The Secret of Contentment

Philippians 4:10–23

Read Philippians 4:10–23 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content in any circumstance. I have experienced times of need and times of abundance. In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of contentment, whether I go satisfied or hungry, have plenty or nothing. I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:11–13

Great Joy in the Lord

The letter is almost over. Paul has issued his greetings, made his appeals, sung his hymn, declared the gospel, charted the race, named the citizens, and promised the peace. Now he turns, at last, to the matter that seems to have prompted the letter in the first place: the gift the Philippians sent him by the hand of Epaphroditus. And he begins with joy.

I have great joy in the Lord, he writes, because now at last you have again expressed your concern for me. Behind great joy stands echarēn, an aorist (literally “I rejoiced”), which describes the moment of receiving the gift. The verb the NET renders again expressed is anethalete, the verb for the new growth of a plant after a season of dormancy. A plant, in winter, looks dead; in spring, it puts out new shoots; the same plant has revived. Paul uses this image of the Philippians’ care for him. It had not died; it had only been waiting for the season to bear fruit again. And now, in the warmth of the gift sent through Epaphroditus, it had put out its new green.

Now I know you were concerned before, Paul adds quickly, but had no opportunity to do anything. He does not want to leave any room for the Philippians to feel that they had been negligent. Their care for him had always been there; what had been missing was the means of expressing it. They had not had the chance. Whether because of distance, or finances, or the difficulty of getting word across the empire to Paul’s location, the Philippians had been unable to act on the love they had for him. Now they had been able to act, and Paul rejoiced.

Notice the small pastoral care of this verse. Paul might have said, simply, “thank you for the gift.” Instead he says, in effect, that he rejoiced greatly, and that he knew they had wanted to do this all along, that they had done it as soon as they could. He goes out of his way to reassure them. He reads their hearts charitably. He receives their gift not as a transaction but as the visible sign of a love that has been there all along, only waiting for the chance to show itself.

This is the proper Christian receiving of a Christian gift. The gift itself is a sign of something deeper: the affection of one Christian for another, the partnership of brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, the fellowship that runs underneath every act of practical kindness. To receive the gift well is to receive the love it expresses, not just the material it brings. And to give thanks for the gift is, ultimately, to give thanks to the Lord who has put the love in the giver’s heart.

Paul’s joy is in the Lord. The phrase is now familiar. Whatever good comes to him, even a practical gift sent by a particular church through a particular messenger, Paul receives it ultimately as the gift of the Lord. The Philippians are the instruments; the Lord is the giver. And Paul’s joy lifts past the immediate cause to the Cause behind it.

Then Paul is careful to make sure the Philippians do not misunderstand him. The gift has been welcome; the gift has been received with joy; but the gift has not arrived to a desperate apostle who could not have managed without it. I am not saying this because I am in need, he writes, for I have learned to be content in any circumstance.

This is one of the most striking sentences in the New Testament. I have learned. The verb, emathon, is the verb for being instructed, for acquiring a skill, for being formed by experience. Contentment, Paul is telling us, is not a temperament. It is not the result of being born with an easygoing disposition. It is a learned state. It is a skill acquired by going through what has to be gone through. Paul did not always have it. He had to be taught.

What did the teaching look like? Paul tells us. I have experienced times of need and times of abundance. In any and every circumstance, Paul writes, I have learned the secret of contentment, whether I go satisfied or hungry, have plenty or nothing.

Two pairs are named. The first, in the Greek, is tapeinousthai and perisseuein, literally to be brought low and to abound, which the NET renders times of need and times of abundance. The second fills it out: satisfied or hungry, plenty or nothing. Paul has been through both ends of the spectrum and he has learned, in both ends, how to be content.

The verb tapeinousthai is the verb form of the noun tapeinōsis that Paul used earlier in chapter three for the humble bodies that will be transformed. To be brought low is to be humbled, to be made small, to be reduced. Paul has experienced this. He has been beaten. He has been imprisoned. He has gone hungry. He has been shipwrecked. He has been left without resources, without friends, without the means to do what he wanted to do. And in those conditions, he has learned how to be content.

The verb perisseuein means to overflow, to have plenty, to live with more than enough. Paul has experienced this too. There have been seasons when he has had financial support, comfortable lodgings, ample food, the means to work freely. And in those conditions also, he has learned how to be content.

