continue our series through Philippians tonight by looking at Philippians 3 verses 1 through 11. Again, it's a bit of a high-water mark in the epistle to Philippians. You know, we've talked about how it's a church that's marred by some of the disunity among its members. It's a church that is easily susceptible to false teaching because of how it was so status-driven. And Paul here is gonna clarify that for them in this passage in Philippians 3. And if you'd like to follow along with us, it's on page 981 in your Pew Bible, page 981. Philippians 3, 1 through 11 says this. Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. 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, note the present tense, past tense to present tense, 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. The grass withers, the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever. Friends, let us pray and ask God's help one more time. Gracious Lord, once again, as we marvel at the majesty of what you've shown us in Jesus, would all other loves in our lives fade away? Would what is passing take the backseat? And would the eternal and life-changing truths of the gospel capture our attention afresh by the power and ministry of your spirit among us now. We ask this in Christ's name and pray this for the sake of his glory. Amen. So Malcolm Gladwell's in his book, Outliers. It's a fascinating book, but he opens the book by telling the story of Rosetto, Pennsylvania. It's an Italian American community that was started in the late 1800s. and was basically named for the same village, Roseto Valforte, Valfortore, sorry, I said that wrong, 100 miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of Italy's Foglia province. I'm butchering these Italian names, please forgive me. But each of their ancestors for centuries had worked in marble quarries in Roseto Valfortore, and they worked in marble quarries or on surrounding hills and farms in the region. And there was no opportunity for betterment, so there was a massive exodus that happened during that time of Italians to America because they heard that it was a better land with more opportunity. And as migration took place, the Rosettans brought more of their families and their Italian culture and transformed a similar rocky hillside close to Bangor, Pennsylvania, with some of the same Italian thriving communityness that they had known there, but it was a better life that they knew. But it would have remained relatively unknown in history were it not for how physician Stuart Wolfe took notice of its people's hearts in the mid-1950s. Wolfe was a physician from the same region of Pennsylvania, and one summer he was invited by a local doctor to give a lecture in the community on health. As his peer who lived in Rosetto talked to him over beers one night, after his talk, he said that in his 17 years of practice in Rosetta, Pennsylvania, he had never or rarely seen someone who was struggling with heart disease below the age of 65. Now that may sound pretty normal and hodgepodge for us, but this was the mid-1950s, okay? It was a time where the epidemic of the age was heart disease. It was the leading cause of death in the 1950s. Heart attacks were the leading cause of death in men under the age of 55. This was before cholesterol medications, any of that. And when Wolf hears this, he's astounded. He's so astounded that he has to go and look at this community. And he began surveying the whole town and found almost no one under 55 showed signs of heart disease. And in men over 65, the death rate from heart disease was actually half that of the U.S. And by all accounts, it didn't make sense. I mean, this was a people that as he got to know their way of life, they smoked stogies without filters, they were technically obese, they loved meatballs fried in lard with soft cheeses, and they drank wine without abandon. Like, there was no reason they shouldn't have suffered from the same effects of heart disease in this community. It wasn't a place that got up at six in the morning to do yoga and run six miles, Gladwell says. It was not just that they didn't die from heart disease. Nearly all their rates of death were actually one third less than anywhere else in the country at that time. And as Wolf tried to make sense of the data, he had one word from the medical profession to describe it. It was an outlier. Rosetta was an outlier community. And an outlier is defined in two ways, a stat that bucks the trend of other samples from one group of data, or it's something that bears the quality of an otherworldly class in comparison to the group in which you find it. It's either an outlier statistic or something that bears an otherworldly quality in the class in which you find it. like it shouldn't belong. And the explanation for Rosetto's outlier status wasn't found in any of the normal explanations of what led to health in Wolf's understanding. There was a power at work in their shared life together that actually changed this community to be an otherworldly place. where its people thrived. And Paul has been writing to this community of Philippians about what it means to be an otherworldly group of Christians marked by the upward