Transcript
This is now the sixth sermon in a series of messages we are preaching on Paul's letter to the Philippians. If you have a Bible, you might want to open up the third chapter as we now consider the third chapter in that great book. It almost looks like Paul is going to close the book. He uses the word finally. You'll notice he uses it again at the beginning of the fourth chapter as he decides the second time
to close the book. And then something comes into his mind. And in the third chapter, Paul shares a profound concern he has about a danger that is threatening those Christians that are at Philippi, the same danger that threatened the Galatians. In fact, the whole Galatian letter deals with this threat. A question had been settled at the first ecumenical council, which is recorded in Acts 15. And at that first ecumenical council, they settled the question that Greeks
did not have to become Jews in order to be Christians. You became a Christian by your faith in Jesus Christ. And yet there was the problem that happened throughout the early church where Jewish Christians were saying to those Greek Christians that they had to first fulfill all the law and experience all the rights of being Jews in order to really be Christians. And that was settled in the ecumenical council in Acts 15. It's not true. You
can be a Christian by simply trusting in Jesus Christ. And yet that problem hounded the church at Philippi, just as it did at Galatia. And you wonder why. Well, even though the question is settled, bad doctrines have a way of coming back. They come back upon us, especially the kind of doctrines that argue that if we only did one more thing, we would have more power or we'd be able to be a Christian that fully satisfied
God. And some of us, since we are aware of our own inadequacies, and the more we are aware of our inadequacies, the more we're, in a sense, easily victimized by that kind of deception. And that deception is what evidently is causing such a problem for the Philippians. Paul decides to answer the problem by turning their eyes upon Jesus Christ. And then also, once more, telling his own story. And he tells his own story of how he
discovered the sufficiency of Christ. And in that telling of his story and pointing their eyes to Christ, we get one of the really incredible passages from the Apostle Paul. Here we have it, chapter 3. Let's take a look at it. Finding my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same thing to you is not irksome to me, it's safe for you. And then this thought occurs to him about those that are causing problems
at Philippi. Look out for the dogs. Look out for evil workers. Look out for those who mutilate the flesh. For we are the true circumcision, who worship God in spirit and glory in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also, if any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people
of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew, born of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee. Notice he's going now through his own pedigree, his own background. As to zeal, I was a persecutor of the church. As to righteousness under the law, blameless. 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. For his sake, I
have suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as refuse in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. And now these next words you'll recognize, very famous words from Paul, as he comes to the close of this autobiographical section. That I may know him and the
power of his resurrection, and that I may share his sufferings in becoming like him in his death, and if possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I've already obtained this or am already perfect. The word here means literally complete or mature. But I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers and sisters, 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. Let those of us who are mature be thus minded, and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal that also to you. Notice Paul doesn't just bind the Philippians to him and to his own journey. He says, this is my journey, this is what
I discovered, and I discovered this about Jesus Christ. And I hope you'll be like mine. And he said, and if not, let God show you, let God teach you. And so he has this confidence that God is able to reveal to the Philippians in terms of their own journey. So let those of you who are mature be thus minded, and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us
hold true to what we've attained. That's our text. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this text. This is a very great text as Paul once again turns our eyes to our center, but also turns our eyes upon ourselves, helps us understand where we journey, and what our journey is like. Lord, bless us as we seek to understand this text for our lives today. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. In this great section, Paul
describes our lives, and of course he's using his own life as a model, but we are involved in this because as he tells his story, we think of our story. He describes our lives in terms of three time sequences. The past, the present, and the future. In fact, he has an incredible athletic image about pressing toward the prize, pressing toward the tape, which is the image that includes the past, forgetting what lies behind, pressing forward to