It is the second of these, abounding, that is sometimes the harder lesson. To learn contentment in poverty is to learn dependence on God. To learn contentment in plenty is to learn not to depend on the abundance. Many a Christian has handled hard times more faithfully than easy times. Paul claims to have learned both. He has been low and he has been high, and in neither has he found the source of his happiness in the circumstance.

The phrase I have learned the secret, memuēmai, is striking. Paul borrows a term from the mystery religions of his day. In those religions, initiates were said to learn the mystery, to be brought into a secret knowledge that only the inducted could share. Paul takes this language and turns it. The secret he has been taught is not a mystery in the pagan sense. It is the Christian’s hidden discipline of finding sufficiency in Christ regardless of outward conditions. And it is a learned secret: not given automatically with the gift of faith, but acquired over time, through the school of experience, by the Lord’s teaching.

This is the proper Lutheran reading of contentment. Contentment is not the same as resignation. The contented Christian is not pretending that his circumstances are good when they are not. He is not denying that hunger is hunger or that loss is loss. What he is saying is that his inward state is not finally dependent on the outward state, because his inward state is anchored in the One who is steady when the outward state is not. He has Christ. He has the righteousness from God by faith. He has the peace that surpasses all understanding. He has the upward call. He has, in short, the One who is always more than enough. And so, whether the outward conditions are favorable or harsh, the deepest level of his life is held.

Then comes the verse that, perhaps more than any other in this letter, has been misread by Christians eager to claim it for the wrong reasons. I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me.

The verse has been embroidered on pillows, printed on T-shirts, recited before football games, painted in capital letters above the doors of houses. It has been used, in countless American Christian contexts, as a confident slogan for whatever the speaker happens to be trying to do: “I can pass this exam through Him who strengthens me,” “I can win this match through Him who strengthens me,” “I can build this business through Him who strengthens me.” The slogan is well-meaning. It is also, almost always, divorced from its context.

Read the verse where Paul wrote it. He has just said that he has learned contentment in being brought low and in abounding, in plenty and in hunger. The all things of verse 13 is the any and every circumstance of verse 12. The strength is the strength to be content (to be at peace, to not despair, to keep going, to keep loving) in whatever situation the Lord has placed him. Paul is not making a triumphalist claim about his ability to accomplish whatever he sets his mind to. He is making a confession about the One who holds him steady through every kind of weather. Through the one who strengthens me is not a slogan about ambition. It is a confession about endurance.

Read this way, the verse becomes a Lutheran verse to its core. The Christian’s strength is not his own. The strength to endure poverty is from Christ. The strength to handle wealth is from Christ. The strength to live joyfully under whatever circumstances the Lord assigns is from Christ. Paul is not boasting. He is testifying. And what he testifies to is the simple, central truth of the Christian life: that the One in whom he lives is the One whose strength carries him through every situation he is given.

This is the secret. Not a trick. Not a posture. Not a way of thinking positively. Christ. The One who emptied Himself for us is the One who fills us, by His Spirit, with the strength to be content in whatever lot we are given. The contentment is not generated by us. It is given to us by the One who has joined Himself to us. And as we walk with Him, day by day, in whatever conditions of life we find ourselves, the contentment grows, because the One who is the source of the contentment is more and more our own.

Giving and Receiving

But contentment in his own situation does not mean that the gift was unwelcome. Nevertheless, you did well to share with me in my trouble, Paul writes. The verb share, synkoinōnēsantes, is built on koinōnia, the partnership word (the NET’s participation in 1:5) that has run through this letter. The Philippians have been Paul’s partners in the gospel. By their gift, they have entered into partnership with his trouble as well. They have made his trouble their trouble. They have stood with him in his chains by sending what they could to ease his lot.

And then Paul begins to remember. And as you Philippians know, Paul says, at the beginning of my gospel ministry, when I left Macedonia, no church shared with me in this matter of giving and receiving except you alone.

The detail is striking, and it is a great honor to the Philippians. Paul is recalling the very beginning of his European missionary work. He had crossed the Aegean from Troas. He had come to Philippi. He had founded the church there with Lydia and the jailer and the others. Then he had moved on: to Thessalonica, to Berea, to Athens, to Corinth. And throughout that westward sweep, only one church had stood with him financially. Only the Philippians. While other churches sent nothing, the Philippians sent. While other churches forgot, the Philippians remembered. No church shared with me in this matter of giving and receiving, Paul says, except you alone.

