We have here again an eager anxiety not to be misunderstood as
undervaluing the Philippians' gift. How beautifully the sublimity of the
previous words lies side by side with the lowliness and gentleness of
these.
We note here the combination of that grand independence with loving
thankfulness for brotherly help. The self-sufficingness of Stoicism is
essentially inhuman and isolating. It is contrary to God's plan and to
the fellowship which is meant to knit men together. So we have always to
take heed to blend with it a loving welcome to sympathy, and not to
fancy that human help and human kindness is useless. We should be able
to do without it, but that need not make it the less sweet when it
comes. We may be carrying water for the march, but shall not the less
prize a brook by the way. Our firm souls should be like the rocking
stones in Cornwall, poised so truly that tempests cannot shake them, and
yet vibrating at the touch of a little child's soft hand. That lofty
independence needs to be humanised by grateful acceptance of the
refreshment of human sympathy even though we can do without it.
Paul shows us here what is the true thing in a brother's help for which
to be thankful. The reason why he was glad of their help was because it
spoke to his heart and told him that they were making themselves sharers
with him in his troubles. As he tells us in the beginning of the letter,
their fellowship in his labours had been from the beginning a joy to
him. It was not so much their material help as their true sympathy that
he valued. The high level to which he lifts what was possibly a very
modest contribution, if measured by money standards, carries with it a
great lesson for all receivers and for all givers of such gifts,
teaching the one that they are purely selfish if they are glad of what
they get, and bidding the other remember that they may give so as to
hurt by a gift more than by a blow, that they may give infinitely more
by loving sympathy than by much gold, and that a £5 note does not
discharge all their obligations. We have to give after His pattern who
does not toss us our alms from a height, but Himself comes to bestow
them, and whose gift, though it be the unspeakable gift of eternal life,
is less than the love it speaks, in that He Himself has in wondrous
manner become partaker of our weakness. The pattern of all sympathy, the
giver of all our possessions, is God. Let us hold to Him in faith and
love, and all earthly love will be sweeter and sympathy more precious.
Our own hearts will be refined and purified to a delicacy of
consideration and a tenderness beyond their own. Our souls will be made
lords of all circumstances and strengthened according to our need. He
will say to us 'My grace is sufficient for thee,' and we, as we feel His
strength being made perfect in our weakness, shall be able to say with
humble confidence, 'I can do all things in Christ who strengtheneth me
within.'