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Brothers, you and I exist in this world for one primary reason: that is to know our Lord Jesus Christ. Knowing him and beholding his glory is our greatest good. It is the thing that we were made for, and all other pursuits in this life are worthless compared to the total pursuit of knowing Jesus Christ our Lord.
That’s a challenging word. Never mind for just a minute that we’re talking about Jesus. When you hear Paul say that the most important thing in life is to know a person, and that your purpose in this life is to know this person better every day and to pursue knowledge of his person with your whole heart, you might feel conflicted. At the risk of indulging in a stereotype, some of us men imagine that we are very good at getting things done, but not naturally very good at knowing people. It’s our wives who seem to have been made for relationships and who are very good at that face-to-face, emotional connectedness with people that we think of as knowing a person deeply. You might even be tempted to think that knowing someone very deeply is an inherently feminine thing. I hope you don’t think that, but that’s certainly an idea in our culture. Our wives are right to encourage us to do better. A man who is capable of making and mending things, but isn’t skilled at living in relationship with other people is deficient as a man. But at the same time, it’s true that men were made to be, in a sense, garden-facing. We’re mission oriented—oriented toward the world in a way that our wives are not. We engage very naturally with the world of ideas and politics and spreadsheets and machines. But the idea that your purpose on this earth is to know someone very well might not fill your heart with excitement.
Now add in the fact that this person who you were made to know is Jesus Christ, the creator of the universe, and it seems that the problem only grows. I have a category for pressing on to know my wife better all the time. But often I’m not very good at knowing even her, who I see and hear and touch every day. How can I know Jesus, who I have no direct access to through my senses? I believe that he died to save me and that my purpose is to serve and worship him. But what does it even mean to know him or to “press on” to know him better?
As we look at this passage, I hope that we’ll see that knowing Christ is certainly not a feminine thing, and it is not a passive thing. It is not even, primarily, an emotional thing (although there is an emotional dimension to it). It is, in fact, the thing that you were made for, and the thing that you should pursue above everything else. It is also not in conflict with your mission out in the world. In fact, Paul would say that you cannot understand anything about your mission in the world apart from knowing Jesus. Knowing him puts everything else in its proper place, and the better you know him, the better you will be at fulfilling your earthly calling. Knowing him is the thing that makes your mission coherent and gives it meaning. Even more, it is through the proper exercise of your calling, with the right perspective on it, that you come to know him better.
So, the claim is that knowing Christ Jesus our Lord is the thing that we were made for, and all other pursuits in this life are worthless compared to the total pursuit of knowing him. A critic might say, “All you’ve done is assert that knowing God is our highest good. You haven’t proven it. Convince me that that’s true.” I would have to admit that I can’t give you a rational proof for it. I can’t tell you why. It’s almost true by definition. If God is God, and he is good and he created us, then to know him is our greatest good. I can’t prove it with an argument. We either see it or we don’t. And our ability to see it—to see and experience God as the most supremely valuable thing, is what sin destroys. When Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden, I suspect it never occurred to them to question whether knowing God was their highest good, until the serpent came and suggested that it actually wasn’t. That first act of disobedience was the first act of valuing something else more highly than fellowship with God. In fact, that’s what sin is. Sin, by definition, is considering something else to be a higher good than God—to consider something to be more valuable than knowing God. And when Adam sinned in that way, the fellowship with God that we were created to know was broken.
I can’t give you a philosophical proof, but here are many places that we can go to show that the testimony of the Bible is that knowing God is our highest good and the thing that we were made for. The Psalms don’t argue for it as much as they just express it. Psalm 73 says, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” Psalm 34 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” God also tells us directly that it’s true.
Jeremiah 9:23–24 (ESV) — Thus says the LORD: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.”
Jeremiah 17:3 (ESV) — on the mountains in the open country. Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your high places for sin throughout all your territory.
And then there’s our passage here in Philippians, which is one of the clearest. Verse eight says, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” That’s the banner over Paul’s life. He says essentially the same thing three different ways in verses seven and eight.
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 may gain Christ and be found in him.
