2025, like most years, hasn’t been easy. Yet God remains at work—we may have been “roughed up,” but in His hands, we are neither forgotten nor abandoned.
Paul wrote Philippians while imprisoned in conditions of unspeakable horror: overcrowded prisons with suffocating air, sleepless nights in chains, underground chambers devoid of light, corroding iron shackles, and appalling filth. Yet Paul wasn’t deterred by these devastating circumstances. Instead, he found something far more devastating: the life he used to live before Christ.
Paul demonstrates three key principles: what he left behind, what he pressed toward, and how we can follow his example.
The book of Philippians is unique in that Paul’s words continually move back to being centered in joy. There is a constant in all of our seasons of life: Jesus reigns over created order and in this life, we will experience hardship. The way to walk in joy through all of our seasons of life is to have it centered in the constancy of knowing Jesus (Phil 2:6-8) who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. We know that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:11).
