Philippians 1:1 -4:3
(i.e., the entire epistle)
Encouragement. It’s the predominant theme of the apostle Paul’s letter to the congregation in the city of Philippi . Encouragement. I need to be encouraged, and so do you, because every day brings upon us much that can discourage us. It’s not difficult to become frustrated, set back on our heels, and finally disheartened. Everyone needs encouragement.
In the year 64, from a prison in Rome , Paul wrote his warm letter to Philippian church. It’s the warmest letter we have from him. It’s not a systematic treatise (such as the much longer epistle to the five congregations in Rome ) that lays bare the totality of Paul’s understanding of the gospel, progressing from point to point to point. The missive to Philippi is a personal letter, and he wrote it the way you and I write personal letters: we jot down whatever comes to mind, in any order at all, higgledy-piggledy. Higgledy-piggledy letters are always the warmest, aren’t they? Paul had loved these people ever since he established the congregation in Philippi twelve years earlier. The city had originally been named after Philip, father of Alexander the Great. The church there was the first congregation Paul had planted in Europe . Now he’s detected that the people need encouragement, and he’s determined to supply it.
But of course real encouragement can’t be something unsubstantial, such as frothy well-wishing. Real encouragement has to have a foundation. The foundation of their encouragement, Paul insists, is that the Christians of Philippi are God’s commonwealth or God’s colony. “Remember”, he says, “our commonwealth (meaning theirs and his), our citizenship is in heaven, above. We are God’s colony in Philippi .”
It was the custom of Rome to settle outlying areas of the Roman Empire by sending out retired soldiers, with their families, into the territories far from Rome . Since a soldier’s career is never long, these retired soldiers were still moderately young and energetic. They were transplanted in groups of 300. Together with their wives and children they formed a sizeable colony. Regardless of how far from Rome they were settled, they always remembered that they were citizens of Rome . However far from Rome they might have to live, they insisted on wearing Roman dress; they spoke the Roman language; they lived by Roman law and custom. Above all, they were sustained by resources sent from the great city itself. They were Rome ’s colony in an alien environment, and they were never to forget whose they were, therefore who they were, and whom they could count on. “In the same way”, exclaims the apostle, “you Christians in Philippi are God’s colony. Your citizenship lies elsewhere. Remember whose you are. Then you’ll remember who you are. And you’ll remember what resources you can draw on.” This is bedrock. And this is the foundation of his encouragement.
I: — They need encouragement, first of all, in order to be content amidst life’s uncertainties. “I know what it is to have plenty”, he writes, “and I know what it is to have little. I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I can do all things – I have the strength to face all conditions – through him, Jesus Christ, who strengthens me.”
At any time you and I may have to be content with less. We need encouragement to understand and accept this. Canada ’s standard of living peaked in 1972. It has declined every year since then. To be sure, it hasn’t declined dramatically; but it has never re-gained its peak of 1972. Perhaps this point isn’t as telling for me as it is for my children, since they will never know the economic privilege that I have known.
Privilege? I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Far from it. Nonetheless, in terms of what economists call “real wealth”, each generation of Canadians, ever since Confederation in 1867, has been twice as wealthy as the preceding generation. I am twice as wealthy as my parents; they were twice as wealthy as their parents, and so on. But this pattern has ended: the next generation isn’t going to be twice as wealthy as the present generation. The gravy train appears to have congealed.
Young people entering the labour force today aren’t paid a bonus of thousands of dollars to start just because they have a university degree. When Maureen wanted to begin teaching school in 1966 she had to be interviewed. Was the interview rigorous? It lasted twenty seconds. “Sign here” said the Board of Education official as he shoved the contract under her nose.
When I was a young adult it was understood that every self-respecting Canadian was on the road to owning her own home. People who didn’t “own their own home” were thought to be short-sighted or shiftless. Nobody talks this way now, as owning a house becomes increasingly difficult for Canadians.
For decades 20% of Canada ’s Gross Domestic Product came from the sale of non-renewable resources in the ground (such as copper, nickel, oil.) I’m in favour of selling non-renewable resources. Leaving copper or oil in the ground is useless; therefore let’s extract it and sell it. That is, sell it once, since it’s non-renewable. In other words, 20% of the income we all enjoyed we never produced.
Is all of this discouraging? “Listen”, says our friend from of old, “I’ve known economic privilege. I don’t have it now. But neither do I complain about not having it. I am ready for anything through the strength of the One who lives within me”, in J.B. Phillips’ fine translation.
