“The Greatness of Knowing Christ”
Philippians 3:7-14
January 3, 2010
Have you seen the bumper stickers that say “Coexist”? They’re all over the place; a lady pulled onto the interstate as we were traveling home and to say that her car was a billboard for every cause imaginable is an understatement. Just underneath and to the right of her “Treehugger” sticker I saw this now-familiar sentiment. Now, I’ve never made any rude gestures toward these folks; never bumped their cars. I’ve thought about it; prayed about it…I really want to engage one of these folks in a conversation about what they’re driving at when they adorn their cars thusly. If all they’re saying is that people of different religious sentiments ought not shoot each other, fine; I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that they mean more than this. My educated guess is that they’re suggesting that we all find ways to soften the edges of our beliefs in order to not make exclusive truth claims, that we alter the entry rules for Heaven so as to accommodate everybody who’s “sincere” or “well-meaning”, regardless of the specifics of those beliefs. Well, thanks but no thanks! Paul has no patience for false teaching—and neither did Jesus, by the way.
Introduction: Confidence in the Flesh (:1-6)
The context of this passage is the warning of Paul to watch out for people he calls “dogs, evil workers, mutilators of the flesh”. These are the same people—note first, though, that Paul doesn’t hesitate to call the proverbial spade a spade; unlike some in our generation who see Jesus as some pussyfooting wimp who is “tolerance personified”, Jesus used the very same term, ironically in Matthew 6, which contains the most-beloved passage of Scripture for those whose intent is to twist Scripture in the first place. In this case, Paul uses the term “dogs” not to refer to cuddly puppies, but rather to false teachers who “dogged” the apostles everywhere they went, seemingly, by introducing the devilish doctrine that suggested that faith alone in Christ alone wasn’t enough. No, for these “Judaizers”, for a Gentile to become a Christian, he had to come first through the doorway of Judaism, and particularly by undergoing the covenant ritual of circumcision. Paul will have none of it; it amounts to nothing more than the mutilation of the flesh when it comes to an attempt to add “religion” to simple faith for salvation. And Paul gives the strongest warning possible, knowing that to mix good works or religious ritual or anything else into the simple salvation equation is to pollute it beyond recognition.
These particular false teachers were placing their faith, not so much in Jesus, but in something done in their flesh: circumcision. Paul adds in verse 3 that, in a “religious” sense, circumcision isn’t a matter of something done outwardly, but rather involves an inward transformation (and this is nothing new; the same is said in several Old Testament texts). There is simply no reason to place one’s trust in outward rituals or good deeds. Paul suggests that if anyone has ever had reason to trust in himself, it is Paul himself. Paul was a religionist of all religionists; he was devout as devout could be, and had the merit badges to show for it! Nobody outshone Paul insofar as fleshly goodness was concerned. And what is Paul’s summation of all of that goodness and religiosity he possessed? Note
I. Paul’s Profit/Loss Statement:
The Relative Values of Christ & Religion
The Cure for Self-Confidence
The very things that he had considered to be great advantages were in fact great hindrances to knowing Christ—which is the ultimate thing. If we really become right with God by virtue of the things that we do, then those things Paul claims for himself in verses 5 & 6 would be of great value—but that’s not how we become right with God, and those things actually can so easily distract us from the value of knowing Christ. How many people today live all around us and are ultimately counting on something other than Christ in order to be right with God? How many of those folks are filling pews in Cobb County today, thinking that all is well because they’re not hearing the precious gospel of Christ proclaimed to them? How many people are trusting their own supposed goodness, or their upstanding image, or their heritage, or their baptism, or what-have-you? Sometimes it is the nicest people, the most upstanding in the community, the ones who do the most in service to others or give the most money to charity, who are the hardest to come to Christ, precisely because they see no need of Christ, particularly when they look at the lives of some professing Christians and compare their morality favorably with those Christians!
Paul will have none of it. Paul is clear: all that stuff is not only a big zero, but a negative in the light of Jesus. What, then, is
II. Paul’s Priority:
The Greatness of Knowing Christ
The Cure for Self-Indulgence
Nothing else matters to Paul nearly as much as this: knowing Christ. It’s more important than getting his way, indulging his flesh (even in wholesome pursuits), pursuing his happiness, or anything else.
