ur, and looking for such a heaven, +stand firm in the Lord,
beloved ones+.

The words are a link of gold between the passage just ended and that
which is to follow. They sum up the third chapter of the Epistle into
one practical issue. In view of all that can tempt them away to alien
thoughts and beliefs St Paul once more points the converts to Jesus
Christ; or rather, he once more bids them remember that in Him they
are, and that their safety, their life, is to stay there, recollected
and resolved. There is the point of overwhelming advantage against
error, and against sin; and only there. "Standing in the Lord," in
remembrance and _in use_ of their vital union with Him, they would be
armed alike against the pharisaic and the antinomian heresy.
Counterfeits and perversions would be seen, or at least _felt_, to be
such while they were thus in living and working contact with the
REALITY. There, with a holy instinct, they would repudiate utterly a
merit of their own before God, and a strength of their own against sin.
There, with equal inward certainty, they would detect and reject the
suggestion that they "should not surely die," though impurity was
cloaked and loved.

But the words we have just rendered look forward also. St Paul is
about to allude, for the last time, and quite explicitly, to that blot
on the fair Philippian fame, the presence in the little mission Church
of certain jealousies and divisions. One instance of this evil is
prominent in his thoughts, no doubt on Epaphroditus' report. Two
Christian women, Euodia[1] and Syntyche, evidently well-known Church
members, possibly officials, "deaconesses," like Phoebe (Rom. xvi. 1),
were at personal variance. Into their life and work for Christ (for
workers they were, or however had been; they had "wrestled along with
Paul in the Gospel,") had come this grievous inconsistency. Somehow
(modern experiences in religious activity supply illustrations only too
easily) they had let the spirit of self come in; jealousy and a sense
of grievance lay between them. And out of this unhappy state it was
the Apostle's deep desire to bring them, quickly and completely. He
appeals to them personally about it, with a directness and explicitness
which remind us how homelike still were the conditions of the mission
Church. He calls on his "true yoke-fellow," and on Clement, and on his
other "fellow-labourers," to "help" the two to a better mind, by all
the arts of Ch