We’re going to focus in on verse 10, but this entire chapter is all about the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. At the beginning of the chapter Paul calls out a particular example of the age-old temptation to value something else more highly than knowing Christ, and then, as Paul always does, he reminds us of the gospel. Then, after making his bold claim about the surpassing value of knowing Christ, he describes what it looks like to know Christ in this life right now, and he also encourage us to keep our eyes fixed on the future prize of knowing him face to face.
This chapter touches the past, the present, and the future. One of the keys to understanding this passage is the very familiar but still mysterious “already and not yet” theme that runs through the Bible. You’ve heard that phrase many times before, and with good reason. It really is a dominant theme in the Bible. That paradigm is on full display in this chapter. We’re going to talk about the already and the not yet. But I actually want to recognize a third perspective that is just as prominent in scripture, and that is the way. In this passage and in the life of a believer there is an already, a not-yet, as well as the way from here to there. All three are described in this passage, and the focal point from all three perspectives is Christ. Knowledge of Christ is the promise that we look forward to. Knowledge of Christ is the present reality that we live in. And knowledge of Christ is the way in which we walk out this life as we move toward that future glory. Jesus is the already, he is the not-yet, and he is the Way.
But before we talk about any future glory or about total pursuit of something more than what we have right now, we have to recognize that knowing Christ is first and foremost about restoring our broken relationship with God. The question, “How can I know God?” boils down to the same question that we’ve been asking and answering in our Romans series, which is, “How can I, an unrighteous man, be in fellowship with God, since he is righteous and I am not?” In other words, “How can I be made righteous before God?” We know Paul’s answer because we’ve been reading Romans, but he states it beautifully and concisely in verse nine.
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.
This is just straight down the middle, Pauline gospel. Knowing Christ starts with an objective reality. The first and most fundamental thing that Paul says about knowing Christ is that knowing Christ means being found in him. And he tells us what it means to be found in him. It means that I do not have a righteousness of my own that comes from obeying the law. To be found in him means that my righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus that is given to me by God on the basis of faith. Paul tells us in Romans that every person on earth is either found in Adam or found in Christ.1 We are all, by nature, born in Adam, and in sin. But if you are a believer who has put his faith in Jesus for salvation, then you are no longer in Adam. You have been grafted in to the vine and you are now in Christ—you are found in him, you are united to him, and you know him. Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”2
In this sense, knowing Christ and being found in him is an already present, objective reality. It’s a status. You were once in Adam, but you are now in Christ. We could say, we once knew Adam, but now we know Christ. But as we know and as Paul says in verse nine, this status change comes to us on the basis of faith, and faith is all about where your confidence lies. We’ve said that sin is simply the valuing of something else more highly than God. Another way of saying almost the same thing is that sin is placing your confidence in something other than God—usually in yourself in one way or another—while faith is the act of placing your confidence completely in Christ. That’s the issue in the first part of this chapter. Paul is dealing, once again, with his old nemesis, the Judaizers. Remember that the Judaizers were Jews who considered themselves Christians, but their thing was that they said that in order for Gentiles to be saved, faith in Jesus wasn’t actually enough. They also had to follow the law of Moses—they had to become Jews. Specifically, they had to take on the fleshly sign of the people of Israel and become circumcised. Paul says that by doing this, they were guilty of putting their confidence in the flesh. For them, it wasn’t Christ alone. It was Christ plus this fleshly thing that had been done to them that together was grounds for them to be able to stand before God with confidence. Paul says, “no way—you guys are nuts.” Christ plus anything is not gospel. He says that if anyone has reason for self-confidence—confidence in the flesh—then he does. He was the most Jewish of the Jews. He has all of the fleshly credentials. And it’s all garbage, he says, compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. He says, “I had all of that ‘gain,’ 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.” Paul had no patience for these Judaizers. He calls them “dogs” and “evildoers.” In Galatians he says, “I wish they would emasculate themselves.”3 The reason he was so brutal with these guys is that they were pulling people away from Christ by adding to the gospel. If your confidence is in Christ plus anything else, then your confidence is unfounded.
Of course we have different things that we’re tempted to put our confidence in, but the temptation is there all the same. To know Jesus means that when everything else is stripped away, the place where you are found is in him. It is his righteousness, given to you as a gift, and nothing else, that is the grounds for your confidence, both now and for the coming day of judgement.
