Preliminary word concerning abortion and health care

Introduction

Last week we reviewed the apostle Paul’s personal list of religious credentials that he had accomplished before he came to Christ in faith. They are in verses 4-6 of Philippians 3, and they are quite impressive, really. For what he knew as a Jew, Paul was a hard-driving zealot for God.

He listed his accomplishments not as a braggart’s resume, but to demonstrate one thing: no matter how religious and righteous a person strives to be, no matter how pious and holy it makes him appear before men, God is not impressed.

Graphically stated, Paul added up all of his most impressive achievements one by one. Consider the fact that he was circumcised on the eighth day, a good member of Jewish heritage, actually a proud Benjamite, as regards the law he was even a Pharisee, as to zeal he was even a persecutor of the rival Christians, and when it came to righteousness no one had more to brag about than he.

Total them all up, in terms of impressing God and giving him confidence in his own religious standing, and the sum is zero. At his most privileged, at his most moral, at his most religiously zealous is not thereby made fit and acceptable before God. I want to emphasize that truth, as Paul did, because it is such a scandal. To think that we try to live up to the best standard we know, and admittedly we fall short, but we try, and it counts for nothing!?

The Nature of the Gospel

We have a hard time with that, because we are legalistically-bent as sinners. We think we must earn what God is insistent on giving to us. The passages we reviewed last week from the book of Romans teach us an important truth: we are sinners, alienated from God because we have sinned. No one has ever lived on earth without falling victim to the lure of sin, except Jesus. This makes us unrighteous before our perfect and holy God.

We know this, we sense this distance from God, so we try to live good lives, do good things. Our hope is that somehow, in spite of our failings, we can eek out just enough good behavior to somehow compensate for our sin. You know, if I just do more good than bad, it will tip the scales and God will say, Oh, all right, you did pretty well. Or maybe He’ll see that we tried harder than others and let us into His good graces because of our effort. But God does not grade on a curve like a high school science teacher.

He is perfect. His justice and His holiness are perfect. And because we have not measured up ours is a failing grade. You may say, I don’t like that way of doing things, but that doesn’t matter. When you are pulled over for speeding you’re not going to get very far if you tell the officer, I know I was doing 75 in a 35 zone, but hey, I almost always obey the speed limit. In fact I’m a hundred times more law-abiding than my brother-in-law! Besides, I’m running kind of late for an appointment, so could you just let me off?

Traffic cops are human, but there are laws to uphold, and they have to uphold those laws, even if they do so imperfectly. God is not imperfect, and there is a perfect standard we have all defied. Romans 3:20 – Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law… Romans 3:1 – There is no one righteous, not even one.

Okay, God is perfectly just and He must uphold His clear standard of righteousness, but He is also loving, isn’t He? My dad had standards of right and wrong for me, but he loved me, and even when I did wrong he forgave me and gave me a fresh start! Our parents did love us, they forgave us, but they were not God and had never sworn that the soul that sins will die. God did.

But what of His love? If we are all condemned, how can that come from a perfectly loving God? Good question! How does a perfect God serve His perfect justice, yet maintain perfect love? How can the perfect God amalgamate love and righteousness when His beloved people sin against Him. Justice must be served; yet love must be demonstrated.

Enter the Son of God. God himself dies the most terrible death imaginable, taking on Himself the sins of His beloved people, and makes atonement through that sacrifice in their place. Romans 3:26 summarizes this most profound reality – He did it to demonstrate his justice…so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus. In Jesus Christ and in Him alone are both the justice and the love of God satisfied!

