Fifth Sunday in Lent — March 28, 2004
Christ Lutheran Church, Columbia, MD
Pastor Jeff Samelson
Philippians 3:8-14
Your Life’s New Ambitions
I. Know Christ
II. Pursue the Prize
III. Keep Your Eyes on the Finish Line
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ:
There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the young man. He grew up in the Abdeen section of Cairo, Egypt. His father was a lawyer, and he was on track to become a professional himself — he studied engineering, and when the opportunity arose to do graduate work at a Hamburg university, he went to Germany.
Neighbors and classmates thought of him as a “good boy” — someone who was too nice and too introverted to make much of a splash in the world.
But the people you associate with can change you, and such apparently was the case with this young man. In Germany, he found like-minded men who gave his life a purpose. They convinced him to become part of something much bigger than any one individual, and gave him a central role to play. The intelligent, introverted, “good boy” from Cairo now had an ambition — he was going to change the world — and that ambition changed him.
Ambition has a way of doing that — changing people, and in far too many cases, corrupting them. The right ambitions can lead to right results, but the wrong kind of ambitions only lead to more wrong. That was the definitely the case with this young Egyptian’s ambitions. Mohamed Atta was going to change the world, and he did, but he did it by flying American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That kind of world-changing ambition we don’t need.
Neither do we need the kind of self-seeking greedy ambition we see celebrated these days on shows like Donald Trump’s “Apprentice.” Getting ahead in the world is one thing; stepping on other people to get to the top or practically selling your soul for success is something else.
It’s no wonder, then, that for many people, and in many cases, “ambition” is a dirty word. I imagine that if you did a study you’d find that most of the time someone is described as “ambitious” it’s not meant in an entirely positive way. Ambitious people, it seems, too often are the ones who put the “rat” in the rat race.
But is ambition entirely a negative thing? Is it possible to have good, godly, and right ambitions? Not if your ambition is all about you — not if it’s selfish, greedy, blind, or just plain evil, like the terrorists’. But the Apostle Paul shows us something quite different in our reading today from Philippians. He shows us godly ambition, and he shows it to us not to draw attention to himself, but to draw attention to Christ, and to encourage us with his example. As we read about Paul’s life, we read about our own: Here, brothers and sisters, are your life’s new ambitions.
Listen again as we read Paul’s words in Philippians 3:8-14:
What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (NIV)
I. Paul had exchanged one kind of ambition for another. In the preceding verses, he outlined for the Philippians what his life had been like before his conversion: He was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.” He had set out to be the best of the best, and he was doing what he set out to do. His zeal for the law — or, rather, the Pharisee’s slavish interpretations of it — moved him to persecute Christians wherever he found them. He even left the Jewish lands of Judea and Galilee to chase down Christians in other places. No one had a greater passion for persecution than he did.
And he had the same zeal and ambition in his personal life. He was convinced that the gates of heaven were opened only to those who arrived there with an abundance of their own righteousness, gathered through painstaking obedience to the law. His ambition was to be the best of the best — the number one Pharisee — and no one made a better show of obeying the law.
But the righteousness he planned to offer to God was a legalistic righteousness — it might have been faultless according to his own standards, but it was worthless according to God’s standards. Christ eventually convinced him of this — but it took a blinding flash of light and a voice from heaven on the road to Damascus to get his attention and for him to exchange his self-righteousness for “Christ-righteousness”. He recognized the emptiness of all those old, proud, self-seeking ambitions — chief persecutor, Pharisee of Pharisee, legalist of legalists — and the futility of all the successes he’d had in fulfilling those ambitions. He said, “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ,” and he called all those self-satisfying good works “rubbish” — something to be thrown out, lost, left behind, and never touched again.
He considered all the “best” things of his former life a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. Once he put his faith in Christ instead of in himself and his own works, he had a new life, and with that new life came new ambitions. Nothing mattered anymore except Christ. He knew his Savior now, but he wanted to know him better; he knew God’s blessings, but he wanted to know them more; he had experienced God’s grace, but he wanted to experience it more. His life’s number one new ambition was to gain Christ and be found in him — to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.
