Philippians 1:2-3I. Think of the beauty of the circumstance that Paul thanked God for the blessing of kind, loving, helpful men. Man serves God by aiding God's servants. II. The more enlarged and susceptible the heart, the more easily can service be rendered to it. III. Learn how good a thing it is to serve the great, and inferentially how sublime a thing it is to live and die in the service of the Greatest. IV. Each of us should leave a memory that shall be cherished and blessed. V. The Apostle stands forth to us as an illustrious man, while the Philippians are not known to us by more than their general name. The hidden workers are not on that account to deem themselves useless. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 176. Philippians 1:3 The text speaks to us of the feeling which ought to exist between a minister and his congregation, more especially how he ought to be able to speak of them and what he ought to make his special prayer for them whenever, in the providence of God, he is for a time separated from them. I. St. Paul was able to thank God, in his compulsory detention at Rome, for all that he remembered of his beloved Church at Philippi. Whenever he prayed, he was able to make his prayer for them with joy. He could think of them as earnestly and resolutely set upon practising and helping the Gospel; they did not shrink even from suffering for it. If St. Paul had been writing to us, could he have thus expressed himself? Could he have said with regard to the great bulk of our congregations that in their several stations, at their various ages, according to their different gifts and talents, they were truly loving and living the Gospel? II. One thing St. Paul was able to say alike for himself and for them: that there was the strongest possible tie between them of mutual love. Surely, where a minister and his congregation love each other fervently, there must be something of. Christ in that feeling and in that place. St. Paul loved and was loved by these Philippians, and he showed and returned it by his prayers for them. He recognised and valued their affection; he felt that their love for him sprang out of love to Christ and showed itself in an active and diffusive charity. But he knew also that in this world it is not safe to rest on that which is; while we stay here, we must always be moving onwards: and what he desired for them was that their love might abound yet more and more in a deeper knowledge and a more experienced judgment. This great gift of judgment or, more exactly, of perception, comes only from being much with God, from being often in His presence, hidden privily, as the Psalmist expresses it, in His pavilion from the strife of tongues, from the conflicts of selfishness, from the din of earth. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 1. References: Philippians 1:3-5.— J. Edmunds, Sixty Sermons, p. 422. Philippians 1:3-11.— J. J. Goadby, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 152; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 48. Philippians 1:4-5I. Prayer may be varied according to the different spiritual moods of the suppliant. The mood need not impair the sincerity. II. Christianity is the most influential of all heart-uniting forces. Men who are one in Christ are united in the highest ranges of their nature. Paul is in Rome, his friends at Philippi; but in the great heart of the Apostle Rome and Philippi are but different names of the same place. The union of the Church is guaranteed by the principles on which it is founded; the moral is the immortal. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 177. Philippians 1:5I. In the text we see age and youth together. (1) The old will contribute the wisdom of experience; the young will quicken the animation of hope. II. In the text, though age and youth are together, yet age takes precedence of youth. It is Paul and Timotheus, not Timotheus and Paul. III. In the text, though age takes precedence of youth, yet both age and youth are engaged in common service. See how one great relationship determines all minor conditions and attitudes; looked at as before Christ, the one Lord, they were both servants. Parker, City Temple, vol. i., p. 215. Reference: Philippians 1:5.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 216. Philippians 1:6 The Apostle lays down a great principle respecting the Divine method of working, viz., to begin is to finish, and that principle, wide enough to encompass the universe, will also comprehend every detail of Christian service. I. God works by a plan; His plan is to prepare mankind for the final day. II. God is not fickle in the prosecution of His purposes; He begins, not that He may conduct an experiment, but that He may perform a design. III. God has so revealed Himself in the education of the individual and in the training of society as to justify the most emphatic expression of confidence on the part of His Church. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 178. References: Philippians 1:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv., No. 872; Homilist, 3rd scries, vol. ii., p. 149; R. Davey, Christian World Pulpit, vol. x., p. 10; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 213; vol. vii., p. 217; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 108; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 289; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vi., p. 245. Philippians 1:7A Man in Rome carries the Philippian Church in his heart. I. He who carries the world elsewhere than in his heart will soon wish to cast off his burden. II. He who carries the good in his heart will never be desolate. III. He whose heart is engaged with the tender offices of affection is the profoundest interpreter and the most efficient servant of mankind. IV. He who enshrines his benefactors in his heart has broken the dominion of selfishness. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 179. Philippians 1:8 The Tender Heart of Jesus Christ. I. What is a tender heart? What is included in it? What is the chief characteristic of such a heart? A tender heart must always be a sensitive heart; where there is life there is sensitiveness; a tender heart is one ready to receive and retain the very softest impression; a tender heart is one that is endowed with a more than ordinary power to love; it is also a heart that is easily pained. A man of tender heart will be sure to live a life in harmony with it. II. It was absolutely necessary that our Lord Jesus should be characterised by tenderness of heart. He had a nature that assimilated to itself the very griefs and sorrows of others. Christ's heart was intensely sensitive, and therefore subject itself to pain. It was the exquisitely tender nature of Christ that made the thought of being alone an anguish. Christ's heart, being tender, shunned giving pain. A truly tender heart will be agonised at the thought of having perhaps unintentionally wounded another's spirit. Then a tender heart not only is susceptible to pain, and not only shuns giving pain to others, but it will always feel the pangs that others endure. Over and over again this sentence concerning Christ occurs in the New Testament: "moved with compassion." III. The tenderness of Christ's heart was shown by tender actions. The tender-heartedness of Christ comes out in every action; it is not shown merely in what He does: it is heard in what He says, for "out of the abundance of the. heart the mouth speaketh." We have not a High-priest who cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. Let us therefore remember that our Saviour is the tender-hearted Christ, and let us not grieve Him by our sins, but let us reflect to the world the beauty of His love. Archibald Brown, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1099. The Source of Christian Love. We see here— I. The Witness of Paul's tender regard for the Philippians: "God is my Witness." This expression should be reserved for periods of peculiar solemnity. Paul on the verge of martyrdom, not expecting to see these brethren again till he should meet them at the great white throne, takes the name of God, not in vain, but in reverent truth, into his lips, and confirms his testimony by his oath. It is healthful to the soul to be constantly reminded of another onlooker. God is not mocked. To go about the business and intercourse of life under the sense of God's presence would cast out all the malice and envy from the heart, would banish all falsehood from the lips. He requireth truth in the inward parts. As the mists of night are driven away by the rising sun, the face of God chases away malice and envy, so that they cannot harbour in the heart. II. The source of his love for the brethren. He longed after them in the compassion of Jesus Christ. From that fountain his own pity flowed. Partakers of Christ as far as their finite nature will permit, Christians partake also of His affections towards the Church on one side of the world or the other. III. The measure and manner of the Apostle's fond desires after these Philippian Christians: "I long after you all." Probably they were not all alike attractive either in person or character. If he had regarded them from a merely human and earthly view-point, he would have held to some and despised others; but he had risen to heavenly places in Christ, and therefore his tenderness shone on them all. A lamp lighted on the top of a pillar casts light on some objects and a shadow on others, but the sun spreads day over all. The love that is grafted into Christ is universal, like His own. There is no respect of persons with God, and none with the godly, as far as they act in accordance with their character. W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul, p. 112. Philippians 1:9 Hindrances to Spiritual Growth. I. The first and greatest hindrance to our abounding more and more is this: inability to see what it is that we ought to improve, where it is that we are defective, and so long as we are content simply to look at ourselves and our doing by the light of our preconceived ideas it is easy and natural for us to be content with ourselves as we are. Our Divine Master has set before us a perfect example of what we ought to be, and He has promised to give us help and grace to enable us to tread in His steps if only we will try to do so, because, try as we will, the copy will fall very far short of the original. The very first step, then, towards improvement is to study the life of our blessed Lord, to learn the principles by which His life was governed. Here, then, is the highest standard by which to measure ourselves. What is the motive which governs our life? Is it a desire perfectly to fulfil the will of God, or is it self in one of the many forms in which self is manifested? II. There is another point on which we need to examine ourselves: whether we are seeking to abound more and more. Holy Scripture assures us that we are not sufficient of ourselves to obey the precepts laid down by our Lord. It is only through Christ strengthening us that we can keep free from sin. We must fulfil the conditions through which we have the promises of gaining what we need; and the very first condition to which these promises are attached is that we should have faith in what Christ has wrought in our behalf. Faith is at first weak, but by continual exercise it develops and grows until it overshadows our whole existence. The more real and true and sincere our faith is, the greater will be the harvest of good works in which we shall abound more and more; whilst, again, the more faithfully and zealously we bring forth such good works, the brighter and deeper and clearer will be our faith: the one will react upon the other; each will minister to the other's growth. Dean Gregory, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 321. Christian Love Abounding. The reference in our text is not primarily to love towards the Apostle himself, as some have supposed, nor yet love towards God in Christ— although this is the spring from which all true Christian love flows— but to love towards others, especially to them who are of the household of faith. I. Let us consider the characteristics of this Christian love, which has proved in the world and in many a Church and home the mightiest spiritual force on earth. (1) One of the first things which distinguish it from other kinds of love is its absolute unselfishness. Selfishness, whether in the nation or the individual, leads to sin, and is the chief antagonist of the love which seeketh not her own, and doth not behave herself unseemly, which is inculcated in our text. (2) Again, the love spoken of here is opposed to all that is impure and unspiritual. Instead of devoting itself only to those who are attractive or winsome, it goes down to the degraded; it surrounds them with a halo of beauty, as being those for whom Christ Jesus died, and it is not satisfied until it can lift them upward and heavenward, and make them more worthy of being loved than they are. (3) Again, this love is distinctively Christian. It is not ours by nature, for none of us loves the unattractive from instinct; but it is generated in us when the love of Christ is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. It is, in fact, a continual manifestation of Christ's love to the world, which led Him to die for us "while we were yet sinners." II. Consider two or three facts which make it necessary that such love should abound. (1) Such abounding love is necessary if we would do Christian work for others steadfastly and earnestly. (2) Besides being a stimulus to service, abounding love is necessary to us when we have to bear the infirmities of others. A. Rowland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 181. Philippians 1:9I. Here we see, first, what St. Paul takes for granted as the underlying substance, as the raw material, of Divine life in the soul of man. Whenever in his writings knowledge and love are put in competition with each other, the precedence is assigned to love. For, as compared with knowledge, love is intrinsically a stronger thing, and it is worth more practically. To be knit to God by love is better, religiously speaking, than to speculate about Him, however rightly, as an abstract Being. To enwrap other men in the flame of enthusiasm for private or for public virtue is better than to analyse in the solitude of a study rival systems of ethical, or social, or political truth. Each has its place, but love comes first. II. But St. Paul would have this love abound in knowledge. The knowledge of which he is thinking is doubtless primarily religious knowledge. The higher knowledge—ἐπύγνωσις is the word, not mere γνῶσις— is what he prays for as the outgrowth of learning. There is a period in the growth of love when such knowledge is imperatively required. In its earlier stages the loving soul lives only in the light and warmth of its object; it sees him, as it were, in a blaze of glory; it rejoices to be before him, to be beneath him, to be close to him; it asks no questions; it has no heart for scrutiny; it only loves. But, from the nature of the case, this period comes to an end, not because love becomes cold, but because it becomes exacting. If the great Apostle had been among us now, he would not have ceased to offer this prayer. How much love, how much moral power, is wasted among us Englishmen only through ignorance. Look at the jealousy of science among us religious people— I mean jealousy of scientific fact; there are plenty of reasons for keeping clear of mere scientific hypotheses when science is waiting in God's good time to echo the words of religion. Look at the jealousy of beauty, which is lashing the well-meaning fanaticism of the country against disinterested efforts to improve the efficiency and tone of public worship. We need to pray this prayer more heartily than ever: that our love may increase in knowledge. H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 321. References: Philippians 1:9.— Pearson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 317; Homilist, vol. iv., p. 13; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vi., p. 222. Philippians 1:9, Philippians 1:10.— T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. v., p. 208. Philippians 1:9-11 In one word, the Apostle prayed that the Philippians might grow. I. True love is intelligent. We are to love God with all our mind. II. The Apostle prays for an enlargement and quickening of the discriminating faculty: that the Philippians might distinguish between things that differ, and that so distinguishing they might choose the right. III. The Apostle, beginning at the centre, finds his way to the circumference; beginning with the spiritual, he culminates in the practical. The doctrines acknowledged in this prayer are (1) that Christian life is progressive; (2) that God is ready to cooperate with His people for their moral enrichment; (3) that the entire Christian manhood is to bear fruit— being filled. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 181. References: Philippians 1:10.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 206; E. Garbett, Experiences of the Inner Life, p. 159; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. viii., p. 81; J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 129; D. G. Watt, Ibid., vol. xxvi., p. 196; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 31; F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 67. Philippians 1:12-14 Circumstances the most untoward may in reality be advancing the Divine kingdom among men. I. God's providence is not to be interpreted in fragments. II. The moral is higher than the personal; Paul is in prison, but the Gospel is free. III. The bonds of one man may give inspiration to the liberty of another. IV. The spread of the Gospel depends upon no one man. V. Even the afflicted Christian has a mission. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 182. References: Philippians 1:12-20.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 221. Philippians 1:12-26.— J. J. Goadby, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 216. Philippians 1:13, Philippians 1:14.—Clergyman's Magazine, vol. i., p. 216. Philipians Philippians 1:15-18I. Diverse developments of human disposition. II. The possibility of doing a good deed through a bad motive. III. The impossibility of entirely concealing motive. IV. The actions of self-seekers turned into the good man's source of joy. V. Man is never so diabolised as when making a good cause the means of grieving and tormenting the Church. VI. The mere fact that a man preaches Christ is not a proof of his personal salvation. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 182. Reference: Philippians 1:15-18.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 108. Philippians 1:18 Christ Preached in any Way a Cause of Joy. We see here a great law of Christ's providence over His Church. He furthers His own ends, not by affirmations only, but by negations: by faith and by unbelief; by truth and by heresy; by unity and by schism. It is a transcendent and intricate mystery, far beyond our intelligence. All things conspire to His purpose, and His will ruleth over all, not, it may be, to the purpose we imagine for Him, nor to our idea of His will, but to His own not as yet revealed. Would St. Paul have rejoiced, had he lived in our day, that, although perfect unity in truth and love were impossible, yet every way Christ is preached? Would the publication of truth even in contention, strife, rivalry, and pretence have given him cause of joy? Would he have said, Rather so than not at all; let Christ's name become gainsaid rather than buried in silence? I think he would— I. Because the name of Christ reveals the love of God. The mere knowledge that God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,— the mere publication and proclaiming of this great fact, without Church or sacraments, without creeds or Scriptures, is a supernatural gift of truth revealing the love of God. And this is an inestimable advance beyond the state of man without this knowledge. Any light is better than darkness, any food than famine, even crumbs of bread which come down from heaven than the husks of this fallen earth. II. The preaching of Christ even in the most imperfect form is a witness against the sin of the world. And what are these two great truths, the love of God and the sin of the world, but the two poles on which all our salvation turns? The mere sound of the name "Saviour," "Redeemer," "Ransom," and "Sacrifice," is a testimony against the natural conscience. The powers of truth are not bound; they, like the presence of God and the nature of man, are universal. Wheresoever they alight, as seeds wafted by the winds, or by the sweep of tides, or by the flight of birds, though not sown in order nor by the ministry of man, they germinate. III. The preaching of Christ brings men under the law of responsibility; it reveals the four last things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven; it testifies to the commandments of God, and the law of charity, and the need of holiness. And all these things, addressed to the conscience of man, produce their own response of fear, hope, obedience. What is the ripe civilisation, the fair peace, and harmonious friendship of states and kingdoms, the alliances and relations of national systems, the temperate sway of princes, the liberty of subject people, the purity of domestic obedience, but a second crop of fruits shaken from the faith of Christ, as from the fig-tree in its later season? All that has been said rests on two undeniable truths: (1) first, that all truth has life in it to those whose heart is right with God; (2) that the duty of believing the whole and perfect truth is absolutely binding on pain of sin to all who know it. H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iv., p. 60. References: Philippians 1:18.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 370; T. Wallace, Christian World Pulpit, vol. x., p. 20c Philippians 1:19I. Mark the confidence of the declaration, "I know." Righteousness is a prophetic power. II. Mark the ground of this confidence. The Apostle's joy does not arise from the fact that certain persons preached, but from the higher fact that Christ was preached. III. The extension of the truth is the best guarantee of personal happiness. IV. The Gospel has everything to hope from being allowed to reveal its own credentials. V. The greatest man in the Church may be served by the supplication of the good. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 207. References: Philippians 1:19.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1139; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 85. Philippians 1:20I. We all see in some points what St. Paul must have meant by this expression. It was a thought frequently present to him. If he lives, if his earthly life is protracted through toils so constant and sufferings so intense, this shows the supporting hand of the risen, the immortal, Saviour. There must be some marvellous power out of and above him, or he must long ago have sunk under such pressure; there must be One above, whose grace is sufficient for him: sufficient to keep him meek under provocation, courageous under intimidation, and steadfast in the face of danger. Christ is thus magnified (not made great, but shown to be great) in his body by life. And if death comes, then Christ, who makes him willing to die for Him, Christ, who gives him grace, courage, and constancy to die for Him, shall be magnified in him still, magnified in his body, as by life, so by death. II. Such was the meaning of the words before us for St. Paul himself. Have they any meaning for us? It is in the power of a Christian, so the words import, to magnify Christ; that is, to show the greatness of Christ in his body. Temperance, purity, activity— by these we may magnify Him. And there are yet two ways besides these more common ones. (1) One of these is suffering. Christ is dishonoured by fretfulness, by repining, by dwelling upon past happiness, by a dejection which refuses to be comforted; He is magnified by a manly and Christian composure, by a resignation gradually brightening into cheerfulness, by a courageous hope, and by a steadfast expectation. (2) And then at last death has to be borne. It is a secret thing, a thing which no man knows save by once for all passing through it himself. When a man can really find peace on his deathbed from a tortured body and an agitated mind in the long-tried support and comfort of a Saviour who died for him and rose again, he pays a tribute to His greatness, and to His truth, and to His character at once the noblest and the best. "Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death." C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 41. References: Philippians 1:20.— A. J. Bamford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 102. Philippians 1:20-21I. "Expectation" and "hope"— these are words which connect the heart with the future. II. No power can so light up the future and throw over it the hues of immortal beauty as childlike trust in God. III. The man who is living without expectation and hope is living only half a life, but the man who is living on false expectations and false hopes is wasting life. IV. It is right that the body should be turned to moral account. V. The possibility of being ready either for earthly or heavenly life. VI. Identification with Christ is the secret of such readiness. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 207. Philippians 1:21I. "To me to live is Christ." The connection in which these words stand seems to give us their primary meaning. The business of my life is Christ; my energy, my activity, my occupation, my interest, is all Christ. St. Paul regarded everything that he had to do, and he regarded everything that befell him, only in relation to, in its bearing upon, Christ. The words describe a condition widely different from that of most of us. Before St. Paul could say that his outward life was Christ, he must have been able to say it of his inward life. Before Christ can be to any one his object, his business, his work, in life, He must first be his trust and his hope, his known and tried refuge from guilt, from fear, from restlessness, from sin. A man must have Christ for the life of his soul before he can have Christ for the life of his life. Small as is the regard paid to Christ in our life, is there not less of regard for Him in our souls? II. To St. Paul— and in this respect St. Paul was but an example for the humblest Christian— to St. Paul, inwardly first and then outwardly, in soul first and then in action, to live was Christ. And therefore, therefore only, was he able to add in truth and soberness, And to me to die is gain. Painful in itself and to all of us, painful in his case even beyond ours— for he when he wrote expected life to be closed— and it was closed a few years later— by a death of martyrdom— yet the death consummated and endured was a gain to him even in comparison with a Christian's life. Here to live was Christ; but even beyond that there was a blessedness into which only death could usher him. To have died is gain. If we would die the Christian's death, we must live the Christian's life; if we would find it a gain to have died, we must have found it to us Christ to live. