Love as from the bowels of Christ

When we think of affections, we probably think the heart is as deep as it gets. And love from the heart is deep. Yet the affection Paul speaks of here goes ever deeper, and you could say it is even stronger than that found in the heart. When something happens to someone you love, it is not just your heart that is moved or aches or bursts with joy. Something happens also in your stomach. It can turn to knots or aches. It is in our guts that we find a raw honesty and depth. When something comes from the gut, it comes from the very core, the deepest part of who you are. That is where Paul’s yearning comes from. I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ (Philippians 1:8). This is the sanitized translation. The old KJV is better: “How greatly I long after you all in [or with] the bowels of Jesus Christ.” Your bowels are your stomach and intestines, your guts.¹ So this is as deep, as raw, as real as it gets!

Paul is not yearning with his own gut, but with Christ’s. “I yearn for you all with the bowels of Christ.” Paul has learned to yearn for the Philippians in the way that Christ yearns for him, for us all. Christ’s love for us flows from his heart and goes right down to his stomach. It is a love that is not skin-deep, shallow, or superficial! At the very core of Christ’s being is a gut-wrenching kind of love, a love that aches for you. When Christ sees us in our brokenness, our struggles, our failures, our tears, our doubts, and our sins, his first instinct is not to turn away in horror and disgust, but to move toward us with a deep heartfelt, gut-wrenching kind of love. It is why he went to the cross. Love welled up deep within his stomach, yes even his bowels, for us, for his church, his bride, his beloved flock, moved him to experience all the horrors of hell on the cross! Can there be any deeper affection? Any deeper love? What heights of love, what depths of peace, when fears are stilled, when strivings cease! My comforter, my all in all, here in the love of Christ I stand!

It is this deep love of Christ that has so filled Paul and so moved him to hold the saints in his heart and to yearn for them as Christ yearns for him. The love of Christ has so compelled Paul, so moved Paul, that he cannot help but love those whom Christ loves and died for and now reigns over in love. So it must be for us.