So as Dean mentioned, I'm Pastor Travis. I work primarily with the youth, but it's good to be here to work with you guys and preach here this morning. So we're going to look at Philippians 3, verses 10 through 14 this morning. And I'm excited because last week we just went over verse 9, and we had three points. And so I feel like that means this week, with five verses, I get 15 points. So you got an extra hour of sleep last night, so that's good. So verse 10 starts in the middle of a thought. So we're not going to actually read verse 10. We'll start by reading verse 8, and we'll go all the way through 14. So here now, the word of the Lord. This is Philippians 3, verses 8 through 14. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count 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 that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me His own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God and Christ Jesus. If you would join with me The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the Word of our God will stand forever. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and so we believe that you are powerful to convict and to encourage, that your Word is sufficient And so we pray now that you'd be glorified through the preaching of your word and that your spirit would do the work of conviction and of encouragement and sustaining us for a long week ahead and after coming off of a long week previously. So Lord, we pray that you'd be glorified in all that we say and do and think even now in this worship service and we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So as Jason pointed out a few weeks ago, I built on it last week, this whole passage of Philippians 3 is about the warnings of self-righteousness. Paul knows the dangerous thing about self-righteousness is that it attacks believers right as they start to figure things out. It's like a wave at the ocean. So the wave comes and it grows and it reaches its highest point, and it's at that highest point that it begins to turn back inward on itself and it crashes. And so it's like that in the Christian life sometimes too. I think we have everything going well and we have things figured out and that's the very moment that things start to turn inward and we begin to be more self-righteous. But Paul, he's pleased with the growth in the Philippians, he's pleased with their health of the church, He takes time to warn them to not turn inward, to be aware that that could be what happens. But he encourages them to continue to focus on Christ because knowing Christ is the greatest joy in the Christian life. Paul knows that self-righteousness is going to stagnate their faith because it will turn them away from Christ and back towards their own goodness. So here, Paul presents three ways that self-righteousness focuses inwards, and then it contrasts it with the outward-facing knowledge of Christ. So our three points, and they're written in your bulletin, are that the self-righteousness focuses on doing what we are called to know. The self-righteousness focuses on doing what we're called to know. The second one is that self-righteousness focuses on our own exaltation. but we share in Christ's suffering. Self-righteousness focuses on our own exaltation, we share Christ's sufferings. And third, self-righteousness focuses on past accomplishments, it looks backwards, but we're called to strive forward towards the future glory of being with Christ. So let's start with the first one. Self-righteousness focuses on doing, but we are called to know So I'm a youth pastor, I already told you that, and we always try to get kids to read their Bibles more. They're teenagers, you all know this, if I simply told them, read your Bibles more, that wouldn't work. So Sarah and I, when we teach, everybody that teaches down in the youth room, we try to show them the depth of the beauty and the sufficiency of scriptures. because then they'll want to study it, right? And so how often for us do we turn our personal devotions into something that we feel like we have to do, not something that we get to do, right? And when we feel like we have to do something, after we do it, it turns into another item on our spiritual resume, right? Look, I've done all these things, look how great I am, but that's a really backwards way of thinking about things. So think about somebody that you really enjoy spending time with. It could be a friend, a spouse, a parent. I saw a couple brothers and sisters sitting next to each other, and they didn't look at each other when I said that. That's all right. So imagine you spend time with a person that you genuinely enjoy. After you spend time with them, you don't pat yourself on the back and think, what a great job I did spending time with this person that I love. That's ridiculous. That's silly. You might do that after you spend time with somebody that you don't like, but you don't do that after you spend time with somebody that you genuinely enjoy spending time with. But that's what self-righteousness does to us. It turns knowing God into a checklist, a thing that we have to accomplish. But knowing God is the crown jewel of gaining Christ and being found in Him. And we see this grammatically. So if you look at