That’s the first thing that it means to know Christ. You are connected to him, united to him, you have been grafted into him, you are found in him. That’s your position. It’s who you are. And that position comes through faith, which means that your confidence is in him, and in nothing else.
But knowing Christ and being found in him is not simply a status. Christ is a person, and knowing him is a personal experience. The verse that describes this experience and that I want to focus on for most of our time is verse 10. This is very rich and deep, and we need to unpack it, because for Paul, this is what it looks and feels like to know Christ. Knowing Christ is the most surpassingly valuable thing. “Ok, great, now what?” This is his answer. Verse 10 says,
… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Paul links four ideas together, without fully explaining the connections. The power of his resurrection, sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death, so that I might attain the resurrection from the dead. We’re going to see if we can work out what’s going on.
First let’s do a bit of nuts and bolts Bible study and make sure we understand the structure of the verse. That’s always the place to start when you encounter a dense verse like this. Verse 10 starts, “that I may know him,” which sounds like it points back to something before it. So we go back up and we’re looking for the action, the purpose of which is “that I may know him.” The action that it points back to is actually not in verse 9. It’s back in verse 8. It’s that three-fold repetition of what is really one action. “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ … I have suffered the loss of all things … and count them as rubbish …” for what purpose? “So that I may know him.” Knowing Christ is the supremely valuable thing. Verse 9, as important as it is, is a sort of parenthetical comment. So, verse 8, “I count everything as loss …” connects to verse 10, “that I may know him.” That’s fairly straightforward. Now verse 10. The structure of verse 10 gets lost a bit in the ESV translation. There is actually one main verb, which is “know,” and then three objects. The objects are him, power, and sharing. So the verb is to know. What do we know? We know him, we know the power of his resurrection, and we know the sharing of his suffering. But the last important piece is to recognize that the “and” between him and power isn’t suggesting a list of separate items. Instead, the sense is something like “that is” or “by which I mean.” It would be like if you said, “Oh yeah, I know Tom and his rascally ways.” What comes after the “and” elaborates on what came before. So, putting it all together, a paraphrase would go something like this. “I have counted everything as loss and suffered the loss of all things so that I may know him, by which I mean, that I may know the power of his resurrection and know the sharing of his suffering, becoming like him in his death—all of this so that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead.” That’s the structure of the thought. Paul is saying that knowing Christ is the supremely valuable thing. But what does it mean to know Christ? What does it look like? To know him means to know the power of his resurrection and to know the sharing of his suffering. It means becoming like him in his death, so that I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
To understand the heart of this we’ll need to consider each of these in the context of the others, so let’s work our way through it. First, knowing Christ means knowing the power of his resurrection. So what does that mean? There is a lot of fruit to be harvested on that tree. It would be time well spent to sit and meditate on what it means to know and live in the power of his resurrection. The first thing to say is that just as to know Christ means to not just to know about him, but to know him by your personal experience with him, to know the power of his resurrection is not just to know about the resurrection and to be aware of what it accomplished because you’ve been told about it your whole life. To know it means to experience it. To know the power of his resurrection means to experience a power that comes to us because of his resurrection. What sort of power is that? What does it look like to experience the power of his resurrection? Again, it might mean a whole host of things. But think about what it was that the resurrection accomplished? The resurrection of Christ demonstrated that the Father had accepted the work that Jesus did, and that the penalty for sin, which is death, had been paid, once and for all. So in the resurrection of Jesus, victory over death was accomplished and publicly declared, not just for himself, but for everyone who is found in him. No doubt, the final fulfillment of that victory is a future thing that we look forward to. We’ll talk about that. But the power of the resurrection is very much a present reality that Paul had experienced and wants us to experience. So if the resurrection accomplishes and represents the victory over death, then I think we can say that to live in the power of his resurrection means to live in a way that conforms to that victory. It means to live in a way that reflects the reality that death has been defeated. What a power that is! To be able to live in this death-defiled and death-obsessed world in a way that is completely free from the fear of death—that is indeed a great power. What a confidence we can have as we go about our lives, knowing that the enemy has already been routed. Hebrews 2 says “that through death he destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and delivered all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”4