For even in Thessalonica on more than one occasion you sent something for my need. Thessalonica was the next city after Philippi on Paul’s itinerary, only a few days’ journey to the west. The Philippians, having just been founded as a church, did not wait until Paul was far away to begin supporting him. They began at once, while he was still nearby, and they continued. On more than one occasion. The Greek idiom, kai hapax kai dis (“both once and twice”), means more than once: during his short stay in Thessalonica, gifts came from Philippi again and again. The Philippians, almost from their first day as Christians, had grasped that the work of the gospel is a corporate work, that the apostle who served them was supported by them, and that giving was the form their partnership in the gospel took.

This is a model for every Christian congregation. The work of the gospel (the work of the missionary, the work of the pastor, the work of the church planter, the work of those who study the Scriptures and translate them and teach them) is not a solo work. It is a partnership. And the partnership is concrete. It involves the giving of resources. The Philippians had understood this from the beginning. They had been partners in this matter of giving and receiving. They gave; they received the fruit of what they gave; and the partnership had grown over years into the warm fellowship that this letter reflects.

But Paul wants to be careful here. He does not want the Philippians to think he is hinting that they should give more. He has, in fact, just told them that he is content with what he has. So he qualifies. I do not say this because I am seeking a gift, Paul writes. Rather, I seek the credit that abounds to your account. The accounting language is back. Paul is keeping ledgers, but the ledgers he is keeping are not his own. He is keeping the Philippians’ ledger. And what he wants to see grow on their account is not the gift they have given but the fruit (the Greek word is karpos) that the gift produces in their lives: the credit that accumulates with God when His people give in the way He has called them to give.

This is the proper Christian understanding of giving. The giver gives, and the gift goes out from him; but the gift does not stop with the recipient. The gift goes back to the giver in the form of fruit: the fruit of righteousness, the fruit of growth in love, the fruit of treasure laid up in heaven. The Lord, in His mercy, has arranged the economy of His kingdom so that to give is to receive, that the one who loses for the gospel’s sake is the one who finds. This credit is not merit that purchases God’s favor. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession teaches that God graciously rewards the good works of believers because He has promised to, not because those works earn justification or eternal life (Ap IV). The Philippians’ gifts to Paul have, in this economy, come back to them as fruit on their own account. Paul rejoices not because he has gotten something but because they have, in a deeper sense, gained.

For I have received everything, and I have plenty, he says now, beginning to draw the matter to a close. I have all I need because I received from Epaphroditus what you sent: a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, very pleasing to God. The language of sacrifice is no accident. Paul is taking the Philippians’ material gift and naming it in Old Testament cultic terms. It is a fragrant offering, osmēn euōdias, the phrase used in Leviticus for the smell of the sacrifice rising to the LORD. It is acceptable, dektēn, the technical term for a sacrifice that meets the criteria of the law. It is very pleasing to God, euareston, the term for what the LORD receives with delight.

In other words, the Philippians’ gift to Paul has been a gift to God. What they sent to Paul, God received as offered to Himself. This is the deepest reason for giving. The Lord, who needs nothing, receives what His people give to His servants as if it were given to Him. The mother who feeds her child, the giver who supports his pastor, the church that sends to the missionary: each of them is, in the deepest sense, offering a sacrifice to God. And the sacrifice rises to Him as a fragrant offering, acceptable, pleasing in His sight.

And then comes the great promise. And my God will supply your every need according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. The promise is conditioned by a relationship. My God (Paul’s own God, the One Paul knows by long experience to be reliable, the One Paul has staked his life on) will supply. The verb is in the future tense; the action is certain. Your every need. Not every want. Not every desire. Every need. What the Philippians actually require for the life God has given them to live, God will provide.

According to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. The measure of the supply is given. It is according to His riches (kata). Not out of His riches (ek), which might mean He gives a fraction of His abundance, but according to His riches, in proportion to them, on the scale of them. God’s giving is calibrated to His own riches, which are infinite. The Greek adds en doxē, “in glory,” which the NET folds into glorious riches: these are riches that belong to the realm of glory, where He sits in the company of the angels and the saints, in the radiance of His own being. And the channel by which the riches flow is in Christ Jesus, the One in whom the whole gospel runs from the Father to His people.

This is the promise on which the Philippians’ giving rests. They have given because they wanted to. They have given more than they could afford. And God, who is no man’s debtor, will see to it that their giving does not impoverish them, not in any final sense. He will supply every need they have, according to riches that cannot be exhausted, through the One in whom all things are held together. The Philippians can be generous because the God they serve is more generous still.

