What Does Philippians 4:13 Mean? — Spurgeon on Christ Who Strengthens
⏱ 13 min read
You have probably seen it inside a locker. Or written on the inside of an athlete’s wristband. Or tattooed across the shoulder blade of a young man who is about to walk out into the lights of the arena. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. The verse has become, in the last fifty years of American Christian sport, the spiritual equivalent of give it everything you have — the holy version of the pre-game speech, the locker-room blessing of the body about to perform. And like everything used that often for that one purpose, the verse has gone thin, until the woman who actually needs the verse — the one who is not going into the arena but is being slowly stripped of the things she thought defined her strength — cannot quite hear it.
This is the slow read. Not the locker-room one. The verse returned to the paragraph it was written inside of, which is not a sports paragraph at all. It is a contentment paragraph, written by a man in a Roman prison, and the all things it names are not the things on the field. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
A few sibling threads on the way in: what does it mean to believe in Christ? — Edwards on true belief for the doctrinal frame underneath; union with Christ — what Teresa of Ávila actually taught for the slow inward reality of through Christ; and who am I in Christ? — Murray on abiding identity for the identity question this verse is, in its original paragraph, actually answering.
The paragraph the verse lives inside
Read the verse with the four sentences in front of it, and the meaning rotates almost a full ninety degrees.
Paul has just written: Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. And then the line: I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.
He is not in a stadium. He is in a Roman prison. The Philippian church has just sent him a financial gift, and the letter is partly a thank-you note for the gift. The all things of the famous verse refer, in the paragraph itself, to two specific abilities Paul has been describing: the ability to be hungry without despair and the ability to be full without forgetting God. The strength Paul names is the strength to remain settled — content — across the full swing of human circumstance. Not the strength of the body in the arena. The strength of the soul on the long swing between abasement and abundance.
The locker-room version of the verse promises: Christ will help you win. The Pauline version promises something stranger and much older: Christ will hold you in the contentment that does not depend on whether you win. The two are not the same line.
This is the first thing the slow read returns to the verse. I can do all things does not mean I can accomplish anything I set my mind to. Through Christ which strengtheneth me does not mean Christ will get behind whatever I am attempting. The line, in the paragraph it actually lives in, says something more useful and more difficult: that the woman who has learned, through long practice, to be at peace whether her circumstance is the full barn or the empty one, is the woman whose strength has stopped being her own — because the strength that holds across that full swing is not a strength a human can manufacture. It is the strength Christ gives, daily, to the soul that has stopped trying to engineer the outcomes.
Spurgeon, who knew the swing from the inside
If you want a Christian voice who knew the swing between abasement and abundance from the inside, Spurgeon is one of the closest. He preached to six thousand people on a Sunday and went home, on Monday, into the long darkness of chronic depression. He was famous through Europe and was, simultaneously, a man whose body was failing by his forties — the gout, the kidney disease, the slow physical wearing-down of a constitution that had been used too hard for too long. He knew the full barn and the empty one. He knew the contentment that has to be learned, not summoned. And his All of Grace, written in the last years of his life, returns again and again to the same point: that the strength a Christian draws from is not the Christian’s strength. It is Christ’s.
The first passage: the channel and the fountain-head
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the architecture of the sentence. Spurgeon is doing something the locker-room version of Philippians 4:13 quietly removes: he is naming where the strength comes from. The Father is the source. The Son is the channel. The Spirit is the means by which the channel’s contents reach the inside of the human heart. The strength that flows is not generated at the heart’s end of the pipe. It is received. The woman who is strengthened is the woman through whose interior the divine virtue is being permitted to pass.
Hold that against Philippians 4:13 and the verse’s grammar suddenly stands up straight. I can do all things — yes, but the I is qualified before the verb. Through Christ which strengtheneth me. The through is a preposition of passage. The strength is passing through Paul, from a source that is not Paul, toward an effect that is not Paul’s either. He is the channel for the channel. The arena-version of the verse turns the I into the centre of the sentence. The Pauline version, and Spurgeon’s reading of it, returns the centre to the One the strength is flowing from.
For the modern Christian woman whose strength is not what it used to be: this is the first consolation of the slow read. The verse is not promising that your strength will be sufficient. The verse is promising that, when your strength is not sufficient — when the season is too long, the marriage too hard, the work too thankless, the body too tired — the strength that flows through you from the fountain-head, by way of the Son, by means of the Spirit, is. You are not asked to summon. You are asked to remain in the channel.
The second passage: the right tune
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it twice.
This is one of Spurgeon’s quietest sentences, and one of his most exacting. He is using the image of a harp. The Christian’s heart is the instrument. The strings are tuned, or not tuned, by the slow daily life of devotion. Christ — the fingers of mercy — is the one who plays. The Christian’s responsibility, in the image, is not to produce the music. The music is His. The Christian’s responsibility is the tuning. The small daily care of the strings, so that when the fingers come, the resonance is true.