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 54. I. "To me to live is Christ." A bold figure, showing, for one thing, the rapid action of the Apostle's mind; a haste to express the main idea; an impatience, as it were, of the immediate and explanatory expressions. For another thing, it shows the mighty magnitude of the object in his esteem. He regarded all the grand truths and interests of religion as centring in Him, comprehended in Him, insomuch that His very name might stand equivalent to them all. How absurd, if He were not infinitely higher, greater, than a man, a prophet. Think how it would have sounded if, for instance, Elijah, the zealous and heroic advocate of the Old Testament law, when he at one time desired to die rather than live, had recovered to the consideration of his important mission and said, "To me to live is Moses." II. "To me to live is Christ." His chief and immediate reference was to the important service which his prolonged life and apostleship would render to the Christian cause, especially to the Christian converts to whom he was writing; but he would include the happiness which he would the while enjoy himself, the communion with Christ to which he and all the apostles so often refer with great emphasis of delight, the hope, the assured prospect, of all that was in futurity for himself and for the world. Yet, with this consummation of animating interests in his soul, the happiest man probably on the whole face of the earth, he deliberately judged that to depart and be with Christ would as to himself be far better. The Apostle was of the highest order of Christians. But to every real Christian to die is gain. The sensible loss of all the evils of this present state will of itself be an immense gain. How mighty the duty, how transcendent the interest, of directing our utmost energy to the object that death may be gain. J. Foster, Lectures, vol. ii., p. 252. Philippians 1:21I. This canon rules the thought; the intellectual life is His. All the thinking a man goes through, all the philosophy he may excogitate, must come under this law of Christ-life. Be it well understood, however, that this is not to impair intellectual freedom. Gold dust is scattered through all the intellectual world, and he who seeks will find. But here is the point: something is found already which will never be lost; something is revealed never to be withdrawn. Christianity is a positive something which to every one that receives it takes firm abiding-place at the centre of his life, and puts itself of necessity and immediately into regulating, vitalising relation with all his intellectual findings. No one point of knowledge, great or small, can be the same to him whose life is in Christ which it would be if that were not true. II. Take life as sentiment, and again this canon will cover it to a Christian. "To me to live is Christ." How shall we keep the poetry in our life? How shall we dignify the struggle for daily bread? How shall we live in this world as in God's garden still, although many a thorn and many a thistle grow in it, and the workers are weary, and the mourners weep? How? I know but one way. There is a name which you can keep in your heart and talk of or whisper in your journey through the days, and that will do it. "For me life is Christ." III. Again, take life as force, active moral force— and the text covers it all: "Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might." IV. Finally, take life as hope, aspiration, destiny; as an unquenchable impulse towards the future; as an instinctive yearning towards immortality. Surely here with emphasis we may say, "For us to live is Christ." We live in Him, and because He lives we shall live also. He liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore. "Fear not"; He has the keys of death and Hades now, and death is to His followers but an hour of sleep, and the grave but the place of warrior's rest, until the morning trumpet shall sound to gather the hosts for battle no more, but for triumphal entrance into the regal city, whose Builder and Maker is God. A. Raleigh, From Dawn to the Perfect Day, p. 153. I. Look at the motive and mainspring of St. Paul's life. For him to live was Christ. Selfishness grew weak; selfishness dropped off as the viper that he shook from his hand at Melita; it died out; it was starved out; it had nothing to subsist on. That is the way to kill selfishness: starve it out. Health, honour, fame, everything that could encourage it, he abandoned. There was a complete self-renunciation in that man's career; there was a complete, unreserved consecration to Christ. With Paul, selfishness being dead, the greatest torment of life was taken away. Paul grew happy in conquering himself; Paul was kept happy in serving Jesus. II. Consider, too, how this motive of devotion to Christ ennobled him. A man is measured by his motives. A lofty aim makes a lofty career in a dungeon or a hovel; a low aim makes a man grovel in a palace or a senate-house. Any man that sets before himself a motive lower than Christ, a motive no higher than self-indulgence and self-seeking, dooms himself at starting. He cannot know life's highest joy; he cannot realise life's noblest purpose; he cannot taste life's sweetest blessings; he cannot please God; life becomes a mockery, and very soon a weariness too heavy to be borne. St. Paul's life was too elevating, too much in fellowship with Christ, for him ever to grow weary of it. Life is glorious, it is exhilarating, sublime, transcendent, when it shines with Christ as a summer morning shines with sunlight; but a life that never hath Christ in it had better never have been. T. L. Cuyler, Christian World Pulpit, vol ii., p. 1. The Ideal of the Christian Life. Living in Christ and for Christ is the only life of satisfaction and enjoyment. "All others," says Gregory Nazianzen, "are like well-painted ships; but he who sets sail for the harbour of blessedness needs a well-compacted ship." I. The text is one of those striking forms of transcendental expression in which the writings of the Apostle Paul abound. It is in the nature of all high emotion that it is dissatisfied with all cold and formal utterance; it does not so much seek as demand to use words of accumulative force. How different are men's estimates of Christ. To some He is a life-power; to some He is merely a dumb, marble, ideal beauty. II. What is your life? It is even that which is your strongest love. It has been often said— and I believe it heartily— that we do not live indeed until we love in real earnest; and the greater, the nobler, our love, the greater and the nobler will be the life born from it. And hence there are many persons who have lived long in the world, but they have never begun to live indeed. We do not know what we are capable of till something crosses our path and says, "Live for me." III. It will be found at last that all life ever known on earth was poor compared to those exalted states in which the blessed ones who have lived for God have moved. If the work of life is to be estimated by the grandeur of its ideals, then what conceptions have ever crossed the most inspired spirits compared to those which have been stirred by the life of Christ? IV. For me to live is (1) faith in Christ; (2) meditation on Christ; (3) action for Christ; (4) hope in Christ. There is no prospect of time He does not illuminate; there is no possibility of eternal blessedness of which He is not the centre. In the heart of all future Christian experience, in the glory of all future advanced societies and kingdoms, in all the eye of the loftiest poet can see, the heart of the profoundest believer can reach out to— in all "to live is Christ." E. Paxton Hood, Sermons, p. 134. References: Philippians 1:21.— J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood, p. 169; Isaac, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 395; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 7th series, p. 1; A. Murray, The Fruits of the Spirit, p. 360; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii., No. 146; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 7; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons to English Congregations in India, p. 135; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 41; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. vi., p. 26; Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 254; J. W. Burn, Ibid., vol. xxiv., p. 165; Laidlaw, Ibid., vol. xxxii., p. 235; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i., p. 267; vol. ii., p. 423; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 13; vol. x., p. 127. Philippians 1:21-24 The Fruit of Labour. Such words can never lose their power. They come down to us from a purer air; yet the voice is human, and is audible to all who feel. They sum up the constant tenor of a life which, like all great lives, is able at once to shame us and to inspire, and also to teach a lesson which may be applied to the most various conditions of human existence. I. Let us try to think of the fact which the words imply. Think of this, and then think of the petty rivalries, the mean pleasures, the waste of power, the frivolous talk, the ungenerous feeling, the mean policy, the mere idle vacancy, which beset our common life; and, however little you may hope to pass at once from this to that, you cannot but feel the weight of the rebuke. Can we realise, have we ever sought to realise, the certainty of our own death? How then shall we compare our lives to his who looked with open face beyond the grave, desiring to depart, and yet, for the sake of others, was content to live? II. Note the general lesson which may be drawn from the text. The Christian ideal of blessedness has two aspects, which both meet in Christ: one inward and upward, looking towards communion with God, and one outward and around, looking towards our brethren and mankind, especially towards the weaker brethren, those little ones for whom Christ died. To act in the present, to live for others, to redeem the time, to use all means for bettering the physical and social, as well as the moral and spiritual, condition of mankind— these, it need hardly be said, are precepts in full accordance with Christianity. But the thought of another life, for which this is the seedtime and preparation, in which some obstacles that check the flow of goodness here will be removed, and whatever we have sown of righteousness will bear fruit a thousandfold— this, instead of being out of harmony with these duties, is the greatest of all incentives to them. L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal, p. 162. Reference: Philippians 1:21-24.— J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood, p. 185. Philippians 1:21-26 There is a triple movement of thought and feeling in these words. I. There is the strong absorbing devotion which a man has to Christ. Here we get the grand noble simplicity and unity or continuity of life and death with a devout man thinking about himself. To me, he says— and the position of the word in the sentence shows the emphasis which is to be put upon it— To me— not merely in my judgment, but in my case, so far as I personally am concerned— to me the whole mystery and perplexity comes down into two clauses with four words in each: "To live is Christ; to die is gain." The outward life is what he is talking about, obviously from the antithesis; and in the latter clause what he says is not that the act of dying is gain, but (as the form of words in the Greek seems to show) that to be dead is gain. Like everybody else, he shrank from the act. No man ever said that the act and article of dissolution was anything but a pain and a horror and a terror; it was not that that he said was an advance, but it was the thing beyond. To die, that is loss; but to be dead, that is gain. (1) Look at the noble theory of life, the grand simplicity and breadth, that there is in these words. (2) Contrast the blessed simplicity, the freedom, the power, that there is in such a life as that, with the misery that comes into all lives that have a lower aim and a less profound source. II. Note the hesitation that arises In Paul's mind from the contemplation of life as a field for work. The text suggests the idea of a man hedged up between two walls and not knowing how to turn. III. Notice the calm beautiful solution of the question— in an equipoise of hesitation, something pulling two ways, and so the rest of equal forces acting— notice the calm solution, the peaceful acquiescence, "I know I shall abide and continue with you all." Then the innate delicacy of the man comes out in the way in which he phrases his perception of the necessity there is for his stopping. He sinks self and represents himself as sharing his brethren's gladness. The true attitude is neither desire, nor shrinking, nor hesitation, but a calm taking what God wills about the matter. A. Maclaren, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 33. Philippians 1:22-25I. In the text St. Paul appears to weigh his life against departing and being with Christ. We must not suppose him to be speaking of his own case only, as an exceptional case, one of those grievously afflicted lives which make men desire death merely as a termination of their earthly sufferings; but we must rather understand him as declaring that to depart and be with Christ is absolutely far better than life here, better for all, a higher state of being, an existence of greater blessing. And it is evident upon what ground. St. Paul declares this preference: the departing is not a mere departing, but it is a departing to be with Christ. The magnification of Christ was the one great end of the Apostle's life: to realise Christ's love, to conform himself to Christ's image, to exhibit to mankind, not by word only, but by life and example, a picture of the life of Christ— this was the thing for which the Apostle strove; and undoubtedly the light which ever shone upon his faith was this: the entire belief that one day he should be with Christ and see Him as He is. If in this life he had only a dim, faint view of Christ, and yet found even that unspeakably brighter and better than anything else which he could see in this world, what wonder if he desired that closer communion with his Lord which he believed would be granted to him when he had put aside the burden of the flesh? II. We are all placed here in God's world, endowed with various powers and different talents; here we are to remain for some few years, and then all to pass away. Fifty years— what is it in the history of the world? and yet in even fifty years how many of us will still remain in this life? The question then forces itself upon us as reasonable creatures, What are we put here for, and why should we desire to remain? The answer is simple: We are placed here to work out our own salvation and for the benefit each of the other. It need not distress any one to find that St. Paul's language is out of his reach; he had much better honestly confess that it is so, than pretend that it is not; but if a man desire this life, at least let him desire it for some good end. Let him take a deep, sober view of his mission in the world, for every one is sent for an important end; every one of us has his work and his Master, who will demand an account of it. We are all successors of St. Paul in this respect, and that which formed to him the principal chain of life ought to occupy a similar position in our minds to that which it did in his. Bishop Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons, 2nd series, p. 245. Philippians 1:22-26I. The personal weighed with the public, or the difficulties of the veteran philanthropist. II. Man's sublimest reason for not wishing immediate translation to glory is that he may be of spiritual service to the world. III. The next best condition to that of being with Christ in heaven is to be working for Christ's people on earth. IV. There is only one world in which you can serve man evangelically; do not be in indecent haste to escape the opportunity. V. God never leaves the earth entirely destitute of great men. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 208. Philippians 1:23 The Believer's Better Portion. I. Paganism had cold comfort for its children. It is the religion of the Lord Jesus which can cheer and satisfy the soul. Our Divine Redeemer having "overcome death" and opened unto us the kingdom of heaven, the reign of the terrible destroyer, death, is broken, and his power over our mortal bodies is only for a brief season. II. Well may we envy the portion of those who, "having finished their course in faith, do now rest from their labours." So long as we are engaged in this warfare, we are exposed to the snares of the destroyer, and great must be the peace of having laid aside this mystery of probation. J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 449. The Blessedness of Death. Why should departure out of this life be an object of desire to a Christian? I. First, because it is a full release from this evil world. There is something very expressive in the word we here render by "depart." It means the being set free after the breaking up of some long restraint, or the unyoking of the oxen wearied with the plough, or the weighing again of our anchors for a homeward voyage. On every side its associations are full of peace and rest. What can better express the passage of Christ's servants from this tumultuous and weary world? So long as we are in this warfare, we must be open to the shafts of evil, and who would not desire a shelter where no arrows can reach us any more? What must be the peace of having put off this mystery of probation, when the struggle and the strife shall be over, and breathless, panting hope, dashed by ten thousand fears, shall be changed into a certainty of peace, into a foretaste of our crown! This one thought alone is enough to make death blessed. Well may evangelists say, "Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly," and souls already martyred, like St. Paul, desire to depart. Even to us it may be permitted to feel our hearts beat thick with hopeful and longing fear when we wait for the voice that shall say to the least of penitents, "Rise up, My love, My fair one, and come away, for lo! the winter is past; the rain is over and gone." Come to Me from Lebanon; look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, unto the everlasting hills and to the eternal years. II. Thus far we have spoken of the desire to depart, which springs from a longing to be set free from sorrow and an evil world, from the temptations and burdens of mortality which weigh upon the soul. But these are the nether, and not the upper, springs of such desires. St. Paul longed for the spiritual body, raised in power and incorruption at the day of Christ, and meanwhile for that personal perfection in measure and foretaste which is prepared for those who die in the Lord and await His coming. Surely of all earthly sorrows sin is the sharpest. The heaviest of all burdens is the bondage of a will which makes God's service a weary task, and our homage of love a cold observance. III. And this leads to another reason why to depart is blessed. It unites us for ever to the new creation of God. What is this new creation but the new heavens and the new earth, in which are gathered the whole order and lineage of the second Adam, all saints, from Abel the just, of all ages and times, in the twilight and the dayspring, in the morning and the noontide of grace, all made perfect, whether on earth or in rest, by the omnipotence of love? This is our true home, where all our reason, all our desires, all our sympathies, and all our love have their perfect sphere and their full repose. IV. "To be with Christ." This is the true foundation of heavenly joy. To be with Him; to see His face; to follow Him whithersoever He goeth; to be conscious of His eye; to hear, it may be, His words of love; to see the gathered fruit of His Passion in the glory of His elect— what, if not this, is heaven? It is only our dull love of this world, or our blindness of heart, or, alas! our consciousness of penetrating guilt, which makes this desire of saints a thought of fear to us. But for this, how blessed to go to dwell with Him for ever! H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 370. References: Philippians 1:23.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v., No. 274; vol. xix., No. 1136. Philippians 1:23-24 Consider:— I. The two desires. (1) To depart and be with Christ. This desire is composed of two parts: a vestibule, somewhat dark and forbidding, through which the pilgrim must pass, and a temple, unspeakably glorious, to which it leads the pilgrim as his eternal home. (2) To abide in the flesh. It is a natural and lawful desire. God has placed us here; He has visited us here; He has given us something to enjoy and something to do here. He expects us to value what He has bestowed. Jesus, in His prayer to the Father for those whom He has redeemed, puts in a specific caveat: "I pray not that Thou shouldst take them out of the world." What Christ did not desire for Christians, they should not desire for themselves. Paul, even when he was ripe for glory, positively desired to abide in the flesh; they are the healthiest Christians who in this matter tread in his track. II. A Christian balanced evenly between these two desires. The gain which it promised to himself made the prospect of departure welcome; the opportunity of doing good to others reconciled him to longer life on earth. These two desires go to constitute the spiritual man; these are the right and left sides of the new creature in Christ. III. Practical lessons. (1) This one text is sufficient to destroy the whole value of Romish prayer to departed saints. (2) The chief use of a Christian in the world is to do good. (3) You cannot be effectively useful to those who are in need on earth unless you hold by faith and hope to Christ on high. (4) Living hope of going to be with Christ is the only anodyne which has power to neutralise the pain of parting with those who are dear to us in the body. W. Arnot, Roots and Fruits, p. 212. St. Paul in Rome. I. It was not weariness of life, not the longing to escape from that close network which he had so sedulously woven round himself, that made the thought of death, not only painless, but welcome, to St. Paul; it was only the prospect of meeting Christ, of seeing Him as He is, of spending the future in His immediate presence and in unbroken converse with Him. To St. Paul this meeting appeared to be the instantaneous sequel of death, even while out of the body and before the great day. Such a condition of rest, and yet of conscious spiritual energy, is that which human reason and analogy suggest to us as far as they can suggest anything on a subject so mysterious. It is evident that the rest to St. Paul is not a complete torpor of the soul's consciousness. He is not looking forward to a dreamless slumber; he is thinking of such a meeting and communion as he can realise and profoundly enjoy. II. Very remarkable it is to note the strength of this desire in the one Apostle who had seen the least of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Had he known the most intimate communion with Jesus in the past, he could not have anticipated with more fervent longing the joy of meeting Christ hereafter. III. Notice how St. Paul's words tell against the efficacy of prayers to departed saints. If a saint can work more effectually in heaven for others than here, then St. Paul was mistaken, and his departure would have been a clear gain to the converts and the Church at large. The value of life, then, in the eyes of the true Christian, lies in the opportunity it gives of serving others. It is worth while to abide in the flesh; it is our duty to control even so pure a desire as to wish to depart and be with Christ for the sake of those to whose higher needs and true happiness God enables us to minister. R. Duckworth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiv., p. 242. The Attractions of Heaven. I. The place heaven has its attractions. It is paradise regained. Beauty smiles there; plenty laughs there; the blessing of God is enthroned there. II. There are attractions in the heavenly state. It is a sorrowless, and curseless, and deathless state. III. "Having a desire to depart," that is, to depart to the realisation of our highest hopes. Is our treasure, like that of Paul, in heaven? S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, 3rd series, p. 67. Philippians 1:27 It is plain that every precept of holy living might be brought under this comprehensive charge. Let us narrow the compass of the exhortation. Let us say, Live inwardly and live outwardly as citizens of that kingdom which the Gospel has revealed. I. How large a part of life is lived wholly within public life, social life, family life; these do not exhaust the whole being even in those who are most busy, most sociable, or most domestic. Within and beside all these there is for all of us a life yet more real, yet more important; and the danger of all these other kinds of life is lest they should obscure or paralyse or stifle this. It is for our soul's sake, for our eternal welfare's sake, that we must watch and pray against this danger. As in some senses we all have a secret life, which we cannot part with nor make public even if we would, so it is our great business to attend to this secret life, to regulate and cultivate it, in such a way that it may become, as it is here expressed, worthy of the Gospel. We ought to be living our citizenship inwardly towards Christ, our Lord and King. The state of our mind towards Him personally ought to be that which suits and is consistent with our relation to Him as His subjects. II. And then that which is within will shine through into that which is without also. He whose inner life is that of one whom Christ has saved will be living outwardly also as a citizen of the kingdom not of this world; his aims and motives will be higher than those of men who know not God; he will not be a worldly man; he will not be a vain man; he will declare plainly by his acts that he is one who seeks a country. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 73. References: Philippians 1:27.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi., No. 640; F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 209; J. R. Woodford, Ibid., vol. xxi., p. 161; W. J. Woods, Ibid., vol. xxxvi., p. 280; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 345; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 145; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., p. 353; Church Sermons, vol. ii., p. 113. Philippians 1:27, Philippians 1:28.—Homilist, vol. v., p. 189; A. Maclaren, The Secret of Power, p. 237. Philippians 1:27-30 This is a call— I. To holiness. There is but one ideal life in the Church. In all our growing and striving Christ Himself is to us, and His grace is, all-sufficient. II. To unanimity. Monotony is not what is meant by unanimity. We are one in our love and service of Christ. III. To courage. Timidity is an impediment on the path of moral progress; it arises from distrust of God. "Straight on," is God's command, and He will frighten the lions from before your feet. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 210. References: Philippians 1:27-30.— J. J. Goadby, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 293; J. P. Gledstone, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 59. Philippians 1:29 The Sacrifice of the Redeemed. I. Christ's sacrifice is no far-away fact, to be shown and gazed upon; it draws us also unto itself. For consider what exactly it was. Where does its vicarious efficacy for us lie? Surely in this: that Christ made His offering out of our very flesh. He laid hold of no foreign thing to offer; He looked not elsewhere for a gift. He looked at this world we live in; He took of its substance for His gift; He laid hold of its present nature, and offered that. Forasmuch as the children partook of flesh and blood, Christ partook of the same. As He found it, so He took it; just it, and no other; this, just this, is that in which He would accomplish His priestly work. But these are the very conditions in which we to this day live. That flesh which He took we still wear; still it is full charged with ache and torment; still it wastes and sickens. We then hold in our hands the very gift which Christ, our Master, offered. It was just these human sorrows that He turned into sacraments of allegiance. Are we blinded to our opportunities by the fact that they fall upon us by natural laws, or that they seem entirely accidental, or that they are brought upon us unjustly by wicked hands? II. But consider the offering of Christ. What can possibly be more unlike a pleasing sacrifice to God than His death? What sign of its being a High-priest's offering broke through the shadow of this world's darkness? It differed in no degree whatever from any common disaster that happens to us. It came upon Him by simple natural means; it looked to the outsider as a most cruel and unfortunate and bloody accident. He offered then, and saved by offering, just that human life which still is ours today; and if so, His sacrifice is not only a vicarious act, but a revelation of the true use to which we may put this very world in which we stand, a revelation of the manner by which even it, with all its confusions, and disappointments, and sickness, and weariness, and anguish, and death, may be justified, may be hallowed, may be transformed into the fuel of the one sacrifice which alone can reconcile the world to God. We are drawn into the circle in which Christ's eternal energies work; the love of Christ lays hands upon us and constrains us; we, as we are uplifted by the prayer of His Passion, we, too, recover our priesthood; we may lift the offering of this our flesh to God, since that day when Christ died in the likeness of our flesh and sanctified it to become an offering to God. We may do it now, though we are severed from that great day by eighteen hundred long and weary years, for still today Christ, the ever-living Priest, pleads within that holy place, into which He has passed before us, that holy blood, once poured out in love for us, which makes Him still bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh; and still today, as the Father looks upon that blood, there breaks from His eyes ever and again the splendour of an unappeasable and exhaustless love, which hastens from afar to greet our poor and pitiful gift of ourselves to Him, kissing us and rejoicing, as God, the mighty Forgiver, can alone rejoice, that this His Son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found. H. Scott Holland, Logic and Life, p. 133. Reference: Philippians 1— Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 24. Philippians 2:1 Two Incitements to Love. I. It is tenderness and compassion which St. Paul wants the Philippians to practise, and he endeavours to win them to the practice by the recognition and proclamation of the tenderness and compassion that were already theirs. Listen, he says— listen to the love-beatings within you, and be loving. Lo, you carry within you a proud and brotherly sensibility; expand and apply it. He would draw them on to be kinder than they are by setting before them the kindliness they feel. And this is the best way of helping and persuading men to improve, the best way in which to try and lead them from lower things to higher, from unworthy to worthier conduct, namely by fastening upon what they are, in the midst of their faultiness, that is good and beautiful, upon what they have of good and beautiful motions in their breasts, by touching these, and calling their attention to them, and demanding that they should be cultivated and followed. II. "If there be any consolation in Christ." That there is is true enough. How many have found, and are daily finding, it in Him. But the true rendering of the word is "exhortation." When, in enjoining on the Philippians to cultivate love, the Apostle points them to Christ, it would be surely, not comfort which he meant them to find in Him, but exhortation— exhortation to the love to which he was so anxious to lead them. And the figure of Jesus in the midst of the ages— is it not just this: a perpetual exhortation to men to be a little better than they are, to be less worldly, less grovelling, less selfish, to rise from their low levels to higher ways, with a nobler and purer spirit? And have we not met with persons, too, who in their silent examples, in their beautiful lives, in the spirit that breathed from them, have been full of exhortation to us, in the presence of whose pureness and earnestness, in witnessing whose deeds, we have felt ourselves called to heights above us, have seen with a touch of shame the comparative poorness of what we were and with a sigh of wishfulness the truer thing that we might be? And is not Christ preeminently such a Person? Whenever we meet Him in thoughtful pauses by the way, in moments of quiet meditation over the Gospel page, does He not act on us thus, with rufflings of self-discontent, with a sense of being coarser and earthlier than we ought to be? He stands out an angel in the sun, for ever above us all, yet for ever moving upon and affecting us all: painted for ever upon the eye of the world, we cannot help aspiring and endeavouring the more for the grandeur of His face; it disturbs us in our worldliness and selfishness, and is always exhorting us against them, is always appealing to us to rise toward nobler things. S. A. Tipple, Sunday Mornings at Norwood, p. 197. References: Philippians 2:1.