Laying the Foundation
Philippians 1 and the foundation of gratitude and peace through suffering
This article was intended to get to you almost a week ago–but then, babies got sick, nap times got wacky, home needed tending… and here we are the Monday before Thanksgiving. Such is the life of a writing stay at home mom, but my prayer is that these words are finding you at just the right Spirit-led moment.
Thanksgiving is around the corner… which may or may not be exciting for you.
If you host family and friends for the big feast, maybe you’re compiling your favorite recipes, making a plan for grocery shopping and cooking, and wiping the dust off of your favorite serveware. Or, perhaps you’re spending more time than usual dreaming of Grandma’s mac & cheese or your wife’s apple pie (that’s a direct shout out to my hubby).
And maybe you’ve done something to prepare your heart, too, like a gratitude journal through the month of November, or at least been inspired on Sundays to turn your mind and heart toward gratitude. Perhaps you’ve bristled at each notion toward gratitude, wondering, “What can I feel grateful for?”
Then, maybe in guilt, you conjure up images of people you know personally and strangers from around the world who have less stuff than you (and more hardship, too). You breathe a quick prayer of thankfulness for the roof over your head, the heat coming out of your furnace, the food in your fridge… Wondering how to reconcile your difficult emotions with the multitude of things you do have and “should” be more thankful for.
The truth of the matter is this: I’m a therapist, and I can confidently tell you that gratitude is a wonderful thing. I’ve got Bible AND research AND clinical experience to back that up.
The practical application of gratitude, however, is something I think we in the West can work on–especially for people going through difficult times.
Which is where Philippians comes in.
If you want to read the short version of why I dug deeply into the book of Philippians, you can find that story here. But suffice to say, I was wondering where we might find the intersection of peace (even joy) and the hard, disappointing, often-overwhelming difficulties in life. How do I honor that God made me a complex human, designed to display a full range of positive and negative emotions, but also acknowledge the beauty of gratitude?
For too long, I conceptualized joy, gratitude, and peace to live on the opposite pole from grief, despair, and lament. For much of my Christianity, I leaned on the side of manufactured positivity at the expense of even being aware of the harder things I felt. But, then, in learning that grief and lament were necessary, I think I found myself trending toward the opposite side of my imagined spectrum, and renouncing joy or gratitude for the sake of honoring the hard.
By the grace of God, I'm starting to see that joy and lament don’t live on opposite poles–that grief and peace can be two sides of one coin. The book of Philippians holds many of the words that help me understand that truth, so let’s dive in.
[I’m going to save space in this note and not copy all of Philippians 1 into the text. Rather, I encourage you to take a minute now and read the chapter in your version of choice before we keep going. I’m going to be reflecting on the words used in the NRSV]
How Paul begins
After a few readings through the whole letter, I finally began to settle in and focus on smaller chunks at a time. The first thing that strikes me about how Paul begins a letter that ends with some pretty full words on joy, contentment, and peace, is his assurance of love.
“I thank my God in every remembrance of you…”
“I hold you in my heart…”
“I long for all of you… with the tender affection of Christ Jesus.”
Paul assures the church in Phillipi of his personal affection for them, and then brings it around to the affection of Christ. These words are so personal, I find that it can be easy to skim over them. They’re relational expressions rather than commands to be followed, so let’s skip to the part where I can sink my teeth into something to do shall we?
Actually, no.
In the face of a difficult situation, neuroscience an attachment theory tell us that what we need first is acceptance. For someone to be present, and love us unconditionally right where we are. (All of you parents, I highly recommend the book The Rabbit Listened as a beautiful illustration of this truth in the form of a kid’s book).
Paul doesn’t jump right in and say, “Yeah, guys, life is hard…. but you know what? The brothers in Rome actually have it way worse, and at least you don’t have it that rough. Just be joyful for the good in your life.”
But isn’t that how we approach ourselves and each other in the face of hard emotions (especially rounding the corner to Thanksgiving)?
I love this implicit lesson from Paul. To pause. To be seen. To be heard. To see and hear. To ultimately, no matter what we’re feeling, rest confident that we are enveloped in the secure love of Christ himself.
Then, he prays.
v9 “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”
Paul is famous for penning some pretty incredible prayers, and this one comes near the top of my most favorite to reflect on.
Beginning with that abundant love he expresses in the opening lines of his letter, Paul prays that it would overflow with knowledge and full insight. Now, Westerners generally think of knowledge as what facts we hold in our pre-frontal cortexes. But the knowledge to the Eastern readers and writers in Biblical times was a more holistic knowledge. Think of how you know it’s going to rain–maybe you checked the forecast, but maybe you sense the change in pressure, smell the familiar smell of moisture on warm asphalt, feel the drop in temperature. You know it’s going to rain before your brain registers that it is going to rain.
