THE INTIMACY OF HUMAN HEARTS IN CHRIST
PHILIPPIANS i. 1-11
The Apostle and his converts one--The possible isolation of
hearts--Union with and in Christ--Christ and the personality--Christ
the secret of intimacy--Is the secret ours?--Reserve in Christian
intercourse
Let us begin our verbal study of the Letter which Epaphroditus carried
to Philippi. We attempt first a translation of its first main section,
interspersed with an explanatory paraphrase. This will be followed by
a brief meditation upon one of the main "Lessons in Faith and Love"
suggested by the section.
Ver. 1. +Paul and Timotheus, bondservants of Christ Jesus, to all the
holy ones+ in union with +Christ Jesus who are living at Philippi,
Overseers, Workers, and all+.[1]
Ver. 2. +Grace to you, and peace+--all the free favour of acceptance
and of divine presence, and all the repose which it brings, within you
and around you--from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,
Vers. 3, 4. +I give thanks to my God+ (He is mine, as I am His) +over
my whole memory of you; always in each request of mine on behalf of you
all forming and expressing+ (_poioumenos_[2]) +that+ (_ten_) +request
with joy+;
Ver. 5. +on account of your participation with me in regard of the
Gospel+, your active co-operation with me, by prayer, by work, by
gifts, in the Gospel work,
Ver. 6. +from the first day up to this present. For+ (the thought of
your long consistency suggests the assertion) +I am quite sure of just
this, that He who inaugurated+ (_enarkamenos_: the word has solemn,
ceremonial connexions) +in you the[3] good work will perfect it+, will
evermore put His finishing touches to it (_epitelesei_), up to +Christ
Jesus' Day+, the Day of His promised Return, and of our glorification
with Him. But this is by the way; I return to my joy and my
Ver. 7. thanksgivings over you: +Even as it is just that I+, I above
all men (_emoi_, emphatic, not _moi_), +should feel+ (_phronein_) +like
this over you all, on behalf of you all,[4] because of my having you in
my heart, as those who, alike in my imprisonment+ (_desmois_) +and in
the vindication and establishment of the Gospel+, the defence of it
against its enemies, the developement of its truths and its power in
the believing, +are copartners, all of you, of my grace+; my grace, the
grace granted me, the glorious privilege of suffering and of doing as a
Missionary of Christ. Your loving, working sympathy has inextricably
united you and me, alike in my prison and in my apostolate.
Ver. 8. Yes, I feel this in my inmost being. +For God is my witness,
how I yearn+, as with a homesick affection (_epipothia_), +for you all,
in the heart+ (_splagchna_) +of Christ Jesus+; for to His members His
heart is as it were theirs; our emotions are, by the Spirit, in contact
with His.
Ver. 9. +And+ what are those "requests" which I make for you with joy?
+This is my prayer, that your love+, in the fullest Christian sense,
but above all in the sense of your love to one another, +may abound yet
more and more+ in the attendant and protective blessing of +spiritual
knowledge+ (_epignosis_) and all needed
Ver. 10. +discernment; so that+, amidst life's many temptations to
compromises of conviction or inconsistency of spirit, +you may test the
things that differ+ (_ta diapherona_), sifting truth and holiness from
their counterfeits; +in order to be singlehearted+ (_eilikrineis_[5])
+and without a stumbling-block+, such as error and inconsistency so
easily lay in our further path, +against+, in view of, +Christ's Day+;
so that when that Day dawns you may be found to be not servants whose
time has been half lost for their Lord's work and will, but
Ver. 11. rather those +who have been filled with the fruit+ (_karpon_,
not _karpon_) of righteousness--the result, in witness and service, of
your reconciliation and renewal,[6] fruit which is borne +through Jesus
Christ+, the Procurer and the Secret of your fruit-bearing life, to
+God's praise and glory+, the true goal and end of all our blessings
and of all our labours.
