I Want to Know You More—part two

Philippians 3:4-11

Imagine this scene. You are at a party and you begin to boast about your skills as a swimmer. “I was the top swimmer on my college swim team,” you tell everyone. Sounds pretty impressive, but what you don’t tell everyone is that your college was a small, division 3 school that had the worst swim team in the conference. While you were busy boasting about your swimming accomplishments, you failed to see a tall man standing three feet away listening to your story. He smiles at you, rips open the buttons of his shirt to reveal 14 Olympic gold medals. The man is Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer to ever walk this earth. We could say that the apostle Paul was the “Michael Phelps” of the Jews. He was the very best at what he did. His pedigree was perfect and his behavior was blameless. He may have been the greatest Pharisee to ever walk the earth.

His pedigree is found in verses 4-6 of Philippians three, and as we will see later, it is like he is placing these things into a financial ledger with profits/assets in one column and losses/liabilities in the other column. At first, all of his “confidence in the flesh” appear in the profit column.

·         circumcised on the eighth day— Paul listed this first since it struck at the heart of the controversy. Remember, what the Judaizers called circumcision, Paul called mutilation.

·         of the people of Israel—Paul was not merely a Jewish convert, but he was of Jewish birth

·         of the tribe of Benjamin—Paul was able to trace his Jewish lineage to the tribe of Benjamin. Do you recall any famous OT figure who was also of the tribe of Benjamin? Saul, the first King of Israel was from the tribe of Benjamin. What was Paul’s name before he became a Christian? It was Saul. It is possible that Paul was named after King Saul. You and I know him to be a failure as a king, but he would have still been revered as the first king of their people.

·         a Hebrew of Hebrews—This might be similar to our saying that someone is a “man’s man.” He wasn’t merely a Hebrew—he was the poster child for being Hebrew. Kind of like saying your physics teacher was Albert Einstein.

·         in regard to the law, a Pharisee--

Then Paul said:^ “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. Under Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers… (Acts 22:3)

·         as for zeal, persecuting the church

and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today. ^I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, ^as also the high priest and all the Council can testify. I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished. (Acts 22:3-5)

Do you remember the name of the very first Christian martyr? Stephen, and who was responsible for Stephen’s death? Saul of Tarsus.

·         as for legalistic righteousness, faultless—if it were possible to earn your way to Heaven, Paul would have been first in line.

This is a most impressive list. Each of these things carried great weight by themselves, but taken together they formed an impenetrable armor of self-righteousness. Paul had the right family, he attended the Harvard of his day and he was a young, rising star among the Pharisee rank. I can imagine that the older, high-ranking Pharisees were keeping a close eye on this talented young man.

Paul’s main point is that the Judaizers could not hold a candle to Paul’s background and skills. If they cam close to matching him on any one of these things, certainly he easily surpassed them in total bragging rights. He had assembled a dream team of Jewish pedigree and no one could match him. As he said in verse five, If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more. That was not just a boast, it was the truth.

Before he met Christ on the road to Damascus, all of these things were a reason to put confidence in his flesh. But what about after he met Jesus? Remember, this is part of Paul’s overall testimony. He is giving us an outline for how to put together a testimony. There are three basic parts:

1.      What my life was like before I was saved by Christ.

2.      How I was saved by Christ

3.      How my life has changed since being saved by Christ.

If you have never written your own testimony, this is a useful outline for how to do it. Which of these three parts did Paul leave out? He left out the part about actually meeting Christ. Paul included this part more than once when he shared his testimony in the book of Acts. Therefore, I don’t mean to imply that it was not important, it just was not vital for his purpose in this letter. Paul especially wanted to focus on what his life was like before he was saved and how his life had changed after he was saved. Before he was saved, he tenaciously clung to the things in this list. And why should he not have boasted about this list? It’s a powerful list. In the realm of spiritual accomplishments, it was a multi-million dollar portfolio. Actually, its worth could not be counted in monetary terms at all. You could never buy these things—you had to earn them. And, if they were the very thing which would gain favor with God, then Paul should have rightly boasted about them.