the scripture in my Bible, I have the ESV, the ESVs are in the pew too, there's a dash right at the end of verse 9. And so it connects kind of the first clause of verse 9 to 10. So we can read kind of like this from verse 8. So Paul says, For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. that I may know Him." There's kind of a rabbit trail in the middle, and then he's going to flesh that out some more. So to know Christ means to be intimately familiar with His love and with His mercy and grace and His goodness. The more we know God, the more we go to Him in prayer. He's the first one that we thank when things are good. He's the first one we confess our sins to. He's the first one that we cry out to when we're disappointed or the first one we complain to. when we're frustrated. To know God means to be familiar with the Father as Father, as Jesus, as our brother, and the Holy Spirit as a helper, something that lives inside us, not just in theory, but in practice. And that's why this quote is in your bulletin, too. J.I. Packer can say that the knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about God. And we have this desire as well, right? We all want to be truly known. We don't want just people to know a lot of facts about us. We want them to know us as people. So there's a line from a song I heard in college that stuck with me as I was about to go to seminary. It says, from the doctrines of atonement to eschatology, am I in love with you, Lord, or am I in love with theology? So theology is fun. It makes us look smart, it helps us understand things, it impresses people, and it gives us something to talk about at parties. It's good. But the goal of the Christian life isn't to know theology. The goal of the Christian life is to know Christ. That said, it's still important to know about the God that we worship. There's a TV show called Parks and Recreation. It's one of my favorite. And so one of the bosses is kind of grumpy. And so he says, when things get a little too buddy-buddy in the office, he pretends he doesn't know one of their names. And so the idea is that he doesn't know something very intimately about them. And so he doesn't really know them that well. So they're not really friends. So for us, our goal for knowing more about God is so that we can know Him more deeply. With the youth, we put it this way, we say that our goal is for a deeper theology to lead to a deeper worship. And that's not linear, it's a circle that builds on itself. So the more you love God, the more you'll study the scriptures, the more you'll know Him, and the more you know Him, the more you'll love Him. And if you love Him more, then you'll study Him more, and it goes on and on. Like that, right? So study scriptures, but also pray simple prayers. Pray from your heart. Read great works of theology. Read John Calvin and Bavink, but also sing the Psalms. Rejoice in knowing God. So know God personally, right? That's good. But don't just know about Him, but know Him. Scripture gives us several ways to do this. I wanted to draw our attention to two that come from the Psalms. just two because they're kind of on opposite sides here. So from Psalm 46, it's famous, it says, be still and know that I am God. Secondly, Psalm 34 says, taste and see that the Lord is good. So be still, right? That's the praying, that's the singing, that's the studying the Bible and reflecting on how God has worked in your life and how the Holy Spirit has sanctified you over your entire walk with Christ. That's laying out your deepest frustrations and your deepest desires to a holy God that loves you and then allowing him to mold your heart. Some early church fathers would do this. They would go out into the desert and they would pray and study scriptures. But they missed the second way, to taste and see that the Lord is good. So Genesis 2 says that God put trees in the garden that were pleasant to look at and good for food. Why would He put trees in the garden that were pleasant to look at unless He wanted us to enjoy them? And by enjoying them, know that He cares for us. So we can experience God's goodness to us in creation if we're mindful. We can experience the joys of church fellowship. Pastor Ben points us out every Tuesday that we can know God's goodness through the gift of pulled pork. We can look around and see that the leaves are changing colors. They could just fall off and die and not look pretty. Even through sports. We try to drive this home too. You learn a great deal about God through sports if you're mindful of it. You sacrifice for the greater good. You learn the value of discipline. And they're just fun. Through art we learn that God is a God of creation. Everything we do, if we take time, we can know God through the gifts that he's given us. If we take time to study his word. And the best part is that Paul makes it clear that we already know Christ, like if we're Christians, we know Christ, but we don't yet know him as fully as we will. See, Paul knows Christ now, but if you look at verse 11, that by any means possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead. He's looking forward to the resurrection, his own resurrection, because then he will know Jesus more fully, because he will be with him not