So the Letter opens; with greeting, with benediction, and then with an
outpouring, of sympathies full at once of the warmest and tenderest
_humanity_ and of the inmost secrets of divine truth and life. It is a
preamble beautifully characteristic not only of St Paul but of the
Gospel. It illustrates from many sides the happy fact that there is
nothing which so effectually opens human hearts to one another as the
love of Christ. We are all sadly familiar with the possibilities of
isolation between heart and heart. Poets have written with eloquent
melancholy of our personalities as islands which lie indeed near
together, but in an unfathomable ocean, over whose channels no boat has
ever passed. Schools of pessimistic thought have positively affirmed
that never really has one _ego_ found its way into another through the
hermetic seal of individuality; all that we seem to know of others is
but the action of our own mind within itself, occasioned by a blind
collision with a something not itself, which we can strike upon but can
never really know. Such lucubrations are artificial, not natural; a
distortion of mysterious facts, not an exposition of them; the result
of an arbitrary selection from the data of our consciousness, and then
the treatment of the selection as if it were the whole. Quite apart
from the Gospel, the facts of human intercourse are full of evidence to
wonderful and beautiful possibilities of insight and intercourse
between human spirit and spirit. But if we want to read the best
possible negative to the gloomy dream of impenetrable isolation, we
must come to the Lord Jesus Christ. We must make experiment of what it
is, in Him, to know and love others who are in Him too. Then indeed we
shall find that we can, in the common possession of a living Lord who
dwells in our hearts by faith, see as it were from heart into heart, in
the warm light of His presence. We shall find how wonderful is the
friendship with one another to which the friends of Jesus are called,
and for which they are enabled in Him.
"IN HIM": those words are the key to this deep, tender, healthful
union, and as it were fusion, of souls. We have the truth which they
convey prominent already in the Philippian Letter. It is addressed
(ver. 1) to "the holy ones in Christ Jesus." That is to say, it comes
to men and women who, taken on their profession, assumed to be in fact
what they were denoted to be in baptism, were separated from self and
sin to God by their union in covenant and life with their Redeemer. It
regards them as personalities so truly annexed by Jesus Christ, in the
miracle of converting grace, so articulated spiritually into Him, that
no language short of this wonderful "in Him" will worthily express
their relation to Him. Later (ver. 11), they are regarded as so united
to Him that "the fruit of righteousness" which they are to bear in rich
abundance is to be borne only "_through_ Him"; He, the Vine, is the one
possible secret by which they, the branches, can possibly be productive
of the sweet cluster of "the fruit of the Spirit." And between those
two places comes a sentence (ver. 8) where, just in passing, in a mere
allusion to his own experience, the Apostle takes for granted this
profound "continuity with Christ" in a peculiarly impressive way:
"I long after you all in the heart of Jesus Christ." As we have seen
above, he regards himself (not as an Apostle but simply as a believer)
as so "joined unto the Lord" that, if I may dare so to expand the
phrase, the heart of Jesus Christ is the true organ and vehicle of his
own regenerate emotions. The whole Scripture, and particularly the
whole Pauline Scripture, assures us what this does _not_ mean. It does
not mean the least suspension or distortion of the humanity or of the
personality of Paul. It means no absorption of his _ego_, and nothing
whatever _un_-natural in either the nature or the exercise of his
affections. His "homesick longing" to see the dear Philippian people
again is quite as simple, natural, personal, as any longing he ever
felt in his boyhood for his home at Tarsus when he was absent from it.
Yes, but this personality, working so freely and truly in its every
faculty, is now, by the Holy Ghost, so put into spiritual contact with
the will and heart of Jesus Christ, who now "dwells in it by faith,"
that the whole action moves, so to speak, in the sphere, in the
atmosphere, of HIM. The love which passes so freely through and out of
the believer to his brethren would not be what it is if the believer
were not "in Christ." He is still all himself; nay, he is more than
ever himself, being in the Lord; for indeed that blessed union has a
genial and developing power upon its happy subject. But such is that
power that it deeply qualifies the mental and spiritual action of the
being who enters into it; never violates but always qualifies.
The fact, the experience, of course transcends our analysis. But it is
not beyond our faith, nor beyond our reception and inward verification.
"Thy love, Thy joy, Thy peace,
Continuously impart
Unto my heart;
Fresh springs that never cease,
But still increase." [7]
Our immediate purpose meanwhile is not to discuss the believer's union
with his Lord, but to remark on this one precious result of it, the
opening of his inmost sympathies to the sharers of the same blessing.
