Philippians 4:6

Philippians 4:6

I. "Let your requests be made known unto God." (1) Requests. All creatures are dependent. The act of breathing seems the emblem at once of the creature's continual need and the Creator's abundant supply. With us there is emptiness: with Him there is fulness; and, as in the case of breathing, the emptiness of the creature draws supply from God. His goodness has compassed us about like the atmosphere, and when we open our mouth it is filled with good. (2) "Let your requests be made known unto God."God desires company among His creatures; He made an intelligent being that He might have intercourse with the work of His own hands. (3) " Yourrequests." Search and see what element it is in the requests of his little child that goes like an arrow to a parent's heart, filling that heart with delight and opening sluices for a flood of gifts; it is this: that they are the requests of his own child.

II. "By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving." Prayer is the soul's believing and reverential approach unto God; supplication means the needs which demand supply or the asking which springs from a sense of emptiness.

III. "In everything." He is not a man of little faith who puts little things into his prayers. That very thing shows him to be a man of great faith. Prayer in secret is a pouring out of the soul before God; and if it is not a pouring, it is not prayer. Anything left behind, cherished in you but concealed from God, vitiates all.

W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul,p. 82.

The Ideal Manhood.

I. This is a command given by one of the ablest professors in the school of Christ. There is a luminousness, and a joyfulness, and a habitual thanksgiving in Paul's life, which contrast very strangely with the outward facts and conditions of that life. He was a prisoner; he was a man advanced in life; he was singularly proud by nature; he was sensitive to a degree that no AEolian harp ever was, for no wind, either loud or low, ever touched him that every sympathy in him did not sound out; and he had been subjected to every indignity of body and soul that a man could undergo. And yet, in other words, he says, Let your disposition be such that you shall see so many things to give thanks for that whenever you have occasion to ask for anything you shall do it through the radiant atmosphere of thanksgiving for all the mercies by which you are surrounded.

II. This is the ideal which a man who comes into the Christian communion sets before himself: a higher, a perfected manhood, which makes him superior to other men. To every intelligent person the first steps on becoming a Christian are steps that lead towards the realisation of the conception of the power of a manhood that has been illumined by the Divine Spirit of God and made superior to the body and to the whole outward life, and that makes a man a prince, who is able to govern both himself and others. The first steps that a man takes in a religious life are ranked, not by external circumstances and conditions, but by the ideal which he is seeking to reach. They are the first steps in that education which is by-and-by to give him control over his own being and over his surroundings. Is there anything in this world more fit to be the object of any man's ambition than the attainment by his reason and moral sense of such an absolute power by which he can control all the conditions of his life and every part of himself? Is there anything nobler than that?

H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 313.

References: Philippians 4:6. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxv., No. 1469; Church of England Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 103; Homilist,vol. iv., p. 302; T. R. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 382; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 215; Sermons on the Catechism,p. 74.