That is the gospel—the good news! As verse 26 says, the one whom God lovingly justifies through the sacrifice of Jesus is – the man who has faith in Jesus. That means that God is not saving people who think they do enough good works to please Him. That’s a spiritual dead end. Who gets saved now, the ones who receive forgiveness and the favor of God, are those who turn in faith to Jesus, God’s loving provision. It’s a GIFT, and God the giver says it cannot be earned! It’s as he said in the 21st verse of Romans 3 – But now, a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

The Spiritual Principle of Losing and Gaining

I want to come back to our given text now in Philippians 3, but we need to understand in the clearest terms the nature of the gospel, so that we can understand the point the apostle brings to our attention. Because God’s forgiveness and reconciliation of sinners is a gift from Him and not on their good efforts, we cannot try to drag our good works in to the salvation transaction.

Paul says it this way: But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. He says that all his best efforts are worthless before God, and he can no longer base his confidence on them, now that he knows Christ by faith. What do you mean, Paul? I mean I no longer trust my own goodness anymore. I trust in what God has done for me by His grace! All that previous supposed goodness—I write it off as a loss.

He goes on—verse 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. That false economy of righteousness is no good to me now. In fact, if I were to begin trusting in my own goodness again, even a little, it would be like treason against the grace of Jesus Christ. He wrote to the Galatian believers who were listening to the Judaizers and turning back to works of law instead of grace (5:4), You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace!

That is very strong, even frightening, language from the apostle, and we must hear the message the Holy Spirit is imparting: your good works are useless in terms of earning God’s favor. You must understand that you are God’s child by virtue of His free grace toward you in Christ! There is nothing you could ever do in the flesh to add to that salvation. And, as a matter of fact, you can never, ever even pay Him back for it.

Fellow Christians, we must let this glorious truth deliver us from a religion of “works mentality” and from a religion of fear wherein we always wonder if we are doing well enough for God to keep His promise of heaven open for us.

Forgiveness is yours because God gave it to you in Jesus when you believed in Him! The hope of heaven is yours because God gave it to you, not because you earned it, but because you trust Him. Salvation is your present possession, not because you worked and saved enough to buy it, but because He loves you and gave it to you in Christ! You have the Holy Spirit living in you, dear Christian, not because you are righteousness in yourself, but because you received the righteousness of Christ.

Let the wonder of grace in Jesus Christ revolutionize your way of looking at God. He loved you and died for you while you were yet a sinner. Accept it. Rejoice in it. And then live your life for Him in the joy of your salvation and the power and presence of His Holy Spirit in you!

You are not living in the BC of the Law, but in the AD of His grace! Compared to a Law existence, Paul says, he gladly gives it up for the SURPASSING GREATNESS of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. You cannot receive or keep His saving righteousness while still trying to hold on to your own righteousness.

How should you now view the religious good deeds that you did in your BC existence? Here’s Paul’s perspective on his “before Christ” religiously good works: I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law… Here is something we must understand in order to be truly free from our sin and guilt, to be truly free to live the life of salvation. Paul considered the BC law-keeping religious acts as rubbish SO THAT he could gain Christ and be found in Him.

Picking up in the middle of verse 9, then, we can clearly see the righteousness that Paul was determined to rely on: 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. There is no doubt that the apostle is saying he had to LOSE any confidence in his own righteousness in order to receive and retain the righteousness that comes by faith.

Listen carefully. The Holy Spirit of God through the Word of God is telling you this—you cannot drag your supposed righteousness along with you into the kingdom of Christ. It does not fit. To even entertain the notion that you have a righteousness of your own is to expatriate yourself from Christ, to alienate yourself from Christ, to fall away from grace.

I said it before, and I must repeat it. You cannot receive or retain the free gift of God’s saving righteousness in Christ while still trying to hold on to your own righteousness. If you find yourself rehearsing how relatively good you are compared to others, you’re in a dangerous spiritual place—a place of pride. If you find yourself coming to God in prayer and forgetting that even the privilege of prayer is a gift of God’s grace through the sacrifice of Jesus, you are out of balance spiritually.

It’s been said that if you ever see a turtle perched on a fencepost you know he had help getting there. We must always see ourselves in the humblest of terms, knowing, believing that we are nothing, nowhere, except for God’s grace toward us in Christ.

