The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the PhilippiansRainy, Robert
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Philippians
Rainy, Robert
Bible. Philippians -- Commentaries
The Apostle's course of thought has not led us to raise any question
about the nature and the virtue of the faith which apprehends and
receives the righteousness of God. It is a subject on which much has
been said. What seems needful here may be soon spoken.
The only way of entering on new relations with God, or ourselves
becoming new men, is the way of faith. This Christian way is the only
way. Every other is simply impossible. Let any man seriously try it, and
he will find it so. But the question, What kind of faith? is best
answered by saying, Such faith as is called for by the object of faith
set before us, when that is honestly and intently regarded. As the
gospel is, the faith must be; for the gospel is the instrument by which
faith is evoked, sustained, and guided. The great object of faith is
God, graciously revealing Himself through Christ. Every genuine aspect
of this revelation takes its significance from its disclosure of God.
The faith, so called, which misses this, is wrong faith; the faith which
marks and welcomes this is right faith. And such faith is already, even
in its earliest life, breaking forth into repentance and love and
obedience. It must be, for God is in it.
So, to confine ourselves to the aspect of things which occupies this
chapter, the faith which meets God in the forgiveness of sins through
Christ, and genuinely accepts from Him the wonderful position of holding
fellowship with God forgiving, is already, virtually, repentance as well
as faith. The man who so meets with God, is therein agreed with God
about his own sin: he feels God to be in the right and himself to be
wholly in the wrong; he feels, in particular, God to be most sublimely
and conclusively in the right in the holy pity of His forgiveness. The
man who does not feel this, is _not accepting forgiveness_. He may be
posturing as if he were, but he is not doing it.
There is just one difficulty in faith--the difficulty of being real. But
when it _is_ real, it makes all things new.
_RESURRECTION LIFE AND DAILY DYING._
"That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the
fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death; if
by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the
dead."--PHIL. iii. 10, 11.
CHAPTER XIII.
_RESURRECTION LIFE AND DAILY DYING._
We have still other aspects to consider of that "gain" which the Apostle
descried in Christ, for the sake of which he had cast so much away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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