THE JOURNEY UP THE MOUNTAIN

SERIES: THE SURPASSING VALUE OF KNOWING CHRIST

Scott Grant

This is the second message in a four-part series from Philippians 3 on the surpassing value of knowing Christ. In the first section of this great chapter, we discovered our identity as followers of Jesus: We are “the circumcision,” which means in our vernacular, the people of God.

Now as we move to the next section of the chapter, we are going to find out our great privilege as followers of Jesus and the people of God: we get to know Jesus intimately.

When the Israelites came to Mount Sinai and the cloud of God’s glory came down and rested on the mountain, only Moses was allowed to go up on the mountain. And as he went up, God called to him from the center of that cloud, “Draw near to me.”  Moses entered the glory cloud and spent forty days in the presence of Almighty God, in the center of God’s glory--in the center of God’s heart (Exodus 24:15-18). I have often tried to imagine what that must have been like.

John 1:14 tells us that the glory of God is now revealed in Jesus Christ. So in a sense God is now calling all of us to climb the mountain and meet with him, to see his magnificence in the face of Christ. If you listen to your heart, I believe you will hear this call. It feels something like a longing, or perhaps an ache. It’s a desire to have something more than you have, something transcendent.

Now, if you are going to climb a mountain as a novice, you need a guide who has been there before and knows how to do it. In this study the apostle Paul will be our guide as he tells his own story. Philippians 3:7-11 is our text, but we’re going to read verses 2-6 first to get the context:

“Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh--though I myself have reasons for such confidence.

 
If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.”

Now the text we’ll be studying begins:

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 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. 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, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 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.

Intimacy with Christ

In verse 7 Paul uses marketplace terms of profit and loss to evaluate his former way of life. Formerly he thought his Jewish heritage was extremely valuable and that his Jewish accomplishments marked him out as a member of the people of God. They were gain, or profit. Now he has a different evaluation: he considers all of that a loss, something he has given up as an advantage. Not only that, he says he considers every other potential advantage a loss.

What has caused this monumental shift in his values? Acts 9 recounts how Paul, then known as Saul, was on the road to Damascus, and Jesus Christ met him there. Saul recognized that he had been going the wrong direction his whole life, and he made a 180-degree turnaround. What was it about Jesus that made it so easy for Saul to discard all his former values? It was knowing Jesus intimately.

The best picture of knowing Jesus that we have in the Scriptures is that of the marriage relationship, the longing of the husband for his wife and of the wife for her husband, the deep desire we all have to relate intimately in that way. That is a small picture of the greatness of the covenant relationship that Jesus wants with us. So Jesus is wooing us. He is lovesick. He wants desperately to know us and for us to know him.

Paul says he has lost all things. Either he decided to let go of all of his former values, or these things were stripped from him in some way. He actually considers all of these advantages rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. Now, the Greek term translated “rubbish” is very vulgar. It means either excrement or street garbage. (I am still waiting for the modern translation that has the courage to put the literal meaning in the Holy Bible.) But it’s not that everything else has no value, it’s just that by comparison to the value of knowing Christ, everything else can be considered garbage. Paul is willing and even eager to suffer loss in order that he might gain intimacy with Christ.

Let us as followers of Jesus be clear and unapologetic that we are willing to suffer loss only because we are going to gain something. We don’t simply give things up; we give them up to gain what is far better: intimacy with Christ. Knowing the Lord intimately is satisfying. The appeal to know him is an appeal to our own hearts. So we are going to hear passionate cries emanating from our heart, and we need to interpret them as Jesus calling to us from that place. We will meet with him there, in the center of our hearts, in the holy of holies where Jesus dwells. When we see the absolutely pure and holy love in his face, we will know that we were made for this meeting.

The top of the mountain, then, ends up being the center of your heart. That’s where the cloud of God’s glory is resting, where Christ dwells. That’s where he is waiting. Your heart is God’s temple now (1 Corinthians 6:19). Can you believe that your heart is that most holy of places? It is because it has been cleansed by the blood of Christ.

I just taught a seminar on intimacy with God at our men’s retreat. Our group was assigned a meeting room that was downstairs. One of the men commented afterward that he thought it was appropriate that we met in a downstairs room, because in a sense we all have to descend into our hearts in order to meet with God.

Think of the soul-mate connection that perhaps you have with a friend or your spouse. When you’re in conversation with them it seems as if fifteen minutes have gone by, when in actuality two, three, perhaps even five hours have gone by. You are sharing thoughts and dreams, being inspired by one another, being challenged. Perhaps memories are surfacing, and at the end of it all you feel as if something has been released.

Jesus wants those kinds of intimate conversations with us. When you meet with Jesus in that way, you’ve shared something precious and it has been received. Nothing satisfies the heart like intimacy with Christ. I am convinced that neither money, possessions, sex, marriage, godly children, health, emotional stability, success, recognition, affirmation, efficiency, competence, attractiveness, nor anything else one might consider valuable, is comparable to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus. Are you convinced of this?

