NOTES for Php 4:19-20

What the apostle Paul is praying about? About the execution of all the desires of Philippians, to whom he writes? No, it is formulated somehow otherwise. He says: " my God shall supply all your need". What means to supply a need? To begin, it does not mean the execution of desires. It is about needs. Well then - will satisfy all the needs? Will give all that it is necessary? It is not completely so. It is rather that He gives something more important, that simply the "need". He supplies to a certain measure by grace the necessary insufficiency – let say, give the strength to survive a difficult situation, but does not eliminate the difficulties.

What does the apostle Paul pray for? For the fulfillment of all the desires of the Philippians to whom he writes? No, it is phrased somehow differently. He says: "My God shall supply every need of yours". What does it mean to supply a need?

To begin with, it does not mean fulfilling desires. It is about needs. So, will He satisfy every need? Give everything that is needed? Not exactly. Rather, the point is that He gives something more important than mere "needs." To some extent He fills, by grace, the lack of what is necessary, for example, He gives strength to live through a difficult situation, but He does not remove the difficulties.

Paul gives special emphasis to humility ("meekness"), without which the Christian path, and therefore salvation, is impossible. At the same time, the apostle describes in considerable detail what humility means as a spiritual state. First of all, following Christ, he calls the recipients of his letter to be anxious about nothing, handing everything over to God, to whom Paul urges them to turn with all their desires.

It would seem simple, but in practice such simplicity turns out not to be easy to attain. Indeed, in order to live this way, one must realize that our very life does not belong to us. In fact, that is how it is, and the Bible says this quite plainly: what makes a human being human is the "breath of life" that God "breathes" into his "nostrils" at creation, and this breath belongs to God, not to the human being.

Yet the realization that his life belongs to God comes to fallen humanity with great difficulty. Direct divine intervention is needed here, the very peace about which Jesus Himself says that it is not of this world. Not of the world in the sense that it cannot be found in nature, in the world, in that space which the ancient Greeks called the cosmos; it belongs to the Kingdom, which is also not of this world. A person experiences it precisely as peace, as inner silence that stops and extinguishes in him all spiritual movements connected with fallen human nature.

The spiritual "I" of a person, which the apostle here, as in his other letters, calls by a Greek word literally meaning "mind," in the fallen state inevitably falls under the power of that nature which, according to God's design, it was meant to control and direct. Meanwhile, to be a Christian means to enter into the relationship that unites the Son with the Father, so that the person's entire spiritual life takes place within the space of these relationships. Without the direct influence of the breath of the Kingdom, which frees a person from the power of his own nature and immerses him in inner silence, it is impossible to enter there. And from inner silence one can already enter into the relationship of the Father and the Son, to "keep hearts and minds in Christ Jesus," as Paul calls it.

But in order to remain there, in order not to fall out of the spiritual space of the relationship of the Father and the Son, one must not admit into one's spiritual life any intentions or even thoughts except those that are "virtue and praise." Otherwise there will be no spiritual path: a person will only sometimes, and only for a very short time, touch the Kingdom and its life, but will not be able to enter it. This is what the apostle recalls at the end of his letter.