You’ve seen the t-shirt (or a variation of it)? “Life is football; everything else is just details”. Change the subject line any way you like it, but the fact is that people have varied passions in life ranging from the common to the arcane. Music, cooking, sports, relationships, the arts; these are some of the common ones. Some are less common; in a quick internet search, I found dozens of people who collect…barf bags. A Swedish man named Rune Tapper has a collection that features 1314 different bags from 486 airlines in 133 countries!
Then there is The Washington Banana Museum. Its curator is Ann Mitchell Lovell. Ann has assembled close to 4,000 items, a melange of artifacts, folk art and other cultural oddities devoted to the world's perfect fruit: the banana.
Different people would fill in that blank differently, but Paul makes it clear: “to me, to live is Christ.” How many of us really think and feel this way? Nothing else matters, ultimately. To you, to live is…what, exactly?
For Christ’s sake, Paul has suffered the loss of all things and considers them trash. “All things” involves terminology in the Greek which suggests that Paul is talking about more than just the things he has enumerated regarding his own life; he’s including anything and everything which would conceivably be a rival to Jesus in a person’s life. Paul uses the term, “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ”, and this “surpassing worth” is not just in relation to the things he’s listed in these verses; rather, the worth of knowing Christ is of more value than anything else.
“At his conversion, (Paul) had to drop the notion that he and God were partners in the project of justification and to accept the means for righteousness that God alone provided—the means Paul summarizes in the phrase “knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” – Frank Thielemann
“Knowing Christ”: what’s he talking about? We use that word “know” in a variety of ways. I can say, “I know (some famous person)”; “I know Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A”; “I know Steve Meacham”; “I know my wife”. And we’d all understand that there are different senses and different degrees of meaning attached to that word, everything from an awareness of a person’s existence to a deep, intimate relationship. In this passage, Paul is talking about not only “knowing Christ” in the sense of a past-tense experience—and my, he had one more of those, didn’t he?—but he’s also talking about what Homer Kent calls “blessed enjoyment in the present and the challenge and excitement of increasing comprehension of Christ in personal fellowship.” “Knowing Christ” is about more than being able to give a testimony of the distant past when one “got saved”; folks, it’s about growing to know and love Jesus more and more.
III. Paul’s Profession:
Righteousness Through Faith in Christ
The Cure for Self-Righteousness
“Believe in yourself”, say the headlines, and it seems axiomatic to say that “believing in oneself” is a good thing. But here’s one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the early twentieth-century, a man named G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy:
“Once I remember…a prosperous publisher, who…said of somebody, ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums…if you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.”
What are we to make of Chesterton’s words which run directly counter to common wisdom, indeed sound almost preposterous in our psychologized society? We are to agree with them—for Paul certainly does! “We, who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus…put no confidence in the flesh!” Paul, in Romans 7, echoes this: “I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” That sounds like the summary description of people who make New Year’s resolutions; they understand that they don’t measure up in some way—they eat too much, or they cuss too much, or they drink too much, or they worry too much, or they give too little or they save too little or they…there is that element of knowing that things aren’t as they ought to be, or as they could be, but the harsh reality of our own sinfulness—whether we speak of it in those terms or not—sets in, and we again blow it, perhaps worse than before!
The term “flesh” that Paul has used back in verses 3-4 refers to what man is outside of Christ; on our own, we are “of the flesh”, merely human; nothing supernatural about us other than the fact that we are created by a supernatural, awesome God. In that condition, apart from Christ, we can accomplish nothing of eternal significance. And so we put no confidence in the flesh; we agree with Paul that we cannot in our flesh or by our resolutions or by our rule-keeping hope to please God. We cannot measure up to His righteous standard through any efforts of our own. If we can, then Jesus is superfluous.
Paul says, “I want to be found in Him”. On that day of judgment, Paul wants the divine scrutiny of God to reveal that he lived his life in a vital union with Jesus. A right standing with God, Paul makes clear, comes about as a result of faith in Christ, and not through vain attempts to keep the dictates of the law of God. Paul doesn’t want the verdict to be that he was a good person, a moral person, a person with “family values” who always voted the right way; he is clear that the only verdict that matters is that Jesus is what God sees when He looks at Paul’s life. Earlier in Philippians, Paul says that “to me, to live is Christ”. We could do worse than adopting that as a motto for life!
