Week 1

Philippians 1:1-6

1. Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the overseers and deacons:

2. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

3. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,

4. Always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy,

5. Because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

6. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Some Reflections or Responses (Not everything, not exhaustive, not very cleaned up or even necessarily well-thought-out):

· Saints and servants: this is the double identity that is ours when we are in Christ Jesus. Though still sinners, we are also saints (always a sinner, yet just). But we are also called to be servants or slaves. This is not an easy one to swallow, but it’s true nonetheless. He came not to be served but to serve, and calls us to follow him.

· All the saints…who are at Philippi: I wonder what exactly this looked like. Various groups meeting in multiple homes, perhaps. It is good to think of the Body of Christ of a certain location being made up of all the believers in that city, to have a view that includes all the members and understands the importance of unity between these different groups. So, when I think of the saints in this city, or the Body of Christ here, it includes people from different backgrounds and different forms of church, some of which are suspicious of each other.

· Upon remembering people is it my default response to pray for them? To thank God in all my remembrance of them? I want my initial reaction to be prayer for them upon hearing their name or seeing them.

· Working on memorizing this passage has made me think repeatedly of those who partner with us in the gospel (not just those who have partnered since our first day, though). It has helped me do a better job of praying for them.

· I have been praying for local friendships that are also gospel partnerships, both with local people and with other foreigners like ourselves. It has been a lonely season and we’ve needed good friendships right here, especially the kind of friendships that are also gospel partnerships.

· Lastly, verse 6 has been a great source of encouragement, to be reminded that the good work he has begun in us will be brought to completion. This has been helpful in developing the patience that we need so badly. Of course, the greatest work of all that he has begun in us is that of conforming us to the image of Jesus, and there have been plenty of instances of seeing that the work is not yet completed. But, it’s not done yet and we have to allow it to be a process. We want things so quickly, but we’re learning to wait and be more patient as he does the good work that he wants to do both in us and through us in this place. Neither are as fast as we’d like them to be, but that’s okay. It also brings hope for areas in which we’ve felt stuck or stagnant and are in need of a breakthrough. He will do it!

On the first day of the year we started working on memorizing Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Today begins week seven of a plan that divides the book up over sixteen weeks, with the hopes of memorizing it all by Easter Sunday. Thus far it’s been quite an encouraging and fruitful experience. We made these little notebooks with the memory verses on the lefthand side of the notebook and blank pages on the right hand side to write down our reflections or questions on the passages we were working on that week. It’s neat how it all came about.

Around Christmas I was spending some time coasting through the blogosphere, reading some articles and blogs and then following interesting links to new blogs which led to new blogs, etc. I usually don’t do this because of the amount of time that can be spent. My preference is to use an RSS reader to follow the blogs that I’ve decided to read, and to only open the RSS reader on Saturday. That helps me to not bounce from site to site, and when I limit it to one day per week I’ve found that I’m much more selective about the ones I take the time to read. If I opened it up daily, there wouldn’t be too many new posts and I’d be more likely to read them all. By letting them stack up for a week each time, the list is much longer and I’m better at skipping over those that I’m not actually all that interested in. Anyways, that’s not the point of this. I ended up on a post that someone wrote a couple years ago, about this method (with the notebooks) that someone had used to memorize Ephesians. They had the templates to be printed out and taped into the notebook already and it seemed like a great thing. I was thinking about going for it and trying to memorize Ephesians this way.

Before I did, though, I started thinking about Philippians. This book has been one that I’ve spent a lot of time in since last October and had already been benefiting from and resonating with. Why not use this method but switch to Philippians? Of course, I would have to through and divide up the passages and format them to print them at the right size, but that would be alright. Then, the next time I opened up my blog reader there was a post inviting people to memorize Philippians this year, using this same method. It turned out to be from the guy whose blog I had landed on after following a long string of links just days before. He was the one who had memorized Ephesians and blogged about it back in 2008. He had recently decided to do this again with Philippians and was encouraging others to join him, and one of the blogs I subscribe to had posted his invitation. It was just perfect. So, all that to say, he did the work of dividing it into sixteen chunks and formatting it to fit in the notebooks that we’ve been carrying around and referring to countless times a day for the past six weeks. We’re both memorizing it together and there are hundreds or thousands of others around the world who are doing it too.