16 days · About 11 minutes a day

Joy in Philippians: A 16-Day Bible Study for Women

This is a free 16-day Bible study through Philippians for women: the whole letter, in order, about eleven minutes a day. Paul wrote it in prison — almost certainly in Rome, chained, waiting to find out whether he would be released or executed — to a small church that had sent him money and a man to look after him. And it is the most cheerful thing he ever wrote. The word joy appears sixteen times in four short chapters, which is why there are sixteen mornings. The study keeps his circumstances in view every day, because the joy is worthless as encouragement if the chains get sanded off. It moves from "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion" through "to live is Christ", the great hymn of Philippians 2 ("He emptied Himself"), Timothy and Epaphroditus and a fever nobody preaches on, "I count it all as loss", "pressing on", "our citizenship is in heaven", two women who couldn't agree, "rejoice in the Lord always" and the peace that guards, "whatever is true", the secret of contentment — including what "I can do all things through Christ" actually means — and "my God will supply all your needs".

Length: 16 days — the whole letter, in order
Time per day: About 11 minutes
Passages: Philippians 1–4
Translation: Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
Format: Read here, or listen in the app
Best for: A first whole-book study; joy in circumstances that aren't joyful; small groups

The 16-day Philippians schedule

One letter, read straight through. Each session assumes you heard the one before, so take them in order.

Day	Passage	Theme	Line to carry
1	Philippians 1:1–11	He Who Began a Good Work	He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.
2	Philippians 1:12–18	What Has Happened to Me	My circumstances have actually served to advance the gospel.
3	Philippians 1:19–26	To Live Is Christ	For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
4	Philippians 1:27–30	Worthy of the Gospel	Live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.
5	Philippians 2:1–4	Consider Others	In humility consider others more important than yourselves.
6	Philippians 2:5–11	He Emptied Himself	He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant.
7	Philippians 2:12–18	Shine Like Stars	It is God who works in you to will and to act.
8	Philippians 2:19–30	Timothy and Epaphroditus	Welcome him with great joy, and honour men like him.
9	Philippians 3:1–11	I Count It All as Loss	Compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
10	Philippians 3:12–16	Pressing On	Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.
11	Philippians 3:17–21	Citizens of Heaven	Our citizenship is in heaven.
12	Philippians 4:1–3	Stand Firm	Agree with each other in the Lord.
13	Philippians 4:4–7	Rejoice — and the Peace That Guards	The peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds.
14	Philippians 4:8–9	Whatever Is True	Whatever is true, whatever is honourable — think on these things.
15	Philippians 4:10–13	The Secret of Contentment	I have learned to be content regardless of my circumstances.
16	Philippians 4:14–23	My God Will Supply	My God will supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.

What this plan covers

Philippians is four chapters, and this study reads them in sixteen passages. Chapter 1 sets the scene: Paul's confidence that God will finish what He started (1:6), his claim that the imprisonment itself has advanced the gospel — the palace guard now knows why he's chained — his honest indecision between living and dying ("to live is Christ, and to die is gain"), and the call to live as citizens worthy of the gospel, a colony idea that meant a great deal in a Roman colony like Philippi. Chapter 2 turns on humility: considering others more important as a decision rather than a feeling (2:3–4), the Christ hymn in which He emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant (2:5–11), shining like stars without grumbling, and Timothy and Epaphroditus, two people and a near-fatal fever where the theology gets faces. Chapter 3 is Paul's ledger — counting everything as loss beside knowing Christ — then pressing on toward what has already taken hold of him, and "our citizenship is in heaven". Chapter 4 is the famous chapter: Euodia and Syntyche and how Paul refuses to take sides, "rejoice in the Lord always" and the peace of God that guards like a garrison (4:4–7), "whatever is true… think on these things" (4:8), the secret of contentment in plenty and in need, with "I can do all things through Christ" read in its context (4:13), and "my God will supply all your needs" (4:19), ending with greetings from Caesar's household. Every day follows the same seven movements — Arrive, Set out, Hear, Hear again, Consider, Pray, Carry — and ends with one line to take into the day.

Day 1 in full: He Who Began a Good Work (Philippians 1:1–11)

This is the complete first session, exactly as it's read in the app. Every day of the plan follows this shape.

Arrive

Welcome.

Wherever this finds you — early, late, or in the middle of something — take a moment to arrive.

Breathe in, slowly. And out.

For sixteen mornings we are going to read a letter. It is short, it is warm, and it was written by a man who did not know whether he would be alive by the time it arrived.

