Partners from the First Day

Philippians 1:1–11

Read Philippians 1:1–11 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

I thank my God every time I remember you. I always pray with joy in my every prayer for all of you because of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am sure of this very thing, that the one who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

Philippians 1:3–6

Servants, Saints, Overseers, Deacons

Paul opens this letter the way he opens most of them, by naming himself, his co-author, and his addressees. But the details are worth slowing down for, because the details tell us what kind of letter we are reading.

He names Paul and Timothy, slaves of Christ Jesus. The Greek word is douloi, and the NET renders it plainly: slaves. In most of his other letters where Paul names himself in the opening, he names himself an apostle. To the Romans he is a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle. To the Corinthians he writes twice as an apostle by the will of God. To the Galatians, when his apostleship is being challenged, the title comes thundering out: an apostle, and not from men or by human agency but through Jesus Christ Himself. Here, in Philippians, the title is set aside. Paul calls himself a slave alongside Timothy, with no separation of rank between them. He is writing to friends. He is writing to a church that has never given him trouble. He does not need to remind them who he is. He needs only to greet them as a fellow slave of the same Lord.

The Philippians are all the saints in Christ Jesus. The word saints (hagioi) does not refer to a special class of spiritual elite. It means those set apart, those made holy not by their own attainment but by the holiness of the One in whom they are now found. Every baptized Christian is a saint in this sense. To be in Christ is to be holy in Him, not because we have produced our holiness but because His holiness has been credited to us. The Lutheran Confessions are emphatic on this point: we are saints not by our doing but by His (SA III XII; LC II, Third Article).

And the saints are in Philippi. The address is important. Philippi was a Roman colony in northeastern Macedonia, founded as a veterans’ settlement and proud of its Roman citizenship. The city had been named for Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, four centuries earlier. By Paul’s day it was a small but strategically located town on the Via Egnatia, the great Roman road that ran east from the Adriatic toward the Aegean. The book of Acts tells us how the gospel came there. Paul, on his second missionary journey, had a vision of a man of Macedonia begging him to come over and help. He crossed the Aegean. He came to Philippi. And there, at a place of prayer by the riverside, he met a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart, and she was baptized along with her household. A slave girl with a spirit of divination was set free in the name of Jesus, and her owners, angry at the loss of their income, dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates. They were beaten with rods and thrown into prison. At midnight they sang hymns. The earthquake came. The jailer, certain his prisoners had escaped, drew his sword to kill himself, only to hear Paul’s voice in the dark: Do not harm yourself, for we are all here. What must I do to be saved? the jailer asked. The answer is the gospel itself: Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. That same night the jailer washed their wounds, and he and his household were baptized.

This is the church Paul is writing to. A woman of means, a slave girl, a Roman jailer and his household. From the very first day, the church at Philippi has been what the gospel always makes a church to be: a fellowship of people who would never otherwise have been in the same room together, drawn into one body by the one Lord. Paul will use the word koinonia (partnership, fellowship) repeatedly in this letter. The fellowship started on day one, with two household baptisms and a deliverance that crossed every social line the ancient world recognized.

The greeting names two more groups: the overseers and deacons. This is the only Pauline greeting that mentions church officers by name, and it is worth pausing over. Overseers (the Greek is episkopoi, from which we get the English word bishop) is here used interchangeably with elders, the way the New Testament uses these terms more broadly (Acts 20:17, 28; Titus 1:5–7). The Lutheran Confessions, citing Jerome, likewise teach that bishops and presbyters are not distinguished by divine right (Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope). Deacons (diakonoi) are servants of the church charged with care of the saints, the work traditionally traced to the appointment of the seven in Acts 6. That Paul greets these officers alongside the whole congregation tells us something about how the early church understood its order. The officers are not a separate clerical class hovering above the body of believers. They are saints among saints, called to particular service within the body. The Augsburg Confession and its Apology, in their teaching on the ministry, will work out at length what this means: that the office of the public ministry exists by divine institution to give the gospel and the sacraments, but it is given to the church as servants of the church, not as lords over it (AC V; AC XIV; AC XXVIII). Paul’s greeting already implies what the Confessions will later make explicit.