And not only has the consequence of sin have been paid, but sin itself has been routed as well. It sometimes doesn’t feel that way because we’re still in the scrum. The power that we have over sin sometimes feels meager, but it is a very real power and it is growing all the time. That power is a resurrection power. Because you know him, in your moment of temptation you have a power to resist. Romans 6 says, “Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life … for sin will have no dominion over you.”5
But to really understand what Paul thinks about living in the power of the resurrection, we have to see it in connection with the next phrase. To know him means to know the power of the resurrection and to share his sufferings, or to “know the sharing of his sufferings.” Some versions say “to know the fellowship of his sufferings.” You could even say the “participation in his sufferings.” Those all get at the idea. To know Christ is to share in his sufferings. It’s a startling idea. The power of the resurrection sounds like something that I want. I’m not so sure about sharing in the sufferings of Jesus. What does that even mean? Didn’t Jesus suffer in my place so that I wouldn’t have to? Why would it be the case that knowing Jesus requires that I share in his suffering? It does require that. Before we talk about what the purpose is, first two things that it is not. First, the purpose of sharing in Christ’s suffering is not so that we can empathize with him and understand how he felt. My wife was with a group of women recently who were making that mistake (not your wives, I’m happy to report). They were talking about the suffering of Jesus and asking themselves, “How do you think Jesus felt when that happened?” Don’t do that. Knowing Christ and knowing the sharing of his suffering is not about understanding how Jesus felt. Don’t presume to know how Jesus felt about something unless the scripture tells us how he felt. Secondly, sharing in his sufferings is not about sharing the punishment for our sin. Jesus bore the penalty for our sin entirely on his own, and no amount of suffering on our part can add to what he did. No, suffering is not about empathizing with Christ or about punishment for our sin. The next phrase explains the purpose in sharing in his suffering, that is “becoming like him in his death.”
This is a hard truth, but the testimony of scripture, and indeed of our lives, is that the way of growth and maturity toward a fuller and more perfect knowledge of Christ is the way of the cross—it is the way of suffering. If he is the Way, then we should expect walk in the way that he walked, which is the way of the cross. This is so important when it comes to understanding our experience of living in this world. The way that we move from this present state of imperfect knowledge to that future state of perfect knowledge is not by existing in some sort of stasis, unchanged and unchanging until one day we die, and then suddenly everything is as it should be. God could have done it that way, but he didn’t. The way that he ordained that Christians would move from imperfection to perfection is the way of gradual and steady growth and maturity. That way is the way of the cross. In other words, the chisel that shapes us as we take on the form of the creator in whose image we were made is trial and suffering.
We’ve all been studying the book of James in our men’s bible studies. What does James tell us in chapter one?
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.6
Paul also encouraged the saints in Antioch, telling them that “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”7 And he says in 2 Corinthians that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”8
This kind of perspective puts our suffering in this life in a completely different light. To be clear, there is no inherent value in suffering. Apart from knowing Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection, suffering only leads to death. The old saying that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a dumb saying. Actually, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you bitter and hard and cold, until eventually it does kill you. Unless … you know him and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his suffering. Then, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you more perfect, more complete, more like your Lord and creator.
Some of you men know what it is like to suffer real physical or emotional pain—much more than I. I don’t stand here to tell you from my own experience how to patiently endure suffering. I can only tell you what God says in his word. And what he says is that because you know Christ and you know the power of his resurrection, the end of your suffering is not death, but life. Your suffering has a purpose, and while there is almost certainly a hidden purpose that God hasn’t revealed to you, there is also a purpose that you know with certainty. That purpose is that you would know Christ Jesus your Lord better, and that you would become more like him.
This brings a little bit more clarity to the first question about what it means to live in the power of the resurrection. We said that living in the power of his resurrection means living in a way that reflects Christ’s victory over death. This is one way that we do that. Paul prayed for the Colossians that they would be, “strengthened with all power (that’s the same power that we’re talking about—the power of his resurrection), according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.”9 The power of his resurrection is a power that enables us to endure suffering with patience and joy, knowing that suffering does not lead to death, but leads to life because the result of suffering in this power is that we come to know him better as we become more like him.