only in soul, but also in body. So we are familiar with this, having just come off of COVID, right? We spoke with people on the phone and we even saw them on screens, but there was something missing, right? To be present with them in body, it was more complete, right? We knew them more fully. And so while our soul will be present with Christ in heaven, right? That's good. So when Jesus come back, When he comes back and he ushers in the new heavens and the new earth and the dead are raised, that is when we will know him more fully and even better. We're supposed to know God. So in college, we'd all come back after Christmas break and a small talk. How was your break? How was Christmas? What did you get? Nothing unusual, but I remember one of my friends, she got kind of excited when she told me she received printer ink for Christmas from her grandmother. And that's really weird. So there's a story, right? There's a story behind it. So for years, her grandmother had given my friend clothes for Christmas, which was fine, but it wasn't clothes that my friend wanted. It was clothes that her grandmother really liked. All right, so this entire time, she had kind of clothes in the back of the closet that she would never wear. She would only wear them when her grandmother came, and then she would get rid of them. All right, her grandmother was very excited to do something, but she hadn't taken time to know what her granddaughter wanted. But then, in I guess a conversation that year, my friend said, you know, she liked to print papers and assignments from her room instead of walking up this giant hill to get to the library at UT and then run off to class. So she liked to print her stuff in her room, and so she needed printer ink. And so her grandmother got her printer ink, right? That's kind of expensive for a college student. So she was thrilled, right? Because her grandmother knew her. She knew something she wanted. So we're in a hurry to do things, right? We focus on getting stuff done, but there's not really a quick way to get to know somebody. You have to take time with them and share experiences with them. To be a Christian means to know Christ, right? We can't confess to be Christians, to know Christ, and then live our lives functionally as deists, people that believe that God is far away. God is with us. God is here. We can know Him. Self-righteousness makes us focused on doing something for Christ, but we have the great joy of knowing Christ. Secondly, self-righteousness focuses on our own exaltation, but we share in Christ's suffering. So when we focus on ourself for too long, it's like we start thinking that suffering is kind of beneath us. We start to think about how we deserve to be comfortable, and frankly we think, like, I'm too good to suffer. It's not for me. Not that anybody particularly enjoys suffering, right? But our culture seems very averse to it. We avoid it at all costs. But Paul has discussed suffering with the Philippians before, and he doesn't say to avoid it. If you look back at chapter 2, verse 18, Paul makes the point that they should rejoice in their suffering. That's a real line in the sand for us, right? Because that's crazy. To rejoice in suffering, we have to make sure that Paul is right. So we gain Christ, we're in Christ, and we know him, but we also know the power of his resurrection. We know the power of his resurrection. That same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that dwells in us. The Holy Spirit transforms our heart and draws us closer to God, and then he strengthens us and sustains us. We have this power inside us, but we can't forget that in order to be resurrected, Jesus had to die first. Jesus didn't live an easy life, and neither will we. The Christian life isn't about the safe religious conformity that Paul had based his life around previously, but the forward thinking and going through suffering. And so we preserve by the power of the resurrection through this suffering and through that we know Christ more and more. We need to make sure we understand what kind of suffering that Paul is talking about here. So Paul's talking about suffering that comes because of our love for God and our dedication to the gospel. He's not talking about the suffering that comes from us just being mean. As one of my pastor friends says, the gospel is offensive enough, it doesn't need our help. But we don't suffer alone, right? We share in the sufferings of Christ, or we have fellowship in his sufferings. That Greek word, you might be familiar with it, is koinonia, right? And it means to have close fellowship with something or someone. So you have standard small talk with acquaintances, how's the weather, things like that. But you have koinonia, you have that fellowship with your best friend. Actually, our benediction today will be from 2 Corinthians 13. It says, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship, the koinonia, of the Holy Spirit be with you all. And that's why we're able to rejoice in suffering. Not because it's fun, but because they're Christ's suffering. We're following Jesus and we're suffering just like he did, but not only like him, but with him. So Paul would have known this very tangibly. So he just rattled off his