Sermon Bible Commentary
Philippians 1:21
I. "To me to live is Christ." The connection in which these words stand seems to give us their primary meaning. The business of my life is Christ; my energy, my activity, my occupation, my interest, is all Christ. St. Paul regarded everything that he had to do, and he regarded everything that befell him, only in relation to, in its bearing upon, Christ. The words describe a condition widely different from that of most of us. Before St. Paul could say that his outward life was Christ, he must have been able to say it of his inward life. Before Christ can be to any one his object, his business, his work, in life, He must first be his trust and his hope, his known and tried refuge from guilt, from fear, from restlessness, from sin. A man must have Christ for the life of his soul before he can have Christ for the life of his life. Small as is the regard paid to Christ in our life, is there not less of regard for Him in our souls?
II. To St. Paul and in this respect St. Paul was but an example for the humblest Christian to St. Paul, inwardly first and then outwardly, in soul first and then in action, to live was Christ.And therefore, therefore only, was he able to add in truth and soberness, And to me to die is gain. Painful in itself and to all of us, painful in his case even beyond ours for he when he wrote expected life to be closed and it was closed a few years later by a death of martyrdom yet the death consummated and endured was a gain to him even in comparison with a Christian's life. Here to live was Christ; but even beyond that there was a blessedness into which only death could usher him. To have died is gain.If we would die the Christian's death, we must live the Christian's life; if we would find it a gain to have died, we must have found it to us Christ to live.
C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians,p. 54.
I. "To me to live is Christ." A bold figure, showing, for one thing, the rapid action of the Apostle's mind; a haste to express the main idea; an impatience, as it were, of the immediate and explanatory expressions. For another thing, it shows the mighty magnitude of the object in his esteem. He regarded all the grand truths and interests of religion as centring in Him, comprehended in Him, insomuch that His very name might stand equivalent to them all. How absurd, if He were not infinitely higher, greater, than a man, a prophet. Think how it would have sounded if, for instance, Elijah, the zealous and heroic advocate of the Old Testament law, when he at one time desired to die rather than live, had recovered to the consideration of his important mission and said, "To me to live is Moses."
II. "To me to live is Christ." His chief and immediate reference was to the important service which his prolonged life and apostleship would render to the Christian cause, especially to the Christian converts to whom he was writing; but he would include the happiness which he would the while enjoy himself, the communion with Christ to which he and all the apostles so often refer with great emphasis of delight, the hope, the assured prospect, of all that was in futurity for himself and for the world. Yet, with this consummation of animating interests in his soul, the happiest man probably on the whole face of the earth, he deliberately judged that to depart and be with Christ would as to himself be far better. The Apostle was of the highest order of Christians. But to every real Christian to die is gain. The sensible loss of all the evils of this present state will of itself be an immense gain. How mighty the duty, how transcendent the interest, of directing our utmost energy to the object that death may be gain.
J. Foster, Lectures,vol. ii., p. 252.
I. This canon rules the thought; the intellectual life is His. All the thinking a man goes through, all the philosophy he may excogitate, must come under this law of Christ-life. Be it well understood, however, that this is not to impair intellectual freedom. Gold dust is scattered through all the intellectual world, and he who seeks will find. But here is the point: something is found already which will never be lost; something is revealed never to be withdrawn. Christianity is a positive something which to every one that receives it takes firm abiding-place at the centre of his life, and puts itself of necessity and immediately into regulating, vitalising relation with all his intellectual findings. No one point of knowledge, great or small, can be the same to him whose life is in Christ which it would be if that were not true.
II. Take life as sentiment, and again this canon will cover it to a Christian. "To me to live is Christ." How shall we keep the poetry in our life? How shall we dignify the struggle for daily bread? How shall we live in this world as in God's garden still, although many a thorn and many a thistle grow in it, and the workers are weary, and the mourners weep? How? I know but one way. There is a name which you can keep in your heart and talk of or whisper in your journey through the days, and that will do it. "For me life is Christ."
III. Again, take life as force, active moral force and the text covers it all: "Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might."
