Philippian Studies: Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the PhilippiansMoule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Religion
Philippian Studies: Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians
Moule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Bible. Philippians -- Commentaries
"According to my eager expectation," my _apokaradokia_, my waiting and
watching, with outstretched head, for some keenly wished-for arrival,
or attainment. Such is this man's thought and feeling with regard to
the "magnification" of Christ through his life and death. It is his
"hope," it is his absorbing "expectation." It is to him the thing with
which he wakes up in the morning, and over which he lingers as he
prepares to sleep at night. It is the animating inner interest which
gives its zest to life. What art is to the ambitious and successful
painter, what literature is to the man who loves it for its own sake
and whose books have begun to take the world, what athletic toil and
triumph is to the youth in his splendid prime, what the fact of
extending and wealth-winning enterprise is to the man conscious of
mercantile capacity--all this, only very much more, is the
"magnification of Christ in his body" to the prisoner who sits, never
alone, in the Roman lodging. It is this which effectually forbids him
ever to find the days dull. Its light falls upon everything; comforts,
trials, days of toil, hours of comparative repose, prospects of life,
prospects of death. It quickens and concentrates all his faculties, as
a great and animating interest always tends to do; it is always present
to his mind as light and heat, to his will as rest and power. It
secures for him the quiet of a great disengagement and liberty from
selfish motives; it continually drives him on, with a force which does
not exhaust him (for it is from above) in the ambition and enterprise
which is for Christ; giving him at once an impulse toward great and
arduous labours, and a patience and loving tact which continually
adjusts itself to the smallest occasions of love and service.
Reader, this is admirable in St Paul. But after all, the ultimate
secret of the noble phenomenon resides not in St Paul but in Jesus
Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" (Gal. i. 15, 16).
The man had seen his Saviour with his whole soul. And because of--not
the man who saw but--the Saviour who was seen, behold, the life is
lifted off the pivot of self-will and transferred to that of "the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The same "revealing" grace can
lift us also. We are not St Pauls; but the Jesus Christ of St Paul is
absolutely the same, in Himself, for us. We will, in His name, place
ourselves in the way of His working, that He may so shew us His fair
countenance that we may _not be able not_ to live, quite really, for
Him as the enthralling Interest of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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