trajectory of the gospel joy that should be theirs, even in the midst of their disunity. He's trying to help the believers at Philippi understand how they can live as a unified, joyful church who's transformed by the otherworldly life they have in Christ. And here Paul talks of the otherworldly righteousness that is the source of this joy. And he's gonna show us in this passage that it's only by reorienting our joy to rest in the righteous life of Christ that we can realize his transforming power in us and our lives together. It's only by reorienting our joy to rest in the righteous life of Christ that we can realize his transforming power in us and our life. He's gonna demonstrate that through three headings. He's gonna show the resume that he used to cling to for his own sense of righteousness in verses three through six. He's gonna reorient them and tell them how his joy was reoriented in verses seven to eight. And then he's gonna show the renewing power of Christ's life in verses nine through 11. But it's interesting as we turn our attention to the text, that this passage represents a change of tone that seems out of character for Paul. I mean, like he's been talking about how much he loves these people, how much he wants them to live a life of unity and togetherness. And then all of a sudden he picks back up. If you had remembered Pastor Knox's sermon, it ended, I think, at verse 18 last week. It said, likewise, you also should be glad and rejoice with me. He pauses there to tell him about what he intends to do with Timothy and Epaphroditus. Then he picks back up his train of thought in chapter three, verse one. He says, finally, my brothers rejoice in the Lord. He's writing again some of the same things he intended to write them about to begin with. But then he launches into this diatribe about dogs and evil workers. and people who mutilate the flesh, what's going on? Like, he's saying, look out, look out, look out. I mean, all of a sudden it just invades upon you as you read the text. Like, what is Paul so upset about? And what he's upset about is the fact that when he began his second missionary journey, that was how the church in Philippi was founded. You know, he was about to go up into Asia, or Asia from your perspective, but he gets a Macedonian man vision and he, chooses to go west at that point to jump on the Ignatian Way, the Roman trade route, and then the first stop that he has is in Philippi in Acts 16. And Acts 16 follows Acts 15, of course. Acts 15 was where the Jerusalem council had met in Jerusalem to talk about the issue of false teachers who were infiltrating the church. People who were very common, they were called Judaizers. They held a view of, yes, Jesus is the one who saves you by grace, but you have to take on the Old Testament ceremonial law in order to really be saved by Christ. You have to follow the same law. Acts 16 in the first few verses tells us that Paul sets out from the Jerusalem Council to let the churches that are established know about the council's decision. And then he's rerouted to Philippi, and now it's almost 10 years later, this doctrine of the Judaizers has grown, and he's worried that his status-minded church, that was a Roman colony that was so driven by this similar sort of probably ambition that our culture is, which was the source of their disunity, was gonna fall prey to a similar form of spiritual elitism. And that's why he's warning them in the ways that he is. Paul has already addressed how the status-minded city and its status-drivenness are starting to show in his calls to humility. And he says, instead of being worried about all the status that you can get from elevating yourself over others, Instead, think of others like Jesus has. That's what chapter two is about. And so he tells them not to be confused and he warns them because Paul knows that the type of spiritual elitism of these Judaizers is a far more dangerous type of status-driven eliteness that this church has already shown that it's susceptible to. because it's spiritual in nature. But he says, don't be confused. He says, they're gonna come at you and say, if you don't follow the Old Testament ceremonial law, you know, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, approach God in a certain way, be circumcised in the flesh, then you actually aren't Christians. In contrast to this, he says, don't be confused. We're the true circumcision. He says, we're really the community marked out by God's promises, not those Judaizers, and don't fall prey to it. And it's interesting, why does he say circumcision? Well, because he's saying like, he knows that these false teachers are gonna say, circumcision was the right that you had to follow because in the Old Testament, circumcision was the sign from Abraham's covenant that marked out Israel's status in the world. And these guys were confused about the nature of the gospel. They thought it wasn't just enough to profess faith. You had to demonstrate your faith and show that you were really trying hard to follow it by taking on the life of one of God's Old Testament people in the life of an Israelite who was circumcised. The idea of circumcision rests on a covenant, though, and