Philippians 3:4b-14

As we read Philippians 3, we cannot help but hear echoes of chapter 2. Paul has just told us how Christ embodied the upside down way for us, by humbling himself and submitting himself unto to death. And now, in chapter 3, we hear how Paul is following the upside down way by submitting himself to the lordship of Christ

In the verse prior to the assigned pericope, Paul is dishing out some pretty harsh language. Dogs? Mutilators of flesh? Ouch. There is conflict between the Jews and Gentiles. People, claiming to preach the Gospel, are coming in and saying to these Gentile converts that in order to really be a Christian, they need to be marked by circumcision. This is troublesome for several reasons. First, the fact that some believers are insisting on circumcision as a part of the Gospel makes it obvious that they don’t really understand the Gospel, the Good News that God acted in a profoundly new way by sending his Son in the flesh to do what we were incapable of doing. Second, it seems to demonstrate that not only do these people not understand the Gospel, they are clinging to these old “signs” that were intended to set the Jews apart as God’s chosen people but have also resulted in some unholy pride.

Paul jumps in and says, this in nonsense! The things that set us Jews apart are all well and good but God is doing a new thing. No longer are these external signs the primary sign of God’s presence. Rather, we are the circumcision. We are the sign of God’s presence in the world.

Paul goes on saying, if anybody has a claim on confidence based on those external signs, it’s me. But now, all those things that I used to claim to demonstrate my spiritual status, they’re like garbage. The Greek word actually means dung. Why is Paul so willing to lay aside all these things that were once so important, and to denigrate them with such vivid language?

To gain Christ. To be found in Him. In all of his writings, there are almost 100 reference to being “in Christ” in Paul’s work. But what does it mean to be “in Christ?” Consider this in terms of citizenship. To be in Christ is to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God, of “Christ-land” so to speak. To continue to be “in sin” is to dwell in the land where Sin reigns, “Sin-land” for the lack of a better term. If you are a citizen of a certain place, you function by the customs of that culture.

Tommy and I learned this the hard way, multiple times, when we served as volunteer missionaries in Italy. We didn’t know how to live as “Italians” so we just kinda ‘winged’ it and learned as we went. For example, we went to the ice cream shop with some friends. Like good, rule-following Americans, we patiently waited in line for our turn only to discover that we were being cut in line left and right, even by the people that came with us! We probably would have stood there forever, waiting for “our turn” that would never come. The Italians weren’t being rude; they just had a different way of doing things.

But the distinctions between “Christ-land” and “Sin-land” are a bit more significant. In Sin-land, status is everything. The people Paul calls “dogs” were pulling out their checklist: circumcision, holy days, and food. Check. Alright, I’m in.” None of those things are bad, but when these “checklist” items become a source of pride and cause a person to base their right standing with God on these external signs and behaviors, we’ve got a problem.

Evangelical Christians do some of the same things, although our list is usually moral-driven: “Do I drink? No. Smoke? No. Give money to the church? Yep. Any raucous clubbing on the weekends? Nope. Did I say a single prayer a long time ago to insure my way into heaven? Yep. I’m good to go.” None of these things are bad things to be checking off a list. But, if we come to rely on some prayer we said when we were 4 or 9 or 18 to grant us our status as “right before God” having never fully surrendered our citizenship in Sin-land, are we really “good to go?” Are we hanging onto our Sin-land passport, just to make travel between Christ-land and Sin-land a little easier? Does any of the stuff we “do” allow us to be “found in Christ?”

No. Nothing we can say or do can ever make us right with God. We are not declared “in the right” based on anything that we have done or will do. We are declared “in the right” because of what Jesus did. The Greek text is interesting here. The phrase “faith in Christ” can also be translated as the “faithfulness of Christ.” That helps us understand the depth of this phrase a little more. We aren’t declared “in the right” before God because we believe that right things about Jesus. We are declared “in the right” before God because Jesus was faithfully obedient unto death, even death on the cross, on our behalf. He did what none of us could ever do, fulfilled the covenant with God faithfully.

Some sermons would stop there. Some people would say we just receive this “right status” from Jesus and throw it on like a T-shirt. Now God sees Jesus’ righteousness, instead of our dirty clothes underneath. But, that seems rather false. We are declared right but never really transformed? It’s like when I go running on these nasty summer mornings. I come home super sweaty and gross. I most definitely do NOT want to just throw my clothes for the day over my workout clothes. That is gross. I want to get rid of that sweaty stuff, clean up, and then put on new stuff.

I can’t imagine that God wants to leave us in our old clothes from “Sin-land” and give us some new Jesus gear to throw on top of it. I have to believe that the one who calls us to be like Christ will empower us to cooperate with him in our own transformation.

To be truly like Christ, we can’t just “try harder” to lay everything down. We can work tirelessly to cover up those dirty clothes all day long but we are never transformed until we submit everything to God and allow the work of Jesus, the truly Faithful One, to change us. We surrender our citizenship in Sin-land and fully embrace our citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven, trusting the work of Jesus to make us “in the right” before God.

Like, Paul we forget all that lies behind (all sin, all successes, all the things we might have claimed to verify our status before God) and strain forward to what lies ahead: life transformed. This is not an easy path, but one the patterns itself after the example of Jesus, who poured himself out for us and for our salvation.