All Things

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me is quoted as a promise of capability. Paul wrote it in prison, in a paragraph about being hungry.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It is printed on water bottles and painted in weight rooms, and in that setting it means something like: there is no limit to what I can achieve.

Read the sentence before it and that meaning becomes difficult to sustain.

Paul is writing from prison, thanking the church at Philippi for a gift they sent. Around the famous line he says this: I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

Then: I can do all things through him who gives me strength.

The all things of that sentence is the list he has just given. Hunger and plenty. Need and abundance. He is not making a claim about unlimited achievement. He is making a claim about sufficiency in either direction, including the direction nobody puts on a poster.

There is a word in that passage worth slowing down for. Learned. He uses it twice. I have learned to be content. I have learned the secret.

Contentment, on Paul's account, is not a temperament some people are issued at birth. It is a skill, and he acquired it over time, presumably badly at first. That is unexpectedly good news, because it means that if you do not have it yet, you are not failing at something you should already possess. You are at an earlier point in a curriculum.

And there is one more thing in the list that is easy to skim. He says he had to learn how to abound. Not only how to go without. How to have plenty.

Most of us would assume the hard lesson is scarcity, and that abundance takes care of itself. Paul lists them as equally requiring instruction. Anyone who has watched comfort quietly erode their attention, or noticed how much easier it is to pray when something is wrong, knows why he put them side by side.

So the gym-wall reading is not merely a bit thin. It is pointed the wrong way. The verse is not about winning. It was written by a man in custody, explaining that he has learned how to lose things and still be fed.

A question to end on, and it is not the one people expect. Which of the two is actually harder for you, being brought low or having plenty? Almost everyone answers low without thinking. Sit with it a while longer than that.