Grace and Peace

You pick up your phone in the morning, and before you are out of bed something on it has already upset you.

Now think about where this greeting was written. Paul wrote Philippians as a prisoner. He tells his readers that his "bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace," and at the end he sends greetings from "they that are of Caesar’s household." He was kept under guard by Roman soldiers. And he was writing to Philippi, a Roman colony where many retired soldiers had been settled. It was the very town where he and Silas had once been beaten and thrown into prison, and the jailer "made their feet fast in the stocks." Both the writer and the readers of this letter know what a bad morning is.

So the greeting is not filler. The usual way to open a Greek letter was with the word chairein, which means "greetings." Paul swaps it for charis, which means grace, and then adds peace, the Hebrew blessing of shalom. In every one of his letters the order stays the same: grace first, then peace. God's favour, which you did not earn, comes first, and the quiet in your heart follows it.

That is the promise, and it does not depend on what kind of day your phone has planned for you. Grace has already come to you "from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ." Peace is what grace leaves behind. You do not have to produce either one yourself. And a man in chains sent them out as an ordinary greeting.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 173 is Not Many Noble (1 Corinthians 1:27).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna