shawnethomas

Those of you who are on social media know that often a person will put on their home page a brief description of themselves, often with just a series of words, saying something like, “Christian, mother of 3, blogger”, or  “Husband, father of two, director of multi-billion dollar corporation” — or whatever brief description they want to give of themselves with a few words.

We see something similar to that occasionally in scripture, especially in the letters of Paul, where he will refer to a person, and give just a little, 2,3,4 word description of who they are — often from a spiritual perspective.  One of my favorite examples of these is here at the end of Philippians 2, where Paul refers to a couple of his ministry partners, Timothy and Epaphroditus. Most of us are familiar with Timothy — but fewer would say they know much about Epaphroditus — but what Paul says about him here is very important, and should cause us to evaluate our own spiritual commitment to the Lord.

First of all, just very quickly, let’s look at what Paul writes about Timothy. Timothy is a living example of the kind of selfless attitude that Paul was writing about earlier in Philippians 2. He says in :19 that he hopes to send Timothy shortly, and then he says in :20 “For I have no one else of kindred spirit who will genuinely be concerned for your welfare, (:21) for they all seek after their own interests, not those of Christ Jesus.”

What a statement!  Remember what he had written in Philippians 2:4; he had said “Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.” We talked about the importance of being able to lay aside our own self-centeredness and selfishness, if we are going to keep unity and power in the church. Paul said Timothy didn’t just “study that in his Sunday School lesson;” he really lived it out. He really did put other people ahead of himself, and that’s why he could trust him to send him as his representative to the Philippians.  

Many of us know something about Timothy through our studies over the years, bur far fewer of us know of the second man Paul refers to here, Epaphroditus. Epaphroditus is one of the great Bible names! You can’t get your graduate degree in New Testament studies unless you can both pronounce AND spell “Epaphroditus”!  But in all seriousness, Epaphroditus is one of the best men in the New Testament that most of us probably don’t know anything about! But what Paul tells us about him here challenges us, and causes us to measure of our own spiritual commitment.

Let’s look at the series of words Paul uses to describe Epaphroditus: