The Surpassing Greatness of Knowing Christ

I wonder if you've ever had to fill out a resume. Resume is basically an attempt to represent you on a piece of paper. Your list of accomplishments and achievements, your education, your experience, all right there for someone who wants to assess you for some sort of a job. I thought of that because in many ways what Paul gives us in this passage is a sort of spiritual resume of himself. It got me thinking about the way in which we as human beings either formally or informally try to catalog what we've got to offer to the world. This here is something that I have. It doesn't have to be things that you can write down. And I think that we actually start looking for these things early in life. Don't do that again. In the springtime. I would begin my Saturday mornings up at PVCC with five to seven-year-old soccer. My son Luke would play. This is not a high level of soccer. They would break them into four-on-four, small fields, not a lot of passing. Everyone runs towards the ball. There's a scrum, a rugby-like scrum of sorts, and then someone will break out with the ball on a breakaway to the goal. And sometimes the teams don't get split up very well. in this particular morning I'm thinking about, there was one boy whose birth certificate we should have checked before we began. He was large. And he was scoring goal after goal, the kind of thing where you just stop counting at some point. At some point, the halftime whistle blows mercifully, and Luke comes over, plops down next to me, gets his water. Luke says profound things oftentimes. He looks up at me, and he says, Dad, Not sure soccer's my thing. Now, to his credit, he got back in there and kept battling for the second half, but it got me chuckling and thinking, we really do want a thing, don't we? I mean, growing up, we try to find something. Could be sports, could be academics, could be something else. We'd like to have something that we're good at. We'd like to have a thing. When we're young, we don't think about it as a resume. That comes later. As we get older, as I said, formally or informally, we begin to compile the resume. So education, skills, achievements, experience. And at some point, most of us have to actually fill one out. Now, I got away with not having to fill one out until just last year. There was a businessman who was happy to employ me to do some work for him in China and then allow me to do ministry on the side. But he said, for my HR department, We need you to fill out a resume." What he said to me is, he said, you know, just write it out, leave off the spiritual stuff. They got to submit it to the Chinese government, so nothing spiritual on there. So I sit down with my computer and some sort of resume form and I fill in my education and that stops at about 1995. And then I'm staring at a lot of white, okay? And I keep thinking to myself, surely I have something that I could write down on this resume. And I kept staring at the whiteness on the paper or on the screen. And I'll confess to you, while it shouldn't matter all that much, I mean, this job was like the most important thing in the world, but I started feeling down about myself. I started thinking, I've got something to put here. I began to feel the tug of just the desire, the internal desire to represent myself in this resume. You know, even in our older years, I think this sort of a desire remains strong. I have a Chinese pastor friend named Chariot. We spend Chinese New Year every year with his parents, especially as he was off at seminary for a number of years. His parents are not believers. I asked his dad one time, what's the hardest thing? I knew it was hard for him that his son was a pastor. I asked, what's the hardest thing for you about your son being a pastor? And he told me that it's when he gets together with his friends and they all start bragging on their kids. He said, I don't have anything to say. I mean, being a pastor to most Chinese, it's not even like a job. It's like being a monk or something. It's not something that they really think about. So he said, it's just really embarrassing for me to sit there as their talking about their kids, their jobs, their achievements, and I just try to be as quiet as possible. From young to old, it seems that we've got this desire to point at things, validate who we are. It's like that oft-used clip from the movie Rocky, where Rocky says, if I can just go the distance, then I'll know I'm not a bum. Well, all of us would like to have the ability to say that we're not a bum. Now, here's the thing. You would think as Christians that we would be immune from this sort of thinking to some degree, right? We've adopted a completely different way of thinking. I mean, we are people who would say that we don't have anything to offer to God. We're sinners in need of His grace. We're people who would say that as we've come to Christ and found that He is gracious enough to forgive us and give us everything that we need. As the text will say today, give us the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. We would say that's everything to us, right? You know, we sing songs like In