How Would Your Life Change If You Did “This One Thing”?
Editor’s Note: If ever there was a man who knew his purpose in life, it was Paul. By all outward appearances, he had it all together. His religious resume was perfectly pristine (Phil 3:3-7). Yet, for Paul, all of his accolades and status were worthless compared to knowing Christ – literally, Paul said they were like dung!
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in a revolving door of achievement or approval, this passage provides the cure. When your life’s aim and focus is to know Christ, you can leave behind everything else you’ve relied on to define you. Like Paul’s we’ve not yet reached perfection, and we never will in this life (Phil 1:6). But, also like Paul, we can forget what is behind – both successes and failures – and pursue the only thing that will give our lives purpose: knowing the Risen Lord Jesus.
But everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ.
More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of Him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them filth, so that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own from the law, but one that is through faith in Christ-the righteousness from God based on faith.
[My goal] is to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead. Not that I have already reached [the goal] or am already fully mature, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus.
Brothers, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.
Therefore, all who are mature should think this way. And if you think differently about anything, God will reveal this to you also.
~ Philippians 3:7-15
