All right. The only announcement I have are for what's coming up this next week. Jim and Phyllis and Pam and I will be leaving for Poland on Tuesday afternoon. So Ray Mondragon is coming in on Monday and he will be filling in and he's going to be doing some lot of up-to-date stuff related to creation and creationism. And that's his area. His background is science. So he's always very interesting and informative. And so he'll be filling in on all the services for the next three weeks. And then this Sunday we're going to have communion. Normally we have the second Sunday, but because I'll be gone, I'll be here to conduct communion this coming Sunday. And there's no men's prayer breakfast this month, but there will be a deacons meeting on Saturday, May the 13th. and appreciate your prayers for us on the trip. There's a lot of moving parts. We're going to get some opportunities to go to some places that have to do with the Holocaust. We're going to go to Auschwitz and a number of other places. And interesting connections developed. And we have an invitation next Friday night to go to Shabbat dinner at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow. So, and then it turns out that a guide that we were put in contact with for seeing the old Jewish quarter in Krakow will also be there. So everything's just starting to come together, but it's frenetic. Trust me. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God. and the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever." So before we get started, we'll have a few moments of silent prayer so we can make sure we're in right relationship with the Lord and be in fellowship. So after a few moments, I will open in prayer. Let's pray. Father, it's a great privilege that we can come together this evening just to learn more about the significance of justification in our lives, that it just doesn't stop with justification, but pushes on to our ultimate priorities in life and growing and maturing. So Father, we pray that as we read and study tonight, that this will be clear to us. And Father, we also pray for this upcoming trip and for the people that will be listening and that they will be ready, receptive to your word, both in all the places that we're going to go and speak. And then Father, just for other open doors and opportunities, So we just put all that in your hands and we pray this in Christ's name, amen. So it's also interesting, Saturday there was a missionary in town who's been supported by Sugar Land Bible Church for about 30 years. And I met with him and he was asking me how and what I had done in Ukraine. And so I told him about coming out last year and he said, oh, now it all makes sense. I was put on alert by someone at Sugar Land Bible Church that I might need to be ready at a moment's notice to go pick some people up who were coming out of Ukraine when the war started. And that was you. So it's amazing how God was planning and preparing all sorts of alternatives for us so that we would get out. All right, so we're going back into Philippians chapter 3 tonight, which has been a month since we were looking through the context of the passage. So I'll be spending some time on that just to review because it flows into the last two, last couple of verses of this chapter, which is what we'll be finishing up tonight, which are verses 10 and 11. So we're going to be picking up that context by way of return. So we're going to be examining what Paul means when he gets down to verses 10 and 11. And just to remind you, what we have seen is that there's two basic themes that the Apostle Paul is emphasizing as he goes through this epistle. The first part of chapter 1 was the introduction down to verse 26. And then starting in verse 27, we have the main body of the epistle. And the two themes are emphasized in verse 27. And that is unity, being of one mind, and then standing fast for the truth. And what we see when we get into chapter 3 is this is where we have the emphasis on standing firm against error. And the first error that he addresses is what he addresses in these first 11 verses. And that has to do with the influx of the false teaching of the Judaizers. And what they were doing is adding Mosaic Law, certain of the rituals of the Mosaic Law into either the Gospel or spiritual life, or both. And so it was the works of the law. So when we memorize or learn these passages, like Galatians 2.16, that we have not been justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ, that's why it is stated that particular way. And so the problem was that You had these Judaizers, and that comes from the word in the blue box, Judaizo in the Greek, and they were those who insisted that to be saved because if Christianity came out of Judaism, Christianity was the fulfillment of Judaism. So a convert had to become a Jew. Males would have to be circumcised, observance of Sabbath, observance of the dietary laws in some cases. So that was the idea. So Paul is warning about this in this section of Philippians 1, I mean, chapter 3, verses 1 through 6. And his confidence, as he states, which is a very important word here, is in the flesh, that is, in his own ability to do something that would give him standing before God, that somehow he could develop enough righteousness in terms of the law, in terms of the traditions of the fathers to be counted worthy of heaven. And of course all religious systems are that way. Man has to do something to overpower sin, but it shows that they have a weak view of sin and a low view of God as well and a high view of man. And so Paul states it in Philippians 3, 3, for we are the circumcision who worship God in the spirit. There he's emphasizing, as we learned, spiritual circumcision, which is what's represented in the Old Testament ritual for the Jews under, for all Jews, Abrahamic covenant, circumcision identified, the Jews as Jews, as descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And