Philippians 2:28 · World English Bible
Philippians 2:28 Meaning I Have Sent Him Therefore the More
I have sent him therefore the more diligently, that when you see him again, you may rejoice, and that I may be the less sorrowful.
What does Philippians 2:28 mean?
When your own conditions cannot be changed, aim at someone else's joy and your state changes anyway. Chains remove every lever on circumstance and leave one: what a man aims at.
From the Self-Help reading below.
Philippians 2:28 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
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When your own conditions cannot be changed, aim at someone else's joy and your state changes anyway.
Chains remove every lever on circumstance and leave one: what a man aims at. Aim sets focus, focus sets state, and state decides whether confinement is a tomb or a post. Sending a recovered friend home early spends the only leverage still in reach, and it works on the sender first.
Sorrow thins when the mind is busy producing gladness in someone specific, and their rejoicing is not a reward paid back later; it is the same act reaching him from the far end. A man who waits for his conditions to improve before he gives anything away keeps his sorrow at full strength and calls the waiting realism.
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Live Philippians 2:28 today
- On a day where your own situation is stuck, spend fifteen minutes making one specific person's day easier. Order them the thing they keep forgetting to buy, or send the document they have been dreading writing.
- Tell someone the good news they do not know yet about themselves, the thing their work actually did, the way their kid speaks about them. Say it plainly in a voice message rather than a typed line.
- In traffic, or in the slow line, when your mood starts narrowing onto your own delay, pick one person in your phone and send them something kind before you get to the front.
What am I waiting to receive before I am willing to give anything away?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism · mudita
The practice of sympathetic joy means deliberately taking pleasure in somebody else's good fortune. It is trained on purpose because it lifts the one doing it, not only the one received.
Judaism · the Talmud on comforting
The tradition says that whoever gladdens another's heart is counted as having done something whole. The act lands in both places at once.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Epictetus taught that your circumstances are not yours to steer, but your aim is. When the outside will not move, the thing still in your hands is what you point yourself at.
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