(avg. read time: 8–15 mins.)
3:8 But instead I also regard all things to be loss because of the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, because of whom all things have been made a loss, and I regard them as excrement, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and I may be found in him—not as having my own righteousness that is from the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness that is from God on the basis of that faith—10 to know him, the power of his resurrection, and the participation of his suffering, thereby being conformed to his death, 11 if in that certain way I will arrive at the resurrection that is from the dead. 12 Not that I have already received it, nor have I already been made complete, but I press on so that I may also lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.
In the summer of last year, the lead pastor of my church approached me about preaching what would be my first sermon in several years. I found that I was drawn to talk about Phil 3:8–12 because it is of personal significance to me. When I was in seminary for my MDiv., I took a class called Death and Resurrection with Dr. Brian Brewer. One of the assignments he had us do was to put together an order of worship for our own funerals. After all, a funeral is not for the dead, it’s for the living. It is a ritual for them to have some kind of closure with the beloved dead, to give them proper treatment before committing them to the earth, to memorialize them, to remember their own mortality, and to reflect on its meaning. For the Christian funeral, our responsibility remains the same: to proclaim the gospel to those who are still alive, to remind them of the resurrection hope that we share in Christ. As I went through my own preparatory work, I decided that one of the texts I wanted featured in my funeral was this text, in the hope that my own life could echo Paul’s words here and that these words could be my words as a testimony to those who remain after my death, should I die before the Lord returns. As Paul is here linking his story to the gospel story, when I say that I hope that these words can be my words, what I am ultimately saying is that I hope that my life’s testimony will be that the gospel story is indeed my story. And that is what the word of God spoken through Paul impresses on us: if we are united with Christ, our purpose is that the gospel story should be our story.
In the context of this passage, Paul has already shown that our very existence involves us in a story much larger than ourselves. As Christians, we are to be more aware, more active and engaged participants in that story. When Paul instructs the Philippians in ch. 2 to be humble and live in union with one another, he punctuates his point by directing them to have the mind of Christ Jesus. Paul explained what he meant by the “mind of Christ Jesus” by giving the Philippians a summary of the gospel story in vv. 6–11. In this story, Christ humbled himself by emptying himself and taking on the form of a slave when he became human and dwelt among us, despite being in the very form of God, refusing to exploit his equality with God. He even submitted himself to crucifixion, the most shameful of deaths designed for slaves and insurrectionists. He submitted to this death in obedience to God the Father, as he was the executor, the enactor of God’s will. For this reason, God exalted him after his death by resurrecting him, declaring him Lord, and causing him to ascend to his right hand, thereby reaffirming Christ’s equality with God. It is thus at the name of Jesus that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that he is Lord, in agreement with what God has already declared of him.
Paul points to this story because it is the story that constituted them as a community of believers. We are a community who defines ourselves in relation to this story. We are a community who defines ourselves by the hope given in that same story, as Paul outlines at the end of ch. 3. We are a community who is waiting for the Lord Jesus Christ to return from heaven. When he does, he will transform our bodies by conforming them to his body, which is to say that they will be bodies fit for the new creation. For those who are dead at the time, he will resurrect them as well, so that they will share in his resurrection. In the end, we will all be conformed to Christ’s image by his life-giving resurrection power, the same power by which he will bring God’s kingdom and enact God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
So on the one side we have this grand story of the past, of God the Son, through whom and for whom God created all things, incarnating to fulfill the will of God, particularly as inscribed for centuries in the promises of God’s Scripture, by living in obedience to that will, submitting to crucifixion, being raised from the dead, and ascending to the right hand of God the Father. On the other side, we have the grand story of the future, of our Messiah returning to bring to completion what he has started, including by making us like him through sharing in his resurrection by our resurrection and transformation. The scope of this story envelops all of history, concerns every creature, involves every nation, tribe, people, and language, for it is the story of God’s kingdom. In between summarizing the story that has happened and the story still to come, Paul also tells us his own story, a story he defines in relation to the gospel.