Christ Alone. my hope is found, and nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling." So we shouldn't be into the whole resume-building thing spiritually, right? We shouldn't feel the need to perform for God and for man. We shouldn't be giving over to spiritual pride and self-advancement and self-validation and one-upmanship, right? Well, as you're probably aware, The reality is that while those sorts of things should be what we left behind, we struggle with it in our flesh constantly. Another way to describe spiritual resume building is self-justification. And it is constantly at war with justification by faith in Christ. And that kind of self-justification with its nasty offspring hypocrisy, envy, self-righteousness, and despair. They can derail our Christian growth, and they can rob us of joy. I want to look at Philippians 3 with you this morning. Joy in Christ is the overarching concern of the Apostle Paul as he writes this short letter. He mentions it more than a dozen times in the letter. So as we look at Philippians 3, 1 to 11, I want us to think about leaving resume building behind and finding our joy in Christ. Or with a nod to the old Michael Card song, it's hard to imagine the joy we find from the things that we leave behind. So for the note takers, we'll think, number one, about what we leave behind. What we leave behind, that's verses one through six. Two, how we leave it behind. how we leave it behind, that's verses seven and eight. And then third and finally, we'll think about why we leave it behind. Why we leave it behind. That'll be verses nine through 11. And it's my prayer that our study this morning will kindle in you a fresh joy in Christ. Let me read again, verses one through six, Philippians three. Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless." All right, he begins here by saying, finally, he indicates that he's getting to the main idea of his letter. Brothers tells us he's writing to Christians, he's writing to the church, and he gives a command right away there, rejoice in the Lord. That command, I believe, frames everything that comes after in this passage. This is a text about how to rejoice in the Lord. I wonder if you've thought about that command. You are commanded to have joy. This is a group of people living amidst conflict and opponents and persecution. He's not just telling them, look on the bright side of life or take life's lemons and turn it into lemonade. No, he's telling them that they're going to have to have joy as a conscious choice by not locating it in their circumstances. They're going to have to locate their joy completely outside of what's going around them. And then he says that this is not the first time he's written this to them. but the repetition is necessary for their spiritual safety. Okay, so we're ready. How do we have joy, Paul? What are we supposed to do? How do we rejoice in the Lord? Well, the first thing he says to them is that they're gonna have to watch out for some bad teaching that they're sure to encounter. Notice there are three times in verse two he says, look out. Look out for these false teachers. There were false teachers around Paul constantly in his ministry. Every church that he planted seemingly faced false teaching and false teachers. But look at how blistering he is here. He calls them names, spiritual name calling here. Dogs, evildoers, those who mutilate the flesh. Who are these guys? Well, apparently, they were calling themselves Christian teachers. They were saying you need to believe in Jesus, but you also need to get circumcised. You also need to fulfill the Old Testament law. He talks other places about these teachers demanding Sabbath obedience and keeping the dietary laws. So you need Jesus. Believe in Jesus. You just need something else also. We could call this kind of a Jesus plus kind of theology. And this kind of teaching has always been tempting to people. It's kind of an antidote, or so they think, to easy believism. To people saying, okay, yeah, I believe in Jesus, and then going and doing whatever they want. It's an attractive way to teach. So you pull some obedience back into what it takes to be saved. Well, Paul sees it as a completely different message, doesn't he? He calls it confidence in the flesh. Putting your confidence in what you have done in order to earn you favor with God. It's really a subtle sort of pride. I mean, it's interesting here that the Jews would call the Gentiles dogs and evildoers, but he's turning it around on them because it's an evil thing to add something to the gospel. They're taking the old covenant sign of circumcision and just turning it into a pointless mutilation of the flesh. Well, we shouldn't give in to this sort of Jesus plus teaching for a moment, because verse three says, we are the circumcision, the we there is believers, those who are circumcised not in the flesh, but in the heart. We are the ones that have the spirit of God dwelling in us, and so we're the ones who put no confidence in the things of the flesh. The best way to resist Jesus plus kind of teaching is to be really clear on who we are as God's redeemed people. We simply don't need anything