How do you pray for your friends and loved ones? If they could have one blessing, what would you want it to be? Health? Wealth? Happiness?

However good all of these things may be, none of them are on the top of Paul’s list as he offers prayer for the Christians in Philippi. Instead, he wants them to know more of Christ’s love for themselves, and wants them to share that love with others. He wants them to have more discernment of God’s will, so that they will be able to make good choices – preferring the things that are truly excellent in His sight. He wants them to put God’s will more consistently into practice in their lives, so that they might be blameless before God when Christ comes again. In short, Paul prays principally not for the Philippians’ happiness, but for their holiness.

And the good news is that such prayers are not only admirable – they are realistic. That’s because as verse 11 says, all those who love and trust Jesus have already been filled with the fruit of His righteousness. Now, I hope we all know that the sins of all of us who love and trust the Lord Jesus have been imputed, credited to Christ’s account and thus paid for by His sacrificial death on the cross. But it is just as true that Christ’s righteousness has been imputed, credited to our account. The amazing truth is that when God looks at Christians, He sees the righteousness of Christ.

In other words, God has already laid the groundwork for the holiness in which Paul prays the Philippian Christians would grow. Paul is thus simply praying that they would become whom God has already declared them to be. And that’s why he can have the confidence he has in verse 6 – if God has declared us Christians to be pure and holy, and if God has filled us Christians with the Spirit of Christ, Who is conforming us more and more into the image of Christ every day, Paul is confident that God will continue that sanctifying, cleansing, renewing work in us Christians until the day Christ comes.

So, do we want that kind of progress in holiness for ourselves? Will we cooperate with God as He works in us to make us more holy? And will we pray that He does the same work in the ones we love?

Philippians 1:3-11 (NAS)

3 I thank my God in all my remembrance of you,
4 always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all,
5 in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now.
6 For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
7 For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me.
8 For God is my witness, how I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.
9 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment,
10 so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ;
11 having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.