We see that result displayed in all its brightness in this first
paragraph of the Epistle; and we shall see it to the end. In the
particular case of St Paul and the Philippians it was indeed a
remarkable phenomenon. Here on the one side was a man who, not very
many years before, had been the devotee of the Pharisaic creed, a creed
which tended powerfully not to expand but to annihilate every sympathy
which could touch "the Gentiles." Here on the other side were people
whose life and thought had been moulded in the proud political and
national ideas of a Roman _colonia_; no kindly atmosphere for the
growth of affections which should be at once intense and comprehensive.
But these two unlikely parties are now one, in the strongest and most
beautiful union of thought and heart. If we may use again a word
ventured just above, they are mutually (not confused but) fused
together. Their whole beings have come into living touch, not on the
surface merely but most of all in their depths. An interchange of
idea, of sympathy, of purpose has become possible between them in
which, while self-respect is only deepened and secured, reserve is
melted away in the common possession of the life and love of Jesus
Christ. The Apostle writes to his friends as one whose whole soul is
open to them, is at their command. His memory and reflexion are full
of them. He not only prays and gives thanks for them but delights in
telling them that he is doing so. He says without difficulty exactly
what he is sure of about them, and exactly what things he is asking for
them as yet more developed blessings. Above all, the name of Him who
is everything to himself and to them flows from his heart with a holy
freedom which is impossible except where the parties in religious
intercourse are indeed "one" in Him. Seven times in these eleven short
verses "Christ Jesus" is explicitly named; as the writer's Possessor;
as the Philippian saints' Life and Head; as the Giver to them, with His
Father, of grace and peace; as the Lord of the longed-for "Day," that
dear goal of hope; as the mighty Sphere of regenerate family-love; as
the Cause and Condition of the Christian's fruitfulness for God. His
presence, as it were, moves in the whole message, in the whole
intercourse of which the message is the expression. Writer and readers
perfectly "understand each other," for they both know Christ, and are
found in Him.
The same divine Cause tends always to similar effects. Unhappily it
does not always act without obstruction--obstruction which need not be.
There are no doubt obstructions to its action which are inherent in our
mortality; things which have to do really with physical temperament, or
again with external circumstances which we may be helpless to modify.
But the Cause, _in itself, tends always_ to the effects visible in this
noble passage of Christian affection. The possession and knowledge of
Jesus Christ, in spirit and in truth, tends always, by an eternal law,
to warm and open as well as to purify the human heart; to anchor it
indeed immoveably to God, but also to suffuse it with a gracious
sympathy towards man, and first and most of all towards man who is
also, in Christ, cognizant of the "free-masonry" of faith.
Let this be our first main Lesson in Faith and Love in our Philippian
studies. The section which we have traversed is full of points of
interest and importance otherwise; but this aspect of it is so truly
dominant that we may rightly take it for the true message of the whole.
Let us welcome it home. Let us question ourselves, in presence of it,
and before our Lord, first about our personal possession of the Cause,
and then about our personal manifestation of the effects. Let us put
to our own hearts some very old-fashioned interrogations: _Am I indeed
in Jesus Christ? Is He to me indeed Possessor, Lord, Giver of grace
and peace? Is my life so lived and my work so done in contact with Him
that through Him, and not merely through myself, "my fruit is found"?
Is His promised Day the goal and longing of my heart, as I submit
myself to Him that He may perfect His work in me by the way, and watch
over myself that I may meet Him single-hearted and "without offence" at
the end? Is He the pervading and supreme Interest of my life? Is He
the inward Power which colours my thought and gives direction and
quality to my affections?_
No answer which a heart fully wakeful to God can give to such
deliberate inward questionings can possibly be an easy or
"light-hearted" answer. The gladdest and most thankful utterance of
such a heart will carry along with it always the prayer, "Search me, O
God, and try my heart"; "Enter not into judgment with Thy servant."
Yet we are assuredly meant, if we are in Christ, so to know the fact as
to rejoice in it, and to be strong in it; we are invited, without a
doubt, so to know Him as to know we know Him, and to find in Him "all
our salvation, and all our desire." Let us not rest till, in great
humility but with perfect simplicity, we so see Him as to leave behind
our doubts about our part and lot in Him, and, "believing, to rejoice."