then under the Mosaic Law, it was to identify with a commitment to obey the Mosaic Law. And so Paul is now saying, for we, that is, church-age believers, are the circumcision, we're the true circumcision, the spiritual circumcision. Not all Jews were spiritually circumcised. They weren't all believers. They were physically circumcised, but not spiritually circumcised. That's why Paul says in Romans 9, not all Israel is Israel, because they have not been spiritually circumcised, which was taught in Deuteronomy as well. And so his confidence was in the flesh. That word is repeated again in a slightly different Actually the verb is used in verse 3 and the noun is used in verse 4. Though I also might have confidence in the flesh, if anyone else thinks he may have confidence, and that's a verb form there, and the flesh I more so. So Judaizers put their confidence in the cross plus obedience to the law. They're looking at both. When they are trusting in something for righteousness, they're combining the cross with the law. And that's what Paul is dealing with here. That's what Paul dealt with in Galatians. So they put their confidence in the cross plus obedience to the law. And this is what he described as being in the flesh, the works in the flesh, in verses 3 and 4. what I taught a month ago was human good, ritual, whatever it may be, any human effort that you think somehow is credited by God, that you've done something good, you've helped out. Human good always wants to help out the work of Christ on the cross. The idea that a person can believe in Christ plus something else is a denial of the sufficiency of the cross. When Jesus said, paid in full, he didn't say, but you can help out a little bit. So it's the cross. And this is what's in the background of what Paul is saying here. So human good plus faith in Christ nullifies the faith. And faith cannot be mixed with anything else. Faith in the cross. So that's why they have the saying, faith alone in Christ alone. And it really is an ambiguous statement because you have alone applied to faith and alone applied to Christ, which gets confusing. And so people don't understand that. But the faith is in Christ alone. And if you're at any if you're relying on something else at the time, it doesn't count. But God's the one who knows what people are trusting in, whether they're trusting exclusively in Christ or not. No one else can figure that out. But that's the deal, it's Christ alone. So we come to verse five and six, where he's listing the things he was proud of, the things he thought would give him credit before God. Circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews. So those four that are listed there, he didn't have anything to do with that was just his birth and then he says a Pharisee concerning zeal persecuting the church concerning righteousness which is in the law blameless so we list four that are related to his genetic genetic heritage circumcision that was his parents volition second he's of the stock of Israel he's a pure racial stock, third tribe of Benjamin, and fourth Hebrew of the Hebrews. Now in the first temple period, and maybe they got some of the records, but knowing that they also had genealogical records in the second temple period, these families could trace their lineage all the way back. In fact, I was told recently that a lady died, a lady in her 80s or 90s died And she lived somewhere in a village in Galilee, and she was the last in her line. She had no children, but she could trace her genealogy back to the second temple period and had all the records. So there were quite a few. There was always a population of Jews in the land somewhere estimated somewhere between probably 35 or 40,000 to 60,000. They lived in various locations. They lived in Jerusalem. They lived in Hebron. They lived up in Tiberias. In that area, they lived up in the hills of Samaria at a city called Thot, which is a holy city. That's where a lot of the ultra-Orthodox live. And so that was So these folks could trace their lineage all the way back. So you'll often hear the lie that, well, the Jews weren't here for a long time. Well, no, they were. The Jews were there. Arabs weren't. Muslims weren't. They didn't come along till later. So the Jews were always there, always living on the land. And that was what was so interesting about that film that I encourage people to watch for a number of reasons. that emphasizes the role of David Friedman, who was the ambassador to Israel during the Trump administration, and Mike Pompeo, who had several different roles in the Trump administration. And they did a narrative, sort of a travelogue through Israel. And they started in Nazareth, and then they went down to the area around Shechem, the area of Nablus, which is an Arab city, to Mount Gerizim where they went in Nazareth and Nazareth was Jewish at the time of Christ. Now it's Arab. Then they went down to Mount Gerizim and showed Joshua's altar. And we had Aaron Lipkin here last year and he gave us all the insights on the discovery of of Joshua's altar. And then they went to Shiloh, and then they went to Bethel, and then they went to Jerusalem, and then they went to Hebron. And all of that, it dawned on me halfway through that this wasn't about come see Israel, isn't Israel wonderful? This was an archaeological tour that demonstrated the historicity of the Jewish people in the Promised Land since at least 2000 B.C. 4000 B.C. rather. 