Ordinary Means · A Philippians Study · No. 1
We begin a new study today, in what may be the warmest letter Paul ever wrote. Philippians is the joy letter — some form of the word joy or rejoice rings through its four short chapters more than a dozen times. And here is the first thing to notice, because everything else depends on it: Paul wrote it from prison. The man overflowing with joy is in chains, under house arrest, awaiting an imperial trial that could end in his execution. The joy is real, and it does not come from his circumstances. It comes from somewhere else.
He tells us where. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, he writes, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. The word for partnership is koinonia — fellowship, sharing, the kind of bond that holds things in common and bears one another's burdens. It is the keyword of the letter. And it runs back to the very first day.
What a first day it was. Luke tells the story in Acts 16: the gospel came to Philippi and gathered, almost immediately, the most unlikely congregation imaginable. Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, a woman of means, whose heart the Lord opened by a river. A slave girl, set free from a spirit of divination. A Roman jailer who had locked Paul in the stocks at night and was washing his wounds by morning, baptized with his whole household before dawn. A businesswoman, a slave, a jailer — people who would never otherwise have been in the same room, drawn into one body by the one Lord. That is what the gospel always makes a church to be. And Paul's joy, all these years later, is the joy of belonging to these people because they all belong to Christ.
You can hear the warmth even in the greeting. To most churches Paul introduces himself as an apostle — sometimes, when his authority is challenged, the word comes thundering out. Not here. Here he is simply Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus — slaves, the two of them together, no rank between them. He is writing to friends, a church that has never given him trouble. He does not need to remind them who he is.
But beneath the partnership lies a deeper ground, and Paul names it in a single sentence that has become one of the most beloved in the New Testament:
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
— Philippians 1:6
It is also one of the most misquoted. We reach for it as if it were about our projects — the marriage we are repairing, the career we are rebuilding, the long climb out of some hole. The good work will be completed. But that is not quite what Paul says. The good work he is sure of is not a project the Philippians are working on. It is the work God has begun in them — their salvation, their being-made-saints, the work of grace itself, begun in the water of baptism and carried along by Word and Sacrament. Look at the grammar: God began it, God will complete it. The Philippians are not the agents of the verb. They are the field in which the work is being done.
That is why Paul is sure. His confidence is not in the Philippians' grip on God; it is in God's grip on them. We Lutherans call this preservation: the same grace that called you and justified you is the grace that keeps you. You do not finish what you began — God finishes what He began in you. And notice what Paul does not say to this suffering, pressured little church. He does not say try harder. He says the One who started the work will see it through. The comfort of that is not that it lifts the Christian life off your hands; it is that it sets the weight of your perseverance on the only One strong enough to carry it. When your love grows cold, He warms it. When your faith trembles, His grip does not.
This is where the joy comes from — not the absence of chains, but the presence of a faithful God and the people He has bound to us. Next time, Paul turns to those chains directly, and says something that sounds impossible from a prison cell: that his imprisonment has actually advanced the gospel, and that for him, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Read Philippians 1:12–30 before then.
Gracious God, who began a good work in us and have promised to bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ: we thank You for the fellowship of the saints, for every partner in the gospel who has walked beside us and never let us walk alone. When our faith trembles, hold us fast in Your grip. Make our love abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, that we may be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to Your glory and praise. Amen.