Joy has a strange habit of hiding from those who chase it directly. We spend a great deal of energy protecting what belongs to us, guarding our time, our comfort, our reputation, our opinions, and somewhere in all that guarding we lose the very thing we were trying to protect. There is a different question underneath the Christian life, one that reorders everything else. It is not what can I keep. It is what can I give.
Paul writes to the church at Philippi from a prison cell, and yet his letter overflows with joy. That alone should catch our attention. A man in chains, uncertain of his own future, writes to encourage a congregation he loves, and he tells them plainly that his joy will be made complete when they are united in mind and love. His own suffering does not consume his thoughts. Their flourishing does. This is not stoicism and it is not denial. It is a mind that has been remade around giving rather than keeping.
We live in a culture that measures a good life by accumulation. More comfort, more security, more control over our circumstances, more affirmation from the people around us. None of these things are evil in themselves, but when they become the axis around which we organize our days, we find that joy keeps slipping through our fingers. The moment we secure one comfort, another anxiety rises to take its place. The pursuit of keeping never satisfies because it was never designed to.
Paul roots the alternative not in a philosophy but in a person. He tells the Philippians to have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, and then he describes what that mindset looks like in action. Though He existed in the very nature of God, He did not treat that equality as something to be grasped or exploited for His own advantage. Instead He emptied Himself, took on the nature of a servant, and was born in human likeness. The Creator of all things entered His own creation, not to extract glory from it, but to give Himself for it.
This is the deepest possible picture of a mind that asks what can I give. The One who had everything to keep chose instead to give everything away. He did not lose His divine nature in doing so. He never stopped being God. But He set aside the exercise of His rightful glory and took up the form of a servant, and He carried that servanthood all the way to a Roman cross, the most humiliating form of execution available in the ancient world. He gave His comfort. He gave His reputation. He gave His very life. And He did it for people who had nothing to offer Him in return.
We are those people. This is not a story we admire from a safe distance. It is the pattern into which we are being formed. Paul does not present the humility of Christ as a piece of trivia about the incarnation. He presents it as the model for how Christians treat one another. In humility value others above yourselves, he writes, not looking to your own interests but to the interests of others. The same mind that led Jesus to the cross is meant to shape how we speak to our spouse, how we handle disagreement with a friend, how we serve in a congregation, how we treat a stranger who can do nothing for us.
This kind of giving does not come naturally. Our instincts run toward self-preservation, and there is nothing wrong with that instinct in itself. But the gospel does not ask us to despise ourselves. It asks us to reorder our priorities so that the needs of others are not an afterthought but a genuine concern, held alongside our own. This is costly. It will not always feel comfortable. Serving others as Christ served us means occasionally setting aside what we would prefer in order to meet a need we did not create and cannot always control.
And yet this is precisely where joy is found, not in spite of the giving but through it. Paul's own example proves this. His circumstances in prison were not joyful by any ordinary measure, but his joy was never tethered to his circumstances. It was tethered to the flourishing of people he loved and to a Savior who had already given everything for him. When our security rests in what we can accumulate, every loss threatens our peace. When our joy is rooted in Christ and expressed through giving to others, our peace becomes remarkably durable, because it was never built on what we could keep in the first place.
There is a reason Paul follows this passage about Christ's humility with the promise of exaltation. Because of His obedience, God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name. The pattern is not humiliation without hope. It is humility followed by glory, giving followed by fullness. This does not mean our giving earns us anything from God. It means that giving, when it flows from a heart shaped by Christ, is never wasted. It is the very shape of the life He has called us to and the life He will one day vindicate.
So the question worth asking each morning is not what can I hold onto today, what can I protect, what can I secure for myself. It is what can I give. What can I offer to the people placed in front of us, the ones who frustrate us and the ones we love easily alike. This is not a comfortable question. It was not comfortable for Jesus either. But it is the question that leads to the kind of joy the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away, because it was never built on what we kept in the first place.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.