Philippians (Page 3)
Scripture’s own sense of humor gets real attention here, evident in Paul’s sarcasm toward saints who claim a perfection they plainly don’t have. Real perfection, paradoxically, means confessing that we lack it rather than achieving flawlessness. Humility, laying claim only to Christ’s perfection rather than one’s own, is where this whole passage actually lands.
Already-and-not-yet, a pattern threaded through this whole series, gets one more careful treatment here, traced across the Old Testament, the Gospels, and ordinary Christian life alike. Paul’s own athletic imagery, running a race, frames what pursuing Christ actually looks like in practice. Winning that race, the sermon insists, happens through sacrificial service rather than simply outpacing others.
Paul abandons every ground for boasting specifically in order to gain something surpassing: the glory of Christ himself. That glory includes Christ’s divinity, a real redefinition of what humanity itself is, his own perfection, and sufferings borne vicariously on believers’ behalf. Ephesians 2 supplies the fuller theological account of what that abandoned boasting is traded for.
Paul’s own journey to Philippi, recounted briefly, sets up a fuller outline of the letter as a whole: encouragement, rebuke, and warning woven together rather than kept in separate sections. The epistle’s real purpose, this sermon argues in summary, is joy in the risen Christ, the thread running underneath every one of those three modes. Nothing in the letter, read this way, is disconnected from that central purpose.
Glorification gets its own careful definition here, both Biblical and catechetical, before the sermon argues the resurrection should actively mold ordinary Christian life, well beyond remaining a distant future doctrine. 2 Corinthians 4-5 supplies Paul’s own sustained meditation on exactly that shaping. Christ’s resurrection, this series has argued before and argues again here, is the real answer to Ecclesiastes’ vanity.
Philippians 3:8-10’s careful structure sets up an already-and-not-yet account of sanctification, neither fully accomplished nor merely future. Paul’s own knowledge of Christ is described as covenantal, comparable to marriage rather than to acquiring information. Hosea and Jeremiah’s own covenant language supplies the Old Testament vocabulary for exactly that kind of intimate, binding knowledge.
Sanctification gets both a Biblical and a catechetical definition here, distinguishing its definitive, once-for-all aspect from its ongoing, progressive one, a distinction several incorrect popular ideas about sanctification collapse. Hebrews 12 supplies the endurance language that fills out the progressive side. God’s own act precedes ours at every point, the sermon insists, which is what actually makes the elect ‘holy ones’ in the first place.
Philippians 3:9-11 amounts to a compressed seminar in doctrine, moving through justification, sanctification, and glorification in just a few verses. Justification by faith alone anchors the whole sequence, tested against Luke 5’s healing of the paralytic as a narrative instance of the same principle. Christ’s own righteousness and faithfulness, rather than the believer’s, are what the seminar actually teaches.
Jacob and Esau’s infamous deal over the birthright gets its real ramifications traced out here, read alongside Matthew 11:12’s difficult language of the kingdom being seized. Philippians 3:7-14 shows Paul willing to give up everything to seize Christ, treated as the church’s actual inheritance. What Esau traded away carelessly, Paul pursues with everything he has.
Paul boasts about his own credentials in 3:4-6, but sarcastically, a rhetorical move this sermon takes seriously as deliberate irony rather than genuine self-promotion. The arrogance of evangelists more generally comes under scrutiny alongside Paul’s own performance of it. Christ’s cross, in the end, supplies the only boast believers are actually given, and it isn’t one they can take credit for.