PHILIPPIANS 1:7-11

7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me. 8 God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.

Verse 7 Paul gives two reasons for the feelings he expresses towards his friends. First, he “has them in his heart”. We need to remember that the “heart” in the Bible isn’t just the mushy, Valentine’s Day sort of thing we leave in San Francisco. It isn’t just the centre of our fleeting feelings, but “the soul or mind, as it is the fountain and seat of the thoughts, passions, desires, appetites, affections, purposes, endeavours” (Strong).

Paul’s commitment to other Christians was an unconditional one, from the very centre of his being.

Second – or maybe it’s an explanation of the first point – he feels this way because “all of you share in God’s grace with me”. Whether in bad times or good, in Philippi or Rome, in prison or on a preaching trip, the distinctive experience of Christian living is the constant receiving of God’s grace. People who share that experience, of God’s grace streaming towards them in Christ, have a bond which nothing can break. One of the things that brings bitterness between us is when we start to miss the grace of God (Hebrews 12:15). If we ignore what God is constantly supplying, we soon fall out with our brothers.

Verse 8 Paul’s affection for the Philippians isn’t just a human attachment, based on natural liking. It comes from the supernatural love which God has shed abroad in Paul's heart (Romans 5:5) for his brothers and sisters.

Francis Schaeffer said that love was “the mark of the Christian”, the distinguishing mark of true Christianity (John 13:35). “The affection of Jesus Christ” is literally “in the bowels of Jesus Christ”. It seems odd to us, but that part of the body was where the Greeks thought the emotions were centred. And so Paul daringly identifies his emotions with the most intimate feelings and personal drives of Jesus himself.

The love we share isn’t generated by ourselves; it’s the very love of God, implanted in us by Jesus. (Which, of course, is why Paul can appeal to the Philippians at the start of chapter 2 to “have the same love”).

Verse 9 Love is a great start. But it needs to deepen and mature as we grow in experience. Paul wants the Philippian Christians to develop a love which isn’t just an emotional rush, but which is founded on increasing knowledge: knowledge of God’s heart, knowledge of the human situation, knowledge of our own inner propensities.

The first of these will deepen our love as we come to understand more and more just how much God cares for our brothers and sisters, and just how greatly it thrills him to see us living in the unity he designed us for before the universe existed. The second will help us be wise in our approach to others (Mt 10:16), not naively expecting a standard of behaviour which will leave us disillusioned when we find out we’ve been let down, but yet able to see (and rejoice in) the grace of God at work in sinful human hearts like ours. And the third will help us keep a sense of proportion, and realize how incredible it is that God loved us in the first place. “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1 John 4:11)

But “knowledge” is a dry, theoretical thing without “depth of insight”, or “discernment”. If our love is to grow, the knowledge we gain mustn’t be merely theoretical, academic learning. It must have a direct impact on our lives and choices; and for that to happen, we need to have the gift of discerning just where this knowledge we’ve gained affects us. This is a skill that takes a lifetime to learn: “discernment selects, classifies, and applies what is furnished by knowledge” (M R Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament).

I haven’t finished preaching until I have given my audience some clue about what the truth I’ve been expounding will mean for them in daily life the following morning. I haven’t finished my morning reading until I’ve reflected on how the facts I’ve considered must alter my priorities and decisions immediately afterwards. And when I get excited about discovering some new idea in the Word of God, do I get equally excited about how I’m going to put it into practice in my life?

Whenever I fail to do those things, I reveal just how little I’ve still allowed my love to become flavoured and deepened by God’s gift of discernment.

Verse 10 There are two reasons that “depth of insight” is so important. First, it helps us see.

We need to be able to focus on “the best” – those things that really matter in life, that will truly inspire us, that will feed our spirits and imaginations. All too often we can read a passage of Scripture without really seeing what’s there. I’ve often re-read a passage I’ve skipped before, and been stunned to see how much there is in it that’s exciting, and obviously so… and yet I’d missed it all earlier.

Sometimes, too, we fail to see what God is doing in a situation. I’ve always remembered the advice an old American missionary gave to one of my colleagues when he was discouraged by mounting problems, and just wanted to resign and go home: “Yes, I know it’s tough, Richard. But don’t miss God in this situation. That would be worse than anything.”

Second, we need to live. Insight helps us steer clear of traps that would otherwise ensnare us. God wants us to be “pure and blameless” in the way we live. Sometimes we make so much of the (equally true) fact that God loves us despite our sin - that he’s committed to us no matter how much we let him down, that we will never reach perfection down here, that there is instant cleansing for failure whenever we simply come to him in confession – that perhaps we forget how often the New Testament insists that purity is at the centre of God’s plan for us, and he really cares about the moral standard of our lives.

Verse 11 But pure living isn’t just a matter of keeping our noses clean. It’s a constructive, fruitful, productive way of life. The “pure” Christian isn’t one who simply never does anything wrong – you can live a narrow, joyless, technically correct life easily enough – but one who brings a new dimension into other people’s experience because of his commitment to God’s standards of integrity. The “fruit of righteousness” includes everything we do that reflects God’s goodness and brings his righteousness to areas where it isn’t already.

We need to remember, as Harvie Conn once observed, that the Greek word for righteousness – dikaiosyne – is used in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament that Jesus used) to mean “social justice” . So the “fruit of righteousness” won’t just mean good deeds in my life on a personal level. It will mean a “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5) which makes me a peace-bringer and an agent of social change in situations of justice and oppression. “There is no holiness,” said John Wesley, “without social holiness.” To the great founder of Methodism, combatting slavery was as much “to the glory and praise of God” as preaching to thousands.