In Greek this verse is a participial (perfect passive) phrase connected with verse 10, but Good News Translation supplies your lives to make it a separate sentence.
Truly good qualities which only Jesus Christ can produce is literally “fruit of righteousness which is through Jesus Christ.” Good News Translation changes Jesus Christ from a secondary to a primary agent (Moffatt “harvest of righteousness which Jesus Christ produces”; Jerusalem Bible “the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces”). The Greek word rendered “righteousness” in some translations (Revised Standard Version Moffatt) is used with several different senses in the Pauline letters. It is sometimes used in the sense of “the requirements of God,” at other times in the sense of “what is right.” It is also used to refer to an attribute of God. Most significantly, this term is used by Paul to convey the idea of the saving activity of God whereby he puts men in a right relation to himself through Jesus Christ. In the present context, however, “righteousness” refers to a person’s inner status, or as Good News Translation renders it, the truly good qualities of Christians (Jerusalem Bible “perfect goodness”; Phillips “true goodness”). These are the natural consequences of being restored to a right relationship with God. Paul is careful to add that this quality is not something that a man can acquire for himself; it is something which only Jesus Christ can produce.
In some languages one cannot speak of “lives being filled with good qualities.” One can say, however, “that all that you do may be truly good.” In this context the noun lives refers to one’s behavior, and the verb filled suggests the totality of such activity.
The qualifying clause, which only Jesus Christ can produce, may be rendered as “only Jesus Christ can cause you to do this,” or “… to have such goodness.”
The supreme end of Christian life is the glory and praise of God. The word glory is an important term in the Bible. In the Old Testament it means basically “weight” or “importance,” and it is often associated with a revelation of the majestic character of God. The same thought appears often in the New Testament also. In the Pauline letters glory appears many times as an ascription of praise (Rom 4.20; 2 Cor 1.20, etc.), and it is prominent in the doxologies (Rom 11.36; 16.27; Gal 1.5; Eph 3.21). In these contexts, glory is equivalent to praise. The phrase can sometimes be rendered “to give glory and praise to God,” but it is must often be expressed as a separate sentence, for example, “all of this is for the glory and praise of God.” However, implied in both glory and praise is an underlying causative relation, for it is people who must give these things to God. Therefore one may need to translate this final phrase as “in order that people may honor and praise God.” In some languages an expression such as “praise God” must be indicated as a type of discourse, either direct of indirect, for example, “say how great God is,” or “say, God is truly great.”
Quoted with permission from Luo, I-Jin. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1977. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .