Supassing Worth

Passage

Philippians 3:8–9 ESV

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 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—

Introduction

Last week, Pastor Andy did a wonderful job introducing the first half of Philippians 3 which is one of the richest passages in the Bible regarding our relationship with Christ. This is the relationship on which all other relationships in the church are founded on. And we cannot address correctly the subject of loving one another until we have thought out what it means to love the Lord our God. The great commandment gives us a clear order of priorities in terms of our relationships: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” These are not two independent commandments but rather one flow of thought, intricately woven together so that you don’t know where one half of the commandment bleeds into the other. If we are truly and authentically loving God, then love for people is the natural by-product of that love. The apostle John makes this point abundantly clear:

1 John 4:20 ESV

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

It would seem there are a fair number of people, perhaps all of us, who fail to see this connection. And just as our love for others flows out of our love for God, our lack of love for others, our hatred, our disdain, our ambivalence is directly related to our lack of love for God. When there is something wrong in terms of our relationship with God, there is some impact, seen or unseen, on our relationship with others.

Body

And so this morning, I wanted to look at the first half of this equation and consider what it takes to love the Lord with all that we are. If this is an area of your relationship with God that you would like to work on, there are three questions that I would like for us to consider.

1. What does it mean to know Christ?

2. What is that knowledge worth to you?

3. What are the benefits of that knoweldge?

If you are not a Christian today, these questions might not seem that relevant to you but actually they are incredibly important for you as well and I’m so grateful that you are here with us. If you would entertain the thought, that there is a God that has created you and now desires a loving relationship with you, that hopefully means something to you. Namely, you would like to know this God, maybe you have some questions for Him, some concerns you would like to address. Well, this journey of discovering God comes through knowing the Son that He gave to the world as a message of His love. This is the reason why Jesus makes this claim in the gospel of John:

John 14:7 ESV

If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Based simply on the things that Jesus says about himself, CS Lewis, who became a Christian much later in life after being an avowed atheist, wrote this about the decision that each of us has to make.

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

For those of us who have chosen the last option, we enter into a life long journey of discovering who our Savior and comingg to know Him. So what does it mean to know Christ?

We know that in the Jewish language, the use of the word know has a wide range of meaning but usually when it is used in relation to a person, it’s talking about knowledge at an intimate level, what we might describe as experiential knowledge. It’s the difference between knowing about someone through secondary sources as opposed to meeting a person face to face and having a genuine relationship with that person. The first human relationship found in the Scriptures highlights this idea of knowing someone intimately.

Genesis 4:1 ESV

Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.”

When Paul is talking about knowing Christ, it’s readily apparent that he is not writing about simply getting to know more about Jesus doctrinally or theologically but he is describing a type of knowlege by which he might gain Christ and be found in Him. I’ll touch on this more later but the fact of the matter is, you could know everyting there is to know factually about Jesus but never draw closer to Him or even have a real love for Him.

The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards helps parse out the connection between knowing the facts about Jesus and tranlating that into a genuine personal knowledge of Him. In his understanding of the human soul, Edward saw two principal parts to it. One part he called the understanding which was responsible for perception and the collection of data. And the other part he called our affections and this was responsible for our likes and dislikes. We all see, hear, and taste roughtly the same things in life but our hearts are drawn to different places. Let me give you an example, chicken feet. Some of us in this room love it and I will grant you that there is a certain tastiness to it but I cannot get over the fact that I am eating the feet of a chicken and so I am not inclined to enjoy this dish. Although we all have the same understanding of what this dish is and how it tastes, our inclination and therefore our affections go in different directions. Now what does this have to do with God?

Well, it has everything to do with our relationship to Him. In terms of our understanding, we all know that God sacrificed His only Son on the cross for the sins of the world. We all know that Christ lived the life that we should have lived. And He died the death that we should have died for us. We all know this to be the Gospel but if it ends with just our understanding and does not stir our affections and our passions, can we say that we have a true knowledge of Christ? Edwards would say that the answer to that question is no based on the following reason: “There must be light in the understanding as well as an affected fervent heart; or where there is heat without light, there can be nothing divine or heavenly in that heart: so, on the other hand, where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things.”

I believe that the main aim of the Gospel when understood correctly is to move the human heart to love God and to love our neighbors. In that way, the Gospel was meant to reorient our hearts to love certain things while at the same time learning to reprioritize the things that get in the way of fulfilling our heart’s desire. Edwards goes on to say that because love is the core emotion of the human heart, it dictates every other affection. Every human being is born to love and in this life we will find something or someone to love whether that be ourselves, our careers, our families, a hobby, or ultimately God. But what we don’t realize is the fact that what we love directly affects what we hate, what we find joy in, what we are fearful of, and every other emotion and passion. It’s not hard to see that if you love some thing, it naturally conflicts with other things. For example, if you are like me and you love the Golden State Warriors, even when they were really bad, you naturally develop a dislike for anything purple and gold, the hated Lakers. In a similar way, the more and more you love God, the more you come to despise sin because it creates separation from the one you love.

Isaiah 59:2 ESV

but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

This is the reason why the apostle Paul comes to the conclusion that everything he has accomplished apart from Christ, all the accolades the he has earned for himself is like a pile of dung in comparison to the surpassing value of knowing Jesus. He recognized that all these things were actually a hindrance to his relationship with God and it created this seismic shift in Paul’s perspective on life. The things that he valued so much prior to meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus, were now of no account. And this leads us to the second point, “What is knowing Christ worth to you?” In other words, what cost are you willing to pay in order to gain a deeper relationship with Him, to grow in greater intimacy with Christ? I wanted us to pause for a moment and think about the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. Is knowing Christ worth sacrificing your time, your finances, your energy? More importantly, is your relationship with Christ worth everything you own, everything you are, up to and including your life?

