Philippians (Page 4)
Sinful pride toward others gets named directly, set against a God who befriends the humble rather than the impressive. 1 John 2:16 and Galatians 6:15-16 together describe two orders of creation, flesh and spirit, that run throughout Scripture as competing allegiances. The proud, this sermon insists bluntly, cannot actually accept God’s grace, since pride and grace are finally incompatible postures.
Several wrong ideas about Christ get corrected here, starting with the disciples’ own mistaken view of children as beneath Christ’s attention. Christ’s deliberate welcome of children in Luke 18 is read as the New Testament visibly overtaking an Old Testament assumption. What the disciples got wrong about children, this sermon suggests, they were also getting wrong about Christ himself.
Circumcision and uncircumcision, bondage and freedom, law and faith: Galatians 3 keeps these pairs distinct rather than blending them, and this sermon follows that same discipline. Covenantal obedience, faith working through love, is how Paul actually resolves the tension Galatians 5 and 6 name. True circumcision, on these terms, was never primarily a physical mark to begin with.
Religious television programming gets called out directly here as a real, contemporary foolishness worth naming. Paul’s own conversion, by contrast, was genuinely unique, no template for a generic ‘testimony’ style faith. Looking away from ourselves, entering the actual change Christ himself experienced, is what this sermon holds up as the real alternative to both.
Paul’s enemies of the gospel get treated to real ridicule here, a rhetorical strategy meant to emphasize the actual evil of their ways rather than mere personal insult. Why Paul calls them ‘dogs’ and ‘concision’ rather than simply ‘false teachers’ gets specific attention. What stands against all that ridicule is the plain glory of the true gospel of Christ, the real subject beneath the polemic.
Persecution facing the church from inside and outside are treated as genuinely different threats here, never collapsed into one generic category. Earthlymindedness, more than external opposition, is named as the church’s real ongoing danger. Paul’s own warning about enemies of the gospel carries extra weight precisely because he writes it from real, present danger, never from safety.
Philippians 3:1’s transitional placement carries real doctrinal complexity, more than its brief wording suggests. The ‘dogs’ Paul warns against in the verses that follow threaten to destroy the Philippians’ own rejoicing, a real danger rather than rhetorical flourish. Paul expends himself joyfully in response, precisely because Christ first expended himself the same way for Paul.
Colossians 1:24’s notoriously difficult claim, filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions, gets careful handling here, weighed against passages that insist on Christ’s own sufficiency in his sufferings. Paul’s preaching, rather than any deficiency in the cross itself, is what actually ‘fills up’ that gap. Philippians 2:25-30’s account of Epaphroditus’s own near-fatal service supplies a concrete instance of exactly that filling.
Paul’s own rejoicing in the Philippians shapes why he sends Timothy specifically, naming him both ‘kindred spirit’ in 2:20 and ‘son’ in 2:22, terms chosen to demonstrate Paul’s real integrity toward them. Luke’s annunciation narrative supplies an older instance of God sending someone to prove his love concretely. God proved his love, finally, by sending Christ himself, the pattern behind every lesser sending that follows.
Biblical ignorance in the contemporary church gets named directly, a real deficiency this sermon traces back to underestimating the depth of Paul’s Biblical Theology in 2:14-18. Preaching Christ, the sermon observes, is common enough; actually living Christ the way Paul did is rare. Sending Timothy, at the chapter’s close, is Paul’s own concrete answer to that rarity.