The way to progress and joy in the faith is Christ.  Obviously.  But Paul is sharing with us some of the mystery of knowing Christ and having him in us.  Paul speaks of the faithful as the “the circumcision” (3:3).  We are marked by Christ, marked in our baptism.  We have the indelible mark of Christ’s body and blood within us, incorporated into the fiber of our being.  We have the indelible mark of Jesus Christ within us as we hear God’s Word, meditate upon it, and put that Word into action in our daily living.  Circumcision means embodied faith.  Our living matters to God, living for Jesus: the way to progress and joy in the faith.

We “serve God by His Spirit” (3:3), not by our deeds.  Discipleship neither begins with nor comes back to me.  God is at work in us, enabling us to will and to act according to His good purposes (2:13).  This can be difficult to understand; recall that, apart from the Spirit, we would not be able to serve God.  Except for the Spirit at work within us, we would have no interest in anything concerning God.  We would just yawn and turn to things that actually mattered to us.

Just be a good person.  We’ve heard that; we nod.  As Christians, though, we should know it isn’t that simple.  Just be a good person: don’t hurt others; be nice.  What we believe isn’t the important thing: it’s what we do.  Actions speak louder than words, right?  Actions, however, come from somewhere; they are born out of our beliefs just like our words, hopes, and loves.  Paul encourages the faithful to live for the joy that is in Christ.  This belief animates us.  Jesus is like the embodiment of God’s joy; God is joyful.  In Christ, God offers us full communion in His sacred, eternal joy.  These beliefs guide our actions.  How we live this embodied life matters: let our embodied lives be continual thank offerings to God.  Let our thanksgiving be joyful!

It can seem as if joy isn’t always so easy to come by.  Where do we find our joy?  We say God, and that’s good, that’s right.  Do we actually live that way?  The joy of God is not the same as the happiness we may find in the things of this life.  The joy of God can be with us and see us through all the ups and downs of this life.  When we try to find our joy in the happiness that may come by the things of this life, we never truly have joy.  We burn up a lot of time seeking things that cannot last.  God offers what cannot be taken from us.

Paul urges us to make our embodied life a continual thank offering to God and to live in the awareness that the Day of Christ will come.  We don’t talk much about that day.  We’re more occupied with finding and having the strength for today, but what of bright hope for tomorrow?  The source of our strength for today and our bright hope for tomorrow is the same: the coming kingdom of God, the completion of all things, the settling of all accounts, God bringing the justice He alone can.  Christ Jesus, in whom we boast, is the way all that happens.

From a biblical perspective, the just be a good person mentality is saying, between judgment and salvation, bank on judgment.  The just be a good person mentality seems to be banking on the hope that, when judgment comes (if judgment comes), your good deeds (and intentions maybe, hopefully) will outweigh your other deeds.  As for all your less than commendable thoughts and intentions, well, who knows?  Do they have any weight on God’s scales?  It’s an awful risk, opting for judgment!  Between judgment and salvation, opt for salvation!  When we are found to be in Christ—that’s salvation—God overlooks our imperfection for the sake of Christ’s perfection—we boast in Christ.  We can be in Christ only by faith; faith, like love, looks like something.  Just being a good person won’t do; we must be faithful.

Like love, faith does not look like an attitude that sets you apart from the riff raff, you know, those people.  To live with an attitude that you have something or know something or believe something that puts you in a superior category is just the sort of vain conceit that Paul discourages.  Clinging to that for salvation won’t work, Paul knows!  By the Spirit, he threw all that away and wants us to do the same.  Christianity does not put us above others: it puts us among others, alongside others—faith in Jesus Christ puts us back together.

When we regard Jesus Christ as the only “thing,” the only one, truly, ultimately worth having in this life, the only source of “prestige,” this changes everything.  Nothing compares to Jesus.  Paul writes poetically of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things” (3:8).  Most worthy, nothing more worthy, nothing compares to Jesus.  Do you like chocolate—not as much as me!  Chocolate doesn’t compare to Jesus at all.  Are you liking this change in the weather—not as much as me!  This weather doesn’t compare.  I love my wife and my children—what I gain from them, all my joy in and love for them, doesn’t compare to my love for Jesus, to what I have in him.

Faith requires sacrifice.  Sacrifice is costly.  If it’s not costly, is it sacrifice?  Only, what is gained in the giving?  We are called to sacrifice the pursuit of status, position, a smugly superior attitude, devotion to destroying enemies, a settled life, nice car, nice home, attractive spouse, children, acknowledgment and respect from colleagues, good paying job, disposable income—all that makes for a successful, happy life.  Losing all things does not sound so good, even for the sake of Christ.

Has Paul truly lost anything, though?  He has thrown away thinking and living that has Jesus on the list of priorities, somewhere.  He let go of all he used to regard as most important: all that the world kept insisting were the most important things to acquire.  “I consider them garbage,” Paul says (3:8).  Wow.  That’s putting it forcefully.  By the ability the Spirit grants him to will and to act for progress and joy in the faith, Paul chooses not to value what the world values, what it tells us to value above all.  Paul will not grant those things any value in comparison with Christ: there is no comparison!  This is the thinking and living that Paul encourages us to pursue, with him.  Thinking and living this way puts faith into action and regards things in a God-devoted way.  This is to get priorities straight.  By this we gain Christ, we are found in him (3:8-9).  Jesus is our priceless treasure, the pearl of rare price.  To gain him is to have wealth the world cannot reckon, wealth the world will not recognize.  Here is the way to progress and joy in the faith.  We are in Christ by faith; faith is living and active, it can grow; we can have progress and joy in the faith.  Christ gets in us by faith, always and only.

