To the Church in Philippi...

I have always found it difficult to study the epistles in the New Testament. The authors just seem to rant on and on, jumping from one topic to another, then writing about something totally unrelated before coming back to the same issue again. My last experience with 1 John was like that. Sometimes, you just didn’t know what John was arriving at.

But the epistle to the Philippians is an entirely different matter. Maybe it was because 1 John was a general letter and we don’t really know who the recipients actually were. In Philippians, we know enough about the church in Philippi to be able to piece together the puzzle. Through Acts 16, we are able to appreciate the deep friendship between Paul and those in Philippi, and how much suffering Paul went through in the founding of the church. We are also able to observe that Paul was addressing specific issues in the Philippian church. We see in this epistle Paul’s heartfelt sharing of his personal struggles which we rarely find in other epistles. We get to see how Paul really loves this church, and how the church was so concerned about Paul after hearing about his imprisonment. I was really quite amazed about this epistle as I was preparing to lead the Bible study on Monday. Here we have a man who was really concerned about the problems in the church he was ministering to; one reason being that he founded the church himself through literally blood, sweat and tears.

It caused me to wonder about some of the ministries that I am involved in. Do I really do it out of love for my neighbors and friends? Is there a deep bond between us, so that whatever we do will be out of love rather than out of ‘responsibility’ because it is our job? Need to spend some time reflecting on this…

Now I’m looking forward to digging into Paul’s other epistles!