Breaking With The Past

“It goes like lighting.”

That’s the way a guy described his new electric car to a group of us who had casually gathered. “The car is so heavy; I can’t punch the accelerator too often or it will ruin the tires,” he said.  He went on to extol the joys of driving past a gas station and waving as weary souls filled their tanks.

This guy truly rejoices in his new car. What do you rejoice in these days?  

Maybe it’s the season of fall, a new baby, your favorite football team, an unexpected raise, a loved one turning his life over to Christ, or a good medical report.

Rejoicing and Pain

Rejoicing comes naturally when things go our way. But how does a person rejoice when he or she is facing hardship or pain?

With great passion, Paul tells his dear friends in Philippi to “Rejoice in the Lord.” Philippians 3:1

Yet he writes these words while chained in a Roman prison. How can he talk about rejoicing when his own life hangs in the balance?

Paul had learned a secret. But before we talk about that, let’s focus on what it means to rejoice.

Confidence

We often associate it with a happy feeling about some circumstance. But for Paul, we rejoice when we put our confidence in something or place our hope in it.  

With great vulnerability, Paul reveals to his friends where he had placed his confidence his until recently: In his flesh. In other words, his hope was in his religious birthright and spiritual pedigree.

Paul says, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:

• Circumcised on the 8^th day
• Part of the chosen people, Israel, from 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.” -Philippians 3:4-6

For reference, there are 613 laws in the Old Testament. Paul says he kept them all.

He lays down a rock-solid resume. No Israelite in his or her right mind could argue against it.

Count as Loss

“But all these gains,” he says, “everything I have supreme confidence in, all my spiritual trophies and accolades, I now count as loss. They are all loss” (Philippians 3:7-8 paraphrased).

For a Jew like Paul, this is an unthinkable break with his past. Why were such valuable things a loss?

“Because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  Philippians 3:8 NRSVUE

Making the Break

Here is Paul’s secret: spiritual maturity requires making a break with the past. He stopped rejoicing in something – his moral conformity – and started rejoicing in Someone – Jesus his Lord.

Perhaps you know what it is like to have total confidence in something and then it slips away from you. It might have been a marriage, a friendship, a job, a reputation, a home, or an identity.

Maybe you realized it wasn’t what you thought it was. That in fact, it didn’t have the power to do what you thought it would. It couldn’t make you feel happy or worthy or important or enough.

Paul gets this. He had it ALL, spiritually speaking. But now he sees the emptiness of putting his confidence in an outward form of righteousness.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a lifetime rejoicing in, putting my confidence in, all kinds of things that have disappointed me.

Whether it was relationships or church growth or popularity or money or possessions or academic degrees or spiritual pedigrees, every one of these and many more have all come up short.

Rejoicing in Someone

At some point, we are called to transition from rejoicing in something to rejoicing in Someone.

Listen to how Paul describes this profound break with his past:                                      

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. 

   Philippians 3:8-9 (NRSVUE)

At a former church, we had a Jr. and Sr. High youth choir. One Sunday, as they were rehearsing before the service, one of the mothers of a choir member said, “You see that girl, the 4^th one in from the left?”

I said, “Yup.”

She said, “She is a fourth-generation member of this church.”

There were a number of things that went through my mind at that point. Most of which I filtered out.

What I finally said was, “Wow. That’s really great.”

What I wanted to say was, “Wow. That’s really great. But does she know Jesus? Has she received the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as her Lord? If not, being a 4^th generation member of this church or any other will come up pretty empty one day.”  

Deep Change

Consider with me for a moment. Where are you placing your confidence? In your work, your degrees, your looks, your family, your connections, your personality, yourself?

What would it be like to count all that as loss…and instead, place your total confidence in Jesus Christ? Imagine rejoicing in what he can do in you and through you that no measure of your own strength or smarts could ever achieve.

In this kind of deep change, the platelets of the earth shift within us. When that happens, we might just know on a whole new level what it means to “Rejoice in the Lord.”

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