Alec Motier tells us in his commentary on Philippians, he said, covenant is one of the greatest unifying themes of the Bible. It's mentioned first in Noah, it comes to full expression in Abraham, and the covenant rests on the sacrifice that God appoints, which is why in Genesis 19 or 21, when God ratifies the covenant, he gives Abraham and provides a sacrifice for him, even though he's already required the sign of the covenant from Abraham in circumcision. Circumcision symbolized the application of the promises that God made to the people whose God had chosen already to receive them before they could do anything to show that they were worthy of being his people. And Paul is saying to this community, you're already a people received by God, not because of your intentions to be real holy and try hard, but because God has chosen you. It's the same thing that he's been building on throughout the epistle. And again, he's warning them because it's just as easy to fall prey to the kind of elitism that characterized these status-minded believers, only it was far more dangerous because it was a spiritual version of it. They were trusting the signs that should have pointed to how they had received God's love, and they actually made them signs that they deserved God's love instead. They thought they were insiders, but Paul says that they're actually outsiders, which is why he calls them dogs and evildoers and mutilators of the flesh. Dogs in the eyes of scripture were ritually unclean. It was actually an insult that Jews reserved for Gentiles who were not people who were God's promised people, not Israelites. They reserved this title for outsiders like the Gentiles. But he says that they're evildoers because they had brought the lie that they were morally upright in their works. And they could prove that they deserve grace, which by nature is undeserved in the favor that God gives. They took the law that God gave and turned it on its head. They made it about service, instead about their service, instead about God's choice of them. And they mutilated the flesh. They hurt and destroyed the people they required circumcision of, instead of helping and healing them like the gospel called them to do. And you have to pause because the moment you jump into this passage, you have to reorient yourself around that context to really understand. Paul is basically warning this church repeatedly throughout his epistle because both groups, like the Roman society that they were part of, and that spiritually elite Jewish false teacher group, they were both confused about the nature of how you gain a righteous status before God. Both groups were really trying to go at the same thing, and they were confused as to how you get it. Righteousness is a word that we still have trouble with today. It's partly because we have two word groups in English to deal with the concept. We have a noun, righteousness, that makes us think of the quality of being morally upright or good. That's the way that Roman society thought that righteousness worked. You cultivated it by your own effort. That's no different than the Judaizers who said you had to take these signs and follow these laws and cultivate a character that was worthy of God's love if you really wanted to be saved. But as a verb, we actually don't have a word that takes the... Righteous does not have a verb form unless you refer to a different word class, justify. You don't have a righteousify word, like it's justified. That's the verb that we use in the Judaizers. They thought for you to stake, for you to take a stake in Jesus, you not only had to receive his righteousness, but there was something lacking about it. And you had to grab a little extra credit by showing your intention to fulfill the law's requirements. And you and I are actually no different. This is the thing is that you look at our world today, you look at a society like ours, like what is it that people cry out for the most in terms of an equitable, equal, just society? They want a society that reflects the righteousness of a world that is right, not one that's unjust and unrighteous. And we too are on a hunt for righteousness in all we do and all who we associate with. We want to belong in the sight of God and in the sight of others. Before God, we want to belong by thinking that maybe if we're really just really good at our quiet times, and if we share our faith enough, and if we go to church enough and serve enough that God will be pleased with us. But before others, we're also really concerned about the way that people perceive us at times. You might not be driven by some of the materialist statuses of the world, but you might be driven by how people perceive your efforts in the context of a church setting. You might be ruled by the fear of what others really think of you, and it keeps you from opening up, because you're afraid at heart that you won't belong, you won't have a righteous status with others, and so we hide. We hide behind a false picture of who we really are. But Paul is pointing out the fact that that just doesn't fly. We all have a resume of righteousness, of some sort of desiring to belong before God and others that we cling