Word of Salvation – Vol. 47 No.14 – April 2002

 

Questions of Commitment

 

Sermon by Rev A Esselbrugge

on Philippians 3:7-14

Scripture Readings: Jeremiah 9:17-24; Philippians 3:1-4:1

Suggested Hymns: Bow: 24a; 186; 487

 

Brothers and sisters, young people, boys and girls.

I want to take a look with you at the issue of commitment as we see it and learn from the apostle Paul.  I want to do that because commitment is an issue that we hear a lot about from the negative point of view.

Older people look at the young people and say things like, “young people these days aren’t like they were when I was young.  We had to stick to things and be much more determined than people are today.  We didn’t have all the choices and distractions of today.  We didn’t have television or computer games.  We ate potatoes, peas and sausages for our meals seven days a week, and we liked it because there wasn’t anything else.”

I don’t want to look at commitment in a negative way, but in a positive way that urges us to run harder and closer to our Lord.

What we want to do as we reflect on the verses before us is to simply test and challenge each other on our own personal level of commitment to the Lord.  It’s possible to speak of commitment as something that almost has a life and existence of its own.  As though commitment by itself is a precious and desirable commodity.  The trouble is, we can be committed to both good and evil.  Commitment is good when its cause is good, but commitment is undesirable when the cause is wrong.

So what we’re addressing here, then, is Christian commitment.  It’s being committed to Christ the Lord.  It’s being determined to stay with the Lord and in service to the Lord, through hard times as well as good times.  Through times when we are tired and times when we just simply want to take a break.  But we hold on to the Lord anyway, because we’ve made a commitment to do that.  And also because we have responded to the Lord’s promise and determination to hold on to us, at all times.

As we look at our verses here, as we read any of the letters that the apostle Paul wrote, we soon see that he was a man committed to Christ.  I find it very interesting how the apostle Paul generally invokes two basic reactions to himself.  You either love him or hate him.  It is very seldom, if ever, that you will meet someone who doesn’t really react to him.  We tend to either idolise him or reject him.  We either regard him as a saint and mighty servant of the Lord, or people will reject him as a womanhating chauvinist.

But for us, who believe in the Saviour, he preached so mightily and with such love, for us, the apostle Paul is a man of God.  None of his faults are hidden from us in his letters.  For example, he could at times be particularly stubborn, but above all he was a man of God with a passion burning in his soul to preach the crucified and risen Lord.  With that same passion he called upon people to repent and believe in order to be saved.

He was a man with a deep pastoral heart and care for the people he served, anchoring the great doctrines of salvation to the trials and difficulties his congregations experienced in life.  And, one thing that all people must agree on, the apostle Paul was a man thoroughly and deeply committed to Christ.

Let’s now, from our verses here, compare our own commitment to his.

Look at verse 7.  The apostle isn’t telling us things here about himself to make us look at him with admiring glances.  His purpose here is not to focus on himself but on the Lord in whom he has life and salvation.  In the verses that come before, Paul has told us about the great advantages, superior advantages, he had as a genuine Jew: a man of noble birth, orthodox in his belief and scrupulous in his conduct.  But when Christ came into his life, when the Lord stopped him on that road to Damascus and confronted him with the true Saviour and the gospel of God’s love and mercy to sinners, this man came to see how all those advantages, those privileges that many in his time regarded with great jealousy and envy, didn’t put him any closer to God or provide him with any guarantees of peace and favour with God.

In fact, it was forcefully brought home to him that the more he used those so-called advantages and the harder he worked to establish his own righteousness, the further from God he became and the more he increased his damnation.  It was there on that road to Damascus, as he was seeking to earn more points of favour with his masters, that God brought him to see himself as he really was, deluded by so-called advantages, a self-righteous and damned sinner.  It was then that he embraced the One whom he’d been persecuting, and he became a “new creature”.

There he realised that all those things, that Paul the Pharisee had thought and regarded as so precious, became and always remained from then on useless to Paul the sinner saved by grace.  And not only useless but positively harmful and liabilities to his position as a Christian.  Everything that he had thought as a man trying to work his own way into heaven – everything – was nothing compared to serving Christ.

How do we compare here?  What do we, what do you, hold as important for Christ’s sake?  This is one of those highly uncomfortable questions because, if we let the preacher and the Word of God strike home into us, it will have us questioning every priority we have and everything we put energy and effort into.  What comes before all else in your service to the Lord?  Your career?  The demands and pressures or expectations of your employer, your money making, or your social life?

But the great apostle doesn’t just urge on us a review of our priorities, he goes on to pose the question for us in the next verse – what exactly have you and I been unwilling to count as loss for Christ?  As for Paul himself, he says in verse 7 that there were certain supposed advantages he now considered as being a liability.  And in verse 8 he goes on to declare that he considered ALL things a loss.  Anything at all, whether it is regarded as an advantage or not.  Anything at all, that could stand in the way of fully accepting Christ and His righteousness, is a liability because there is nothing that can compare with the super, wonderful, greatness of knowing Christ.

