Abound
When Love Learns to Grow
If you’ve ever played Guitar Hero, you know it can trick you into believing you’re one power chord away from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. My boys played for hours —
Freebird, Sweet Child of Mine — and honestly, they were pretty good.
But hitting colored buttons on a plastic guitar isn’t the same as playing a real one. There’s knowing about, and then there’s knowing — the kind that comes from touch, repetition, and experience.
Paul is praying for that kind of knowing in Philippians 1:9 -11:
That your love may abound more and more
in knowledge and depth of insight…
“Abound” — perissos
— means to grow past the edges. To spill over. Paul isn’t praying for love that stays where it started. He’s praying for love that keeps going, that wakes up tomorrow and chooses generosity again.
And honestly, that’s Advent:
the season when light grows in the dark, slowly and steadily. Advent doesn’t rush. It invites us to let hope grow one small flame at a time.
Love works the same way.
Paul uses another word — epignosis
— the kind of knowing that comes from participation. From actually doing love, not just talking about it. You can know the stories and still not know love in a Christ-shaped way.
For Paul, knowledge isn’t worth much unless it leads back to love. That’s what Advent calls us to a faith that moves from the head into the hands, from theory into practice, from information into incarnation.
God didn’t send a lecture. God sent a baby — love in its smallest form — growing, growing, growing.
I’m in a brand-new career — final expense insurance — something I never imagined after years in the pulpit. Some days I’m hopeful. Other days I’m sure I’m in over my head. And on those days, God keeps using someone to teach me about abounding love. Her name is Lauryn. She’s my mentor in this new world, but honestly, “mentor” doesn’t quite cover it.
What she really is… is steady. She doesn’t get much out of my success. She doesn’t benefit if I stay or go. But she keeps showing up — offering encouragement when I’m discouraged, clarity when I’m confused, and a nudge forward when I start looking for the exits.
Her support isn’t loud or dramatic. It’s not flashy. It’s faithful. It’s Advent in human form — a small light that keeps showing up, growing stronger, enough to help me take one more step.
She’s teaching me that love abounds not through grand gestures, but through consistency — the quiet determination to keep choosing one another. That’s how love grows “more and more.”
Paul adds another phrase: that we might be “pure and blameless.” Not spotless. Not perfect. The Greek word — proskopto
— is about stumbling. Paul is praying that our love would grow in such a way that we don’t cause others to trip over us.
We trip people up when we talk a big Jesus talk but don’t live it. When we choose fear over compassion. When we forget we’re supposed to be servants, not gatekeepers.
But when love grows — really grows — people breathe easier around us. That kind of love is what Advent asks of us: wake up, light one candle, and let that small flame shape how you treat the world.
With the first Sunday of Advent upon us, this feels like the season’s invitation:
to let love grow a little more. Not perfectly. Not instantly. Just steadily — the way we trust that one candle means more light is coming.
Maybe the
Unlikely Altar this time isn’t a manger or a sanctuary. Maybe it’s the small place where someone helps you keep going — where their steady encouragement becomes grace, where you learn in real time that love grows by being practiced.
Maybe the Unlikely Altar
is the moment you realize that God is teaching you how to love through someone who keeps showing up. And maybe the prayer Paul prayed from prison is the one Advent whispers to us again:
May your love abound more and more.
One small flame at a time. One act of compassion at a time. One steady step at a time. Because the world doesn’t change in a day. But love grows — quietly, faithfully — until the light is strong enough to see by.