to. And Paul is, what's fascinating about this passage is that Paul is saying that he was someone who actually subscribed to a similar standard before he came to faith in Jesus. He was someone who used all of his spiritual activities, all of his efforts, all of his desires for status to be someone who gained, someone who had a resume that he could count on, that God would look at and say, you know what, you're okay, you can get into heaven. That's what he actually says in verses four through six. He says, the mark of people who belong to the church is that they're a community who does not put confidence in the flesh, but I have all the reason to put confidence in the flesh. He says, if we're gonna start talking resumes, I can actually show you mine. And then in verses four to six, he actually says, I have reason for confidence in the flesh. I was someone who had a status as a true Israelite. I was circumcised on the day. I was born into Jewishness. I held the law. I was of the people of Israel. I was of the tribe of Benjamin. That was the tribe that was most loyal to the King of Israel and the Southern kingdom, kingdom of Judah, King David. He was of an elite tribe, even though it was small. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, meaning his parents were also Jewish. But then he gets into the qualities that he actually attained in his resume of righteousness. And he gets into saying, as to the law, the way that I approached the law, I was a Pharisee. Pharisees were people who built fences around fences around fences to avoid breaking the law. That's how severe they were or serious they were. And they were actually people who society looked on as having integrity. in the day of the Pharisees. They were the people who were morally upright in the eyes of the community around them. Paul says, I was a Pharisee. I was this elite group of spiritual people. As to zeal, I took my job as a teacher so serious that I became a defender of doctrine and I persecuted the church because I thought they were not orthodox. That's how seriously Paul took the doctrine that he subscribed to. And he actually lists it as a qualification for his confidence on resume building. And as to the righteousness under the law, he says he was blameless. What does that even mean? That's crazy if you think about it, because Paul, is he saying I was perfect? If you look at other passages in Scripture, Paul was not saying that he was perfect. If you look close up, what he was saying was that oftentimes you and I, we sort of take this view of Paul and his conversion on the Damascus Road as he was someone who was struggling with his inability to keep the law. But Paul was actually saying, no, I actually kept the law, all of the Old Testament ceremonial rights. Paul clearly is saying here that he thought he was doing pretty good. In fact, he was living a successful, best Jewish life now as a Pharisee who was persecuting the church. And so whether it's the spiritual qualities he received or the ones he achieved, Paul has said, this is the way that I used to think too. And his thinking reflects a common form of Jewish thinking in the day of Paul's Pharisaic pursuit of God. You see, the Jews knew that man was under sin, but the way to overcome its power was through the law given to Israel. They knew that sin was universal because death was universal. And all of them were trying to push off death by pushing off sin. The law was unique as a means to acquire merit, reward, and righteousness before God. It was the instrument that God gave to put down your evil impulses and to lead a good life to the victorious Jewish life, if you will. Jews even thought that God was merciful and forgiving in giving them the law. But see, what they were doing was, it was such a delicate turn. And you and I are the same. They took what God had given them as a sign of his love. And they turned it on its head as a sign of their righteousness. And in doing that, they actually set themselves an antithesis to who God was. He set himself an antithesis to God and he indebted God to himself. But Paul is saying, that's the way I used to think, but let me tell you about how my joy was reoriented. He says something so profound in verses seven and eight, whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. And that's our second point, the reorientation of his joy. There was a point where Paul reached, it happened on the Damascus road when Jesus appeared to him. Because when the absolute righteous one from God came to him and said, Paul, why are you persecuting me? It totally blew apart his understanding that he was a pretty OK guy. Because the very voice of the son of God, the very righteous one from heaven, came and revealed himself to Paul and everything that Paul had considered in the asset column of his life before. instantly got transitioned to the liabilities section of his life. And everything that was what he used to define himself as a way to belong before God and others, crumbled in his hands when he was faced with the righteous one from God. It totally demolished his approach to righteousness based on his own resume. So much so that he uses banking terminology to describe it this