About this sermon
Paul counted his former gains, his heritage and his righteousness under the law, as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. He wants to gain Christ and be found in him with the righteousness that comes from God through faith, and he presses on toward the goal. When believers love God first, every other love falls into its proper place, and their union with Christ in his death and resurrection becomes a witness to the world.
Sermon transcript
And then we’ll be primarily considering those middle verses surrounding 7 and 8. Paul talks about losing things, profits, and then down into his pushing forward, growing. But we’ll be considering those middle verses from like 7 through 12, 13 or so. We’ll read the whole chapter. context. So Philippians chapter 3. I’ll read starting verse 1 through the end of the chapter there. And let me remind us that indeed this is the Lord’s infallible and inerrant word to us. Let us receive it and hear it as such. Philippians chapter 3. 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. Though 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, of 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. 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 have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I might 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 in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Let those of us who are mature think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us, for many of whom I have told you often and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body. by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
Let’s pray together. Father indeed these are your words. So take this your word. Take the words of my mouth. the meditations of our collective hearts, and make them acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer, through Christ. Amen.
When the financial world fell apart about 11 years ago, I was actually working in Manhattan, working in New York when all that happened. And it was quite a dour time. Huge financial firms vaporized. It seemed like in an instant leaving thousands of people out of work in New York. And then the Madoff scandal broke and they’re probably still calculating the damage to people for over a lifetime because of his scandal. One of the casualties of that meltdown was a gentleman named Barry Fox. Barry worked for Bear Stearns, one of the financial firms that actually melted down.
And he actually loved working for them. Work was his life. When he got notice that he was let go, not long after that, he caught a subway to his high-rise apartment building. His apartment was on the 29th floor. He went home, up to his apartment, promptly hurled himself out of his window.
Now, when things like that happen, or even large scale catastrophes, lots of truth gets set before us. Lots of things are revealed. I mean, it reminds us that we just don’t know what a day will bring forth. Things can be peaceable, calm. The next thing you know, your whole life is upended. We gain insight into the scripts by which we live. Our deepest beliefs come out in catastrophes. The values that drive us surface. The things we consider profitable, profits, gain, The things we count as true loss, right? A lot of these things are made manifest.
And obviously, for Barry Fox, his value, the thing he thought was great gain and profit, was tied to his job. Clearly, his job was very high in the hierarchy of things he valued and that he thought were profitable. And so to lose it, to lose that job was to actually reduce, in his own mind, his life to almost worthlessness. It wasn’t worth going on. And of course, he’s not alone in seeing things that way, in measuring gain and profits around something like paper with numbers on it, or what we have in our retirement or savings accounts, what things we possess. He’s not alone in thinking that.
In particular, in this text before us particularly, Paul asserts that to be in Jesus Christ, to come into saving union with Him, is to have your whole sense of what is profitable loss, to have our whole understanding of that reordered, to be changed fundamentally from what we as natural men and women might consider profit, consider gains, and consider losses. He says to come to know Jesus Christ by faith. is to have our sense and understanding of value radically reoriented and changed. To come into Christ tells us now what is truly valuable, profitable, and what isn’t. And all things needful for us, we gain in having Him, and nothing needless.
I love how Calvin begins his book three, his institutes. You know, in book one, he richly lays out the knowledge of God as creator. It just gives us great theology. He wrote his instruction manual for believers. He wanted to see, grow a knowledge of grace. Book one gives out the knowledge of God as creator. In book two, he turns to the knowledge of God as Redeemer. The work accomplished by Christ. And then in book three, he turns his attention to the disciple, to the believer. And how that wonderful work of God and Christ as Redeemer comes to be actually applied to us. How it actually becomes ours and something more than just rich knowledge. How accomplished redemption becomes applied redemption.
And as he begins book three, he makes a quick, careful qualification about value. In fact, he uses the word value in the actual title. Here’s what he says very early on, maybe the second sentence. He says, He’s about to talk about how all that wonderful blessing of the work of Christ becomes ours.
And he says, we must understand, though, first, that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, there’s only two possibilities in the universe, in Christ or outside of Christ. And so long as Christ remains separated outside of us and we separate from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us.
