One day our 4 years old grandkid in CA, Amelia (now 5), said to me (in Danish), “You are not my friend!”  I  saw  the roguish twinkle in her eye, and she hastened to say, “It was just a joke!”  Of course we are the best of friends, and she doesn´t know what it is to pretend.  Children are honest.  They like to play, but they don´t play a game about their feelings.  It´s impossible for them to pretend that they are your friends and at the same time have hostile feelings against you.

No wonder that our great philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said he preferred to talk to children for of them he had fond hopes.

Not so with the adults.  You watch on the TV how world leaders shake hands  with big smiles, but we all know it´s just a game, not true friendship.  Sad to say you may see the same thing among professing Christians.  They would smile and be polite till you´re soon stabbed in the back.  Is a behavior like that possible?

Indeed, it is.  The apostle Paul had that experience.  He writes about some fellow Christians who “indeed preach Christ” but with a hidden wish “to add affliction to my chains”  (Phil. 1:15-16).  Imagine Paul, outside the jail, listening to them and then commending one of them for a good, Christ-centered sermon.   That preacher may have said, “Thank you for your approving words”, but deep inside with negative feelings against the apostle Paul.

What Paul went through didn´t make him suspicious toward other followers of Christ.  Of course not.  His epistle to the Philippians just breathes joy.  “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you”, he writes to his friends in Philippi who had filled him with such a genuine joy.  He confides in them and they in him, and he rejoices with them, nay he calls them “my joy and crown”  (ch. 4:1), and it all revolves around the gospel, i.e. “the furtherance of the gospel” (1:12).  In other words, the opposition he encountered  from Christians with wrong motives didn´t make him bitter.  No, he rejoiced that Christ is preached “whether in pretense or in truth”  (1:18).

O, may that mind and attitude prevail among us before a watching world.  It costs us our pride, prestige, “offended feelings”, the wrongs done to us, - yes,  too high a price to pay for “the flesh”, but by the grace of Calvary this freedom in Christ is there!  There is no freedom apart from the cross applied by faith in our “chained” circumstances, no matter what they are.  In the case of Paul they were real chains!

April 29 2011,

-jn-