I. The context shows that it is more of bearing than of doing that St. Paul speaks. He has been initiated, he says, into the great mystery of contentment. He knows how to reconcile himself to every extreme, how to conduct himself in plenty and in hunger, in abundance and in need. It is true in every sense of a Christian, certainly it was true in every sense of St. Paul, that he can do all things through Christ strengthening him; but here we are especially called to notice that Christ enabled St. Paul, and can enable all who believe, to be contented with any condition and with any circumstances of life which the providence of God has been pleased to ordain. Contentment is the ready acquiescence of the heart and will in that which is, and is for us; it is the not reaching forth to that which is forbidden or denied to us; it is the not looking with eager desire through the bars of our cage at a fancied liberty or an imagined paradise without; it is the saying, and saying because we feel it in the deep of our soul, This is God's will, and therefore it is my will; it is the condition of one who is independent of all save God, of one whom neither riches nor poverty, neither affluence nor want, neither success nor failure, neither prosperity nor adversity, can so affect as to make the difference to him of being a happy man or a miserable.
II. Such contentment is, as Paul himself here writes, of the nature of a secret or mystery communicated only by special revelation to a selected few. I have been initiated, he writes, into it. Who tells the secret? who initiates into that Divine mystery? It must be a person. We do not hear secrets from the whispering winds; we are not initiated into mysteries by common rumour or by the passing changes and chances of mortal life. That contentment which is in one sense a mystery is in another equally true sense a grace and a strength.
C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians,p. 311.
We see here
I. Jesus Christ strengthening His disciple and Apostle Paul. Every man needs strength, but no man has within him strength equal to the demands that are made upon him. An Apostle is no exception to this rule. The apostleship did not assist Paul's personal Christianity; but it rendered that Christianity more difficult and more arduous. Paul, the wonderful convert, the chief Apostle, was equal to all things only by Christ strengthening him.
II. Paul assured that all things were possible to him. He felt equal to all the labour and toil which duty could ever involve; he felt equal to all suffering which could become his portion. Not as a Jew, not as a child of Abraham, not as a disciple of Moses, but as a Christian, Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."
S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons,1st series, p. 126.
References: Philippians 4:13. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 346; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 268; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 107; Sermons on the Catechism,p. 1; F. Temple, Rugby Sermons,1st series, p. 1.