Paul prays for that kind of knowledge of God and his inner workings into our lives. He also prays that the love we are immersed in would overflow with full insight. The trickle-down effect of our lives overflowing with this love-drenched knowledge and full insight is that we would be able to determine what really matters. Discernment. That our hearts are so overcome with gospel truths, that when we look around at the world in front of us, our daily lives, the things people come to us about… That we would have a clear picture of what really matters.
All of this is so that in the day of Christ (when his kingdom comes in fullness), we may be found to belong in it–that the harvest of righteousness has been produced, or found completed, within our hearts. And all of this through, or by the means of, Jesus Christ.
This prayer is a reminder that godliness, and being able to see our world through the eyes of Christ, to discern what really matters to God, is a Jesus-propelled process. It’s a lifetime of training, learning, coming to knowledge, and adjusting. He’s about to launch into how that training takes place, but I want to make sure we stop a minute here and rest in that truth. The goal is not perfect gratitude today (not even by Thursday when the turkey is being cut). Rather, the goal is a lifetime of learning the heartbeat of God, and therefore growing in our ability to express gratitude for the things he’s encouraging us to.
Suffering to shape us
From here, Paul explains a bit of what his training has looked like. As he writes from prison, he shares with the church in Philippi that what has happened to him has actually resulted in the progress of the gospel. He shares that as a result of his hardship, people are preaching the word, and more people are coming to trust in this gospel message.
It’s in this section that Paul shares his famous line, “for to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” I’ve always been a bit baffled by this line… living is Christ? I think I understand the flip side of the argument–dying is gain. But for life to be Christ has always seemed to be an odd statement. I wonder if the original hearers struck a look of confusion at this line as well. We get further into what he means by “Christ” as a descriptor in chapters 2 and 3, but for now we’ll just let our hearts wonder about it.
And, like any good teacher, Paul effortlessly brings the conversation from his own suffering (and the things he’s seeing in the midst of it), to the suffering of those he’s writing to. It’s in the middle of this section that he says the line that caught me in my tracks, and made me slow down through this letter.
“For he has graciously granted you the privilege not only on believing in Christ, but of suffering for Him as well–since you are having the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I still have.”
This challenging season for me was a far cry from what Paul has been through at the time of writing this letter, and I still stopped dead in my tracks when I read that line.
I’m so sorry, what? Graciously granted you the privilege?”
Nothing about hard seasons feels like it’s full of grace or privilege? Generally, when we talk about God’s grace to us, it’s in providing us with pleasant things.
“By God’s grace we made it out Ok.”
“By God’s grace, I passed my test.”
No, Paul here is doing something different. He is communicating that it’s not only a grace that we get to trust Jesus with these lives we lead, but it’s gracious privilege to suffer for him.
Now, there are a couple of things that came together for me in this moment that I’ll share with you, and then I’ll leave you be to marinate on these things.
First, the word “for” in this context gives us the idea of “on behalf of.” In other words, this “for” is not just for the benefit of Christ, but rather we’re picking up the mantle of suffering and carrying it forward in the name of Christ.
Earlier this year, I was so fortunate to pick up Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement, and the single most profound point from that book that I’ve held onto is this–the love of God has always been cruciform.
The cross wasn’t a one-off event where this God did something unique and out of character, but rather the cross was the embodiment of the kind of love God has demonstrated for his people through the ages.
And suddenly, the Spirit inched the door of my heart a little wider to see into this mystery of life with him.
I don’t rejoice in spite of suffering. I don’t push those negative, unpleasant feelings to the side in favor of more righteous thoughts. No, Paul is advocating here that there is something God-shaped, kingdom-sized, and Christ honoring in our suffering.
If you read my article last week, my lowercase “s” suffering revolves around life as a stay at home mom feeling very unpleasant much of the time, in addition to a particularly challenging season of marriage. I suggested for you it may be a job, or a spouse, or some other collection of circumstances that doesn’t seem right because it’s downright unpleasant, painful, or infuriating.
But Philippians 1 gives us a window into the truth that these things of life, this suffering and hardship, can in fact serve to shape our hearts into the kind of hearts that feel at home in the kingdom of God.
Because as verse 9 reminds us, it’s a process. We won’t find complete peace in the kingdom of God until Christ comes in fulness. But as Marty Solomon ponders in the gospel episodes of the BEMA podcast–are we allowing this life to shape us into the kind of people who will even want to be in heaven?
I believe our lives, even (especially) the parts that feel the most difficult, can be the liturgies used by the Spirit of God to shape us into kingdom-hearted people.
It gets even juicier in the next few chapters, but for now here are a couple more things that I think touch this subject well–if even poetically.
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Beautiful post! Thank you for this! ❤️