“So then, my dearly loved and longed for brothers and sisters, my joy and crown, in this manner stand firm in the Lord, dear friends. I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I also ask you, true partner, to help these women who have contended for the gospel at my side, along with Clement and the rest of my coworkers whose names are in the book of life.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A message without application is just information, and people tend to forget information. Paul’s letters are filled with information. But at the end of them, he turns to application. He switches gears to giving his readers some very practical things they can do with all of the information he has been imparting at the Spirit’s direction. For the last three chapters Paul has been encouraging the Philippian believers to stand firm in the Lord in the face of various trials and tribulations. Here, as he begins to draw things to a close, he gives them some examples of what that actually looks like. Let’s take a look.

It’s been a few days (I’ve been out of town), so let’s take a second to remember what Paul has been talking about. Indeed, where we are is always influenced by where we’ve been. That’s important to keep in mind whether we are talking about the Scriptures or life more generally, but that’s a message for another time. In any event, Paul has been calling the Philippian believers to work hard in the Lord and with His help to reach forward toward the grace and hope of their kingdom citizenship. What comes next here moves forward in light of that call.

“So then…” In other words and again, with all of what we have been talking about firmly in mind. “So then, my dearly loved and longed for brothers and sisters, my joy and crown, in this manner stand firm in the Lord, dear friends.” Wait, he has been telling them to reach forward toward God’s kingdom and now He’s telling them to stand firm in the Lord. Which is it? Reach forward or stand firm.

The answer, obviously, is yes. It’s both. They – and we – are to reach forward by standing firm. If we want to reach forward to receive all that God has to give us, we are going to have to stand firm in Christ Jesus. That is, we are going to have to remain rooted in our faith in Him. It will require us to be deeply committed to His character and command. Nothing should be able to move us from the post of faithfulness to the path He walked and called us to follow Him down. If we reach from that foundation, we will be unshakable.

But notice that Paul doesn’t simply tell us to stand firm here. He tells us to stand firm “in this manner.” Just like the opening admonition, “so then,” this phrase has us looking both backwards and forwards. He has been giving us counsel that will help in our efforts to stand firm. But what follows from here will offer us several more examples. That’s actually something we will need to keep in mind as we go forward and which I will remind us of regularly. Everything in vv. 2-9 that we’ll talk about over the next couple of weeks falls under this exhortation. Paul is going to be giving us several different manners in which we can stand firm in the Lord.

Let’s start today with the first one in vv. 2-3. Paul urges two different women in the Philippian church “to agree in the Lord.” We’re not sure what was going on between these two, but something was amiss. They were at odds with each other, and the news of their dispute had reached all the way to Paul’s ears. This is likely because, as he indicates in v. 3, they were ministry partners with him while he was in Philippi. Either way, something has caused friction between the two of them, and it needed sorting out. They needed to get over themselves and resolve their differences.

Paul doesn’t just tell them to get their stuff worked out, though. He invites the church into the process. “Yes, I also ask you, true partner, to help these women who have contended for the gospel at my side.” So then, is this giving leave for all the meddlers in the church to get to meddling in the business of the people around them? Most decidedly not. If these two women had been able to work out their differences just between the two of them, Paul would have called them to that. After all, Jesus’ process for resolving conflict among church members in Matthew 18 starts with just the two who are at odds attempting to work it out all by themselves.

Evidently, though, whatever was going on between Euodia and Syntyche was significant enough that they weren’t finding themselves able to come to come to a place of agreement on their own. They were both stuck in their respective positions, and they needed help. Specifically, they needed the help of the church. But again, this wasn’t an invitation to meddling or gossiping or playing one side off the other. This was a call for peace-minded fellow believers to gently, humbly, lovingly wade into the midst of their conflict with all the objectivity they could muster in order to prayerfully and compassionately help the pair navigate a way forward.

Now, yes, this process was likely going to involve give and take on both sides. They were going to have to let go of their pride and embrace a godly humility. They were going to have to be willing to lose some in order to win more. But because they apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t do that on their own, they needed help in the process. In an ideal world, we can work out all of our differences with other church members one-on-one because we are all committed to walking with the humility of Christ (which is why the context of the whole letter matters here). In the real world, though, we often fall short of that and so we need the help of committed and sincere fellow brothers and sisters in the church who can help us see and do what we are struggling to accept.

What Paul envisions here is a church community in which the members are thoroughly invested in the lives of their fellow members. This doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t still have things that are private, but I would argue that we keep a great deal more private than we probably should in a healthy, stable, positive church community. We hide our junk for reasons of pride and shame. We fear that other members will talk badly about us or look down on us and not without good reason in many cases. We fail to truly love each other like Jesus does.

The result is that we struggle on our own with things that we should not have to bear by ourselves. We hide sin from our brothers and sisters rather than holding it out for the sake of accountability. This would seem to make sense except for the fact that sin thrives in the darkness. Light is what destroys darkness, not privacy. We doubt we will truly be loved by our brothers and sisters if they could see what and who we truly are. Yet while this may indeed be the case, that is a sign that things are not as they should be. We are failing to trust our Lord as we should and failing to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us.

Solutions to these challenges are not easy to come by. It takes great humility and a willingness to learn and grow together as a body, majoring on grace and turning quickly to forgiveness. The work here is hard, but the results can be utterly transformational, not only for the members of the church, but for the entire community as those same members are strengthened and equipped to live and love like Jesus with ever greater effectiveness and care as they go out into the surrounding community. This in turn will draw more people to the church as they long to experience the wonder of the Gospel. In this manner stand firm in the Lord indeed. Let’s do it.