Philippians 2:3-4

AGAINST CONTROVERSY

‘Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.’

Php_2:3-4

I. There are two great notes in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians:—

(a) The note of joy: ‘Rejoice,’ he is always crying, and this is the more noble because, as you remember, he wrote as a prisoner and as one in chains.

(b) There is the note of love. There is no Epistle in which the fire of love burns more brightly. We can see quite early that it is an anxious love that he has for his Philippian converts.

II. Yet even here it is not all perfect: he has heard of discord and differences; he has noted the growth of party spirit and personal rivalry. We have sometimes seen something of this sort in the modern Church, and indeed this warning of St. Paul’s may very well save us from the common danger of idealising the past. St. Paul urges on the converts as a remedy for this the cultivation of the spirit of humility. ‘Let nothing be done in the spirit of strife or vainglory,’ he says. It is, I think, beyond dispute that we are in need of some such warning. There are not wanting certain signs of the rekindling of party spirit. The English Church, in spite of the service she has done for the nation, has been vexed and troubled by matters of little importance. The time has come when we should concern ourselves more with the things that really matter; that we should throw ourselves heart and soul into the work which Christ has given us to do here in England.

III. It may be well for us to take and hear the words of the Apostle: ‘Let nothing be done in strife or vainglory.’ He exhorts us to that lowliness of mind so far removed from party spirit and self-assertion. There are two things which will help us here.

(a) Religion will present itself in different fashions to different classes of minds. St. Paul, St. John, and St. James held the same faith, but hardly in the same fashion.

(b) We must consider the incompleteness of our knowledge. Human knowledge widens every year, and the more it widens the more it brings home to us our ignorance.

—Rev. H. R. Gamble.

Illustrations

(1) ‘No chain can ever fetter the free spirit:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage.

Even so one thinks of Bunyan, with his body indeed in Bedford gaol, and with his spirit in the House Beautiful, or treading the Delectable Mountains, for in spite of circumstances he finds more in Christ to make him glad than in the world to make him sad.’

(2) ‘I will not rest from mental strife,

Nor shall the sword rest in my hand,

Till have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.’