And then let us covet the developement of those results of possession
of Christ, of union with Christ, which we have specially studied in the
opening section of our Epistle. Let us welcome the Lord in to "the
springs of thought and will," with the conscious aim that He should so
warm and enrich them with His presence that they shall overflow for
blessing around us, in the life of Christian love. I do not mean for a
moment that we should set ourselves to construct a spiritual mannerism
of speech or of habit. The matter is one not of manufacture but of
culture; it is a call to "nourish and cherish" the gift of God which is
in us, and to give to it the humble co-operation of our definite wish
and will that it may be _manifested_ in the ways commended in His Word.
It is a call to desire and intend to "_adorn_ the doctrine of God our
Saviour," in the outcoming of His presence in us in our tone, temper,
and converse, towards those around us, and especially where we know
that a common faith and common love do subsist.
If I mistake not, there is far too little of this at present, even in
true Christian circles. A certain dread of "phraseology," of
"pietism," of what is foolishly called "goody-goody," has long been
abroad; a grievously exaggerated dread; a mere parody of rightful
jealousy for sincerity in religion. Under the baneful spell of this
dread it is only too common for really earnest Christians to keep each
other's company, and even to take part in united religious work, and to
be constantly together as worshippers, aye, perhaps as ministers of the
Word and Ordinances of Christ, and yet never, or hardly ever, to
exchange a word about HIM, heart to heart; still less to "speak often
one to another," and share fully together their treasures of experience
of what He is and what He has done for them. The very dialect of the
Christian life has greatly lost in holy depth and tenderness, so it
seems to me, since a former generation in which this over-drawn fear
(it is a mere fashion) of "phraseology" was less prevalent. It ought
not so to be.
Let us each for himself come closer to our eternal FRIEND, converse
more fully with Him, "consider HIM" much more than many of us do. And
then we too shall discover that "our mouth is opened, our heart
enlarged," for holy converse with our fellow-servants, in that
wonderful interchange of souls which is possible "in the heart of Jesus
Christ."
"Oh days of heaven, and nights of equal praise,
Serene and peaceful as those heavenly days,
When souls, drawn upwards in communion sweet,
Enjoy the stillness of some close retreat;
Discourse, as if releas'd and safe at home,
Of dangers past and wonders yet to come,
And spread the sacred treasures of the breast
Upon the lap of covenanted rest." [8]
[1] _Sun episcopois kai diakonois_. I render the words as literally as
possible, not to discredit the distinctive functions of the Christian
ministry, but to remind the reader of the natural origin of the titles
by which Christian ministers are designated. And it is important here
to remember that our word _bishop_, while derived from _episkopos_,
cannot properly translate it _as it is used in the New Testament_. For
_episkopos_ is not used there as the special title of a superintendent
pastor set over other pastors. Such superintendents, however the
office originated, are found in the New Testament, and early in the
second century are called distinctively _episkopoi_: but the term so
used is later, on any theory, than the origin of the office. But I do
not purpose in these devotional chapters to discuss at length such a
question as that raised here. The reader should by all means consult
Bishop Lightfoot's Excursus in his Commentary on this Epistle, _The
Christian Ministry_. The views advanced in that essay were, as I
personally know, held by the writer to the last.
[2] The middle suggests a certain fulness of action.
[3] I think the definite article should be supplied in English; the
reference is to the work of works.
[4] I give both the possible renderings of _huper_. Both would
certainly be in place, as he thought of them and prayed and gave thanks
for them.
[5] The derivation is doubtful, but the idea of the word in usage is
clearness, freedom from complication.
[6] With some hesitation I assign to _dikaiosune_ here the meaning of
the righteousness of justification, as in iii. 9.
[7] F. R. Havergal.
[8] Cowper, _Conversation_.
_THE APOSTLE'S POSITION AND CIRCUMSTANCES_
"Yield to the Lord, with simple heart,
All that thou hast and all thou art,
Renounce all strength but strength divine,
And peace shall be for ever thine."
MME DE LA MOTHE GUYON, _translated by_ COWPER.