For Me to Live Is Christ

The sermon worked through Philippians 1:12-26, with the preacher returning from a family trip to Spain and picking up where Van had left off the previous week. The central thread was Paul's account of his imprisonment and what he made of it, and the preacher kept coming back to the idea that circumstances that look like setbacks can serve the forward progress of the gospel.

What was said

Paul opens this section of the letter with "Now I want you to know," which the preacher noted was a standard turn in letters of that era, a signal that this is the main thing being communicated. Paul is answering the Philippians' concern about how he is doing in prison. His answer is that his circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel, not despite being imprisoned but because of it. The Praetorian Guard keeps coming to him, and he has slowed down enough to write. Colossians, Ephesians, and Philippians all came out of that period.

The preacher then spent time on verses 15 through 17, where Paul acknowledges that some people are preaching Christ from goodwill and love, and others from envy and selfish ambition, thinking they are adding to Paul's suffering. The preacher pointed out that selfish ambition comes up more than once in Philippians and is near the heart of the whole letter. He noted the chiastic structure in those verses, where the pattern moves from bad motives to good motives and back, drawing attention to the contrast.

Verse 18 lands as the surprise. Paul's conclusion is that whether people are preaching Christ from pure motives or impure ones, Christ is being proclaimed, and in that he rejoices. The preacher was clear that Paul elsewhere pushes back hard on bad theology, pointing to Galatians as the example. But these rivals are still preaching the gospel itself, and Paul refuses to let their wrong motives become his preoccupation. The preacher said he wished more people could get to a place of worrying about their own theology and their own application of it rather than what the church down the road is doing.

God redeeming Christian suffering was a thread that ran through the middle of the sermon. Paul's attitude in prison gave other believers courage to speak without fear. The preacher said godly sorrow and suffering can produce something that cannot be regretted, where worldly sorrow just leads toward death. He connected the practice of searching for gratitude when anxious to this same idea.

The "to live is Christ, to die is gain" passage in verses 21 through 26 brought in an extended comparison to Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. The preacher's point was that Hamlet stayed alive out of uncertainty and fear of the unknown, whereas Paul's reasoning moved in the opposite direction. Paul would have preferred to depart and be with Christ, which he called very much better, but chose to remain because remaining meant fruitful labor and progress and joy for the people he loved. The preacher connected this to the Jesus-others-you ordering he remembered from a camp in his past.

The sermon closed with the observation that Paul's letters, read chronologically, show him boasting less in himself and more in Christ over time. The preacher drew a comparison to what art historians observe about painters, that the horizon line in their work tends to drop lower across a career, leaving more sky. The word translated "pride" in verse 26 was explained as the Greek "kauchema," meaning boasting or glorying, which is always positive when directed toward Christ and always a problem when it rests on self-righteousness. The preacher's grandfather was quoted: if you can brag without lying, go ahead and brag, and the point was that bragging on Jesus is the one kind of boasting that holds up.