Now that’s quite a different kind of ambition than what the world around us is used to, isn’t it? And that’s precisely the point here — what Paul and the Holy Spirit want us to understand and take hold of for ourselves. By both nature and far too frequent practice we, like all people, are sinners. We do the things we’re not supposed to do and fail to do what we are supposed to do. God says, “Be perfect, like me,” but the best we can give him is perfect sinfulness. We may not end up persecuting the church the way Paul did before his conversion, but there have certainly been times where we have judged people we shouldn’t be judging, and times we have trusted in our own works instead of Christ. Name a commandment, and you’ve broken it in one way or another — that’s the reality of our human condition, and it doesn’t matter how “outwardly” good or righteous we or anybody else might seem. God says that all our human, self-approved righteousnesses are as filthy rags in his sight. We have nothing to offer the Lord but rubbish.
Unless someone else offers his righteousness in place of ours. And that’s what Christ has done. That was his godly ambition. He set out from heaven to live a truly perfect life on earth, as one of us, to perfectly fulfill God’s law on our behalf, since it was impossible for any of us to do so. He came to give us what was missing from our lives — true righteousness that comes from God through faith in Christ. Jesus made that great exchange — his righteousness for our sins — with his sufferings and death on the cross, and sealed the deal with his resurrection from the dead. He fulfilled the greatest ambition anyone has ever had — because God loves, and wants no one to spend eternity apart from him, in the fires of hell. And all who put their trust in Christ, as Paul did and encourages us to do, have all the things Jesus came to give us: salvation, forgiveness, eternal life in heaven, and the reality of a new life here on earth — we are no longer what we used to be. We’re Christians now.
And so Paul shows us what the first and greatest ambition of our new lives in Christ is — it is simply and most importantly to know Christ. We already know him through faith, but we’re never satisfied with just a beginner’s knowledge — we want to know him more, know him better, and know him forever. And that means we make an exchange of our own — through daily repentance, we trade the rubbish of our sin and self-righteousness for the power of Christ’s resurrection. Our life-long ambition is now to stay in Christ, to grow in Christ, and, at the end of life, to be found in Christ. We have something to live for now. Or, rather, we have someone to live for — not ourselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord.
II. During World War II in Great Britain, there was a problem in the coalmines. Knowing their nation’s need, and wanting to participate more directly in the effort to defend their country, many of the miners were inclined to leave their difficult, thankless jobs and join the army instead. They wanted to be a part of something bigger, more glorious, and more meaningful.
This was a problem, of course, because the war effort desperately needed the coal that these miners brought up out of the ground every day. The nation needed those men motivated to mine more coal, not leave the mines cold. And so one day Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke to the miners. He delivered a speech that though only thousands heard you can be sure was quickly passed on from mine to mine and miner to miner.
Churchill told them something surprising — he told them that their dirty, grimy jobs were just as important in the war effort as anyone else’s. He asked them to picture in their minds the grand parade that would take place when the work of the war had come to its conclusion and victory finally came. Their children and grandchildren would be watching to see the men —the heroes — who had secured their freedom. First in the parade, he said, would come the sailors of the British Navy, the ones who had fought hard in the grand tradition of the Navy — the same kind of men as the heroes of Trafalgar and the defeat of the Armada generations before. Next in the parade, he said, would come the pilots of the Royal Air Force, the few to whom so many owed so much, because their skills and bravery, more than any others, had defended England’s skies from the dreaded German Luftwaffe. Then the heroes of the Army would march by, men who had stood tall at Dunkirk and who would have taken the battle directly to the enemy.
But at the end of the parade, Churchill said, would come a long line of sweat-stained, soot-streaked men in miner’s caps. And someone seeing them, he said, would cry from the crowd, "And where were you during the critical days of the struggle?" And then from ten thousand throats would come the proud answer, "We were deep in the earth with our faces to the coal."