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii., No. 348. Philippians 2:1-4.— J. J. Goadby, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 293. Philippians 2:1-11I. "If" is not in this case a sign of doubt or hesitation, but, on the contrary, a sign of the most assured certainty. As employed by Paul, it is equivalent to "If there is any water in the sea," or "If there is any light in the sun." II. This appeal of the Apostle is a burst of tenderness. Affection delights in repetition; love amplifies its expressions to the utmost. III. Paul having laid his basis in the very heart of Christ, makes an appeal: "Fulfil ye my joy." It is right to interject one's personality as an element in an argument for brotherhood and consolation in the Church. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 211. References: Philippians 2:1-11.—Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 99; Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 50. Philippians 2:1-14.—Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 350. Philippians 2:2I. Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be of one mind. St. Paul's happiness was not quite complete until he could see those whom he loved— and he loved these Philippians— walking in unity. There may be unity without acquaintance, and there may be unity amidst variety. These two defects (as they might appear) are not fatal to the unity of which St. Paul speaks. These things are not the real, certainly not the most formidable, impediments to Christian unity; its worst dangers lie nearer to us than these. St. Paul here shows us what they are. He points out what I may call the conditions of unity, and they are two: humility and unselfishness. (1) Humility. Act not, he says, on a principle of party spirit or vainglory; but in your humility count each superior to yourselves. Need I point out how inseparably connected are individual vanity and collective discord, how it is the assumption, and the pushing, and the arrogance, and the expectation of undue respect and deference, on the part of individuals, which cause at least half of those piques and misunderstandings and secret heart-burnings which run on at last into open dissensions? (2) Unselfishness. The two graces have their root in one. Look not each of you on your own things, but each of you also on the things of others. Vanity is a fruitful cause of dissension; but below vanity itself lies ever a foundation of selfishness. II. Note the motives by which Christian unity is here recommended and enforced. I beseech you, Paul says in effect, by every comfort and by every privilege of the Gospel. If there be any such thing as consolation in Christ, if there be any such thing as comfort in love, if any such thing as a joint participation in the Holy Spirit, if any such thing as a heart of pitying compassion, then by all these things I beseech you to be of one soul and of one mind. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 87. I. "Being of one accord" does not always mean being of the same opinion. Of course in the main there can be no good work done unless the great verities are believed by us all. We believe the vital truths, but then there are shades of opinion about many things. I do not want to see eye to eye with every one on men or things. Variety is intended by God. There are men emphatically endowed by special gifts for mission work; some have tender sympathies, and they can be friends to the fatherless and widow; some have gifts for calling out the energies of the young. II. There must be in this one accord subordinacy of one to the other. Everything must be subservient to great ends. There must always be the chorus-leader; you know he was called so in the Greek choruses. There must be men of the same faith, all inspired by the same Spirit. By subserviency I mean everything uniting for Christ's end. You fall into your place, and subserve the interests of the Cross. III. In this harmony there is health. It is so in a nation. A nation is in harmony when the rich sympathise with and help the poor, and the wise help the ignorant. You may live many years, but the poor you will have always to the end of time, and men must be self-disciplined who have these blessings and seek to use them aright. A prosperous Church and nation is where there is health in the body politic. IV. We shall thus enjoy influence. The world likes harmony; it does not know always how it is attained, but it likes it. V. Lastly, it means heaven. What does heaven mean? It means rest in God. Whose mind have we? Christ's. And that is heaven begun on earth. W. M. Statham, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiv., p. 397. Philippians 2:3-5 The Discipline of the Christian Character. I. The Christian character is set before us in manifold and diversified ways in the Bible. The Christian character in its completeness is the result and outgrowth of all that series of events of which the Bible is in part, but in the most important part, the record, which begins in ages back beyond our ken and which comes down even to the day which is passing. This form of human character, tending from the first to the mind of Christ and at last culminating in it in His person, and less completely in His saints after the day of Pentecost, is the character put before us in the Bible and given us to study, to learn from according to our measure, to assimilate and reproduce. II. The foundation of the religious character of the Old and New Testaments was laid in a great idea which is brought into clear and strong distinctness in the age of the Patriarchs, in God's dealings with Abraham, in what is shown to us of the discipline and guidance under which he became the father of the faithful, the first example, that is in detail, that is of feeling and action, of the religious idea. And that idea is the singleness and individuality of the soul in its relation to the God who called it into being. If the feeling of the individual being, merged and swallowed up in the aggregate, is strong and even irresistible at times now, how much more so in the infancy of the world, when that discipline of man began which was to lead at last to the mind of Christ. And so the first work of that discipline was to enforce and impress deeply another great and paramount aspect of man and life, another great side of the truth which should balance, correct, and complete the other. It was to teach and leave firmly planted the faith that God had His eye on each separable unit in these innumerable crowds; that each separate soul in them had its direct relations to its Maker, its course to follow for itself, its destiny to fulfil or to fail in, its special calls and gifts, according to its Master's purpose, to account for, its own separate hopes, its own separate responsibilities. In the history of Abraham, from his call to the last trial of his faith, we see that great and, as far as we are allowed to see at least in its greatness and depth, that new, lesson. III. We live alone as much as we die alone, and we, "whose spirits live in awful singleness, each in his self-formed sphere of light or gloom," need to know that great conviction before we die. It may indeed come at any moment; in the hurry of business, in the hour of joy, in the misery of bereavement, in the flash and revelation of the beauty or the awfulness of the world, oh even in the very moment of temptation and the hour of sin, we may learn and feel the startling and essential singleness of the soul. But it will be well for us not to wait for its coming, but to seek it as the Psalmist long ago taught men to seek it: "O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee." Dean Church, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxviii., p. 104. Philippians 2:3-5I. There are two ways of doing even the best work: through strife and through love. This was seen in the first chapter, where two classes of preachers are described. II. Entire sympathy with Christ will always heighten man's appreciation of man. III. Christianity is thus the only humanising and fraternising religion. IV. Self-seeking is in utter antagonism to the spirit of Christianity. V. Christianity never encourages a degrading view of human nature. Man is to be esteemed by man. Christians are to recognise each other's excellencies. Love's eye is quick to detect virtue in another. Up to this point Paul continues his appeal for unanimity. The spirit of this appeal is most suggestive; it is the spirit of profound and tender sympathy with Christ. Absence of union is a reflection upon the uniting force. What is the uniting force of a Christian Church? The love of Christ. Where, then, there is disunion, it is plainly to be inferred that there is either not sufficient of this love, or that this love is unequal to the exigencies of the case. The world has a right to compare the deeds of the servant with the deeds of the Master, because the connection is moral, and consequently involves responsibility. All the practices of the Church are carried back to Christ, and He is magnified or crucified afresh according to their nature. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 212. Philippians 2:4 Courtesy. I. Courtesy is the expression in outward manner of deference for the most delicate susceptibilities of others. It is doubtless, on the one side, a habit; it is practised instinctively; its forms are caught by unconscious imitation; it is inherited like other habits, so that it seems sometimes a native characteristic of particular blood. On the other side, like other habits, it has been generated originally by the feelings and the will. While it is practised it reacts on the mind and heart, and fosters and keeps alive those feelings from which it sprang. If the feelings which renew and vivify it die away, it will become an empty shell or form: a part will drop in here, and a part there. The hasty observer may not detect the change. The gracious manner will remain as an ornament in the public eye; but those who know the man behind the scenes will know that even the manner is forgotten when he is most truly himself. II. Courtesy, then, if it be a virtue of manner, is an essentially Christian virtue; that is, it rests on ideas Christian in origin: (1) first, on the universality of our relations to mankind, in the sense that all men are of one blood, one Father; (2) secondly, on the special claim of the weak upon the strong, the claim for sympathy inherent in pain, even in the little pains of injured susceptibility, the paramount claim to tenderest consideration of childhood, of the weaker sex, of the poor, of the wronged, of the dependent. Graft upon these the idea inherent in the highest types of the Christian character drawn in the New Testament, the idea of self-respect, pride turned inwardly as a motive and exacting standard of personal high living, and we have complete the chivalrous conception of a gentleman's courtesy. We find the best pictures of it in two characters put before us in the New Testament: (a) in the writings of St. Paul; (b) in the acts and words of One greater than St. Paul. E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 82. Christian Self-sacrifice. I. Christian self-sacrifice necessarily takes two forms, for, on the one hand, there is a self-sacrifice for the sake of ourselves, as it were for our own self-discipline; there is a self-sacrifice which gives up a great deal which otherwise we might reasonably keep in order that we may more entirely devote our whole souls to God; there is a self-sacrifice the purpose of which is closer communion, the purpose of which is to live in our thoughts and in the impulses and emotions of our hearts more entirely in the Lord's presence, close to Him, drawing in, as it were, into our souls the light of His love. This self-sacrifice has high honour, and, from certain points of view, it stands above all others. But, on the other hand, our Lord's self-sacrifice was more markedly of another kind: self-sacrifice not for His own sake, but for the sake of others. II. The commandment of the text ranges from the highest to the lowest; it embraces the largest and it embraces the smallest thing that we can do. It penetrates because it is a spiritual force; it penetrates even into all the details of life; and it bids the man be self-sacrificing as in great things, so in small things, because what is asked of men is not the self-sacrifice itself, but the self-sacrificing spirit, which is sure to issue in self-sacrifice perpetual. III. This spirit of self-sacrifice, as it is the duty of individuals, so is it the duty of the Church as a body. The Church as a body is called upon to labour earnestly for the good of men and the good of those who have been brought by baptism within her pale, for the good of those who are still outside. The Church is called upon perpetually to that self-sacrifice which made the Lord stretch out His hand all day long to a disbelieving and gainsaying people. Bishop Temple, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxviii., p. 337. Sectarianism. I. Our first association with religion is its bearing on our own souls and their salvation. He that has been struck by a great conviction is for the time isolated from his fellows. All the world for him centres round the single question, "What must I do to be saved?" For a time the Church and general interests are lost to view, just as the whole world would be to a man who had fallen into a crevasse, and who could have leisure for no other thought than how to extricate himself and how to get others to help him into safety. Such a man must for the time look on his own things, not on the things of others. There are those who think that Christian separateness consists in being very unlike other men. Rather it should be said, Live in faith and prayer the same life that others live without them, and you have entered the true separate state of consecration to God. II. There is the sectarianism of the congregation. We say, This is my Church; these are our forms of worship; this is our effort to do good. Without such appropriation of truth no Christian work can thrive. But if we mean that the work is ours to the exclusion of others or to the prejudice of others, sectarianism at once begins. We should try to see and to know each other's work, and to take part in common effort. III. There is a denominational sectarianism. There are three things in which the advantage of amity among the denominations maybe seen. (1) The first is that which occurs to us all: that, while we maintain a separate and defiant attitude, we waste our energies in collisions that cannot be avoided, and we are much weakened for all good purposes. (2) If we would deal with one another in the confidence of Christian brotherhood, our mutual influence for good would be increased a hundredfold. (3) Ministers and Church rulers of all denominations should ask themselves this question: how they will answer to Christ if they build up His people into the image of their own exclusiveness, instead of the image of the world-embracing love of their Lord. W. H. Fremantle, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 385. References: Philippians 2:4.— A. Blomfield, Sermons in Town and Country, p. 158; W. Bennett, Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 105; G. W. McCree, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 357; T. T. Lynch, Sermons for my Curates, p. 147; Forsyth Hamilton, Pulpit Parables, p. 66; J. Fraser, Church Sermons, vol. ii., p. 209. Philippians 2:5 The True Imitation of Christ. Consider two or three simple instances of the mode in which we may catch something of the true mind of Christ, and carry out into our lives something of a true Imitatio Christi.I. There is, first of all, the readiness to forego, for the good of others, things to which we feel we have a fair claim. It seems a very homely lesson, yet so strong is the tendency to self-assertion and pride that we find both the Apostle and his Master laying on it an exceeding stress; a homely lesson, yet one which, strange to say, may bring opportunities of drawing near to the mind of Christ, occasions in little things or in great. II. Is not this a field in which we may seek for the mind which was in Christ Jesus? I do not mean only by being ready to do our appointed work with our whole hearts, but by recognising it as being the work set us by Him who sent us all into the world to work while it is day, by facing readily and cheerfully all that is distasteful and wearisome in the work, even as He bore the perpetual association with unsympathising dullness, with human ignorance, with scenes of misery, of disease, wretchedness, and sin. III. Remember, too, another point in which we need the mind of Christ. Our work, our occupations, our recreations, are apt to take entire possession of us, to overwhelm us, to model us into their shape, to reduce us to their level; they cling to us like our shadows; they keep us from rising out of them or above them. Remember that He is recorded as having gone up from the crowded plain to the quiet hill, and there continued all night in prayer to God; and that we are told how the disciples went to their own home, but Jesus went to the mount of Olives. Surely we cannot fail if we wish to keep Him before our eyes to find even in the busiest life some still time for thought, for looking backwards and forwards, for withdrawing ourselves for a moment from the throng of common cares and pleasures to some peaceful hillside, from amidst the swarming and noisy flats of life, where we may snatch short times of insight and resolution which may be worked out in days of hurry or perhaps of gloom. G. G. Bradley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxiii., p. 177. I. St. Paul sees in the Passion of our Lord the crown and climax of the stupendous act of condescension which began in His incarnation. Being found in fashion as a Man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient, submitted Himself to the will of the Father, even to the point of drinking the cup, to His true human nature the bitter cup, of death. We may notice two points which St. Paul emphasises. (1) The condescension has its roots in our blessed Lord's conception of the scope and value of His own Divine prerogatives. It was He through whom all that is is, yet to Him that pre-eminence was not a thing to set store by in itself. From that infinite height He stooped to the level of the creatures of His hand, that He might serve. The Creator valued not His creative power, laid aside readily the Creator's prerogatives, that He might help, might serve, His creature. (2) The condescension was complete, not measured or stinted. The cup was drained to the dregs. He came to do His Father's will, and He did it— "felt all, that He might pity all," bore what to man is the extremity of pain and shame, that He might save man from pain and shame. II. There is something of the sense of passing from infinite differences to infinitesimal ones, of turning the eyes from light so bright that nothing for the time is visible after it, when we pass from contemplating this infinite self-humiliation to think how we can in any true sense imitate it. Yet St. Paul bids us so pass. It is his very purpose in so painting the Divine condescension: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." The consciousness of this infinite condescension of God for us must transfigure life to us, break down once and for all our pride, show us the true proportions of things, open our hearts to Him who has done so much for us. E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 35. References: Philippians 2:5.— E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 191; Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 185; R. W. Church, Ibid., vol. xx., p. 181; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 323; H. D. Rawnsley, Ibid., vol. xxix., p. 298; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. v., p. 273; Preacher's Monthly, vol. x., pp. 164, 180, 193, 201; J. Edmunds, Sixty Sermons, p. 157; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. viii., p. 107. Philippians 2:5-7 The Humiliation and Glory of Christ. Consider the practical purposes of the Apostle in bringing this subject before us. I. Among the chief of these is the inculcation of humility. This whole marvellous passage is brought before us, not for dogmatic teaching, but for moral example. The main intention is, not to reveal Jesus Christ as the foundation of a sinner's hope (although that is implied), but it is to point out the wonderful moral beauty of His condescension and to enforce it upon the regards of His followers for their devout and diligent imitation. Because He humbled Himself, because He pleased God, expressed the very mind of God, "God also hath highly exalted Him," and we are allowed to reason that with and in Him we too shall rise. The Master and the disciple, together treading the valley of humiliation, shall together sit on the throne. To be partaker of the sufferings is the sure pledge of participation in the glory. II. "Work out your own salvation," this moral conformity to God, by following Christ; by cross-bearing; by self-denial; by descents into darkness with your lights, into misery with your joys; by holding yourself at the service of Christ; by making life a sacrifice and yourself a living victim; by filling yourself with the tenderness and Divine passion and unutterable love of the Cross. A. Raleigh, From Dawn to the Perfect Day, p. 282. The Incarnation a Lesson of Humility. I. Christ "emptied Himself." He, the Creator, passed by the heavenly host, delivered not them by taking their nature, but came down to us, who were lower than the angels, last in order of His rational creation, and became as one of us. He emptied Himself of His immortality, and the Immortal died; He became subject to death, the penalty of sin. Not only in birth, in life, in death, but now also in His glory, He is content to be hidden still. So did He veil His majesty that because, as man, He confessed, "My Father is greater than I," some whom He came to redeem will not believe in Him; others believe not in Him as He is. II. God incarnate preaches humility to His creature. For this is the foundation of the whole building of Christian virtues, or rather thus alone can we reach that foundation whereon we can build securely. The heathen had semblances or images of well-nigh every virtue; the heathen had self-devotion, contentment, contempt of the world without him and of the flesh; he had fortitude, endurance, self-denial, chastity, even a sort of reverence for God, whom he knew not; but he had not humility. The first beginning of Christian virtues is to lay aside pride. III. Dig deep, then, the foundation of humility, so only mayest thou hope to reach the height of charity; for by humility alone canst thou reach that Rock which shall not be shaken, that is, Christ. Founded by humility on that Rock, the storms of the world shall not shake thee; the torrent of evil custom shall not bear thee away; the empty winds of vanity shall not cast thee down: founded deep on that Rock, thou mayest build day by day that tower whose top shall reach unto heaven, to the very presence of God, the sight of God, and shalt be able to finish it, for He shall raise thee thither who for thy sake abased Himself to us. E. B. Pusey, Sermons from Advent to Whitsuntide, vol. i., p. 61. Philippians 2:5-8 The Humiliation of the Eternal Son. I. In looking into these words, we observe (1) that St. Paul clearly asserts Jesus Christ to have existed before His birth into the world. By saying that Jesus Christ existed in the form of God before He took on Him the form of a servant, St. Paul would have been understood by any one who read him in his own language to mean that, when as yet Christ had no human body or human soul, He was properly and literally God, because He existed in the form, and so possessed all the proper attributes, of God. (2) St. Paul goes on to say that, being God, Jesus Christ "thought it not robbery to be equal with God." This sentence would be more closely and clearly rendered, "Christ did not look on His equality with God as a prize to be jealously set store by." Men who are new to great positions always think more of them than those who have always enjoyed them. Christ, who was God from everlasting, laid no stress on this His eternal greatness; He emptied Himself of His Divine prerogatives or glory. (3) Of this self-humiliation St. Paul traces three distinct stages. The first consists in Christ's taking on Himself the form of a servant or slave. By this expression St. Paul means human nature. Without ceasing to be what He was, what He could not but be, He wrapped around Himself a created form, through which He would hold converse with men, in which He would suffer, in which He would die. The second stage of His humiliation is that Christ did not merely take human nature on Him; He became obedient to death. The third stage in this humiliation is that, when all modes of death were open to Him, He chose that which would bring with it the greatest share of pain and shame. "He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." When on the cross of shame He endures the sharpness of death, He is only completing that emptying Himself of His glory which began when, "taking upon Himself to deliver man, He did not abhor the Virgin's womb." II. Why may we suppose that God, by His providence acting in His Church, places before our eyes this most suggestive passage of Holy Scripture on the Sunday next before Easter? (1) We stand today on the threshold of the great week which in the thought of a well-instructed Christian, whose heart is in its right place, is beyond all comparison the most solemn week in the whole year. It is of the first importance that we should answer clearly this primary question: "Who is the Sufferer?" That which gives to the Passion and death of our Lord its real value is the fact that the Sufferer is more than man; that, although He suffers in and through a created nature, He is personally God. (2) The lesson which St. Paul draws for the benefit of the Philippians from the consideration of the Incarnation and Passion is a lesson which is as valuable to us as members of civil society, as it is valuable to members of the Church of Christ. If Christ did not set store on glory which was rightfully, inalienably His, why should we? All who have lived for others rather than for themselves in His Church have been true to Him, true to the spirit of His incarnation and death, true to what St. Paul calls "the mind that was in Christ Jesus." H. P. Liddon, Passiontide Sermons, p. 18. The Mystery of the Cross. I. We all agree that God is good; all, at least, do so who worship Him in spirit and in truth. We adore His majesty because it is the moral and spiritual majesty of perfect goodness; we give thanks to Him for His great glory because it is the glory, not merely of perfect power, wisdom, order, justice, but of perfect love, of perfect magnanimity, beneficence, activity, condescension, pity, in one word of perfect grace. But how much must the last word comprehend as long as there is misery and evil in the world, or in any other corner of the whole universe! Grace, to be perfect, must show itself by graciously forgiving penitents; pity, to be perfect, must show itself by helping the miserable; beneficence, to be perfect, must show itself by delivering the oppressed. II. The Apostles believed, and all those who accepted their Gospel believed, that they had found for the word "grace" a deeper meaning than had ever been revealed to the prophets of old time; that grace and goodness, if they were perfect, involved self-sacrifice. If man can be so good, God must be infinitely better; if man can love so much, God must love more; if man, by shaking off the selfishness which is his bane, can do noble deeds, then God, in whom is no selfishness at all, may at least have done a deed as far above his as the heavens are above the earth. Shall we not confess that man's self-sacrifice is but a poor and dim reflection of the self-sacrifice of God? Shall we not find, as thousands have found ere now, in the Cross of Calvary, the perfect satisfaction of our highest moral instincts, the realisation in act and fact of the highest idea which we can form of perfect condescension, namely, self-sacrifice exercised by a Being of whom perfect condescension, love, and self-sacrifice were not required by aught in heaven or on earth save by the necessity of His own perfect and inconceivable goodness? C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons, p. 1. References: Philippians 2:5-8.