other than faith in Christ to save us. But Paul wants to nail this down without a shadow of a doubt for them. So what he does in verse four to six is he picks up the argument from the perspective of the false teachers, and he argues that if it were possible to put confidence in the flesh, he would have been the one who was able to do it. So what he has here is an impressive list of seven privileges that were his either by birth or by accomplishment. Let's look at them briefly. First, he says it was circumcised on the eighth day. It means he was a Jew by birth. He was not a convert to Judaism. Second, he says, I'm of the people of Israel, literally of the race of Israel. He's claiming a genealogical purity here, no Gentile blood mixed in. Now, we know he's argued elsewhere that by faith in Christ, Gentiles can be grafted into the vine of Israel, but he's taking up the point of view of the Judaizers' way of thinking, that it's more significant to be of the race of Israel. He says, well, I am. Third, he says, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin. It's a favored tribe in Israel. Remember, Benjamin was the favored son of Jacob because he was born to his beloved Rachel. He was the only son to be born in the promised land. And he produced the first king of Israel. Also, Benjamin was the tribe that remained faithful to the Davidic dynasty when the other 10 tribes went away. So this is really good pedigree for Paul. Fourth, he says, I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. He's moving now to cultural superiority. With the scattering of the Jewish people around the Mediterranean, the second and third century BC, many Jewish people stopped teaching Hebrew to their children. But he said, mom and dad wanted me to be true and faithful, so they taught me Hebrew. For the last three, we turn from those privileges Paul inherited from his parents to a personal list of accomplishments. Fifth, he says, as to the law, a Pharisee. It means that he was a part of this renewal movement, focused on a return to obedience to the Old Testament law in a lax age, an age where people did whatever they want. We're used to thinking poorly about the Pharisees because they come across bad in the Gospels. But they were the ones who were fervent about their faith. They were the Bible people. They were committed. They were pious. They were dedicated. Six, he says, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, means that he was willing to fight for what he believed in. He saw the Jesus movement as a threat to God's people and he acted accordingly. At the stoning of Stephen, Paul would have thought about himself as being zealous for God and for his word. And then seventh and finally, the summary, as to righteousness under the law. blameless. Or the word could be translated as uprightness. He's not contradicting what he writes elsewhere about everybody having sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He's again taking up the argument from his opponent's way of thinking, what he means that he was the most consistent, the most faithful, the most law-abiding Jew of his day. He was upright. If anyone could have achieved favor with God by what they did, it was him. But in spite of his pedigree and his accomplishments, he puts no confidence in the flesh. And we shouldn't either. We should look out for anyone who tells us differently. Well, how do you and I apply this? How do we look out for this sort of teaching? It's worth recognizing that there are some today who still officially teach a Jesus plus kind of theology. The Roman Catholic Church does teach that we are justified not simply by faith in Christ, but also by the merit that we can accrue by obeying God. We need to watch out for that kind of theology, which is wrong, but we need to do more than that. Listen to what one writer says about Paul's resume here. Although Paul's reasons for confidence in the flesh are specifically related to his Jewish origins and achievements, they reflect universal elements of human pride. In every age and place, an arrogant pledging of allegiance to their nation and complacent polishing of their trophies of perfect performance eclipsed the centrality and sovereignty of Christ in the lives of Christians. Did you hear that? The universal elements of human pride. Confidence in the flesh is a human way of living. I was thinking about in China, nearly everyone who lived around us was an atheist. And yet there are nearly constant appeals made to kind of a group righteousness of being a good son or daughter, of being a good citizen. Even in 2019, there was a great kind of push to become sorters of trash. Okay, now you may sort your trash, but It's an important thing for us in China because the way trash works is you take all of your trash and you set it out in the hallway and then someone comes up on every floor and pulls the trash bag into the elevator and starts sorting it. Okay, so you have cardboard and you have plastic, but you also have the leftover seafood soup from last night, the kind of wet trash that kind of gets on everything and it stinks. So, in Shanghai, we're going to have this great kind of messaging. There