I know a number of you have been working your way back through Paul’s Letter to the Philippians in retrospect. I commend you for doing that because it will cement a number of things in your mind and in your memory for the future. I too have been working my way back through the text of Paul’s letter and after reviewing the first chapter have made some summary notes, I will read again the text of Paul’s letter a number of time and then read the Gems I have written on each chapter. I have set myself the goal of doing a chapter of Philippians for each of the four weeks of this month.
Allow me to give you what I trust will be a helpful a summary of the first chapter to assist you in the process or to motivate you to review Paul’s letter to the Philippians for yourself and to pick out some highlights:
The first two Gems (1899, 1900) were merely exhortation to encourage you to read the text as a block over and over before we started to dig deeply into what Paul had written.
Gems 1901 to 1907 simply give you some background to Philippi and Paul’s contact with the Philippian Christians. In these Gems I compared the opening of the letter to the Philippians with the standard Greek letter and Paul’s other letters to show you the difference in this letter. Paul’s letter to the Philippians is the warmest and most personal of all his letters. He considered himself to be in partnership with the Philippians for the sake of Gospel.
The first real sparkiing Gem you encounter is found in the sixth verse related to Paul’s confidence, Gem 1909. Why was he so confident and what was the source of his confidence? This confidence and the reason behind it keeps surfacing again and again through the letter. Where do you find your confidence? Reading this Gem and listening to the song I have given you with the Gem will help you find your source of confidence.
I write these Gem in conjunction with Deeper Bible. The Gems exemplify the approach of Deeper Bible and therefore give you practice in the deeper approach to the studying your Bible. One way to do that is to learn to read the Bible in the right way. Learn to follow Paul’s connected thoughts. To teach you how to do that I give you time at the beginning of each chapter to divide the chapter into the natural segments in Paul’s thoughts. There are many opportunities for you to do that throughout these Gems on Philippians. Here in the first chapter you have a chance to develop your skills to do that in:
Gem 1911 – Rightly Dividing the Next Section
Gem 1912 – Dividing Paul’s Letter
The rest of the Gems I wrote on the first chapter of Philippians are standard Gems dealing with the struggles Paul faced in spreading the Gospel and the opposition he encountered because of it. The same opposition the Philippians themselves faced and all Christians in each generation face. In order to find the precious Gems in Scripture we have to go through the daily grind. As my Greek Prof used to say: to find the sparkling Gems we have to sift through the overburden, the overlying rock. To do good Bible study and find gold we have to do the plain, ordinary work of digging into the text before we can recognise the treasure.
You will find three practical Gems in:
Gem 1917 – Never The Less I Will Rejoice
Gem 1918 – Conduct Yourself in a Manner Worthy of the Gospel
Gem 1919 – Stand Together, Don’t Be Intimidated, Trust Christ
There that gives you some help to negotiate the Gems on the first chapter of Philippians from the fruit of my own review of Chapter One and the Gems I wrote on the opening part of Paul’s letter.
Some selected pithy quotes to help you from the review of Philippians 1.
I am not concerned that you have fallen, I am concerned that you will rise.
Abraham Lincoln
When you begin to understand the depth of God’s Word, you understand the limitless nature of it. It’s then that you want to plumb its depths for all you’re worth.
Ian Vail
Dread of death ends when you know heaven is your true home.
Max Lucado
I loathe the thought of speaking of the glory of God or the joy He gives in a way that is so familiar or stale or clichéd that it wakens no sense of wonder.
John Piper