 But then verse seven begins the part of his testimony describing how Christ changed his life. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. Do you see what Paul did here? In one fell stroke he transferred ALL of his former assets into the liabilities column. Absolutely everything that was of value to Paul was abandoned. He gave it all up. How could he have done something as radical as this? The next verse explains. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. Once he moved all of these former treasures over to the liability column, what did he put in the profit column? He put “the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Due to the crash of the housing market and investment scams, many fabulously wealthy people have lost everything they owned. Maureen Ebel of Florida lost everything she owned to Robert Madoff. Her life savings of over seven million dollars was invested with Madoff and now she is cleaning houses to make a living. She unintentionally lost everything of value for the sake of greed, but Paul lost intentionally lost everything for the sake of Christ. One commentator expressed the change in this way. Paul found “the only knowledge worth having, a knowledge so transcendent in value that it compensates for the loss of everything else.”[i] In transferring his former profits to the loss column, Paul was making a statement about his former treasures: they were worse than mere losses—they were liabilities. If he were to hold on to any of those things he would not gain Christ. All of the things he formerly treasured were now liabilities.

But Paul was not done extolling the wickedness of his former boasting in flesh. Remember from last week Paul called the Judaizers dogs, evildoers and mutilators of the flesh. He has an equally strong word for the fake treasures—he called them rubbish. Our English word “rubbish” is too nice of a term. A rubbish pile is sometimes another word for a compost pile. A compost pile is organic material that is decaying slowly into rich fertilizer, which is obviously a good thing. Even a garbage dump is too nice of a translation because you can still find small treasures in a pile of garbage. As a kid I remember digging through piles of old garbage looking for antique bottles, of which we found a few.

Skubala—the word translated as rubbish here—is sometimes translated as dung. One person explained it this way. “It is inappropriate to weaken its meaning because of embarrassment, as some of the early church fathers did: the two notions of worthlessness and filth are present in σκύβαλα”[ii] In other words, garbage and rubbish are too nice of terms for skubala. Skubala is “foul-smelling street garbage fit only for dogs.”[iii] Skubala is nothing short of things like rotting meat and human waste. Here is the force of what Paul is saying. Before he became a Christian, he used to boast about these false treasures. In other words, it was like Paul put on display for all to see a rotting piece of meat and human waste. Would you display a rotting piece of meat or human waste in a china cabinet or trophy case? It’s a disgusting thought, but that is equivalent of what Paul had been doing. He had continually boasted of these things, if not to others, then at least to himself and before God.

The problem with this rubbish is that it had served as the payment to God in order to purchase a relationship with him. Next, Paul wrote, I consider them rubbish, 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 is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. He is talking here about righteousness. Righteousness is the way in which we enter into a right relationship with God. Another word for righteousness is justification, as in justification by faith, the core doctrine in our salvation. The phrase, righteousness that comes from God and is by faith, is the same thing as “justification by faith.” Paul was saying, “I don’t want to present my own self-righteousness to God. When I stand before God, I want him to see the perfect righteousness of his son, Jesus Christ. I don’t want God to see me, I want him to see Christ’s finished work on the cross. You can see why he used a word like skubala to describe his own righteousness, because what else could you call it in comparison to the righteousness of Christ. It is sheer arrogance and utter stupidity to compare our goodness with Christ’s perfection

What we need to do next is to figure out exactly what we have placed in our profit column. We don’t have any of the same things that Paul had in his profit column, but we do have other things. Last week we talked about baptism. I hope that this is not in your column. I hope that you see the utter futility of depending on baptism—whether you were baptized as an infant or as an adult.

What is in your column? What is holding you back? Now make sure you understand we are talking about these profit and liability columns from two different perspectives. One perspective concerns salvation. We can call this I want to know Christ perspective, because it concerns whether or not we actually know Christ—whether we are saved or not. If you have anything in your profit column other than Christ, you cannot be saved. You are clinging to rubbish. You are presenting dung to the Lord in exchange for your salvation. The other perspective we could call I want to know Christ more. This is for most of us here this morning who have a saving knowledge of Christ but want to know him more.