way, assets and liabilities. Actually, assets, not liabilities, losses. Losses, that's a term, a financial term in the ancient languages that means shipwreck, it's gone, not coming back. That's how deeply Paul saw his righteousness. Because when he saw Jesus, he saw the righteous one who was deserved everything, who was owed every ounce of glory and honor and praise, ashamed and covered under the shame of crucifixion in the service of others, that he might give us the righteousness of God. It's kind of like the difference between trying to tell, when Paul was confronted with Jesus, it's kind of like the difference between trying to tell whether something that's a ring on your finger is an engagement ring that's made out of cubic zirconium or fake glass. Or cubic zirconium or real diamonds, sorry, not fake glass. Or one of those lab-grown diamonds. You know, they have all sorts of tests of how you do this. But one of the telltale tests, it's not conclusive, you have to go to a jeweler and get your ring fixed out. A ring surveyed by a jeweler. But one of the tests is that if you breathe heavy on a diamond ring, and it's plate glass, it stays fogged for a long time. Whereas real diamonds don't do that. And Paul is saying that when he was presented with Jesus, it was like a foggy, fake sham righteousness was spotlighted in his world. And he looked like the fiance that was actually trying to gain the love of a girl by making claims that he couldn't actually follow up. You know, a fiance who would buy this giant diamond ring, as the song might say. But it's really just a fake. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to convince someone that you believe you don't have the credentials to be worthy of, to love you. But that wasn't just a once in a lifetime sort of experience that Paul had. it now has become the way that he stays close to the cross and his savior. It's because he counts all things as loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus. Again, note the change in the tenses. Paul said it's only by transferring what he previously considered to be his greatest assets and to his greatest losses does he stay near to the cross. He even goes so far as to say that he considers it on the same level as a heaping hot pile of what you and I deposit into the bathroom every single day of our lives. Excrement, that's what the word means, dung. And it's so fascinating because Paul says that what actually kept him from knowing God previously was not his sinful character, it was his righteousness. You know, it's an incredible comment on the nature of human beings that it's not your sins that Paul is talking about that keep you from really knowing God. It's what you think makes you righteous. You and I, not just you. What righteousness do you cling to in order to give you that sense of belonging in the sight of God and others? That's what righteousness is, right? What do you cling to that gives you the sense that everything in your world is right? What is it that keeps you from seeing Jesus as your, note the personal pronoun, Lord? My Lord, that's what Paul says here. I count everything as lost because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus as my Lord. Martin Luther said the Christian faith is a faith of personal pronouns. Christ, our righteousness, Jesus, my Lord. Because in the reality, what else can you cling to? Nothing, because everything else is lost in comparison to knowing Him. What is it that you compete for your joy in relationships with others? Like, how can you tell that you are actually clinging to some other form of belonging or righteousness rather than to the righteousness, the surpassing righteousness of knowing Christ your Lord? Usually there's several signs. What is it that gives you the most anxiety at the thought of not having? Could it be the financial bank, the financials in your bank account? Could it be the approval of your peers? Could it be a good name and a good reputation? Could it be relationships in which you feel taken care of? Or what is it that gives you guilt? That person that you let down and just you can't forgive yourself or can't believe that you were the kind of person that actually acted that way in that kind of relationship. What is it that competes with your boredom and can actually entertain you? What is it when you are sitting around and you have nothing else better to do? You find your mind fixating upon. Usually that's the source of one of your righteousnesses that you're clinging to. And the problem is not that we are sinners, we need grace because of our sinful tendency to reject the glorious good news of the gospel. But Paul says the problem was actually for him, that there were things he were clinging to that were actually good, his righteousness. And it tells us in every way that you cling to some form of belonging or righteousness that is not the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, then it's just a sham form of belonging and righteousness. But Paul doesn't stop there. He talks about how his joy was reoriented And then he also shows how the renewing power of Christ's life has so changed him. Why did Paul give up this sham righteousness? All that