Paul’s life before Christ was defined by his allegiance to the old, Mosaic covenant. He brings up his past as part of his rebuke against those who “mutilate the flesh,” his regular opponents who require keeping the old covenant to be truly in right standing with God. Paul knows all too well the errors of their thinking, because he was himself once an exemplary keeper of the old covenant, in fact he was one by birth. As a Pharisee, he went above and beyond what was written in the Torah to demonstrate his holiness. He was zealous in that he was devoted to maintaining the holiness, purity, and separation of God’s people, even engaging in violence against anyone who got out of line and threatened to contaminate the people with idolatry. By these means, he thought he was guaranteeing the salvation God promised his people, that God would find him in right standing at the final judgment.
But now he has learned what it means to live in accord with God’s will and thus to have one’s right standing before God assured. It is to be in Christ, to know Christ. In other words, Paul is invoking the many promises, such as Jer 31, of the time to come in which God said that his people will know him, that they shall be his people and he will be their God. This is the knowledge of relationship, it is participatory knowledge, it is interactive knowledge. Most importantly, it is divine knowledge. For to know God in Christ is to know the embodiment of God’s love. Such knowledge surpasses all understanding and surpasses all other things in value. That is why what Paul once thought to be advantages for him on Judgment Day, he now regards as loss. He can do without it all, leave it all behind, for the purpose of knowing Christ. The word I have translated as “excrement” can also be translated as “garbage” or “rubbish,” or it can be translated by an even stronger synonym for “excrement.” But however you translate it, the basic message is twofold. One, those who seek to force the old covenant on others for the purpose of attaining right standing with God are attempting to reclaim from the garbage heap or the dung heap what ought to be left behind. Two, Paul regards such status as he once enjoyed as so utterly disposable because knowing Christ is that much more valuable, because it is life-giving.
Paul also says that he wants to be found “in him,” which is to say, in union with him. For it is by this union that we are saved. The right standing that we can have before God, which comes from God’s own verdict, can only come from our union with Christ, whom God has also declared “in the right” by means of his resurrection. This is why Paul says this righteousness is not his own or our own. It is Christ’s status declared by God on the basis of what he has done and we only have it because we are incorporated into and are identified with him. Most of your translations probably render the key phrase as describing righteousness that is through faith in Christ. But because of the context emphasizing our union and identification with Christ and because of how Paul links his own story to the gospel story that he previously outlined in ch. 2, where he describes Christ’s faithful obedience to God, I think it is better to understand this phrase as referring to the faith or faithfulness of Christ to the one whom he declared his complete allegiance. It is only because of our union with him that God grants us the same verdict, the same resurrection. We signify this union when we declare our own allegiance to Christ by confessing with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believing in our hearts that God raised him from the dead. We also signify it when we declare our allegiance in identifying with him by undergoing baptism, when we imitate and thus participate in his death, burial, and resurrection, in anticipation of the day when we will be bodily resurrected.
Paul goes on to show that baptism is meant to be a snapshot of the Christian life. Our salvation comes from knowing Christ, being incorporated in him. We who have thus declared our allegiance to him to share in God’s verdict of him pledge to share in the life that led to that verdict. To know him, as Paul describes here, is to leave behind everything else that we thought gave us privileged status before in order to identify with him by enacting his story. This union is participatory in that it participates in the way by which Jesus attained salvation for us all through his death and resurrection; we are to participate in the sufferings that come from faithfulness to the will of God in order that we may also receive God’s resurrecting power to participate in Christ’s resurrection. There is no path to the resurrection unto everlasting life that does not go through the cross. This is why Jesus instructed us that whoever wants to follow him must deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow him who took up his cross.
Now Paul knew quite well what it meant to share in Christ’s sufferings. He was imprisoned multiple times. He received the punishment of thirty-nine lashes from Jewish authorities five times over. He had been beaten with rods three times over. Once, a crowd tried stoning him to death. He was shipwrecked four times, including once when he was adrift in the Mediterranean for a full day. It did not matter how he traveled, where he went, or who he encountered, he knew danger as a constant companion. He knew what it was to be sleepless, hungry, thirsty, cold, and naked. And on top of it all, he knew what it was to be anxious about the several congregations in his care across the Mediterranean world.
