“The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ.”
Philippians 3:7, MSG
Carried
After Philippians 3:4b-14
Have you
ever thought
you had it
all
then awoke
in the middle
of the night
freezing in the
thin air?
The view
was grand—
but the wind
was stronger
than the fire you
built, and the ground
harder than
the pegs
of your tent.
Come down
the mountain.
Throw the map
in the bin.
Descend into the valley
and be carried up the true mountain
in oneness with Christ.—
Can you relate to the narrative of this poem? Have you ever reached a destination you dreamed of, only to find it wasn’t exactly right or what you truly needed?
Paul’s plummet into Christ is one of the most dramatic events in the New Testament apart from the resurrection.
What is Paul saying in Philippians 3? He is saying that at one point he checked all the boxes. He had it made.
Yet after encountering Christ, he found all that he had amassed inferior. It was as if he invested everything into a currency that was no longer traded. He collected dust, and Christ was gold.
Most of the translations I read didn’t give the full picture of Paul’s feelings toward his previous religious achievements. In Phil. 3:8b, Paul says, “For [Christ’s] sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” (NRSV)
“Rubbish” reads less dramatically than what Paul is saying. John H. P. Reumann’s commentary in the Anchor Bible Commentary Series translates it as “crap.” In that context, Paul means something more like garbage from the dump or sewage.
I think it’s worth sitting with Paul’s very strong statement. I see in my own life how quickly I can cling to things that offer me temporary success, safety, or some notion of status. Well, Paul had pretty much all of that, in the form of a spiritual-industrial complex.
It reminds me of when C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory,
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
He threw it all away and took the costly route of uniting his life with Christ’s death and resurrection.
I pray I can be as daring and courageous as Paul. I pray I can seek to know Jesus and be known by Jesus more fully because that is where my true riches reside. That is the climb I long for.