It is through Christ alone, by His dying and death, by His rising to life again, and doing all this for the forgiveness of sin, that a person by faith alone looks at life now and life beyond this world.  Believers do all that, secure in the knowledge they belong to the Lord and will live forever.  For that, everything is worth giving up.  In fact, compared to salvation in Christ, everything else has to be classified as mere rubbish.  That’s the position of this servant of the Lord.

How do you and I stand on this?  A man once said, “giving is not measured by what you surrender to Christ, but by what you withhold”.  The same is true of dedication and commitment.  What you and I hold back from Christ measures our commitment.  For the apostle Paul, he considered everything a loss for Christ.  He gave up all and was prepared to give all away for his love to Christ.

It’s possible that you might be sitting here now and be starting to feel horribly uncomfortable and guilty as you measure and compare yourself and your commitment to the commitment of the apostle.  Let me just say that I don’t just want to make you feel that way.  That’s not my intention, nor is it of these verses of our text.

There’s more to the gospel message than just guilt and a troubled conscience.  If you are feeling in any way disturbed by unbalanced and wrong priorities in your life, or that you are unwilling to give up some very precious things for the sake of Christ, I urge you not to stop there but look again at the incomparable message of God’s grace and love.  Our Father in heaven gave up His dearly loved Son in order to obtain for us the pearl of great price, peace with God, the ransom of our souls from the hands of Satan.

Look at Him and only Him.  See His love.  See the Son of God, our dear Saviour, hanging and bleeding and dying.  Look there at the grave and see them laying His broken body in the tomb.  Look again at the tomb with the stone rolled away and Jesus, the Christ, stepping forth with His arms outstretched saying, “Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.”  There’s where we are to go, and when we embrace Him as He embraces us, we will also say with the apostle, “everything is a loss and is nothing to me compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.”

There are still two other questions the apostle Paul poses for us from our verses here.  Look at verse 12.  The question there is, how long has it been since you measured your growth in Christ?  Back in verses 9 and 10 Paul’s great desire is to be found in Christ, to receive by faith from the Lord Jesus the work of Jesus, the righteousness of the Saviour.  He wants to know Christ, to know the power of the resurrection.  But then he says in verse 12, “not that I’ve already obtained all this.”  How could he know that, unless he was measuring himself against the Lord?

The things he speaks about in the earlier verses of this chapter occurred about 30 years before.  And during the period that intervened, between that great experience on the road to Damascus and the writing of this letter to the Philippians, the joy of knowing Christ Jesus in both his heart and mind, the knowledge of the Lord had been growing constantly, so that this knowing the Saviour outshone everything in beauty and desirability.  There is no greater joy, no greater passion or desire for this man of God but to know Christ, and to press on and go on holding ever more to that for which Jesus Christ took hold of him.

Thirty years, and nothing of the fire in the heart of Paul had died down.  If anything, his passion had grown.  For thirty years he’d preached and travelled gospelling the good news of Jesus Christ to sinners.  He had planted many churches, he had been privileged to lead many people to faith and to form those churches all across the known world of that day.  He endured persecution, shipwreck, imprisonment and hunger, and still he wasn’t satisfied.  He still wanted to be even closer and even more intimately connected to his Saviour.

We must regularly measure our growth in our knowledge and in our love of God in Christ Jesus.  This, too, will test our commitment to the Lord.

Glance down now to the next verse, verse 13, because there the apostle gets even more practical with us than he has been already.  He says he does one special thing: he forgets those things that are behind.  The language in these verses is that of a runner in a race, and there is this one thing a runner must do: he or she must practise persistent concentration on the goal, the prize at the end.  What’s behind is put out of mind.  There’s only one thing to concentrate on, perfect fellowship with the Lord.  It’s when sin will be no more and there will be the joy of the presence of the Lord as has never been known before, and perfect wisdom, holiness, peace and all to the glory of God forever – that’s the goal!

Here’s the question this raises for us now.  Are we harbouring grudges that hinder our service for Christ, things that are holding us back in reaching for glory?  How often do we have to catch ourselves from thinking unworthy thoughts about fellow believers?  We sometimes find it hard to forgive each other, and how wrong we are in that.  We should not remember what God has forgotten.  Old barriers between believers have to come down.  We must stop grieving the Holy Spirit.  And he is grieved when we don’t forgive each other.  And don’t even fall into that old snare that wants us to believe we can’t forgive certain Christian brothers or sisters for the way they have treated us.

Congregation, here’s how each of us ought to live before the Lord, how we ought to live in our families and with our partners in marriage and with our children, with our parents and with our friends.  This is how we are to live in our place of work and as we walk and ride along the street, as we sit down to eat and rise up to work and play.  Examine your commitment to the Lord Jesus.  His commitment to us involved His entire life, and even now involves heaven and all His angels, for the glory of His Father and our Father in heaven.  Are you ready for Jesus to come again?  Just how hard are we stretching forward and straining toward what lies ahead, the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus?

Amen.