were commercials. There were videos you could watch. There was an app you could go to. And my favorite is I would watch kind of these cartoons that were made to encourage people to sort their trash. You would have the good citizen who would take his wet trash and his dry trash down in the complex and, you know, dump his wet trash in the slot pile for compost, you know. put his cardboard over here and his plastic over here. He's smiling and the other neighbors applaud him. The good trash sorter, but then a very sneaky looking character with all of his trash in the same bag would slip in when he thinks no one's looking and dump it all together and get caught and people would point at him and he would walk away in shame. Righteousness through trash sorting. Now we may laugh at that, but that's human beings in a nutshell. Let's define who are the righteous and who are the unrighteous. Maybe you don't think of yourself as this kind of a person with this kind of thinking, but ask yourself a few questions. First, do you think that God owes you certain blessings because of the way that you're living, because you're a good person. Thinking that God should bless you because of what you do, that's confidence in the flesh. I'm often reminded of when I got diagnosed with cancer. I had people after the church service, I shared it with the church, they came up to me, they said, Mark, I'm sure you're going to be fine because you're serving God and you're a good person. And I think, boy, that's, and I related to what they were saying. I wanted what they were saying to be true, but scratch below the surface, I think you and I often live this way, that God owes us. On the flip side, do you feel bad about yourself when you sin? Are you crushed by failure? Now, godly sorrow certainly is a feeling bad about sin and a desire to overcome it for God's glory. But when you or I feel bad about ourselves, about who we are, based on our spiritual performance, that's confidence in the flesh. Being crushed by failure is a sign that that's where you are. For many of us, an idolatrous pursuit of success points out that we are driven by a desire to gain favor with people and with God. Okay, so our text urges us to identify this sort of thing in our lives, the confidence in the flesh that we have. Identify spiritual resume building in our lives and leave it behind. But how do we do that? Point number two, how do we leave it behind? Look again at verse seven and eight. Paul writes, but whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish. Notice several things here. First is the financial language that he uses, the language of gain and loss. An accountant that has a ledger, keeps track of assets, and liabilities, pluses and minuses. Well, before he was a believer, Paul had these items from his spiritual resume in the gain column. Second, notice that the word count or counted is used three different times. This is an intellectual exercise. He has changed the way that he thinks about his life's successes. In his mind, he's moved them from the gain column to the loss column. This is quite striking to me, and I think it requires some thought, some meditation on our part. I mean, most of the things in Paul's list, maybe with the exception of persecuting the church, they're not bad things. They're good things. Being an obedient Jew is a good thing. Being zealous for God's law, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. And then notice that Paul isn't saying that these things that he used to think of as assets, as gain, it's not that he now thinks that they're worthless because he realizes they can't save him. He doesn't say that they've come down to zero. He says that they've moved into the negative, that they're lost to him. Why? Well, his answer here is for the sake of Christ. But what does he mean? What does he mean by that? You remember the story of Paul's conversion as it's recorded in the book of Acts, how he was knocked off his donkey by a light from heaven and by a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Well, I want you to picture for a moment temporarily blinded Paul. He goes to Damascus and he sits there for three days, not eating, not drinking, blinded. And he's just thinking back on his life. He's thinking about all that has brought him to that place. I think Philippians 3 is the fruit of his meditation on those days. I mean, when his eyes are opened, even though he's temporarily blind, when his eyes are opened to see who Jesus is, in his words, to see the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, he asks himself, how did I never see that before? What's his answer? to that question. Well, all that good stuff that led him to put confidence in the flesh is what kept him from seeing Christ in the gospel. So you know what repentance looked like for him and what it looks like for us? Taking all that good stuff, everything that can blind our eyes to grace. I'm a kind person. I'm a good person. I go to church, read the Bible, I teach kids, I serve in the local community, I pay my debts, I don't harm other people, I don't lie, I don't cheat, I don't steal, I wear a mask, I don't look at porn. We