Christ Is Proclaimed

In the last lesson we saw Paul re-frame his chains as a gospel advance (L6). Here he faces a hurt of a different kind, and a more personal one. While he sits in prison, other preachers are at work in the open, and some of them are using the pulpit to twist the knife. The remarkable thing is what Paul does with it. He does not defend himself. He rejoices. Watch what his joy is anchored to, because it will tell you something about joy you cannot learn anywhere else.

1. The same message, two motives

Paul sorts the preachers into two groups, and the message is the same in both. Both preach Christ. The difference is the motive. One group does it "from good will... out of love" (1:15–16), genuine love for Christ, for Paul, for the church. The other does it "from envy and rivalry... out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment" (1:15, 17).

So Paul is being kicked while he is down, and not by pagans, by preachers. These rivals see his imprisonment as an opening. With Paul silenced they can step into the spotlight, build their own name, and add to his humiliation. The message is right; the heart is rotten. David Murray puts it bluntly: "They preached the selfless Christ selfishly, the humble Christ proudly" (Murray, "Fallen (or Falling) Preachers," on 1:15–18).

2. "What then?" and Paul's wide joy

Now comes one of the great lines of the letter. "What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice" (1:18). Read it slowly. Men are trying to wound him, and his first thought is not they are trying to wound me. His first thought is Christ is being named.

This is what we have been building toward since L3. Paul's joy is not tied to his reputation, his comfort, or his career. It is tied to the advance of Christ's name. That is why no rival could steal it, and no prison could reach it. Murray catches the picture exactly: "Rejoice if Christ is made known, even if the preacher is making himself known."

3. The narrowness that makes joy wide

Here is the devotional turn. We tend to think a wide joy comes from a wide life, lots of friends, easy circumstances, everyone on our side. Paul shows the opposite. His joy was wide precisely because the thing he cared about was narrow: Christ proclaimed. Because that was the one non-negotiable, everything else, his status, his rivals, his chains, could be released. He was not easily offended, because he was not easily displaced from his true joy.

Where does that leave us? Most of our joy-killing resentment does not come from people preaching a false Christ. It comes from people overlooking us, or succeeding where we wished we had, or getting credit we felt we deserved. Paul invites us to test our joy by one question, the same one he used: Is Christ being made known here? If yes, then rejoice. The rest is God's to settle.

This is the soil in which the most famous line of the chapter grows. When Paul says in the next breath, "to live is Christ and to die is gain" (1:21), he can say it because he has already shown us, here, that Christ being proclaimed matters more to him than Paul being praised. A life organized around Christ's name is the only life that can say both to live is Christ and to die is gain. We go there next.