what lies ahead, and looking to the future. So he uses all three of these tenses in a very decisive and important way. I want us to reflect on these three tenses that Paul puts into focus for us in this third chapter of Philippians. First, the past. We should not misinterpret Paul in this passage by his use of the word forgetting. He says, forgetting what lies ahead, we look forward. You notice that line, one thing I do,
this is verse 13, one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind, straining forward to what lies ahead, I press. There are the three tenses together. Straining forward to what lies ahead, I press in the present, forgetting what lies behind. What does he mean by that? We shouldn't misunderstand what he means. Paul is not anti-historical. This passage is not an anti-historical passage. It's not a nihilistic, existential passage that sees yourself only in terms of the
present. Paul is decidedly not anti-historical. In fact, he has very accurately remembered his past. He has just narrated his past. He understands his past. He tells about, he says, I was circumcised, and of course that was one of the issues. Do these gentile men have to be circumcised? And that's why he challenges them, he says, beware of those who mutilate the flesh. Beware of those who are trying to circumcise you, trying to turn you into
Jews in order to be a Christian. No, thank God for the Jews in their journey, and thank God for you in your journey, and you both discovered Jesus Christ. And it's Jesus Christ who made the difference in your life. You don't have to go through anybody else's journey. And yet, notice Paul is very accurate on his own journey. He's not anti-historical. He remembers his past. Because, as a matter of fact, his very salvation comes from
the past. So does yours. So does mine. I love a line from Pascal that he puts in the Pensees. He says, while the disciples slept, Christ won their salvation. And before we were born, Christ died for us. That's a historical event. That's not an existential, philosophical, eschatological, sort of Christic moment or idea. It's an event that happened. Jesus Christ was on the cross. He died. And he also conquered death in history. On the third day, notice
the New Testament is so clear on that, on the third day, Jesus Christ conquered death. So that our salvation comes from a past event. So obviously Paul is not anti-historical. He tells about how Jesus Christ, the man Jesus Christ, won his salvation for him. And Paul also remembers his own story and his own journey. He's accurate in that. Well, then what does he mean if he's not being anti-historical? What does he mean by forgetting
what lies behind and looking forward to what is ahead and pressing here in the present? Well, it seems to me what Paul's arguing against in this passage are two harmful ways of remembering. He's concerned about a bad kind of memory, a bad kind of looking path in the past. Let's think of both of those that are in this passage. One way is when I overrate the harm that has happened by mistakes of my past. Notice how
Paul is very frank there. He says, I have not made it my own. I am not already perfect. I know my own sinfulness. I know my own inadequacies. It was the inadequacies that perhaps the Philippians felt within themselves that made them a target for this, you might say, kind of cultic movement that was afoot in Philippi that was saying, if you only do this, then you'll really have the power of God. Then you'll really satisfy God.
You'll please him because you'll fulfill all the righteousness of the law that he commands. In a sense, moving beyond Jesus Christ and putting something else. So that Paul is concerned about a kind of bad memory of the past where I overrate the harm that's happened by mistakes in the past or the mistakes that other people did toward me as if those mistakes have now an irreparable kind of power to mortgage my present and my future. And
what Paul is saying here when he says, forget the past, is that Jesus Christ has mediated between myself and my past. That's the whole point he makes. Notice, he says, I don't have a righteousness that's of my own, but a righteousness that comes from God and depends on faith. And so then he says that I may now know him and the power of his resurrection, and I may share in his sufferings and become like him in
his death, and if possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead. I have a righteousness that comes from Jesus Christ who stands in between my life here in the present and my failures in the past. Somehow the failures of the past have got to be resolved, and Paul knows that, and they're resolved by Jesus Christ. He has the power to redeem the past, and because of that, I don't have the past mortgaging my present and
mortgaging my future. I don't have to look over my shoulder continually at the past. The second thing he's arguing against would be an idealization of the past, of trying in effect to return to the past, maybe returning to the innocence of the garden. This is not possible. It's not even healthy. And it may have been that that is what caused some of these people at Philippi to be deceived, is to think if they could only fulfill
all of the righteousness of the law, they would then have a kind of innocence and a perfection. They're yearning for that. Everyone is yearning for that. But the New Testament is very clear. Our justification that we have in Jesus Christ is a justification that resolves the past. It doesn't return us to a kind of innocence. In fact, in the Bible, we go from the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis to the City of God
