All right, if you'd open your
Bibles to Philippians chapter 3. Philippians chapter 3. I thought I had my Bible open
to that, but I didn't. All right, let's pray. God, our
Father, bless us now as we look at your book, and we pray that
your son would be made clearer to us today than we have seen
him before. In the name of Christ, we pray.
Amen. Now, we'll be looking at verses
9 through 16. At least that's the plan. And sadly, this passage
has been used by many over the years to give the impression
that a person may lose his salvation. In other words, Paul speaks of
pressing on so that he might lay hold of that for which Christ
had laid hold of him, you know. And this, the King James plays
into this error because it translates a Greek word as win rather than
just gain. And so people act as though,
you know, you get started with this, they'll call it a salvation
experience, but they don't really think that you are saved at that
point. You're not saved until you reach
the end. And finally, you're saved. And
they use this passage trying to prove it. He speaks of attaining, of pressing
towards something, things that may be possessed, things that
can be better. But if in all of those things
he is speaking of salvation, as we understand the word, then
he is saying that he's not yet saved. But that's not true. Now, having said that, I also
want to distinguish, and this is really how to understand this
portion of scripture, to distinguish between our salvation looked
at objectively, or as God sees it, and our salvation as we experience
it. To God, we are already fully
saved, because he's outside time and space, so everything's already
done. But we're going through time,
and God's salvation, while And remember he said, he that began
a good work in you will bring it to perfection till the day
of Christ. He says that in chapter one,
I believe it's verse six. So we know that if God begins
a work in someone, he will bring it to perfection. And so we have this experience
of being regenerated, being born again, learning things, and then
continuing to grow in our salvation, to mature in our salvation. And
that's not exactly a steady climb either. It's more like, you know,
going up hills and down in valleys and back up. But it changes until
We are with Christ at which point everything bad is gone. And that
which God has worked in us is perfected. Now it's always the
context that we must look at before we can understand a text. Someone once said a text without
a context is just a pretext. So we have to consider what is
the context that he speaks these words into. What has he been
talking about? Well, he's been talking about having confidence
in Christ and no confidence in the flesh. That's been his point
in chapter three, the first eight verses. And now, What he is saying
or what he is expressing here is his experience as a believer
in dealing with the conflict between flesh and spirit. Being a creature still possessed
of the nature that he was born with, what Paul is speaking of
in this passage is coming to a greater realization or richer
experience of what God has already done for him. Paul is a sinner
saved by grace, and because he is a sinner saved by grace, he
is righteous and holy in the sight of God. God no longer remembers
his sin. He is already, according to what
Paul says in another one of his books, he's already seated in
the heavenly places in Christ. But that nature he was born with,
the old man, it is always about the business of interfering with
a believer's enjoyment of that which he already possesses. We cannot lose what we already have in Christ.
You know, the Bible only has two categories of human beings. Those outside of Christ and those
in Christ. And those in Christ, everything
they have in Christ, they've had it from the foundation of
the world. Even before they knew they had it, they had it. And
once we found out we had it, we keep learning more about what
we have. But what we have as an objective
reality never changes. Just our ability to perceive
and enjoy. And we as believers long for
the day that the accuser that's in our heart and our bosom will
no longer be able to hinder our enjoyment of our salvation. Let's face it, what most of all
hinders our enjoyment of our salvation? Constant reminders
of our sin. When David made his, they call it a penitential
psalm, but it's Psalm 51, and it was written in response to
what he had done with Bathsheba and Bathsheba's husband. Committing
adultery with her and then killing her husband to cover it up. And
Psalm 51 is his psalm of repentance. And in that psalm he said, my
sin is ever before me. You know that feeling? And he
also says, restore unto me the joy, the enjoyment of your salvation. He never acted like he thought
that he'd lost his salvation, but he wasn't enjoying it anymore. And so this is what Paul is speaking
of. The flesh is subdued by the spirit,
but the spirit does not eradicate it. It's right to rule. The flesh's authority over us
has been removed, but not its power. Now, it's good to distinguish
between authority and power. God has both authority and power,
but there's a lot of things that have authority, have no power,
and a lot of things that have power, but no authority. I mean,
if a guy points a gun at you and says, give me your money. Well, he's got lots of power,
but no authority to do what he's doing. The flesh once had both
authority and power with us because we were in our sins by our experience. And therefore, when our fleshly
conscience would accuse us and remind us of our guilt before
God, it was doing so rightly, with authority and with power.