— G. Huntingdon, Sermons for Holy Seasons, p. 75; T. A. White, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 159; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 88. Philippians 2:5-9.—Ibid., vol. vi., p. 148. Philippians 2:5-11 These delineations of Christ reveal the true method of rendering moral service to man. Human deliverance and progress will remain a theory only until men come to work upon the method here stated. Great philanthropic programmes must begin at Bethlehem and comprehend the mysteries of Golgotha if ever they would ascend from Bethany into the heavens. To serve man, Christ became man; so in serving others we must identify ourselves with them. I. This identification of Himself with the human race made Christ accessible to all classes. We, too, in our philanthropic work must go down. II. Christ's piety was not a mere index finger. Instead of saying, "That is the way," He said, "I am the Way." A man's whole moral vitality must constitute his redeeming power. III. Does it not degrade a man to have this personal association with human vice and misery? The answer may be given in a question: Was Christ degraded? A man's spirit will determine his fate. Benevolence will come forth unpolluted as a sunbeam, beautiful as summer's purest flower. IV. Condescension is not degradation. Christ speaks in monosyllables, as it were; He pronounces each word with emphasis, giving each a wide circumference, until every tone penetrates the listener's ear. Be Godlike, and come down to those whom you would save. Parker, City Temple, vol. ii., p. 213. References: Philippians 2:5-11.— C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons, p. 193; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 82; J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 2nd series, p. 52. Philippians 2:6-7I. The Son of God was in the form of God: glorious as the Father; equal to the Father; the Creator and Upholder of the universe. Notwithstanding, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God, i.e.— for the words are obscure as they now stand— He deemed not His equality with God a matter eagerly to be grasped by Him; did not think of it as the robber does of his prey, so that he would not on any account let it go; esteemed it not matter of self-enrichment or self-indulgence. He looked on His Divine glory and majesty as willing, if need be, to detach them from Himself, if He might thus the better fulfil the great end of His Divine being: the expression of the Father's will and the showing forth of the brightness of His glory. He made Himself of no reputation; literally, He emptied Himself. He laid aside, not His Divine nature— for that was His very being— not His Divine person as the Son of God, not His purity and holiness— for these were the essential elements of His Divine nature and person— but all accessories to these: all power, all majesty, all renown, yea and what is more mysterious still to our apprehension: all that infinite knowledge of all things with which as God and Creator He was clothed. II. "He was made in the likeness of man." From being a glorious uncreated Being He became enshrined in a created nature, became as to His outward form a creature and subject to the laws of the creature: hunger; weariness; pain; death. We in vain endeavour to form any idea of this vast descent into degradation of the Son of God. When He, in His glory and His joy, took on Him the character of Redeemer, He knew what was in man; He saw all the depths of depravity, all the wonders of selfishness, all the pollutions of sin, of which this our nature was capable, and to which it would degrade itself: and He shrank not from contact with, from identification with, the vessel which had been thus defiled. We shall never know what Christ's humiliation was till we know what His exaltation and His glory are. The eye which cannot bear the light above is dazzled and misted when it contemplates the depth of darkness below. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. vi., p. 35. References: Philippians 2:6-11.— W. Harris, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 276. Philippians 2:7I. We must be careful that we do not suffer our knowledge of the perfect Deity of Jesus Christ to confound or weaken our apprehension of His entire and essential manhood. A very little error on this point may lead to the worst consequences. For instance, if Christ be not absolutely a Man, if His Divinity come in in the least degree to qualify human nature, then He practically almost ceases to stand forth as an example which we are to follow. For the answer will be always ready to our lips, He is of a different and distinct order; imitation is impossible, for He was Himself holy by Deity: and besides this, unless He be perfect man, His death may carry the form of an infinite sacrifice, but it cannot be viewed in the light of a strict substitution. II. The manhood which Christ assumed is full of the deepest comfort to His Church. For observe its consequence. All the nature of our race was gathered and concentrated into the one human life. He stood forth the great representative Man; what He did, it was as though we had done it: what He bore, it was as though we had suffered it. But were even one iota taken out of the manhood of Jesus, the parallel of the work would cease, and the provisions of the mediatorial scheme would fail. Therefore St. John twice makes the belief in it essential to our salvation. "Whosoever confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is born of God." J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 1. Philippians 2:7 Christ a Slave. The word servant will convey to us in this present age a very inadequate idea of the degree of the degradation of which it is the figure. For service has been dignified since Jesus was a servant. We know nothing now more really honourable than Christian service. But let us not forget that He first taught us to call servants friends. I. Notice one or two of the laws and customs respecting Jewish slaves, that you may see the correctness of the title and the exceeding extent of the humiliation of Jesus. (1) No slave among the Jews could have any position or right as a citizen; he had no political standing. If injured, he had no redress; if assaulted, no protection. And very accurate was the counterpart in our Saviour's life when subjected to the most outrageous violence and wrong. No arm of law was ever outstretched for His defence. (2) The slave could hold no property whatever. And what had He, the Servant of servants? Which of the world's paupers ever walked the earth as poor as the world's Creator? (3) And every slave was in the eyes of the law a mere piece of goods and chattels, which could be bought and sold. It was in the strictness therefore of the letter of the law to which He subjected Himself when for the base sum of less than three pounds Judas sold Him. (4) And when he died, the slave was still pursued by his brand; he might be scourged and tortured, and a last distinctive punishment was assigned him: the cross. So Jesus under the lash and on the tree was the slave. II. As a servant or slave Christ had two duties to execute. The first was to His Father; (2) the second was to His people. What He did the last night in the upper chamber is only an epitome of His whole life; the girded towel and the basin in the hand characterised the Man. He is always going to persons' feet; He is always performing inferior offices; He is always in the attitude of some active ministration; He takes His Church as a charge committed to Him by God, and He honours and tends each one, as a servant does his lord's friends, and of each one He is able to give in the good account at last, "Of them which Thou gavest Me have I lost none." J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874. Reference: Philippians 2:7, Philippians 2:8.— W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion, p. 3. Philippians 2:8 The Humility of Christ. I. Among the virtues of Christ's humanity brought to dwell among men was humility, a virtue which lies at the foundation of the Christian character, a virtue unknown to the moral philosophy of the ancient world. "Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself." The Apostle is not now speaking of the infinite condescension whereby He as God left the glory that He had with the Father before the worlds were made, but rather he is speaking of the humility of Christ as man, by which as a Child, though conscious that He was about His Father's business, He went down to Nazareth, and was subject to Joseph and Mary, that humility by which He became obedient unto death, even the shameful, ignominious death of the cross. II. Humility is the direct opposite and contradiction of the spirit which, in the case of those who possessed high privileges among the sons of God, exalted them against God; and so they fell from heaven. And therefore, as humility is the groundwork and beginning of the Christian life, so it is the ingredient and accompaniment of all progress in heavenly virtue, the lowly handmaid of true charity. III. Hard it is for human souls to keep humility and strength. According to the world's estimation, humility is at a discount. And another difficulty arises from the fact that the counterfeits of humility are so detestable. But if the counterfeits are base, genuine humility, sterling modesty, bear none the less the stamp and impress of the Divine character; and if they be not current in the world, yet surely they pass without question for their full value in the Christian life. With humility come the grace, the courage, the fortitude, necessary for the Christian warfare. The truly brave are, as a rule, modest and humble. And, finally, humility is a brave helper and comforter in sorrow, and trial, and tribulation; and when the end draws nigh, it has the peace of resignation, it has the calm assurance of the presence of the Comforter within, with whom the soul can fear no evil, though it be in the valley of the shadow of death. E. Warre, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiii., p. 209. Christ Degraded. I. Consider the manner in which Christ as a Man took the lowest place and did the meanest part. Here is the most beautiful feature in all the exquisite portraiture of His humiliation: that at the time He did any of the acts of His wonderful life the humiliation was never prominent and seldom apparent. For had you met Jesus in one of His usual walks of mercy, or sat with Him at the meal, or listened to Him as He spoke, I do not imagine that you would have been impressed at once and very consciously with the lowliness of the transaction, as though He were doing some very wonderfully condescending thing. That is what we often do— a posture, a garb, a studied word— and we call it humility. But there would have been a depth of selfforgetfulness in all which Christ said and did and was which would tell on you in a way which you could scarcely clothe in language, but when you looked quietly back upon it, it would amazingly grow upon you in the greatness of its quiet modesty. And this is the truth of the grace of a humble mind: it is too humble to look humble; it hides self so well that the act which hides it is not seen— the humility is humbled. II. The great lesson of every Christmas is humility. The genius of the life of Jesus from its cradle to its glory was self-abandonment, the most self-denying love, robing itself in the most self-forgetting modesty. He cast His own deeds into the shade by the very light which threw a radiance on the actions of His people. If He told us to take the lowest seat, Himself chose a lower still than all His followers, and burying unparalleled glories in unequalled sufferings, He was to men only a Servant and to God nothing but a Child. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 9. I. Christ's death was not a mere martyrdom. A martyr is one who dies for the Church, who is put to death for preaching and maintaining the truth. Christ indeed was put to death for maintaining the Gospel, yet He was not a martyr, but He was much more than a martyr. Had He been a mere man, He would have been rightly called a martyr; but as He was not a mere man, so He was not a mere martyr. Man dies as a martyr, but the Son of man dies as an atoning Sacrifice. The sufferings and death of the Word incarnate could not pass away like a dream; they could not be a mere martyrdom or a mere display or figure of something else; they must have had a virtue in them. This we might be sure of, though nothing had been told us about the result; but the result is also revealed— it is this: our reconciliation to God, the expiation of our sins, and our new creation in holiness. II. We believe that when Christ suffered on the cross our nature suffered in Him. Human nature, fallen and corrupt, was under the wrath of God, and it was impossible that it should be restored to His favour till it had expiated its sin by suffering. In Him our sinful nature died and rose again; when it died in Him on the cross, that death was its new creation: in Him it satisfied its old and heavy debt, for the presence of His Divinity gave it transcendent merit. His presence had kept it pure from sin from the first; His personal indwelling hallowed it and gave it power. And thus, when it had been offered up upon the cross and was made perfect by suffering, it became the firstfruits of a new man; it became a Divine leaven of holiness for the new birth and spiritual life of as many as should receive it. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vi., p. 69. References: Philippians 2:8.— Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 328; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 94; C. J. Vaughan, Words of Hope, p. 162; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 85; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 155; J. Vaughan, Sermons, 1869, p. 234. Philippians 2:9.— Philpot, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 265; Homilist, 2nd series, p. 541; Preacher's Monthly, vol. i., p. 267; J. Cairns, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 315. Philippians 2:9-11.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii., No. 101; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 109; Ibid., vol. xviii., p. 293; Ibid., vol. xxx., p. 282; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 222. Philippians 2:10I. Even angels are to worship in the name of Jesus. It is, however, more to the purpose for us to remember that God desires men, all men, so to worship. And it is a thought at once solemnising and comforting that not only living men, but the dead also, are required to call upon God in the name of Jesus. It is assumed in the words of our text that all God's creatures will bend the knee somehow. Prayer is an instinct of nature. God has so made us that we feel a power above us, and desire that that power should be friendly to us, and not hostile. The first element of prayer" is the calling in of that power, the praying it not to be unfriendly to us, not to exert itself to crush, but to benefit, to bless, to save. The poor idolater does that. All his miserable superstitions point that way. Prayer in some form is an instinct. But is prayer in the name of Jesus an instinct? Is it the prayer which even Christians always offer? That is the name which is our passport; that is the name which has power with God and prevails; that is the name which we must take with us if we would know what it is to be heard and to be answered. II. And that every tongue may confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. This is the second part of the design of the exaltation of Jesus. God will have Him owned as Lord throughout the whole world. Yes, the praises of the Church as well as the prayers of the Church have a value in heaven. The religion of many Christians never gets beyond prayer. There is not a word of praise in it; there is no bold, frank, honest avowal of convictions deeply cherished as to the person and the work of Christ. The language of praise in God's worship ought to be consistent with the still more real language of the life. "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord," our Saviour Himself asks of us, "and do not the things which I say?" If the tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, ought not our acts and common words, our habits and principles, our aims and motives, to say the same thing? The acknowledgment which is frank and emphatic ought to be consistent also and harmonious. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 103. Reference: Philippians 2:11.— W. Wilkinson, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 109. Philippians 2:12 Working out Salvation. (1) This counsel implies that something has been already done. The very phrase "Work out" suggests this. The salvation has been begun, and is in one sense a complete thing. We stand still and see the salvation of God. (2) The exhortation implies that something more is to be done: "Work out your own salvation." Then it is not only a work done for us and without us, but it is a continual process within us. There is a new life created, and the life grows, as every life does, and must grow or die. I. We work out our own salvation by the acquisition of spiritual truth. There is a danger in resting satisfied with a faith received by tradition from our fathers. While it is unwise to break away from the past, it is equally unwise to reject the new truth that may be revealed to us and to close our minds against reasonable and honest convictions. II. There will then be progress in character. The spiritual truth thus acquired will be the food of the soul, supporting and strengthening it; the faith that was once like a weak thread binding us to Christ will become a cable to hold the ship from drifting in the storm. III. This work must advance even in the absence of means which are important. God may deprive you of your compass and keep the north star all the more brightly before you; He may take away the Apostle, and yet grant a fuller revelation of Christ. IV. Think of the spirit in which we are to do the work. There is no room for presumption, but much for precaution and self-distrust. "Be not high-minded, but fear." J. Owen, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 237. References: Philippians 2:12.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii., No. 1003; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. viii., p. 144; F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii., p. 337. Philippians 2:12-13I. A Christian man has his whole salvation already accomplished for him in Christ, and yet he is to work it out. Work as well as believe, and in the daily practice of faithful obedience, in the daily subjugation of your own spirits to His Divine power, in the daily crucifixion of your flesh, with its affections and lusts, in the daily straining after loftier heights of godliness and purer atmospheres of devotion and love, make more thoroughly your own that which you possess. Work into the substance of your souls that which you have. "Apprehend that for which you are apprehended of Christ," "Give all diligence to make your calling and election sure," and remember that not a past act of faith, but a present and continuous life of loving, faithful work in Christ, which is His and yet yours, is the holding fast the beginning of your confidence firm unto the end. II. God works all in us, and yet we have to work. The Apostle did not absorb all our individuality in one great Divine cause which made men mere tools and puppets; he did not believe that the inference was, Do you sit still and feel yourselves the ciphers that you are. His practical conclusion is the very opposite; it is, God does all: therefore do you work. Work, for God works in you. III. The Christian has his salvation secured, and yet he is to fear and tremble. Your faith can be worth nothing unless it has, bedded deep in it, that trembling distrust of your own power which is the pre-requisite and the companion of all thankful and faithful reception of God's infinite mercy. A. Maclaren, Sermons, p. 215. The Twofold Force in Salvation. This sentence falls from the lips of St. Paul as easy and natural as his breath. It has no particular emphasis, no special importance; it is not a climax either of thought or feeling; it is not a definition; it shows no trace of a long or careful process of thought of which it is the conclusion. As it came from St. Paul it was a simple, natural, almost commonplace exhortation to earnestness, with the encouragement that God would cooperate, as any one of us might say to one another, Work with all your might, and God will help you. St. Paul says simply this: Strive for your salvation; work it out yourself,; do not rely on others; it is your own matter, and a very serious one: hence be earnest about it; do not trifle nor take it for granted that you will be saved; if you ever see salvation you must work for it with fear and trembling, or you may fail of it. But at the same time remember also, for your encouragement, that while you work God also works in you; He wills in your will; He acts in your act. If you are earnest in this matter and have an honest heart about it, you may rely on the fact that God is at work in you, the soul and energy of the whole process. Such, and so simple, is the thought. But, simple as it is, it teaches several important lessons. I. That salvation is an achievement. It was a moral process that St. Paul had in mind. If a man has any sinful habits, he must overcome them; if he has any lacks or weaknesses, he must work to supply the deficiency. And then there is the great reality of character— a welded group of qualities that only comes about by elaboration. The qualities may have a natural root or ground, but each one must be worked out; it must come under the conscience and the will; it must be tried, and shaped, and fed, and worked into the substance of the character. II. This achievement of salvation is at the cost of sharp and definite strife. All the various works that are commonly assigned to man are works of deliverance or salvation; they resolve themselves at last to that complexion, and properly take on that designation. You can have no better or truer name for the great world-work of man than salvation. And as salvation is the great world business, so is it the main thing every man has to do. When the house of his heart is swept clean, and the faulty or vicious disposition is brought under control, then there opens before him the great positive work of salvation; then he may begin to build himself up into the proportions of true spiritual manhood. III. The world does not exist by itself; it exists in God. Man does not live, machine-like, by himself; he lives, and moves, and has and holds his being, in God. His energy and force are not his own, but flow out of God. He has, indeed, a free will, but God is the source of it; but, because it is a free will, God can only act with it and by its consent. He is not, however, excluded from the realm of our nature. God may enter the will, and fill it with power, and work with it, without impairing its nature or injuring the value of its action. Use your will; work out your salvation with fear and trembling, that is, in humble, dead earnestness; when you so work, God is working with you. It is all His; it is all yours: it is each; it is both: it is neither alone; together they are one. T. T. Munger, The Appeal to Life, p. 169. I. There is a sense in which salvation is not yet wrought out, not yet accomplished, not yet wrought so as to be wrought successfully. The Christian is saved; Christ has borne his sins; Christ has done all for him; Christ is his sufficient sacrifice; Christ is his availing Intercessor; Christ is charged with his soul; Christ is already his Life; and because Christ lives, he lives also: but yet, though saved, he is not safe; though all has been done for him, he is not in repose; though his true life is hid with Christ in God, yet his lower life is still lived on earth, in a world of abounding temptation, of perpetual turmoil, of overflowing iniquity, of unrest therefore, of anxiety, yes of risk. Like St. Peter walking upon the water, he is safe while he looks to Christ; but he is not safe from the danger of looking off from Christ. If he does that, he begins to sink. Perseverance is a privilege of the elect; but what sign is there of the elect, what infallible sign, save perseverance? He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved; till that endurance is completed, who shall presume upon it? The condition of the Christian is made up of various, of opposite, ingredients. There is sorrow for sin; there is peace in believing; there is the fear of God; there is the love of God; there is salvation rejoiced in; there is salvation to be wrought out. II. Let us now turn to the opposite half of the text. A Christian must work out his own salvation; that is one truth: it is God who works in him both to will and to do; that is the other truth. Let us say then to ourselves, If it is God who works in Christians both to will and to do, to Him will I seek, for Him will I wait, with Him will I abide, day by day, that He may both lay in me the train of holy resolution, and also kindle it into action by the spark of His grace. We have in the subject (1) a motive of warning and (2) a motive of hope. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 119 The Work of the Christian Life. I. The exhortation. There is a sense in which salvation is no work of ours, but is simply the free gift of God in Christ Jesus. But salvation is a great deal more than forgiveness. It is not enough that our souls are pardoned and justified through the faith of Christ unless we are also delivered from those evil tendencies, habits, and likings, those lusts of the flesh and of the mind, which are, after all, the real ruin of our souls. In this view of it, salvation must be wrought out by us, not merely for us. For this part of it our cooperation is as essential as God's grace. Let us be up and doing, busy and earnest, patient, faithful, struggling with sinful lusts and habits, mortifying the flesh, and reaching forth and pressing on to the mark for the prize of our high calling. So let us give all diligence to work out our salvation. II. The encouragement. God is working in us, and He is mighty to save. All the feelings you have that seem to discourage you ought to encourage you as being tokens of His working in you. Let not your heart be troubled, only let not your hand be slack, for He will have you to be working along with Him. III. The manner of the work: "with fear and trembling." The very earnestness, the very devotion, the very eagerness, of Christian love and hope become a kind of fear. Such a responsibility we have for the grace shown to us in Christ; such a labour lies before us ere in Christ we are meet for the inheritance of the saints. The Christian must needs work on with fear and trembling, with diligence, watchfulness, and hopefulness, yielding up his soul to every impulse from on high to make his calling and election sure. W. C. Smith, Christian World Pulpit, vol, xxiv., p. 81. References: Philippians 2:12, Philippians 2:13.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv., No. 820; D. Rhys Jenkins, The Eternal Life, p. 242; G. Huntingdon, Sermons for Holy Seasons, p. 199; J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, p. 80; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. i., p. 180; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 131; Ibid., vol. x., p. 410; Preacher's Monthly, vol. x., p. 23; Redpath, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 301. Philippians 2:12-18.— J. J. Goadby, Ibid., vol. xv., p. 345. Philippians 2:13.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 362; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 306; Preacher's Monthly, vol. iii., p. 243. Philippians 2:14, Philippians 2:15.