Verse of the day · September 25
What does Paul mean by think on these things in Philippians 4:8?
One thing on this list is being easy to love. A sour Christian spoils how people see the good he does.
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Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Philippians 4:8
The letter this verse comes from is Paul's, written from Rome, where he was a prisoner for preaching the gospel and waiting to be tried. Near the end of it he names two women in the church at Philippi — a church he had brought the gospel to himself. Euodias and Syntyche were at odds. What about, the letter does not say; nor which of them was in the wrong, nor what either stood to lose, nor how either of them took being named. It was either a falling-out between the two of them over some everyday matter of their own, or a difference with the rest of the church over something in the faith. The second is the likelier, in a letter meant to be kept and read out in the churches. Either way, a falling-out in a church is not a private thing: it strengthens the hands of everyone set against the church, and trips up the members who are least sure of their footing. So he names them — partly because they needed to hear it directly, partly to stir up everyone else who would hear it read. He asks the two of them to be of the same mind in the Lord. He asks a third person to help them to it — when believers have fallen out, bringing them back together is hard work, and being asked is often not enough. He never says who that was. And in the same breath he says who the two women were: they had worked for the gospel at Philippi alongside him, standing by it in public and taking the insults and the persecution that came with it. That is why they were worth the trouble, and it went on the record beside their names, and not the quarrel only.
What comes next is a run of instructions to the whole church, and today's verse is where they are summed up. Rejoice in the Lord always — and again, Rejoice: a prisoner soon to be tried for his life telling other people to be glad. What he was glad about was not his circumstances: later in the letter he says he has learned to be content in any state he is in, and that it is Christ who strengthens him in it. Let your moderation be known unto all men. It meant not insisting on your own rights to the last inch, and letting an insult go rather than taking it up. Gladness in the Lord is what lifts a person above being hard on other people; sadness pushes the other way, into harshness. And all men meant all of them: even the perverse, and even their own persecutors, so that those people might be won. Be careful for nothing — no distressing anxiety about anything; pray about everything, and put the lot in the hands of the one able to deal with it. And then, in the sentence immediately before today's, the promise: the peace of God, which passes all understanding, would keep their hearts and minds — the settled sense of being reconciled to God and in his favour.
What the verse sums up is how to live with other people — as a parent or a child, a husband or a wife, a friend, a neighbour, anyone you deal with in a day. And this stretch of the letter had opened with two people in that church who were failing at exactly that. You cannot separate being devoted to God from being decent to people; it is one love facing two ways.
Six things are named. True, just and pure stand as they sound; honest, in the English of the translation, meant something nearer to dignified, worth respecting. Not one of them is optional: no keeping one set of duties and dropping another, no being punctual about religion and careless about ordinary decency between people. Then lovely, and of good report.
Those last two are measured in other people. Lovely is what you are to a person's face; of good report is what gets said of you when you are not in the room. Lovely means lovable: something pleasant to be near, a disposition somebody can actually love. Sour, bad-tempered and quick to take offence is the opposite, and it has a look to it: the hard set of the face, the unkind eye, the habit of finding fault with everything. Almost nothing does more damage to how people see the faith than somebody who is permanently irritated. And plenty of people who claim no religion at all are far better at this than plenty of people who do.
Good report takes in whatever the public acknowledges as useful and good for people, and things far more ordinary too: courtesy, kindness, respect for parents. When the world sizes someone up, it weighs his fairness and his honesty much more heavily than how regular he is at his religious observances. None of that makes other people's good opinion the aim: the point is not to be praised, but to live in a way that would deserve it.
The list ends on two loose conditions — if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise — which leaves the door open: anything else of the same kind counts too. Virtue was the standing word for goodness in pagan ethics, and the door is open that wide: anything in their non-Christian neighbours that was genuinely good by the measure of this same list, the Philippians were to copy.
To think on these things is to chew them over, turn them round in your mind, argue them out with yourself until you come to esteem them highly — and the point of all that is to end up doing them.
The stretch that began with two women who were not of the same mind runs on to its greetings and never comes back to them, and nothing more is said of them — whether they made it up, nobody is told. And the instructions do not stop at the thinking: one sentence later they end on a single word, do — and in the same breath, a promise, that the God of peace would be with them. He is the one who made peace between heaven and earth by sending his own Son and giving him up, and the one who enables the doing and the keeping on with it. And on this list, part of the doing is being easy to love.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made