Philippians 3
The surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
There once was a certain man who had it all. He was at the top of his field and respected by all his peers. He had the full support of his superiors, and was given license to travel and do his work wherever and whenever he saw fit. Everyone who was important knew who he was, and he was everywhere the important things were happening.
One day he had a terrible road accident. He fell off his horse and even went blind because of it for a little while. People say that he was never the same afterwards. Soon after, he chucked it all in. He gave up his old job. He started bagging out his old bosses. He was selling arts and crafts in markets just to make ends meet. He was attacked by mobs, chucked out of towns, thrown overboard sinking ships, and eventually locked up in prison.
But the strange thing was that when he was in prison, he found he had never been happier.
Why is this letter – St Paul’s letter to the Philippians – so filled with rejoicing?
The key part of today’s passage, the third chapter, is found in verse 8:
I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
It is a passage that challenges all our assumptions about “the good life”. St Paul is saying to his church family back in Philippi, and to us on the other side of the world 2,000 years later, “I’ve seen it all. And if you want to know Jesus, follow in his footsteps”.
There is a great tendency amongst us humans to think that a blessing from God is something material. Say I had a scale up here on a whiteboard. On one end is a big bucket of money. On the other end is a broken leg. If I asked you to think of “blessing”, which end would you point to? I don’t know if anyone would point to the broken leg!
Yet St Paul is saying here that for all the good he had – a member of God’s covenant community from birth, of a godly family, doing all the right things, and indeed zealous in wanting to do the right things, too – it was all loss for the sake of knowing Christ. There was no value in it. It was worthless; it was garbage. He even warns the Philippians: watch out for those people who place value in material things. He doesn’t hold back:
Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.
The true blessing is knowing Christ Jesus. Being blessed is being able to sing the old hymn:
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
St Paul is teaching us how God gives us this blessing: it is by leading us on the same path Jesus walked.
Hopefully you remember a little of last weeks’ reading from Philippians, when the apostle wrote about Christ in these words:
6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
The path of Jesus is one where he had it all, and chucked it all away so that he could walk the path of suffering in this life. In doing so, Christ defeated the power of suffering, and has opened the gate to everlasting life to all who place their faith in him.
It is not a very sexy appeal to the faith: Christianity is to follow Jesus through suffering into glory. Yet that is what we are doing. And the apostle recognises that in his own life, and he is rejoicing! And he is encouraging his brothers in the church to rejoice, too! Indeed, so flush is he with this heavenly joy that he says that to tell them to rejoice “is no trouble to me”.
This can be hard for us to wrap our heads around. But there are a few reflections I want to share with you that might help.
First, consider the broad strokes of the general pattern that St Paul is pointing to, and see if it lines up with your lived experience: you were in a good place materially, but then you had to sacrifice it for the good of something else. Maybe you have or had a loved one that required all of your attention; you had to “empty yourself” for the sake of sacrificial love, just like Jesus did for you. Maybe there was a moment or a season where you were surrounded with strong anti-Christian sentiment and you had to sacrifice your good social standing for the sake of your Lord? You had something – and you gave it up for the sake of someone else, either a fellow human, or Jesus himself.
I say these things because it can be difficult to know if our suffering is the same as Christ's. I would hate to think that I am hard done by because of my own silly fault, and not because I am following my Lord. But I have come to think that if I do have that worry, it is more likely than not that I am actually following my Lord and sharing in his sufferings. And this is a great comfort and security to me, and, I pray, for you. If we think we have been silly, have we actually been silly? Or is it only in the eyes of the world that we have been silly, when in fact we have been faithful, and God is with us?
This is the first reflection: that while our sufferings might not line up perfectly with those of Christ’s, they follow the same general themes and patterns, and so we can be assured we are sharing in those of his. Secondly, there is the promise that they lead to something far better, and this is where St Paul takes us at the end of this chapter.
Talking about sharing in the suffering of Christ so that he may gain the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, St Paul writes:
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him … that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Suffering is not the end result of our faith in Christ. It is merely the gate through which we pass; the gate to something far greater than all the wealth of this world. When we speak of the resurrection of the dead, we speak of something so vastly incredible and gloriously mysterious we cannot even properly conceive it. The resurrection – a literal, bodily resurrection to a glorious and perfect body that will never fade and is free from all sin, a body that does not need faith to see God because it can see him perfectly – is the great promise of God to us and our great hope in him. This is the goal to which St Paul is directing all his efforts:
But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
It may not be very trendy in our modern, enlightened age. But the resurrection is the doctrine to which we must hold, especially in times of suffering. Christ’s resurrection from the dead shows us that our sufferings in this world prove that we are following him. And if we are following him, the resurrection is the place he is leading us.
And so as we continue our pilgrim journey through this life, with its attendant suffering and glimmering trinkets, let us continually recall the words of the suffering apostle: rejoice in the Lord! Let us continually recall “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”, to walk with him and to talk with him and to hear him call me his own. Let us “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”, the resurrection to eternal life, to eternal bliss with God and his saints in the glorified bodies he has promised to us. In all things, remember where God is leading you, and the priceless treasure of his Son he has given to you. It is no trouble to me and is safe for you for me to continually say: rejoice in the Lord!