Let the day wait. This one is worth starting properly.

Set out

Here is the situation, and it governs everything in this walk.

Paul is in prison. Almost certainly Rome, almost certainly chained, waiting to find out whether the emperor will release him or have him executed. He mentions the chains four times in this letter, so we are not importing the detail.

Years earlier, in a city called Philippi, he had been beaten with rods and thrown into a cell, and had sung hymns at midnight until an earthquake opened the doors. A small church started there out of that night.

That church has now heard he is in trouble, and has sent him money and a man to look after him.

So he writes back.

And here is the fact this whole walk turns on. This is the most cheerful thing Paul ever wrote. The word joy, in one form or another, appears sixteen times in four short chapters — which is why there are sixteen mornings.

Written from a cell, by a man who might be executed, to people who were worried about him.

Hear: Philippians 1:1–11

Philippians, chapter one, from verse three.

I thank my God every time I remember you. In every prayer for all of you, I always pray with joy,

because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now,

being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart. For in my chains and in my defence and confirmation of the gospel, you are all partners in grace with me.

God is my witness how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to test and prove what is best, and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.

Hear again

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

He began it. He will finish it. And the middle part — the part you are standing in — is His as well.

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

A question, and it is about the unfinished rather than the failed.

It might be a habit that will not shift. A faith thinner than it used to be. A relationship half-mended and left there.

Where do you feel unfinished? Just let it come to mind. Nothing is being asked of it this morning.

Consider

Paul is confident, and it is worth being precise about what he is confident in, because it is not what you would expect.

Not the Philippians. Not their consistency, or their discipline, or their track record — and he knew all three well enough to have opinions.

He is confident in the One who started it.

That is a different kind of confidence from the one most of us live with. We tend to assume that God began something in us and it is now our job to keep it going — and that if we let it slip badly enough, that is the end of the matter.

Paul says: God started it, God is carrying it, God will complete it. You are not the builder. You are the building.

And notice when he is saying this. He is in chains. His own good work looks, from the outside, as though it has been stopped — no travel, no churches planted, no preaching tours, a man sitting in one room attached to a soldier.

And still: I always pray with joy.

Not because the situation is joyful. Because he remembers people. Every time he thinks of them, thanks arrives before anything else does.

There is something worth learning in that. Joy, for Paul, is not a mood he generates. It is what happens when he remembers who he has been given.

And then his prayer for them, in the last verses. He does not pray they will be safe, or comfortable, or successful.

He prays their love will grow — and grow with knowledge and depth of insight, so that it becomes not merely warm but wise.

That is an unusual thing to ask for. Most of us pray for people's circumstances. Paul prays for their capacity, and specifically for a love that can tell the difference between things. That is what a good work looks like while it is still being carried.

Pray

Lord, You began a good work in me. I had forgotten it was Yours rather than mine.

The unfinished part. Show it to Him — the thing you named earlier. Say how long it has been unfinished, and whether you had privately given up on it.

Carry it on. I will stop trying to carry it alone, which has not been working.

And now do what Paul does at the start of this letter. Think of one person who has been grace to you.

Thank God for them by name. Notice whether anything shifts while you do it — that is the mechanism he is describing.

Let my love grow, and grow wise. Amen.

Carry

The line to carry today.

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

Say it once — about yourself, rather than in general.

If you are walking with somebody in this app, that is a good line to send them today. Especially if they are feeling unfinished, which most people are and few people say.

Tomorrow: what prison actually did to Paul's plans, and what it did not.

For now — it was never your job to finish it. Go and let Him carry.

Listen to Day 1 and the rest of Philippians in the app. Every session is read aloud, softly, over quiet music — about eleven minutes a day.

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Days 2–16: the letter, read straight through

Short summaries of the remaining sessions. Each full session is around 1,000 words and takes about eleven minutes to listen to.

Day 2 · What Has Happened to Me (Philippians 1:12–18)

“My circumstances have actually served to advance the gospel.”

The Philippians funded a missionary and he's now in a cell; from their side the investment has failed. Paul writes that the imprisonment itself has cut a road. Two pieces of evidence, neither spectacular: the whole palace guard knows why he's chained — only because he couldn't leave — and other believers have become bolder, not more frightened. He doesn't say God will bring something good out of it eventually. He says the thing itself has done work his freedom couldn't.