As we journey up the mountain, whether we give things up or have them stripped from us, the loss is an opportunity to gain intimacy with Christ, so we win. Wouldn’t it be good if we looked at every at loss as an opportunity to gain priceless intimacy with Christ?

I have a friend who has a stock expression when he is not doing well: “We’re getting down to bare metal.” In other words, God is stripping away a lot of things from him.  He has a couple of other stock expressions. One is “Whatever it takes.” That is, whatever it takes to draw him closer to Christ, he is willing to go through it. And the other is when he suddenly gets a far-away look in his eyes, and you know that he’s some place like Mount Sinai, enjoying a sweet moment with the Lord, and then he comes back and looks at you and says, “Ah.” You want to go where he just went, whatever it takes to get to that place, stripped down to bare metal if that’s what it takes to have that kind of intimacy with the Lord. That’s what I want.

So as you head up the mountain, you have to leave baggage behind. First of all, like Paul, you have to leave behind your efforts to find your identity in your cultural heritage, achievements, and observances. Probably you will find that you have to let go of other values as well. You will not want to be weighed down by such excess baggage. I have a very simple philosophy on long trips: travel light. It makes it easier to move around from place to place. I went to Italy for three weeks once with a friend, and he had this huge suitcase, and I just had a little bag. Our car got in a wreck, and we had to walk two miles to a train station. (I did not gloat.) Often the things you think are important are really not. Knowing Jesus is what is important.

“The righteousness that comes from God”

On this journey up the mountain we arrive at a surprising base camp: “the righteousness that comes from God.” When you see that term, think of covenant membership, being “in,” being among God’s people. Paul says he no longer finds his sense of membership in his Jewish heritage and his Jewish accomplishments. He now finds his sense of membership and belonging to God based solely on faith in Christ.

In verse 10, righteousness is for the purpose of knowing Christ. Verse 10 is actually a continuation of a sentence that began in verse 8. The New American Standard Bible makes this clearer:

“More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him . . . ” (italics mine).

So righteousness is not an end in itself but a means to the end of knowing Christ. I make this point because many of us have a problem with this as followers of Christ. We have arrived at the base camp of the righteousness of God, and we are “in,” but what we do now is go searching around for another base camp. We start trying to be righteous, to measure up to some kind of performance standard, to conform our lives to something. We are trying to get “in,” to achieve our way to a certain status, when all the status we could ever want has been given to us in the righteousness of God, in being members of his family. The goal, brothers and sisters, is intimacy with Christ. That is the prize. Climb the mountain. The great privilege, and I would say the great holy duty for us as God’s righteous ones, is to pursue this intimacy with Christ, to draw near to his heart.

How do we do this? Paul has a couple of ideas for us. Verse 10 sounds as if Paul is saying he wants to know three things: Christ, the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings. But actually, the grammar of the Greek text indicates that he wants to know one thing: Christ; and the way he knows Christ is through these two other things: his resurrection and his sufferings.

Resurrection and sufferings

Resurrection and sufferings are the two dominant themes in the life of Christ.  Now, if you want to connect with Christ, you must connect with his story. You must read the gospels and let them into your heart. There you will find the sufferings of Christ and the resurrection of Christ.  You also need to connect with the overarching Genesis-to-Revelation story of God that finds its climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. But Paul not only wants to know the story, he wants to live the story.

What does it mean to experience the power of the resurrection of Christ? Well, it means to experience the Holy Spirit. When Christ was raised from the dead, he gave his followers his Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enlightens us, shows us Christ, empowers us, motivates us, leads us. Particularly in this context, the Holy Spirit leads us to experience the sufferings of Christ. Isaiah 53:3 foretold that Jesus would be a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering. If you want to know someone, you want to know what that person cares about. Jesus cares about a world full of people in pain. He suffered and died for the sin and brokenness and pain of this world. And he calls us now to share in that suffering, to bear the sorrows of the world. That’s one of the ways that you know Jesus. And here, from Paul’s perspective, suffering is not only to be tolerated, but it is to be desired, because he gets to know Christ through the suffering.

Knowing Christ through his Holy Spirit probably means doing something you don’t know how to do for the sake of Christ, something that is beyond you, something that you really don’t have the resources to pull off. It means taking a risk in the name of love. Otherwise, why would you need the power beyond yourself that the Holy Spirit provides?

And then we know Christ through his sufferings. Go someplace where it hurts, someplace where someone is in pain, and meet with that person there. Another place you might need to go is your own heart. There are wounds there, and if you spend enough time there, you are going to find Jesus, because Jesus is where it hurts. Jesus is weeping there.

I want to share a little story. This is one way I experienced Christ through his resurrection and suffering. I was on a short-term missions trip that about a dozen of us took to Belize. One day three of us went to an orphanage. This didn’t seem as if it were going to be a reach for me (although I had never been to an orphanage before), because I enjoy kids. So I looked forward to spending a day playing with these kids, until I got there. I was unprepared for two things.