— Gregory, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 49. Philippians 2:14-16 The Duties of a Church towards its Neighbourhood. I. The relation of a Church to a neighbourhood is that of salt to the land. Prejudice may be dispersed, and men be favourably disposed to the truth, (1) by the irreproachable character of the individual members of a Church; (2) by the harmony and brotherly love of a Church; (3) by the inviting aspect of the public worship and ministry of a Church; (4) by Churches forming benevolent institutions in their neighbourhood. II. The relation of a Church to a neighbourhood is that of light to the world. A Church can testify to the truth (1) by providing and sustaining an efficient ministry; (2) by every member ministering as he hath received the gift; (3) by cherishing and exercising a spirit worthy of its vocation. III. The individual members of any locality so circumscribed as to admit of fellowship are to that locality as separate stars in one constellation, and the Churches of such a locality are thereto as so many golden candlesticks in one holy place. S. Martin, Rain upon the Mown Grass, p. 491. Reference: Philippians 2:14-16.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 472; Homilist, 4th series, vol. i., p. 301. Philippians 2:15 Sons of God. I. Sons of God. Let us inquire into the nature of the relationship. (1) The sons of God are here clearly distinguished from the world. It is a title in whose honour all then living, man as man, had not a right to share. But how does this square with the doctrine of the universal fatherhood, with the right which we claim for every human spirit to say, "My Father," with the assertion which we maintain that in regeneration a relation to God is not for the first time created, but renewed, and in a higher and more glorious form restored? I think we shall see our way through the difficulty if we recognise that children and sons are not coordinate here. The one is a higher power of the other; the one is the base out of which the other is to be evolved. The children, those made in the Father's likeness, alone can become sons, children of His Spirit; but before the child grows into the son there must have been a spiritual unfolding of the Father's likeness, which makes the children sons indeed. Man universally may be a child of the great Father; but he may be a sensual child, a rebellious child, a sullen, envious child, a prodigal child; and to such God accords not the name of sons. Children He still calls them; a Father's duties He still amply fulfils; a Father's tenderness He feels; a Father's sorrows He knows: but sons they are not; they cannot be until the spirit of sonship is in them, until all the higher and heaven-born elements of their being conspire to make the relation of the child effectual to the gladdening of the Father's home, the doing of the Father's work, the blessing of the Father's heart. (2) And this is what regeneration means. It is the begetting of the spiritual sonship, the carrying up of the child's relation through all the higher powers and faculties of the human spirit, and yielding to God this child complete. And this needs a spiritual regeneration. Life must be kindled from the source of life and grow by communion with it. II. The manifestation of sonship and its fruits. Christ first exalted goodness to the throne of the world. Force had been the Divine thing till then. It was to be the sheer force of goodness which should bear the Christian on to the spiritual conquest of mankind. There is nothing exclusive about sonship. "Holding forth the word of life." Why? That men may live also. The sons are to be magnets to draw the children to the Father, that they may be received as sons. This is the essential element of the light that they are to hold forth: the word of life, the word of sonship, the word of regeneration; they are to reveal the Father and the sons. One glimpse of a home to an exile is the sweetest attraction you can offer. That is the meaning of a Church: God's home; Christ's home for souls. And what a Church is on a large scale a home should be on a small one. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/sermonbible/ Philippians 3:3 The Inheritors of the Promises. I. They who worship God in the spirit are the sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. II. They behold the brightness of the Father's glory. III. They inherit great and precious promises. IV. They are favoured with special Divine revelations. V. They are a royal priesthood. VI. They are connected with an ancient and sacred lineage. VII. While of the Israelites as concerning the flesh Christ came, of those whom Paul here describes Christ comes as a gospel and as a revelation to the world. S. Martin, Rain upon the Mown Grass, p. 321. References: Philippians 3:3.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 126. Philippians 3:4-7—Homilist, vol. i., p. 40. Philippians 3:7 The Christian Estimate of Gain and Loss. The Christian man keeps an accurate account-book; he reckons up with an intelligent and enlightened judgment his gains and his losses. And most important is it that those who would be Christian men should be rightly informed and rightly minded upon this great question, this question which takes precedence of other questions, inasmuch as it is preliminary and introductory to all. I. I need not say what answer the world would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the natural heart would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the religion of many persons would return to this inquiry. You will find health entered as a clear gain, and money as a clear gain; comfort, ease, tranquillity of mind and life, prosperity in business, a sufficient and growing income, all these things will be found at once carried to the side of profit, and no hesitation, and no further question asked concerning them. And you will as surely find sickness, disappointment, contraction of the means of pleasure, sorrow, pain, bereavement, entered in the same reckoning as an undoubted and unmixed loss. II. St. Paul says that for Christ's sake he now accounts as loss all that he had once accounted gain. The reason why he calls his apparent gains a loss is that they had too great a tendency to make him trust in them; to make him look to outward things as his passport to heaven; to make him build on a foundation of his own, and not upon the rock of another's righteousness. What do we know of the thought, Things which were gain to me, these I have accounted for Christ's sake loss? I say it sorrowfully, but with deep truth, that many of us live and die on the strength of a gospel which has no Christ in it, no demolition of self, whether in the form of self-confidence or self-seeking, and no exaltation of Christ upon the ruins of self either as our Saviour or as our Lord. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 183. Philippians 3:7-8 The Apostle's Ground of Trust. I. When such general homage is paid to earnestness as in our own time, what wonder if some people should mistake it for religion; and if a man should imagine that because he is zealous in the activities of benevolence, warmly attached to certain Church organisations, and in some measure sympathetic with the spiritual forces which they embody, he is really a partaker of the undefiled religion of the Bible! It is no marvel if a man accustomed to earthly standards of arbitration should imagine that the goodness which has been so cheerfully acknowledged on earth will be as cheerfully acknowledged in heaven, and that he who has passed muster with the world will not be sent abashed and crestfallen from the judgment-seat of God. You may be early initiated into the ordinances of the Christian Church; you may have come of a long line of spiritually illustrious ancestry; you may give an intellectual assent to the grand harmony of Christian truth; you may be zealous in certain activities of benevolence, and in certain matters connected even with the Church of God itself; and yet you may gain all this world of honour and lose your own soul. II. Notice the compensating power of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ. This compensation runs through creation; it seems to be a radical law both in the physical and spiritual government of God. Trust that Cross for yourselves; take hold of it; it is consecrated. In all circumstances of your history, in all exigencies of your mortal lot, take firm hold of the Cross. W. M. Punshon, Sermons, p. 384. I. Is that man's normal state— loss in order to gain? Certainly not. In God's own case it is not so. Has not God perfect and complete happiness? Was there any amount of loss sustained by Adam in order to gain? Was there any progress dependent upon loss? The idea is an absurdity. It was not so. Then how did it come to pass that loss ever came to be sustained in order to gain? I need scarcely say that all loss in the universe is involved in sin, it is sin that has brought loss, and nothing else, and we all feel it and realise it. We have lost paradise, we have lost the image of God, we have lost our inheritance, we have lost everything, by sin. Then comes the question, Is it the law in regard to a sinful being that there is loss in order to gain? Does the suffering of loss bring gain? I say distinctly not, not as a necessary rule. There may be always loss and no gain. Yet, though loss does not bring gain with it, there never can be gain to a sinner but through loss. A man may suffer loss and have no gain, but no sinner can ever get gain but by suffering loss. II. Look at the first principle in this matter; look at the Saviour and then at the saved. How was it with Jesus? Did not He suffer loss in order to gain? He must needs suffer, if He is to be a Saviour; He must needs sustain loss; He must lay aside the robe of His glory, He must take our nature upon Him, He must die in that nature, He must suffer the curse of that nature, or He cannot be a Saviour. But He did do it. Then the gain of salvation was the gain of Christ. And as regards ourselves, whatever stands between the soul and Christ must go, whether it is what the world calls good or bad; whether it is gross immorality or integrity, honesty, and uprightness; whether it is the love of pleasure or of wealth; whether it is the love of wife, husband, or child. The creature must give way to God; if the heart is to be filled with all the precious things of God's salvation in Christ, the creature must give way. A. Molyneux, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 120. References: Philippians 3:7, Philippians 3:8.— J. Jackson, Sermons before the University of Oxford, p. 1; Philippians 3:7-9.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii., No. 1357. Philippians 3:8I. "The knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord"; that is, the knowledge of our wants and of the means by which those wants may be most fully satisfied; the knowledge of sin and of salvation. Men's eyes in general are equally closed against both, for as none but Christians have anything like a true notion of their own evil, so also none but Christians look forward with any lively hope to the glory that shall be revealed hereafter. When our Lord was foretelling the state of the world in after-times, He more than once declared to His disciples that His Gospel would only in a small degree overcome the wickedness of the world; He says that "as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man," that as before the Flood men ate and drank, bought and sold, planted and builded, and thought nothing of God till His judgments burst upon them and destroyed them all, so it should be at the time when the Son of man should be revealed. Now how is it that so many of us are living exactly in the manner which Christ described? II. Very often after baptism children are suffered to remain in complete ignorance of everything that concerns their salvation. The boy grows into manhood with a confirmed unchristian practice and scarcely any relics of Christian knowledge. And what is the issue? In the ordinary course of things, it is a sinful life and a hopeless death, unless God touches the heart with a sense of its danger, and in His power and mercy brings it to true and effectual conversion. Those who have grown up to youth or manhood without having yet fully embraced the offer of salvation through Christ are called upon to turn to Him and to believe on Him; and the threatenings addressed to the unconverted sinner are at present all in their full force addressed to them. Remember that he that doeth righteousness is righteous; that he that committeth sin— that is, who is in the habit of carelessly committing it— hath not seen Christ, neither knoweth Him, but is of the devil, who has been a sinner from the beginning. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i., p. 28. References: Philippians 3:8.— J. H. Jellett, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 25; Homilist, 4th series, vol. i., p. 68; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 288. Philippians 3:8-9 Christ the Only Gain. Consider:— I. What it is to win Christ. (1) To win Christ is to count Him gain. What is gain to me is what puts me on a right footing with God. This I once thought that my personal qualifications of birth, profession, privilege, attainment, might do; now I see that for such purpose they are useless, and worse than useless. In the view of the end for which I once prized them, I now perceive that Christ is gain. (2) Christ is coveted and sought as gain. Are you so thoroughly in earnest in this matter as not merely to perceive that Christ is gain, but to be honestly anxious to possess this gain? (3) Christ is appropriated as gain. "He that seeketh findeth"; he who seeks Christ, willing just as he is to have Christ just as He is, finds Him, and in finding Christ appropriates Him, and in appropriating Christ feels Him to be gain. It is for this, and nothing short of this, that you are asked to count all things but loss that you may win Christ. (4) You win Christ so as to enjoy Him as gain; you win Him, not as the miser hoards his wealth, to keep it, not as the spendthrift gets his property, to waste it. He is yours for profitable use: for peace, contentment, honour, happiness, and whatever else is comprehended in your standing right with God. II. To be found in Christ is the fitting sequel of winning Christ; it is the double fruit, the twofold good, of winning Christ. (1) For defence I am to be found in Christ, that I may meet every adversary, that I may silence every answer. I have always to present on every side an impregnable front; I have a righteousness, not my own, but wholly Divine, to plead in every emergency; against every adversary who would assail or question my standing, I have the Apostle's challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" (2) But I am to win Christ, so as to be found in Him, not merely to meet and answer every assault of the accusing adversary, but to meet also and obey the high calling of God in Christ. If I am found in Christ, it is that I may die with Him unto sin, and live with Him unto righteousness and unto God; it is that I may grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; it is that in Him I may go on to perfection. R. S. Candlish, Sermons, p. 203. I. St. Paul has consented to the loss of all things; nay, he has transferred to the side of loss in his accounts all that once stood on the side of gain; and if the matter stopped there, we might have pronounced him a bankrupt as much in hope as in possession. But he now says that he is purposed to replace all his cancelled gains by one single item, just one word, just one name, a monosyllable, the name, as some would tell us, of a dead man, the name of One whom rulers and philosophers have agreed in despising and rejecting: "That I may gain Christ." When St. Paul hoped to be able to write the word Christ on the side of his receipts, he hoped to enter there the brief summary of inexhaustible treasures, enough to counterbalance the loss of all things and to replace it by an inestimable and incalculable gain. II. St. Paul's second aim is directed to the great day of judgment: "That I may win Christ and be found in Him." St. Paul had submitted to the loss of all things now, in the hope that he might be safe then. While others shall be found in that day standing, as it were, exposed and defenceless while God's judgments are abroad upon the earth, even like those Egyptians of old who believed not the prediction of the plague of hail and dared its perils in the open field, St. Paul and those who, like him and with him, have believed, will then not be exposed, not be unsheltered; they will be found in Christ. Could any words express more forcibly the safety of the Christian? He will be found enclosed, incorporated, and thus hidden, in Christ Himself, in the Lord, in the Judge of man. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 199. References: Philippians 3:8, Philippians 3:9.— L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal, p. 203; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iii., p. 83. Philippians 3:8-11 The Cross Borne for us and in us. I. The whole of the Gospel is the doctrine of the Cross, but that twofold: the cross borne for us and the virtue and power of the Cross by the sacraments communicated to us and henceforth to be borne by us. By baptism we are made members of Him who for us was crucified; and our life from baptism to our death should be a practice of the Cross, a learning to be crucified, a crucifixion of our passions, appetites, desires, wills, until one by one they be all nailed, and we have no will but the will of our Father who is in heaven; and in the prospect of each lesser cross, such as are allotted to us, not merely when laid upon us, and we cannot escape them, we, too, should take up our Master's words, "Not My will, but Thine." II. The ancient Christians followed this example: they shared each other's sufferings; they suffered one for another, the rich the poverty of the poor; they saw Christ in the poor, the prisoners, the captives, the sick, as He bade them and as He had told them, and underwent sufferings for them; they laid down their lives for the brethren. So then they well understood the two parts of the doctrine of the Cross, the cross which was borne for us by Christ and the cross which was to be borne by us, in Christ's strength and for Christ's sake, and this not for a brighter crown merely, but that they might finally be saved. III. Every shade of self-denial, from the pettiest denial of our appetites to the martyr's mangled and scored human form, is all included in bearing the cross, the least because He has commanded it, and He, for His own love's sake, accepts it. All crosses are preparations for heaven; for though we know not its unspeakable joys or wherein they consist, this we know: that we must learn to do His will on earth as it is done in heaven, to be like the blessed spirits who do His pleasure, swift and instant as the lightning, to count nothing labour, toil, or cross, which is to do His will. This portion of the cross has a blessed privilege, in that it is taken willingly in obedience, not simply borne willingly, as the chastisement of disobedience; it is taken in order, in what little way regenerate man is capable of, to be like his Maker; it is taken out of love to Him and to do His commandments. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times" vol. iii., p. 1. References: Philippians 3:9.—Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 277; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ill., p. 90; J. C. Finlayson, Ibid., vol. xi., p. 342; T. Jones, Ibid., vol. xii., p. 118; T. T. Lynch, Three Months' Ministry, p. 97. Philippians 3:10I. The great object of the Christian, the great end and aim of the Christian life, is to know Jesus Christ. There is a great difference between "knowing" a person and "knowing about" a person. Many can give an outline of His history, can repeat some of His sayings, and describe His miracles, but not every one knows Him with a personal knowledge and acquaintance, knows what it is to have spiritual communication with Him, knows what it is to understand Him and to sympathise with Him, even as a man understands and sympathises with a personal and human friend. And it was this knowledge that the Apostle asked for, and it is this that every Christian heart desires: to know the personal Jesus Christ with some degree of intimacy, and to advance and grow in that knowledge day by day under the promised teaching and direction of God the Holy Ghost. II. This personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ becomes an impossibility so long as our dependence for salvation is upon external observance. St. Paul found it to be so. Whilst he was trusting to ceremonies and to what he considered to be good works for salvation, there was a barrier erected between his soul and God; he had no fellowship with God: and it was not until the barrier was thrown down, it was not until the last obstacle of self-trust and self-dependence was removed, that he came to know "the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom He had sent." There is a broad difference between religiousness and religion. There are people who think that all is right with their souls because they are interested in Christian worship, because they feel profoundly moved by an eloquent sermon. This is "religiousness"; this St. Paul had before his conversion. Religion, as Paul found it afterwards, is something very different from this: it is the surrender of the will to God's will in Christ; it is the suffering Christ so to enter into the soul that every act, every thought and feeling, shall be pervaded by His presence; it is the living for Christ and by Christ. G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1010. Philippians 3:10I think many must have felt a kind of disappointment in the language of the collect for Easter Day. It begins grandly, as we suppose an Easter prayer should begin: "Almighty God, who through Thine only-begotten Son hast overcome death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life." But what is there answering to this invocation in the words which form the substance of the petition? They simply ask the almighty God that "as by His special grace preventing us He does put into our minds good desires, so by His continual grace we may bring the same to good effect." Is not this a sudden and painful fall? In moments of strong, highly braced feeling, when we have regarded Easter as offering at once the greatest gift to the universe and the deepest consolation for individual sorrow, have we not been indignant that we are required to utter words which appear to forget both? I. We dwell upon the fact of Christ's resurrection; upon the evidences which establish it; upon the inferences which may be drawn from it. St. Paul also dwelt upon the fact; it was the very ground of his Gospel to mankind; but fact, evidences, inferences, were all inseparably bound up with the idea which is expressed in the words of the text: "The power of His resurrection." The power or energy which quickened the soul and the body of Jesus Christ, which made it impossible that He should be holden of death, is declared to be the selfsame power which works in us who believe, which opens the eyes of our understanding, which reveals to us the hope of our calling. Those who receive the New Testament as a Divine authority cannot shrink from these words; cannot explain them away. II. Assuredly those who wrote the prayers of which our liturgy is composed did accept it. They connected Easter Eve and Easter Day with Christian baptism; they believed that we are baptised into the death of Christ, that we are buried with Him in baptism, and that we rise to a new life by faith and the operation of God, who raised Him from death; in other words, they looked upon the resurrection-day as the new birthday of the world. And is it then a low and grovelling prayer, unworthy of the Easter season, degrading our thoughts of the victory that has been won for us and for mankind, that He who, by His special grace preventing us, has put into our minds good desires, by His continual help will bring the same to good effect? Could you have a more wonderful, a more practical, test than that which this prayer offers you, and enables you to apply, of the triumph over death, of the opening of the new gate into life? Could any ecstatic language about the state of departed spirits, about the things which eye has not seen nor ear heard, enable us equally to realise our communion with the one, actually to participate in the other? To be governed by Christ in all the movements of his being, in all his purposes, in all the issues of these movements and purposes— is not this the freedom of the most glorified spirit? To be able to do what one longs to do, our longings being first in accordance with the Divinest mind, prompted by the Divinest inspiration— is not this a good thing beyond the grasp of eye or ear, answering to the desires of the heart, but surpassing them all? And this petition, because His risen life is ours, we are to believe that He will begin to answer at once, will answer completely hereafter. F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. vi., p. 1. The Power of Christ's Resurrection. I. The power of the Lord's resurrection is manifested as furnishing the strongest confirmation of the truth of the Gospel. II. The power of Christ's resurrection is exhibited in the effectual comfort which it affords under sorrow and suffering. III. The power of Christ's resurrection makes itself felt as an incentive to holiness. IV. A fourth evidence of the power of Christ's resurrection is found in the comfort which it gives to us when kindred and friends are carried to the world of spirits. V. Once more, the power of Christ's resurrection furnishes an effectual remedy against the fear of death. J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 226. Philippians 3:10I. That is to say, participate in them. Christ, then, did not suffer what He suffered that we might be discharged from suffering it, did not endure certain pains in our stead, that we might escape them; otherwise St. Paul could not have yearned as he did to be admitted to drink of His cup. He sacrificed Himself to put away sin, and it is only as sin is put away that suffering can diminish and cease. Our emancipation from it depends upon our emancipation from sin. Pain is symptomatic— symptomatic of the want of conformity to law. Nothing can extirpate it from the world but a reduction of the world's dislocations, which latter is the end and aim of Christ crucified, and not for the sake of our deliverance from the misery of the pain, but because such dislocations are themselves degradation and shame, and their cure grace, and beauty, and eternal life. Let us be thankful that so long as sin remains untaken away more or less of suffering remains. In our as yet unrightened realm, its pricks are serviceable, and cannot be spared. II. But then, further, according to the Apostle's view and impression, Christ suffered what He suffered, not that we might be delivered from it, but, on the contrary, that we might be brought into it, that we might come to suffer with Him. His advent and presence did indeed stir up pains, new pains, that had not shaken the sphere of humanity before. The Apostle had no idea that there was virtue or praise in suffering; that to be scourged was a thing to be aimed at or gloried in. He never courted it, or threw himself in the way of it, that it might come upon him, but he rather took measures to escape it when he could; yet here he is yearning to know the fellowship of his Lord's sufferings. What, then, does he mean? He wanted to enter yet more deeply into that spirit of Christ, that spirit of holy love which in an evil world necessarily involves suffering, to have more of His unselfish devotion to the cause of God and man, to feel more with Him the leprosy and disharmony of sin, and to follow Him more closely in His righteous concern with regard to it and His earnest activity against it. It was not the mere anguish he craved, but the grand moral heart, the grand moral sympathies and affections, which the anguish expressed and implied, and which could not be had without it. III. It will always be but the few who will be found entering abundantly into the fellowship of His sufferings, giving themselves grandly to the cause of God and man; yet, to know the Lord Jesus at all, we must to some extent feel with Him the pang and burden of His cross. There is no other way of knowing Him, and heaven will not stoop and bend for those who cannot climb, will not lower its price or reduce the terms of admission to let in those who have not wherewith to pay. S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words, p. 57. The word "fellowship" might startle us in this connection. The sufferings are Christ's sufferings, and St. Paul speaks of sharing them— "the sufferings." They did not begin on Calvary; the death was but the consummation of the life; His sufferings were of the soul; the Passion was the Atonement; the suffering of sufferings was the sin-bearing, the taking upon Himself by a conscious act, possible because He was God, of the whole loathsome, putrefying mass of a world's sins, so that henceforth they should lose their condemning voice and also their constraining pang against all who, in deep penitence and unswerving faith, draw nigh to God Himself through the blood of Jesus. I. At first sight we might regard the sufferings of Christ, and especially those last spoken of, as lying beyond the reach of human fellowship or human communion. There is a great comfort, no doubt, for Christian people in being able to regard the trials and discomforts of this life as a real and integral portion' of that suffering which Christ Himself undertook and endured below. If it were only of these things, St. Paul might speak of it as a high and holy object to know the fellowship of Christ's sufferings. II. This was certainly not the whole of that fellowship of Christ's sufferings which was St. Paul's aim and object. The clause which follows the text suggests a further meaning: "Being made conformable unto His death." This introduces us into St. Paul's characteristic view of the spiritual life. It is the life of one who died when Christ died, rose when Christ rose, ascended when Christ ascended, and lives now a life, not seen and temporal, but hidden with Christ in God. In this way the fellowship of Christ's sufferings becomes a true sympathy with Christ in His abhorrence and repudiation of sin. III. The fellowship of Christ's sufferings is not only sympathy with Christ's warfare in destroying our sins, but also a true participation with Christ in the anguish, though not in the virtue, of His sin-bearing for the world. St. Paul shared Christ's yearning over the sin-stained, self-ruined souls of fallen men. There is a vicarious sacrifice still in all who know the fellowship of the sufferings, not to purchase again the purchased possession, but yet to bring the one Ransom and the one Redeemer home to the erring, straying, lost ones, who know not their need or His sufficiency. C. J. Vaughan, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 818. Philippians 3:10 St. Paul, a better man than any of us, had found the hollowness of self-trust. He had willingly consented to part with all that he had once thought most valuable in a religious sense for the sake of knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection. I. For the sake of knowing Christ. In that knowledge, he was aware, lay his eternal life. The words do not refer to a merely intellectual knowledge of Christ; such knowledge as this Paul might have acquired without parting with his all to gain it. (1) Though the intellectual knowledge of Christ is not the whole or chief part of man's great need, yet it must not be undervalued. We may have it and yet be nothing profited; but, on the other hand, without it the other cannot be. A man must know of Christ by the hearing of the ear, if he would ever know Him for himself by faith. (2) But the knowledge of which St. Paul speaks is a personal knowledge; his acquaintance with Christ (a) reconciled him to the painful vicissitudes of outward circumstances (Philippians 4:11-13); (b) brought him help under the emergencies of special danger (2 Timothy 4:16-18); (c) brought him support and comfort amid the special inward trials of his personal life. II. And the power of His resurrection. The meaning is not so much the power shown in His resurrection, the manifestation of God's almighty strength in raising Christ from the dead, but rather the power with which resurrection invested Christ; the power upon which He entered as the result and consequence of His resurrection; that power which He still exercises throughout heaven and earth as the risen and exalted Saviour. The power of His resurrection might be expressed perhaps more intelligibly in the form, His resurrection power. Because He lives, His servants live; the risen life of Jesus is daily manifested in their body. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 213. Philippians 3:10I. There is a fellowship of Christ's sufferings in relation to pain. The pains of life, inward and outward, are as varied as the bodies and souls on which they fasten. Our sensibilities to pain are very various: one thing hurts one person, and another another; that which is agony to me my neighbour scarcely feels. This is true of the roughnesses of life, and it is true of the calumnies of life, and it is true of the disappointments of life; it is true of those trials which come to us through the affections, and it is true of those trials which come to us through the ambitions of our nature. Thus much we may say with certainty: that no man, and therefore no Christian, passes through life untouched by distress. The cause may vary, and the kind may vary, and the degree may vary, all but infinitely; still the fact is there, the thing is there; the experience must be gained, as alone it can be gained, through suffering; and oftentimes the even tenor of an untroubled life, in its brightest and serenest day, is but the torrent's smoothness ere it dash below. But in all this there is lacking as yet the essential feature of a fellowship in Christ's sufferings. For this faith is needed, and devotion is needed, and submission is needed, and the support of a heavenly arm, and the expectation of a heavenly home. II. There is a fellowship of Christ's sufferings in relation to sin. As He resisted unto blood, striving against sin, so must we. It is a life-and-death battle for each one of us. We shall never have done with it for long together while life lasts. Sometimes by craft and sometimes by assault, sometimes by ambush, sometimes by feigned flight, sometimes with parade of arms and trumpets, as though secure of intimidation and of triumph, the old enemy attacks again, the old sin rises from its fall, and there is nothing before us yet once more save hard-earned victory or shameful defeat. In the midst of all, let this be our stay: "Greater is He that is with us, than he that is in the world." C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 229. References: Philippians 3:10.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x., No. 552; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 329; R. Lorimer, Bible Studies in Life and Truth, p. 377; Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 226; Homilist, 1st series, vol. vii., p. 341; Ibid., 3rd series, vol. iii., p. 159; H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 282; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 87; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 384; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 240; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 32; Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 339; W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of Suffering, p. 29; S. Martin, Sermons, No. 15. Philippians 3:10-11 The Fellowship with Christ's Sufferings. I. It is manifest that there are senses in which we can have no community with our Lord in His sufferings, in which they were peculiar and His own. For they were meritorious sufferings, whereas we have not, and can never have, merit in God's sight; they were voluntary sufferings, whereas all our sufferings are deserved, being entailed upon us by sin. They were also distinct from ours in degree, as well as in kind. Jesus knew all things which should come upon Him; He saw the whole cup brimming over with woe, and every ingredient of every bitter drop to come was known to Him. This we are spared. That cup is dealt out to us in drops only; we never know whether we are not close approaching its end. In capacity also for suffering He surpassed us equally. It is a token of God's mercy, as well as of our infirmity, that we are ever benumbed by pain. Beyond a certain point, the anguished eye puts on darkness, the fevered frame subsides into lethargy. But so was it not with Him whom we love. In that long procession of human sorrow of which the world's history, disguise it as we will, is but the record, His mourning has ever been first, and chief, and unapproachable. Look and see whether there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow. II. The first point of fellowship with Christ's sufferings is grief for sin, deep, earnest personal affliction for our own guilt and unworthiness. Enter into fellowship with Christ's sufferings, learn to know what sin is, and this very knowledge shall relieve you from the bondage of sin. Begin to grapple with the strong man armed that keepeth thine house within by the aid of that stronger one, who shall help thee at last to bind him and spoil his goods. It may, and it will, cost thee suffering; but is it not worth any present loss if we may live freely, and purely, and blessedly, and die without terror, and fulfil in a higher and perfect state all the best ends of our being in the sinless and everlasting service of Him from whom that being came? H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. Hi., p. 160. Conformity to Christ's Death. This shaping in the form of Christ's death is one of the Christian's earnest endeavours and most cherished objects in life. No advantage of birth, no distinction of rank, no triumph of intellect, no extending and pervading empire of the will, nothing, in short, that tempts ordinary men of the world, can attract him in comparison with this. I. Christ's death was a death unto sin; and all conformity to His death must be conformity begun, continued, and completed by death unto sin. Suffering on account of sin is a very different thing from death unto sin. Fellowship with Christ's sufferings— this is the restless, endless conflict of the believer's course, ever raging, ever distracting, ever wearing and wearying him; conformity to Christ's death— this is the deep calm of indifference to sin, and to the solicitations of Satan, and to the allurements of the world, which is ever setting in together with and over against the conflict. This deadness to sin is the first and most essential element of conformity to the death of Christ. II. Let us follow out this conformity to His death into some of its attendant circumstances. (1) Sin and the devil will not let us alone in its various stages. The nearer we approach in likeness to Him, the more will His enemies treat us as they treated Him. (2) Again, that death of His was a death to all mere human ambition. In conformity to His death we also must read the death-blow to all other ambition. (3) And, once more, all self-righteousness is sacrificed and nailed to His cross in those who are made in the likeness of His death. (4) Nor should we entirely dismiss such a theme without one look onwards. "If we be dead with Christ, we shall also live with Him." The Christian should never end with Calvary, nor with the mortification of the body, nor with deadness to sin, but ever carry his thoughts onward to that blessed consummation to which these are the entrance and necessary condition. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 173. A Sermon for Easter Day. I. First of all, what is the event itself, the resurrection of Jesus, of which this day is the joyful commemoration? Of whom is the resurrection? Lazarus was raised from the dead by Christ; wherein did Christ's own resurrection differ from that of him whom He loved? In two most important particulars. Lazarus underwent no change from suffering, death-doomed flesh and blood to a body of the resurrection. As he entered the tomb, so he came forth from it. Then, which is closely dependent on this, Lazarus died again. His was in some sense a resurrection; but it was no part of the resurrection, of which the Lord is the example and firstfruits. For "Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more"; He brought up His body out of the grave changed and glorious, with no more infirmity, no more blight of sin upon it. II. Need we ask how the resurrection of Christ can extend beyond Himself? If these faithful and careful ones bore into the tomb the dead form of the Son of man, of our collected and concentrated humanity; if there we lay with and in Him, watched by ministering angels during that solemn and mysterious pause in the Life of our life, who can tell what happened when that same form was lit up again with the returned spirit, when the Godhead again entered into its fleshly tabernacle, or rather, having taken down its frail and temporary tent, entered into its new-built and eternal temple, when those lacerated feet began their glorious and onward march of triumph, and those pierced hands unfurled God's banner of everlasting victory? He rose not alone; we, our humanity, in its whole reach and extent, rose with Him. Thus mankind, and the myriads on myriads of whom you and I are units, burst but from that tomb in and with Him, and stood complete in His resurrection. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But this power of His resurrection does not begin to be exerted in the next life; does not then first act when the mute clay bursts out into songs of praise. It is acting all through the Christian's course below, and its action is shown here by the springing up and waxing onward of that new life in His spirit which, expanded and glorified, shall continue its action through eternity. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 187. References: Philippians 3:11.— G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 114; E. L. Hull, Sermons, 1st series, p. 28. Philippians 3:12 Our Christian Aim. I. Progress is not identical with growth. In speaking of progress, we take account of human endeavour, and not only of Divine law. It is not only that the minute germ appropriates by some mysterious power the elements which it needs, and clothes itself with beauty. The idea of progress suggests thoughts of conscious effort, resolute will, and obstacles vanquished; of the striving after an ideal; of the presence of an animating desire. Progress is not only a movement guided successfully towards a worthy end; it is movement inspired by a worthy motive. Progress must be guided by reflection. According to a memorable Greek saying, "the God of revelation neither hides the truth nor tells it plainly, but shows it by a sign." God does not dispense with the fullest exercise of our faculties; it is by these, and these only, that we can know Him and serve Him. II. The Christian aim is, briefly, attainment of the likeness of God, for which man was made. There can be no repose or stationariness in the Christian course while life lasts. We cannot continue the feelings, or habits, or methods of one period into another, because, while our aim remains unchanged, we shall approach it in new ways from each new position. Fresh difficulties and opportunities will be disclosed as we go onwards; we shall gain by the discipline of effort a keener vision and a prompter judgment. The voice of Greek philosophy gave utterance to the last thought of the soul when it proclaimed that the end of man was to be made like to God as far as possible. The end, then, towards which the soul strove, has been brought by Christ within our reach. No life which is directed to self-seeking is easy, and no labour which is spent on transitory objects can bring peace. For us, being of the world, the effort of self-denying service is the one aim to that rest for which we were made, rest on the bosom of God. Bishop Westcott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiv., p. 104. References: Philippians 3:12.— T. T. Lynch, Sermons for My Curates, p. 281; Homilist, vol. i., p. 45; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 96. Philippians 3:12-15.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 317; Ibid., vol. xi., p. 394. Philippians 3:13I. The past has its uses. Not for nothing did God bestow upon us memory; not for nothing do His servants recollect themselves, look back, call to mind, remember. (1) We want the past for purposes of humiliation. We might almost content ourselves, if we desired to humble the pride of any one, with saying to him, Let memory work; think of that shameful fall which you had yesterday or the day before: that broken resolution, that outbreak of temper, that irreverent worship, that omitted duty, and that secret sin thought of, not done. I can scarcely see how he can be proud whose memory is not dormant. We must not entirely forget the things that are behind, so far as our past sins are concerned, if we would be humble as we ought to be. (2) Again, we want the past for purposes of admonition and warning. It is thence that we draw experience. A man cannot live out half his days without becoming wise as to his failings and infirmities. If we were in such a sense new men every morning as that the past were a blank and the future a conjecture, we should be far worse equipped than we are for the work and the conflict of the present. II. But there are two senses in which we ought all to forget the things that are behind. (1) It is possible that upon some the memory of the past may have an elating influence. There are those who trust too much to a past conversion and look too little to a present consistency. Hear St. Paul utterly disclaiming any such trust; telling how he forgets the things behind, and reaches forth only to the things before; nay, declaring his conviction that he might even preach to others, and yet himself be a castaway. (2) But far commoner is the opposite risk; far more in number are they whom the thought of the past deeply depresses. May it not be said to such persons, Forget the things behind? When the question is of courage or cowardice, of resistance or of flight, then forget the things behind: let past falls be forgotten; let past proofs of weakness be disregarded and dismissed; put your trust in God, and in His name and strength go forward. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 247. References: Philippians 3:13.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons, p. 4; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 141; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 237; F. W. Farrar, In the Days of thy Youth, pp. 51, 275; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 290; J. H. Jellett, The Elder Son, pp. 278, 291. Philippians 3:13-14 Living in the Future. I. First, we may take this as the advice commended to us in the example here taught us: Live in the future. Our highest condition in this world is not the attainment of perfection, but the recognition of heights above us which are as yet unreached. From generation to generation, for the individual and the species, the condition of our progress is a distance beckoning us, and a feeling that we have not already attained, neither are already perfect. II. Let the bright, certain, infinite future dwarf for us the narrow and stained past: "forgetting the things that are behind." (1) Forget past failures; they are apt to weaken you. (2) Be sure to forget past attainments; they are apt to become food for complacency, for every vain confidence. (3) Forget your past circumstances, whether they be sorrows or joys; the one are not without remedy, the other not perfect. "Forget the things that are behind." III. Let hopes for the future and lessons from the past alike lead to strenuous work in the present. "This one thing I do." Be the past what it may, be the future what it may, I know that I cannot reach the one nor forget the other, except by setting myself with all my might and main to present duties, and by reducing all duties to various forms of one great life-purpose. Concentration of all our strength on a single aim, and that aim pursued through all our days, with their varying occupations— what a grand ideal of life that is! We shall work hard and heartily at various tasks, and yet the good part shall not be taken away from us by outward activity, any more than our possession of it will sequester us from vigorous service of God and man. A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester, 3rd series, p. 39 The text shows— I. The greatness of Christian hope. Two things are suggested by the context as having been actually attained by Paul: a satisfying religious faith and a sufficient religious purpose. (1) He had attained a satisfying religious faith. This is the portion of all believers in the Gospel. In some it appears almost independently of experience; the reason of it is vouchsafed them in their conversion; they will speak, with no consciousness of exaggeration, of being brought out of darkness into marvellous light: in their joyousness they are new creatures. In others it grows and strengthens along the whole course of Christian fidelity; they have a peace which passeth all understanding. But out of this satisfaction there arises a special danger. Satisfaction with an ideal often so contents us that we make no effort to realise it. We have not attained when we have begun to trust. Faith is the means of Christian living, not the end, not the sum, of Christian life. (2) Paul had also attained a sufficient religious purpose. It was characteristic of him, as of all noble natures, that he valued his faith according to the energy with which it filled him, and that he estimated spiritual energy by the sacrifices it enabled him to make. The power of the Gospel is seen in that it not only inspires a Christlike passion of love and righteousness, but also transforms the passion into purpose. This is the true test of spiritual vigour: the energy of purpose with which we are inspired. II. The method of Christian endeavour. "Forgetting those things that are behind."— this is one of the conditions of manful Christian endeavour. The habit of brooding over the sins of the past must be laid aside, and also the habit of dwelling on our spiritual attainments. Our only contentment is in aspiration, for our true life and its issues are before us. The bliss of the imperfect is in their efforts after perfection. From the knowledge that we have not attained comes the hope of attain ing; nay, rather, it is the hope of larger blessedness which makes alt we have yet reached appear incomplete. We have not yet fathomed the Divine purpose, nor known the fulness of the grace of Christ. A. Mackennal, The Life of Christian Consecration, p. 164. Reference: Philippians 3:13, Philippians 3:14.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1114; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses in Mar thorough College, p. 341; C. H. Grundy, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 87; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol; xvi., p. 210; Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 92; H. P. Liddon, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 257; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ix., p. 20; J. J. S. Perowne, Sermons, p. 104; W. M. Punshon, Sermons, p. 26; F. Temple, Rugby Sermons, 1st series, p. 224; F. Case, Short Practical Sermons, p. 43. Philippians 3:13-15.— W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons, vol. iii., p. 236. Philippians 3:14.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 46; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 263; H. S. Hird, Ibid., vol. xv., p. 278. Philippians 3:15-16 Toleration. I. In proportion as we really love the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall love those who love Him, be it in never so clumsy or mistaken a fashion, and love those too whom He loved enough to die for them, and whom He lives now to teach and strengthen. We can surely do good together. Together, let our denomination be what it may, we can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, reform the prisoner, humanise the degraded, save yearly the lives of thousands by labouring for the public health, and educate the minds and morals of the masses, though our religious differences force us to part when we begin to talk to them about the world to come. II. True, there are errors against which we are bound to protest to the uttermost, but how few! The one real enemy we have all to fight is sin, evil-doing. If any man or doctrine makes men worse, makes men do worse deeds, protest then, if you will, and spare not, and shrink not; for sin must be of the devil, whatever else is not. And therefore we are bound to protest against any doctrine which parts man from God, and under whatsoever pretence of reverence or purity, draws again the veil between him and his heavenly Father, and denies him free access to the throne of grace, that he may speak with God face to face and yet live. For this right of access we must protest; for this we must die, if needs be; for if we lose this, we lose all that our reforming forefathers won for us at the stake. Ay, we lose our own souls, for we lose righteousness and strength and the power to do the will of God. III. Just in proportion as we delight in and live by the great doctrines of Christianity, all controversies will become less and less important in our eyes. The more we value the living body of Christianity, the less we shall think of its temporary garments; the more we feel the power of God's Spirit, the less scrupulous shall we be about the peculiar form in which He may manifest Himself. Personal trust in Jesus Christ, personal love to Jesus Christ, will keep our minds clear, and sober, and charitable. C. Kingsley, Sermons for the Times, p. 278. Reference: Philippians 3:16.— F. Ferguson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 193. Philippians 3:18 The Cross the Measure of Sin. How is it that every sin, even the very least, makes men enemies of the Cross of Christ? I. First, because it was sin that, so to speak, created the Cross: sin made a Redeemer necessary. It opened some deep breach in the order of life and in the unity of God's kingdom which could be no way healed but by the Atonement. If there had been no sin in the world until now, the sin we have committed, each one of us, this day, would have demanded the sacrifice and reconciliation. Such is the intensity of one offence, such its infinity of guilt. II. And, again, not only does sin both create and multiply this necessity, but, so to speak, it continues to frustrate the work of the Cross and Passion of the Son of God. It demands His death, and it defeats its virtues; it invokes it from the mercies of God, and it wars against it by direct hostility; it first makes it necessary, and then would make it fruitless. III. And, once more, sin makes men enemies of the Cross, because it is in virtue and spirit a renewal of the Crucifixion; it acts the Crucifixion over again. And therefore our Lord, though He was already in the bliss and glory of the Father, cried saying, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" It is no mere figure of speech, but a very deep and appalling reality, that sin makes every soul that willingly offends an enemy of the Cross of Christ by converting it into a direct spiritual antagonist of the will and intent of our merciful Lord in the mystery of His Passion. Hence we may see (1) the exceeding sinfulness of every act of wilful sin; (2) the sinfulness of every habitual state or temper of mind contrary to the spirit of our Saviour. H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 201. Reference: Philippians 3:18.— R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 1st series, p. 290; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. ii., p. 93; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 3245. Philippians 3:18, Philippians 3:19.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii., No. 102; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. vii., p. 219; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vi., p. 253. Philippians 3:19.— Wilkinson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 9; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 250. Philippians 3:19-20I. Others, says St. Paul, have their mind set upon things below; appetite is their god; they make the Gospel itself a means of worldly gain; what they pride themselves upon is just what a Christian should be ashamed of; and the end of these things is death. When the world perishes, its children and its subjects must perish too. But we are not of the world. Already, even in this life, our citizenship is in heaven; and thither is our eye ever turned, in expectation of His coming who is even now our King, and shall one day be our Deliverer and our Saviour too. II. If anything for a moment shows us to ourselves as we are, stripping off the disguise by which we commonly impose not upon others only, but also upon ourselves, does anything strike us so painfully as this one conviction?— that we are predominantly earthly-minded; that, whatever else we may be or may not be, we have things on the earth for our thought and for our feeling. There is a quietude and a self-complacency in worldly success which puts us, as it were, in good humour with both worlds: with God above and man below. But take one world away, and what has become of the other? It is a mistake to suppose that affliction, in any form, drives men to God. It may in time, with pain and prayer and many struggles, make the heavenly-minded man more heavenly-minded; but it might almost be said to have an opposite effect upon the godless and the earthly-minded, at once showing him his state and fixing that state upon him. Depend upon it, he, and he only, who has a country above will ever sit loose to interests below; and if he would ever escape the terrible condemnation of having minded earthly things, it must be because God, in His infinite mercy, has given us the comfort and joy of being able to say from the heart, My home is not here; my citizenship is in heaven. