Philippians 3:10-14
Forgetting and Focusing
I noticed an odd phenomenon in the military. When people were drawing close to retirement or their discharge date, their whole demeanor changed. They started dragging to formation. Their PT efforts became weakened. Their work grew subpar, or average at best. They looked like a zombie, like the walking dead. Now to be fair, it was not their fault. They had an STD, which in this case stands for: “short-timers’ disease.”
What about you? Do you ever feel like you have short-timers’ disease in life? Do you ever feel like, why make the effort? Maybe you’re just going through the motions. Maybe you feel like you’re just surviving, going in circles on the treadmill of life. Today’s scripture may give you a whole new attitude: about your past, present, and future. If you look at Paul’s words, first he advises us to ...
1. Release the past.
In verse 13, he uses the phrase, “Forgetting what is behind.” Is Paul asking us to suppress those troublesome memories of the past? No. Paul is talking about letting go of things that still have a hold on us. If we don’t release our past, two things will get us into trouble: past failures and past successes.
Past failures make us think we are a failure. Paul could certainly recall his failures. He supervised the death of the first martyr of the church, Stephen. He could have carried a lot of guilt for his persecution of Christians before his salvation. But no, he said we need to release all of that to God. God can forgive your guilt, if you give it to him. God can forgive all the woulda/coulda/shoulda decisions you’ve analyzed to death. Give it to God and let him take it away. 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
We need to forget our failures, and also our successes. Why? If we concentrate on them too much, we’ll rest on our laurels and never want to do more. In business, the biggest threat to future success is past success. That’s why companies always keep reinventing themselves. We say in marriage seminars, “Being married is like riding a bike: it takes some work, some peddling. If you’re coasting, you’re always going downhill.”
Paul had much success under his belt. Earlier in the chapter he listed his pedigree as a learned Jewish scholar and Pharisee, trained by the best. Yet, he said, compared to knowing Christ, all his Ivy League prowess was garbage (verse 8). The actual word there means dung. All of our earthly efforts amount to nothing compared to knowing Christ. Don’t let those past successes go to your head!
Now I’m not saying the past isn’t important. We need to learn from the past. But life is like driving a car: Most of the time you want to look out that large front windshield; every now and then you need to glance back through the tiny rear view mirror. Too much looking back will get you in trouble. Or for you Navy types, use the past like a rudder to guide your future path, but not like an anchor to drag you down. Learn from the past. Make peace with the past. Celebrate the past. And then let go of the past, so you can, #2,
2. Reach toward your future.
Paul says in verses 13 and 14, “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. [In other words, “I haven’t arrived yet!”] But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”
Paul pictures here the sprinter straining forward to cross the finish line. Commentator Gordon Fee recalls the famous “miracle mile,” the first time two milers ran under four minutes in the same race. Roger Bannister and John Landy competed in Vancouver, B.C. in 1954. Landy had led all the way, but coming off the final turn toward the finish line he looked over his shoulder to find out where Bannister was, only to be passed on the other side and beaten to the tape! [Gordon Fee, “Philippians,” IVP New Testament Commentary Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 155.]
You can’t worry about what is behind you. You need to lean into the run and give it all you got, keeping your gaze on the finish. And what a finish it will be. What is our goal? What is the prize? It is the heavenward calling of God in Christ Jesus! There is nothing finer. Heaven will make it all worth it, you just wait and see!
A couple of weeks ago we looked at Paul’s life mission when he said, “For me, to live is Christ, to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). We talked about living with one foot in eternity, the idea that, as we live out this life, we remember this is not our home. We are just passing through. And in God’s perfect timing, he will bring us home to our glorious future. When we remember that, we can press forward in the race of life, running every day in serving God, not worried about anything. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)
Someone once said, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the ‘present.’” As we yield our past and our future to God, we are left with the present. We run the race, a race that is never over until it’s over. As long as you have breath, you need to press on! Stay with it. Follow Christ, love Christ, serve Christ, and know Christ. And that is what we do now. We release the past, we reach toward our future, and we ...
