Philippians 3:1-8 | Gaining Christ: The Value of Loss

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

What brings you joy?

What brings you joy?

I'm not asking what brings you happiness as opposed to what makes you sad.

I'm asking what leads you to a state of peace, a deep contentment, an anchored satisfaction?

Is it a job well done?

Does your family bring you joy?

Maybe it's it's your your job or your position in life.

Maybe it's retirement.

Although I hear it gets busier in retirement.

I don't quite understand that.

Does serving others bring you joy?

Do your achievements bring you joy?

Maybe it's the completion of a long project or or or graduation.

Think about one or two or three things in your life that bring you that kind of joy.

I'll give you a few seconds to figure that out.

One or two things that bring you a deep sense of peace, contentment, satisfaction, and joy.

Now think about something that may be hard to imagine.

Think about those joys being taken away from you.

And they are no more.

Your life has changed so much that what once mattered and brought you joy no longer holds any value for you.

Would you still have joy if all the earthly things, things related only to this life, suddenly lost their value and their meaning for you?

In a fascinating 2005 interview, Tom Brady, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the New England Patriots, said that his three Super Bowl rings that he had at the time were not all there was to life.

He said in a quote, why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me?

It's gotta be more than this.

I mean, this can't be all it's cracked up to be.

What else is there for me?

There was a man who had achieved the pinnacle of his sport three times.

Now, in his book and in other later interviews, he clarified that he has since learned that there are deeper things to life than Super Bowl rings, things like family and relationships and personal growth.

But like Tom Brady, we might find joy in some of those deeper things in life, things that are more than just something that's today and gone, but maybe sticks around for a while, like family and relationships.

Those are good gifts from the Father of heavenly lights.

But they are not true joy.

In fact, they even can be said to have no value.

True joy, my friends, is found only in knowing Christ Jesus as your Lord.

Look at me.

Look at Philippians three with me.

Don't look at me, look at your Bible.

Philippians chapter three.

We work our way through this book together.

Philippians chapter three.

The finally at the beginning of verse one of chapter three is not the Apostle Paul being like a preacher who says, finally, in the middle of his sermon, it's it's a difficult word to translate.

It just kind of means he's going to a different subject now.

To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.

Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh.

For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also.

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more.

Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

Amen.

Guys in the booth, are we out of our thank you very much.

Finding joy in the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as your Lord is the main idea of this unit of Paul's letter.

He wants us to look at life and to evaluate where we find true joy and to understand it's without value.

Because knowing Christ pushes all of that aside.

So I want us to leave our gathering this morning full of joy, rejoicing that you know Christ Jesus the Lord.

Truly knowing him brings the kind of joy that all earthly joys and all earthly happiness and accomplishments and priorities fade away and become losses to us.

Joyful losses when we truly know Christ and find our joy in him.

What we lose in life to gain Christ is worth the loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ.

Therefore, loss becomes valuable if what we gain is Christ.

I hope Lowell, our accountant, can verify that for me.

Loss to gain Christ is valuable.

It is worth it to lose whatever you need to lose to find Christ.

In this passage, we find a warning to guard the joy that we find in Christ.

And we're going to see an apostolic example of misplaced confidence.

We all place confidences in the wrong place sometimes.

Then we're going to see a reminder that losing everything is worth it to know Christ.

So let's first consider the warning to guard the joy we find in Christ.

It's essentially a warning to watch out for joy thieves.

And we're not watching out for people who are going to steal your Christmas presents.

This is the joy that we find in Christ.

Because, yes, it's even possible to have that snatched away from you.

Look at what he says.

He begins in verse 3 with a command.

I'm sorry, chapter 1 of verse 3.

Rejoice in the Lord.

But then he immediately shifts to a defensive posture after that command.

Look out, watch out.

Why is that?

Why is that command given to do something positive immediately followed by a defensive element?

Well, it's because joy in Christ alone is a target for those who do not have joy in Christ alone.

If you are a child of God with joy in Christ, there is a target on your back.

And the enemy wants to steal your satisfaction and your contentment and the joy that you find in Christ alone.

Apparently, this is a continuing threat in the lives of the Philippians because it requires repeated warnings.

Apparently, you need to hear this.

He says to the Philippians.