in the book of Revelation. We don't go back to the Garden. When we're redeemed, we are justified and reconciled. Those are the great words that are used in the New Testament. And that doesn't mean that we become innocent. We become resolved. And there's a big difference. Can I tell you a story that illustrates this to me? A few years ago, I was speaking at a conference of youth pastors. And this conference was held in Chicago. It
was put on by the National Youth Workers' Assembly. And all these youth workers and youth pastors were there from all over the United States. And one young man came up to me after I did a Bible study. And he said, Reverend Palmer, I just have to talk to you. And he was from South Carolina, as I remember. And he said to me, you know, I have to tell you a story. I was in Berkeley, California, where
you were a pastor at Berkeley Church. And I was there. And I lived there for two years on the streets of Berkeley. And I was into drugs. And I did all these terrible things in my life. And somebody from your church reached out to me and showed me some friendship. They invited me to their home. They invited me to come over to the church. I was a nomadic youth and just wandering around those streets. And they
invited me to come over to your church. And through their life and through the witness of other people, I became a Christian. And then I called up my family back in North Carolina. And I was reconciled with my family. And I then quickly left Berkeley and went back to North Carolina. I never had a chance to meet you. Never had a chance to come and talk to you. And to tell you what your church meant to
me. And then he had his wife there standing. He said, here's my wife. And we have a little baby. They just had a baby. He said, I went to school. I finished school. I went to seminary. I'm now a pastor. I'm a youth pastor in this church. And I'm here at the Youth Workers' Assembly. And I was so happy. I was rejoicing with him at the tremendous power of reconciliation, the power of the forgiveness of the
gospel. And we stood there. It was really so exciting to see this evidence that the gospel works in young people's lives. And then he said something to me that I'll never forget. He said, you know, the two years I was in Berkeley, except for those last few weeks, are like a blur. Two years were like a blur. I can hardly remember the things that happened in those two years. I was so spaced out. I was so
confused. And then he rolled up his sleeve. He says, but I've got the scars to prove I was there. And he had about three knife wounds on his arm. And you know, I got to thinking about it afterward. This young man is referring to two years in his life, age 19 and 20. At 19 and 20, he says, those two years were a blur. You know, that's sad. Two of the greatest years of your life. In
fact, according to educational psychologists, you're at your very brightest and greatest peak intellectually at 19 and 20. And those two key years of his life, this young man lived in a blur. And then Jesus Christ forgave him. And he was healed and he was resolved. But let me tell you something that didn't happen in his forgiveness. He didn't get to live those years over again. He didn't get to go back and get all the scars taken
off his arms. And probably there's some scars on other people's arms if he was in a knife fight. And they bear them too. And those don't go away. They're healed, but there are wounds that are still there. And his forgiveness did not give him the chance to live those two years over again. The two years were forever lost. And that's a sadness. That's a part of what Unamuno calls the tragic sense of life. That life does
count. And every day we live does count. And it leaves marks. But thank God it can be forgiven and it can be healed. And the Apostle Paul. Isn't it interesting in the Apostle Paul's list of his achievements in his early life? He says, I was, as to zeal, I was a persecutor of the church. And as you know, as you've read other places of Paul, he's profoundly regretful for that. Because he stood by when Stephen was
stoned to death. He held their coats. He probably voted for the stoning, that illegal stoning of Stephen. And nothing can ever change that again. And he bears that all his life. And that's a terrible scar in Paul's life. And he puts it in this litany. He puts it in his journey. And yet Jesus Christ has come in between his life and that past. And when Paul is forgiven, he doesn't get to return to innocence. As if
that had never happened. There's one little phrase that sometimes people will say that I don't agree with. Some will say, justification means just as if I'd never sinned. That's not true. Justification does not mean just as if I'd never sinned. It means I did sin, scars are there, but I'm healed. And I'm resolved. And I'm forgiven. That's better. And Paul, notice, presses that point. Now because of that victory, and now let's take a look at the
present. Because of that victory, I'm set free to live here and now. I can run the race I'm in. I don't have to look over my shoulder. I can go where God wants me to go. And I can be what God wants me to be. Because Jesus Christ now is my mediator. As Von Hopper says, I don't have a direct relationship with anything. I have a mediated relationship now with everything. Christ is the mediator between my
life and my past. Both the positive sense of the past and the negative sense of the past. Christ is my mediator. You know, right now I'm reading one of my goals in reading. I love Russian novels, and through the Russian novelists, I've made the discovery of Joseph Conrad in the last few years. And I've been trying to read all the Joseph Conrad books. And this summer, I've of course read Heart of Darkness a long time ago.