IV. Paul’s Potential:
Experiencing the Christ-Life
The Cure for Self-Protection
Paul is expressing the potential that he might come to know Christ in an intimate and experiential way, to have his own heart beat with the heartbeat of God, to have his own words and actions reflect Jesus’ work in his life. Do you catch Paul’s lay-it-on-the-line words, his desire to forego the safe life, the predictable existence, for the sake of experiencing all that God would have for him? Yes, he wants to know the power of God pulsating through his words and life and ministry, but he is also willing to experience what it means to suffer as Christ suffered, even to the point of death, as Christ did. Paul is convinced that there is something about living in such close communion with Christ that makes suffering something worthwhile, something to be gained from rather than despised or even merely endured.
Further, on this point of “death”, it is clear that the Christ-follower is to die to himself on a daily basis; that’s what Paul has said, that he dies daily. Jesus didn’t seek His own good, but the eternal well-being of others; similarly, it isn’t about us seeking or receiving what we want, but rather subsuming our desires under the will of God. Ironically, though, as John Piper makes clear, we can say with Biblical warrant that it is as we seek first the kingdom of God that we find our deepest longings satisfied, culminating in our own pleasure to a degree we cannot experience in any other way.
V. Paul’s Pressing:
The One Thing Paul Does
The Cure for Self-Satisfaction
Paul wants his Philippian readers—and us—to understand that this righteousness that he has experienced in Christ does not constitute the sum total of all of the Christian experience, that somehow once one has settled the question of his eternal destiny through faith in Christ, there is nothing more to experience, as though one had achieved everything including, possibly, perfection. That’s why he says what he does in verse 12. Pau
Because Paul has set his value system up so, he determines that his logical pursuit will be to press on toward the prize that Christ calls him to. Paul says that he hasn’t yet achieved this state, but he continues to make it his all-consuming goal: the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
“Forgetting what lies behind” doesn’t mean that Paul is trying to be oblivious to what God has done for him in the past, but rather that he doesn’t allow either what he thought to be advantages, nor even his previous Christian attainments, to get in the way of desiring to possess everything possible in this life that God has for him in Christ. He uses an athletic metaphor; one commentator is convinced that Paul has the Roman chariot races in mind here, keeping his eyes on the prize and his focus on the goal. If this is the case, the “upward call” referred to here would be analogous to the summons that the race winner would receive to approach the elevated stand of the judge I order to receive his prize. It’s the approval of the judge upon winning the race, reaching the goal, that Paul has in mind—and we can make that connection, can’t we?
But the verbs Paul uses are words like “pressing” and “straining”. We can get so self-satisfied, can’t we? We find a level of spiritual comfort and sort of settle in, willing perhaps to be challenged here or there in some minor point of Christian living, but more or less assuming the spirituality level of the other Christians around us, not willing to vary too much off the norm. I’ve used the metaphor before, but we can settle into a familiar and comfortable orbit of Jesus. This is not the attitude of Paul—and it ought not be ours, either!
The attitude of John Baptist is instructive to us. When Jesus came on the scene baptizing and gaining followers, some of those who had been following John were concerned about this. And what was John’s response? When the best man sees and hears the groom coming, he gladly stands to the side so as to give the groom the attention; John summed up his little word picture by saying, “so, He must increase, and I must decrease.” In 2010, how will you “decrease” so that Jesus, in and through your life, might increase? Because in the end, it’s about Jesus, as Paul has expressed to us the greatness of knowing Jesus. And so,
Run to Jesus. Believe Jesus. Trust Jesus. Obey Jesus. Serve Jesus. Emulate Jesus. Know Jesus. Follow Jesus. Love Jesus. Worship Jesus. Glorify Jesus. Because it’s all about…Jesus!
TalkAbout
Our relationship to Jesus is “The Cure” for various issues related to the self. Take a few minutes and talk about how each of the main points serve as cures for a self-focused life.