Then comes the greeting proper: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace (charis) picks up the standard Greek greeting chairein, but Paul fills the word with gospel content. Peace (eirene) translates the Hebrew shalom. Greek and Hebrew, Gentile and Jew, fused into one Christian greeting that is also a benediction. Paul is not merely wishing them well. He is naming what the gospel gives: grace, the free favor of God, and peace, the wholeness that follows when we have been reconciled to Him. These are the twin gifts of the cross. And they come, Paul says, from a particular source: from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Father and Son named together, with no distinction of dignity between them. The Christology of this letter has already begun in the second verse.

I Thank My God

I thank my God every time I remember you. Paul begins this letter the way he begins most of his letters, with a thanksgiving. It is his settled habit. When he sits down to write to a church, the first thing he does, after the greeting, is to thank God for them. Only in Galatians, his angriest letter, does he omit the thanksgiving altogether. But in Philippians the thanksgiving runs warmer than anywhere else in his correspondence. There is no rebuke embedded in it, no concern leaking through. There is only joy.

I always pray with joy in my every prayer for all of you. In the Greek word order, joy comes at the climactic position. Paul prays for the Philippians always; he prays for them with joy; the joy is the texture of the prayer itself. He is, remember, in chains. The man writing this is under house arrest, awaiting an imperial trial, possibly facing execution. And his prayers for this church are prayers of joy. The chains do not produce joy, and they do not extinguish it. The joy comes from somewhere else.

He tells us where. Because of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. The Greek word is koinonia, the same word translated fellowship elsewhere and rendered partnership here in many translations, and it is the keyword of this letter. It will appear again. It is the word for the most intimate kind of sharing, the kind that holds property in common, that bears one another’s burdens, that suffers and rejoices together. The Philippians have been Paul’s koinonia-partners in the work of the gospel from the very first day: from the night the jailer washed Paul’s wounds, from the morning Lydia opened her home. They have stood with him in the work. They have sent him money. They have sent Epaphroditus to him with their care. They have not abandoned him in his imprisonment as some others have. This church has been faithful to Paul as Paul has been faithful to Christ. And it is this that fills his prayers with joy: not the absence of chains but the presence of brothers and sisters who have walked with him through the chains and never let him walk alone.

The Lutheran tradition has always understood that the Christian life is not a solitary affair. We are not saved alone, and we do not walk alone. The Apostles’ Creed confesses the communion of saints, not just the saints in heaven but the company of the baptized on earth, the body of which every believer is a living member. Luther’s Small Catechism grounds this in the Third Article: the Holy Spirit is the One who calls believers, gathers them into the Church on earth, enlightens them with His gifts, and sanctifies them, and within that fellowship the daily forgiveness of sins is given richly to all who believe (SC II, Third Article). We belong to one another because we belong to Christ. And the joy of belonging to one another is one of the gifts of belonging to Him.

He Who Began a Good Work

If verse 5 names the ground of Paul’s joy, the Philippians’ participation in the gospel, verse 6 names the deeper ground beneath that one. Paul is sure of this very thing (he uses a strong verb) that the one who began a good work in the Philippians will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

This verse is one of the most quoted in the New Testament. It is also one of the most misquoted. We hear it often as if it referred to whatever project we happen to be working on: a marriage, a career change, a difficult recovery. The good work, we tell ourselves, will be brought to completion. But Paul has something more specific and more astonishing in mind. The good work Paul is sure of is not a project on which the Philippians are working. The good work is something God Himself has begun in them, namely, their salvation, their being-made-saints, their conversion to Christ. The good work is the work of grace itself, begun in baptism, sustained through the Word and the sacraments, brought to its completion only at the return of Christ.