2000 B.C. Since 2000 B.C. It was remarkable. And the point was, they were there. So it's fascinating. And so Paul was of a family that could trace their lineage all the way back, probably back to the conquest, if not before. And then on the other side, there were four decisions related to him that he was a Pharisee, or three rather. I still haven't fixed that typo. Three, that he had, He was a Pharisee, zealously persecuting the church and blameless in the righteousness of the law. And this is what he thought was gained to him. This was on the credit side of his ledger. Because as we have seen here, these words are financial terms. And so he says, what was gained to me, what was on the credit side of the ledger, was all these things, but now I count them all as a debit. And so as we look, we've looked at these words. So what were the things that he thought were gain? Same thing we just looked at. He thought that gave him standing with God. So these words, gain is the Greek word kairdos, and that has to do with the credit side of a ledger. Hegeomai, we studied this quite a bit, is a word that means to think, consider, And to regard something, it's an accounting term. So you're adding up all your good deeds and you're going to sum it up as righteousness. So Paul is saying, what was on the credit side to me, now I count it all as a debit. It is nothing for me. And it's this word, hegetomai, and also you have a parallel word used and a synonym used for imputation, which we studied, which was logizomai. So both of these words are words that have to do with thinking, with reasoning. People think, oh no, you have to park your brain in neutral to be a Christian. No, you have to park your brain in neutral to believe in evolution. You have to park your brain in neutral to believe in Marxism. You have to park your brain in neutral to buy into critical race theory. You have to park your brain in neutral to be anti-Semitic. But you have to use your brain to understand the Word of God. And God has revealed it to us in such a way that it demands constantly going back, reading it, studying it, thinking about it, and developing your understanding. So these are very rational concepts. It's not the autonomous use of reason. The independent use of reason always degrades into mysticism. Always. And mysticism is nothing more than worshiping your inner thoughts and feelings. It's self-worship. We'll get into that in the next section. of Philippians 3. So these are the economics, the arithmetic of justification. And so those who, when we trust in Christ, all the stuff that we thought was of value before is a debit. It's a penalty. That's why it doesn't count. So then Paul says in verse 8, He starts off with an extremely strong statement. He says, Allah, Allah minun gay. Now that didn't mean anything to you. You just think I'm blathering in tongues up here. But it's actually four words. Allah, which means but. Men, which means on the one hand. Un, which is therefore. And gay, which is also therefore. So Paul takes four particles and he combines them together to emphasize the importance of what he is saying. I can imagine, I mean, this is a word he uses two other times in Romans, one in Romans 9 and one in Romans 10. This is, he's coined this word, and I can imagine somebody who was Greek probably looked at that and went, what? This must be important. And so he's making a shift here and he's stressing this. Yes, therefore, indeed, I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as dung, scubala, that I may gain Christ. Notice the words we have here. You've got the words, same words we had in the previous verse, count, loss, loss again, and gain again, count again, and gain again. So we've got three times the use of the word hegeomi. So he's counting or considering, he's got three statements that emphasize what he has thought through, what he has come to think about. So he says, I have, I also count, or I also consider, or I have also reasoned my way through this and come to the conclusion that everything is loss. It's loss for what? It's loss for the excellence. This is the above and beyond anything else. No matter what we see in the created world, nothing compares to the knowledge about Christ. The knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord. And he uses all three titles for the Lord Jesus Christ there. Lord emphasizes his deity. Christ emphasizes his messianic role. And Jesus emphasizes his humanity. And it's interesting as you go through this, that in the Apostle Paul, he uses the Christ Jesus 62 times. He uses Jesus Christ 118 times, almost twice as many times. And I'm still trying to figure out if there's a significance there, because in Philippians 1.1, he uses Jesus Christ in the first line, and he uses Christ Jesus in the second line, and I can't figure out what the significant difference is. People have theories. But I go to Philippians 1 and 1 and go, those theories don't work there that I can see. So all of this adds up to nothing more than scabbala. It's dung. It's, you know, everybody says, well, garbage is better than rubbish, but dung can be used for fertilizer. Well, everything else can be used for something. So it's talking about it is useless, it's unacceptable, it's just to be discarded completely. So he says, I have thought this through and come to the conclusion that everything, whatever detail of life really floats your boat, that's nothing compared to the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. and for whom I suffered the loss of all things because everything that he had achieved in life up until about 35 A.D. when he was saved, so I would put Paul's salvation somewhere around 35 or 36. Everything that he had gained, everything that he had worked for, everything that he had earned, he lost. Respect, he lost privilege, He lost position. He probably lost family. He lost friends when he trusted in Christ as Savior. Everything was gone, but he says, that's nothing. I've got Christ. That's what matters. It doesn't matter to have whatever you enjoy, whatever your pleasures are, whatever your possessions are, whatever people you enjoy being with. None of that should even matter compared to the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, for whom, he says, I have suffered the loss of all things. Now, what are those all things? Well, the all things would relate