Paul wasn't worried at all about repeating himself and getting complaints back.

He's a good pastor because he knows that his sheep need to hear the same gospel truths over and over again because our hearts are prone to wander.

Martin Luther was said to have been asked why he preached the gospel so often, and he reportedly replied, because you keep forgetting it.

Now, who are these joy thieves that they need to be reminded to watch out for?

Why the reminder to keep rejoicing and to watch out for these joy thieves?

Well, he uses three very strong descriptors in verse 2.

He calls them dogs, evildoers, and those who mutilate the flesh.

That sounds harsh and unnecessary to our modern ears, but we need to understand what he's doing.

The Apostle Paul is using irony to combat an invasion of harmful teaching.

He's likely referring to what we call Judaizers, Jewish people who claimed to know Christ but wanted to draw Christians back to Judaism.

They say, no, you can be a Christian, you can follow Jesus, but you still need to be a Jew.

You need to follow all of the patterns and requirements of Judaism.

So Judaism often called people who weren't Jews dogs.

Gentiles were evildoers.

And Paul flips that all back and he says, No, listen, if you don't follow Christ, you're following wrong teaching.

What they claim of us is actually true of them.

By doing this, the Apostle Paul is countering the attacks against joy.

Specifically, joy in Christ alone.

See, these teachers were saying Jesus is a great start.

Coming to church is a great start, and believing in Jesus is a wonderful place to begin, but you need more.

You need our tradition, you need our rituals that you have to follow on a regular basis.

You need to look like us, and you need to even become one of us to be fully embraced by God.

Friends, listen very closely.

You kill joy in Christ when you add a plus to Christ.

Jesus plus your goodness, Jesus plus your political alignment, Jesus plus your social status, Jesus plus your good works, Jesus plus your belonging to this place or that place or your connection here or your status here.

Jesus plus anything steals your joy.

If your joy depends on something within you, then you can never be sure you've done enough.

It's what drove Martin Luther to insanity, such that he read the book of Romans and realized, I can't do it, only God can.

Christ alone is not something of surpassing value if Christ is insufficient.

In other words, if you have to add Christ plus Judaism, Christ plus rituals, Christ plus belonging, Christ plus anything else, then Christ is insufficient.

He's not enough, he's not valuable enough, he's not worth enough.

And you can never be fully certain of your joy.

May it never be.

So he emphatically flips the script in verse 3 for we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.

He's not talking here about the physical mark of belonging to Judaism.

He says the true people of God are not marked by physical signs of belonging, but by faith in Christ.

He told the Roman church, true circumcision is a matter of the heart.

Instead, he outlines three characteristics that are true of the people of God in verse 3.

Number one, they worship by the Spirit of God.

Goes to the Gospel of John, where Jesus told the woman at the well, a time is coming and now is where people will worship in spirit and in truth, right?

That means it's a genuine, not rote or ritualistic worship.

It's not a cultural expectation that's tied to a particular place or time.

It's worship that is united by the Spirit of God, that is driven by the Spirit of God, because, number two, they glory in Christ Jesus.

They're not glorying in a magnificent temple, they're not glorying in traditions, they're not glorying in rituals, but it's driven by faith in something that is inglorious: a crucified Lord.

And so if you worship by the Spirit of God and you glory in Christ Jesus, you put no confidence in the flesh.

And this is the secret to guarding your joy.

If you possess joy in Christ because of saving faith in him, your joy will be eaten away by insecurity and uncertainty the moment you start trusting in your own resume to justify your link to God.

It will start eroding like a soft bank on a riverside.

And eventually the whole thing will collapse.

So verse 4 then shifts from the warning about joy thieves to a warning about self-confidence.

He says, watch out for your self-confidence.

Now there's no lecturing here from the Apostle Paul about misplaced confidence.

Instead, he makes a case from his own life.

He uses himself as an example, and not a positive one.

It's a negative one.

He essentially says, if anyone could have made it to heaven by their own resume, by their own achievements, by their own status, it would have been me.

The joy thieves were confident in their view of Judaism being the right way to God, and they were proud of their pedigree.

But Paul challenges that view.

And so he lists his own resume in verses 5 and 6.

He says, I have the right heritage.

Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews.