The encouragement for all of us is to think that way about our suffering. We’re talking about total pursuit of knowing Christ. What does it mean to pursue a greater knowledge of Christ through our suffering? It doesn’t mean that we pursue more suffering. It means that when we suffer, we work hard to think rightly about it and to let it have its intended effect, which is that we would see Christ in our suffering as the supremely valuable thing. It’s hard to think rightly about suffering when you’re in the middle of it. So we should prepare ourselves and pray that God would prepare us so that in our moment of suffering, Christ is there in our mind’s eye as the thing that is infinitely valuable. Counting everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ is a mental exercise that you go through before the trial comes. Pray and prepare yourself so that you would be able to say, along with Paul, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”
There is another way that we pursue a knowledge of Christ through sharing in his suffering—a more common way. It’s one that applies to all of us, regardless of whether or not we are experiencing any sort of acute physical suffering. It’s hinted at when Paul says that we know Christ by sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. What’s that about? What part of the death of Christ am I called to model in my own life? Clearly, what Christ accomplished on the cross was a once-for-all act that only he was fit to accomplish. So what is Paul talking about? I think the answer can be found if we go back to chapter two. What was it about Christ’s death that we are called to emulate? Chapter two, verse three gives a hint:
Philippians 2:3–8 (ESV) — Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
I think this is Paul’s meaning in chapter three—the main way that we become like Jesus in his death is when we empty ourselves, looking to the interest of others and counting others as more significant than ourselves, being obedient to God even to the point of death. In other words, when we die to ourselves. It’s possible that you could be asked to become obedient to the point of a physical martyrdom, and you should be ready for that. This death however—this daily dying to yourself as you count everything else as loss, emptying yourself as Jesus did for the sake of others and for the sake of knowing your Lord better—there is no question that you are called to that kind of death.
Isn’t it striking that he says “have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” Even your ability to live this way is only yours in Christ. Dying daily to yourself, looking not to your own interest but to the interest of others is only possible because you know Jesus and are found in him, and it is only possible by the power of his resurrection. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “If the dead are not raised at all … why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!”10 Do you hear that? If the dead are not raised, why would I live this way, in danger every hour? But because the dead are raised, I die every day.
All Christians are called to die to ourselves. Jesus himself said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”11 But there is a particular charge given to us as men to come and die. One of my favorite shorthand definitions of masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. The life of a godly man is hard. The constant, daily experience of a Christian man, from the time the alarm goes off until you crawl back into bed, is denying yourself the thing that you want in your flesh, and choosing instead the thing that needs to be done for your own soul and for the people in your care. Of course I’m not saying that this is a ponderous chain or that there is no earthly reward for living this way—there certainly is. But there is no doubt that the life of a godly man is a life of dying to himself. At the end of the chapter Paul is warning us about those who walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. He says that “their god is their belly.” Our belly wants to sleep until seven rather than get up at five so that we can pray and read our Bible. Our belly wants to disappear to our room when we get home rather than sit down with the kids to talk about their day. Our belly wants to say “no” when our homegroup leader asks us to prepare to lead a discussion for the group, even though it’s been a long week. All of those things are a kind of suffering—a kind of dying. So why do we say “yes”? Not because suffering is good, but because our god is not our belly. Christ is our God, and the way that we come to know him is by walking in the way that he walked. By taking up our cross and dying to ourselves, we share in his suffering, becoming like him in his death. It’s only possible to live this way in the power of his resurrection. Because we know him, each time we die to ourselves we come to know him a little bit better, and we become a bit more like him. And so do the people in our care.
Finally, let’s think about the last phrase in this thick chain. “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” We’ve talked about the “already” and about “the way,” but we misunderstand the passage, and we misunderstand the Christian life, if we don’t follow where all of this is meant to lead us—which is to something that is still yet to come. Paul wants us to experience the power of Jesus’s resurrection right now, but he always has one eye on something that he knows is still coming. You can hear it in the verses that follow.
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.
And then he gives another warning about the enemies of the cross who want nothing to do with this life of daily dying because they have their minds set on earthly things. But as for us, he says:
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.
