ES/PHIL/24 Philippians 3:12–16
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7 But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. 8 Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; 10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, 11 if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. 13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
15 Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. 16 Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us be of the same mind.
You might think it odd that I speak of New Year when 8 months have gone, and 4 months to the next one but it is to illustrate a point now that we know where we are with those things we said we would change. How did we do?! For when a New Year beckons it is a time to reflect on where we have come from to where we are going. Reflection is good as long as we do not linger there too long for we should always be moving forward towards the goal of the upward call of God, the joy of meeting and greeting our Lord Jesus Christ and being with Him forever.
With a New Year comes New Year Resolutions. Did you make any? You know, those annual decisions to slim down, shape up, sort through, and generally get our lives back in order? There’s something about starting a new year that drives us to make resolutions. We like the idea of leaving behind an old year, with its mistakes and frustrations, and beginning afresh. Of course we know that New Year’s Resolutions are like friends. They are easier to make than to keep. And a New Year’s Resolution usually goes in one year and out the next.” Morgan, R. J. (2001). Nelson’s Annual Preacher’s Sourcebook (2002 Edition., p. 396). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
This is what this passage is about. Except not just at New Years but with New Days. The same excitement that comes with New Years should be how it is everyday for this is the day the Lord has made and we will rejoice in it. It is good to start the day well. It is also good to end it well.
One of the practices I have is at the end of most days is to reflect on what went well that day, what didn’t go well and if I had the day again what I would do differently – all this in the space of 1 minute. This makes it do-able and it is only between God and me. Each day then is considered thoughtfully and not mindlessly. This should also lead to greater communication with God and asking Him for help in the coming day so that there will be more in the things that went well than those that didn’t. We lose too much of what goes on in a day. Don’t most of us have trouble remembering the previous day?
Paul is full of energy, he was not one of being passive and let God do it. Paul expected God to be at work as he moved forward. He knew that God permitted him into the race qualifying him for the race he had to run. Of course, we know that none of us have reached perfection including Paul, including me, including you but what is expected is that we grow in Christ. We are all on a journey or as Paul would say; a race.
Paul is keen to press on to lay hold of the fullness of that which has been given us. We must now become what we are.
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 31: Galatians / Ephesians / Philippians / Colossians / Philemon Recognize Who and Where You are
We are caught in tension. The demand is that we live in the now as those who have “died with Christ” to sin, yet are still sinners. We have been reckoned by God as righteous and He has accepted us by our faith in Christ. Yet we are in fact unrighteous and any claim we make to righteousness is “as filthy rags.”
We are in a tension, a struggle between what we are now and what we will be, between what God says of us now and what we are. In all this we are drawn into a closer relationship with Christ for he has already made us His own.
The result of a closer relationship with Christ is that we don’t want to have anything in our lives that will mar it. This means that we start to deal with those things that have long been neglected because they are part of us. So it is time to put down the bad habits in our lives; we have to be intentional, deliberate about it. Make New Year Resolutions but start today, don’t wait four months to create new and good habits but these things only happen when we are more interested in our relationship with Christ.
There are three things needed to get to this place:
1. First we need to realise how good a Saviour we have. We remember His birth, coming in human form, born in a stable to poor parents, living an exemplary life doing good among the people and teaching repentance and then dying in our place because of our sins. There is no better passage of Scripture for this than:
2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
3 He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
How can we not be moved when we consider all He has done for us? Constantly remember His love for us. This should spur us, who are His, to better habits. We love because He first loved us.
2. The second things is to realise we have to answer for our daily lives, for our moment-by-moment thoughts and actions. And if we know that we have to give an account of everything to God life takes on a different perspective:
9 Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 11 Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences.
Shouldn’t this thought change the way we live? Well, it should. It was effective in changing the way Paul lived day-by-day for he himself admits he has not attained perfection. It seems that it took effort and daily rededication to Christ, of knowing Him and making Him known. We are then motivated to push forward and think of ways we can do better, to make the Gospel known. Paul was all about Christ remember; ‘for me to live is Christ’. How close are we to this? Is our living for Christ or is it for ourselves?
God is watching us and this very knowledge is a strong motivator. And just as when a manager at work is watching us we actually do some work – so it is with the fact that God is always watching and therefore we will work for Him and not do anything that would bring shame upon ourselves. We should get to the place where our love for our Lord is such that we do everything in our power to see that we do not offend Him because we love Him. The Psalmist understood this. It was His love for the Lord that made him say:
11 Your word I have hidden in my heart,
That I might not sin against You.
