Philippians 4: Paul Thanks Them Without Quite Saying Thanks

I said last time I'd come into Philippians 4 at verse 10, where the money gets thanked. I didn't make it that far. Verse 6 stopped me, and it stopped me because of a Sunday night last March.

A settlement file had come through at work with what looked like a duplicate row in it. $4,180.00, same merchant, same timestamp down to the second. I saw it around 9:30, couldn't touch it until Monday and went to bed anyway. By 11:40 I was on my back running the query in my head. I had the join written out. I had three ways the duplicate could have gotten in, and I'd moved on to ranking them by how embarrassing each would be. Melissa didn't open her eyes. She said, "You can't fix it from the ceiling," and rolled over.

Monday at ten to seven I ran the real query. It was a duplicate, and the check downstream had already rejected it on its own, which is what the check is for. Four minutes. Nothing about that night had needed me.

What does "be careful for nothing" actually ask?

Read fast, "Be careful for nothing" sounds like a safety sign, and it means close to the reverse. In 1611 careful meant full of care, so Paul is saying be anxious about nothing, and he follows it with what to do with the anxiety instead of just telling you to drop it.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7

Two things in that sentence caught on me, and the first is "every thing," which takes in a diagnosis and a late library book with the same grammar, and Paul doesn't sort them into prayable and not prayable. The other is where the thanksgiving sits. It's inside the asking, "with thanksgiving," so the thanks goes up before there's any answer to be thankful for. I can't swear that's the whole meaning of the phrase, but it's the order the sentence gives.

Verse 7 promises less than people tend to remember. The request isn't granted in it. What it says is that the peace of God will keep your hearts and minds, which makes it a promise about the person doing the asking, and plenty of people make their requests known and get a bad Tuesday anyway. The verse is for them too, since it never said otherwise.

Paul would know what "keep" means, because the last chapter of Acts has him at Rome "suffered to dwell by himself with a soldier that kept him" (Acts 28:16). A man with a guard in the room is telling them peace can do that job for a mind. I'd leave it there and not build on it.

The sentence just ahead of all this is short and easy to skip. "The Lord is at hand" (v. 5). My guess is it carries more of the load than it looks, since being anxious about nothing makes more sense if somebody else is on his way.

Why are two women named right before everybody is told to rejoice?

The chapter divisions were added centuries after Paul, and this is one place where it shows. Chapter 4 opens with "stand fast in the Lord," and then comes a pair of names.

I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord.

Philippians 4:2

Paul says beseech twice, once for each of them, so whoever was at fault, and we're never told, gets the same sentence and the same weight as the other. Then he asks a "true yokefellow" who goes unnamed to help those women, and he describes them as "which laboured with me in the gospel" (v. 3). He says nothing about what they're doing to each other and plenty about what they did beside him.

Notice the job he gives the yokefellow, too. Paul is in custody and can't walk over and sit the two of them down, so he asks somebody who's in the room to "help." He doesn't tell that person to rule on it. He wants them helped, which I'd call a different assignment from refereeing, and probably a harder one.

We don't know what the quarrel was about, though the Philippians did, and a letter like this would have been read out to the whole congregation, so both women heard their names said in a room full of people they knew. That's not a gentle way to handle it, and it isn't a cruel one either, since the same breath calls them his coworkers. I don't think I'd have had the nerve.

Two verses, and then he moves on.

So verse 4 arrives with two unreconciled people somewhere in the audience. "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice." The "again I say" reads differently when you picture who might have been staring at their shoes. What I'd quarrel with is the poster, which takes the verse out of a congregation with an argument going and sets it beside a sunset.

If you want to see how he tells another church to handle anger, Ephesians 4 and the verse about the sun going down is the closest thing he has to a method.

Does "I can do all things" mean what the poster says?

It's printed on gym walls and water bottles with an unspoken "win" attached to the end. Read the sentence before it.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

Philippians 4:12-13

So "all things" has a list, and the list is sitting right there in verse 12. Full and hungry, abounding and in need. The strength he's describing covers both halves, and I'd say it matters more in the second, since anybody can be gracious on a full stomach.