Read this way, the verse is a statement of pure monergism. The grammar gives the entire action to God. He began it. He will complete it. The Philippians are not the agents of the verb; they are its objects. They are the field in which the good work is being done. And the One who began it has staked His own faithfulness on bringing it to its completion. This is why Paul is sure: not confident in the Philippians’ own perseverance but confident in God’s. We Lutherans speak of this as the doctrine of preservation. The same grace that called us and justified us is the grace that keeps us. We do not finish what we have begun; God finishes what He has begun in us. And He keeps us through the means of grace, the Word and the Sacraments, not apart from them. This is not the “once saved, always saved” of Calvinist readings, for Scripture also warns that believers can fall away through unbelief and impenitence, as Paul’s tears over the enemies of the cross of Christ in 3:18–19 show (see Session 6). The comfort of verse 6 is that the God who began the work keeps drawing us back to the places where He has promised to keep us (SA III III; FC SD XI).

This does not mean we are passive in the Christian life. The very next verse will speak of the Philippians as partners in God’s grace together with me, language of active participation. We are not asleep on the road. We are walking. But what we walk in is grace, and what carries us through to the end is not our walking but His leading. The Formula of Concord puts this in its own characteristically careful way: faith and good works follow from regeneration, but the power to believe and to do good is given by the Holy Spirit through Word and Sacrament, who is the One actually working in us (FC SD II). Paul’s confidence is in that Worker, not in the works.

There is a pastoral side to this confidence that we should not miss. Paul is writing to a church under pressure. Philippi was a Roman colony, intensely proud of its Roman identity, and Christians in such a city would have felt the social weight of refusing to participate in the imperial cult and the civic ceremonies that went with it. The Philippians had been suffering in small ways and large ways for their confession of Christ. Paul knows this. And what he says to them is not, Try harder. He says that the one who began a good work in you will perfect it. The pastoral force of monergism is not that it takes the Christian life off our hands. The pastoral force is that it places the weight of our perseverance on the One who can bear it. When the saints are weak, He is strong. When their love grows cold, He warms it again. When their faith trembles, His grip does not.

Until the day of Christ Jesus. The completion Paul has in view is eschatological: the day when Christ returns, when the dead are raised, when the saints are seen for what they have been made to be. Salvation is a present possession and a future hope. We are saved; we are being saved; we shall be saved. The work begun in baptism is not a work that we finish on this side of the resurrection. It is a work that Christ Himself will bring to its completion on that day. Until then, we walk by faith, kept by the grace that called us, looking toward the day when faith will give way to sight.

Paul moves from this confidence to the affection that flows from it. It is right, he says, to think this about the Philippians, because he has them in my heart. They are partners in God’s grace together with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. The phrase behind partners in God’s grace together with me (synkoinonous mou tes charitos in the Greek) is striking. Grace is shareable. It is something we hold in common with our fellow saints, not something we possess privately. To be in Christ is to be in a fellowship of grace with everyone else in Christ. And that fellowship, Paul says, extends even into his chains. The Philippians share his imprisonment by their faithfulness in supporting him, by their prayers, by the gift Epaphroditus has brought. They are with Paul in the dungeon even though they are hundreds of miles away.

God is my witness, Paul writes, that I long for all of you, and the longing has the texture of the affection of Christ Jesus. The Greek for affection (splanchnois) is a vivid word; it refers to the deep inward parts, the seat of the strongest feelings in the ancient understanding of the body. We might say with the heart of Christ Jesus. Paul’s love for the Philippians is not merely his own; it is Christ’s own affection flowing through him. This is what pastoral love is at its truest: not a sentiment generated by the pastor but a participation in the love of the Shepherd. Paul loves these people with Christ’s own love because Christ has put His love into Paul’s heart.

That Your Love May Abound

The thanksgiving gives way to a prayer. Paul does not pray for the easy things. He does not pray that the Philippians’ troubles would lessen, that their persecution would cease, that their finances would improve, that their leaders would always agree. He prays that your love may abound even more and more in knowledge and every kind of insight.

The Greek word for love here is agape, the highest and most distinctively Christian word for love in the New Testament. It is the love God has for the world. It is the love that sent the Son to the cross. It is the love that the Holy Spirit pours into the hearts of the baptized. And Paul prays that this love would abound: would overflow, would grow beyond its current measure. The verb tense suggests a love already at work but not yet at its full. More and more the love is to grow.