But now that our sins, in the flow of time and in our experience,
our sins have been put away, our flesh has no right to accuse
us, but it still has the power to do it. And that interferes
with our enjoyment. The Bible says that we are to
reckon or count the old man to be dead. Now, when you reckon
something to be so, or count it to be so, or you're only reckoning
or counting, what it means is you're recognizing, okay, I'm
gonna act as though that's the way it is, but even though I
know that's not the way it is. We are to count and consider
that the flesh is dead. But it's not, is it? Someday
it will be, but it's not. We're to count it and reckon
it as dead and do our best no longer to listen to what it's
saying and treat it as though it were dead. But the fact is
it's not dead and it hinders our enjoyment of God's salvation. The fact is there's nothing we
can do that will affect God's relationship with us. I was in
a Christian bookstore once. I used to, I haven't been in
a Christian bookstore in a long, long time, but I used to go in
there and rarely would I find anything worth taking a second
look at, much less buying. But I was leafing through this
one book and I don't, I think it may have been called, What's
So Amazing About Grace? And that's why I picked it up.
And at the beginning of each chapter, he would just have a
little statement. And I don't know if he made this
one up, but it's as powerful a truth about the gospel as can
be said. He said, there is nothing you
can do to make God love you less. There's nothing you can do to
make God love you more. Why? Because his love never was
based upon who we are or what we do. It just flows from him
entirely of his own will. We can't change his love. He says, I've loved you with
an everlasting love. However, what we do can affect
our enjoyment and assurance. That is our feelings of assurance
of that love. When we act as the rebel child,
it should not surprise us that we become fearful of our father
and that we wonder whether or not we have disobeyed past the
boundaries of his love. Of course, we always find out
we didn't. We haven't, but we can't do anything
to change the relationship between God and us. Now, Paul has declared
that the flesh is useless. He has said that all the successes
he had made in the flesh were nothing but stuff to be thrown
to the dogs. That's what the word there, in
the King James it's translated as dung, but dung had a different
meaning back in 1611 than it does now. It simply means garbage. The word actually is made up
of two Greek words that mean dog and throw or cast. And it
was stuff that was so useless. you would throw it to the dogs.
And when you realize that back then it took just about all that
a person could do to scrape together food to eat, if they threw something
to the dogs, it was utterly worthless. And that's what Paul was saying
all his success as a self-righteous pharisaical Jew had been. It was nothing but that which
is to be cast to the dogs. And so this is the context. He longs to find or to be found,
to win, to attain, and such is the longing for the day when
he will cross over the finish line and be done with the race. And here's something that blessed
me. because it's a struggle I have,
I assume it's a struggle every believer has, but it's good to
hear someone like Paul indicate this. What he's saying is, in
the final analysis, I'm so sick of the legalistic spirit of my
flesh. I want to be free of it because
it hinders me. Now Paul, of all the apostles,
spoke out most strongly against legalism. I mean, the book of
Galatians is just a thrashing to anyone who puts any confidence
in what they have done. But you know why Paul could write
about that so clearly and effectively? He'd spent the first part of
his life pursuing that with all of his heart. And even as a believer,
he continued to struggle with it. Now imagine that, the Apostle
Paul, that great preacher of grace. I once read an article
called the six most influential people in the history of the
world, and one of them was the Apostle Paul. And they made this
point, said now many will think that's strange and maybe we should
have said Jesus. He said but looking at it from
the effect that they had during their day said Jesus never left
the boundaries of Israel so long as he was in this world He had
really very little effect on it. Now we understand whatever
Paul did that affected the world was Christ working through him.
But again, this was written from a historical viewpoint. It said,
it went on to say, Paul essentially turned the world upside down. And so, you know, he's the one
of all the 12, he's the one that most actively pursued the Gentiles. And he went all over. the Roman
world, and from there it's spread to other parts, but he spread
the gospel farther in his day than anybody else did. And yet for all that, he's saying,
I'm pressing on, I'm still in this fight. I still wrestle with a guilty
conscience before God. My flesh still holds me back,
still keeps me from a full enjoyment of all that God has revealed
to me that I have. So he says, at the end of verse 8, I consider
them garbage that I may gain Christ. In, again, the King James, it
says that what he once counted gain, he
now counts loss, that he may win Christ. And that's why I
said that the weakness of the King James version in this passage
is one of the reasons that people misunderstand it. But what he
taught, when he says, that which I once counted as gain, That's
the same word that's used when he says that I may win Christ. In other words, that I may gain
Christ. Here's his point. He says, I'm counting, considering
everything that I did in the past. I'm considering it loss. I once considered it gain. I
now consider it loss that I may consider Christ. gain, that Christ
may be the gain to me. And brethren, that's the struggle
we're in. Now we struggle because the flesh is sinful in every
way that it can be sinful. We still struggle with temptations
to do that which is in and of itself sinful activity. But the
spiritual struggle that we undergo is that struggle between the
fleshly approaches to God that are natural to us, that are made
of legalistic efforts, and then spiritual approaches to God,
which are based entirely upon what Christ has done. How do we know that this is our
struggle? Because when we sin, notably, When we fall to some
sin that we thought we had managed to overcome, or when we find
that we're not able to quit doing something that we know is wrong, it makes us feel lost. And if we had a full apprehension
of the grace of God, our sin would cause us to be sad, as
it should. but it would not have a moment's
effect on our confidence in the presence of God or our enjoyment
of his salvation. Paul says we don't wrestle against
flesh and blood. Our war is in spiritual things.