just go on and on. List it out. Whatever makes you think of yourself as a good person, recognize that that can blind your eyes to grace. That's a staggering thought. It's not that the good things become bad, but what we've done with the good things in our minds and hearts make it a loss. I think that word rubbish there is funny as a translation, because we don't really use the word rubbish very often. It seems British to me. I don't know if that's right. But the rubbish bin? I don't know. We don't often say rubbish. The word, Paul picks a vulgar word for filth. It usually means excrement. The King James Version translates it as dung. I think it's bringing Paul's emotion through pretty clearly. He doesn't want us to miss the point. He's probably thinking about that verse from Isaiah where God through the prophet says that all our righteous deeds are like filthy rags before God. One commentator wrote it this way. To repent does not mean to become indifferent to what we formerly were, to the former objects of our devotion and the former conduct of our lives, but to be horrified by it all. Okay, so we're to count everything we've got, especially those good things that push us towards confidence in the flesh. We've got to move from them. We've got to move them from the gain to the loss column. But I want to ask a question. What happens in our lives when we fail to do that? When pride and self-righteousness move in and start making themselves at home in our lives? Well, it messes with our joy. I was thinking about that from a personal standpoint with some of the struggles that I've had just this past year. I mean, Keith mentioned in our normal life, I'm a pastor and a church planter and a missionary. As we came home and as I was really struggling with this last fall, I was thinking, I'm not any of those things. And I felt like my joy just was plummeting. Why was my joy plummeting? Well, it's because as the Lord began to show me, I had begun clinging to those things. Those things had become part of my identity, how I think positively about myself. So because they're what I'm clinging to, when they're taken away, well, what happens to my joy? There's another problem that arises too. We start to look at other people the wrong way. One of the things that struck me as I came back to the States again last year, it struck me in several churches that we were at, what was the lament over what is happening or what was perceived to be happening in the US, in this country. And on one level, I could understand. Lament is sometimes appropriate. I understand it was a strange and difficult year with issues of politics and race and the pandemic. Living abroad for most of the last 20 years, I have pretty limited understanding about a lot of that. But as an outside observer, it struck me that we are very much in danger of thinking that the problems are out there and not in here. There's a fine line between a right lament over what you see happening in the society and the kind of spiritual pride and hypocrisy that starts to locate the them out there as the problem and not the us in here. What's that old Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote? If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were just necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil runs right through every human heart. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? What horrified Paul was not the badness of other people, but the misguided goodness of his own heart. So if you and I are going to leave behind confidence in the flesh and self-righteousness and spiritual resume building, we're going to have to change the way we think. We're going to have to change the way we count. Got to leave all that talk of goodness behind. We actually need to learn how to repent, not just of our badness, but how to repent of our goodness. I was thinking this is one of the reasons why community is essential to the Christian. Why, you know, as you move from place to place, job one is finding a local church to join. You need brothers and sisters around you that you can be building the kind of relationships with where you can talk not just about the big sins, but about the sins you struggle with in your heart. The idolatries and the self-righteousness and the loss of joy. We need each other in community. Well, what we need to leave behind is confidence in the flesh. That's clear. How we leave it behind is by counting everything as a loss compared to knowing Christ. But why? Let's finish third and finally by thinking about what motivates the believer here. Why we leave it behind. Pick it up there at the end of verse eight. In order that, in order 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 comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. by any means possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead." What we have here is essentially a list of benefits that Paul sees from leaving behind confidence in the flesh. What do we get by counting all of that stuff as loss? What's the gain? Well, he lists seven ways. They balance the seven points of his spiritual resume. Let's look at them. First, simply having Christ in our