We are told there were tears visible on the soot-laden and weathered faces of those miners. They returned to their pits with their shoulders straighter and their heads held higher, because they had been given a new purpose and a new vision of their worth. They had a new ambition.
We are often in the same kind of situation as those miners. We get so focused on the pain or dirt or drudgery of our lives that we feel we’re not really doing anything significant. We feel like we’re stuck in the pit of thankless jobs and endless responsibilities, and we want to be a part of something bigger, more glorious, and more meaningful.
Well, what Paul is showing us here is similar to what Churchill showed those miners — that we already are a part of something wonderful. We have a goal, we have a calling — we have a new ambition.
Instead of focusing only on what we’re living through right now, God calls us to live for heaven in whatever we’re doing. I don’t think any of you here has a calling as a coal miner, but you have your calling as a mother or a father, a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter; you are called to be a student or a teacher, an employee or a boss; whatever. God has given you a role to fill, and it is a proud and happy role, and now you have a new ambition in fulfilling it, because you are pressing on and stretching for the goal of heaven: you are pursuing the prize of perfection.
You haven’t achieved it yet, of course, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying. And as long as we’re this side of heaven, this heavenbound ambition of ours will result in stress and suffering. In the first place there’s your constant struggle with the sinful nature — sin causes stress — because we keep on doing what we don’t want to do! But the world and people around you have different ambitions, too. Their goals — maybe even the goals of people in your own family — are not the same godly goals you have, and that causes tension. In some cases it’s more than that, too — it’s actual suffering because you follow Christ.
Pursuing the prize may mean tension with a spouse, who doesn’t see why you have to spend so much time and money on all that “church stuff”. Pursuing the prize may mean ridicule from a co-worker or classmate who thinks you’re foolish for following Christ. Pursuing the prize could be suffering simply for doing the right thing.
But no matter what pain or stress your new ambition causes, you can have comfort and confidence — because you are sharing in Christ’s sufferings. This is a sign, not that he has forgotten you, but that you belong to him. Jesus warned us that his disciples would be treated as he was, so we can take joy in being counted worthy of suffering as he did.
But no matter what comes in our lives, good or bad, no matter what stress or pain — what do we do? We keep pressing on, not looking behind or to the side, — pressing on. Because our eyes are fixed are fixed on Christ. We are focused on our goal of heaven.
III. On March 6, 1987, Eamon Coughlan, an Irish runner who held a record in the 1500 meters, was running in a qualifying heat at the World Indoor Track Championships in Indianapolis. With two and a half laps left, he was tripped. He fell, but he got up and with great effort managed to catch up to the leaders. He was running an incredible race. With only 20 meters left in the race, he was in third place— which was good enough to qualify for the finals — and then he looked over his shoulder to the inside, and, seeing no one, he let up just a bit. But another runner, charging hard on the outside, passed Coughlan a yard before the finish, and he — the record holder! — was eliminated from the finals.
Everything Coughlan did — his great comeback effort — was rendered, in a moment worthless. Why? Because he took his eyes off the finish line.
Paul wants us to have a similar picture in our minds with the final verses of our text. The language he uses is that of a race. He wants us to think that way. Just as a runner, if he wants to win the prize, keeps his eyes focused on the finish line, and doesn’t turn his head to the left or the right, and or even think about what’s behind him, so we, also, as believers, engage in a single-minded hot pursuit of our goal. Just as we read in Isaiah: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” — we fix our eyes on Jesus, and through there are distractions, and though there are people who try to slow us down, and though it is simply plain hard work, we run a,d we stretch and we strain to cross that finish line and win the prize. Because we know it is ours. Because God has called us to it.
And that — that pursuit, that race, that prize — is our new life’s ambition. We say it with Paul, and we do the same “one thing”: Forgetting what is behind and stretching — straining — reaching — towards what is ahead, we press on toward the goal, to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus. Amen.
And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
