Two Incitements to Love.
I. It is tenderness and compassion which St. Paul wants the Philippians to practise, and he endeavours to win them to the practice by the recognition and proclamation of the tenderness and compassion that were already theirs. Listen, he says listen to the love-beatings within you, and be loving. Lo, you carry within you a proud and brotherly sensibility; expand and apply it. He would draw them on to be kinder than they are by setting before them the kindliness they feel. And this is the best way of helping and persuading men to improve, the best way in which to try and lead them from lower things to higher, from unworthy to worthier conduct, namely by fastening upon what they are, in the midst of their faultiness, that is good and beautiful, upon what they have of good and beautiful motions in their breasts, by touching these, and calling their attention to them, and demanding that they should be cultivated and followed.
II. "If there be any consolation in Christ." That there is is true enough. How many have found, and are daily finding, it in Him. But the true rendering of the word is "exhortation." When, in enjoining on the Philippians to cultivate love, the Apostle points them to Christ, it would be surely, not comfort which he meant them to find in Him, but exhortation exhortation to the love to which he was so anxious to lead them. And the figure of Jesus in the midst of the ages is it not just this: a perpetual exhortation to men to be a little better than they are, to be less worldly, less grovelling, less selfish, to rise from their low levels to higher ways, with a nobler and purer spirit? And have we not met with persons, too, who in their silent examples, in their beautiful lives, in the spirit that breathed from them, have been full of exhortation to us, in the presence of whose pureness and earnestness, in witnessing whose deeds, we have felt ourselves called to heights above us, have seen with a touch of shame the comparative poorness of what we were and with a sigh of wishfulness the truer thing that we might be? And is not Christ preeminently such a Person? Whenever we meet Him in thoughtful pauses by the way, in moments of quiet meditation over the Gospel page, does He not act on us thus, with rufflings of self-discontent, with a sense of being coarser and earthlier than we ought to be? He stands out an angel in the sun, for ever above us all, yet for ever moving upon and affecting us all: painted for ever upon the eye of the world, we cannot help aspiring and endeavouring the more for the grandeur of His face; it disturbs us in our worldliness and selfishness, and is always exhorting us against them, is always appealing to us to rise toward nobler things.
S. A. Tipple, Sunday Mornings at Norwood,p. 197.
References: Philippians 2:1. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 348. Philippians 2:1-4. J. J. Goadby, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 293.