Our Revised Goal

With all of this emphasis on our righteousness being useless, and our emphasis on Christ’s righteousness being everything in our lives, I won’t want us to lose sight of something very important.

Now that we know how utterly useless our own righteousness is in earning the favor of God, are we to avoid righteousness as Christians? Once we are in our saved state, trusting only in the grace of Christ, how do we now relate to doing good works, living a righteous life for Christ? Certainly we are not to avoid doing righteousness and good deeds as Christians, lest we get caught up in trusting our own righteousness again. Here is precisely where we need to understand the difference between working for our salvation, and working out our salvation.

Ephesians 2:8-9 is often quoted, and rightly so, as evidence that we are saved by God’s grace and not our own efforts. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. Now, consider the next verse which is quoted unfortunately far less often. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

So doing good works is not out of the picture for believers in Christ. In fact, it is one of God’s primary purposes for saving us, that we would faithfully live out the good works He prepared for us to do. So the question becomes, how do I as a Christian, live out a life of doing good works and acts of righteousness in obedience to Christ, without taking pride in them and seeing those good works as a product of my own righteousness?

I think that verse 10 of our text gives us the answer. Read it aloud with me: 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, and so somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

The first 5 words give us the answer – I want to know Christ. Here’s how we live productively and victoriously in Christ without falling into pride or legalistic religion. We commit ourselves, like Paul, to knowing Christ.

Now that we are saved and have partaken of the heavenly gift we are free to live 100% for Jesus. And it is our privilege to make knowing Him the #1 priority of our lives. To know Him more is to grow in our appreciation of His power within us. Power, as Ephesians 1:19-20 says, is the working of his mighty strength in and through us. It is exactly the same power God exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead. Similarly, once we have been raised from the grave of the law of sin and death, He empowers us to live faithfully for Him.

Here’s the key. Devote yourself to knowing Him more and loving Him more, and you will know His power in your daily life.

But Paul wants to know more than just the power of his resurrection; he also wants to know (to fully experience) the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings. Is he saying he wants to suffer as a Christian? Yes, in this sense: he wants to go through whatever suffering he must to become like Christ, and he wants to undergo such suffering exactly as Jesus did—with endurance and victory.

Hebrews 12:2-3 shows that vital connection between knowing & loving Jesus and enduring suffering well. Again, it is all about knowing and loving Jesus more and more. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

Fellow believers, to live a faithful, victorious life of faith and ministry for the Lord, fix your eyes on Jesus. Get to know Him better; learn to love Him more. What issues from that kind of relationship is a healthy, productive life of good works that allows you to remain humble, and serve Him faithfully with good works.

Sharing in the sufferings of Christ simply means living faithfully for Him and facing what naturally comes to those who are faith-fully serving Him—suffering in a world that neither knows Him nor loves Him like you do. Jesus said that in the world we would have tribulation, but, He said, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. Paul said he wanted to engage in the kind of life that would draw fire from the enemy. He wanted to be in the fellowship of Christian suffering. He knew perhaps better than we that it is the most direct route to becoming like Christ.

I encourage us all to drop any false notions we may have picked up along the way that the Christian life is a life of ease and comfort. No one welcomes suffering, but we know because Jesus told us so that following Him it will not be without suffering. Paul says the truth of the matter is, that is exactly how we become like Him. As Jesus Christ lived, died and rose by the power of God at work in Him, so we who serve Him may be confident that we will rise, as He has risen, in the resurrection from the dead.

Conclusion

The question I pose as I bring my comments to a close is this: As you have considered this teaching from God’s Word, what do you firmly believe God is calling you to do? Are you convicted that you must put to death the pride you have in who you are? Is it time for you to stop taking pride in your accomplishments and acknowledge with Paul that they are utterly without value in impressing God or giving you spiritual confidence? Is it time for you to finally acquiesce to Him in faith and trust Jesus?

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