Philippians 3:8 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ
I am sure you have seen the images of people around the world searching through large landfills for items of value. For most of them, the value is life itself. They scour the trash in an attempt to get enough resources to eat that day. They are not getting rich, just surviving.
We fence off our landfills and don’t allow anyone to search them for items of value. We generally don’t even recycle very well, having made it economically inviable to do so. Instead, we discard things that only need a small repair in order to purchase the newest and greatest.
The writer of our text has just outlined all his qualifications for the position he holds in the Church. He was over-qualified. But he was also disqualified; he had been a persecutor of the Church before Jesus appeared to him. In our modern terms, he had been part of a death squad seeking out Jesus’ followers. This certainly takes him out of the running for leadership from an earthly perspective.
With a history like this, how did Paul become a leader? Jesus radically changed him. Then his attitude toward those earthly qualifications and disqualifications changed. Grace made it possible for a persecutor to become a defender, a blasphemer to become a blesser, a radical to become a rescuer.
Paul’s attitude toward his past qualifications is outlined in our text for today. Paul considered all those things in which he used to boast as loss. They were now things that detracted from his mission and qualifications. They got in the way of the display of God’s grace.
He considered all those old objects of his boasting as garbage. The word for garbage is the word used for human dung. You know what dung is, the stuff you flush down the toilet. Nobody in their right mind would collect dung and boast about their collection.
Paul had to have a change in what he valued. He used to consider his earthly qualifications as assets to his job as a scholar and religious up-in-comer. He was a rising star in his circles. Today he would have had millions of Twitter followers. His instagram posts would be among the most well circulated.
But Paul came to know that if he held onto those qualifications, he couldn’t hold onto the grace of Jesus. It was one or the other. Boast about earthly qualifications or about the grace of Jesus. There was no way to do both. So he gladly considered the earthly as dung.
Are there earthly qualifications that we are holding tightly, so tightly that we don’t have a free hand to grasp the grace of Jesus? All our social media status disqualifies us from the grace of Jesus, if our goal is to rise in the eyes of the world. In order to rise in the Kingdom of God, we must renounce all those things and desperately cling to His grace and mercy.
All our earthly possessions, the status connected to the neighborhoods in which we live, the circles in which we rub shoulders, the resume’ we possess. These can either be high status gainers in the eyes of the world or detractors. If they are part of our boast, they get in the way of the grace of God.
Some boast about their poverty, the extent to which they emulate the poor, the extents to which they go for the Gospel. All such boasting inhibits the grace of God from being fully embraced. You can’t serve God and Mammon.
The Arnold Journey 