Verse of the day · October 6

What does be careful for nothing mean in Philippians 4:6?

The man told to stop worrying still has a family to feed and a trade to keep.

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

Careful has moved. In the English of the King James, being careful meant being full of care. What the command asks is that a man have no distressing anxiety about anything. The phrase behind it in the Greek is the same one that Matthew 6 renders take no thought for your life. Paul wrote the sentence as a prisoner at Rome, and part of what this letter does is thank the church at Philippi for a gift that had reached him at last, after a stretch of time in which they sent nothing. It was not that they had forgotten him. Rome was a long way from their city and nobody had been going that way, so there had been no one to send.

The instruction arrives in a row of short commands in the letter: Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Moderation there is a good disposition towards other men — dealing by fairness rather than by the severity of strict justice, and not rigidly insisting on a right that is genuinely yours. Then: be careful for nothing. In today's English that sounds like an order to care less, and it is not one. The command does not tell a man to take no care to keep what he owns, or no care to provide for his family. It aims at something inside him: a confidence in God strong enough to free the mind of anxiety, and a sense of depending on him steady enough to keep that mind calm.

The list of what a man must still take care of is long. He is to look after his body and its health, and his soul as well, and to keep his family fed and clothed and provided for. He is to seek the things of this world in due measure, working for them with all diligence, and to do the duties of whatever job he holds in ordinary life. He is to care about God's honour, the good of religion and the support of the Gospel, and to take care that he does not offend God by sinning against him.

All of that survives the command, because there are two kinds of care here and only one of them is forbidden. There is a care of diligence, which is a duty, and consists in looking ahead wisely and being properly concerned. And there is a care of distrust, which is sin and folly, and all it manages to do is unsettle a man and pull his mind in several directions at once. It is an anxious, immoderate concern about worldly things, and it grows out of distrusting God's power, his watch over the world and his faithfulness — or out of leaving all three out of account. What the command forbids is carrying care so far that it turns into that distrust and makes a man unfit for God's service. And it gains him nothing. Anxiety cannot shift anything from bad to good, and it will certainly do his own soul damage.

What a man is to do with the forbidden kind is cast it on the Lord, carry every case to him, and leave it there. Against that care the verse sets prayer, and the two are as opposed to one another as fire and water. The reach of the prayer has no limit put on it. In every thing means every case a man could bring — of body or of soul, his own case or another man's, his family, the people he knows, the church, the world. There is nothing to do with body, mind, what he owns, friends, losses, troubles, hopes or fears that he may not take and spread out in front of the Lord. Of the two words the verse uses, prayer asks for the good he wants, and supplication asks for some feared evil to be turned aside. Thanks goes with both, because a man who comes to ask has always had mercies already to bless God for.

None of it is aimed at informing God. He knows what we want better than we can tell him, but he will have it from us all the same, and what he requires is that we come and say it. And the telling is to be done plainly. Not to any human helper, but to God, and told to him the way you would tell a friend — freely, fully, the whole case poured out. Poor telling still counts. A sigh, a groan, a noise no better than a bird's chatter: he understands all of it, and however weakly the thing gets out, if it gets out it is enough, and it will not be brushed aside.

The peace named next is of a different nature from anything that can come out of human circumstances. It is either the peace made with God by Christ's blood, shed on the cross, or the settled conscience of a man who has seen that peace made — and the verse holds in either sense. What it rises out of is a sense of pardon and the favour of God, and nobody can explain it. How good it is surpasses what any man's understanding can take in. And the natural man knows nothing of this peace. He does not know what that quiet of mind means, and he cannot make sense of believers who have peace in Christ while they are harassed and insulted and hunted in the world.

It is only in Christ that a mind is kept in peace. And the verb in shall keep is a military one. The mind is guarded the way a camp or a castle is guarded, held against the intrusion of anxious fears and alarms — kept like a stronghold with a garrison inside it, so that the troubles of the world cannot knock a man over. Hearts and minds divides in two: the heart, which is the seat of the will and the affections, and the mind, the higher part, by which we understand and reason about things.

There is a question about how that clause is pitched. Shall keep your hearts and minds can be read as a wish — let the peace keep you, may it keep you — which is to read it as a prayer said over them, and that is how the Latin Vulgate takes it. It is rather a promise, set there to encourage believers in the instructions just before it: rejoicing in the Lord always, showing moderation to all men, refusing the anxious care, and going to God in prayer on every occasion there is.

So nothing has come off the plate of the man who hears this. The health he looks after, the family he feeds, the work he does for a living, God's honour that he is bound to care about — all of it stands where it stood. One thing was taken off him: the worry that came of distrusting God's power, his watch over the world and his faithfulness, or of leaving them out of account. So the guard goes up around the heart and the mind, and it is in Christ Jesus that they are kept. The peace holds inside, whatever trouble may be besieging from outside.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson. How these teachings are made

All teachings