Philippians 4:13 means that Paul could be held through either half of his life, the fed one and the hungry one, and that the strength doing the holding was never his. That is a smaller claim than the one taped to a wrist at a Friday night game, and it is built to take a great deal more weight.
Hunger is on the list
Not that I speak because of lack, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content in it. I know how to be humbled, and I also know how to abound. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound and to be in need.
Philippians 4:11-12 (WEB)
Paul hands you his own list. When he writes all things one verse later, he has already spelled out what he means by it: filled and hungry, abounding and in need. Nobody puts the second word of any of those pairs on a wristband. Verses get shortened in the direction that flatters us. The one about money went the same way.
I used this verse badly for a long time. I wrote it in cards for people starting things, and I meant the cheerful half of it, and I never thought about the chains. Some of those people are still out there. A few of them will have reached the year when the cheerful half stopped working, and I don’t know which ones. That is the part I would take back.
He was in chains when he wrote it
Philippians is a thank-you note.
The church at Philippi had sent Paul a gift, and a man named Epaphroditus carried it to him. Near the end Paul writes that he is filled, “having received from Epaphroditus the things that came from you,” in the World English Bible at Philippians 4:18. In the same passage he says plainly that he is not writing out of present need, and that he has been at both ends of his own list.
He wrote it from custody. Earlier in the letter he tells the Philippians what the imprisonment had accomplished. It had become clear “to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my bonds are in Christ,” in the World English Bible at Philippians 1:13. The King James makes it a place, not a company of men, “in all the palace.” What got around the barracks was what the chains were for, which his guards could work out only by watching him.
Paul had already shown this church how far out his all things ran. In the first chapter, while he is weighing whether it would be better for him to live or to die, he writes this: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” in Philippians 1:21, World English Bible.
Does “all things” mean all things?
The objection is obvious. Paul did put down all things, and I am shaving the verse to fit an argument.
Paul answers that himself, one verse earlier, and he answers it in pairs, so a reader knows which things he has in view. A writer who says he knows how to be humbled and knows how to abound, and then says he can do all things, has told you what the all is doing there.
One modern committee agreed and said so in print. The New International Version used to read everything; in its 2011 revision it reads all this, which points the sentence back at its own paragraph. The page this site keeps for the verse quotes the New Living Translation, which kept everything. The translators have been disagreeing about it for a long time, and one side of the disagreement is reading verse twelve.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13 (WEB)
The promise is about the carrying. You can be held through either column, and the holding is done by somebody else. Paul closes the paragraph with a promise of his own, and the noun he picks is need rather than want: “My God will supply every need of yours,” in the World English Bible at Philippians 4:19.
Where it breaks
Printed alone on a jersey, the verse reads as a guarantee about outcomes. Try it and you can do it. That reading survives right up until somebody loses.
Paul was let into it, on his own account
The King James reads “which strengtheneth me,” and the verse has its own page here. Either way the strength is Christ’s, and Paul is reporting what was handed to him. He tells this same church to stop being anxious a little earlier in the chapter, in Philippians 4:6, which he wrote with a guard on the door. In verse eleven both translations agree on his verb. I have learned. In verse twelve he reaches for a different word, and there the two part company: the King James gives it as “I am instructed,” the World English Bible as “I have learned the secret.”
The word is memyemai, a perfect from mueo, which appears nowhere else in the New Testament and which the lexicons gloss as being initiated into the mysteries. Whatever contentment in hunger was for Paul, it was not a lesson he sat through, and the World English Bible is nearer to that than the King James.
Paul says he was initiated into it, which means there was a before. Somewhere tonight a kid with that verse taped to his wrist is going to lose the game. Paul put him in the sentence. The word he used for him was hungry.