious. And that was His greatest, victory. And He achieved that victory through suffer…

Donnelly's favorite image from Scripture: the Messiah sees the serpent, knows he must put his heel on its head to crush it, knows the serpent will bite him intensely, but proceeds anyway. At Calvary, Christ did exactly this — the naked, agonized, abandoned man on the cross was in fact winning his greatest victory through suffering. Extended to believers: we are called to 'serpent trampling' in mortification, church discipline, and evangelism.

You see, you don't become meek by sitting in the study or in an armchair, reading and thinking and praying about it. You become meek by having to be meek. You become meek by being insulted. You become meek by being pushed to the back of the queue.

30:37 - 30:54 Read in full sermon

The point: Church leaders must not tiptoe around scandalous sin, doctrinal error, or disciplinary situations. No matter the cost or opposition, they are called to be 'serpent tramplers' — putting their foot on the serpent even when…

When a great sin or doctrinal error enters a church, the elders' temptation is to tiptoe around it, pretend not to see it, or hope it goes away. Donnelly insists they must put their foot on the serpent no matter what it costs — the only way to serve God is to trample the serpent even when it bites back.

Now, I would have expected Paul to say that I may know him and the fellowship of his sufferings and then after that, the power of his resurrection. But that's not what he says. He says that when you begin to know the power of Christ's resurrection, what's the first thing? The first thing he's going to do in that resurrected life, he's going to lead you into the fellowship of his sufferings so that you may be made more conformable to his death and attain to the resurrection of the dead.

32:27 - 33:00 Read in full sermon

The point: Church leaders must not tiptoe around scandalous sin, doctrinal error, or disciplinary situations. No matter the cost or opposition, they are called to be 'serpent tramplers' — putting their foot on the serpent even when…

Satan leaves a church alone as long as the church does not bother him. The moment a church gets serious about evangelism and taking the gospel into the community, Satan is stirred up and comes against them. The suffering that follows is the serpent biting back because the church's foot is coming down on his head.

The parabola.

33:00 - 33:01 Read in full sermon

The point: Pastors should understand that stomach ulcers, depression, broken hearts, exhaustion, and misunderstanding are not signs of ministerial failure but the actual content of filling up in their bodies the afflictions of Chri…

Donnelly uses Paul's statement about filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ to define pastoral ministry as stomach ulcers, depression, a breaking heart, shot nerves, exhaustion, misunderstanding, and shortened life. 'That's the work. That's the deal.'

And we need to realize that this same pattern is not just worked out in our souls, but is worked out in our physical bodies.

33:31 - 33:41 Read in full sermon

The point: Pastors should understand that stomach ulcers, depression, broken hearts, exhaustion, and misunderstanding are not signs of ministerial failure but the actual content of filling up in their bodies the afflictions of Chri…

Christ speaks to complacent, self-indulgent Christians: 'Hast thou no scar, no hidden scar on foot or side or hand? I hear thee sung as mighty in the land... Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent, leaned on the tree to die... Pierced are the feet that follow me, but thine are whole. Can he have travelled far who has no wound, no scar?' Challenges Christians to expect wounds as the normal marks of following a crucified Master.

You remember how the super-spiritual people in Corinth despised Paul's physical appearance. They said, his bodily presence is weak.

34:03 - 34:10 Read in full sermon

The point: Young people should not be deceived by the world's presentation of Christianity as a soft option. The Christian call is the toughest call on any human life — a call to brave men and women who will fight, suffer, and die …

'Someone once said, when Christ calls a man to follow, he calls him to come and die.' Cited as a challenge to young people not to believe the world's caricature of Christianity as a soft option for wimps and inadequates.

But in 2 Corinthians 13, 4, Paul understands his frailty and his weakness not as a contradiction of his union with Christ, but as proof of his union with Christ. He says, we are weak in him. But we shall live with him, always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. And I would suggest to you, my Christian friends, that this is surely a different and a refreshing way of looking at our aches and pains and wrinkles and gray hair.

34:19 - 34:55 Read in full sermon

The point: Believers can nurture their communion with Christ through suffering itself — recognizing that in shared experience of trial they are drawn into deeper fellowship with the Savior who himself suffered hatred, estrangement,…

Two parallel illustrations of koinonia created by shared suffering: (1) Two war veterans who have never met instantly become best friends when they discover they served together. (2) Two women who have both had bunions removed can talk about it for hours. Both illustrate the instinctive bond linking people who have passed through the same experience — applied to the fellowship believers share with Christ through suffering.

Think about the total, ultimate, everlasting difference. Between those two old people. The old person who's not a Christian is aging for hell and destruction and death. But that older lady, who is a Christian,

35:39 - 36:01 Read in full sermon

The point: Believers can nurture their communion with Christ through suffering itself — recognizing that in shared experience of trial they are drawn into deeper fellowship with the Savior who himself suffered hatred, estrangement,…

Donnelly walks through Psalm 69: 'Those who hate me without a cause' connects to believers hated unjustly; 'I have become a stranger to my brothers' connects to believers estranged from unbelieving families; 'I looked for comforters but I found none' connects to those who have walked through deep loneliness. Suffering opens a window into Christ's own heart and helps believers know their Savior better.

It's the pattern of our conformity to Christ. Our physical weakness is an outward reflection of the parabola of grace in the soul.

36:33 - 36:44 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Not only do our sufferings help us to understand our Savior better, but what is infinitely more significant is that in our sufferings he comes closer to us.

A parent who loves all children equally nonetheless gives special tenderness and intimacy to the sick child on a Sunday evening — staying home with them, reading Bible stories, holding them on their knee. Donnelly applies this to Christ: in our suffering he draws especially close, showing a special and intense compassion beyond his ordinary love for all his children.

His work was to suffer.

37:42 - 37:44 Read in full sermon

Driving home: My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own but I belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

Donnelly highlights the 'surpassingly beautiful' but often overlooked second clause: 'while their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till their resurrection.' He applies this to standing at a believer's grave and saying 'that body, being still united to Christ.' The dust of believers' bodies is dear to Christ because he died for their bodies and will raise them.

You remember the classic picture in Genesis 3.15. He shall bruise your head and you, you shall bruise His heel. That is one of the most significant images for me in my Christian life.

37:58 - 38:13 Read in full sermon

Driving home: My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own but I belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

'My only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own but I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.' Cited as the Reformation's summary of union with Christ as the believer's supreme comfort, tying the entire sermon series together.

You remember the classic picture in Genesis 3.15. He shall bruise your head and you, you shall bruise His heel. That is one of the most significant images for me in my Christian life.

37:58 - 38:13 Read in full sermon