Several years ago I walked into a fellow-minister’s home and found nailed to the wall a line I shall never forget: “The more you have to live for, the less you need to live on.” A huge witness the Christian community can make to the wider society is just this: “There’s more to live for.”
So far in this sermon we’ve talked about scarcity and abundance, the “more” and the “less”, in terms of economics. But we shouldn’t restrict it to economics. There are many matters in life that aren’t matters of economics, yet which still have to do with the “more” or the “less”. I have in mind something as commonplace as friends or acquaintances. Is it better to move in an orbit of many acquaintances, be a hail-fellow-well-met, even the life of the party? Or is it better to have two friends with whom we could entrust anything and who would never fail us or forsake us? The more we have to live for (our Lord, his truth, his kingdom, his promises), the less we need to live on (more-or-less superficial acquaintances who may stimulate us or flatter us but would never go to the floor for us).
We are God’s colony, Paul reminds his readers; our citizenship is in heaven; we live here on earth always remembering whose we are and therefore who we are and what we can count on from the eternal city whose outpost we are.
II: — Paul encourages his readers in Philippi yet again; this time he encourages them to resist mind-pollution, and therefore to resist heart-pollution. “Whatever is true”, he says, “whatever is honourable, just, pure; whatever is lovely and gracious – think about these things. Hold them up.” When he says “Think about these things” he doesn’t mean “Ponder them now and then; reflect on them once in a while; mull them over when nothing else is occupying your mind.”
“Think about these things”: he means “Hold them up; hold them up in your mind; soak your imagination in them. Whatever is true, honourable, just, gracious, lovely: steep yourselves in all this until it’s fixed in your mind and heart and bloodstream.” It so happens that whatever is fixed in mind and heart and bloodstream will effervesce in us for the rest of our lives. When we wake up, when we fall asleep, when our minds are relaxed, unguarded; when we’ve “let down” at the end of the day or haven’t yet “geared up” at the start of the day; when we are all alone by ourselves, when we come to lie week after week as we wait to die; what’s going to flood into our minds and soak our hearts? – precisely what we’ve hung up in our minds for years.
Everyone agrees that reason is part of the definition of the human. In other words, reason is essential to being human. Where we are frequently one-sided, however, is our restricting reason to reasoning. We assume that reasoning is thinking deductively or inductively. One instance of deductive thinking is logic: “All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal.” Inductive thinking is what we do when we experiment scientifically. Having performed many experiments and made many observations, we conclude that water consists of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
The mistake we make is assuming that deductive thinking and inductive thinking are all there is to thinking, all there is to reason. Too frequently we forget that there’s yet another kind of thinking: pictorial thinking, imagistic thinking, everything that fills up our imaginations. At the level of scientific thinking a child opens an encyclopaedia and reads “Horse: an herbivorous quadruped that runs on one toe.” Perfectly true. But at the level of the imagination (where children live) the child thinks “Black Stallion”. And then there swims into the child’s mind a wonderful assortment of images around Black Stallion: adventure, danger, affection, strength, loyalty.
Years later the child, now an adult, hears at one level of reason such expressions as “immigrant”, “New Canadian”, “refugee”. At another level of reason, this time the level of imagination, he’s flooded with – with what? — “DP”? “Hunkie” “Wop?” “Paki?” “Slant-Eye?” All of these images are negative; they foster contempt and hatred; these images are purely destructive.
Let’s be honest: adults, not merely children – we adults live in our imaginations far more than we live in deductive or inductive reasoning. Then what are the images that swim through our heads night and day? What are the images that we foster in each other and nourish in ourselves? Paul knows that we live chiefly in our imaginations. For this reason he urges, “Whatever is true (always a good place to start); whatever is just; whatever is noble, kind, gracious – hold these up. Soak your imagination in them. Because these images are going to effervesce night and day, always bubbling up from your unconscious mind to your conscious, then back down to your unconscious where they shape you when you aren’t even aware of it.” The apostle is profound here: abstract ideas don’t govern our mind; images govern our mind.
Then when we hear the word “true”, what concrete image comes to mind instantly? When I hear the word “godly” the image that comes to me automatically is Ronald Ward and I sitting in his living room. Ronald Ward was professor of New Testament at the University of Toronto (1952-1963), and he was the most transparently godly, unaffectedly godly, believably godly person that I have ever met. I think of the man every day. In his natural, credible, transparent, uncontrived manner he said to me (among many other things), “Victor, if we genuinely fear God, we shall never have to be afraid of him.”