All that He possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with Him. To be in Christ is to have everything needful, everything valuable from life and eternity. To be outside of Him is to have what is a loss, ultimately. Eternal loss. As Paul said, our sense of profit, gain, and loss It’s changed when we are in Christ. So let’s just pull on two strands here from this passage. In having Christ, we have everything. In not having him, or so we can lose everything, we’ve actually gained even more. It’s one of the summations of what Paul is saying in the central part of this passage.
So let’s look at how our perception changes by being in Christ and then how our pattern of life and existence actually changes from being in Christ. So perception is how we see differently in Christ. verses 1 to 11 generally orient around that, and the second part is the pattern, right? It’s about 12 through the end, but we’ll just pull out some things. You see it in verse 7, right?
But whatever gain I had, I count it 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 have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.
So, after the first few verses of chapter three where Paul is encouraging these Philippian believers, he’s encouraging them from jail, from prison, encouraging them to keep on rejoicing, warns them about Judaizers, those who would mutilate the flesh, those who would lift up Jewish cultural identity as essential to Christian identity, They’re warning about that. He slows down and he takes aim at this false idea of religious, Jewish religious or even cultural identity and achievement, right? He says, look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. Watch out for them. We have our own form in our day. Watch out for them.
Why, Paul? Because verse 3 says, for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. Watch out for the folks who say you have to be physically, socially, culturally, ethically circumcised because that and this point of redemption. History has changed. It was always pointed to the true circumcision. We are ones who have true circumcision, he says in verse 3. What is that, Paul?
We worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Jesus Christ and put no confidence in our ethnic badges, our cultural identity. regardless of how central it was to the economy of God’s work in the past that Christ has come. It’s not about the external badges. It’s about the true badge of being in Christ, worshiping and glorifying him in the spirit.
So we don’t have confidence in the flesh. It’s not the grounds for our deepest sense of who we are. And if you think they are, Paul says, he says, look, if you really think those things matter, I have more grounds to boast in them than you do. And I don’t count them as gains.
There’s a work in New York, you know, the young Christian women were looking for three H guys, they said. That is, they wanted a handsome, Harvard-educated guy with high income. Those were the badges for a young man worth allowing to court, a date, or whatever you want to call it. Paul’s saying, if you think those badges matter, man, I’m like a 5 or 6 age guy. I’m a Hebrew of Hebrews. I’m holy and have all these other ages.
He’s saying, if you think you have value in those cultural markers and badges, I actually have more. And yet, those things, the value of them has been reordered. He says, whatever I had as gain. And people consider those kinds of things gain. Valuable to have. And the tricky thing always is, they are good things. Paul’s upbringing was a blessed heritage. Those are good markers. They are good central things that God in his kindness and providence gave to the Apostle Paul as well as many others.
And yet, in Jesus Christ, he looks at those things and goes, they are worthless compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Physical circumcision was good. To them were given the covenants and the oracles of God. The blessings of his promises were carried and transmitted to the rest of the world through this covenant people. And yet Christ has come. We who are in him by faith have so much more than those kinds of ethnic cultural privileges.
So much so that we can look at those things and go, they were good, but they are like us compared to what we have in Christ. He’s making a comparative statement. You know, it’s a, it’s easy to get on Judaizers. It’s easy to get on people who are so transparently, we’re finding some sense of deep significance. You know, in our day, because religion and race and culture have been separated so much, where kin and creed don’t line up, where I can’t see your last name and know what faith or tradition you belong to, those things have been separated. We don’t have a stronger sense of how powerful this kind of identification was in ancient civilization. don’t have as keen or acute a grasp of it was powerful defining reality to be Jewish and to know the history of what God had given to you and how he had used you and that nouns for Christ to come and to basically say those things were types pointing to greater reality antitypes that they were part of promise fulfilled in Christ and don’t have any kind of saving significance. To see that is, I’m sure for many, to have your whole sense of who you are destabilized. Paul makes the comparison. He says, I counted as lost these things for the sake of Christ, whatever I had gained. in verse 7.
Another interesting thing, you move, you live in a big city, I’ve lived for years out in New York, when I lived in New York, what you find in New York City particularly, Manhattan, is a bunch of people, especially young people, who are running away from small town life for the big time.
They think their small town they grew up in was a great place to be from, not a great place to be. And so they were looking to make it big, to move up with all the opportunities of the great big global city of New York. So they were actually, their sense of identity was defined by running away from the suffocating, limiting small town life of their youth. They were running, so they were defined, they literally would define themselves as, I’m from there. They’re running away.