Hold this against Philippians 4:13. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me names a strength that flows. Spurgeon’s image names what the soul has to do to be resonant when the flow arrives. Not strain. Not effort. Not engineering. The slow daily tuning — the prayer, the scripture, the honest evening sentence, the small repeated returns to Him — that keep the strings of the heart at the pitch where, when His fingers touch them, the note rings true.
The locker-room reader of Philippians 4:13 hears strength and thinks of force. Paul, and Spurgeon, mean resonance. The Christian who has been tuned by years of small daily devotion does not produce strength when Christ touches her. She rings. The strength is the sound that comes out of the resonance. The resonance is what the years of small devotion have made possible.
For the woman who has been showing up to the page for years without seeing what it has done in her: this is the second consolation. The tuning has been happening. The strings have been settling at the pitch where, when the next hard thing comes — the diagnosis, the loss, the long stretch of the season that demands more than you have — the fingers of mercy will find a string that has been kept in tune by the small repeated practice, and the note that comes out of you will be His.
The somatic — where the strength enters the body
Pause here. The verse has a body to it. The body of the modern woman has been instructed, by a culture of optimisation, to generate her strength — through the supplements, the sleep, the workout, the mindset. Paul and Spurgeon describe a different physiology of strength, and the body can feel the difference if you let it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both shoulders drop by half an inch — not by relaxing, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Take one slow inhale. As the inhale comes in, do not pull it. Let it come. Do not draw the breath; receive the breath. On the exhale, do not push it out. Let it leave. Repeat once more. Two slow received breaths, with the shoulders lowered, without effort.
That is the body of through Christ which strengtheneth me. The breath is not generated. The breath arrives, passes through, and leaves. The woman who has been summoning her strength is the woman whose shoulders are up and whose breath is shallow because she has been doing the work of breathing instead of letting the breathing happen to her. The body of the verse is the body that has consented to be passed through — by the breath, by His strength, by the slow daily channel of grace. Two received breaths, in a quiet chair, is the smallest possible practice of the verse the locker room has been mis-reading for fifty years.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of small daily receiving. One short verse each day, one slow line of meditation, room for the honest sentence about what the day actually asked of you. The workbook is not the strength. The workbook is the tuning of the strings, the keeping of the channel clear, the small daily practice of being a soul through whom the divine virtue is permitted to pass. I can do all things, in the workbook’s vocabulary, is the slow week-by-week recognition that the strength has been His all along.
The third passage: the magnified Spirit
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit. Magnify, then, the Spirit. There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read this one slowly. Spurgeon has added a sentence to the architecture, and the sentence is the one the question what does Philippians 4 13 mean most needs.
There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit. Notice the grammar. Worked in us. Not worked by us. The good thoughts you have had this week, the kind acts, the small obediences, the moments of patience with the difficult colleague or the difficult child — Spurgeon is making the claim, calmly, that none of them originated with you. The Spirit worked them in you. You consented to them. You permitted them through the channel of your heart. But the originating of them was His.
This is the line that makes Philippians 4:13 finally readable. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me is not a sentence about the upper limit of your potential. It is a sentence about the origin of every good thing that has ever been done through your life. The patience with the dying parent. The forgiveness of the spouse who hurt you. The slow steadiness of a marriage held for thirty years. The decision, this morning, to get up and care for the child for the seven thousandth day. None of it was you, in the sense the modern self-help vocabulary uses you. All of it was Christ, strengthening, by the Spirit, in you.
The locker-room version of the verse asks you to do more. The Pauline-Spurgeon version of the verse releases you, finally, from the burden of being the source. Christ is the source. You are the channel. The strength is not yours to summon. It is His to flow. The contentment is the resting in that, across the full swing of the abasement and the abundance.
What the slow read returns to the verse
The locker-room version of Philippians 4:13 promises that Christ will get behind your performance. The contentment-paragraph version, read with Spurgeon beside it, promises something older and quieter: that the woman who has learned, through years of slow daily devotion, to remain at peace whether her circumstance is the full barn or the empty one, is the woman whose strength is no longer her own. The fountain-head is the Father. The channel is the Son. The means of receiving is the Spirit. The Christian is the small instrument through whom, by way of daily tuning, the music of His strength is permitted to ring.
What the verse asks of you is not a performance. What the verse asks of you is the slow daily tuning — the small repeated returns to Him, the keeping of the strings in pitch, the consent to be passed through. The strength will come. It always does. It comes from the source it has always come from, by way of the channel it has always come through, into a heart that has been quietly tuned by the practice you have been keeping.
That is the slow read. That is the verse worth keeping near the page.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day a short verse, a slow line of meditation, room for the honest sentence — the small daily tuning of the strings, until the fingers of mercy find the heart in pitch and the music of His strength is the song the day rings with.
For the sibling fathers in this series, the slow reads of Romans 8:28 — Augustine on all things working together and Jeremiah 29:11 — Spurgeon on plans to prosper sit alongside this one — the three most-worn verses in modern Christianity, returned to the paragraphs they were written inside of, with the fathers as the steady older voices beside the text.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this slow reading — paragraph by paragraph, line by line, with the fathers held alongside the text — into a daily companion built for the woman whose strength has been her own for too long, and is ready, at last, to be His.
