A New Devotion - Gains as Losses

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page.

Philippians 3:1-11

Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord.

To write the same things to you is not troublesome to me, and for you it is a safeguard.

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Gains as Losses

When I was a young minister, a lot of Christians measured the faith and dedication of themselves and others by the dramatic content of their conversion stories. You see, for them, every believer needed to be saved from something. And the worse the sin, the better the conversion. For example, turning away from smoking cigarettes was fine, but turning away from smoking weed was even better. And making Jesus lord of your life was great, especially if you’d hit rock bottom, because the improvement would be a whole lot more dramatic than if you believed when life was pretty good. And so a lot of believers wanted their lives to be really bad so that they could tell people about how much better it had become post-conversion. As a matter of fact, I remember a young lady telling me that she was really frustrated, because she’d never been bad enough to have a good testimony.

And even though in the passage we read, Paul was talking about things like circumcision and heritage to highlight dedication, the though process is very similar. You see, whether it was being saved from something really scandalous or being a Hebrew born of Hebrews, these are all external things that have absolutely nothing to do with the righteousness that comes from God. Instead, it has everything to do with us and what we think is important. And for that reason, for us to appreciate the power of Christ’s resurrection and to share in his sufferings, we might need to put these things we consider important aside. As a matter of fact, if we want to move closer to our savior, we might want to regard all these gains as losses.