And then I moved back to small town. Western Pennsylvania, where so many revel in the provinciality of small town life and are suspicious. The big town people think they’re better, right? In one case, cultural identity was defined by rejecting or running away from it. You’ve got these big cities, the coastal cities, the giant cities. Come back into the small town, it’s defined by resting and reveling in.
People in my family are proud that they’ve never lived anywhere else than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That’s grounds for boasting. Cultural identity is found in the kind of provincial sense. Right? So in one case, one is running away from, and defined by that. In the other case, resting and reveling in. Paul does neither of those. He’s relativizing them.
He can boast in his identities that God has given him as a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the tribe of Jeff Benjamin, as Pharisee, blameless concerning the law. He can actually assert those things as truth. But yet say all of that, as good and true as it is, relative to knowing Jesus Christ and being him. The true circumcision, one in which we boast in glory of Christ by the Spirit, far better than the physical circumcision.
He can wear it lightly. He didn’t lose any of those things. He wears it lightly. He can take it off. It doesn’t define him. So he doesn’t reject the reality of those things. He doesn’t revise his background. But he doesn’t rest in it either. He doesn’t run away from it. He doesn’t rest in it. He compares it to his true identity in Christ. He says, I have physical circumcision, but here’s the real circumcision. The circumcision, verse 3, where we glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh. I have the fleshly markers, but I have no confidence in them.
So recognizing the truest sense of who we are, how God has named us as being in Jesus Christ and having all the benefits of redemption come to us, while being given in God’s providence these other badges and markers, to recognize what is first and what is truly profitable helps us to actually appreciate properly all of the other blessings and badges and things we have. To recognize the true circumcision helps us to identify and recognize whatever good there is in our natural circumcision. Just like when we know that our deepest marital satisfaction, our deepest marital union satisfaction, is in our union with Christ. Our earthly marriages are only strengthened by recognizing the deepest union we have. Because then we don’t put too much weight on the earthly institution. We don’t demand that it give us what only Christ himself can give us.
That’s why spouses should say to each other in loving ways, you’re not enough. And that’s a good thing. Jesus Christ is enough. Single should say that. Whether God gives us spouses or not, Christ is enough. Marriage is a wonderful thing. It keeps the world going. But our union with Christ is where our life is found. And so we can accept The natural marriage. Better, and receive it as God’s good gift. Good imperfect gift. Imperfect gift. Because we have first accepted the greater marriage.
I love C.S. Lewis when he’s talking about lovers. He says this, he says, when I’ve learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. Insofar as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed, but increased. Augustine talks about the order of love. We cannot love earthly objects the way that they should be loved if we do not love God first.
For when we love God first, all other loves are put in their proper place, therefore we love them best. So when we understand our true circumcision, our true spiritual circumcision and position in Christ, we can understand the other circumcisions of our lives, the other benefits and badges and things. We can properly relativize them. in light of our primary badge in defining reality of being in Christ. We can accept the other things for what they are. So our sense of value, gain, profit gets radically reordered.
I don’t want to diminish the strength of Paul’s language. Relative to Christ, counts those things that were gain as loss and indeed in verse 8 I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish. Paul doesn’t know rhetorical restraint. In order that I may gain Christ that was the great goal.
But look at how it reframes not just his way of seeing. Look how union with Christ, being in Christ, doesn’t just change the way we see life, particularly our earthly identities, culture, the things God has given to us. Look how it doesn’t just reorder our perception. It actually pulls us in. Being united to Christ pulls us into this new pattern. Not just new perceptions, but a new pattern.
You see it in verse 9 and 10, right? And be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes with the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. That’s basically Paul’s explaining our justification there. But verse 10, here’s the new pattern.
This happens. We come into Christ. that 10, I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Here’s the new pattern of the person who is in Jesus Christ. We live out this drama of death to resurrection. Suffering, and on the other side of that, life.
That’s the pattern and drama that we participate in with Christ. Because Paul later says, imitate me. Your life is going to be like this. Imitate me. Follow me. He didn’t have books you pick up and read on discipleship and leadership. There were no Skype conferences with a mentor. You literally had to watch people, follow them around, and imitate their life patterns. And Paul’s saying, his life? was in it lived out of participation in Christ, which imitated the pattern of death or suffering and resurrection life on the other side.