Then look at what follows. Verse 14 doesn't carry on about power or accomplishment. It says "ye have well done, that ye did communicate with my affliction." So the verse sits between a sentence about going without and a sentence about being helped, and that's its address. Maybe Scripture has something to say about ambition and effort, but I'd want a different verse for it, because this one has already told you what it means by all.

Fair enough, a coach can quote it at a ten-year-old before a game and do no harm. I just think it deserves to be read once with its own paragraph attached.

Why is Paul's thank-you so awkward?

This is the part I meant to start with, and I like it best, mostly because it's uncomfortable to read.

Go through verses 10 to 20 and look for the word "thanks." It isn't there. I checked twice. He rejoices "in the Lord greatly" that their care "hath flourished again," and then he starts backing away from what he just said. "Not that I speak in respect of want" (v. 11), meaning don't think I'm asking. Then "ye have well done" (v. 14), which is approval, the kind a foreman gives and not gratitude. A few verses on comes the one I'd put at the center of the whole letter:

Not because I desire a gift: but I desire fruit that may abound to your account.

Philippians 4:17

He's moving the profit over to their side of the ledger, and it's accounting talk all the way through, "giving and receiving" in verse 15, "account" here, and in verse 18 a receipt, "I have all, and abound: I am full, having received of Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you." Anyone who's watched a man who hates owing people write a thank-you note will know the voice. He wants the gift understood as their investment and not as his rescue. He also wants it on record that they were the only ones. When he left Macedonia, "no church communicated with me as concerning giving and receiving, but ye only" (v. 15), and even at Thessalonica "ye sent once and again unto my necessity" (v. 16). In the King James "communicate" means share, which is how he can say it about money.

What gets me is that this is the same man who has just written that he's learned to be content in whatever state he's in, and you'd expect somebody like that to need nothing and to say so. He does say he isn't speaking from want. Three verses later he calls what they helped with "my affliction." The gift wasn't a courtesy to him.

He needed it. He says so in a roundabout, slightly stiff way and he's glad of it.

That changes what the contentment can be, because it can't be the kind that needs nothing. He says he knows how to be hungry and he says he knows how to be full, which means he knows how to take a meal from a church he loves without giving a speech about how little he requires. I'd say the second skill is the harder one, and this chapter shows him doing it clumsily.

None of this is a complaint about him. The whole letter reads differently once you remember where it was written from, which Philippians 1 took up at the start, and a man in that spot has earned some awkwardness about taking a church's money.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does being content mean I shouldn't want anything better?

No, and Paul makes a bad witness for that reading, since he was glad when the gift came, and he says so in verse 10. What he says he learned is how to be content in a state, whichever one it happened to be. Wanting your situation to improve and not being ruled by it are separate things, and the chapter doesn't ask you to give up the first.

What do I do with verse 8 when my head is full of the opposite?

Read verse 9 right after it, because it hands the list a verb. "Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do." Verse 8 says think on these things, and the thirteenth Article of Faith says "we seek after these things," which is a more active word, and Joseph Smith chose it. I take that to mean a good thought list isn't supposed to stay a list. Go and do one of the things on it.

How can Paul tell people to rejoice always from a prison?

He's not telling them to feel a certain way on demand. Rejoice is a command, and commands are things you can do on purpose when you don't feel like it. The letter ends with greetings from "they that are of Cæsar's household" (v. 22), which tells you he's writing from the middle of the empire, not from some quiet place where joy came easy. Whatever he means, it was said by a man who had every reason not to say it.

What does "let your moderation be known" mean?

Most newer translations say gentleness or reasonableness, and with two women who aren't speaking in the room, that seems like the right size for it. Moderation in 1611 didn't mean a diet. It was closer to being easy to deal with. People should be able to tell, from how you handle a disagreement, that you aren't carrying the whole weight of it.

The last promise in the chapter is verse 19, and it's made to people who had just sent him money. "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." He doesn't say they'll be repaid. He says need, which is a smaller word than want, and he says your, plural, to the whole church. I'd think about who wrote it before deciding what "all your need" covers, because the man who wrote it had already told them, in verse 12, that he knew what it was to be hungry.

— D.