It’s Time For A Spiritual Audit – Philippians 3:7-10 Series

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at my credit card balance, and it was much higher than I expected it to be. So I knew I needed to do a little audit there myself. I checked it out and realized that some of these charges aren't even mine. So I called the credit card company and we together realized that these aren't my charges. They canceled my card, sent me another one, and got rid of the charges. I'm sure you've had that experience before. But the point is, there's a point where we need to do an audit like that in our lives of our credit card or bank account. I think also we're going to see today in our passage there's some times when we need to do a spiritual audit of our lives. And that spiritual audit will help us understand what's going on, if things are out of balance, they're not in the right place. Now I use that terminology today because it's accounting terminology that Paul's going to use in Philippians 3 to help us know how to do a spiritual audit in our lives.

So if you would, open your Bibles to Philippians 3, starting in verse 7. We're going to pick up this teaching. But let me bring you back to verse 1. Because if you remember in Philippians 3:1 Paul starts with this. He says – Finally, brethren, rejoice in the Lord. So all of this that we're going to talk about now ties back into that command that Paul gave to rejoice in the Lord. Rejoicing in the Lord is going to be that key idea.

Then you remember right after that in verse 1, and you see it in the text there, it says – For this is safe for you. For this is safe for you. What does that mean, for this is safe for you? We talked about that. In fact, I really liked what Joan Yi said in the small group that we had this week. She said that we guard our joy so that it can guard us. That's the idea here. It's safe for you. We also talked last week about how we have this confidence in Christ instead of in ourselves. And then Paul goes on to list a number of things that he could have confidence in. That's in verse 6.

Now we come to verse 7 because he's taking off on that idea of all these things he knows he's good at. You know, he has a good history, he's done a lot of good things. He says I could put my confidence in these things, but I don't. Now he says in verse 7 – But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. So do you see that accounting terminology there? Gains are like profits. Losses. And he says – I reckoned it or I counted it as loss. Gains and losses. Today what we're going to do is we're going to take a spiritual audit of our own hearts and lives. We're going to learn how to do that, but why it's so important to do it on a regular basis.

The first word there, gain, is an important word. It has to do with something that is valuable, something that's important. Paul has just listed a number of things that were important to him, that he was persecuting the church, and that he was a Pharisee, all those things in verse 6. He lists those things. Those were very important. They were his values.

We have to think for a moment what is important to us. This is how you do a spiritual audit. You start looking at what are the profits that I have because I need to make sure they go in the right column here. Paul is saying that I valued all these things and I'm putting them in the loss column. That's what he's doing. Compared to knowing Jesus Christ is his point.

Now think about the things that we value. Because here's what happens in life. When you value something… and those values are not necessarily bad things. Sometimes they're good things. But the things that we value, sometimes we invest our emotions into them and when we do and something happens, then we get upset. So we get angry, or we get depressed, or we get anxious, because the things that we value are being threatened, or somebody's taking them from us, or we lose them. When that happens, then we start to feel something. We start to feel bad, we feel distressed, we feel discouraged, we feel anxious, we feel upset in one way or another. Often it's because we look at our spiritual audit. We say, you know, I'm upset. I think I'm upset because I probably value this thing too much. Now, sometimes the values are tangible. They're things like a car or a house or a bank account or investments. And so our investments start to go down if the stock market goes down, and we start feeling bad. Maybe we need to say to ourselves, maybe I'm investing a little too much of my emotion into this investment. Maybe I need to do a spiritual audit here and find out what's really important to me. But sometimes the things aren't tangible like that. Sometimes they're intangible or they're more conceptual. Things like my reputation, or things like safety, or things like pleasure.