That’s why he said to the Corinthians, as they were in their suffering, we have, what is it? Where is it? We have this sentence of death. In chapter 1 verse 9, St. Corinthians, we have a sentence of death. That’s how hard Paul’s life was at that moment. We know his badges. We know the suffering he went through. And he’s speaking to other people going through various kinds of sufferings, right? And suffering is part and parcel of abiding in a living, groaning creation that is not yet what it’s going to be one day.
We have the sentence of death in ourselves. Why, Paul? Why did you have a sentence of death? I thought we were supposed to have victory and triumph. We have the sentence of death in us so that we might not trust in ourselves, but in the God who raises from the dead.
He knew in the depths of pain and suffering that he was being prepared and refined. When we have our crutches of comfort, physical health, and financial health and stability, when those planks are pulled out from us, as well as when relationships fail, And there’s just all manner of hardship and suffering as you are one, united to Christ. We have those things. Our trust is being purified. We’re being cast upon the mercy of God. And yet we are not nihilist. That is not the end of the story.
We have this sentence of death written in us so that we might not trust in ourselves, but in the God who raises from the dead. The pattern of our life in Christ is one of deep, deep, deep, deep suffering, because we are in a fallen world, and it does not avoid us. Deep, deep, deep suffering. But resurrection life, at the personal level, but also at the collective level. This is how Christians can look suffering and death in the face, and not fail. Because we know There’s life after death and suffering. We’re in Christ.
So we’re not to be the kind of people who go about our life knowing this is our pattern. I might know him and the fellowship of the sufferings, the power of his resurrection. We’re not to be those who go through our life, you know, carefully managing it so as to avoid suffering. to be safe little shopkeepers who just want to make sure our life is as comfortable and middle-class American as possible. That is not the calling. That is not the pattern to be lived out.
I love the example from Rodney Stark’s book on why Christianity exploded in the first few centuries. He talks about that great plague in the second century where a second century Rome, it was a plague that wiped out a quarter to a third of everybody. You could read it, probably Google it, probably Stark, there’s probably other accounts of it. Right, it wiped out about a quarter to a third of the population over 15 years. So it was huge, it was massive, right? And what was interesting is people recorded and recounted how the Christians were known for caring for the neglected family members in the streets.
Pagan families, whenever one of their children or one of their household members showed marks of the plague, would often take them and throw them outside in the street. Christians would go by and collect them and take them into their homes and put themselves at risk to love their neighbor. So they would take on greater suffering for the neglected as well as their own. They created basically the first kinds of social care networks voluntarily. Now you might think that that would have wiped out the Christian population because they took on greater risk. They went down to the depths of suffering with others and exposed themselves in the process.
But actually, Christianity exploded, continued to grow and explode. Because what happened is minimal care actually reduced deaths. So as over 15 years, the population of Romans declined, the population of Christians grew. That I might know him and the fellowship of his sufferings with others and the power of the resurrection. New life came in dramatic, numerical ways, even as death and suffering were embraced by Christians.
That’s a little bit of what it looks like in a collective sense. This happens to us personally, too. We don’t just perceive these things, changes in what’s valuable, what is not, what is profit, what is loss, our lives actually are order, we live out a new pattern. Suffering is not something to be raged against as having no redemptive value. We know that it is something that God and His great redemptive purposes in Christ, as we are united to Him, uses. So our suffering is not apart from the power of the resurrection.
We have to stop here. Let’s stop. That’s just one point. Let’s pray. Let’s embrace suffering and power of resurrection. United in Jesus Christ, we have all we need. Nothing needless. Let’s embrace that with Paul. Imitate him as he imitates Christ in this. Let’s pray together. Father, take your word. Confirm it to our hearts.
Give us the grace to embrace these truths and these realities and to live them with joy. And to see not only our own lives changed, but as we bear witness to one who has died and suffered, that his elect might live. As we bear witness to that in our own lives, may others see and come to believe. May you draw others to yourself. as we imitate out of participation in the Savior’s work, saving work for us.
Amen. Let’s take our hymnal. Of course, all of this, Paul says we died with Christ in His death, he tells the Roman Christians. So the cross, when Christ died, is the center, the historical, redemptive center of our own participation in dying with Him to be raised in newness of life. So let’s sing about that, the cross of Jesus, in hymn number 177.
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