he might know more of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ is Lord. It was Jesus. And he says in verse nine, not just the idea of knowing Christ, like gaining Christ, but that he might be found in him. not having a righteousness of his own, but the righteousness from God that comes through faith and depends on faith. Because the moment that you realize that you are helpless without him is the moment that Christ gladly comes to make his home in people in need of his righteousness. God justifies us, as Paul says, not because of our efforts or attainment according to the law, but through faith alone in Christ alone. Because in the economy of God, it's only when you realize you don't deserve it, and you could never earn it, and you actually have lots of liabilities to getting it, that you can come to gain the benefits of what Jesus has accomplished. And how do you know that the trying you God really wants to give you this life? It sounds too good to be true. because Jesus was the one who actually thought of others and served them. Philippians 2 verses 5 through 11, because he's the servant who sang the song to go and redeem his beloved, that he might show that his delight is actually in you and I. That's one part of the renewing power of Christ's righteousness. Paul can actually rest and be at joy in his relationship with God and others because he doesn't have to prove himself anymore. It's a righteousness not from himself that he has to mitigate and manage, but a sense of belonging that comes from the one who deserves everything, the righteous one. But that's not all it provides. There's three other purposes that come to fruition in Christ that Paul receives as His renewing power. He says, I count them as loss because surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, I've suffered their loss and count them as rubbish because not just that I might be found in Him, but that I might know Him and the power of His resurrection, that I may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and that by any means possible, I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Verse 10 and 11 lay out three more purposes why Christ has considered all things, or why Paul has considered all things as loss. And there are these parallel clauses for us to know Him and the power of His resurrection. That's the power of Christ's life to defeat sin in us. You know the decisive power of the risen Lord who defeated sin in your own life. And that's why Paul is saying there's a life at work in me when I received the righteousness of Christ, that only he could be the one that actually has an infinite and eternal power who defeated sin. That's also at work in me to defeat sin in me. So you are sanctified. Paul is sanctified by considering all things as loss. But it's not just that. He says we share in his sufferings. He wants to actually bear out the cruciform life. He's willing to suffer loss because he gets so much more when he gets Jesus. It's that word that Paul has already used of the Philippians. It's sharing in the fellowship or partnership that he'd already praised them for. He says that we have a partnership in Christ's sufferings when we count all things as loss in order that we may gain Christ. And what he's actually saying is like, now the suffering which would normally shame me because of how others harm me and make me feel as if I don't belong or how Because of the sense of like, God has abandoned me in my trial. Whatever suffering would come, I actually want it because it's a way that I look more like Jesus. And Christ is bearing out his image in me when I learn to count things as loss. And it's not just that he's wanting to know him in the power of his resurrection, not just his resurrection life at work in Paul's life. It's not just that he wants to bear out the cruciform life, to look more like Jesus, but he wants to simply be identified with him that he might attain the resurrection from the dead. I don't think Paul is calling into question whether his status as someone who will receive the resurrection of the dead is actually in peril. But what he's actually saying is that it's only possible because I have rejected and suffered other things that I would base my right standing with God and others upon. And if you think about it, this outlines all the benefits of our salvation. It outlines Paul saying, I am declared right before God and others so that I don't have to use others or God to vindicate myself for my own right standing. I am actually equipped to be sanctified, to look more like Jesus. And I actually will achieve the glorification of my soul. And note the order that Paul gives. He says, the moment that I counted all things lost and reoriented my joy to rest in the transforming love of Jesus, I actually got the same pattern at life that was at work in Jesus, because he is in me and I am in him. Note the order, life, death, then life, and all in fellowship with Christ, because the risen Lord of heaven walks with Paul and us in each of these battles. because of how we're united to him by faith. The righteousness that Paul received produced a righteous life in him that had the power to transform and shape him into