May glory be given to God our Father forever and ever. Amen. The doxology breaks out, as Paul’s doxologies often do, in the middle of his train of thought. The great promise of God’s supply has so moved him that he cannot help bursting into praise. God our Father: the warmest divine name. Glory: the proper response to all His goodness. Forever and ever: into the unending future. Amen: let it be so.

The Saints of Caesar’s Household

And now Paul turns, at last, to his closing greetings. Give greetings to all the saints in Christ Jesus. Every single one. Paul does not name them by name as he sometimes does in his other letters. He simply asks the Philippians to greet all the saints, every Christian in their congregation, on his behalf. The phrase is warm. The whole body of Christ at Philippi is in his mind as he writes. He cannot pick out individuals because every one of them matters to him.

The brothers with me here send greetings. These are Paul’s immediate co-workers in Rome: Timothy, perhaps; Aristarchus; Luke; the other men who have made up Paul’s traveling team and now share his Roman house arrest with him. They want the Philippians to know they are thought of. The greetings are sent.

And then the line that has captured every reader of this letter for two thousand years. All the saints greet you, Paul writes, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.

Those who belong to Caesar’s household. The phrase refers not to the imperial family in some narrow sense (wife and children of the emperor) but to the great network of slaves, freedmen, and officials who served the imperial bureaucracy. Caesar’s household in this sense was a sprawling administrative body, with thousands of members scattered across the empire, all of them legally part of the emperor’s household and most of them either slaves or former slaves of the Caesars. They cooked the meals. They wrote the letters. They administered the estates. They were the working core of the imperial machine.

And among them, Paul tells us, there were saints. There were Christians. There were members of the body of Christ. There were people who, even as they served Caesar, called Jesus their Lord. The gospel had reached into Caesar’s own household, perhaps in part through the slow work of the imperial schedule and the rotating shifts of the Praetorian Guard, and there were now believers in the very offices of the emperor.

This is the climax of the letter that began with chains. Paul opened the letter by saying that his situation had turned out to advance the gospel. He named the imperial guard, the Praetorian Guard. He named the way the brothers in Rome had been emboldened. And now, at the end of the letter, he tells the Philippians the result: there are saints in Caesar’s household. The chains had cut their road into the very heart of the empire. The man who had been arrested in chains had become the apostle of the saints of Caesar’s house.

There is a quiet triumph here. The empire that had imprisoned Paul had not silenced the gospel. The gospel had infiltrated the empire from within. The very men who served the emperor now also served the King of kings. They greeted their fellow saints in Philippi as members of the same body, the body of which Christ is the head, the body whose citizens are in heaven, the body whose Lord will one day return to take what is His.

Paul does not boast about this. He simply mentions it, in passing, in his closing greetings. But the mention is unforgettable. The gospel that began with Lydia’s household, a slave girl set free, and a jailer’s household has reached, in a generation, to the saints of Caesar’s household. And the same gospel that did that work then is the gospel that is at work in the world today.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. So the letter ends. The final word is grace. The same grace that began the letter (Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!) is the grace that ends it. The grace, this time, is named more intimately. It is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ: the grace that flows from Him specifically, the grace that is His own, His gift to His people. And it is to be with your spirit, with the inmost being of the Philippians, where the Spirit dwells and where the believer most truly is.

This is Paul’s benediction on the church at Philippi, and through them, on every reader of this letter. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. May the grace that has run through every page of this letter be with you in your inmost being. May the same Christ whose attitude is to be yours, whose righteousness has been given to you, whose peace guards your heart, whose strength carries you in every situation, and whose name is above every name be with you in His grace, forever and ever. Amen.

Gathering the Threads

Philippians 4:10–23 brings one of the warmest letters in the New Testament to its close. It moves from Paul’s joy at the renewed gift, into the famous declaration of learned contentment, through the historical reflection on the Philippians’ faithful partnership, and on to the final greetings and the closing benediction. The letter that began with two slaves of Christ Jesus greeting the saints at Philippi ends with the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ resting on every member of that church, and on every reader who has come along for the journey.

Several Lutheran themes have come to their final expression. The doctrine of contentment receives one of its great biblical articulations: contentment is a learned skill, given by Christ, that anchors the believer in plenty and in want, in abundance and in need. The believer does not generate this contentment; he receives it from the One who strengthens him. The famous misused verse, I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me, is restored to its proper context as a confession of endurance, not a slogan of ambition.

