Never Lose Your Greatest Gain
NEVER LOSE YOUR GREATEST GAIN
Philippians 3:4-11
Pastor Jeremy Mattek – September 4, 2016
Danny Davis is a United States Congressman serving the 7th District of Chicago. This past Tuesday around 3:00 in the afternoon, a 43-year-old woman walked into his office started picking up various items around the room. Danny Davis wasn’t in the office at the time, but some of his staff members were. They told the woman to stop and said the police would be called if she didn’t listen. That’s when the woman picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer, began to drink it, poured the sanitizer over herself, pulled out a lighter, and set herself on fire. One of the staff members grabbed a fire extinguisher and put the fire out. An ambulance was called, and she was taken to the hospital. Last I heard, no one really knew for sure why she walked into his office and set herself on fire. But we do know why some others have done the same thing in the past. It was to protest something.
Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in the city of Saigon in 1963 because he wanted to protest the South Vietnamese discriminatory policies. Ryzard Siwiec set himself on fire in 1968 because he wanted to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. If a person sets themselves on fire to protest something, you typically know two things about them. 1) They value something very highly. 2) They are willing to lose good things, like their health, their skin, and the lives, in order to stand up for it.
If you call yourself a Christian, then, by definition, you have assigned the highest value to Jesus Christ. When someone becomes a Christian, it’s often easy to identify the bad things they should give up in order to follow him. Being a Christian means giving up drunkenness, materialism, pornography, sex outside of marriage, racism, bigotry, addictions, and grudges you know you’re not supposed to be holding. But did you notice what Jesus told his disciples to give up in today’s Gospel? Your father. Your mother. Your wife. Your children. Your brothers. Your sisters. Your life. Those are good things. He doesn’t mean that you must give them up in order to follow him. But he did mean that following him means assigning a value to Jesus that would compel you to give up any other good thing if you had to make a choice between them or him.
When we see someone set themselves on fire, we see what it looks like when someone values something more than anything. Today we see how to put that same attitude into practice in the life of the Christian. In the book of Philippians, the Apostle Paul tells us all that he was willing to lose in order to gain the one thing he valued more than anything. And you’ll notice that some of the things he was willing to lose are things people often defend pretty strongly and work very hard to attain.
4 If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more:5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee;6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.8 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. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ9 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.10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
In the first couple of verses here, Paul is basically giving his spiritual resume. And his resume can be broken up into two categories: things about Paul’s life he had nothing to do with, and things about Paul’s life he had something to do with. The things he had nothing to do with include the fact that he was circumcised on the 8th day of his life. He obviously had no control over that decision. His parents made that decision for him. He also had no control over what nation he was born into or which tribe within that nation he would belong to. He had no control over those things. As he grew up, though, he did have control over how well he kept the law, how zealous or eager or happy he was to do his job, and how strongly he encouraged others to live righteously (to do good things). And these are all things that, even today, people recognize as good things.
People don’t look much at circumcision today. But we are happy when parents have their children baptized and when they take their kids to church with them. The Olympics is a great example of how eager we often are to celebrate our nationality. If the athlete you’ve never heard of before had a United States flag next to their name, someone from the USA will typically cheer for them. The city of Milwaukee is an excellent example of celebrating the different tribes within our nations. We have Polish Fest, German Fest, African World Fest, Scottish Fest, Bastille Days, Festa Italiana, Irish Fest, Mexican Fiesta, Indian Summer Festival, and probably some other fests and festas I’m forgetting. These are good things we spend a lot of time and money celebrating.
We also celebrate obedience to the law. “Be a good little boy, and I’ll give you a cookie,” has been heard in many homes throughout history. Our Justice System is set up to reward good behavior. Ideally, the people in prison are those who deserve to be. People who like their job and do it eagerly, like Paul did, are the ones typically rewarded with a raise or promotion. Karen and I were grocery shopping this week, and I can tell you that the check-out lady in our aisle is not getting a promotion any time soon. She was complaining about everything to the woman bagging the groceries. We also like it when we see others live righteously; when children help clean up the kitchen or when people donate money to their favorite charity. These are good things.
And Paul points out something about them in verse 7. He says all these things were “to my profit.” In other words, you can profit in life, depending on where you fit in each category. Not only might you get a cookie for doing the right thing, others may even like you more and treat you better if you fit into the categories for which they’re looking. Even though the color of your skin, your nationality, and the religious decisions of your parents are things you had nothing to do with, some will use those things as the basis for whether or not they talk to you, sit next to you at lunch or in church, give you a job, or even consider you someone who’s valuable enough to stand up for and defend in some situations. And that’s where we get into the warning Paul gives us here.
When Paul says, “but now whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ,” that word for “loss” really means “damage.” In other words, if someone uses how well a person ‘fits’ into these categories to determine their value, then they are actually doing damage to their relationship with Christ. There are two reasons why.
Firstly, I want you to imagine a man and a woman on a date. They’re sitting down for dinner at a fancy restaurant. The music is playing. The food is great. It’s a beautiful evening, and the man gently grabs the woman’s hand, looks deeply into her eyes and says, “Honey, you are so lucky to have me. I am the greatest guy you could ever be having dinner with tonight. I’m so tall and handsome. I exercise a lot. I actually get calls from other women repeatedly to have dinner with them. Yea, I am quite the catch.” Would that woman feellike she is the most valuable person in the world to that man? No. He obviously values himself a bit more.