lives. He says, that I may gain Christ. When we gain Christ, we gain all the benefits that come with him. So he says, secondly, we have union with Christ. He says, and be found in him. To be in Christ means to be united with him such that he identifies with us and we identify with him. It's a new identity. Third, we have the righteousness of Christ. Not having a righteousness of my own, but that which is through faith in Christ. So, no more worry about a spiritual resume. No more worry about our accomplishments, our achievements, our performance. His record of righteousness belongs to the believer. We should never walk into church feeling bad about ourselves. We should walk in rejoicing that Christ's righteousness is ours. That's what we come to sing about. Fourth, knowing Christ. He says that I may know him. It means a relationship with Christ in which we get to know him more. We can enjoy friendship, relationship, fellowship. Fifth benefit is suffering with Christ. He says, to share in his sufferings. Paul views his own life story, even in prison, as a privilege in which he gets to reenact Christ's journey to a cross. He sees this as a gift. He had said in chapter one, it's been granted to you, it's been gifted to you, not only to believe, but also to suffer for him. You'll never hear prosperity teachers teach on this text. But there's a joy in suffering because of the fellowship we have with Jesus in it. Sixth benefit, becoming like Christ. It says, becoming like him in his death. It means we get to copy his obedience to the Father for the benefit of others. We're like that drink offering that's poured out, just like Jesus. And then seventh and finally, the benefit is being raised with Christ. This is the crown jewel, victory over death in the grave. He says it twice here, the power of his resurrection and attained to the resurrection from the dead. No other power can compete with the power that can raise the dead. Now, how do we summarize all of this? How do we put it all together, all the benefits that we have and what they mean to Paul and to us? The word that comes to mind to me is the word love. Christ is everything. That's anything to Paul. He loves Christ, not a nebulous idea, not a theological concept or truth, but the person he met on the road to Damascus. He loves him. Christ is his all in all. And this, I believe, is the key to joy for you and I. How do you and I rejoice in the Lord? How do we locate our joy not in the success of our business, not in having a thing we are good at, or our kids doing things that make us proud before our friends? How do we find a joy that's not based on our physical appearance or our financial bottom line? Well, we love Jesus Christ. for who he is and for what he's done. I've been thinking a lot recently about the challenges of living in this culture. It's different than some of the challenges faced in living in different other cultures. I was reading about a decision that was made in Afghanistan just a couple years ago to include your religious identification on your ID card. It was a government decision. Christians there had to struggle through. They know where they live. Many of them decided to go ahead and put Christian on there. You wonder how they think about that decision now. I think about my friend Happy in China. He's a pastor. He's under government surveillance. The government has told him to stop pastoring the church, that they can't meet together anymore. He's thinking about what to do with his life. He's struggling. He's thinking about losing his livelihood, he's thinking about losing his church. You know, in situations like those, the external pressures make those last phrases there, sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and attained to the resurrection of the dead, to be very real, very present, very near realities. Here, it seems all too easy to be lulled into a kind of spiritual complacency. where we forget, start focusing on other things, in kind of a spiritual sleep. But really, in any of those situations, the challenge is the same thing. If we are going to say, to live is Christ, to die is gain, then you and I are going to have to want to know him. Knowing Christ is gonna have to be the jewel of life for us. It's gonna have to be all that matters to us. We're gonna have to love him. So friends, the call of the text I believe this morning is very clear to us. We are to leave resume making behind. We are to leave confidence in the flesh behind. We're to do it by counting all things as a loss. compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. We are to love him for who he is and for what he's done for us. It's hard to imagine the joy we'll find from the things we leave behind. Let's pray. Father, you've been so good to us in so many ways, but we're thankful most of all for your son, Jesus Christ. For the death he died on the cross for our sins, for the resurrection from the grave which accomplished our justification, and for the spirit that now lives inside of us, we pray by the spirit that you would help us to count all things as loss compared to knowing you. For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.