IV. Finally, take life as hope, aspiration, destiny; as an unquenchable impulse towards the future; as an instinctive yearning towards immortality. Surely here with emphasis we may say, "For us to live is Christ." We live in Him, and because He lives we shall live also. He liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore. "Fear not"; He has the keys of death and Hades now, and death is to His followers but an hour of sleep, and the grave but the place of warrior's rest, until the morning trumpet shall sound to gather the hosts for battle no more, but for triumphal entrance into the regal city, whose Builder and Maker is God.
A. Raleigh, From Dawn to the Perfect Day,p. 153.
I. Look at the motive and mainspring of St. Paul's life. For him to live was Christ. Selfishness grew weak; selfishness dropped off as the viper that he shook from his hand at Melita; it died out; it was starved out; it had nothing to subsist on. That is the way to kill selfishness: starve it out. Health, honour, fame, everything that could encourage it, he abandoned. There was a complete self-renunciation in that man's career; there was a complete, unreserved consecration to Christ. With Paul, selfishness being dead, the greatest torment of life was taken away. Paul grew happy in conquering himself; Paul was kept happy in serving Jesus.
II. Consider, too, how this motive of devotion to Christ ennobled him. A man is measured by his motives. A lofty aim makes a lofty career in a dungeon or a hovel; a low aim makes a man grovel in a palace or a senate-house. Any man that sets before himself a motive lower than Christ, a motive no higher than self-indulgence and self-seeking, dooms himself at starting. He cannot know life's highest joy; he cannot realise life's noblest purpose; he cannot taste life's sweetest blessings; he cannot please God; life becomes a mockery, and very soon a weariness too heavy to be borne. St. Paul's life was too elevating, too much in fellowship with Christ, for him ever to grow weary of it. Life is glorious, it is exhilarating, sublime, transcendent, when it shines with Christ as a summer morning shines with sunlight; but a life that never hath Christ in it had better never have been.
T. L. Cuyler, Christian World Pulpit,vol ii., p. 1.
The Ideal of the Christian Life.
Living in Christ and for Christ is the only life of satisfaction and enjoyment. "All others," says Gregory Nazianzen, "are like well-painted ships; but he who sets sail for the harbour of blessedness needs a well-compacted ship."
I. The text is one of those striking forms of transcendental expression in which the writings of the Apostle Paul abound. It is in the nature of all high emotion that it is dissatisfied with all cold and formal utterance; it does not so much seek as demand to use words of accumulative force. How different are men's estimates of Christ. To some He is a life-power; to some He is merely a dumb, marble, ideal beauty.
II. What is your life? It is even that which is your strongest love. It has been often said and I believe it heartily that we do not live indeed until we love in real earnest; and the greater, the nobler, our love, the greater and the nobler will be the life born from it. And hence there are many persons who have lived long in the world, but they have never begun to live indeed. We do not know what we are capable of till something crosses our path and says, "Live for me."
III. It will be found at last that all life ever known on earth was poor compared to those exalted states in which the blessed ones who have lived for God have moved. If the work of life is to be estimated by the grandeur of its ideals, then what conceptions have ever crossed the most inspired spirits compared to those which have been stirred by the life of Christ?
IV. For me to live is (1) faith in Christ; (2) meditation on Christ; (3) action for Christ; (4) hope in Christ. There is no prospect of time He does not illuminate; there is no possibility of eternal blessedness of which He is not the centre. In the heart of all future Christian experience, in the glory of all future advanced societies and kingdoms, in all the eye of the loftiest poet can see, the heart of the profoundest believer can reach out to in all "to live is Christ."
E. Paxton Hood, Sermons,p. 134.
References: Philippians 1:21. J. Clifford, The Dawn of Manhood,p. 169; Isaac, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 395; J. Vaughan, Sermons,7th series, p. 1; A. Murray, The Fruits of the Spirit,p. 360; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. iii., No. 146; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 7; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons to English Congregations in India,p. 135; Church of England Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 41; Homilist,3rd series, vol. vi., p. 26; Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 254; J. W. Burn, Ibid.,vol. xxiv., p. 165; Laidlaw, Ibid.,vol. xxxii., p. 235; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 267; vol. ii., p. 423; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 13; vol. x., p. 127.