And the war within us is a spiritual war. Now, he says he wants to be found
in Christ. Excuse me. Verse nine, 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. Now, the scriptures there say,
strictly speaking, the faith of Christ. But that word that
they translate of, actually, there is no word there in the
Greek. And the reason is one of the differences between the
Greek language and our language is it uses what grammarians call
case to indicate the relationship between words. We generally use
prepositions to establish the relationship between words. You
know, like we went to the store, you know, or that is so-and-so's car, or the car of
so-and-so. We use those prepositions. They
used word endings. And the word ending here on this,
on the word Christ here, is what we would use the preposition
of. But you know, the preposition of can mean a lot of things.
And whether it's a reference here to Christ's faithfulness,
because the word translated into faith can also be translated
as faithfulness. Whether it's talking about the
righteousness that has come to us because of the faithfulness
of Christ to do the work that the Father gave him to do, or
as our translation puts it, whether it's because of the righteousness,
or excuse me, it's a reference to the righteousness that comes
to us through our faith in Christ because both of them are true. I've heard people argue about
this as though this is a big issue. It's not. Whether you
refer to this as the faithfulness of Christ or our faith in Christ,
it all ends up the same. It's talking about that our salvation
and all the blessings that come to it are based upon the righteousness
of God that comes to us through Christ and is received by faith. But he said, I want to be found
in Him. Now, he wants to be found in
Him as opposed to being found in the flesh. Oh, wouldn't it
be good? to live without any of the distraction
of the flesh, without being in the flesh in any sense whatsoever. That is, without listening to
its voice, without hearing its voice, without succumbing to
its lies. Wouldn't that be wonderful to
live that way? That's what Paul says. I want to be found in Christ,
totally trust in Christ. I want to be found with nothing
but Christ and His righteousness. I want to be found with nothing
of my own. I want to be found with everything
in Him. Now, that's our desire right
now if we're a believer. However, His language here expresses
that He has not gotten to that state. Now, this does not mean
that he is not in Christ in that objective sense. Remember, he's
talking about the experience of his salvation, not the reality
of it. And he's saying, my mind, the whole of my way of thinking
is not yet entirely in Christ. And brethren, it won't be. until
we die or he returns. The flesh and the spirit are
always going to be warring against anything. And he goes on to say,
I want to know Christ. Did he not know Christ? Of course
he did. But he wanted to know Christ
in such a way that he didn't know anyone or anything else
in terms of his salvation. He wanted to enter into deeper
understanding of who Christ is and what he's done. And he wanted to enter into a
deeper personal knowledge of Christ. You know, if someone
came up to you and said, well, do you know so-and-so? Sometimes
you'll answer them and say, well, I know who it is. And they might go, yeah, but
you know him. Well, I know him a little bit, you know. He lives
across the street, and I know where he works, you know, and
we wave hi to each other and everything else. There's all
different levels of how you can know a person. A good friend?
Do you know that guy? Oh, yeah,
I know him. And you can come to know somebody so well, a person
might make an accusation about it, and you say, listen, I know
that guy. He wouldn't do that. And this same word translated
no here is the one that the Bible commonly uses to describe the
intimate relationship between a husband and wife. And you know,
the moment that you became attracted to your spouse, you knew them
some. But the knowledge of that person
becomes more and more intimate. And even after you're married,
you come to know them better and better and better. There's
some people, some couples I've seen that it seems as though
they know each other so much they have melded into one person
and you can't even think of one without thinking of the other.
You don't mention the name of one without mentioning the name
of the other. That's what he's talking about. In his mind, he
wants to be so consumed with Christ that there isn't room
for no one else. He says, in verse 11, and so somehow attaining
to the resurrection of the dead. He doesn't mean that he thinks
by his efforts at this, that's how he's going to attain. It's
probably one of those words that's difficult to translate, but it
indicates that by this means, by knowing Christ, we attain
to the resurrection of the dead. And he goes, not that I've already
obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press
on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.
Now, we aren't going to finish, but just let me briefly remark
here in his statement, not that I've already obtained all this.
And that's the key to understanding what Paul means. He says, I'm
still struggling. I believe, but Lord help my unbelief. In my spirit, Christ is all. In my flesh, he is nothing. And I so much want to be completely
in Christ and not at all in my flesh, but I'm not there yet. We'll finish up this section
next week.