Day 3 · To Live Is Christ (Philippians 1:19–26)

“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Paul doesn't perform serenity. He says he's torn and can't choose. He'd rather depart and be with Christ; he concludes he should stay, because it's more necessary for them. The tie is broken by usefulness to other people. Then the famous half-sentence: to live is Christ has a gap in it that everyone fills with something — work, family, being thought well of. To die is gain isn't a claim about courage. It's arithmetic that follows from what's in the gap.

Day 4 · Worthy of the Gospel (Philippians 1:27–30)

“Live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”

Philippi was a Roman colony, eight hundred miles from Rome, run as a piece of Rome. So live as citizens worthy of the gospel means: be a colony — a piece of somewhere else, visible, where the rules are different. Then the hard verse: suffering granted to you, from the root for grace and gift. This session is careful: nobody should seek suffering, and Christians have done real damage telling people their pain was a present. What Paul offers people under opposition isn't a theory. It's company.

Day 5 · Consider Others (Philippians 2:1–4)

“In humility consider others more important than yourselves.”

Consider others more important than yourselves uses an accounting verb — to reckon, to make an assessment. Paul isn't asking you to feel others are better than you, which would be false or damaging. He's asking for a decision about how you treat someone, in this case, and then acting on it. It's available to a person with a healthy sense of her own worth, on a day she doesn't feel humble at all. And not only your own interests: yours stay in the sentence.

Day 6 · He Emptied Himself (Philippians 2:5–11)

“He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant.”

Follow the direction of travel: equality with God, not grasped, emptied, a servant, human, obedient, to death — even death on a cross, added like one more thing on the pile. Crucifixion was for slaves and rebels; a Roman citizen couldn't legally be crucified. And emptied doesn't mean He stopped being God. Look at how the sentence works: He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. He became less by adding something.

Day 7 · Shine Like Stars (Philippians 2:12–18)

“It is God who works in you to will and to act.”

Yesterday, the greatest act of self-giving in existence and every knee in the universe bowing. Today, on the strength of it: do everything without grumbling or arguing. It reads like an anticlimax and isn't one. The gap between a cosmic hymn and a grumble is where most Christian lives are lived. And the word for complaining is the one used of Israel in the desert — rescued from four hundred years of slavery and spending forty complaining about the catering.

Day 8 · Timothy and Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:19–30)

“Welcome him with great joy, and honour men like him.”

The passage nobody preaches, read at full length. A tired man in a cell concludes he has one person he can rely on: I have nobody else like Timothy. And Epaphroditus, dangerously ill far from home, distressed not about dying but because the church back home would be upset — the kind of person who apologises from a hospital bed. And Paul admits he was afraid of grief, and relieved when it didn't come. That sits four chapters from rejoice always, and neither cancels the other.

Day 9 · I Count It All as Loss (Philippians 3:1–11)

“Compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Paul doesn't say his achievements were worthless; he calls them gain. He reassesses what they were gain for: beside knowing Christ, they turn out to be in a withdrawn currency. It's an exchange rate, not a judgement on his life. What he wants instead isn't a doctrine: I want to know Christ, the word for knowing a person. And the clause almost everyone skips — the fellowship of His sufferings — asked for in the same sentence as resurrection power, from a cell.

Day 10 · Pressing On (Philippians 3:12–16)

“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”

If anybody had grounds to say he'd arrived, it was Paul, near the end of his life. He says not that I have already obtained it. If you've been waiting to feel you'd got somewhere before counting as a proper Christian, the man who wrote this never felt it either. And the small phrase that holds it together: I press on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of me. The grasping is mutual, and the other party started it. It isn't an audition.

Day 11 · Citizens of Heaven (Philippians 3:17–21)

“Our citizenship is in heaven.”

Citizens of heaven isn't a departure lounge. The colonists at Philippi built roads, farmed, ran courts and raised children; they made the place work like the place they'd come from and didn't sit waiting to be recalled. So this is a claim about what you're here to establish, not where you'd rather be. And what the Saviour will do isn't take you away from here — it's transform your lowly body to be like His. Lowly is the same root as the humility of chapter two.

Day 12 · Stand Firm (Philippians 4:1–3)

“Agree with each other in the Lord.”

Two women, Euodia and Syntyche, remembered for two thousand years for a quarrel. Look how carefully Paul handles it. He never describes the dispute, so the letter can't be used as evidence by either side. He doesn't adjudicate; he urges both identically. And he praises them in the same breath: they laboured with me, their names are in the book of life. Not two difficult people written off — colleagues he thinks highly of who've got stuck with each other. Nobody here is the villain.

Day 13 · Rejoice — and the Peace That Guards (Philippians 4:4–7)

“The peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds.”