Keep that illustration in mind and think about how you usually determine your value in the world. Don’t we often use some combination of Paul’s lists here? We like it when the categories we had nothing to do with meet someone’s approval. But I think we like it even more when we fit into the list of things we have some control over. For example, at the end of the day, how do you typically feel if, looking back on the day, you got your to-do list done, you didn’t give in to any temptations, had lots of energy, and received a lot of compliments for something you did? You typically feel pretty good about yourself when the day is done. If, however, you have a day on which nothing on your list got done, you gave into lots of temptations, you felt sad or depressed throughout the day, and people criticized you for a lot of things, aren’t those the days you’re pretty well convinced something needs to change? Isn’t that when you don’t feel all that valuable to anyone?
If that’s what makes the biggest difference; if the majority of my self-perceived value has to do with who I am or what I have or have not done; if that’s what I care about most in my heart, that means I look across the table and tell Jesus that I care about him to some degree less. And if our hearts are focused on Jesus less than anything, then we don’t love him more than everything, and we aren’t really following him according to Jesus’ own definition of discipleship. Trying to gain better standing in these categories can be damaging to our relationship with Christ.
Secondly, I want you to imagine that you are exactly the color and race and ethnicity and gender that gives you the greatest advantage in this world. Imagine you thoroughly enjoy your job and are really good at it. Imagine everyone tells you regularly how much they love and appreciate you or even wish they were you. What is the most you could ever gain if that were the case? For Paul, who actually did have every advantage and felt really good about what he did every day, the most he could ever gain was hell. Paul’s list describes his life before he became a Christian. And one day, before he was a Christian, he was walking on the road to Damascus when Jesus appeared to him in a blinding light and told him that all the advantages he had gained on earth didn’t gain him any advantage with God. God made Paul blind that day to put him in his place. And it was in being blind to everything he had gained in this world that Paul was able to clearly see the one thing his profitable and privileged life had been missing.
Jimmy Cox is a 23-year-old plumber who lives in Texas. Last week he was called out to a house to fix a broken water line. A pipe had burst five feet under the ground, pouring gallons and gallons of water into the yard, creating a big muddy mess. Getting to that pipe 5 feet under the ground, cutting it, and putting a valve on it, was the only way to fix the problem. The trouble was, the only way Jimmy could do that was to dive head-first into 5 feet of muddy, dirty, stinky water, and hold his breath underneath it until the job was done. So what did Jimmy do? He dove in and got the job done, because getting to that pipe and fixing the problem was more important to him than anything. You don’t see that too often.
Just like, until he was blind, Paul had never seen the type of man standing in front of him. A man who could have profited in this world so much more than Paul ever did; someone who could have had all the wealth and fame this world could ever give; someone who could have been adored by everyone if he just would have done more miracles or overcome the Romans like they were expecting, but who considered all of that worth far less than you and me and Paul; and getting us into heaven by diving into the muddy pain of a crucifixion so our self-centered sins could be forgiven and we could one day attain what Paul calls “the resurrection from the dead,” or, in other words, far more than you or I could ever gain for ourselves no matter what category of life we fit in.
When we talk about discipleship, one of the first questions that pops into our heads is usually: “What does my life need to look like in order for me to know that I love Jesus more than anything?” And that’s not a bad question to ask. But maybe a better question to start with is this: “What does Jesus’ life need to look like in order for me to know that he loves me more than anything?” Does his life need to look and different than it already does. No. It doesn’t.
And do you know how hard you have to work to gain that love? About as hard as I needed to work to get a beer during the 4th of July parade. We were visiting with Karen’s parents this past 4th of July. Their home is the starting point for the 4th of July parade in little Three Lakes, Wisconsin. The parade started at 9:00 in the morning. We were sitting by the curb, watching all the floats and horses and bikes and vehicles go by when someone from one of the floats came down to the street, walked over to me, handed me a beer, and said, “Thank you for your service.” I looked at the float he came from and it said, “Thank you veterans – free beer for veterans.” Karen looked at him, pointed to me, and said, “But he’s not a veteran.” “Oh,” the guy said, and pointed to my hat. I was wearing a hat that said “US Army.” He treated me like a veteran because he thought I was. And even after he knew the truth, he let me keep the beer anyway.
In verse 9, Paul said he wanted to “be found in [Christ], 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. For years, Paul tried to prove his place in God’s family by how righteously he kept God’s laws. But Paul was righteous in front of God in the same way I was a veteran – not at all. And yet God handed him heaven just as freely and gladly as that guy handed me a beer because, when you wear the hat of faith in Jesus, God gives you credit for a life of perfect service that you really had nothing to do with. God looks at your life and treats you as though he’s looking directly at the life of Jesus.
Paul saw that as a gift; and a gift so great that it changed how he operated. From then on, all the things he could have in common with some (nationality, ethnicity, level of obedience) just weren’t quite as important as the one greater thing he could have in common with everyone. Think of all the things you could have in common with some; all the categories of life you fit in that will always exclude everyone else who’s different. They might be good things. There might be a time and a place to celebrate them. But God has given us a gift that far surpasses any good any of those categories could ever give – the gift of a Jesus who holds all of us together, no matter our lives, no matter our skin, no matter our sin, in the only category, the only family, that can never be broken.
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