Variety: Philippians 4v13

“I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). 

The earliest documentary witness to Jesus Christ which we possess is the witness of mysticism; and it tells us, not about His earthly life, but about the intense and transfiguring experience of His continued presence, enjoyed by one who had never known Him in the flesh.  

Paul was a great contemplative: we have not only a sense of vivid contact with the Risen Jesus, translated into visionary terms—“I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me” [Acts 22:17]—but an immediate apprehension of the Being of God…. 

As his spiritual life matured his conviction of union with the Spirit of Christ became deeper and more stable. It disclosed itself … as a source of more than natural power. Its keynote is struck in the great saying of  “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13). This was in a letter written from prison after twelve years of superhuman toil, privation, and ill-usage, accompanied by chronic ill-health; years which had included scourgings, stonings, shipwreck, imprisonments, “on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, … in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked” (2 Corinthians 11:26–27). [1] 

These, and not his spiritual activities and successes alone, are among the memories which would be present in St. Paul’s consciousness when he declared his ability “to do all things.” 

In Paul’s letters he is simply trying to find words which shall represent to others this vivid truth—“I live, yet not I … to live is Christ … Christ in me…” [Galatians 2:20].  

[His] letter [to the Romans] is the work of a man who has fully emerged into a new sphere of consciousness, has been “made free by the Spirit of Life,” “a new creature,” and enjoys that sense of boundless possibility which he calls “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” He knows the mysterious truth, which only direct experience can bring home to us, that somehow even in this determined world “all things work together for good to them that love God” [Romans 8:2, 21, 28].  

Evelyn Underhill