It's the first weekend of a new year. But we are not here to discuss a calendar change; we are here to discuss a trajectory change.

 

You do not need another list of tasks to perform. You do not need more pressure to "do better" or "try harder." If willpower were enough, you would have already arrived at your destination.

What you need is not a new to-do list. You need a new place to stand. And that is my title for my talk today.

If you build your life on the shifting sands of your own performance, your own resume, or your own emotional stability, you will eventually collapse. The storms always come. Today, I want to offer you a foundation that cannot be shaken. I want to offer you a blueprint for a psychological and spiritual fortress.

It is found in a single, ancient sentence written by a man who was intimately acquainted with trauma, violence, and redemption.

"Therefore, my beloved and longed-for brothers and sisters, my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, beloved." (Philippians 4:1)

At first glance, this sounds like a sentimental greeting card. It is not. It is a battle cry. It is the architecture of a mind that has been completely reconstructed by grace. To understand how you can build this kind of indestructible mental and emotional health this year, we must analyze this verse in three distinct elements:

AGENT: We will look at the FTP who is writing these words. I'll come back to what I mean by that.

REVOLUTION: Something dramatic—revolutionary—has happened to the person writing these words. Because when you understand you will realize why these words are so mind-blowingly remarkable.

INTERVENTION: How it happened, which is the Paradigm No One Saw Coming.

This is the key. It is the secret to why so many of us are exhausted, and it is the unexpected solution—the "scandal"—that changes everything.

The Agent
Look at the biography of the man writing this letter. Before he was Paul, he was Saul. And Saul was not a champion of grace; he was a champion of coercion.

He was a religious extremist who believed that the best way to serve God was to destroy those who disagreed with him.

He did not value human dignity; he valued theological correctness.
He presided over the execution of Stephen, the church's first martyr.
He hunted Christian families.
He dragged men and women to prison.
He was judgmental, violent, repressive, and vehemently anti-Christian.

In one of this trials, he said:
"I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And I did so in Jerusalem. I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them. And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme, and in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities." (Acts 26:9-11, ESV)

Paul's "Past Self" was a nightmare. He was a man whose heart was a fortress of stone, incapable of the tenderness we see in this verse.

 

So, when a man like that looks at a group of Christian people and calls them my beloved, and my "joy and crown," you have to ask: How? How does a heart that hard become a heart that soft? How does an executioner become a tender hearted friend?

Lean in, because if God can change Paul, he can change anybody.

But Paul isn't the only Formerly Troubled Person in this story. Look at the people he is writing to—his friends in a city called Philippi, a city of the Roman Empire.

We tend to romanticize the Roman Empire with white marble statues and movies about gladiators. But the reality is that Roman culture was a meat grinder for the human soul. It was a culture designed to manufacture trauma.

It was built on slavery: Human beings were tools to be used and discarded.

It was built on exploitation: Sexual morality was nonexistent; the weak were prey for the strong. There is no such thing as consent or age of consent. It wasn't even a concept.

It was addicted to violence: The "entertainment" of the day involved watching human beings butchered in the Colosseum.

It was crushed by poverty: The vast majority lived on the razor's edge of starvation.

This was a dysfunctional, addictive, brutal world where human dignity was not a concept.

If you lived in the Roman Empire, you were likely carrying deep, unhealed wounds. You were an traumatized person... even if you were in the patrician upper classes and had everything money could buy.

So it was for these friends in Philippi. Trauma, abuse, humiliation, indignity was simply a fact of life, and something they had to deal with every single day.

For Paul, his traumas were hyper-religious.
For the Philippians, they were hyper-decadent.

And this is where we pivot to this room. This is where we pivot to you and to me.

We don't live in first-century Rome.
We're no religious executioners.
But still, we all have our scars.

If you are honest—radically honest—you are an FTP. You are a Formerly Troubled Person, or perhaps, a Currently Troubled Person.

We all carry the scars of a "Past Self." We all navigate a modern culture that, while different from Rome, is still designed to damage the soul. We live in a world of comparison, of transactional relationships, of anxiety, and of pressure to perform.

Yes, there is a lot of good. Yes there is a lot of blessing and beauty.

But none of that changes the reality that this fallen world is a morally broken pain machine, and you're stuck dealing with it.

At its core, every mental health struggle, every emotional breakdown, and every spiritual crisis is a breakdown in one main thing:

 

It is a breakdown in love for your neighbor—viewing them as competition rather than community, annoyance rather than sacred beings in the image of God.

It is a breakdown in love for yourself—swinging between narcissism and self-loathing.

But most of all, it is a breakdown in love for God.

The ultimate dysfunction is feeling unloved by God.

It is the fear that if God truly knew you, He would reject you. It is the belief that you are an employee of a religion, not a child of the King.

Paul knew that dysfunction. The Philippians knew that dysfunction. And I suspect many here today know that dysfunction.

But look at Paul again. Paul has moved from dysfunction to "Joy." He has moved from a hard edged, heartless threat to a man who calls his friends "Beloved."

Explain that.