NOTES for Php 3:1

Here is what is hardest in the Christian life. One Christian woman with very long experience says that in her life she has hardly met joyful Christians. Why is this so? After all, the Gospel is the Joyful News, the news that God is love, that He forgives us, that He is with us, that He is in us. Is this really not enough for us to abide in joy?

But this joy was paid for at a very high price. Should we, remembering the Resurrection, forget the Cross? Can we be raised together with Christ without being crucified together with Him? And this means constant participation in His sufferings for the sins of the world, for our sins. It means a heart that trembles at every manifestation of non-love and bleeds from the misfortune, pain, and death around us. What kind of joy can there be here?!

That is why the apostle Paul writes, "Finally..." He is not writing this letter from some palace, but from prison. He knows very well this paradox, this tension of the Christian life, and nevertheless he believes that joy overcomes, because Christ did not die in vain. He conquered death; He redeemed the sins of the world, and ours too.