It seems pretty clear that the thing on Paul’s mind that he has not yet obtained and that he is always pressing on toward is the full knowledge of Christ that we’ve been talking about. “Pressing on, straining forward, pressing on toward the goal.” What does that look like? I think it looks exactly like what we’ve seen so far—dying to ourselves every day in the power of his resurrection. But “pressing on, straining forward” implies that there’s a finish line. All of this is leading somewhere. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the finish line, the highest good, is resurrection per se, as if what mattered most was simply not being dead. What is it that makes a resurrection worth having? Paul told us in chapter one. “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” It is better to depart because to depart is to be with Christ. Knowing God and being in fellowship with him is thing that is supremely valuable—not simply coming back from the dead.
As saints, our life and our attention are fundamentally future-oriented. Really, how could it be otherwise. The thing that we were made for, knowledge of God and fellowship with him, we only have in part. We were made to have it in full, and God has promised that one day we will. How could we not constantly look forward to that day? “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known”12—1 Corinthians 13.
Paul says something poignant in verse 15, “Let those of us who are mature think this way.” Maybe some of you have experienced this. In the early days of my marriage, when we were having kids and building a home, I bristled at the idea that my sights should always be set on heaven. I really wanted to press in to the Lord’s prayer. “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” I had a vision for my own sort of heavenly kingdom on earth on my little 10 acres in New Hill. Not all of that was bad, and many of us still have instincts that lean that way. But the older I get, the easier it is to let those things go, perhaps because the older I get the more I realize that those things, even if you achieve them, can’t last. It’s just simply true that as we mature in the faith, the things of this life—even the good things—tend to diminish and Christ and the promise of eternity with him becomes greater.
This is a tension that we have to navigate. Life in this “already and not-yet” situation that we’re in is full of unresolved tension. On the one hand, we know that the way from this present state to that final state is the way of the cross, and the pleasures of this life are fleeting. But at the same time, isn’t it also our experience that this life in Christ is full of many rich blessings that God has given for us to enjoy? How do you receive the blessings that God offers with gratitude and live the good life that he has made possible for us, while at the same time counting everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of Christ Jesus our Lord, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead? Is the life of a Christian a life of blessing and gift, to be enjoyed with thankfulness, or is it a life of trial and suffering, anxiously waiting for something that has not yet come? The answer, of course, is that it’s both. What God is calling us to do is to see Christ in all of it. To know Christ means to see him as the one who is there, behind the mask, in all of it. As the old prayer says,
Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left
The battle for us is a battle to see. If you know a person well, then you recognize them when you see them, even from far off or through a crowd. To know Christ means that you recognize him where you see him. And he is there, in all of it. “From him and through him and to him are all things.”
When you just enjoyed the perfect ribeye with three of your closest friends, sitting by the fire, laughing and talking about everything and nothing, who is there behind it as the giver of that gift? It’s Christ. Receive it from him with gratitude. Counting everything as rubbish in order to that I may gain Christ does not mean that we gain Christ by treating everything else as rubbish. Paul didn’t think that. “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving,”13 he said in 1 Timothy. Express your gratitude to him and acknowledge to yourself and to God that Christian brothers and perfect ribeyes are an expression of his character and are a way that we experience the blessing of knowing him. Even in the ribeye, Christ is there. Fight to see him.
But also, when the test result comes back and it says, “cancer,” he is there as well. Receive it also as being from him. Think this way, have this mind among you. The purpose of that cancer diagnosis is so that you will learn to see and to say, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” You can endure such a trial in the power of his resurrection, knowing that even as that cancer eats away at your body, you are sharing in his suffering and you are being molded by your creator into the thing that you were made to be. Even in the cancer, Christ is there. Fight to see him.
The battle is a battle to see. It’s a battle to see him and to see him as supremely valuable. Ultimately, this kind of seeing is a gift. In verse fifteen Paul says, “If in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you.” But this is yet another paradoxical tension in the Christian life. The thing that is given as a gift, we are to pursue with our whole heart. Press on, brothers, to make it your own, because he has made you his own. Press on to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, sharing in his suffering, dying to yourself every day as you wait for the day when you will see him face to face.
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