From sin be daily freed.

"More of Thy glory let me see,
Thou Holy, Wise, and True;
I would Thy living image be
In joy and sorrow too."
H. B. SMITH, _from the German of_ C. LAVATER.

CHAPTER VI

THE LORD'S POWER IN THE DISCIPLE'S LIFE

PHILIPPIANS ii. 12-18

"Your own salvation"--Stars in the midnight sky--Truth and
holiness--The atonement and the indwelling--Mystery and need of the
indwelling--Indifference in God--Spiritual power shewn in
love--Aggression and witness--The witnesses and the martyr

We have just followed the Apostle as he has followed the Saviour of
sinners from the Throne to the Cross, and from the Cross to the Throne.
And we have remembered the moral motive of that wonderful paragraph of
spiritual revelation. It was written not to occupy the mind merely, or
to elevate it, but to bring the believer's heart into a delightful
subjection to Him who "pleased not Himself," till the Lord should be
reflected in the self-forgetting life of His follower.

In the passage now opening before us we find St Paul's thought still
working in continuity with this argument. He has still in his heart
the risks of friction at Philippi, and the need of meeting them in the
power of the Lord's example. This will come out particularly in the
fourteenth and fifteenth verses, where he deprecates "murmurings and
disputings," and pleads for a life of pure, sweet light and love. But
the line of appeal, though continuous, is now somewhat altered in its
direction. The divine greatness of the love of the Incarnation has,
during his treatment of it, filled him with an intense and profound
recollection of the greatness of the Christian's connexion with his
God, and of the sacred awfulness of his responsibility, and of the
fulness of his resources. So the appeal now is not merely to be
like-minded, and to be watchful for unity. He asks them now to use
fully for a life of holiness the mighty fact of their possession of an
Indwelling God in Christ. The details of precept are as it were
absorbed for the time into the glorious power and principle--only to
reappear the more largely and lastingly in the resulting life.

Ver. 12. +So, my beloved ones+, (he often introduces his most
practical appeals with this term of affection: see for example 1 Cor.
x. 14, xv. 58; 2 Cor. vii. 1,) +just as you always obeyed+[1] me, obey
me now. +Not+ (_me_, the _imperative_ negative) as in my presence
only, in