PHILIPPIANS 1:19-20
Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, 19 for I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. 20 I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.
Verse 19: There’s another cause for rejoicing: Paul has come to the conviction that he will be set free, or at least not executed (the word he uses, soteria, can mean simply “safety”). How will this happen? Again he’s careful to stress that there are two agencies involved: God’s part and ours. Our part is prayer. God’s is to help through the Holy Spirit.
Prayer is important! Can’t God deliver Paul without it? Yes, of course he can; but prayer is the way he chooses to bring about solutions in the real world. He involves us in the process. It isn’t just a matter of our standing helplessly by while he does everything for us. We can be co-workers with God.
We need to realize that prayer is serious work! It’s taking part in a spiritual battle, as Scripture insists again and again. It isn’t just a matter of addressing a few polite requests to God and leaving him to get on with the job. The mystery of how God’s action and our prayers work together is ultimately insoluble; but we know that both things are vital parts of the process. When we forget this, we stop praying!
Note that Paul doesn’t ask for prayer here. He simply assumes that the Philippians are praying. Why wouldn’t they be?
How does the Holy Spirit help? Paul isn’t specific; he simply talks about “the supply of the Spirit” – epichoregia, which comes from the word choregos. A choregos was the citizen in a Greek community who was nominated by the state to pay the full costs of the training and performance of the chorus in a tragedy. The chorus consisted of a lot of people, and the costs could rise to 3000 drachmae (a drachma being equivalent to a normal day’s wages). The choregos took pride in never being niggardly, but providing lavishly everything that was needed. So epichoregia came to stand for the most lavish supply you could imagine. That, says Paul, is how God gives the Spirit; and so in this perilous situation God will supply everything that could possibly be required to ensure Paul’s safety.
It’s never safe to assume that we know precisely how God will work in any given situation. He is always capable of surprising us; he’s a God of infinite resources and unending creativity. All we need to know is that through his Spirit, he’ll meet every single need we have – and generously.
Why “the Spirit of Jesus Christ”? Perhaps because Jesus is seen as the source of so much in Philippians, it’s the natural way to refer to the Spirit too. The fruit of righteousness comes through him (1:11). Joy (1:26), grace (4:23), affection (1:8), God’s riches (4:19), and much more, all flow from our relationship with Jesus. So the natural title to choose for the Spirit brackets his work with the Lordship of Jesus.
Verse 20: “I eagerly expect and hope” uses a very odd word, which occurs only once more in the New Testament (Romans 8:19). It literally means a way of looking forward which stretches the head outwards – almost standing on tiptoe to peer eagerly into the future. Paul is stressing that he isn’t avoiding thoughts of what might happen to him; he is so confident that the supply of Jesus’ Spirit will enable him to meet any eventuality with courage, that he isn’t worried about facing up to it.
It is important to him that he is able to use his body in God’s service – whether freely moving around the map preaching and church planting, or giving it up to be tortured and destroyed. As far as Paul is concerned, the body matters. Unlike the Greek philosophers he’d studied when a pupil of Gamaliel, he didn’t believe that only the invisible spirit mattered. The body was a vital part of our identity, and God was concerned with the whole person (1 Th 5:23). The future after death is not to float around as a disembodied spirit; we’ll be reunited with our bodies one of these days (1 Cor 15:42-44).
How careful are we with our bodies? When we allow them to grow fat, or go out of condition, or inspire inappropriate desire in others, or look unkempt and uncared for, we are making a comment about how much they matter to us. When we let them go to the wrong places, or do unchristian things, we misuse one of God’s eternal gifts to us. How much do we think about the issue of whether Christ is being exalted in our body?
posted by John @ 1:17 AM
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