"Temporal Loss For Eternal Gain" Series

In saying ‘He brought us forth’ he means He gave us life and in saying ‘by the word of truth’ he means the truth of the gospel. That is the perfect gift that comes down from the Father of lights.

First there is righteousness. Now that is not a reference to an upstanding character or a self-rightness through human moral effort. That is why Paul clarifies his statement with ‘…not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law…’ as in, the keeping of the Law; even the perfect keeping of it were that possible.

No, this righteousness means the ‘state of a man as he ought to be; that which makes him acceptable to God’.

With only one exception this same word is translated ‘righteousness’ through the entire New Testament. It refers to right standing with God. It goes like this. God declares the person right with Him through faith in Christ. He sees belief and He says, ‘you are now right with Me. You now stand as you ought. You have righteousness.” We also call this ‘justification’. You are justified before Him. He finds no fault in you, as He sees you completed through the perfect work of His Son in the atonement.

By the way, as a point of interest you may want to go later to Romans 5:10 where that exception is that I mentioned, where a different word is translated ‘righteousness’ and meditate on what is being communicated there. The word pertains to a self righteousness – a right standing through human effort.

Consider its impossibility.

So that is the first step and it is God’s step. It is His work, bringing us into Christ and declaring us right with Him on the basis of faith, and we understand that to be a reference to a very specific faith, or a specific belief, which is in the good news of Jesus Christ; His atoning death and resurrection.

Then we come to verse 10, one of the most powerful verses in the Bible, and we note as we begin that again, it is all God’s doing that Paul has found himself in this position.

I want you to consider that all those things Paul has cast away as rubbish he cast away after all these things in verse 10 came upon him. He did not make some deliberate decision to deprioritize every important thing in his life and then come to Jesus and say ‘Ok, here I am, I’m going to believe in you now’.

No, he was still holding all those things, and himself for having those things, in very high regard when Jesus knocked him in the dirt and called him into belief and service. Actually, it would probably not be a stretch to assume that Paul’s reprioritizing of his life came progressively and as he learned from his Lord in the desert; just like the rest of us.

So there is the order of things and it is always that way, because of our own accord we do not seek for God. He calls us and when we respond to the call in faith He places us in a state of righteousness with Him and then with the help of the Holy Spirit our life gets reprioritized and as it does, joy and peace grow in abundant supply.

Now I may have misled when I said ‘first’ there is righteousness. I did not mean to imply that there is going to be a progression in the time/space continuum of these things listed in verse 10. I only meant that everything begins with God declaring us right with Him. That’s when the reprioritizing begins but that is also the moment we are given life from above and placed in the state that makes all of these next things true of us.