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 263. Philippians 3:20 Heaven the Christian's Home. I. "Our conversation is in heaven." Many are the meanings of this word, and every way the Apostle says we are in heaven. For the word, in the language in which God wrote it, means the city or state to which we belong, or citizenship, or the rules and order of a state by which it is governed, or the way of life of the citizens; and in all these ways he places us in heaven. Our home is in heaven. Yet so it might be, so in one sense it is, though we were away from home. For, as the Apostle says, "while we are present in the body, we are absent from the Lord." Yet it is not altogether an absent home of which the Apostle speaks. He speaks not of our home as something separate from us, not as something in space in which we might be and are not, but as something belonging to us, and to which we belong, to which of right and in fact we belong. For the temple of God, the Church, is not made with hands, not a material building. One Church we know it is of all who are, or have been, or shall be in Christ Jesus, all, wherever they are, in heaven or in earth, all, men and angels, knit in one in Him. In soul and spirit we are in heaven already. There our life centres; there we live: to it we belong. II. But how then if on earth, as we know we are, as the corruptible body presseth down the spirit, is our citizenship, our dwelling-place, yea we ourselves, in heaven? Because our Lord is there. This is the great blessedness of our citizenship, as of every other gift of grace or glory: that we have it not of ourselves, but of and in Christ. E. B. Pusey, Sermons from Advent to Whitsuntide, vol. i., p. 328. Our Heavenly Citizenship. I. There are only three ways on record by which any man ever became a citizen of any state; but not by one only, but by all the three, are we citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. (1) For, first, we were made citizens by purchase. He who was the King of that beautiful city did actually give up for a season His kingdom, and He was content to become a stranger here, and to forfeit all His dignities, and to be human enough to die and to be buried, that He might by that absence and death buy an admission for you and me to that heavenly city. (2) And, in addition to this purchase by the blood of Christ, it was free for us to take as a gift. (3) And because birth is better than purchase or gift, therefore by the same grace we are born again, that we should change the place of our nativity and have our settlement no longer in a slavish world, but be born free; and this admission by birth is that which lies in the text: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." II. Look, next, at the privileges of citizenship. (1) It is the first privilege of every citizen that he is represented. Accordingly it is the plan of God's great government that every one who belongs to His Church is represented. Christ is gone into heaven for this purpose, and there at God's right hand He stands. (2). And the right of a citizen is that he is under the laws of his own state, and no other; he may appeal up to this. The Christian is continually appealing to a grander award than that of this world. (3) The citizen can go in and out. Is he not free of his own state? But it is a holy liberty. There is the same God to all there in the city; He is very near. (4) It is the right or privilege of all citizens to go to the presence of the King. Whatever be their petitions, the access is open. We carry in our hands a white stone, with a new name written; we command entrance by that stone, the proof of our union with Christ. We are His people, and His whole empire is pledged to us; and we may be in that royal presence night and day, and enjoy such elevation and such converse and partake of such favours as it passeth the natural eye to see: "but God has revealed them to us by His Spirit." J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 4th series, p. 233. References: Philippians 3:20.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 476; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons, p. 27; Ibid., The Life of Duty, vol. ii., p. 197.; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 25; vol. xxii., p. 109; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. iv., p. 218; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 31; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vi., p. 215. Philippians 3:20-21 The Reunion of the Saints. I. "The body of our humiliation." What a word is that! It was not always thus. When God, in the solemn conclave of the Eternal Trinity, said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," He could not have been speaking only of man's soul. The record of the Creation which follows is almost entirely corporeal. He must have been speaking of the entire man. In the likeness of Christ's body, God formed the body of Adam, not in the likeness of Christ's body as He wore it down upon this earth, but the likeness of that body as it is now, as He ascended into the heavens, the body glorified, so that in all probability the body of our first parents in paradise was the very same body as we shall receive after the resurrection, both being in the likeness of Christ and both glorious. And this is, therefore, one of the points in the fulness of the restitution of all things, and shows how we regain in Christ all, even to the exact bodily form— all that we lost in the Fall. II. The resurrection body will be a body which we shall glory in, just as in this body we now are humiliated. So the one becomes in some sense a measure of the other; and such as is the degradation of the body now, so will be the exaltation of the body then. For it will be the memorial through all eternity, not of a fall, but of the grace which has raised us to an elevation higher than that from which we fell. Christ will be both admired and reflected in it before the universe. Continually, without cessation, it will be capable of worship and service; and, like Him it mirrors, it will express transparently the whole of the intellect and the love breathed in it, and, like Him, it will never change. A beauty which we see each in the other will never fade away from before our eyes; the satisfaction which we never found in a creature we shall find absolutely and for ever in that new creation: and from the moment of our waking up in that blessed morning, on and on, for ever and ever, the gushing sense of light, and life, and power, and service, and purity, and humility, and love will flow, ever full and ever fresh, out of the freeness of the fountain of the indwelling of God. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 4th series, p. 225. The Heavenly Citizenship. St. Paul had just been speaking of some members of the Church whose god was their belly, who minded earthly things. It is a plausible opinion that in the text he intended to contrast with their state of mind his own and that of the persons who strove to imitate him as he imitated Christ. Our translators probably adopted that notion, or they would scarcely have rendered πολίτευμα by conversation. That word had undoubtedly a more extensive signification in the seventeenth century than it has in ours: it included the whole course and habit of life, and had no special reference to intercourse through the tongue. But it can never have denoted what a word derived from "city" and "citizen" does most naturally denote: a condition and privilege which belonged to certain men, whether they made use of it or forgot it. I. That natural sense, I apprehend, St. Paul gives to the expression here. He does not contrast his heavenly temper with the earthly temper of those concerning whom he speaks with so much sorrow; but he blames them for that temper because he and they had both alike a Divine πολίτευμα, because a state had been claimed for them and was implied in their acts with which such a temper was wholly at variance. The opposition is not between them and him; it is between them and themselves. It is not, again (as we sometimes state it), between them and their professions, as if they boasted of a high citizenship when, in fact, they were only aliens. They had too low, not too high, an appreciation of their status and of their rights; they would be raised above their grovelling tendencies, yea and above the conceit which no doubt accompanied these tendencies, if they could once really understand what they were: what honours and estates were legally theirs, only waiting to be claimed; under what title these honours and estates were to be held. II. To say, "Our conversation is in the heavens," would be a bold thing for most of us; but when we say, "Our citizenship is in the heavens," then need we no faltering of the tongue, no timidity in the spirit within. That is declaring God to be true, and us to be liars; that is affirming He has not made our lives to be insincere in solitude or in society, our friendships to be poor in quality and to be shorter than the existence which they glorify. All that is fragile and transitory belongs to us; we have failed to recognise the stamp of His eternity which He has assuredly put upon us and upon all our human attachments. We sever by our sin and unbelief links which He has fastened; our noise has disturbed the great deep of memory which His Spirit broods over; but His blessed order stands firm, however little we abide in it. The affinities in the world of human beings, like the affinities in the natural world, have all been constituted by Him, are all maintained by Him. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/sermonbible/ Philippians 4:1(with 1 Timothy 6:12) From the soul's supreme object comes her supreme inspiration. I. We do not ask you to stand fast in anything that is partial, limited, or temporary. "Stand fast in the Lord." "Lay hold on eternal life," which is nowhere save in the eternal unity of powers, which is, and was, and for ever shall be, the Lord. As we might expect, the Gospel of the Lord and the Gospel of the sky are in perfect harmony. Astronomy is the word of God, and the New Testament is a mirror of astronomy's higher meaning. It was not only at the point of the sun's return from his deepest absence and at astronomical midnight that Jesus was born; but His birth was also the turning point of earth's moral cold and moral darkness. The sun of nature and the sun of our souls were coming anew into our world, and were coming together. Lay hold on His eternal life. His eternal life is your eternal life; His form is the ideal of your form, and capable of transmuting your form. II. The eternal life often flashes on us, touches us to the quick, talks with us; but much more than this is necessary, if it is to create us anew. We must ourselves lay hold on it. We do our very utmost to maintain our hold on mortal life, not because it is mortal, but because it is life. The eternal life visits all men's souls, but all men's souls do not take hold, and therefore they are not changed, not glorified. III. A word must be said to beginners, who are perhaps doubtful whether they have any hold at all on the eternal life. Persevere, and your new nature will grow, and with growth its appetite will increase. Remember, it is a form of your nature which can never undergo disintegration. You may undergo a thousand deaths before you attain to it, but when once the Lord's form of humanity is evolved about you as your own form, you can die no more. J. Pulsford, Our Deathless Hope, p. 137. References: Philippians 4:1.— Talmage, Old Wells Dug Out, p. 340; E. Lawrence, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvi., p. 395. Philippians 4:1-4.— H. Quick, Ibid., vol. ii., p. 312. Philippians 4:2.— Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons, p. 353. Philippians 4:3.— R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 1st series, p. 40. Philippians 4:3-4 One Spirit and One Body. I. This measureless body, spread out before our eyes in vast outline, so varied, so glorious, so wonderful, is convincement enough of the wealth and grandeur of the Spirit whose body it is, whose manifestation it is. It is God revealing Himself to the eyes of our flesh. The whole body is as full of soul for our souls, as of glory for our eyes. There is soul in the sun, and the earth is full of the same soul. In the beast world, the bird world, the tree world, the flower world, the one soul is present, and revealing Himself. "There is one body and one Spirit." II. Endeavour to keep the unity of both, that you may come to wisdom. If you break up the unity and begin to analyse, you may have little bits of knowledge, but no wisdom, fragments of this and fragments of the other, but no philosophy, no apprehension of the order of God. Sacredly keep the unity of every material form, for its life, its Divineness, depends on its holiness. If you want to get at the unity of the Spirit, do not desecrate the unity of any body in which the Spirit dwells. Respect the unity of your own body, and do your utmost to keep its unity, for directly it loses its symmetry and balance your health is gone, and your life is in danger. III. Man is the miracle of the universe, a little unity of body and spirit, representing the great unity of the one body's nature and of the one Spirit, God. Man is the epitome of all wonders, the looking-glass of the universe, the house of God's incarnation. Reflect why Jesus is Lord: He is not Lord because He is called Lord; He is Lord because the great, mute body of the universe is unified in Him. The humanity of Christ found the secret path through death to heaven, because the unity of the Spirit was in Him. It is in virtue of His secret inmost essence likewise that He opens every secret door in man, touches the most secret springs, and remakes the soul. He is the Divine reconciliation of all things; therefore He is creation's peace and our peace. J. Pulsford, Our Deathless Hope, p. 21.Philippians 4:4 Christian Cheerfulness. I. We can hardly appreciate the full instruction to be drawn from these words unless we remember St. Paul's condition when he wrote his epistle to the Philippians. He was a prisoner at Rome, and his life hung on the caprice of the insane tyrant who then occupied the imperial throne; his circumstances were so dreary, so comfortless, so hopeless, that, except for his brethren's sake, he desired earnestly that death might release him from his anxiety and sorrow. Yet he was so wonderfully supported by consolation in Christ, comfort of love, and fellowship of the Spirit that the burden of his exhortations to distant friends, from whom he was thus cruelly separated, was that they should rejoice in the Lord. II. We learn then generally from the Apostle's emphatic and repeated exhortations that God intends His people to be habitually cheerful and happy. (1) Note the limitation to this cheerfulness. We are to rejoice in the Lord. There are some kinds of joy which would separate us from Christ. (2) Joy in the Lord must be a real practical principle, influencing all our habits and the whole regulation of our conduct. The signs and consequences of our privilege are three: (a) forbearance for others, (b) freedom from anxiety for ourselves, and (c) communion with God by prayer. III. The precept, "Rejoice in the Lord alway," teaches us that manly cheerfulness is characteristic of the true Christian, and that this is alike remote from selfish inactivity and overcareful anxiety. This is the spirit in which each of us should go forth day by day to the work to which God has called him, and should carry it on in trustful prayer, in faith and hope and love. G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons on the Epistles, vol. i., p. 40. I. Who would care for any gain or loss today, if he knew for certain that Christ would show Himself tomorrow? No one. The true Christian feels as he would feel did he know for certain that Christ would be here tomorrow. For he knows for certain that at least Christ will come to him when he dies; faith anticipates his death and makes it just as if that distant day, if it be distant, were past and over. It is very plain that matters which agitate us extremely now will a year hence not interest us at all. So will it be with all human hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, jealousies, disappointments, successes, when the last day is come. They will have no life in them; they will be as the faded flowers of a banquet, which do but mock us. What this world will be understood by all to be then, such is it felt to be by the Christian now. He looks at things as he will then look at them, with an uninterested and dispassionate eye, and is neither pained much nor pleased much at the accidents of life, because they are accidents. II. Another part of the character under review is what our translation calls moderation: "Let your moderation be known unto all men," or, as it may be more exactly rendered, your consideration, fairness, or equitableness. The Christian does not fear; fear it is that makes men bigots, tyrants, and zealots; but for the Christian it is his privilege, as he is beyond hopes and fears, suspense and jealousy, so also to be patient, cool, discriminating, and impartial, so much so that this very fairness marks his character in the eyes of the world, is "known unto all men." III. Joy and gladness are also characteristic of him, according to the exhortation of the text, "Rejoice in the Lord alway." The duty of fearing does but perfect our joy; that joy alone is true Christian joy which is informed and quickened by fear and made thereby sober and reverent. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. v., p. 58. References: Philippians 4:4.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 24; H. P. Liddon, Advent Sermons, vol. i., p. 283; C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons, p. 394; H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 401; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xii., p. 147; Colborne, Ibid., vol. xvi., p. 382; J. Baldwin Brown, Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 129; A. P. Stanley, Ibid., vol. xxi., p. 10; F. Case, Short Practical Sermons, p. 94; E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 1. Philippians 4:4-6A Life of Prayer a Life of Peace. St. Paul in these words bids the Christians of Philippi to carry all their sorrows and fears to the throne of Christ. He specially bids them remember the nearness of our Lord and the freedom we may use in speaking to Him; and in so doing he has taught us a great and blessed truth, needful for all men in all ages; I mean that a life of prayer is a life of peace. I. St. Paul here tells us, first of all, that there is One ever near us who can fulfil all our desire and overrule all things in our behalf: "The Lord is at hand." How soon He may reveal Himself in person we know not; but, soon or late, it is certain that, although unseen, He is ever near us. His presence departed not from the Church when He ascended into heaven. He is withdrawn from the eyes of our flesh, but in the sight of our hearts He is always visible; though He be at the right hand of God, yet He is in the Church and in our secret chamber; He is both able and willing to fulfil all our hearts' desires, and nothing is hid from His sight. II. St. Paul tells us further that we may make all our desires known unto God; we may speak with Him as a man speaks with his friend. We all know the relief of unburdening ourselves and opening our hidden cares even to an earthly companion; we seem to have laid off a weight when we have told our sorrow: and yet there is a point beyond which we do not reveal ourselves to our fastest and nearest friend. But from God not only is it impossible to conceal, but we do not desire to hide, anything. Though He be the Holy One, and His eyes as a flame of fire, so piercing and so pure, yet we do not shrink from making all known to Him, for though He be perfect in purity, He is likewise perfect in compassion; He is as pitiful as He is holy. Though unworthy to ask the least blessing, yet we may make our requests known unto Him by silent humiliation and by secret appeal to His perfect knowledge. We shall not indeed always have what we ask; but if we ask in faith, we shall always have peace. Of this we shall never fail— (1) first, because whatsoever we ask which is truly for our good, that He will give us freely. No father so much delights to give the very thing his children ask for, as our Father in heaven. Whatsoever we desire that is in harmony with the eternal will, with the love of our Redeemer, and with the mind of the Holy Ghost— those things we shall without fail receive. All good things, all good, eternal and created, all blessing, grace, and truth, all the benedictions of. the kingdom of God, all the promises of the Gospel, and all the pledged mercies of redemption— all these we may ask importunately, and shall assuredly receive. (2) Whatsoever we ask that is not for our good, He will keep it back from us. In this entangled twilight state of probation, where the confines of good and ill so nearly approach and almost seem to intermingle, there needs a keen and strong spiritual eye to discern and know the nature and properties of all things which encompass us about. How awful would be our lot if our wishes should straightway pass into realities. (3) We know certainly that if God refuse us anything, it is only to give us something better. H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 240. References: Philippians 4:4-7.— E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 57; J. Carr, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 13. Philippians 4:5 The Great Expectation. I. It has been the expectation of the coming of the Lord which ever since the time of the Apostles has always been the inspiration of the Christian world. The noblest souls always have believed that humanity was capable of containing, and was sure sooner or later to receive, a larger and deeper infusion of Divinity. The power of any life lies in its expectancy. What do you hope for? What do you expect? The answer to these questions is the measure of the degree in which a man is living. He who can answer these questions by the declaration, I am expecting a higher, deeper, more pervading, mastery of Christ— we know that he is thoroughly alive. II. The more varied and manifold a man's experiences have become, the more he has the chance to know of God, the more chance God has to show Himself to him. Every new experience is like an opportunity of knowing God; every experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our lives, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of Himself. And the man who feels himself going out of a dying year with these jewels of experience which have burned forth from his life during its months, and knows that God in the new year will shine upon them and reveal them, may well go full of expectation, saying, "The Lord is at hand." There are two ways in which the Lord is always coming to His servants. He opens their eyes to see how near He is already, and He does actually draw nearer to their lives. III. In the text St. Paul describes what ought to be the result of this expectation of the coming of the Lord upon a man's life: "Let your moderation be known unto all men." This word ''moderation"— "forbearance" the new version renders it— is one of Paul's great words; it means self-restraint, self-possession. There is somewhere in the human mind an image of human character in which all wayward impulses are restrained, not by outside compulsion, but by the firm grasp of a power which holds everything in obedience from within by the central purpose of the life. It is this character which St. Paul calls by his great word "moderation." It is self-possession; it is the self found and possessed in God; it is the sweet reasonableness which was in Jesus, of whom it was written that He should not strive nor cry, neither should His voice be heard in the streets: that He should not break the bruised reed, and the smoking flax He should not quench, until He sent forth judgment to victory. In these words we have the true description of what St. Paul meant by moderation. Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons, p. 353. References: Philippians 4:5.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 157; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. v., p. 53; Ibid., 4th series, vol. i., p. 34; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. xii., p. 278. Philippians 4:5-6I. It is not easy to determine in which of two senses the former clause is to be taken. The Lord is near in position, and the Lord is near in approach. In either sense we can connect the doctrine and the precept. If the Lord is soon coming, how idle must be all anxiety about things soon to be dissolved; if the Lord is always present, how needless must be all anxiety about things easy of remedy. The two thoughts fall into one. But it is with the latter of the two that I desire to occupy you now. The Lord Jesus Christ is always at hand; therefore turn all anxiety into prayer. Thousands of hearts have found repose in this one word of inspiration. Towards some verses we cannot but feel as we do towards a place ennobled or consecrated by the footsteps of saints or heroes. Such verses have a history as well as a doctrine, and is not this one of them? The Lord is ever near, not more in the approach of His advent, than in the reality of His spiritual power. Wherever, in perfect solitude or amidst the din of uncongenial sounds, one humble heart turns to Him as the Saviour and the Intercessor, there is He, not to be sought far and found late, but listening before speech, answering before entreaty. Whatever we be, He changes not; if we doubt His presence, we disparage His power, we deny His Divinity. II. Be anxious about nothing. Anxiety is (1) an idle thing: (2) an enfeebling thing; it eats the very life out of the energies; it leaves the man, not only where he was, but ten times less capable and less vigorous than at the beginning: (3) an irritating thing; it ruffles the temper; it upsets the balance of the spirit; it is the sure source of moodiness, and sharpness, and petulance, and anger; it sets a man at war with himself, with his neighbour, with God's providence and God's appointments. Anxiety is a sign of mistrust; a sign of feeble faith, of flagging energy, and languid obedience. In Christ's presence, in His human soul, in His compassionate heart, we may lay aside our anxieties, we may rest from our burdens, and we may take refuge from our fears and from our sins. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 279. Philippians 4:6I. "Let your requests be made known unto God." (1) Requests. All creatures are dependent. The act of breathing seems the emblem at once of the creature's continual need and the Creator's abundant supply. With us there is emptiness: with Him there is fulness; and, as in the case of breathing, the emptiness of the creature draws supply from God. His goodness has compassed us about like the atmosphere, and when we open our mouth it is filled with good. (2) "Let your requests be made known unto God." God desires company among His creatures; He made an intelligent being that He might have intercourse with the work of His own hands. (3) "Your requests." Search and see what element it is in the requests of his little child that goes like an arrow to a parent's heart, filling that heart with delight and opening sluices for a flood of gifts; it is this: that they are the requests of his own child. II. "By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving." Prayer is the soul's believing and reverential approach unto God; supplication means the needs which demand supply or the asking which springs from a sense of emptiness. III. "In everything." He is not a man of little faith who puts little things into his prayers. That very thing shows him to be a man of great faith. Prayer in secret is a pouring out of the soul before God; and if it is not a pouring, it is not prayer. Anything left behind, cherished in you but concealed from God, vitiates all. W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul, p. 82. The Ideal Manhood. I. This is a command given by one of the ablest professors in the school of Christ. There is a luminousness, and a joyfulness, and a habitual thanksgiving in Paul's life, which contrast very strangely with the outward facts and conditions of that life. He was a prisoner; he was a man advanced in life; he was singularly proud by nature; he was sensitive to a degree that no AEolian harp ever was, for no wind, either loud or low, ever touched him that every sympathy in him did not sound out; and he had been subjected to every indignity of body and soul that a man could undergo. And yet, in other words, he says, Let your disposition be such that you shall see so many things to give thanks for that whenever you have occasion to ask for anything you shall do it through the radiant atmosphere of thanksgiving for all the mercies by which you are surrounded. II. This is the ideal which a man who comes into the Christian communion sets before himself: a higher, a perfected manhood, which makes him superior to other men. To every intelligent person the first steps on becoming a Christian are steps that lead towards the realisation of the conception of the power of a manhood that has been illumined by the Divine Spirit of God and made superior to the body and to the whole outward life, and that makes a man a prince, who is able to govern both himself and others. The first steps that a man takes in a religious life are ranked, not by external circumstances and conditions, but by the ideal which he is seeking to reach. They are the first steps in that education which is by-and-by to give him control over his own being and over his surroundings. Is there anything in this world more fit to be the object of any man's ambition than the attainment by his reason and moral sense of such an absolute power by which he can control all the conditions of his life and every part of himself? Is there anything nobler than that? H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 313. References: Philippians 4:6.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1469; Church of England Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 103; Homilist, vol. iv., p. 302; T. R. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 382; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 215; Sermons on the Catechism, p. 74. Philippians 4:6-7 The Peace of God and what Hinders it. The Apostle speaks of certain things which hinder the ideal peace, and the practical thing for us is to understand these hindrances and remove them. I. The evil that he would prohibit is care— over-anxiety about the things of life. The care condemned is an overanxious solicitude about material things; a restless, wearing, fretting anxiety, that cannot let us do our best, and then leave issues in the hands of God's providence. Exercises of faith are more easy in spiritual things than they are in temporal things. The slightest derangement of our business plans, the least check in our business prosperity, is often too much for our faith. We give way to despondency; every experience seems a presage of evil, every road tangled and rough; we receive no gift of God with joy, we offer no prayer with thanksgiving; we fret ourselves, and perhaps charge God foolishly. II. There are things that we have no right to care about at all, things of sheer envy and covetousness. How our cares would be lessened were they limited to things fairly belonging to us. They, too, who are always foreboding evil, always looking on the dark side of things, and if there be a disastrous possibility anticipate it, make cares for themselves. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Every anxiety about duty has its limits, overpassing which it becomes a disqualifying burden, presses down the springs of action, and disables the judgment. I may be so afraid of doing wrong that I never do right. III. It is difficult to distinguish between the measure of legitimate desire which is right and the excess of it, which is wrong. Two or three suggestions may help us. The legitimate measure of even lawful care is exceeded when religious trust in God is disabled; when our spirit is so disquieted and absorbed that we cannot pray, save in the utterances of imperious desires; when the care intrudes at all times and overpowers all feelings, so that we absolutely cannot leave the issue with God. Undue care is one of the most inveterate forms of unbelief. It wears out physical energies, takes the vital spirit out of a man; instead of a sound mind in a healthy body, he has to contend with a disordered mind in a body nervously unstrung; he can neither work by day nor sleep by night; full of morbid activity, he does nothing; his over-anxiety has defeated itself. IV. How is this great hindrance to peace to be counteracted? The strong man armed can be cast out only by a stronger than he; we cannot cast out the evil spirit and leave an empty heart— swept and garnished. Natural human feeling must have something whereon to rest. It rests upon its misfortune and fear; the true remedy is to rest on God. Pray, and the peace of God shall guard your heart and mind. H. Allon, The Indwelling Christ, p. 107. Reference: Philippians 4:6, Philippians 4:7.— J. Fleming, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 145. Philippians 4:7 The Peace of God. Let us consider the two ideas suggested by the statement that this peace is the peace of God, and that it passeth all understanding; that is, we propose looking at its nature and its greatness, its Divine source, and its incomprehensible character. I. The nature of this peace is such that it is denominated the "peace of God." For this we assign the following reasons: (1) Because it is that for which God made man at first; it is the realisation of His original idea of the happiness of humanity. (2) To this general statement you might add that religious blessedness, as now experienced by humanity, is denominated the peace of God because it is the result of His merciful interposition for man as well as the realisation of His original ideas respecting him. (3) The blessedness of the spiritual life in man is denominated the peace of God because, in addition to its including restoration to the happiness for which God originally designed him and the possession of that which God supernaturally provided for by the Gospel, it is that which is immediately produced by God's Spirit, and is thus in some degree of the nature of a direct Divine donation. (4) It might be said perhaps, in the last place, that religious peace is the peace of God because it is sustained, nourished, and enlarged by those acts and exercises, private and public, which bring the soul into contact with God. II. The second thing is the statement in the text that this peace of God "passeth all understanding." (1) The peace of God in the soul of man, or the felt blessedness of the religious life, passes the understanding of the men of the world. (2) The peace of God, as a felt, conscious, and experienced blessedness, passes the understanding of the Christian himself. (3) The peace of God, looked at in connection with the facts and agencies from which it springs, is a thing which passes the understanding even of angelic intelligence. In the mystery of God, of the Father and of Christ, there are "treasures of wisdom" laid up which no created intelligence will ever comprehend, and which eternity will not exhaust. But this mystery is precisely that out of which flows to man the power of God; the stream partakes of the nature of its source, and hence the Divine gift of the incomprehensible God itself surpasses "all understanding." T. Binney, King's Weighhouse Chapel Sermons, p. 106. The Warrior Peace. The great mosque of Constantinople was once a Christian church, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom. Over its western portal may still be read, graven on a brazen plate, the words, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." For four hundred years noisy crowds have fought, and sorrowed, and fretted beneath the dim inscription in an unknown tongue; and no eye has looked at it, nor any heart responded. My text is Christ's offer of peace. The world offers excitement; Christ promises repose. I. Mark, first, this peace of God. What are its elements? (1) It must be peace with God; (2) it is peace within ourselves. II. Notice what my text tells us that the peace of God does: it takes upon itself warlike functions, and garrisons the heart and mind. The peace of God, which is peace militant, is unbroken amidst the conflicts. The wise old Greeks chose for the goddess of Athens the goddess of Wisdom, and whilst they consecrated to her the olive branch, which is the symbol of peace, they set her image on the Parthenon, helmed and spear-bearing, to defend the peace which she brought to earth. So this heavenly virgin, whom the Apostle personifies here, is the "winged sentry, all skilful in the wars," who enters into our hearts, and fights for us to keep us in unbroken peace. III. Notice how we get the peace of God. (1) Trust is peace; (2) submission is peace; (3) communion is peace. You will get no quiet until you live with God; until He is at your side you will always be moved. A. Maclaren, The Unchanging Christ, p. 115. References: Philippians 4:7.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv., No. 180; vol. xxiv., No. 1597; J. H. Thorn, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 2nd series, p. 1; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 31; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 280; T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. v., p. 238; H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 3rd series, p. 446; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 3753. Philippians 4:8 When the Apostle wrote these words, he was filled with the best of all loves. These grand words were almost the last outpouring of the fulness of the Apostle's love. Everybody knows them; everybody admires them; everybody is conscious of an undefined pleasure in them. I. Observe that all the good and holy things of the text purify. St. Paul does not say, Do them, but what is far more: "Think on them." The word means literally, Take them into your mouths; dwell on them; imbue your very spirit with them; for there is life in them when fostered in the inner life of which the outer life is only a reflection. Every mind must have its thoughts, and every thought must have its food. Thought dies without food. Some men think too abstractedly; some men think much of the evils which they wish to avoid; that is vainness: the thought may take the bad character even from the wrong thing, which it is the object of that very thought to destroy. It is far safer, it is far better, and far more effective to think of the true, the holy, and the good. II. The more you meditate upon the truth, the honesty, and the justice which regulate the sacred transactions between Heaven and man— that is, the more you see the Cross of Christ as the great embodiment of the mind of God and contemplate the highest truth as it is exhibited there— the more prepared you will be to go on to take a proper estimate of what is to be "the true, the honest, and the just" in the relations and dealings of the present life. Whenever you can form this lofty conception of the inner and beautiful principle, your standard will be very high, and you will be better able to take measure of the circumstances of life. He will always make the best prophet the eye of whose mind is the most familiar with a Divine and prompt obedience. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 151. I. We can all appreciate the importance of being able to guide and control our thoughts; we can all understand that it must be a serious thing to have lost or not to possess the power of doing so. And who has not known by experience something of the evil effects of thinking of the opposite things to those which St. Paul here recommends? St. Paul bids the Philippians entertain one kind of guests within, and by inference exclude or expel another. And which of us does not feel that there is wisdom in this caution? A man who lives much amongst the evil things of human nature, even if professional or other duty requires it of him, can seldom preserve unsullied the purity of his Christian feeling. And if such be the effect of an acquaintance with things hateful and impure in those who approach them at the call of business or duty, how must it be with those who live amongst them by choice? There are those who gloat upon the records of vice or crime, and find in them an attraction and fascination which is wanting in things lovely and of good report. II. St. Paul's charge has a depth of wisdom and a wholesomeness of counsel scarcely noticed perhaps on its surface. We ought to cherish only such thoughts concerning others as are lovely and of good report; we ought to dwell by choice only upon virtues. The charge presupposes a power over the thoughts. And thus we are led to a serious reflection upon the importance of turning our faith to account in the work of regulating and disciplining thought. Of ourselves we can neither think nor do one good thing; but if the Gospel be true, we can think as well as do all things through Christ who strengtheneth us. Let us pray to God to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit.C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 295. References: Philippians 4:8.— F. W. Farrar, Everyday Christian Life, p. 46; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 158; W. B. Pope, Sermons, p. 213; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 200; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 115; R. M. Stewart, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 121; H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 148; J. G. Rogers, Ibid., vol. xxviii., p. 28; Ibid., p. 295; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. vii., p. 289. Philippians 4:9.— W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxx., p. 277; S. Martin, Sermons, 2nd series, p. 219; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 382. Philippians 4:11 The Secret of Happiness. I. When St. Paul speaks of being content, he uses in the original a word which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. But this word, so rare with St. Paul, was in common use with all the schools of ancient Greece. Perhaps it would have been rendered more closely by "self-sufficing." St. Paul, as was his custom, took the old Greek word and baptized it; he gave it a new value; he read instinctively a new meaning into it. A Christian can only be self-sufficing, because in a Christian self is virtually suppressed. The old self is superseded by, is absorbed into, another self. II. What are the ingredients of Christian contentment, and what are the ruling considerations which should make a Christian happy and thankful to be what he is? (1) The first motive, common in a large measure to St. Paul and to the wiser heathen, is that nothing earthly either lasts or satisfies. Why not acquiesce in whatever befalls us when all is relatively unimportant, relatively insignificant? (2) The second motive for cherishing a contented spirit is confidence in the wise and loving providence of God. We each are placed where we are. God is too 'wise not to know all about us and not to know what it is best for us to be and to have; and God is too good not to desire our highest good, and too powerful if He desires not to effect it. Our true course is to remember that He sees further than we do, and that we shall understand Him in time when His plans have unfolded themselves. (3) The third motive is that a Christian in a state of grace already possesses God: "If any man love Me, My Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." Surely, if these Divine words are real to us, we must know that nothing that is finite can be needed to supplement this our firm hold upon the infinite, that no created thing can add to what we have in possessing the Creator. H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv., p. 273. References: Philippians 4:11.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 320; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 47; Homilist, 2nd series, vol. ii., p. 247; Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 1; H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 1st series, p. 159; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vi., p. 204. Philippians 4:11, Philippians 4:12.— E. Cooper, Practical Sermons, vol. ii., p. 189. Philippians 4:11-13.— H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 124. Philippians 4:12 All men have owned that the knowledge which Paul claimed is not an easy one to win or keep. To know how to be poor! Plenty of people there are who are set down to the hard lesson. Plenty of people— yes, all people in different degrees and different ways— are led into some disappointment or abasement, but how few seem to stand in it evidently the stronger and the better for it. Poverty seems to men to be like the old fabled Sphinx, a mysterious being who has in herself the secrets of life, but holds them fast and tells them only in riddles, and devours the brave, unfortunate adventurers who try to guess at the wisdom she conceals and fail. The result is that few men seek her wisdom voluntarily. It is only when all other schools turn them out that they will go to hers. I. It is evidently a distinct region of life in which Paul finds himself, where so long as he lives there is a special harvest for him to reap which he could reap nowhere else. To recognise the land in which he finds himself and to reap the harvest which he finds waiting for him there— that is the knowledge of how to be abased which Paul is thankfully claiming; that is what all his life and abasement has given him. "When I am weak, then am I strong." Is there not here a true intelligible picture of the way in which a man may know how to be abased? If it is possible to look upon a limited, restricted life as a certain kind of life, with its own peculiar chances and environments out of which a man, if he knows how, may get a character, and in which a man, if he knows how, may live a life which would be impossible elsewhere, then certainly this limited restricted life may win and hold an affectionate respect which is a positive thing and may be very strong and real. We need not be haunted with the demon of comparison; we need not say whether the cultures and pleasures of abasement are greater or less than those of abundance; enough that it has its own, peculiar to itself and full of value. Life is a medal with two sides; the "other" side, as we choose to call it, has its own image and superscription, and is not made up only of the depressions which are necessary to make the elevations on the face. Not to all men, not to any man always, does God give complete abundance. To all men sometimes, to some men in long stretches of their lives, come the abasement times, times of poverty, times of ignorance, times of friendlessness, times of distrust and doubt. But God does not mean that these times should be like great barren stretches and blanks in our lives, only to be travelled over for the sake of what lies beyond. To men who, like Paul, know how to be abased, they have their own rich value. To have our desire set on nothing absolutely except character, to be glad that God should lead us into any land where there is character to win— this is the only real explanation of life. Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 179. Philippians 4:12I. The phrase is very simple. Behind the duty of being anything lies the deeper duty of knowing how to be that thing in the best way and to the best result. No man has a right to be anything unless he is conscious that he knows how to be it, not with a perfect knowledge— for that can come only by the active exercise of being the thing itself— but at least no man has a right to be anything unless he carries already in his heart such a sense of the magnitude and the capacity of his occupation as makes him teachable by experience for all that his occupation has to make known to him. This is the law which Paul suggests with regard to abundance. Wealth is a condition, a vocation, he declares. A man may have the condition and not have, not even seek to have, the knowledge of how to live in that condition. Go to, ye rich men, and learn how a rich man ought to live. II. Is it possible for us to put our finger on this mysterious knowledge of St. Paul, and say exactly what it was? I think we can. It must have been a Christian knowledge. Imagine that to his meagre life there had been brought the sudden prospect of abundance. "Tomorrow, Paul, a new world is to be opened to you. You shall be rich; you shall have hosts of friends; all your struggles shall be over; you shall live in peace. Are you ready for this new life? Can your feet walk strong and sure and steady in this new land, so different from any land where they have ever walked before?" What will Paul's answer be? "Yes. I have Christ; I know my soul is in Him. I am His servant; nothing can make me leave Him. With the power of that consecration, I can rob abundance of its dangers, and make it the servant of Him and of my soul. I shall not be its slave; it shall be mine. I will walk at liberty because I keep His commandments." The power by which Paul could confidently expect to rob abundance of its dangers and to call out all its help was the knowledge of the true perfection of a human soul in serving Christ. III. In each of the several departments of our life it is not enough that a man shall have attained abundance: he must also know how to abound in riches, in learning, in friendships, in spiritual privilege; there is a deeper knowledge which alone can fasten the treasure which he has won, and make it truly his, and draw out its best use. What a great principle that is! Under that principle a man may even be the master of the heart and soul of some possessions whose form he does not own. I know that Jesus, the poor Man who walked through rich Jerusalem and had not where to lay His head, had still the key to all that wealth. We cannot attain to all abundance in this one short life; but if we can come to God and be His servants, the knowledge of how to be things which we shall never be may enter into us. In poverty we may have the blessing of riches, in enforced ignorance the blessing of knowledge, in loneliness the blessing of friendship, and in suspense and doubt the blessing of peace and rest. Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 157. Reference: Philippians 4:12.— Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 41. Philippians 4:13I. The context shows that it is more of bearing than of doing that St. Paul speaks. He has been initiated, he says, into the great mystery of contentment. He knows how to reconcile himself to every extreme, how to conduct himself in plenty and in hunger, in abundance and in need. It is true in every sense of a Christian, certainly it was true in every sense of St. Paul, that he can do all things through Christ strengthening him; but here we are especially called to notice that Christ enabled St. Paul, and can enable all who believe, to be contented with any condition and with any circumstances of life which the providence of God has been pleased to ordain. Contentment is the ready acquiescence of the heart and will in that which is, and is for us; it is the not reaching forth to that which is forbidden or denied to us; it is the not looking with eager desire through the bars of our cage at a fancied liberty or an imagined paradise without; it is the saying, and saying because we feel it in the deep of our soul, This is God's will, and therefore it is my will; it is the condition of one who is independent of all save God, of one whom neither riches nor poverty, neither affluence nor want, neither success nor failure, neither prosperity nor adversity, can so affect as to make the difference to him of being a happy man or a miserable. II. Such contentment is, as Paul himself here writes, of the nature of a secret or mystery communicated only by special revelation to a selected few. I have been initiated, he writes, into it. Who tells the secret? who initiates into that Divine mystery? It must be a person. We do not hear secrets from the whispering winds; we are not initiated into mysteries by common rumour or by the passing changes and chances of mortal life. That contentment which is in one sense a mystery is in another equally true sense a grace and a strength. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 311. We see here— I. Jesus Christ strengthening His disciple and Apostle Paul. Every man needs strength, but no man has within him strength equal to the demands that are made upon him. An Apostle is no exception to this rule. The apostleship did not assist Paul's personal Christianity; but it rendered that Christianity more difficult and more arduous. Paul, the wonderful convert, the chief Apostle, was equal to all things only by Christ strengthening him. II. Paul assured that all things were possible to him. He felt equal to all the labour and toil which duty could ever involve; he felt equal to all suffering which could become his portion. Not as a Jew, not as a child of Abraham, not as a disciple of Moses, but as a Christian, Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, 1st series, p. 126. References: Philippians 4:13.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 346; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 268; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 107; Sermons on the Catechism, p. 1; F. Temple, Rugby Sermons, 1st series, p. 1. Philippians 4:17I. In a certain sense all almsgiving abounds to the account of the giver, all almsgiving, I mean, which is worthy of the name. I may be glad of the gift given, but I cannot call it almsgiving of a Christian kind unless there be two things in it: disinterestedness and self-denial. We must have no side aims, no crooked or selfish motives, in that almsgiving which is to inherit the promise. A person must not give to be seen of men, and a person must not give because not to give would, be to be blamed by men, and a person must not give thus much because not to do so would appear mean and illiberal. These are bad motives, and half the almsgiving in Christian congregations is no doubt spoiled by them for the giver. Again, I cannot call it almsgiving in a high or Christian sense unless there is in it something of self-denial. I say again, it may do good without this, but it can bring no blessing after it. It is well from early years to associate the idea of giving to another with sparing from one's self. Let the little sum which you had intended to lay out upon self, in body or mind, be willingly and cheerfully given to another: to the relief of the body, the instruction of the mind, or the enlightenment of the soul, of some other person or persons for whom, as for you, Christ died. Then that is Christian almsgiving; it is the act of one who out of love to Christ gives away that which he would have had to spend. Now all such almsgiving brings after it fruit which abounds to the giver. II. But most of all surely will this be so in cases where the act itself is an act of faith. To relieve distress, disease, destitution, when it stares you in the face, is better than not to relieve it; but it is oftentimes an act rather of natural kindness than of spiritual principle. But when you give in the cause of a Christian mission, you are doing that which can be prompted by no such motive; and it is the certain reaction of such almsgiving, such in motive and such in object, that it strengthens the faith out of which it springs. C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 327. References: Philippians 4:18.— J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons, p. 192. Philippians 4:19.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1712. Philippians 4:21.—American Pulpit of the Day, p. 374; Wilkinson, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 94. Philippians 4:22 The Spirit of Christianity. I. The words of the text suggest to us that the Gospel is a spiritually restoring power. It makes men, sinful men, saints; it is a power to raise, ennoble, and make morally strong, a power which the world needs and must experience before prosperity shall abound and peace on earth shall be enjoyed. The want of the world is saints— saints like those who were in Rome, and who during all the ages have been the salt of the earth. Saints are those who* stand right with God, right with all their brethren and mankind, and right with themselves. They become all this by the spiritual power of the Gospel, the spiritual energy which alone can turn sinners into saints, and the old mankind into a new mankind, zealous of good works. And all Churches should be gardens to grow such saintly men, who will go forth as the sacramental host of God's elect to do battle with sin in every form. II. The words of our text suggest that the Gospel is a spreading power. It has within it a life which must expand and permeate all with whom it comes into contact. Like the light of the sun, it seeks to flood the world with heat, life, and glory; like the fragrance of the flower, it diffuses itself all around and sweetens the atmosphere of human existence. Christianity is a movement and a moving power. Under its inspiring and elevating influence civilisation advances, science makes progress, literature flourishes like a green bay-tree, trade and commerce are developed, and nations lifted to higher altitudes of moral and spiritual being. And as it moves on it blesses and scatters benefactions on all around. The soul is not saved for itself only, but for others also. Every real Church should be, and is, a company of men animated by the missionary spirit, and all its members should be living epistles, known and read of all men. III. Further, the words of the text teach us that the Gospel imparts the spirit of true courage. Previously to the appearance of Christ in the flesh, the world recognised those who were animated by the spirit of bravery, and whose courage was embodied in action; but the courage we should now admire most is the moral courage which is ready to stand up for the right and the true, no matter the nature and extent of the opposition. And those are the real heroes who dare to be right, even with two or three, and are ever ready to obey God rather than man. Such courage is the fruit of the Gospel, and has been exhibited in its grandest manifestations in the history of the Christian Church. IV. Finally, our text implies that the Gospel imparts a spirit of sympathy. This is needed in the world. The Gospel might have made those who received it righteous, brave, and heroic, but it would have failed in its mission if it did not at the same time impart a strong and genuine sympathy with all those who are called upon to shed tears, heave sighs, part with loved ones, and struggle hard with the opposing forces of everyday life. Let us cultivate the element of sympathy, for it is an element of the Divine life in the soul. It is a strange, strong power, without which in many cases existence would be a burden, and earth a prison-house of despair. Let it be ours to dry the tear, to quell the fear, and make the burdens of others our own. In this way we shall weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who are glad, and thereby fulfil the law of Christ. W. Adamson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxvi., p. 163. References: Philippians 4:22.— W. Walters, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 382; G. Dawson, The Authentic Gospel, p. 101; Preacher's Monthly, vol. vii., p- 245.