The Affection of Christ

In the last lesson we watched Paul turn memory into thankful prayer and anchor his joy in a partnership God began and will finish. Now the tone shifts. Verse 6 was certainty; verses 7–8 are affection. Paul has been telling the Philippians what he thinks of them. Now he tells them what he feels, and the source of that feeling is the surprise of the passage.

1. "I hold you in my heart"

"It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart" (1:7). Notice the honesty. Paul is not embarrassed to name his love out loud. He is in Rome; the Philippians are 800 miles away in Macedonia. He cannot reach them with his hands, so he tells them, in effect: you are kept in the closest, safest place I have, my own heart.

But he immediately refuses to let this be mere sentiment. He gives a reason, and the reason is not nostalgia. It is grace: "for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel." Look at the three things grace is doing in that sentence. They are getting grace together, defending and confirming the gospel together, and suffering for it together (note imprisonment). This is koinōnia again, the same word from 1:5, now shown in its costliest form: a partnership that shares the suffering, not just the success.

2. "With the affection of Christ Jesus"

Then comes the line that turns the whole paragraph inside out: "For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus" (1:8). Read it twice. Paul does not say he loves them with all his heart. He says the love he feels for them is, somehow, Christ's own affection flowing through him.

The word behind affection is the Greek word for the deep, gut-level organs (the splanchna), in the ancient world the seat of tender, viscera-moving compassion. Paul invokes God as his witness that this is real, not performance. And he is doing something quietly staggering: he is telling the Philippians that the way Jesus yearns for his people is the measure and the model of the love they are now feeling from Paul.

This is the first faint glimpse of something this letter will shout by chapter 2: the believer's inner life is meant to be shaped by, and filled with, the very mind and heart of Christ (see the great hymn, 2:5–11, still to come). Here at the start, Paul is already living it. He is not generating love from his own reserves. He is a channel for Christ's.

3. What this means for the rest of the letter

Hold verses 7–8 beside the problems we know are coming. In chapter 4 two women, Euodia and Syntyche, are at odds; in chapter 2 there are ego-driven rivalries and a call to "do nothing from selfish ambition" (2:3). How will Paul dare to command a divided, pressured church to be of one mind and love one another? Because the love he is asking for is not a feeling they must produce by willpower. It is Christ's own affection, the overflow of grace, available to people who are partakers of that grace together.

And that is deeply personal before it is corporate. If Paul's love for the Philippians was actually Christ's affection poured through him, then the same is offered to you: the yearning Jesus has for his people can become the shape of your yearning too. You love others with Christ's love by first receiving Christ's love (1 Cor 13; 1 John 4:19). Murray frames the lesson for us: "The more we feel Jesus's yearning for us, the more we will yearn for Jesus's people too." (Murray, "I Love You," on 1:7–8.)