What Really Matters in Life? Paul's Answer in Philippians 3

Introduction

What really matters in life? In Philippians 3:3-11, Paul looks back on a life of status and achievement and says he came to regard them as rubbish. Revd. Mark Fletcher asks what we are chasing instead, and explains the righteousness by faith that replaced Paul’s gains and his one great ambition: to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.

The great William Morris once said that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. I think he’s talking about stuff rather than people, but you get the idea. And I think he knows something about this tendency that we have to accumulate stuff, to fill our houses with things that perhaps we worked hard for and thought were going to be important, but in the end just ended up clutter.

But perhaps that’s true not just of our possessions, but also of much of what we spend our life chasing after or worrying about. These things which seemed so important, and in the end we look back and we say, that didn’t really matter at all, or it never really offered the satisfaction that we thought it would. And our passage today is an amazing vision of what it looks like to kind of cut through the clutter, to see what really is of value, and a desire to be uncompromising in the pursuit of what really matters in life.

So we’ve been studying these prison letters of Paul. And I have this thing where it seems like pretty much every book of the Bible that we study becomes my favourite. Well, this is my new favourite. Philippians is incredible in its richness and its insight, in its beautiful language and the sort of profundity of its vision. And what’s happening in our passage today is that Paul is addressing one of the controversies which dogged the early church, and it was sort of the struggle to put into practice the equality which Jesus had enacted, and to allow Gentiles, non-Jews, to have the same status as everybody else. And it seemed that the early church then, perhaps still now, is marked by that old human desire for status and hierarchy and looking down on people. And so Paul addresses that, but as he does so, we catch a glimpse of Paul’s early life and some of the things that he thought so important back then, which now he realised had led him down a blind alley. So there’s that really interesting description of his life in verse four. He says, if anyone else had reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Paul was a brilliant, ambitious young man who pursued academic and religious excellence and all of the kind of status that comes with that. He was self-confident to the point of arrogance, hugely accomplished, impressive, even intimidating. And yet all of that had led him to a place… well, they say, don’t they, that pride comes before a fall, and that is certainly what happened to Paul. The thing, the pursuit of these things for their own sake, had blinded him to what really mattered. And now, looking back, he is able to say, verse 7, whatever gains I had, I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

Now, we live in a very different world than Paul did, and yet there is still, I think, this tendency to spend our lives chasing things that ultimately don’t really matter, or worse, do great harm. What is it for you? Is it wealth and comfort, or status and success, or possessions and pleasure? It’s not necessarily that these things are bad in themselves, but if we stop and ask whether that is actually what life is about, is fullness of life, is freedom found in that way, or are they things that actually end up just trapping us? And if they are not, then there is great potential for a terrible sense of waste as we realise we spent our life pursuing empty things. The Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins talks about this. He says, I meet people who want to act and be famous, and I tell them, when you get to the top of the tree, there is nothing there. It is all nonsense. And I think that’s true of so many of the things that our world encourages us to strive for. Why do we do it? I suspect most of us don’t even think about it. It just plays into our ego and our ambition. We do what feels good, and we assume that, well, if that’s what other people want, then that must be an important thing. C. S. Lewis has got a great line on this in Mere Christianity. He says, you know, the problem is our desires are not too strong, they are far too weak. We are half-hearted, fooling around with fleeting pleasures and ambition when the greatest of joys is offered to us. We are too easily pleased. And I think we need those who have the wisdom to help us kind of cut through the noise and the distraction and show us what really matters, where lasting joy lies. And so here we have the great apostle Paul at the end of his life, reflecting on the mistakes that he made and what he lost and what he discovered through all of that. And so he says in verse 8, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him. This is one of the great realisations of the saints throughout history. St. Augustine said, to fall in love with God is the greatest romance. To seek him, the greatest adventure. To find him, the greatest human achievement. God cannot give us joy apart from himself, because it does not exist. And scripture is full of these injunctions. It says things like, what good is it for a person to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their soul? Jesus says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will fall into place. Paul had to lose everything in order to discover the greatest thing. And that was achieved not by his brilliance or his ambition or his own efforts, but through humility and faith. Verse 9, he says, to be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes by faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. His experience of Christ is that it’s like the sun breaking out on a cloudy day, which transforms everything and gives joy and meaning to everyday life. I think our aspirations are far too small. And what we have at the end of this passage is an incredible picture, a sort of breathtaking vision of Paul’s ambition. After he’d been through all that, after he’d lost everything, this is what he realised mattered more than anything else. And it’s astonishing. Just let it sink in. Hold on to this. Perhaps write it down so that you can meditate on it. It’s serious stuff. Verse 10, he says, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing in his suffering by becoming like him in death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection of the dead. Let me just break that down for you. To know Christ: there is a God who is not distant, who has made himself known to us. The author of the universe, the Logos, the one who was there at the beginning, can be known and is seeking us out. And there is no greater thing than that. Paul says he wants to know the power of his resurrection. Scripture tells us that the power which raised Christ from the dead can be at work in us through faith, bringing new life and transformation, that we might be a light in the darkness, the salt of the earth, the first fruits of the resurrection. Paul speaks about sharing in Christ’s suffering, and there is this kind of incredible dignity and privilege of discovering that our pains and our sorrows need not be meaningless, but may be part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world. And ultimately, that he might attain the resurrection from the dead. Perhaps the greatest promise of all, that death is not the end and that we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth. Is that not a remarkable vision? The greatest aspiration. Set that before yourself and make the choice. Are our desires too strong, or do we not desire enough?

So what is it that you’re pursuing in life? Don’t settle for that which does not satisfy. Do not allow yourself to be distracted from the pursuit of the real joy that is to be found in Christ Jesus. Let us, as Hebrews says, throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race before us, so that we might be part of the greatest story of all. Amen.