Text: Philippians 3:4b-14
Focus: Perseverance
Function: to remind people to focus on the heavenly reward
4If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
12Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
This is a deep passage. I have often pondered the mystery of the phrase in verse 10 when he says “I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection…”
So, I hope to unwrap this passage a little bit this morning.
Paul starts out with the fact that he stands in the right position before God, not because of the fact that he was born of Jewish ancestry. Not because his family obeyed the law and had him circumcised on the 8th day. Not because of his extensive religions vocation denoted by the fact that he was an expert in the Law and was called a Pharisee, a person of a strict religions sect that carefully obeyed all 1,000 commands in the OT and 13,000 commands in the Talmud, their commentary on the OT.
He makes the point that if anyone could have earned salvation, or more theologically correct: an upright standing with God, it would have been a person like him who kept himself blameless according to the letter of the law.
But he recognizes that the correct doctrine, without trust in God, is meaningless if we are trying to win God’s favor by our actions.
According to Paul, we cannot win God’s favor by our actions alone. It takes faith. Faith is trust. So then, He says that he has obtained a righteousness, that is, an upright standing with God, because he has trust in Jesus Christ to be His savior.
He says, it is faith, or more clearly, it is by living in the trust that God loves and forgives us and keeps us holy and pure by His Spirit inside of us that makes him a person who has an upright standing with God.
Brother Paul gives us a personal glimpse into the motivating factors in his life. For him, all of it is based on the fact that he has personally seen Jesus Christ risen from the dead in the vision that leads him to faith in Christ.
(When he was converted on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, At the time, he was on the way to incarcerate people for believing in Jesus and Jesus opened up the heavens and revealed Himself to Paul and Paul became a believer.)
And because Jesus rose from the dead, that is the goal of his life as well: His own resurrection from the dead. And he says that in his life, he presses on toward that prize of the resurrection.
He tells us that he has not yet obtained it. He is living on this side of the great veil of death that separates the living from the dead and because he is still on this side, he does not want to give up living a life that brings honor and glory to the fact that Jesus Christ has given him a real purpose and hope in this life.
Now, the whole passage is crouched in the fact that Paul rests in Christ to save Him. He trusts Christ to keep him close to Christ so that he can obtain the resurrection of the dead for himself.
As a pastor, I want the flock to rest in the loving arms of Jesus and keep themselves close enough to Christ to keep from straying and confident enough in Christ to be bold in their proclamation and demonstrations of their love for others.
Paul tells us he rests in Christ and at the same time, he presses on.
He motivates himself. And a large part of it, I believe born out of gratitude for his salvation, is to understand more and more thy mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.
There are a lot of questions around it for me. I don’t understand why it takes a death to pay the price for sin. I know that God could just forgive by choice, as God commands us to do.
But God forgave through the mystery of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
God choose a violent and terrible symbol for us to behold when God saved us.
If you were living in the 1st century, the word “Crucifixion” brought chills to your spine and a sense of terror and dread. You knew how awful it was. In contrast, our crosses today are golden.
We might not fully appreciate what Jesus did for us when He gave his life for us.
To Paul, the mystery of what that meant was an intellectual pursuit because it was driven by his love and gratitude to Jesus Christ.
I ponder the questions myself. I wonder: Just what kind of love could draw me to the point whereby I was willing to endure a torturous death for someone I did not know?
Could or do I have that kind of love within me?
We reckon ourselves as heroes, I imagine. I imagine that all of us could see ourselves giving our lives to save a loved one, but Jesus does it for strangers. He does it for the people who loved Him and mourned His death as well as those who plotted His judicial execution.
From the cross He said: Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”
What kind of love drives a person like that? It must be divine. And when Paul says that he wants to know, to understand, Christ and all of that mystery, I feel the same way.
Can I love like that as well?
How do we love like that?
We, I believe, as Paul says in this passage, do it by faith.
I believe that when Jesus asked the Father to forgive them, He was appealing to the Father’s superior knowledge of justice and fairness.
When evil happens to us, our natural reaction is defense and we generally want retribution, or at least we want to be vindicated.
Jesus was vindicated by the resurrection. The resurrection of the dead trumped the injustice and unfairness of His murder.
But Paul presses on to the knowledge of what it means for him to be the servant of Christ.
I want to have that kind of love inside of me, inside of all of us.
Paul wants to grab a hold of the love that drove Jesus to the cross so that he can experience the resurrection of the dead. He is willing to give up everything in order to be considered upright in God’s eyes. I am glad that Jesus made the command simple when He said for us to love one another. At the same time, Just like Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the cross, our love can be our own sacrifice in faith to God.
We need to make loving others the priority in our lives so that we too can obtain the resurrection of the dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment