Philippians 3:7

Posted by DJL on Nov 10, 2012 in Daily Bread | 0 comments

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.

This is the pivot point in this section of Paul’s letter. He is making a sharp turn, moving from warning about the false confidence his opponents are offering to encouraging the Philippians to lay hold of the true confidence one can have in Christ. And to do that, Paul gets personal, contrasting what he once thought was important and mattered to what he now values.

In the previous section, Paul listed all his reasons for “confidence in the flesh” – that is, all the ways in which he honored the old covenant, participated fully in it, and excelled in its requirements. It’s easy to read this as a “that was then” kind of story, assuming that while biographically interesting because it tells us more about Paul, it’s not all that relevant to us today.

But what, exactly, were the things that gave Paul confidence? His background, his training, his experience, his accomplishments. And when you put it that way, you realize that we are not all that different. We, too, are tempted to bolster our confidence about ourselves by checking things off our list or keeping a running tally of what’s going right in our lives, of what we’re accomplishing, or what we’re earning. The methods vary – how much money we make, what schools we went to, a recent compliment someone gave us, how well our kids are doing at school or sports, the new car we drive or latest computer tablet we just bought – but in the end they all come down to the same thing: we establish our sense of ourselves in terms of who we are and what we have done.

And it’s this – this penchant for evaluating and establishing our worth in terms of what we have done – that Paul now counts as loss.

Any chance we could do that?

To understand Paul’s motivation – and what he believes he gained in return – we’ll have to read a little further.

Prayer: Dear God, remind us that we are not merely the sum of our accomplishments and possessions but instead are your beloved children, and help us to treat others the same. In Jesus’ name, Amen.