There’s a phrase Paul repeats three times in two verses, and it’s the kind of line you skim past until it taps you on the shoulder: “All of you.” He’s writing from prison. Chained. Cut off from almost everything familiar. And yet he says it like a benediction: I hold all of you in my heart… I long for all of you… I care for all of you. Really, Paul? All of them? Even the difficult ones? The ones who drain the room? The ones who argue, complain, or test your last nerve? And Paul answers with that stubborn, beautiful certainty: Yes. All of you. Our English translations make it sound like Paul is describing emotion — “I feel this way about you.” But the word he uses, phroneō, is deeper than feeling. It’s the mindset, the orientation of the whole self — the place where decisions are made and loyalties formed. Paul isn’t saying, “I feel warmly about you today.” He’s saying, “My whole being leans toward you. You matter to me. My life is tied to yours.” That’s not sentiment. That’s love with roots. Then Paul uses another word — koinos — meaning “ shared ” or “ held in common. ” He’s reminding them (and us) that grace creates its own kind of family. Not the tidy, polite version — the beautiful, annoying, complicated version. We don’t get to choose who grace binds us to. We only get to choose whether we show up to it. Finally Paul reaches for the deepest word he can find — splagchnon . The gut. The bowels. The place where your deepest feelings live. We might say it like this: “ I feel this love for you in my gut. ” But even here, Paul refuses to make the love about himself. He doesn’t say, “I long for you with my gut.” He says, “ I long for you with the splagchnon of Christ.” As if to confess: “ I’m not loving you out of my own strength. Christ is loving you through me.” And honestly — that’s the only way “all of you” ever becomes possible. There’s a line in this passage — “ all of you ” — that I didn’t fully understand until much later in life. And strangely enough, I didn’t understand it completely until after my biological father died. I spent years trying to sort out how to feel about a man who refused to acknowledge my existence. I wanted some kind of reconciliation — or at least some inner peace — but it never came. Not from him, anyway. And now his ashes sit in my closet. That’s its own kind of unfinished story — one I never quite know what to do with. How do you hold someone in your heart who never made space for you in theirs? How do you love someone who kept the door closed? How do you make peace with a relationship that never even had the chance to begin? For a long time, I couldn’t. But after he died, something shifted — slowly, quietly, almost without my permission. Not forgiveness wrapped in a bow or tied up neat.. Not closure. Just a loosening. A softening in a place I’d kept boarded up. And I realized the compassion that began to grow in me wasn’t mine. It wasn’t something I manufactured through effort or maturity. It was Christ doing something in me I could never do on my own. The love I couldn’t find while he was alive began to take shape only after he was gone. Maybe that’s what Paul meant when he said he longed for the Philippians from his splagchnon — that deep, gut-level place where Christ’s transforming work actually happens . Because sometimes the hardest people to love become the very places where Christ does His most surprising work. Maybe “ all of you ” even includes the ones who ignored us, or hurt us, or never became who we hoped they would be. Maybe the altar this time isn’t a table or a church. Maybe it’s a closet holding ashes and questions — a place where grief and grace sit side by side. Maybe it’s the place where Christ heals a relationship we never got to finish, and teaches us how to love someone we never fully knew. Maybe that is the Unlikely Altar. Because the sacred shows up there too — in the tension, in the ache, in the deep-down places where Christ is still doing the good work. And if Christ can create love in a prison cell, and in a grieving heart, He can create it in us, too.
There’s something both hopeful and haunting about unfinished work. A story that ran out of words. A prayer that’s still waiting on an answer. A dream that stalled halfway between vision and reality. We all have a few of those, don’t we? Places in our lives that feel like construction zones — full of sawdust and scaffolding, promises we meant to keep, and prayers that haven’t yet found an answer. That’s the space where Paul writes his letter to the Philippians — from a Roman prison, talking about a good work that God had started and would somehow finish. “I am confident of this,” he writes, “that the One who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Jesus Christ.” If anyone had reason to question that promise, it was Paul. He was chained to a guard, his freedom gone, his ministry on pause. Yet his words breathe confidence, not despair. He looks at his friends in Philippi — people who had risked their safety to stand with him — and he sees evidence of God’s goodness still unfolding. He doesn’t say, “I hope you can finish what you started.” He says, “The One who began this work in you will finish it.” There’s a difference. One puts the weight on us; the other reminds us whose hands hold the hammer. Paul’s language echoes the creation story — the God who began the world with light, called it good, and didn’t stop until it was complete. That same creative rhythm, Paul says, is alive in us. The God who started something beautiful in you isn’t walking away halfway through. Even when you can’t see the plan, even when all you’ve got are pieces on the floor, God is still building something that will one day make sense. From the first sunrise in Genesis to the flicker of a lamp outside Paul’s cell, that has been the way God has always worked: Begin. Call It Good. Complete. Paul’s confidence wasn’t built on theory — it was built on relationship. The Philippians didn’t just send thoughts and prayers; they sent food, support, and friendship. They were what Paul called partners in the gospel — not in a business sense, but in the kind of companionship that costs something. They stood with him when others wouldn’t. And in their faithfulness, Paul saw proof that God’s good work wasn’t stuck just because he was. That’s often how grace works — through people who quietly show up, carrying a little hope when ours has run dry. If you’ve ever looked at your life and thought, “This isn’t what I imagined,” you’re in good company. Paul’s letter reminds us that unfinished doesn’t mean abandoned. Sometimes God’s work looks less like building and more like waiting. Less like progress and more like perseverance. But make no mistake — even the waiting rooms can be altars. Because maybe the sacred work isn’t what we’re doing for God, but what God is still doing in us — shaping patience, humility, and trust. Maybe the Unlikely Altar this time isn’t a table or a church. Maybe it’s the half-built part of you — the one still covered in dust and duct tape — that God refuses to give up on. That's the Unlikely Altar. After all, the sacred shows up there too — right in the middle of the mess. A Roman prison doesn’t seem like the ideal spot for a letter about confidence and joy — but that’s where Paul wrote it. And maybe that’s the point. If grace can write from a prison cell, then it can certainly keep writing in us. The same hands that shaped light out of darkness are still working on you and on me, still carrying the good work forward — even on days when we can’t see it. So take heart. The work isn’t done yet. And that’s good news.
