Philippians 3:4-14
Pressing On

… though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. If any other man thinks that he has confidence in the flesh, I yet more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the assembly; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless.

However, what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yes most certainly, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death; if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on, if it is so that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus.

Brothers, I don't regard myself as yet having taken hold, but one thing I do. Forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

World English Version

Paul was writing the church in Phillipi with anxiety over the false, dangerous teachings that were pushing those believers into wrong ways. Some false teachers, whom Paul calls "dogs" in the second verse of chapter three, were teaching that we couldn't become Christians without first becoming Jews, and that the prerequisite for Christ's love was to follow the volumes of Jewish religious customs.

Fortunately for us, those false teachings have been abandoned in the centuries, just as we have discarded the theory that the earth is flat. Unfortunately for us, we have our own false teachings that haunt us.

Ours are more subtle. They sometimes take the form of the belief that if we do good, we will get to heaven. Sometimes, they are expressed in a compulsion for church work, with people who volunteer for everything in the church until they are members of 28 committees and have to forward their personal mail to the church's address to read it. Sometimes, these untruths are exhibited as an out-of-control malignancy that once was the ideal of "self esteem." We even see glimpses of it in the heritage of the United States of "self sufficiency," which when it grows to excess, feeds the stereotype in the rest of the world of the arrogant "Ugly American." The common theme in these false teachings is an assurance placed on ourselves.

We want to be good enough. We want to be smart enough. We want to believe that we control our own destiny, and that we can earn God's love and our heavenly reward.

But we know it isn't true.

If we can be honest with ourselves, we know we aren't good enough. We know that God is Good, and we are not. We work so hard to forget those times when we were anything but good, and pray that the people we hurt with our evil will not be waiting for us when we try to enter heaven. We fight back against the despair that tells us that we are more driven to evil than we would ever admit to our closest friends. Our frustrations with our failings drive us harder to believe in the myth and fight for the self-goodness that we want so badly to believe we can attain.

So, we keep lying to ourselves and keep bragging about our own goodness. Or we give up on our goodness and lie that there is no Good God, and this life is all there is.

Or we, like Paul, find we can't lie any more. Paul had to confront his lies on a trip to the city of Damascus, where Jesus dropped him to his knees in a blinding light, and turned his life around.

So we hear Paul talking to us with as fresh a message as if it were written yesterday. Paul tells us he can beat us hands down when it comes to self-goodness. He had us on every point—more religious knowledge, more time spent in the church, more sacred marks and trappings than anyone else in his generation or in ours. If anyone ever was "good", it would have been him!

And what does he do with that "goodness?" Pitches it in the trash where it belongs. Paul tells us that only when we give up those lies are we able to accept God's Truth. Only when we give up our feeble, diseased caricatures of good are we ready to look in the face of God and feel God's love for us!

Paul knew that feeling! He wanted it so much for those he was teaching. More than that, he knew the feeling he had here on earth was nothing compared to the full force of that love in God's presence forever in heaven. That's why the caution and the urgency of his instruction to "press on." He knew that some in the church at Phillipi considered him a celebrity, a "super Christian" full of goodness. Paul knew if he allowed that thought to enter back into his mind, he'd fall away and fail again. So he resolved to put his great successes as a missionary behind him, in just the same way as he'd put the evil failings of his life behind him! His constant focus was pressing onward to serve God more, to feel God more fully in control of his life now, and to live with God forever!