So Paul was part of the long-standing core of the covenant people of God.

He didn't choose it, it was his birthright.

If anybody could have it, it would be Paul.

Okay, let's set aside who you are by birth then.

Just set that aside for a moment.

What about your education and your orthodoxy?

As to the law, as a Pharisee.

Not just a casual Jew, in other words.

Not just somebody who goes to synagogue every once in a while.

Not just somebody who goes to listen to the Word of God, read, but who studies it, who knows it.

He's a member of the religious elite.

It took years of training to become a Pharisee.

So he's got the heritage.

He's got the education and the orthodoxy.

And then you add to that zeal.

He says, I was a persecutor of the church.

In other words, there's something inside of him that drove him, that pushed him.

He wasn't just an observer who stood in the back and watched what went on.

He was so on fire for God and defending God and defending Judaism that he sought to destroy anything he perceived as a threat to Judaism.

So he's got the heritage, he's got the education and the orthodoxy, he's got the zeal, and lastly, he says, I've got the moral performance.

As to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Now I don't know how he can say that because he knows he's a sinner.

He calls himself the chief of sinners.

What that probably means is that he knew that everything that the law required of him, that is, even though he's a sinner, when you sin, you go and you offer sacrifices and you do all of the rituals, all of that that is required, he did it all.

He pursued it faithfully such that he did it blamelessly.

So according to the arguments of Judaism, Paul's personal record of obedience to the Mosaic law was perfect.

If there's a religious checklist, Paul had checked every box, showed it to his teacher, taken it home, framed it, and put it on his wall.

He was the achiever.

Some people claim that these kinds of gains are the path to being right with God and having joy in him.

They represent the best the world has to offer and the best that religion can offer.

They represent the Super Bowl rings of the spiritual world.

Paul had it.

He achieved it.

But then he throws a cold bucket of ice water on that thinking.

He says the fleshly or the earthly or the physical things of life that can potentially give us a standing before God and to bring joy in him are in reality worthless before Christ.

He realized that his heritage, his pedigree, and his theological standing and his perfect attendance and his moral goodness were nothing before God.

His earthly resume was a worthless pile of junk compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ.

So think deeply.

What do you feel gives you standing before God?

I like to ask our new members the question If you were standing before God today and he asks you, Why should I let you into my heaven?

What would you say?

Is it because you were raised in a good Christian home and you went to church?

Maybe you went to Iwana and you made it all the way through and you learned all the verses.

Is it because of your connection to a specific church or a denomination?

Maybe you have astounding social media validation and you project a light.

Of virtue and righteous opinions, and everybody accepts you, and you've gained a following.

And you say back to God, Don't you know who I am?

Haven't you followed my Instagram?

Maybe it's the career that you've made for yourself, and you say, God, I've I made it.

These are all checklists, friends, that promise value and even a sense of security, but deliver only emptiness.

It's like opening up your favorite present on Christmas morning, and by Christmas afternoon it's broken.

And useless.

So if you're leaning on your goodness to be right with God, you're standing on a trapdoor.

And before you know it, it's gonna give way and you're gonna fall through.

Joyless.

Because true joy can never be found in the things that belong to this world.

So what do we do?

Paul's answer to this dilemma and these errant paths is a charge.

In verse 7, in the beginning of verse 8, to practice proper axiology.

Now that term axiology comes from a Greek word axios, meaning worthy or value.

Axiology is the study of what determines value, what determines worth.

Everyone in this room is an axiologist.

Maybe not trained, but practicing.

You are an axiologist.

You make decisions all the time based on what you value in the moment.

You sat down in this room in a place because you determined it was valuable to sit there rather than there.

We choose what to buy.

We choose how to spend our time.

We decide what to worry about based on worth of the things that are in front of us.

Friends, we need to overhaul our axiology.

Christians need to have their view of worth and value revolutionized.

Look at what he says in verse seven.

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

Imagine you go to Lowell's office, and he presents you with a ledger, and on one side of the ledger is loss, and on the other side of the ledger is gain, and in the middle is zero.

Paul took everything that was in his gain column, his pedigree, his learning, his morality, his righteousness according to the law, and he didn't just move it to the middle zero column, he moved it to the loss column.

Why?