The doctrine of vocation runs through the passage at every turn. The Philippians have served the gospel by supporting their apostle. Their gifts to Paul have been gifts to God. Their gifts to God have come back to them as fruit on their own account. The economy of the kingdom turns out to be one in which giving is a form of receiving and serving is a form of being served. The Christian’s vocation, including his vocation as a giver, is also the place where his own sanctification is being worked out.

And the doctrine of the gospel’s advance receives its climactic confirmation. The chains have cut their road. The saints of Caesar’s household greet the saints of Philippi. The gospel that began at a Macedonian riverside with one woman’s open heart has reached, in a single apostle’s lifetime, into the very household of the Roman emperor. The kingdom of God advances, the Lord adds to His church those who are being saved, and the citizens of heaven multiply in the most unlikely of places.

Beneath all of this is the simple gospel hum: Christ is the substance of Paul’s life. For to me, living is Christ. The contentment is Christ. The strength is Christ. The peace is Christ. The supply of every need is Christ. The grace that ends the letter is the grace of Christ. From the first verse to the last, Paul has been writing about One Person. And as the letter closes, that Person, by His own grace, is named one final time as the substance of the Philippians’ lives and ours.

And so we come to the end of the study that bears His name, To Live Is Christ. Paul has shown us, in this letter, what it means to say it. He has shown us in his chains. He has shown us in his thanksgiving. He has shown us in his counting of all things as loss. He has shown us in his pressing on. He has shown us in his rejoicing. He has shown us in his contentment. And now, as the letter ends, he commits the Philippians, and us, to the grace of the Christ who has been with him from the beginning and who will, by that same grace, be with us to the end. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.

For Discussion

This session, the last in our study of the letter, brings the gospel of Philippians into its final pastoral application: to the questions of contentment, generosity, and the gospel’s reach into the world. The questions below invite you to think about your own circumstances, your own giving, and your own place in the long story of the gospel’s advance.

Paul says, I have learned to be content in any circumstance. The contentment is learned. What has been the school of contentment in your own life? In what seasons have you most clearly been taught contentment, and what was the lesson? Where in your present life are you still being taught?
Paul names both ends of the spectrum: times of need and times of abundance (in the Greek, being brought low and abounding), satisfied or hungry, plenty or nothing. Which of these has been harder for you? Where have you most clearly found yourself depending on God in poverty, and where have you most clearly forgotten Him in plenty?
I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me. In what ways has this verse been misused in your hearing or in your own thinking? When you read it in its proper context, as a verse about contentment in every circumstance, how does it change what you take from it?
The Philippians supported Paul from the very beginning, when no other church did. Where in your own congregation is there a Philippians-style partnership with those whose work is the work of the gospel? Where could that partnership grow, and where have you held back from the kind of giving that would build it?
Paul calls the Philippians’ gift a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, very pleasing to God. How does the recognition that your giving is, ultimately, given to God change the way you give? How does it change the way you receive what others give to you?
The letter ends with greetings from those who belong to Caesar’s household: Christians in the most unlikely of places. Where today do you see the gospel advancing in unexpected territory? Where in your own city, or in the world, are there saints in places where you would not have guessed to look?

Looking Ahead

This is the final session of To Live Is Christ, Volume Two of The Pauline Captivity Letters. The next volume, Christ in You, will take up the third of Paul’s captivity letters, Colossians. There Paul will work out, more cosmically than anywhere else, the doctrine of who Christ is and what He has done: all things were created through him and for him; he himself is before all things and all things are held together in him. He will warn the Colossians against false philosophies and human traditions, and he will set forth the supremacy of Christ as the head of the body and the fullness of God dwelling bodily. The journey continues, in Christ.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we have learned to live and to die, to be brought low and to abound, to receive plenty and to bear hunger; teach us the secret of contentment in You. Make us a people who can do all things through the One who strengthens us: not the all things of our own ambition, but the all things of Your own assigning, in whatever situation You place us. Grant us the joy of the Philippians, the partnership of their giving, the fragrance of an offering that pleases You. Supply every need of ours, according to Your glorious riches. And bring us all, with the saints of Caesar’s household and the saints of every age, into the praise of Your name forever and ever. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with our spirits. Amen.