3. Grow closer to Christ every day.
Paul says, over and over in this chapter, his number one ambition is to know Christ. The word “know” doesn’t refer to head knowledge. He doesn’t want to know more about Christ. He wants to know Christ. It’s the word used to describe how a parent and child know each other, or how a husband and wife know each other. It means to know in the context of relationship, to know more intimately, to grow closer and closer. This is Paul’s goal: every day, to know Christ more!
Paul said, “I want to know him in two ways.” In verses 10 and 11, Paul said, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”
Paul starts by saying, to know Christ means to know the “power of his resurrection.” Think about the power found in our greatest atomic bombs or our largest hydroelectric plants. Resurrection power is so much more! How much power does it take to reverse death and decay? All the blood loss and tissue damage done to Jesus’ body, all the muscles ripped apart by spears and whips and nails, and the weight of hanging on a cross—God reversed all of that, restoring Jesus not only to a healthy human body, but to the very first resurrection body, a body that would never again age!
We could use that kind of power in our world, couldn’t we? When the cruel words cut into our heart, when our mood darkens, when the prognosis is not good, when tragedy strikes, when the loss is devastating, we need the resurrection power of Christ. And we have it, as we get to know Christ better and better. Paul talks about having that power now, in his first phrase. We can be victorious, because we know that, even in the valley of the shadow of death, “Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).
Paul also talks about having that resurrection power completely in the future, when we “somehow” attain to the “resurrection from the dead.” I like his word “somehow” there. People have wondered, does this mean Paul had doubts? I don’t think so. He doesn’t strike me as a guy who was unsure what he believed. I think, with the word “somehow,” Paul was alluding to the mystery of the final resurrection. The Bible describes how the dead in Christ will rise first, followed by believers who are still alive, as we join Jesus in the air. But what a mystery! Our minds cannot conceive it. It is simply too great to imagine!
But Paul was not content to know only the power of Christ’s resurrection. He also wanted to participate “in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” A past church member once quipped, “Everyone wants his resurrection power, but nobody wants his sufferings.” But Paul did! Paul knew that if you were to know Christ, you were to know suffering. And Paul suffered. He was arrested on false charges. He was beaten. He was run out of cities. He was slandered. He was shipwrecked. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he carried what he called a “thorn in the flesh,” what we might call a palliative condition the Lord refused to remove.
I don’t have to tell you there is a lot of suffering in this world. Ask the citizens of Las Vegas. It seems the news headlines are none-stop lately, from one hurricane to another, from earthquakes to mass murders. And here around us, many are suffering in various ways, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
I’m going to ask you to do something biblical here, and that is to suffer well! When you suffer (not if, but when), draw closer to Jesus in his suffering. He knows what it’s like to suffer, so he knows what you are going through. None of us have suffered to his extent, but he knows our situation quite well. And he promised in John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” Jesus can bring perspective and meaning to your suffering if you will let him.
The famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis suffered several losses: He lost his mother early on, and his dad emotionally abandoned him. Lewis suffered from a respiratory illness as a teenager. Yet, he fought and was wounded in World War I. He married later in life, and had to bury his beloved wife just years later, after her bout with cancer. Lewis wrote a book called, “The Problem of Pain.” There he said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Let your suffering bring you closer to Christ in his sufferings.
Release your past to Christ, all the good, the bad, and the ugly. Reach toward your glorious future, living with one foot in eternity, as you remember where you’re heading. And then, every day, seek to grow closer to Christ. Make it your daily ambition to get to know Christ more and more. Let us pray:
Lord, thank you for maintaining these words from an old letter from the Apostle Paul. How richly relevant they are for us today. We are running the same race as Paul. Somedays we feel free and vibrant, but other days we wonder when this race is going to end. We may even feel like giving up. Help us to keep our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Help us to let go of those things from the past that weigh us down—whether successes or failures. And help us make it our daily ambition to know Christ just a little more. We ask this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