3. And the third thing that spurs us on to better habits is to realise that we no longer have to have bad habits for we have been set free from the bondage of sin, that we no longer have to sin. There is no half-way house.
There’s a term being banded about and you may have heard it: A ‘gay Christian’ or ‘LGBTQ Christian’. Why would you wear such a title? A lying Christian. Would you wear this with pride? Just because we may have an inclination to such sin? How about a worldly Christian? Is that something we should own just because the world gets more of our attention than it should? Of course not. When we become a Christian what we were is dealt with and we have been given new life.
How do I know this?
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
We are now Christians. We have been made perfect in His sight. Of course, the tension is there, we still are not perfect, not one of us. It is not to say the struggle is over. We will never achieve perfection in this life for when we think we have got it sorted some other fault of ours raises its head and most likely in areas we are not even looking at such as ego, pride or coveting or the old one crops up in an unexpected way. This is important to realise for some think that perfection is possible but, and this is not to be used as an excuse, it will not be so in this lifetime:
8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
However, we are clothed in His righteousness; we have been made right with God and that cannot change. Christ has made us new creatures but we confess humbly that we have not become in fullness what Christ wants us to be. We are on the road to holiness.
So whilst we normally wait for the New Year to make resolutions we needn’t do so. Every day is a new day, a day to start afresh for:
22 Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed,
Because His compassions fail not.
23 They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
Paul mentions two further things that we need to take account of in Phil 3.13:
1. Forget the past and
2. Strain forward
The Christian, drawn by the powerful impulsion of a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, is uniquely equipped to leave the past behind. Yet, how many of us do not. The dimension of our past that continues to drag us back, weigh us down, and make our movement stumbly at best, is our sense of failure, our guilt over past sin, our pain from past hurts.
Very often we find ourselves remembering the past but it is this very thing that can prove to be a hindrance for moving forward, it is attached to us like a ball and chain. We all have regrets. If someone says they have no regrets they are liars. The best we can do is to learn and move forward. If it is sin then we have the promise of Scripture:
9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
We need to accept the forgiveness given to us by God. The past can always haunt us but it can be more to do with not forgiving oneself. This itself is an inverted kind of pride. We are always reminded of the past by Satan, the accuser, and he is normally right that we have sinned but as far as God is concerned, once we have asked for forgiveness, it is forgotten, buried, separated from us as far as the east is from the west, and sunk into the depth of the sea where a sign says: 'no fishing'. Then comes the wonder of knowing: 'I'm forgiven'. It’s time to tell the devil and yourself; you’re forgiven.
The past is not just about bad things it is also about our thinking of the good things of the past that can cause us to rely on the past’s achievements but this does not prepare us for the future. Remembering, however, how God has brought us through things in the past also helps us to trust Him for the future and we needn’t face the future with fear but with faith. Once we have accomplished goals it is time to make new ones. The winner at the Olympics or Formula 1 or football games celebrate the win but soon they are back training. One victory is in the bag but it is not enough another is reached for. A sports person will ignore all else in pursuit of one thing and it is the point of us forgetting what is behind and reaching forward. As Theirry Henry on a TV advert today said: ‘there’s always next week’. Something we should know about sports people is that you have to maintain fitness. You can slack for two weeks before you need to get back to training. The third week becomes a hard slog. We have to keep going forward in our Christian life or we lose momentum and we lose focus.
These things, though, only apply to those who have already put their trust in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. This same new life and eternal life is on offer to all who, even today, decide to follow Jesus. He has done everything for you to be reconciled with God by dying on a cross in extreme pain to pay the penalty for your rebellion against God - for all of us have been in rebellion against Him - and then, as I have said so many times before historically He rose from the dead. The facts are indisputable. Now it needs to get from the head to our hearts.
We want to be those who can say with Paul at the end of our lives:
7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing.
Let us press towards the goal of the prize ceremony in Heaven.
Bibliography
Bibliography
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Dunnam, M. D., & Ogilvie, L. J. (1982). Galatians / Ephesians / Philippians / Colossians / Philemon (Vol. 31). Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.
Hughes, R. K. (2007). Philippians: the fellowship of the gospel. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.
Leadership Ministries Worldwide. (1996). Galatians–Colossians. Chattanooga, TN: Leadership Ministries Worldwide.
Osborne, G. R. (2017). Philippians: Verse by Verse. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
Runge, S. E. (2011). High Definition Commentary: Philippians. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
Walvoord, J. F., & Zuck, R. B., Dallas Theological Seminary. (1985). The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.
Exported from Logos Bible Software, 19:44 12 August 2018.