specifically contextually to what we listed before, the four things that he had nothing to do with and the three that he did. But it goes beyond that. It's, it's, he suffered the loss of everything in his life. And so that's what he's emphasizing. I suffered the loss of all things and count them. So now he's going to count something else. He's going to, I'm going to add all of those things up and draw a line and the sum is dung. It's just manure. We think it's important and it really isn't. compared to gaining Christ. So this is the focal point. And he's focusing on gaining Christ. So there's these three new thoughts that he's worked through. That's, I'm taking the word Hegetomai in the realm of considering or thinking something through. So first of all, he thinks it through and concludes that all the former things he counted on, depended on, valued, and thought were really super. were all debits. They were all losses. Nothing there mattered anymore. Second thing, he thinks it through further, and he further concludes the losses are replaced by something. They're replaced by the excellence of the knowledge of Christ. Now when you look at this, when he thinks it through up here, that ties into justification. Because when When he counts it all loss, he realizes that my works don't get me justified. Christ's work on the cross is what justifies me. Then he thinks it through further and concludes that beyond that, he can pursue the excellence of the knowledge of Christ. Now we've moved from justification into the spiritual life, into the motivation for spiritual growth. into the importance that we should have on knowing God's Word and internalizing God's Word. And then third, he thinks it through even more, and he considers all the things, everything that he thought had some value, some importance, and some significance was done in order to gain Christ. So he's realizing that no matter what you look at in life, When you compare it to spiritual values of knowing the Lord, nothing else matters. Nothing else measures up. That is to be our priority. That's what Paul says over in Ephesians 5, 17 when he talks about redeeming the time. As believers, we have to have a scale of values and priorities. That doesn't mean that because you put the Lord first that every day you're going to have time to get up and Read your Bible, but you've got to make sure that even those days where there are exceptional demands on your time, that you make up for it in some way. You don't let that just completely replace what you were doing. We all have things that come in at the last minute or even in other circumstances. So what he's looking at is the excellence of the knowledge of Christ and then gaining Christ. And so two words that show up here that are translated knowledge in this passage are the first word is gnosis. Now gnosis is a big broad word and it incorporates, it can mean anything from just basic intellectual knowledge, grasping basic facts about something to having a full, rich understanding of something. So it would include words like epinosis would be a subcategory but wouldn't In certain contexts where epinosis is used, it's emphasizing going on to a more personal relationship with the Lord on the basis of that knowledge. I did not put epinosis in this because it's not in the passage. Gnosko is the verb, and it means to arrive at the knowledge of something. It's talking about the development of knowledge. That's the progress of the Christian life. We have to know God's Word. We have to come to know it. We have to study it, read it, and it's a never-ending process. And so, he then comes to verse 9. It continues the sentence, "...and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ." Notice, it's one or the other the way he expresses it. the righteousness which is from God by faith." Now, the three verses are 8, 9, and 10, and they're all one sentence. Yeah, 8, 9, and 10. They're all one sentence. So I diagrammed it for you. Not an official diagram, but I have to lay these things out. You have to take it, because the way Paul piles phrase upon phrase And he makes compound, complex sentences that go on for four, five, or six verses that you have to take a good look at this. So he is, I did this for years just on a scratch paper, but now I can put that into Lagas. So he says, I count all things loss. And then he expands on that over here. And you have a conjunction here, and I count all things lost and count them as rubbish. That's your main thought. I count all things lost and count them as rubbish. That's his big idea. That's what he's talking about in these verses. And so you have two uses of hegeomi, which is introduced in the previous verse. And he goes on and he says that they're all lost, Four, and that four is probably a causal sense because of the excellence of the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord. It's lost because of the knowledge of Christ. It's lost because there's nothing that can compare to the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things. And so that suffering is brought into it that time, and notice, didn't put another arrow here, but down here you have sufferings. The fellowship of his sufferings, that connects up here. So this is a very well constructed and a very long sentence. So I do this and I hope it helps you visualize it, but I have to do this or I'm just getting lost in the words. And then he goes on to say, he counts them as rubbish that Now this, you have a purpose clause here and a purpose clause here. And in the next verse, it's going to start off with a different form of a purpose clause, which I'll explain in a minute. I think these are the two that go together. These both relate to justification. The next one's going to relate to spiritual growth after justification. So he says, I count all things lost. I count them as rubbish for two primary reasons here. The purpose, the two purpose clauses. that