Between rejoice always and be anxious about nothing — two commands impossible to obey by trying harder — is a statement of fact: the Lord is near, in time or in space; the Greek allows both. And a strange ingredient in the recipe for worry: with thanksgiving. Anxiety narrows your field to one unresolved thing in the future; thanks requires looking at something past that you didn't manage yourself. The anxiety can't have the whole room while you're thanking someone. Then the peace that guards, a military word.

Day 14 · Whatever Is True (Philippians 4:8–9)

“Whatever is true, whatever is honourable — think on these things.”

Usually used as a rule about what to avoid. It's an instruction about what to put in. Attention isn't a container you can empty and leave sitting there, and it responds badly to prohibition — tell yourself not to think about something and you just did. It responds to substitution. So Paul doesn't mention the wrong things at all. He gives eight categories of good ones, broad on purpose. Lovely is an aesthetic word. It means what it says.

Day 15 · The Secret of Contentment (Philippians 4:10–13)

“I have learned to be content regardless of my circumstances.”

Paul lists two directions and treats both as needing a skill: humble circumstances and abundance, hungry and filled. Plenty has its own quieter hazards — the gratitude goes first, then the attention. Then the verse on gym walls: I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Look at what all things has just been defined as — plenty and need, any situation. It's about endurance, not achievement: I can get through any of these. It doesn't promise the outcome you want. It promises you can survive the one you get.

Day 16 · My God Will Supply (Philippians 4:14–23)

“My God will supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

Paul, in prison, says he's less interested in the money than in what giving it has done to the people who gave. He calls a collection from a poor church, carried eight hundred miles by a man who nearly died doing it, a fragrant offering — the vocabulary of the altar. The money was worship. And the last line of the letter is a joke and the whole point: all the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar's household. The guards have been listening.

How to use this Philippians study

In order. It's one letter. The colony of chapter 1 returns in chapter 3; the humility of chapter 2 is what chapter 4's contentment rests on.
Keep the cell in view. Every time the letter says rejoice, remember where the man saying it is sitting. That's what makes it usable on a bad week.
With a friend. This is a thank-you letter to friends who'd sent help. Day 1's question — who do you thank God for every time you think of them? — is a good one to act on.
With a small group. Four chapters, four weeks. Days 8 and 12 are the passages groups most often skip and most enjoy.
Alongside. Fruit of the Spirit takes Philippians 4:4 from a different angle on its day 2; together they make a good month.

Frequently asked questions

What is the book of Philippians about?

It's a thank-you letter from Paul, written in prison — almost certainly in Rome, chained, waiting for a verdict that could mean release or execution — to the church in Philippi, which had sent him money and a man to care for him. Its theme is joy: the word appears sixteen times in four chapters, which is why this plan has sixteen days.

Where was Paul when he wrote Philippians?

In prison, most likely in Rome. He mentions his chains four times in the letter. The plan keeps that in view every day, because the letter's joy only means something if the circumstances aren't sanded off.

What does 'I can do all things through Christ' really mean?

In context, 'all things' has just been defined in the previous verse: plenty and hunger, abundance and need. So Philippians 4:13 is about endurance, not achievement — the strength to get through any circumstance, written by a man in a cell. Day 15 takes it slowly.

What does Philippians 4:6–7 mean by 'the peace of God will guard your hearts'?

The word for guard is a military one — a garrison posted at a gate. Day 13 looks at it together with the sentence that sits between the two commands, 'the Lord is near', and the odd ingredient in the instruction about anxiety: 'with thanksgiving'.

Why read Philippians in order, all 16 days?

It's one letter, and the walk reads it straight through. Every session assumes you've heard the previous one — the colony idea in chapter 1 comes back in chapter 3, and the humility of chapter 2 is where the whole letter turns.

How long is each day?

About eleven minutes. Each session is a guided reading of roughly 1,000 words: you arrive, hear the passage, sit with one line, consider it, pray, and carry one sentence into the day.

Which Bible translation is used?

The Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Every session works with any translation you already read.

Do I need the app?

No. The schedule and Day 1 are here in full. In the HER Hallow app each session is read aloud with music, about eleven minutes a day.

Can I do it with a small group?

Yes. Philippians is four chapters, so four weekly meetings of four days each works well. Day 8 (Timothy and Epaphroditus) and Day 12 (Euodia and Syntyche) are the ones groups rarely get to and most enjoy.

A letter from prison, read aloud to you. The HER Hallow app has Joy in Philippians and twelve other walks — Bible reading plans for women you can listen to.

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Written by the HER Hallow team.