Because those things were hindering him from seeing his need to know Jesus.

He says they were rubbish.

They were dung.

That's the literal word that Paul uses later.

He says that compared to Jesus, the best this world has to offer is like manure that gardeners and farmers use for fertilizer.

But knowing Christ is of surpassing worth.

This isn't a minor upgrade.

This isn't like going from a 2025 car to a 2026 car.

This is like trading in a penny for all of the gold reserves in the world.

Because true joy is found in the surpassing value of knowing Christ as Lord.

Where we gladly count everything as loss.

Because this is so worth it.

The word that Paul uses here for surpassing means to excel, to tower above, to be superior in every way.

It's the same word used in chapter 4, verse 7, to describe the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.

The value of knowing Jesus is so high that it cannot be measured on the same scale as earthly joys.

There's no comparison.

Anything of value in this world is a loss to know Jesus.

But notice one little detail.

Verse 8.

Indeed, I count everything, not just my pedigree, but everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Messiah Jesus, my Lord.

Christ is Lord.

That's a fact.

It's a New Testament way of saying that He's He's Yahweh in the flesh.

He's the great I am.

But the word my points to a unique, intimate connection.

Often we we think of that kind of connection in regards to Psalm 23.

The Lord is my shepherd.

That's Psalm 23 is a matter of pronouns.

My shepherd.

Christ Jesus, my Lord.

This isn't just knowing about him, that he exists, that he died on a cross in a Roman-conquered world, and he was buried and he rose again.

The value of knowing Jesus is different than that.

It's the difference between knowing a sports star's stats and being their best friend.

Paul had already gone through Philippians 2, 9, 10, and 11.

He had already bowed the knee and confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

He saw the value of Christ and it changed his entire accounting system.

He moved on from his losses by allowing Christ to challenge his thinking and motivate how he lived in a world where nothing matters but knowing Jesus.

And in those moments, Christ was his Lord.

The Apostle Paul concluded that losing the valuable things of this world is actually beneficial.

It's a gain for you if you gain Jesus.

There is value in that kind of loss.

So what if you lost it all tomorrow?

What if your career ended?

What if your reputation was tarnished?

What if your health failed?

What if everything that mattered to you in life was just worthless now?

Friend, you will be devastated if your joy is built on things that you can't take with you into eternity.

But if your joy is built on the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, then even your losses become a means of gain.

Now the world looks at a Christian who has lost everything and still has joy and says, boy, you're weird.

That makes no sense.

And they're right.

It makes no sense according to the common forms of axiology.

According to the way that our world thinks and functions about value and worth, it makes no sense.

But that's because that's all they can see.

But for those whose eyes have been opened to see the worth and the value of knowing Jesus, it makes perfect sense.

The Apostle Paul didn't enjoy suffering.

He didn't enjoy losing his family and his connection to Judaism.

He just loved Jesus more.

He realized that the gains of this world are actually losses if they keep him from knowing Christ.

You see, joy thieves blind us.

Self-confidence blinds us.

Those things keep us from seeing the value in Christ alone.

That's why I love singing that song, Sing.

Because it helps us see that Jesus is worth it.

Well, we're going to see more of this next time in the remainder of this section, but here we have to have our thinking challenged, friends.

We have to have our convictions molded.

We have to let our lives display the reality that knowing Jesus is better than life itself.

Key is where true joy is found.

Your axiology will impact your life.

How you think of value and worth will impact your life.

It is at this very moment impacting it.

You will either believe those who would turn you away from Christ and steal your joy, thinking that value is found somewhere else.

Or you will listen to the enemy of your soul and put your confidence in the things of this life that you have something to do with.

Or you will turn to Jesus and you will pursue Him as the ultimate value.

Because knowing Him is of surpassing ultimate value.

Help us to see you clearly.

Help us to see them as they really are, as perishing, as temporary.

And enable us to see you in all of your glory.

And to put all of our trust and our rest in you so that our joy will never be taken away.

Lord, by your grace, would you bring it about that no one would leave this room today?

Or anybody even listening online would not shut off the computer or leave this room without experiencing that true and everlasting joy that comes from knowing, really, truly, knowing by faith Christ alone.

For your glory, and your honor, forever and ever.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.