accomplishments, you'll remember, in the first part of chapter three. And one of them was that he persecuted the church. If you're unfamiliar with Paul, he persecuted the church. Jesus appeared to him and changed his life. When Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and he stopped him, Jesus said to Paul, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting, not why are you persecuting the church, not why are you persecuting my followers, or my friends, Jesus said to Saul, why are you persecuting me? Why are you persecuting me? So we aren't alone in our suffering. Our suffering is very real to Jesus and He suffers as well. So we're fellowshipping with our Savior in a very real way when we suffer for His sake. We need to hold both of these in tension. the power of the resurrection, but we also share in the sufferings of Christ. Or we know the resurrection in light of suffering, and suffering in light of the resurrection. So we can rejoice that Christ has risen from the grave, but also confess that life is hard. And then when life is hard, we can still rejoice because Jesus has risen from the grave. walking if you're out on a hike or something, and I gave you an umbrella, you would know, I only gave that to you because it's about to rain, right? We have the power of the resurrection because we know that we will share in God's suffering. But then when it did start to rain, you would see how awesome that umbrella was, right? So we're in the midst of suffering, we have the power of the resurrection. Now this shared, sharing it in both the humiliation and exaltation of Christ. So this is another quote in your bulletins from Scottish theologian Sinclair Ferguson. He says, the whole of the Christian life is born out of this womb of our union with Christ in his death and his resurrection, his sufferings and his glory. So I'm a pessimistic sports fan. Generally speaking, I expect the team I cheer for to lose in the most heartbreaking way possible. But I come by it honestly. My grandma and my papa were Cubs fans. My dad and my uncle are Cubs fans. To the extent I like baseball, I'd cheer for the Cubs. So I would watch games with my dad. Being a fan of the Cubs his entire life, he was used to endless disappointment. But I didn't really understand it. until one day when I was in eighth grade, I was 13, and I did understand it. So the Cubs had done pretty well that year. They had made it to the National League Championship Series. So if they won this series, they would go to the World Series. They were against the Florida Marlins. They were up three games to two in a best of seven series. So they needed to win this game. They would go to the World Series for the first time in like 60 years. They were winning three to nothing. In the eighth inning, they had one out. They were five outs away from going to the World Series. I don't even need to finish this story for some of you. The Marlins hit a fly ball to left field. The Cubs outfielder, Moises Alou, went to catch it. A fan, Steve Martman, also tried to catch it and knocked the ball away from the player. Everybody went crazy. And I thought, that's all right. We're still in it. I was naive. My dad knew that the game was over. The next pitch was a wild pitch, runners on first and third. Then a ground ball to shortstop Alex Gonzalez. He was a very good player. It should have been a double play. It wasn't. Everybody was safe. The Marlins scored eight times that ending. And they ended up winning that game. And then they would win in Chicago the next night and go on to the World Series. So that night, I entered into a long line of pessimistic sports fans in the Brown family. I became intimately familiar with sports heartbreak, and I shared in the sufferings of my dad and my uncle and my grandparents. But I want to make sure that we get this, because suffering is very real for us. I know in this congregation, I look out, I see spaces in the pew that shouldn't be empty. I know you guys suffer in the holidays. People in your own family don't believe in Jesus, and so you're alone. I know deep desires in your heart that haven't been answered or prayers that feel like they haven't been heard. I know we as a congregation are familiar with suffering, but we don't suffer alone. Jesus wept. over the death of his friend, he felt betrayal from those closest to us. And so when we sit there at night and we reflect on our sufferings and we wonder, how am I going to get up in the morning? Will I be able to be happy? Will I be able to be strong for somebody? The answer isn't that we'll be able to do that because of the power in us. We're able to do that because of the power of the resurrection Jesus loves us, the Holy Spirit dwells in us, and because of that we can face these sufferings. So, self-righteousness focuses on our own exaltation, but we share in Christ's sufferings. Alright, the last point here then is that self-righteousness focuses on past accomplishments, but we were called to strive towards future glory. Self-righteousness tells us that we're not good enough, right? Or no, it tells us that we are good enough, the opposite. But if there's room for improvement, that means we're not perfect, and we don't like to hear that about ourselves. But Paul realizes