Philippians 4:5

Philippians 4:5

The Great Expectation.

I. It has been the expectation of the coming of the Lord which ever since the time of the Apostles has always been the inspiration of the Christian world. The noblest souls always have believed that humanity was capable of containing, and was sure sooner or later to receive, a larger and deeper infusion of Divinity. The power of any life lies in its expectancy. What do you hope for? What do you expect? The answer to these questions is the measure of the degree in which a man is living. He who can answer these questions by the declaration, I am expecting a higher, deeper, more pervading, mastery of Christ we know that he is thoroughly alive.

II. The more varied and manifold a man's experiences have become, the more he has the chance to know of God, the more chance God has to show Himself to him. Every new experience is like an opportunity of knowing God; every experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our lives, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of Himself. And the man who feels himself going out of a dying year with these jewels of experience which have burned forth from his life during its months, and knows that God in the new year will shine upon them and reveal them, may well go full of expectation, saying, "The Lord is at hand." There are two ways in which the Lord is always coming to His servants. He opens their eyes to see how near He is already, and He does actually draw nearer to their lives.

III. In the text St. Paul describes what ought to be the result of this expectation of the coming of the Lord upon a man's life: "Let your moderation be known unto all men." This word ''moderation" "forbearance" the new version renders it is one of Paul's great words; it means self-restraint, self-possession. There is somewhere in the human mind an image of human character in which all wayward impulses are restrained, not by outside compulsion, but by the firm grasp of a power which holds everything in obedience from within by the central purpose of the life. It is this character which St. Paul calls by his great word "moderation." It is self-possession; it is the self found and possessed in God; it is the sweet reasonableness which was in Jesus, of whom it was written that He should not strive nor cry, neither should His voice be heard in the streets: that He should not break the bruised reed, and the smoking flax He should not quench, until He sent forth judgment to victory. In these words we have the true description of what St. Paul meant by moderation.

Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 353.

References: Philippians 4:5. Church of England Pulpit,vol. xix., p. 157; Homilist,3rd series, vol. v., p. 53; Ibid.,4th series, vol. i., p. 34; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xii., p. 278.