"Only let them order their life in a way worthy of the Gospel of Christ." "_Only_"; as if this were the one possible topic for him now. This will content him; nothing else will. He "desires one thing of the Lord"--the practical holiness of his beloved converts; and he cannot possibly do otherwise, coming as he has just come from "the secret of the presence," felt in his own experience. Will they be watchful and prayerful? Will they renounce the life of self-will, and entirely live for their Lord's holy credit and glory? Will they particularly surrender a certain temptation to jealousies and divisions? Will they recollect that Christ has so committed Himself to them to manifest to the world that it is the "only" thing in life, after all, in the last resort, to be _practically_ true to Him? Then the Missionary will be happy; his "joy will be fulfilled."
What pastor, what evangelist, what worker of any true sort for God in the souls of others, does not know something of the meaning of that "only" of the Apostle's?
Then he passes, by a transition easy indeed in the case of the Philippian saints, to the subject of suffering. In that difficult scene, the Roman _colonia_, to be perfectly consistent, must mean, in one measure or another, to suffer; it must mean to encounter "adversaries," such open adversaries, probably, as those who had dragged Paul and Silas to the judgment seat and the dungeon, ten years before. How were they to meet that experience, or anything resembling it? Not merely with resignation, nor even with resolution, but with a recognition of the joy, nay of the "_gift_," of "suffering for His sake."
Circumstances infinitely vary, and so therefore do sufferings. The Master assigns their kinds and degrees, not arbitrarily indeed but sovereignly; and it is His manifest will that not all equally faithful Christians should equally encounter open violence, or even open shame, "for His sake." But it is His will also, definitely revealed, that suffering in some sort, "for His name's sake," should normally enter into the lot of "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus." Even in the Church there is the world. And the world does not like the allegiance to Christ which quite refuses, however modestly and meekly, to worship its golden image. To the end, pain must be met with in the doing here on earth of the "beloved will of God."
But this very pain is "a gift" from the treasures of heaven. Not in itself; pain is never in itself a good; the perfect bliss will not include it; "there shall be no more pain." But in its relations and its effects it is "a gift" indeed. For to the disciple who meets it in the path of witness and of service for his Master amongst his fellows, it opens up, as nothing else can do, the fellowship of the faithful, and the heart of JESUS.
[1] Observe the aorist infinitive, _to apothanein_, of _the crisis_, dying, contrasted with the present infinitive, _to zen_, of _the process, living_.--It may be noticed that the renderings of Luther, _Christus ist mein Leben_, and Tindale, _Christ is to me lyfe_, are untenable, though expressing as a fact a deep and precious truth. The Apostle is obviously dealing with the characteristics, not the source, of "living."
[2] _Sunechomai_: literally, "I am confined, restricted from the two (sides)"; as if to say, "I am hindered as to my choice, whichever side you view me from."
[3] Literally, "having the desire"; not "a desire," which misses the point of the words. He means that his _epithymia_ lies in one direction, his conviction of call and duty in the other. _The_ desire, the element of personal longing in him, is for "departing."
[4] The Vulgate renders here, _cupio dissolvi_, as if _analysai_ meant, so to speak, to "analyse" myself into my elements, to separate my soul from my body. But the usage of the verb, in the Greek of the Apocrypha, is for the sense given in our Versions, and above; to "break up," in the sense of "setting out."