Knowing Him

Chapter three opens with a sudden sharpness. Paul warns the Philippians about people he calls dogs, evildoers, mutilators of the flesh. He is talking about teachers who insisted that Gentile converts be circumcised, adding the marks of the old covenant to faith in Christ. Paul has seen this movement wreck the churches of Galatia, and he will not let it near Philippi.

His argument is personal. If anyone had reasons to trust in the flesh, in pedigree and performance, he did. He lists them. Then he says that whatever was gain to him he now considers loss for the sake of Christ. The word he uses for the rest of it, in verse 8, is blunt. Garbage. Refuse. The thing you scrape off and throw out.

What did he get in exchange? He tells us, and the language is intimate. He wants to be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of his own from the law but the righteousness that comes through faith in Christ. He wants to know Christ, the power of his resurrection, and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain the resurrection from the dead.

The one idea here is that the Christian life has a center, and it is a person. Paul does not say he wants to serve Christ more effectively, or build something for him, or defend his cause. He says he wants to know him. Everything else, including his own remarkable ministry, is secondary to that. The righteousness he has is not his own. The power he wants is resurrection power. The suffering he expects is a way of sharing in Christ, not a price paid for him.

Turn it toward yourself. Many faithful people are busy for Christ and strangers to him. They know his teaching, run his programs, argue his case, and rarely sit with him. Paul's ambition is a corrective. What would it look like this week to want to know Christ more than to accomplish anything for him? Perhaps it means less doing and more reading of the Gospels. Perhaps it means letting a suffering you have resisted become a place of fellowship with him instead. Whatever it means, the target is clear. Not a better record. Him.