“Whatever is just, whatever is fair – think about it”, says the apostle, “Hold it up in your imagination.” Fair? One day when I was 23 years old I was discussing the World War II with my father. I began to speak disdainfully of German history, German people, German military personnel. My father didn’t rebuke me or argue with me. Instead he told me a story, a story about Winston Churchill. When General Erwin Rommel’s forces were hammering the British Eighth Army in North Africa, hammering the Brits so badly that the Brits were on the point of going under, a British member of parliament rose in the House of Commons and spoke contemptuously of the German general, Rommel. Churchill took it for as long as he could, then he leapt to his feet and shouted, “I will not permit you to speak such villainies about so fine a soldier”. That’s all my father said. He had hung up in my mind, my imagination, a picture I shall never be without. “Whatever is fair.”
Whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is commendable, Paul says, “Think on it”. He means “Catch the vision of it.” Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who survived Ravensbruck, the forced labour camp (death camp too); years afterward Corrie told a story about her sister, Betsie, who didn’t survive. One day the two sisters were unloading boxcars when a guard, angry at the low productivity of Betsie (who was very ill), cut her with his whip. Upon seeing her sister struck and seeing her sister bleed, Corrie was enraged. Betsie put her hand over the wound and cried, “Don’t look at it Corrie; don’t look at it. Look at Jesus.”
“Whatever is….” You fill it in. Think about it. Catch the vision of it. Fill your imagination with it. Because as it is with our imagination, so it is with us.
III: — The last point we’re going to note from Paul’s letter to the Philippian congregation has to do with humility. Whereas the other congregations Paul wrote had horrific problems within them, the congregation in Philippi had no such problems. Paul was always joyful when he had this congregation in mind. He wrote, “Do one thing to make my joy (my joy in you) complete: humble yourselves with the same humility wherewith Christ Jesus humbled himself in order that he might serve. For although he was in the form of God…he chose to take the form of a servant.”
We must be sure to understand what humility is not. Humility isn’t self-belittlement. Self-belittlement is the pathetic overflow of low self-esteem. Jesus didn’t lack self-esteem.
Humility isn’t pretending we lack the gifts we know we have and everyone else knows we have. Such pretending is phoney. Jesus never pretended he wasn’t the world’s sole Saviour and Lord.
Then what is humility? It’s self-forgetfulness; self-forgetfulness in the work Christ has given us to do on behalf of his people. Humility is self-forgetfulness in the service of a purpose bigger and nobler than our ego and its clamouring.
As in any congregation there were tensions in the congregation in Philippi . Luke tells us in Acts that a woman named Lydia belonged to the congregation. Lydia was an extremely wealthy businesswoman. A slave girl belonged as well. In first-century society a slave girl wouldn’t have been regarded as a human being, merely as a useful tool that had to be fed. Lydia and the slave girl would have brought very different social histories to the congregation.
This particular slave girl, we are told, spoke Greek. Another person in the congregation was a Roman jail-keeper, and he spoke Latin. We can feel the tension as these three people sat side-by-side in church and whispered to each other, “There’s much about you I don’t understand. I don’t come from your social set. I don’t live in your financial world. And I have little facility in your language.”
And then there were Euodia and Syntyche, two women who had had a tiff at a church meeting. The tiff had spilled over and now was upsetting more than merely the two of them. Paul urges the two women to “agree in the Lord” – which is to say, he encourages them to humble themselves, forget themselves as once more they are taken up into the kingdom pursuits of Christ’s people.
“Remember”, says the apostle, “We are God’s colony. We belong to a different country and possess a different citizenship. Then let’s be different. Let’s be like our Lord.” Different in what respect? “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”
And what will be the result of such unselfconscious humility? In the first place, our arrogant, obnoxious self-importance will be curbed. In the second place, our fellow-believers will be edified. In the third place – let’s let Paul tell us himself: “You will shine like stars…in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.” It is Christ-modelled, Christ-inspired humility that corrects us, helps the congregation, and scintillates in a world that boasts of its corruption.
Paul wrote his warm letter to the Philippian congregation when he was in prison awaiting execution. He knew he had only weeks to live. Still, he was preoccupied with his friends in Christ, the joy they have brought him (in this one letter Paul speaks of joy more frequently than he does anywhere else), and the encouragement he has wanted to impart to them.
Then may you and I find in the apostle’s word encouragement too, for we need
encouragement to find contentment in our Lord at all times and amidst all circumstances;
encouragement to steep our thinking, our imaginations, in what is true and just and gracious and noble;
encouragement to forget ourselves in humble service on behalf of Christ’s people.
Victor Shepherd
October 2005