If you feel that you are a bad Christian because of your failures, you might be putting confidence in the flesh. If you feel that you are doing OK as a Christian (because, well, you are doing OK, at least right now), you might be putting confidence in the flesh. But the Holy Spirit calls us to put all our confidence in Christ, not our own performance.

This is the heart of the gospel: Jesus is surpassingly good. He, and he alone, is worth everything. Nothing else can compare to him, and when we have only him, then through him, we have everything we might need.

God’s chosen people are those who belong to his family through Jesus Christ. Through Christ, all the promises of the Old Testament are applicable to those who follow him. What an honor, what unearned favor, that we have been chosen by God!

If our joy is fully in the Lord, then our hearts will always be satisfied, because the one thing that Jesus gives us without limit is himself. If what we want is Jesus himself—not the stuff he can do for us, but his presence—then we can continually rejoice in the Lord. Even if Jesus is the desire of our heart, it may seem sometimes like we are not fully satisfied, but scripture tells us that the Lord is in us, and with us, even when the voices of the world, flesh and devil whisper that our experience says otherwise. We can count on the promises of God to be with us always.

Epaphroditus gives us another example of what it means to live a life surrendered to Jesus Christ.

If we avoid grumbling and complaining, and we hold fast to the word of life, we will shine like stars, especially compared to the crooked and perverse generation of those who do not follow Jesus.

In John’s account of the resurrection, he shows us that faith in what we have not yet seen is more blessed than faith that insists upon personal, sight-and-touch verification. That kind of faith in the resurrected Jesus changes everything for those who have it.

The crowd on Palm Sunday were worshipping Jesus, but it may have been for the wrong reasons. Sometimes, we too, miss the point of what Jesus is doing.

Being a Christian means that we trust Jesus in such a way that it has consequences in our daily lives. It’s a bit like marriage. Getting married is relatively simple (you don’t need all the wedding pomp and fancy things). But once you are married, there will be years working the implications of your marriage out into your life. So, in the same way, it is simple to come to Jesus. We also spend a lifetime working our salvation out into our lives. And yet, it is not we who do the work, but God himself.

I feel that at least on this occasion, we should look at this text in the way that Paul clearly meant the Philippians to understand it. He wasn’t trying to write a hymn. If he was using a piece of an existing hymn, that is beside the point. He wasn’t creating a theology of Jesus, either. Instead, he was urging the Philippians to be humble in practical, loving ways.