“Greet every saint in Christ Jesus. The brothers who are with me send you greetings. All the saints send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Another book down today. If you have been journeying with me on here for very long, we have now covered Mark, Amos, Exodus, Romans, and now, Philippians. Just 61 more to go and we will have worked our way through the whole set. Here at the end of Philippians, we find Paul’s final greetings as is typical of his letters. And, as is often the case, there’s more here than it first appears. Paul was right that all of Scripture—even the parts we don’t expect—is breathed out by God and useful for making us more like Him. Let’s talk about what’s going on here at the end and how God’s people are present even where we least expect them to be.

Final greetings like this from Paul are typically the one place in his letter (along with perhaps his opening greetings) that we just kind of skip over. And this particular set of final greetings seems especially pointless to study. I mean, just look at it. “Greet every saint in Christ Jesus.” Okay, so what? That is an instruction for the Philippian believers to greet other believers in Jesus’ name. Big deal. What does that mean for us?

It doesn’t seem like very much. Sure, a particularly rhetorically gifted preacher could probably use that to launch into a sermon about the importance of hospitality within the church community. He could parry that command into a call for people to sign up to be a part of a church’s hospitality ministry.

And indeed, that kind of a first impression effort really matters. A guest visiting a church knows within the first few moments if their experience is going to be good or bad. She knows if she is going to feel comfortable in the church, or if it is going to be a long hour. There are lots and lots of anecdotes about unbelievably bad first time visits to churches. Many of these are hilarious they are so terrible. It’s hard to believe that some Christians can be so unwelcoming to new people. Those are folks who have lost sight of the Gospel and need to be reminded rather strongly what it is they are doing there in the first place.

So, perhaps there is some worth in a verse like this one, but you have to really mine for it. Of course, isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing with the Scriptures anyway? How many calls do we see for God’s people to meditate on His word? The author of Hebrews gives us the exhortation that His word is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates to the deepest parts of our heart and soul, but it needs time germinating in us before it is going to bear much fruit. Because God’s Spirit is alive and active in and through His word, even the most seemingly irrelevant parts can be remarkably fruitful in terms of the application they offer for our living the life of Christ well.

Okay, but what are we supposed to do with things like, “The brothers who are with me send you greetings”? And? The believers who were there ministering with Paul sent back greetings to these other believers they had met before. Or maybe they hadn’t met them. They were simply passing along a good word through Paul. Well, you could go in this kind of a direction with that: We are to be checking in on other believers and giving grace and care to one another.

This could be used as a call to establish or join a visitation or card ministry in the church. That kind of personal, pastoral care can make an incredible difference in someone’s life. People want to feel connected with their church. It takes remarkable little effort to do this in such a way that really strengthens a church community. A quick phone call or text with the occasional visit is the kind of fuel that will keep someone rolling with the church for a very long time.

During Covid, one of the things I had our deacons do was to split up the church into eleven groups of 8-10 families (although we are constitutionally required to only have about 7-8 deacons, we have eleven because of an old tradition I haven’t even tried to touch since it is working fine the way it is). Each deacon was given a group of families that he was to check in with by phone or text over the course of a couple of weeks. At the two-week mark, everybody rotated to the next list and did the same thing.

By this, every single active attender at the church was contacted on a regular basis. They were given greetings from the brothers of love, and if they had a particular issue they needed help with, they were able to raise it. Whereas many churches fractured and split and generally came out of Covid weaker than they entered. We came out stronger and have built ourselves by God’s grace and the movement of His Spirit among us to the point now that we are even larger than we were before Covid with an active, strong, healthy community. And if you think that’s a really good idea, it wasn’t mine. It was my wife’s. She is the source of all of my best ideas, and the kind of pastor’s wife every pastor wishes he had.

It’s starting to seem like there just might be more here than we first thought, isn’t it? That’s the way the Scriptures work. When we are willing to take time with them, they will quickly prove to be of far greater worth than we imagine they will be.

Paul offers two more things here. One is his final benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” It is important that we communicate the grace of Jesus to one another. There are a myriad of ways to do that. Most of them are simple. The grace of Jesus includes all kinds of good things. His love, His compassion, His mercy, His peace, His hope, His joy, His gentleness, His patience, and on and on and on the list goes. If His grace is going to be with us, that is going to most often be ministered to us through His body, the church. If you want to experience the grace of Christ on a regular basis, then, you need to be in the church. On the other hand, you need to be extending the grace of Christ to others on a regular basis so they will experience it. When all of us are committed to that together, the church community becomes very healthy indeed.

That’s the very last thing Paul says. Just before that he says one that really captured my attention. “All the saints send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.” Caesar then would have been Nero. He was the crazy one who infamously fiddled while Rome burned and then blamed it on the Christians, and used that accusation as the impetus to launch a pogrom against them, one that eventually resulted in the deaths of Paul and Peter. In that kind of an environment surely there were no believers. How could one possibly survive there? And yet, here is Paul offering greetings from “those who belong to Caesar’s household.”

This doesn’t likely mean these believers were actually royal family members (although one of the men who was in the prayer group that God used to commission Paul for his missionary work was “a close friend of Herod the tetrarch”), but rather that they served in the palace in some way. They could have been slaves. Either way, they were positioned to be able to bring the Gospel right into the very heart of the Empire. This was an insurgent movement that had people in all sorts of places no one would have expected them to be. That’s how God works. He puts His people right where they need to be in order to accomplish all that He has planned for them to do.

No matter how broken you might think a particular government may be, God has people there, working quietly and courageous to accomplish His will. They may not be in flashy positions, but He doesn’t need that. He just needs them to be faithful where they are. (And I use the word “need” there carefully since God doesn’t need anything. He plans for the advance of His kingdom to happen through these faithful individuals’ actions.)

Let’s make that even more personal. God has you right where He wants you to be able to advance His kingdom in that particular place. You are uniquely positioned to share the Gospel with some folks that no one else will be able to do as effectively and well. The advance of God’s kingdom in your location depends on your faithfulness to His call and command. Of course He can do it without you, but He has planned to do it through you because that increases His glory and it increases your joy from getting to take part in the growth of the Gospel. All you’ve got to be is faithful. Your circumstances may be hard like Paul’s were when he was writing this letter, but if you will stand with boldness, humility, and courage, He will yet use your faithfulness to great effect. To God be the glory.