Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 180 · June 29
Knowing Him
“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;”
Two magistrates in Philippi once had a man stripped and beaten with rods in the market square and thrown into the inner prison with his feet in the stocks, and discovered the following morning that he was a Roman citizen.
That man is now writing to that town, guarded again somewhere else, cheerfully reporting that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace. So the fellowship of his sufferings is not a phrase he has to introduce to them. They saw his back. Some of them were converted the week it happened.
Read the order he puts things in. That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death. Knowing him comes first, and the power stands ahead of the suffering in the sentence, holding it up. And the line immediately after it is not a man claiming to have arrived: If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.
May you know him, and not merely know about him. May the power come first for you as it does in his sentence. May the fellowship, when it costs you something, turn out to be fellowship and not simply pain. And may you be spared the belief that a man who wrote if by any means was somewhere you have failed to get to.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 180 is Out of the Pit (Psalm 40:1-2).