I may gain Christ and that I may know him. And in knowing him, he has to know the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, which happened when I was conformed to his death. So when was he conformed to his death? We'll get there. So this is how it's laid out. And the focal point of all of this is recognizing that everything is lost, all the details of life are rubbish compared to the knowledge of Christ. That doesn't mean they don't have some value in our lives and we can't enjoy the details of life, but that compared to Christ they don't have value. Christ is the one who has value. So in verse 10 he says that I may know him and the power, so it should be that I may know him and know the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings when I was conformed to his death. So I think that's what I did here. Be found in him that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings. So what is the power of his resurrection. That's the Holy Spirit. He's raised by the power of the Holy Spirit. How do we know that? Well, we have verses. In Romans 15, 13, he says, Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. In verse 19, he says, in mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. And 1 Corinthians 2, 4, my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power. Ephesians 3, 16, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might with power through his spirit in the inner man. Second Timothy one seven for God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind. So God the Holy Spirit is the power for the resurrection and God the Holy Spirit is the one that gives us power and strength in the new life, because we are raised in new life. Now we'll get a tighter connection to the Holy Spirit in just a minute. So we'll know Him and the power of His resurrection, which came from the Holy Spirit, and then, and the fellowship. Now that word fellowship, koinonia, means a partnership that comes together toward a common goal. It's not social interaction. It's not getting together with Christian friends. It goes beyond that. There is a conscientious partnership, and it's a partnership with the sufferings of Christ. Now, how did that happen? Now, we have to understand how these verses come together, because he then uses a word Summorphizo, the root there is morph, which has to do with the form of something. And so it comes to be sharing the same form or being conformed to something. And it's a participle. And in the Greek, it doesn't have a noun in front of it. So that means the participle functions as a adverb. It modifies a verb. So it's saying something about these verbal actions back here. When did you know him? When I was conformed to his death. When did you know him, know the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings? This is your main verb here that I may know. When I was conformed to his death. When did that happen? This is Romans 6, 1 through 4, and then Romans 6, 11 to 14, where he begins with the rhetorical question to move the thought from justification and reconciliation in Romans 3, 4, and 5 to the spiritual life. Starting in 6, 1, we're not talking about how to be justified or our reconciliation with God. We're talking about how the justified, reconciled person is supposed to live. So he says, what shall I say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? No, not at all. How should we who died to sin live anymore in it? So death to sin doesn't mean you can't still sin because otherwise they wouldn't be still living in it. It is that we died to the power of sin, not the presence of sin. So at the cross, we're saved from the penalty of sin. In the spiritual life, in phase two, we're saved from the power of sin. And then in phase three, we are saved from the presence of sin. So he's talking here about being saved from the power of sin. What's the basis for that? That's verses three and four, where he says, do you not know that as many of us as were baptized, that means to be identified with Christ. Word for baptism always stands for identification, baptized into Christ, Christ Jesus were baptized or identified in His death. We were conformed to His death when we trusted Christ as Savior in baptism by the Holy Spirit. We're conformed to His death. Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death. This isn't water baptism. This is the baptism by the Holy Spirit. That just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. That newness of life is the result of the fact that the power, that tyrannical power of the sin nature is broken. But it's our comfort zone. And we like it so much that it's very hard for us to break those habits because we've managed to let sin work for us and make us think that, oh yeah, my life's a lot better if I have my little sinful pleasures. So we have to learn that. That's what Paul's saying. No, no, no, no. You don't give in to your sin nature. You are to walk in newness of life. So then he picks this thought up in verse 11, and he says, Likewise, you also reckon or consider this is that other word, Logitimai, to think about it. Reckon or consider yourselves dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Therefore, don't let sin reign in your mortal bodies, that you should obey its lust. You don't have to do that, believer. You don't have to do that. You can pray, but it doesn't, and that doesn't change overnight. God's not going to zing you with a second blessing or give you some kind of a supernatural empowerment. He's already done that with the Holy Spirit. The thing is, it's the Spirit of God plus the Word of God. If you're biblically illiterate and doctrinally impoverished and theologically heretical, you'll never get past your sin nature. You've got to know the Word. And we conscientiously think that this is my sin nature and I'm going to say no. I know two minutes later you're going to say, or two seconds later you'll say, oh, yeah, I