Righteousness, like faith, yearns for God because, like faith, righteousness is from God.  The Heidelberg Catechism, teaching the faith, says: “the righteousness which can stand before the judgment of God must be absolutely perfect and wholly in conformity with the divine Law.  But even our best works in this life are all imperfect and defiled with sin” (Q/A. 62).  Ouch.  I feel the truth of it, though.  Do you?  My ethics professor in college couldn’t understand this.  Reformed theology, our theology, insists upon being realistic about our situation in relation to God.  As we are realistic this way, we see more clearly what we are being offered in Jesus Christ, our priceless treasure, to whom nothing compares.

We cannot realistically rely upon our works, on being a good person, to save us, to balance out the bad.  All our reliance is upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ!  Christ alone is our salvation.  We receive Christ only by faith.  What is God pleased with, truly, perfectly pleased with?  Christ.  O to gain Christ and to be found in him!  It’s by faith.  Paul elsewhere calls our attention to Abraham, who believed what God promised him, believed the Word of God: “Abram believed the Lord, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6).  God accepts us by grace, through faith; we serve God by the Spirit.  The Spirit feeds us with grace, fills us with faith.

Today in a special, holy, and powerful way, we are called to experience this grace and to affirm and renew this faith.  This bread and this juice before us on this table today are sure signs of the righteousness of God, the unmerited gift of God for us in Jesus Christ.  By the Spirit, faith comes alive in us and we become alive.  Broken people don’t rely upon themselves; we rely upon God.  I don’t come here with any works to offer; we have no works to offer God.  I can’t even offer my faith to God: faith comes from God!  The most we can do, what God invites us to do, is come, together, in humble, abiding, persevering trust: this, also, is a gift of the Spirit.  God gives gifts.  It is God’s nature to give gifts because God is love.  Love gives, is always giving itself away.  Let us meditate upon that, ongoingly.

When we know Christ, as we can, in this bread, in this juice, by faith, this body broken, this blood shed for us, we know the power of Christ’s resurrection (3:10): power for our life, for undeniable victory, for transformation, restoration, reformation, for mending and amending us.  When we know Christ, as we can, by faith, from this table today, we know he is always truly with us.  The world cannot take him from us: he has overcome the world (Jn 16:33).  We find Christ most completely when we most completely let go of whatever else we had wanted to rely upon for the fullness of happiness in this life.  Happiness comes and goes, oh we know!  Joy, love, and faith abide.

Christ here offers the gift of his life, call, glory, peace and power.  He wants you to know him, to receive him into your life personally, as those who embrace joyfully, as those who are blood brothers.  Calvin wrote of how “Christ [. . .] is rightly known, when we feel how powerful his death and resurrection are, and how efficacious they are in us.  Now all things are [. . .] furnished to us [in his death and resurrection]—expiation and destruction of sin, freedom from condemnation, satisfaction, victory over death, the attainment of righteousness, and the hope of a blessed immortality” (Commentary on Philippians).  Thinking of these blessings evokes great joy; God wants us to have this joy.

To participate in Christ’s resurrection also involves, must involve, “participation in his sufferings” (3:10).  Here is a mystery Paul wants to share with us.  From his own suffering for the faith Paul writes to a church suffering for the sake of the faith.  Our progress and joy in the faith is progress and joy in Christ, who lived with complete devotion, who walked the way of obedience unto death: Christ suffered for the sake of his call, his mission.  God exalted him to the highest place!  We’re not going to know Jesus fully if we don’t, or won’t, know him in his suffering as well his glory and power.  To know him we must know both: they are completely intertwined, as the mystery of this table tells us, shows us.  Suffering we don’t need to seek.  Let us seek Christ.

Paul speaks of wanting to become “like [Christ] in his death” (3:10).  He isn’t being morbid.  I take him to mean following Christ’s way all the way.  Though tempted, often and sorely, though mocked and battered, Christ died to sin to live for righteousness.  Pursue this same way, valuing Jesus above whatever supposed treasure with which the world would tempt us: youth, beauty, wealth, status, and so on and on: you know the temptation tempting you.  To follow Christ in dying to the world is the way to “the resurrection from the dead” (3:11): new life, true, everlasting life, eternal joy in the presence of God.  Calvin puts the matter this way: “Christ crucified is set before us, that we may follow him through tribulations and distresses; and hence the resurrection of the dead is expressly made mention of, that we may know that we must die before we live.  This is a continued subject of meditation to believers so long as they sojourn in this world” (Commentary on Philippians).  Indeed, it is—all along this journey that we are on, together with one another, together with Christ.

We’re all limping along, faster, slower, with more or less pain.  With Paul, let us “press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold” of us (3:12): salvation, resurrection, eternal joy, everlasting life in the presence of God.  God takes hold of us in Christ by the Spirit not because we deserved this or did anything to earn it—it’s all by God’s free choice—God choosing to take hold of us.  Me, of all people!  You, of all people.  As He has taken hold of us, He will grant each of us progress in the faith, together.  May this thought bless you with great joy.

Living, striving, suffering, seeking Christ, rejoicing, serving, loving—let’s live the time we are given in this way, lived in the one body through the one blood by the one Spirit, fostering a shared Spirit of perseverance to get us, together, to the Day.  The Spirit so arranges things that, as we go together, we grow together.  In all things, God asks for faith from us and makes faith possible for each of us.  We are all at a different point on this journey.  We have the same destination.  The way from difference to destination is to continue to “live up to what we have already attained” (3:16).  Live a life worthy of the Gospel.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.