Paul starts his letter to the Philippians the way he starts almost every letter he ever wrote — with two simple words that sound like a benediction and a blessing all at once: “ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. ” Grace and peace. It’s easy to glide right past them. After all, Paul says it so often it can sound like his version of, “ Dear friends, hope you’re doing well. ” But those words are anything but filler. They’re the opening line of a letter written from prison — a man in chains sending light through a keyhole. That’s the thing about grace and peace. They don’t wait for better conditions. When Paul writes, he doesn’t start with complaints about the guards or the food or how cold the nights are. He doesn’t list his injuries or beg for sympathy. Instead, he offers what he himself most needs: grace and peace. I’ve come to believe that the words we offer the world when we’re hurting reveal what’s deepest in us. For Paul, it was this stubborn conviction that God was still at work, even in confinement — that grace still flowed and peace was still possible. Grace and Peace Paul begins with two words that still have the power to stop me in my tracks: grace and peace. He could’ve opened with something more ordinary — Dear friends , or Hang in there . But instead, from a cell that smelled of iron and damp stone, he chooses a blessing. He leads with joy. Grace — that wild, unearned love that shows up even when we’ve done nothing to deserve it. Grace is the quiet voice that says, “ You’re still min e.” It’s the kind of love that doesn’t wait for you to get your act together. It just walks right into your mess and sits down beside you. And peace — not the fragile kind that depends on calm seas or perfect days, but the kind that holds steady when the waves are high. The kind that whispers, “ You’re okay, even here .” I love that Paul links the two together, because grace without peace feels unfinished, and peace without grace feels forced. Together they form a rhythm — grace that reaches, peace that remains . And maybe that’s what Paul was really offering: a new way to begin. Can you imagine if those were the first words we spoke to each other every morning? Joy to you. Peace to you. Every kind of good to you. How different a day might feel if it started there — not with headlines or hurry, but with blessing. Maybe that’s the secret of Paul’s letter: that even in a place built to break him, he still believed goodness could find a way through the cracks. So what would it look like to practice this? Maybe it starts small — whispering “grace and peace” toward the people you don’t even like. Or toward yourself when that inner critic starts its sermon again. So what would it look like to practice this? Maybe it’s learning to pause, breathe peace, and offer grace instead. When gossip starts — grace and peace . When the argument heats — grace and peace. When you replay the hurt that still stings — grace and peace . Interrupt the old patterns with blessing. The early church actually practiced this. In Acts 14 and 20, believers would commend one another to God’s grace before sending them out. They’d gather, pray, lay on hands, and say, “You are given over to God’s grace and peace.” What if we did that? What if we treated every conversation, every cup of coffee, every parting at the door as a small commissioning — giving one another over to grace and peace before we go back into the world? A Roman prison doesn’t sound like much of a sanctuary, but Paul found one there. Maybe that’s the invitation — to find our own Unlikely Altars , the places where grace still surprises us and peace somehow holds. If I’m honest, I’m preaching to myself here. I could use a little grace and peace most mornings before the second Mountain Dew. So wherever you are today — in traffic, in grief, in the middle of a week that feels like too much — hear this old, stubborn greeting again: Grace and peace to you. Not someday. Not when you’ve earned it. Right now .