that he doesn't fully know Christ perfectly, and so he presses on to this goal. He strains for this goal. And ironically, this would be a pretty good time for him to rest on his laurels, right? He just said that he counts all his accomplishments as rubbish, and that seems like a great place to be, but that's not enough for him. Because he sees that, he pushes harder. He leans into it. Sometimes we think that just because we're justified by grace, then the Christian life kind of ends when we're saved, and we just kind of coast to the finish line, right? But that's foreign to Paul. He continues to work hard to know Jesus more fully, not to earn his salvation or to solidify his spot, but because he loves God and he wants to know him more. Just like nobody accidentally ends up married, I can only speak to this from a male perspective, but it's hard when you date to get married. You have to explain the rules of your sport every 10 to 15 seconds. You have to watch Pride and Prejudice, right? It's not fun, but it's worth it. You do these things, it's worth it. Last week you used the example of giving, like our kids give art to their parents. And the parents don't love the kids because of the art, but they love the art because of the kids. So if we build on that now, kids enjoy pleasing their parents with art. And so they keep trying to draw things that their parents will love. So it starts out as scribbles, and then it gets to drawing the family house or the family dog, things that they love. Ben has a picture of a Clemson tiger that one of his kids drew, because he loves them. Kids don't do this because they want their parents to love them more. Kids do this because they delight in pleasing their parents, and so they work at it. They try to get better. And so look at the repetition in these last few verses. Paul presses on to make it his own. He strains forward to what lies ahead, and he presses on towards the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So these verbs show that you have to work hard, right? You don't have to... to work hard, or strain, or press on, to watch the 11-hour Lord of the Rings trilogy, extended edition, right? It's easy, you just sit there, it's not hard, you don't have to strain. But we're called to strain, and we have to strain, if you think about it, we're finite beings trying to know an infinite God, so there's always something for us to work on. There's always something more for us to know. So I went, Yeah, I went to the state cross-country meet yesterday, and we saw these kids really striving for something. I think about high school's hard. There's lots of personal dynamics going on. But they weren't thinking about that. They were learning. They were focused on the goal. They were straining towards that goal. They weren't thinking about their math tests or that mean thing that somebody said. They were focused on one goal. So for us, right? If we're not striving, if the things in our life aren't helping us strive towards God, maybe it's time to give those things up. Because I don't think we're losing our ability to strive. I see kids striving, families striving every day. But I wonder if we put too much effort into things that aren't as important as knowing Christ. It's just like in a marriage that's grown cold because the husband and the wife take each other for granted. We've been striving after promotions and grades and popularity, and we just figure that God's along for the ride. And so we've neglected to strive after the one who died for us. And I don't say this to heap up guilt. I say this as someone who's asked himself the same question all week. But what a prayer it would be for all of us if we prayed, Lord, help us strive. Help me strive to know you more. Because the foundation is that Christ knows us, so we're not striving after a stranger. We're striving after somebody that loves us and died for us. So if we put all this together, we get a pretty complete picture of the Christian life, right? Our greatest joy is knowing Christ personally, not just knowing about Him. And because we are in Christ, we can be sure that our suffering, it'll come our way, but we don't face this suffering by ourself. Christ is there in our suffering and we're empowered to face it by the power of His resurrection. Now all of these trials and all of our knowing and being known by Christ doesn't result in apathy, but it results in us striving and working and pressing on to know him more and more, to seek him in all that we do. So let's pray now that the Lord would bless us in this way. Father, we do pray that you would empower us to strive more and more towards knowing you. Why don't you give us dedication and work ethic, and we confess that we use those gifts for things of this world often, Lord, We also confess that we take your grace for granted and we don't strive after you as we ought to. So I pray that you would put a fire in our bones, Lord, that knowing you would be the primary goal of our lives because it's the primary joy that we can have. So Lord, continue to work in us. I pray that you would watch over us this week, Lord, and give us wisdom. Show us the surpassing worth of knowing You, so we may strive to that goal. I pray this all in Your Son's name. Amen.