(3) В¶ I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, (4) Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy, (5) For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now; (6) Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ: (7) В¶ Even as it is meet for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart; inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, ye all are partakers of my grace. (8) For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ. (9) В¶ And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; (10) That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ; (11) Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.
I admire the Apostle's entrance into the subject of his Epistle. He first blesseth God, and then blesseth the Church in the Lord's name. And he blessed God as his God in Christ. I thank my God, he saith. Right and property in God, as a Covenant God in Christ, is the only solid foundation for the assurance of faith. And the cause for which Paul found his heart led out into prayer to God, in the consciousness that the Church at Philippi was established in grace, would have had no such effect upon the Apostle's mind, had not Paul himself felt and enjoyed his own establishment in the faith. The Reader will readily enter into an apprehension of these things. He, and he only, that knows the blessedness of the fellowship of the Gospel himself, can describe what joy of the heart that is, which takes part in the felicity of others on the same account.
I beg the Reader not to overlook the confidence with which the Apostle tells the Church of their safety in grace. He that began the good work is a wise Master-builder, who never entered upon so grand a concern, as the salvation of the soul, to leave it unfinished. And the reason is evident. Because the beginning of the good work in regeneration, is, in fact, but the finishing the first and original purposes of God in election, the confirming it in redemption, and now by quickening the soul, which was before dead in trespasses and sins, to the knowledge and enjoyment of it in regeneration, becomes an earnest and pledge of an interest in it to all eternity. This work of regeneration by the Holy Ghost, though, in fact, the last in point of order among the Persons of the Godhead, is the first in point of our apprehension to the knowledge of the love of God. By this gracious act, God's children are brought into spiritual life, to discover their having been chosen of God the Father before the world, and redeemed by God the Son in the time-state of the Church, and now, by regeneration, made partakers of an inheritance with the saints in light. Hence, this good work, as Paul calls (and beyond all conception both of goodness and of greatness it is), comes the earnest of our adoption-character, and our union with Christ Jesus. It is impossible, therefore, but that it must be completed, being secured by such principles, and not founded in human worth, but divine grace. Because I live, (saith Jesus), ye shall live also. John 14:19.