the likeness of Jesus, because it was God's own righteous life. Friends, do you realize that that's what God wants to give you in the gospel? Do you realize that that's what you're actually building your hope for belonging on in your relationship with God and others? If it's any other basis than Jesus, If you build your understanding of what it means to be righteous on anything other than unique, righteous life that comes from Jesus, you build your life on a standard of belonging that doesn't have the power to change you. It leaves you critical or suspect of others and their perceptions of you. And it makes you fear the cruciform life of suffering that Christ has invited us into. It can't actually make you resilient, nor can it change you deep in your character because you're still clinging to your own resume. But Paul is saying that if you base your understanding on righteousness, on the outlying otherworldly righteousness of God in Christ, it produces a life in you that makes you resilient in the face of suffering, connects you to the same power of God at work to raise Jesus from the dead, and gives you the fellowship of God himself in Christ who walks with you. So the question, friends, is where is your righteousness? If you were to go back to Stuart Wolfe, the physician who founded Rosetta, as Wolfe made sense of the data of this otherworldly life, otherworldly community that had this sort of quality of life that gave them great joy and just resilience and set them apart from their surrounding communities. He kept looking for other explanations, but he eventually got to the point to where he found it wasn't in their diet, their genes, their exercise, or even their location that they came from in Italy. It wasn't even in the fact that they were immigrants because two other nearby cities of European immigrants suffered the same kinds of disease rates as the rest of America. But Wolfe found it was their Italian way of life called Paisani culture, I think that's how you say that, that created its own effect in how they cared for each other through close-knit relationships. You see, as he studied the community, he saw this incredibly tight-knit community form because of the quality of this otherworldly life and culture that they shared. They looked at how the Rosettans visited one another, cooked for one another in their backyards, had huge extended family clans that underlay the social structure of town. They had multiple generations living under one roof. They went to church together for a collective sense of identity. There was an ethos in the community that actually discouraged the wealthy from flouting their success and helping the unsuccessful. So much so that in the world they knew in Eastern Pennsylvania, they had a quality of life that was otherworldly compared with the society around them. It even came to be called its own health effect, called the Rosetto effect. If you Google it or Wikipedia, it's the effect by which a close-knit community experiences a reduced rate of heart disease and increased health and resilience because of a shared sense of identity and rich life together. It was so fascinating that Wolf studied the community. One study lasted for 50 years. including a 50-year study comparing Roseto to another European immigrant city, Bangor. He predicted that as these Italians lost their way of life and their otherworldliness, that they would, and they lost their shared connection. As they Americanized, in other words, their disease rates would increase. And there's actually a documentary that tells the story of Italian immigration that says, as the generation of Italians grew up underneath these natives of Italy in America, they actually faced a different quality of life because they increasingly wanted to identify as the world around them. looking for their belonging and status from a resume that they could build around them instead of the world from which their identity could only truly come from. That's what's at stake for us as people who claim the righteous otherworldly life of Christ. If we build our sense of identity and belonging, looking for righteousness anywhere else than in the life of the one who's come down from heaven, then we too will experience all sorts of increased risk and deteriorated spiritual health. But if we learn to rest in the transforming righteousness of Christ, then His power is at work in us, much like Paul says it is in verse three. We'll be the true people of God who worship by His Spirit. and glory in Jesus as we put no confidence in what we can attain in our own flesh. It's only by God's Spirit that we can do that, friends. Let's pray and ask His help as we do so now. Father, we pray that You would be with us, and that You would take the precious truths of what Paul has seen accomplished in Jesus, and that You would apply them to our hearts, Lord. Help us to see the places that we cling to things other than You, and the surpassing joy of knowing You. and help us to find rest in the safety and shadow of your wings so that we might become a community that lives with an otherworldly kind of life as we seek to rest in the righteousness Jesus provides. It's in his name we pray. Amen.