§25 Exhortation to Stand Firm (Phil. 4:1)
4:1 / Paul once more expresses his joy and pride in his Philippian friends and encourages them afresh to be steadfast in their Christian life (cf. 1:27). More particularly in the present context he encourages them to be steadfast in resistance to those influences against which he has just warned them—influences that would undermine their Christian stability. But the delight he finds in these friends as he addresses them and calls them to mind suggests that those harmful influences had not made serious inroads among them, as they had done in some other churches.
4:1 / Whom I … long for renders the verbal adjective epipothētos, “longed for”. While this form does not appear elsewhere in NT, the verb epipothein is more common: it has occurred twice earlier in this letter—in 1:8, where Paul speaks of his “longing for” them all (see additional note 1:8), and in 2:26, where he speaks of Epaphroditus’s anxiety to see them.
My joy and crown; cf. 1 Thess. 2:19, where Paul and his companions, with an eye on the advent of Christ, call the Thessalonian believers their “joy and crown of exultation” (NIV: “our joy, or the crown in which we will glory”). In both places the “crown” is the stephanos, the wreath awarded to the victor in the games (not the diadēma, the symbol of sovereignty).