This summer I got to reading, and finally I've just about finished, Lord Jim. What a remarkable book Lord Jim is. It's a little bit like Heart of Darkness, because the main character in Lord Jim, this young man named Jim, interestingly enough, the son of a Presbyterian minister from England. But because of a ship accident on the Patna, where he was a seaman, in which he acted the role of a coward, and though he got off and
wasn't sentenced in that ship accident, he feels the terrible scar of that failure. And the whole novel is about a young man who cannot go home. He can never go home to England. A little bit like Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, who can never go home from the Congo River, must always stay there. Even though Marlowe comes to try to bring him home, he cannot go home. He has seen too much horror. Something has happened
that's too bad, and he can't go home. The same thing is true of Lord Jim. Jim, though he becomes a huge hero in the South Pacific, and people practically worship him, and he has so much power, he's so handsome, he's so outstanding, but he cannot go back to England. And here's some lines, some powerful lines, that Joseph Conrad puts into Lord Jim. He says, say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to
face its truth, one must return, he's talking about to the land that we come from, one must return with a clear conscience. And all this may seem to use sheer sentimentalism, but indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. But he says that's the way it is. And then one of the most famous lines from Joseph Conrad, each blade of grass has its spot on
earth, whence it draws its life, its strength. And so is man, rooted to the land from which he draws his life. Rooted to the land. And Jim cannot go back to England, he cannot go back to face his father, to face his mother, to face his old sweetheart, to face all the people of his youth. He can't go back to face the ground of England because of the failure in his life. What a tragedy. You know
he can go back because of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ can enable him to go back. You have some place like Lord Jim where you can't go back because you've done something that has stained the earth, something that has stained your own life, and you feel that sense of regret. This is what Paul is talking about. He is saying because of Jesus Christ I can go back. Because of Jesus Christ I can revisit the law, and I
can now honor the law, but no longer do I get my salvation from the law. Because of Jesus Christ I have forgiveness, and I can go back to England. I can go back to where my family is. I can go back to where the earth is from which I came. Why? Because we live in the present with the companionship of Jesus Christ, and because we live from the future. We know that Jesus Christ has boundaried the
past. This is the doctrine of creation. He boundaries the future. This is the doctrine of the second coming of Jesus Christ. He boundaries all of my history, and he's in the midst of my life. This is the doctrine of the present, real presence of Christ in the Holy Spirit with me in my journey here and now. And because of these boundaries, because of the past resolved by Jesus Christ, and because the future is in his hands,
for to me, as Paul realizes, I can now press the race because of Jesus Christ. It's interesting. We don't live in the past. That's the sort of sentimentalism that Paul has certainly not advocated here. That's what he means by forgetting it. And we don't live isolated in the present, and we don't live wistfully for the future. We live from the future, from the future hope that we have in Jesus Christ. You know, I've been thinking a
lot about our country right now. Our country is having an experience of a recession, and I agree with a lot of economists and other observers, social observers in the American scene right now, that part of the recession we're in right now is a psychological recession. The United States proved in the Desert Storm experience that we can organize and incredibly, with lightning speed, can organize our military forces. We are able to pull our country together and do
things. We are a country with incredible capability, incredible economic productivity, but we have to believe that we live from a future of hope. I really think that's something our country needs right now, is we need to believe in the strong, productive future that we have, and then we need to invest in it. I really think our whole welfare system has to be completely rethought. Right now we have a welfare system that in effect is a safety
net, but it is not a jumpstart in people's lives. I think our country has got to put people to work, and I think we've got to find ways of enabling people to work and to have a stake in the future, to have a sense of investment of their lives, so they can run a race here and now. The same sort of thing that we see Paul talking about our lives spiritually, we need as a country socially.
Paul says we need to run a race here and now, knowing that there is a great future from which we live. And I think that's what's so exciting about being a Christian today. We have a tremendous hope that we live from, and we have a tremendous challenge here in Seattle that's right in front of us. The challenge of this incredible university student population that's across the street, literally, of this church. I was at the inn last
Tuesday night and saw some over 600 students there, and to see those students ministered to by this church, that's our future. To see this high school ministry that's happening in this church, I've been here now long enough to be able to watch the ministries that God has given to this congregation, and he has given us this stake in the future to invest in, to give our lives to. This is what Paul wants the Christians at Philippi
to do. He wants them to run the race that God has given them, and to run that race in that marvelous hope that comes from knowing that Jesus Christ has resolved the past and Jesus Christ holds the future. It's in his hands. And we are in a decisive place in the middle where we are to run the race that God puts in front of us here and now. That's what Paul wants for the Philippians. Thank God
for this great text. Heavenly Father, thank you for this text. Thank you for the way Paul calls us to invest our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ in the world in which we live. Lord, give us that kind of confidence knowing that we live from a future that comes from you. And Lord, resolve the weight of sin and failure from the past and protect us from those who terrorize us by pointing out our own weaknesses. And
Lord, turn our eyes upon the Lord Jesus Christ who is the one that gives us hope for here and now we live. In his name we pray. Amen.