First, I was unprepared for starvation--starvation for affection. The other two team members were women, and I was the only man, so all the boys just mobbed me. They were literally getting into fights with each other in order to be close to me.

The other thing I was not prepared for was disease. There were runny noses, open wounds. I began to think, “This is the beginning of the missions trip, and if I get too close to these kids, I’m going to get sick, and my trip is going to be ruined.” So about thirty minutes into it, I was trying to keep my distance even though these kids were mobbing me. I was sitting down, and I had one little guy on my knee, and I was almost holding him at arm’s length, bouncing him up and down.

At that point the Holy Spirit did something. He showed me Jesus. Jesus took all of my disease, the disease of my sin, and eventually every other disease as well is going to be wrapped up in the atonement. He took that on himself. He brought me close to him, and he absorbed it all. So who was I to keep this little guy away from me? Then I held him close to me, cradled him with his head against my chest. This little kid who had been bouncing off the walls became completely at rest. I don’t know how long I held him, but it was a long time, and I was very close to Jesus at that point. I knew something of the heart of Jesus that I hadn’t known before, through the resurrection of Christ, through the power of his Holy Spirit, through the sufferings of Christ.

Don’t just learn the story; live the story. Enter the world seeking to bring the love of Christ to it. As you do, you will find that you need the Holy Spirit. You can’t pull it off on your own. And as you do, you will find love growing in your heart. You will find that you care a lot more than you thought you did.  And if in all of this you feel the pain--maybe you even wish it could be you suffering instead of someone else--you are about as close as you can get to the heart of Jesus.

We tend to separate knowing Jesus and serving him, being and doing, the contemplative life and the active life. But we can see from this text that knowing Jesus cannot be limited to contemplative activities such as Bible study, quiet times, worship services, personal retreats, and so on. Those are all wonderful, and I advocate those, because I’m more on the contemplative side myself, but that’s not all there is to it. I find that these two ways of living are mutually reinforcing. If you think about Jesus, you want to go out and do something for him. If you do something for Jesus, you want to come back and think about him.

So look for Jesus everywhere. Find him in the Scriptures. Find him in your prayers. Find him in your passions, your dreams. Find him in your fears, your wounds. Find him when a memory produces a wistful sigh. Find him in your deep desire for intimacy. Find him in your victories and in your defeats. Find him on the mountains and in the valleys, in the rivers and in the deserts. Find him in the crash of a wave and the cry of an eagle. Find him in the stunning colors and subtle hues of a sunrise or a sunset. Find him in the way droplets of dew capture the sunlight. Find him at the first instant you notice a change of seasons. Find him in Michelangelo and in Frank Lloyd Wright. Find him in Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and John Grisham. Find him in Mozart and U2. Find him in Casa Blanca and The Matrix. Find him in the intricacy of a computer chip and the immensity of the Golden Gate Bridge. Find him in the elegance of flow charts, balance sheets, and business plans. Find him in the smile of a child and the tears of an orphan. Find him in the glow of a bride and the despair of the homeless. Find him in the joy of a grandfather and the sadness of a widow. Find him in the living and in the dying. Find him with your eyes, your ears, your nose, your hands, your mouth. Mostly, find him with your imagination. Let what you take in stir your heart and take you to Christ. For that’s where Christ dwells--in your heart. Climb the mountain.

Paul says loving people this way is what makes him like Christ in his death. “Becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Paul has no doubt about whether he will be resurrected from the dead, but this word “somehow” is used to convey humility in the face of the power of God, a certain inability to understand how anyone can be raised from the dead.

Paul climbs the mountain of knowing Christ twice in this passage. And now he is talking about the resurrection from the dead. And if he were to climb the mountain one more time, what he would say is, “I am being resurrected from the dead in order that I might know Christ.” What is it about the resurrection of the body that is so great? Paul writes, “And so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

A couple of months ago I went for a walk. I had been very active and I just wanted to be with the Lord for a little bit and share my thoughts with him. It was just a nice little casual conversation. And after about ten minutes of walking and sharing my thoughts with the Lord, I said, “It’s good to be with you, Lord.” And I barely had a chance to get those words out of my mouth when I felt something within me, and it went like this: “It’s good to be with you, Scott.” Do you struggle believing that? But how can it not be true? Everything we know from the Scriptures about Christ’s inviting us into his presence tells us it is good for us to be in his presence. It’s good for him as well. “Come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:8).

In this passage Paul has led us up the mountain, to the center of the heart of God. I hope he has led us to the center of our own hearts where we meet with God. In your heart do you feel the longing, the ache? Do you sense something like a voice? I think that voice is calling you to come closer. I think it is the voice of the lovesick Savior who is asking you to climb the mountain to draw close to him.

Where indicated, Scripture is taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All other Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ("NIV"). © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

Catalog No. 4788

Philippians 3:7-11

2nd Message

Scott Grant

February 2, 2003