Enduring with God in Days of Pandemic
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:14
Philippians 3:12–16 – ... with God in Days of Pandemic
Second Sunday of Easter – April 19, 2020 (am)
Vv.7-11 are favorites for many people. They capture the imagination of those who’ve never thought in this way about Jesus. They reignite spiritual passion in those whose hearts have grown cold. They can express the essence and uniqueness of Christianity to those who always assumed it was just another world religion. And they say all this with such penetrating pith that we feel drawn by their hardness as much as by their heart. They draw us like the call to be a Marine: the few, the proud! Like the gym: no pain, no gain!
Paul wants to know Christ (10). Not just about Christ—he wants to know him by experience! He wants to engage with Christ, walk the path that He walked, do the things He did, feel the things He felt! Paul wants to know him and the power of his resurrection, but he also wants to share his sufferings, including his death! (10) Paul wants to know Christ as fully as He can be known! He wants to commune with Christ, to conform to Christ, to cooperate with Christ! He wants to identify with Christ and engage with Christ! He wants to live a life that is worthy (1:27) of Christ! This is a guy who had every advantage in life: born into one of the two remaining tribes among God’s chosen people, educated to the highest degree, a member of the ruling body (5-6). Yet, Paul was willing to set all that aside, to count it as [disadvantage] (7), just to gain Christ, to identify with Christ, to know Christ—intimately, to know him in that sense, the fullest sense—to be united with Him, joined to Christ, forsaking all others, as it says in the marriage vows! That is Paul’s desire here, his testimony, as our text opens today.
And just in case we might think otherwise, Paul wrote: 12 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. I am His, Paul says. I belong to Him. And that is His own doing. So, what I’m doing here is just seeking to experience to the fullest what Christ has taken hold of me to accomplish. I’m trying to work out [my] own salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that it is God who works in [me], both to will and to work for his good pleasure (2:12-13). 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made [this] my own. I’m not yet perfect at this, Paul is saying. 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. Let’s take this one step at a time. Paul hasn’t yet arrived at the destination he’s [pressing] toward—he doesn’t yet know Christ as fully as he wants to know Him, as fully as Christ intended for Paul to know Him when He called him to saving faith. So, that’s why Paul is continuing to press on toward [that] goal, [that] prize (14)—the prize of [knowing] Christ on the far side of Paul’s own resurrection from the dead, when his experience of Christ will finally be complete, and his devotion to Jesus will finally, for the first time, be unimpeded by his sin and selfishness. Obviously that day has not yet come, so Paul is [pressing] on toward it, hungering and thirsting after it, and casting aside everything that obscures it in his life (8), everything that clouds his vision of it, or competes with it. Everything he’s tempted to count as [an advantage] in this life, he labors to [forget] so that it will be less likely to get in the way of the pursuit of this goal, this prize!
Vv.15-16 are written to the Philippians, but we can hear them apply directly to us even over the centuries. 15 Let those of us who are mature think this way…. In other words, this is what [maturity] looks like. This is how we will live as we grow toward [maturity] in Christ. So, … if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you—He’ll show you. 16 Only let us hold true to what we have attained. While we’re growing in Him to the place where we recognize with Paul that [knowing] Christ is the ultimate gain—the unrivaled passion and the sole devotion in our lives, the ultimate end in which all other aims in this life find their truest meaning—let us hold true to what we have attained. Let us hold our ground, stand firm in what we have already learned, just live our lives in a manner worth of the gospel of Christ (1:27) that we have received, the gospel that has saved us.
So, what Paul is saying here is that the general rule for living like a believer in this world is to leave behind the normal things we’d be tempted to lean on, to depend on, to put on our resume, or mention at a social gathering to establish our identity, or stake our claim and determine our place among those who are present. Leave all that behind, Paul is saying. And more, we must let go of our frantic dependence on accumulating such things: the size of our retirement account, or the value of our home, the make of our car, or the title behind our name. We discover at times like now that these are not really the most important things in life; they’re not really the things we depend on; their value can be gone so quickly. A tiny little virus can reveal the absolutely unreliable worth of the things we’re tempted to think are most valuable in life, the things we’re inclined to find our identity in, which is exactly what Scripture has told us all along. The resources of this world are like grass, here today and burned in the fire tomorrow. Who would have ever thought that we in America would be talking about possible food shortages in our stores? Who would have thought Amazon could be brought to a place where they’re struggling with their corporate identity and the core feasibility of their business model overnight? As 2020 began, who foresaw the need of the Federal Government to prop up our American economy with a multi-billion-dollar stimulus package by the end of the first quarter?
We are far more vulnerable than we would have ever imagined! And the amazing part is, even when we realize our vulnerability, we still continue on pursuing the very same kinds of safeguards. We tend just to pick up on new expressions of the same old self-sufficiency, self-defense, and self-protection. We make sure to wear an N-95 mask and vinyl gloves when we go to the grocery store or have any other sort of involvement outside our homes. And that is a good practice; I’m not discouraging it. But there is something far more important that we need to do. We need to fight and win the battle not to place our trust and our hope in such frail expressions of self-sufficiency, self-defense, and self-protection. We need to fight and win the battle not to believe that our lives can be protected by our self-imposed safeguards. We need to fight and win the battle to live this life with a clear understanding that the life to come really is better than this one! We need to fight and win the battle to grasp and comprehend that to die really is gain (1:21).
When we’re [pressing] on to know Christ like Paul is in this passage, then any form of [suffering] in this life becomes a friend—a faithful if short-lived friend. Not only would this help us put away any other thing we’d be tempted to count as a safeguard, as an advantage in this life (when it’s really just a distraction to [knowing] Christ), it would also help us find our joy, satisfaction, meaning, and purpose in God alone, just as Jesus did. And thus, as a result of that, it would help us know Jesus on an even deeper level. It will help us fellowship with Him in his sufferings, and in so doing, to know Him even more deeply and richly. You can see this when two old soldiers meet. You may have been a life-long friend with someone who’s fought in a war. But as soon as he meets another veteran who has actually been in battle, there’s a brotherhood between them that you will never understand until you have been in battle yourself.
That’s the sort of fellowship we have with Jesus when we cling to nothing but our faith in Him in times of hardship, turning away from trusting in any advantage this world can offer (Jesus had every advantage…) that promises us safety and security. This doesn’t mean we don’t wear a mask and gloves. It means we don’t place our trust in a mask and gloves. This means that when [suffering] arises in this life, when all the advantages we’re tempted to lean on get kicked out from under us, we don’t stumble and fall because it’s proven that we weren’t leaning on those things in the first place! Our security wasn’t tied up with our wealth, our status, or even our health. Our aim, our goal is the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. More than anything else in this life we want the full realization of the purpose for which God placed us here, then called us into relationship with Christ!
We don’t want a life that’s all bound up with things that are passing away! And we don’t want to fool ourselves into believing that things are reliable and permanent when in reality they are feeble and faltering! We want to affix our lives to that which is truly reliable! And the Person and work of Christ Jesus our Lord are true and reliable! When we press on to know Him as fully as He can be known in this life, when we press on to realize the full purpose for which He made us, then saved us, when we intentionally, purposefully turn away from refreshing and reassuring ourselves in the fleeting fineries of this fallen world, that is when we’ll be enduring with our God in days of pandemic! And Paul is showing us here in this passage just what that looks like! Press on with Him, my friends, and count these days of lack as gain in that pursuit!