But Paul does not pray for love alone. He prays for love in knowledge and every kind of insight. The Greek words are epignosis and aisthesis. Epignosis is full knowledge, deep knowledge, the kind that knows a thing through and through. Aisthesis (the NET’s insight; older translations say discernment) is moral perception, the trained sense for what is right and good, the discernment that can tell apart things that look similar but are actually different. Paul prays for a love that is informed, a love that knows, a love that can judge. Christian love is not sentimentality. It is not the warm fuzzy feeling of approving everyone and everything. It is a love wedded to truth, a love that grows up into the deep knowledge of the One loved.

This matters because love divorced from knowledge becomes something other than Christian love. Love without knowledge cannot tell the difference between affirming a brother in his sin and loving him toward repentance. Love without discernment cannot tell the difference between false teachers and true. Love without judgment cannot tell the difference between the gospel and a counterfeit gospel that sounds almost like it. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted on this connection between love and truth. The faith we confess is a specific faith. The Lord we love is a specific Lord. The gospel we hold is a specific gospel. And the love that is the fruit of that gospel must grow up into the knowledge of the Christ whose love put it in us.

The result, Paul says: so that you can decide what is best, and thus be sincere and blameless for the day of Christ. The verb rendered decide (dokimazein) has the sense of testing and then approving; older translations say approve what is excellent. The Philippians are to develop the capacity to test the things that come before them, to discern what truly matters, and to give themselves to what is best. The day of Christ is again in view. They are being prepared for that day. The standard against which the testing happens is not the world’s standard but Christ’s. Sincere (eilikrineis) and blameless (aproskopoi): language of integrity and uprightness, of a life that has not stumbled over scandal or caused another to stumble.

And then the climax of the prayer. The Philippians are to be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, all to the glory and praise of God. Notice carefully what Paul does not say. He does not pray that they would produce the fruit of righteousness. He prays that they would be filled with it (passive, receiving) and that the righteousness in question would come through Jesus Christ. The fruit of righteousness is not something we generate. It is something Christ produces in us when we are connected to Him as branches to the vine. The righteousness is His; the fruit is His; the filling is His. The glory at the end is His as well: to the glory and praise of God. Soli Deo gloria, as the Reformation-era watchword would put it some fifteen centuries later. To God alone the glory. We are not the source of the fruit and we are not the destination of the praise. We are the field in which the One who began the good work is bringing it to completion. And when the harvest comes in, every basket of fruit will be carried to Him.

This is the Christian life as Philippians 1:1–11 envisions it. We are slaves of Christ, set apart in Him as saints, served by overseers and deacons in the body, greeted with grace and peace from the Father and the Son, joined in fellowship with one another, the recipients of a good work that God Himself has begun and will complete. We are partners in grace with those Christ has placed alongside us. We are loved with Christ’s own affection through one another. We are prayed for and praying. And we are growing in a love that knows and a love that discerns, being filled with a righteousness that is not our own, all of it ordered to the praise of God.

This is, by any measure, an astonishing description of a small assembly of Christians in a Roman colonial town. It is also, by exactly the same measure, an astonishing description of every Christian congregation that gathers in His name. The Christians at Philippi were no different in kind from us. The same Christ is among us as was among them. The same gospel is the air we breathe. The same Spirit is doing the same good work. And what Paul saw in them (partnership, fruit, grace, love) is precisely what God is making of every congregation that lives by the Word and the sacraments. We need only the eyes Paul had to see it.

Gathering the Threads

The opening eleven verses of Philippians are short on doctrinal density compared with what is coming later in the letter. But they are not short on theology. They give us a portrait of the Christian congregation as God sees it: a body of saints in Christ, served by overseers and deacons, founded on grace, kept by the One who began the work, knit together by a partnership that reaches even into prison, growing in love with knowledge and insight, awaiting the day of Christ.