But he persevered through it all for so many years because he knew what story he was a part of. He not only encountered the Jesus who was crucified and raised again, he not only proclaimed the gospel of this Jesus, but he also lived that gospel, he had made the story of the crucified and risen Jesus the pattern of his own story. He had experienced a taste of God’s resurrecting power when God stopped him from persecuting his Church and made him to walk in new life as an evangelist in that same Church. As in Christ’s death he showed forth the power of God who raises the dead, so too the apostle would show the power of God in his weakness.
And just as the gospel story still awaits its conclusion, Paul knows his own story awaits its conclusion. God has already given him and we who believe the verdict of “in the right” inasmuch as we are in union with Christ. Paul is not striving to obtain this verdict by his own works. What he is striving towards is the conclusion of his story, his completion in resurrection, by running the course and finishing the race set before him. We have been given a general idea of how the gospel story ends—God wins, by the way—but we have not yet reached that end and we do not know what all we may have to face before arriving there. And because our story is the gospel story, we know that God has not promised that our Christian lives will be free from struggling, from striving, from suffering, as the gospel story reminds us that the incarnate life of God’s own Son was not free from these things. And this is the gospel story because there is life at its end, his life.
With all that said, what does it look like on a practical level to be active in making the gospel story our story? It involves responding to at least three general challenges. First, there is no substitute for learning the gospel story if we want to know the pattern of life we have devoted ourselves to. That means learning this book, not just the Gospels, even though those will tell you the most about the story of Jesus, but also the OT that set the story before the Gospels, and the rest of the NT that emerges in response to the story in the Gospels. If you want to know the story you are a part of, as well as some wisdom on what it looks like to embody that story, you must read it again and again until it becomes part of who you are. Then keep reading.
Second, we need to find our examples who follow the pattern of Christ. After all, Paul offers himself as an example and he makes that all the more explicit in v. 17, and he points to others still. Paul is not himself the pattern, but he gives us a good example of what it looks like to follow the pattern who is Christ, since it is Christ’s story that defines his life and ours. There are many cases in the Bible where we see appeals to historical examples. By the same token, we stand at almost 2,000 years since the completion of the NT. The great Church tradition has left us many examples of how to live into the gospel story, to follow the pattern of Christ’s story. We need to learn more about our history and learn from the examples of those who have gone before us. We also must remember that when Paul wrote this, he wrote to an audience who knew him beyond this letter. We need our living examples as well.
Third, if we want for our lives to be a testimony to the gospel story, we need to pause and take stock of our lives. And to take such a challenge seriously, we need to make a habit, not simply an immediate response to a text like this. If we take seriously the many statements the Bible makes about our identity, they should make us pause and reflect, because God often makes these exalted declarations of who we are: image-bearers and children of God, the body of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, saints, and so on. But when we look at our lives and the world around us and we notice some discrepancies, it can seem like these are nice sentiments, but maybe God has some unrealistic expectations. Well, maybe the God who created us knows us better than we know ourselves and that’s why much of his directives to us amount to “become who you are” or “become who I know you are.” So as we take stock of our lives, we all need to ask ourselves questions like these: What testimony do I want for my life to give? Is my life giving that testimony? In what ways can I ask God to bring me into greater conformity with Jesus? Who can I help with my testimony?
And remember through all of this that God has not called us to strive on our own, for it is God who works in us, not ourselves. He has given us a community of believers who are involved in the same story. He has given us the clear pattern of this story in Jesus, the same Jesus who promised to be with us always. And he has given us the same Holy Spirit who indwelt Jesus and who indwelt Paul. Even Jesus did not rely on his own power as God’s Son, but surrendered himself completely to the Spirit. It is the Spirit’s goal to conform us to the image of Jesus, ultimately by conforming us to his resurrection. Let us then submit to his will, as Paul did, and more importantly, as Jesus did.