will. But that's the learning process. We all go through that. And I look at my life sometimes and I think, well, I can see some advance. It's maybe measured in millimeters, but there's advance. And that's true for all of us. It is a part of spiritual warfare. So he goes on to say, verse 13, do not present your members, your physical body, as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but instead present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead. and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. This is our spiritual life after salvation. Four, he says, sin should not have dominion over you for you're not under law but under grace. So this is what Paul is talking about when he says the power of his resurrection. And that's here in the baptism by the Holy Spirit. That's the power of the resurrection. and the fellowship of his sufferings when I was conformed to death." And so Paul is thinking in terms of all of the various things in which he suffered. And this is nothing compared to what Christ has done for him. So these sufferings are not, in the sense of Christ's actual physical sufferings on the cross, but we're identified with them, which is the process of making us a new creature in Christ, which is why we are supposed to walk in newness, newness of life. And so as we learn to walk and live our Christian life, we have to be obedient to Him. So then we come to, I'm not going to go there, I must have left a slide out. So when we look at the fellowship of his sufferings, there's a couple of verses that are significant. Number one is Philippians 129. When Paul is talking, this is in the intro to the main body of the epistle. He says, for to you, just put your name there, for to you it has been granted. Whenever you see the word granted related to the verb give, it's always a function of God's grace. Think about that. For to you, for to Robbie Dean, it has been granted, graciously given on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake. See, Paul's already introduced this concept here. We are going to be identified with his suffering, and that will be part of our experience to one degree or another. In Acts 9.16, when Ananias, remember when Paul got saved on the road to Damascus and after he sees Christ in a blinding light, he's blinded for two or three days. The Lord told him, go into Damascus and you'll meet a man named Ananias. And I've already told him what he's supposed to do. And he's going to take you and he will restore your sight. And so that's what happened when he goes in and is going to see Ananias says that when the Lord instructed him, the Lord said about Paul, for I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake. So from the get-go, suffering is part of the spiritual life. And then Paul comes to his last statement in verse 11 and this is a actually this is a difficult and a very unusual construction in the Greek that I've had to spend a lot of time on and it's been a while since I've gone back to it so that was good to go I like to get into passages fresh and not look at what I did before but you know take another path of research And it's translated, if by any means. And what he is stating in the Greek with this is the idea of uncertainty on his part as to how he's going to die. He's not uncertain about, is he going to be saved? He's made that very clear. He's justified. But he's uncertain. Where is he when he writes Philippians? He's in prison. So he's uncertain about whether or not they're going to execute him or let him go. He's uncertain about, well, if they let me go, am I going to live to the rapture because he had that sense of imminency? Am I going to make it to the rapture or am I going to live long enough and die before the rapture? So that's the level of uncertainty. And so he says, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead. And the word there is ex-anastasis. Anastasis is the Greek word for resurrection. The X at the beginning is a prefix from the preposition ek, meaning out from. And so this is talking about the rapture. So he's going to eventually, one way or the other, he will be with the Lord forever. But he's uncertain about when that's going to happen or whether it will be that he dies or that he makes it to the rapture. So that brings us to the end of this opening section of Philippians 3, 1 through 11. And then he's going to shift gears when we get into verse 12. And I did not want to go beyond verse 12 tonight because that gets us into the whole next section. And with my travels coming up, I didn't want to just stop and go forward. So he says, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Now, verses 12 to 14, he talks about not that I have already obtained it or already become perfect. And this is talking about the goals for the Christian life. That's what it was that 12, 13 and 14 are really focusing on this shift to what our goals and objectives should be on for the Christian life. And I wanted to wait until I got back to get into those three verses because they need to be thought through together. So we'll close in prayer. Father, thanks for this time we had to look at this and to realize that that we need to take a fresh look at our priorities in terms of our values and our value and not just coming to know some things about Jesus, not just coming to know some doctrine, but building and developing that experiential relationship that we can have with the Lord Jesus Christ. And that this only comes through knowing him through his word. And so we are to be challenged to continue to focus, to study, to read, to understand, to think about it. And God, the Holy Spirit, then uses your word to mature us and to conform us to the image of Christ. So Father, we pray that you would use these things and that we would continue to reflect upon what our values are in terms of our spiritual walk. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.