Several Lutheran themes have already surfaced and will return as we move through the letter. Justification is not yet spoken of by name, but it is present in the talk of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ: not our righteousness but His, given to us. Sanctification is in view in the prayer for love to abound and the talk of being sincere and blameless for the day of Christ. Preservation is the burden of verse 6: the one who began the work will perfect it. Vocation sits in the very greeting, in the naming of overseers and deacons alongside saints, each in his calling. The fellowship (koinonia) that is the keyword of these verses is the Lutheran teaching of the communion of saints embodied in a single first-century church.

But beneath all of this, and holding all of it together, is the figure of Christ Himself. Eleven verses, and Christ has been named seven times. He is the One whose slave Paul is. He is the One in whom the saints are found. He is the One whose grace and peace are given. He is the One whose day is coming. He is the One whose affection Paul feels for the Philippians. He is the One through whom the fruit of righteousness comes. He is the One to whose glory and praise everything is ordered. Paul has not yet begun to describe his chains; he has not yet sung the Christ Hymn; he has not yet counted his Pharisaic credentials as loss. But Christ is already everywhere in this letter, because Christ is already everything to the man writing it. For to me, living is Christ, Paul will say in a few verses. He has already started to show us what he means.

For Discussion

The opening of Philippians is unusually warm: a letter from prison written with joy to a church Paul loves. The questions below invite you to slow down and let the text shape the way you see your own congregation, your own partnership in the gospel, and the work God is doing in you.

1. Paul calls himself and Timothy slaves of Christ Jesus and sets aside the title of apostle that he claims in most of his letters. What does this tell us about Paul’s relationship with this church? When have you experienced relationships in the church where titles or roles took a back seat to the deeper bond of being fellow servants of Christ?

2. The church at Philippi began with two household baptisms and a deliverance across radically different social positions: a wealthy businesswoman and her household, a slave girl set free, and a Roman jailer and his household. How is the makeup of your own congregation a sign of what the gospel produces? Where do you see the Spirit drawing together people who would not otherwise have been drawn together?

3. Paul thanks God for the Philippians’ participation in the gospel from the first day until now. The Greek word is koinonia, partnership or fellowship. In what ways have you experienced the church as a partnership rather than as a service you receive? Where has your own koinonia with other Christians cost you something, and where has it strengthened you?

4. Verse 6, the great assurance that the one who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus, is often quoted as if it referred to any project we happen to be working on. How does the meaning shift when we read it as Paul intended, as a statement about the good work of salvation that God has begun in us? What pastoral comfort does the verse offer when our own faith feels weak or our progress feels slow?

5. Paul prays not that his friends’ troubles would lessen but that their love would abound even more and more in knowledge and every kind of insight. Why do you think Paul connects love so closely to knowledge and discernment? What does Christian love look like when it is informed by truth, and what does it look like when it is divorced from truth?

6. The closing of Paul’s prayer, to the glory and praise of God, names the destination of the whole Christian life. How does keeping that destination in view change the way you understand your own day-to-day life as a Christian? What would change in your week if you really believed that the fruit of righteousness in you was ordered to His glory rather than yours?

Looking Ahead

In Session 2 we turn to Philippians 1:12–26, where Paul reflects on his own imprisonment and how it has served the gospel. He will tell the Philippians that what has happened to him has actually advanced the good news, that even those preaching Christ from envy and rivalry are still preaching Christ, and that he himself is torn between two desires: to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, or to remain in the body for the sake of the church. The session culminates in the most concentrated statement of the Christian’s relationship to life and death in all of Paul: For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.

Read Philippians 1:12–26 before our next session.

Closing Prayer

Gracious Lord, You who began the good work of our salvation in baptism and have promised to perfect it until the day of Christ, we thank You for the partners in the gospel You have placed alongside us. Grant us love that abounds more and more, knowledge of Your truth, and every kind of insight, that we may decide what is best. Fill us with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ alone. Keep us faithful in fellowship with one another and steadfast in the hope of Your appearing. To the glory and praise of Your name. Amen.