PHILIPPIANS 2:1,2

1 If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

Verse 1 Four “ifs…” which remind Paul’s readers of the things that have happened to them that should propel them towards unity with other Christians. First, union with Christ and the encouragement it brings. “Encouragement” is the word paraklesis, the same word that’s associated with the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. The root idea is “coming alongside” someone else, or calling them to your side. It can also mean “exhortation”, “admonition” , or “appeal”. So it’s not the kind of encouragement which simply soothes us and reassures us; it’s the kind of encouragement which prompts us into action, stimulates us to serve God better.

Our union with Christ will not simply make us feel good, but stimulate us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do. One of them, says Paul, should be drawing closer to other Christians. If that isn’t happening, perhaps we aren’t listening attentively enough to the “encouragement” Christ gives us.

Second “if”: comfort from the love of Christ. Now this is the word paramuthion, which is a bit more soothing. Its basic meaning – speaking closely to someone – suggests tenderness, intimacy, emotional support. Christ both prompts us into action, and develops a close, personal, unique relationship with us, based upon his self-giving love. If he cares for us in this breathtakingly individual way, it should give us confidence to reach out to the other people who matter to him just as much.

Then there’s fellowship with the Spirit. The AV translation, “fellowship of the Spirit”, is literally accurate, but may suggest our Spirit-inspired, shared fellowship with one another. And that’s not really what Paul has in mind.

He’s talking about the relationship with the Spirit which every Christian enjoys, and saying: doesn’t the Holy Spirit himself “drag you along” (Romans 8:14) towards greater unity with other Christians? His promptings inside us should make us feel uncomfortable is we are living at war with others in whom he is also at work.

Fourth and finally: tenderness and compassion. Literally this means “intestines and bowels”, another reminder that this is where in the body the Greeks believed the emotions to be located. Paul is saying: don’t you feel any stirrings within you of inward affection, of pity and compassion for others? Quite apart from the moment-by-moment promptings of the Lord Jesus, and the constant leading of the Holy Spirit, there is inside you a capacity for love and an instinct for brotherhood which is part of your new nature. And it, too, should be drawing you towards others, demolishing barriers, creating community and the impulse to forgive.

Verse 2 If these things are at work in our lives, then, says Paul, certain results should follow; and if the Philippians will only show some signs of that, his joy in them will reach its climax. (Paul was always clear that the joy that results from bringing someone to Christ was only part of the deal; the joy of seeing Christian maturity arrive was the icing on the cake. He was never happy with a shallow commitment. He’d already written to the Galatians to say that bringing them to Christ had been like going through labour (Gal 4:19) – but that the job of bringing them to spiritual adulthood was costing him the same agony of childbirth all over again.)

What results did Paul want to see? First, he wanted them to have the same mind. This doesn’t mean identikit opinions; Christians can disagree about all sorts of things, and on some contested questions Paul was happy to allow differences of opinion (Romans 14:4-6). The word phroneo isn’t so much about the content of our opinions, as about the disposition of our minds. It’s more a case of having the same outlook as one another: the same priorities founded on a biblical world view.

Indeed, it can help us enormously to have different opinions from one another; it makes the unity all the more real. If we always see eye-to-eye about everything, there’s no effort involved in agreeing together. But if we sometimes struggle to see why the other person is thinking as he does – and yet we respect, honour and defer to him – it shows just how much Christ has really changed our natural instincts.

Mark Ashton, one of Britain’s best Bible teachers, used to say: “Loyalty begins at the point of disagreement.” If my superior wants me to do something which I’d have done anyway, it costs me nothing to be loyal! But if he disagrees with me, and asks me to do what I consider wrong-headed… loyalty dictates that I go his way, not my own.

Paul wanted them to have the same love. (This is agape, the self-giving, ask-for-nothing-back kind of love, which characterizes Christians.) John Newton once wrote searchingly about different kinds of love which may exist between the people of God: “natural love”, “party love”, “love of convenience”. If we’re not careful, we can mistake these kinds of affection for the true supernatural thing. But they aren’t; they always work very well between some of us, and exclude all the others. Only the love of God given to us by the Spirit will embrace all believers in an equal, undiscriminating way.

Finally, he wants them to have the same spirit and purpose. This sounds a bit like “the same mind”, and to some extent it is; Greg Herrick is right to comment that all of these phrases are “virtually synonymous, and their piling up on top of one another is Paul’s way of emphasizing to the Philippians’ their need for genuine unity”. But there’s a bit of a difference. If the same mind is about the way we think, the same spirit is about the way we put that thinking into action – the way we approach life and its challenges. So in every area of our inner lives – thinking, relationships and emotional temper – our functioning is supposed to be identical. That’s the sign that we really are branches, organically connected to the Vine.