The Humble Servant

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul doesn’t necessarily have an axe to grind as he does in some of his other letters. Nevertheless, as he writes on a personal level to the Philippian church, one thing seems to be at the forefront of his mind.

He expresses it clearly in what is, to us, a well-known statement: “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Ph. 1:21). It’s worth taking a moment to dwell on what was at stake for Paul and why he desired to continue living.

Paul wrote this letter from prison, though it was not likely his final imprisonment. One reason we can think that is because he gives the church cause to believe that he will be set free (1.25). Another reason is a statement that is almost an aside: “Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering . . . (2.17)” This is Paul’s metaphor for death, which he takes up again in his second letter to Timothy, also a prison epistle, with an entirely different tone: “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering” (2 Ti 4:6).

Still, in Philippians Paul has death on his mind. His statement to the church expresses both a single-minded purpose and a thorny dilemma. To “live in the flesh” meant “fruitful labor” (1:22) for the apostle, but we must also read into that what else it meant: more beatings, confrontations with the Jews, and further run-ins with Roman law.

As Americans, we often miss this subtext, that to live for Christ meant—for most Christians at that time and to one degree or another—exclusion, economic uncertainty, persecution, and death. All but one of the apostles became a martyr, and church tradition tells us that John’s natural death wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the Romans. As Christians in America today, we have no idea the kind of courage it took for Paul, or anyone else, to say, “to live is Christ.”

How is it that Paul was able to say that? He had a good example, to put it mildly. “Look not only to your own interests,” Paul writes, “but also to the interests of others” because Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” Instead, Jesus “emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (2.4-7)”

Paul could choose to live as Christ and endure the hardships of that life for the joy of laboring for the church (though he would rather die and depart to be with Christ) because Paul followed the example of his Savior who “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (2.8).

Jesus’ humbleness and obedience to the will of God call us to follow after him in the same manner. But that’s not the only thing that calls us forward in the Christian life. Paul goes on to say that because Christ obeyed his father’s will, “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father” (2:9-11).

For Paul, saying “to live is Christ” is not a matter of Paul agreeing with Christ’s opinions or of Paul thinking Christ made a real impact during his time here on earth or even of Paul believing in what Christ did and stopping there. It is a matter of Paul seeing the abject humility to which the Son of God drove himself for the sake of his people, for the desperate need of their salvation, and for the glory that awaited him, and saying, “I’m going to do that too. To live is Christ.”

Obviously, Paul was not striving to accomplish what Christ accomplished. But Paul had his own crown to receive. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” Paul wrote to Timothy near the end of his life. “Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but to all who have loved his appearing. (2 Tim. 4.6-8)”