Strength Beyond Self: Receiving The Power Of God

Over the past several Sundays, we have been working through a sermon series on Paul’s letter to the early church in Philippi—a now ruined city in north east Greece. As we’ve worked through this series (which we are concluding today), we’ve seen how this little letter is overflowing with faith, love, and gratitude in and for our risen Lord Jesus, despite having been written by Paul at time when things were really not going well for him, seeing as he was in one of his various imprisonments.

Whilst imprisonment (regardless of time and place) was and is a deeply distressing experience (and something I’m sure I can’t even begin to imagine), imprisonment under the Roman Empire had the added complexity that if one wanted to eat or drink (or stay alive!) whilst imprisoned, friends and loved ones had to actually go to the prison themselves to bring provisions for the prisoner. The Empire did not provide their prisoners with anything, thus, the church in Philippi (upon hearing of Paul’s imprisonment) took matters into their own hands and sent one of their own (a man named Epaphroditus) hundreds of miles with money to make sure their friend and teacher, Paul, would survive his imprisonment.

And so, here we have the main impetus for Paul sending this letter to the Philippians at this moment in time: to say… thank you! But Paul being Paul (a man who is nothing if not verbose!) wasn’t just going to send them a simple thank you note. No. He, of course, was also going to send them encouragement and teaching, to help them in their continued journey of trying to live out faith in Jesus at a time when to do so was not only (still) completely novel, but also considered illegal.

In the Mediterranean world of the first century CE, Stoicism was one of the most influential (if not the most influential) philosophical thought systems, offering an all-embracing vision of a united and divine world order in which humans could participate through their inner rationality. This inner rationality was seen as a kind of “divine spark” within all creation, including humans. And so, because Stoicism taught that humans were a part of “the divinity” (so to speak), it was not inconsistent within this worldview to see a powerful ruler (especially one who embodied cosmic order) as being divine. Consequently, a cult of worship eventually developed around the Roman Emperors and their families, and, by Paul’s time, it had become obligatory to participate in this cult within the bounds of the Empire.

That being said, the only group that had official sanction to not participate in this Imperial Cult were the Jews—that’s how important the land of Judaea was to the Empire! So whilst many early Jesus followers (including Paul) considered themselves to still be following the Jewish faith (in light of the belief in Jesus as being the fulfilment of the Hebrew Scriptures), many within the Jewish establishment (like the Pharisees) considered the Jesus followers as deeply other, thus leaving the early Jesus followers in this religious and legal no mans land. As such, the fact that the early Jesus followers around the Mediterranean managed to persevere (managed to continue in their existence) despite having no real allies around them, suggests something very important. The kind of “power” (the kind of strength, the kind of hope) they would have needed to have kept going must have come from outwith themselves; it must have come from God! How else could they have managed to get through such difficulty and continue living the Good News of Jesus?

It is this idea (that God’s “power” infills us and strengthens us in the midst of life's trials) that Paul speaks to in the passages we've heard today. And as we bring this sermon series on Philippians to a close, I'd like to spend the rest of our time today unpacking this idea, to help us make sense of Philippians as a whole.

When I was about 13 or 14 years old (I can’t really remember exactly when), my mother (over the course of several weeks) sat me down, at various points, in the living room to listen to and take notes on the audio book "Grit" by Angela Duckworth, which has the subtitle, “Why passion and resilience are the secrets to success.” Now, I don’t know for certain why she felt her early-secondary-school-aged daughter (who already had crippling anxiety telling her to “do more” and “do better”) needed to listen to a book aimed at business professionals trying to understand how to sustain long-term success and high performance. But what I do know about my experience of listening to "Grit" is that it only made me feel more convinced that my anxiety was telling me nothing but the truth.