From this perspective then, what is holding you back? What are you clinging to that prevents you from knowing Christ more? For some people it might be education. Did you know that the more formal education you have, the more likely you are to lose your faith ,or at least have a weaker faith?  On average, the increase in your level of education is directly linked to a decrease in Christian faith. Why is this true? The academic elite would have us believe that these two are inversely correlated because the smarter you become, the more you realize the foolishness of the Christian message. Once you have become enlightened by sitting in their halls of knowledge, you no longer need the childish beliefs or Sunday School stories. This is what they believe and what they want you to believe, but it is a big lie. These people have not abandoned their Christian faith because they are smarter than us or because they know more about life and have finally rejected the ancient myths and kindergarten stories of their simple youth. The reason they abandoned their Christian faith is because they have been trained in a secular, God-hating worldview. At the university level, God is mocked in nearly every classroom. Students are encouraged to throw away their outdated, close-minded, intolerant faith. And the fact is that most do throw away their faith.

Karen was in the most liberal program at her school and knows full well the struggle that can ensue. You may not have thrown away your faith, but you may have lingering struggles from your university studies. Perhaps you are just too smart for your own good and have rejected some of the Biblical teaching. If this describes you, then your education is getting in the way of knowing Christ more.

Ministry can get in the way of knowing Christ. At the last Bible quiz meet we heard an excellent testimony from a former quiz student. Ben quizzed for many years and was always ranked high in the nation and took first place at nationals one year. Looking back on his quiz years, Ben realized that he had loved quizzing a lot more than he loved the Bible or even more than Christ himself. He always thought those Bile verses were for the other people, but not him. He believed that the person sitting next to him needed the truth, but that he had already found it. Ben had put Scripture memory in his profit column but he left out Christ.

Another good example is John Swanson, the pastor of the Free Church in Janesville. John ministered with Campus Crusade for twenty years and led hundreds of college students to Christ. John successfully planted the church in Janesville which is growing and healthy. John and his wife have done a great job raising five kids. Everything was going so well until about six years ago. His 22 year old son was planning to be married in about four months when he had a terrible skiing accident. He ran into a pole and crushed his skull. He survived the accident but he has a severe brain injury and requires around the clock care for the rest of his life.

Pastor John addressed a conference full of pastors about ten months after he accident and I will never forget what he said. He said it’s not about evangelism, it’s about Christ. John had led who knows how man people to Christ but despite that he said evangelism is not the primary thing in life, it is knowing Christ. Do you see, John removed evangelism from his profit column and replaced it with Christ alone. But he was not finished. He went on to say, “It’s not about church planting, it’s Christ. It’s not about discipleship, it’s Christ. It’s not about family, it’s Christ.” He must have listed a dozen types of ministry and since he was speaking to a room full of pastors,  that everyone in that room was very good at these things. And to each ministry he said, “No, it’s not about that ministry, it’s about Christ.” I am not sure if John had this white hot clarity before his son’s accident but he certainly possessed it after. When everything else is stripped away you realize that it is all about Christ.

Is anything wrong with evangelism and family and church planting and discipleship and constructing a church building? These are all good things and if they are done with love and with right motives, they will secure treasure in Heaven for all of us, but if any one of them takes priority over Christ, then they become rubbish. God will still use your ministry to help others and for his glory, but for you, that ministry is rubbish. God promised us that such ministry will be burned up at the judgment, and what kinds of things do you put in the fire? Rubbish. The answer isn’t to stop doing ministry, but the answer is to put ministry in its proper place. Paul was doing great ministry by writing this letter to the Christians in Philippi. Paul was doing evangelism with the Roman soldiers guarding him. Paul was the greatest church planter who ever lived. Paul did, and was doing all of this ministry, but it was not in his profit column. The only thing is his profit column was the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ the Lord.

I believe that for all eternity we will be attempting to exhaust the knowledge of Christ. We will forever grow in our understanding of Christ—his identity, his character, his substitutionary sacrifice, his love. But when will we come to a full understanding of these things? Never! It is impossible for us to have complete knowledge, because to do so, would mean that we were God.

Rich Maurer

January 25, 2008