Whether we realize it or not, every relationship comes at a price. The deeper the relationship, the greater the cost. When me and Mira started dating, it was my final quarter of college and I ended up getting the worst grades I have ever recieved in my life. Yet it was a small price to pay for a chance to court my future wife. When you decide to get married you’re going to understand that relationships come at a price. You will lose some of you’re freedom, along with your time, and even some of your prior relationships. In very same manner, Paul lays out what he had to sacrifice in order to know Jesus. Essentially this is what the apostle was saying, I was born in the right family, went to the right school, I had the right career, and attained the highest position in that career. In today’s terms, he might say I went to Yale, graduated from Harvard Business, and now an executive at Google . How many of us could give up such power and prestige for a relationship with Christ. Paul not only gave it up, he states that he considers all these things rubbish in comparison to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus.

We know that Paul wrote this letter to the Philippians later in his life and by this time he had clearly experienced the cost of following Jesus and he describes this in detail.

2 Corinthians 11:24–28 ESV

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

Amazingly by his own calculations, whatever price he paid, it was well worth it. And though we may never get to the level of faith and sacrifice of the apostle Paul, we can all grow in our desire to know Christ at any expense by consciously prioritizing the importance of our relationship with Him. Otherwise circumstances around us will dictate to us how important Jesus is in our lives. Our careers, our education, family, friends, and just the busyness of life will compete with getting to know Christ.

1. It means that whenever I am called upon to choose between anything in this world and Christ, I choose Christ.

2. It means that I will deal with the things of this world in ways that draw me nearer to Christ so that I gain more of Christ and enjoy more of him by the way I use the world.

3. It means that I will always deal with the things of this world in ways that show that they are not my treasure, but rather show that Christ is my treasure.

4. It means that if I lose any or all the things this world can offer, I will not lose my joy or my treasure or my life, because Christ is all.

If you are not yet a believer, don’t waste too much time making a decision to follow Christ. Important relationships are not things that you hold off because you run the risk of missing the opportunity. Many people say that they will start a relationship with God or take faith more seriously later in life. It’s easy to make excuses like, I’ll get to it when I’m less busy with the family or when my career has taken off. There is nothing more urgent than building a relationship with Jesus as soon as possible. A genuine relationship with Christ is the most important thing than you can experience in this life. There is nothing that can compare to knowing him. The love, the joy, the peace of God, these are the things that a relationship with Christ provide in a way that the world could never do.

Conclusion

What is the benefit of knowing Christ so that in the process I gain Him? Well, at first it may not seem like a benefit but the end of the journey of faith is to you lose yourself and find all your worth and significance within your relationship to Christ. We’ve talked about our union with Christ and what it means to be found in Him. When God looks at you, He doesn’t see your sin and your flaws, He sees the righteousness of His perfect Son. This is why Paul finishes his thoughts in these verses with the statement, not having a righteousness of my own but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God.

Whne you look at all the things that Paul built His life on before Christ, He was building up his own sense of worth and significance, His own righteousness. And you might ask yourself, “What is so bad about that, why is it worthless?’’ Here’s what I believe, living for your own righteousness is a product of the original sin of Adam and Eve. If you remember the temptation of Satan as the first man and woman stood before the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, if you eat of this tree, you will become like God. And in part, Satan was right, getting to choose for ourselves our own good and our own evil makes us like God. But what Satan didn’t add was that it also makes us like him. When we look at the resulting sin that comes after the Fall, we see Cain and Abel both giving their sacrifices to God.

God, using his own standard of righteousness, decides to recieve Abel’s sacrifice over Cain. But Cain can’t accept God’s judgment of what’s good and acceptable, maybe he thought it was arbitrary, unfair. Why wasn’t his sacrifice just as good if not better than his brothers? Then having decided that he was right in his own judgment, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him. The apostle Paul would also make that very same mistake, He had also built up an entire life of things that he had deemed to be righteous, things tha gave him a sense of worth and significance, and when Jesus and his followers came and threatened all of that, he too rose up in anger and looked on with pleasure as Stephen became the first martyr of hte church.

The ability to choose good and evil gives us the flexibility to choose our own sense of righteousness like God but it comes with the curse of Satan. It has the capacity to turn us into horrific monsters. During my years in seminary, our professors warned us about the dangers of post-modernism where truth would be made relative. When truth is made relative, everyone becomes their own arbiter of good and evil. It is a return to that first sin of Adam and Eve. And we’ve seen the fall of mankind when we are the authors of our own righteousness. The culture wars between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, masked vs unmasked, vocal protestors vs those who chose to remain quiet. Everyone assumes their choices are the right one and then their anger rises up when their righteousness is threatened.

When we come to know Christ deeply, intimately, it breaks the curse of the original sin and the hold that Satan has over us becasue no longer do we care about our own rightesness because we are able to see clearly that it gets us no where but further away from God. Knowing Christ, you come to realize their is only one who is good, one who is pure, one whose righteousness truly matters. It’s Christ and him crucified. He is the one standard of righteousness that leads to our peace and the peace of this world.