Everything As Loss

Sunday, March 25th, 2007
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Text: Philippians 3:4-14

4even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh. If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

We love it here.

We really DO love it here.

Not just in the sense of loving the scenery, or the relative peace of living in the country, the friendliness, the neighborliness. We love it here on a far deeper level than I think we are aware of on a day-in and day-out basis.

I don’t want this to sound sappy, but I hope you realize that we love YOU as well. That loving YOU is a huge part of why we love being HERE. We love spending time with you, talking to you, knowing you, knowing your families, and what’s going on with them, laughing and sometimes crying together, eating and meeting together, studying the Bible together, wrestling with the truths of scripture and those parts of scripture that are sometimes confusing. I treasure being able to be with you when you have to be at or in the hospital, or when you go through the loss of a loved one. Being able to BE present with you in those times is not in any way a burden. It is in the fullest sense of the word, a blessing. Yes, it can be hard, but blessings come in many forms.

We love it that you all are interested in how the kids are doing, how our parents and brothers and sisters are doing, and what is going on in THOSE relationships as well. There is a wonderful sense of family that comes from being asked about your relatives, their health, and just the regular daily-ness of life. We love that we are walking beside you on this pilgrim journey, working out our salvation “with fear and trembling”.

During our prayer and share times on Wednesday evenings, and especially here, on Sunday mornings, during the Pastoral prayer, to be able to voice concerns and praises, thanksgiving and worship is easily a highlight of the week for me. For those of you who haven’t been to a Wednesday evening service in a while, we’d love to see you, if you can make it. The time together can really fly by. During our sharing time before prayer, we go through new additions to our prayer list, and also bring up concerns or updates to the list – it is an open time of sharing, not very structured, because I believe that the praying is actually already taking place before the formal prayer is voiced. This past Wednesday we concluded our winter Bible Study just a single day over the mark – the first day of spring. This coming Wednesday as well as Wednesday of Holy Week we will be doing just a couple of more reflective Lenten-oriented devotionals. After Easter we will be digging a little into the Old Testament, probably looking at the Minor Prophets – most likely Habakkuk to begin with.

There’s this thing, though, that I have to deal with. Call it insecurity, call it trouble with self-esteem, whatever; I don’t always know if I’m doing things right or not. I HOPE I am, I THINK I am, some of the time, maybe a slight majority of the time, but not always. And I’m not saying this looking for affirmation, but simply as a point of information. Having said that, I need to let you know that when you DO say something in that way; encouraging, affirming, even constructively criticizing, it gives me a boost like you wouldn’t BELIEVE!

… What’s that, you say?

When is he going to get to the text? When is he going to get into the passage? Oh, that.

Well, in a way, I have been. You see, Paul was going over in his mind what it was he had to look back on and treasure, and appreciate, and hold in high esteem in his life. He had his Pharisaic heritage, that is, his faithfulness as a member of that Hebrew group that was intent on seeking and fulfilling all that it meant to be HOLY before God, as they understood it.

He had a lot to be thankful for, a lot to hold close, a lot to inform him of who he was.

So I’ve been working up to somehow telling you that, as dear as you ALL are to me, and as MUCH as I hold you ALL close to my heart, by the light of the gospel I have to be able to let this all go for the sake of the Gospel.

I’m not saying that that is in the process of happening. Thankfully, I don’t have any sense that I’m supposed to be anywhere else doing anything else than what I am doing. But it’s the attitude that I think we ALL need to cultivate.

It’s unsettling to think about. And it feels especially odd for me, having come from a life of observing my parents and other key figures in my life GET that … sense of call, to move from what they know to what they DON’T know … I would’ve expected my sense to be … more willing?

I think back to my late teens and early and mid twenties, when I was wrestling with what God’s call on my life was going to look like, having thought all along that I’d end up somewhere overseas, living a life similar to that that I’d grown up around. And I remember hardly giving a thought to serving a local church, much less a rural congregation, as their Pastor.

And now, it seems like it is what I was born to do, insecurity and all. I’ve learned in the last ten years to trust God in all things. Like Paul says, “not that I have already obtained this”, but it is at work in me.

So I’m working on learning to count all this as loss. As beautiful as it is, as wonderful as it is, as good a life as it is, if this were all ripped away from me tomorrow, would I find my faith intact? Would I find my trust still there? Would my center be Christ? Can I even phrase that question “Would my center STILL be Christ having not actually gone through that?

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Do you know someone who has gone through the ‘loss of all things’ that Paul talks about? Are YOU someone who has experienced that? I think it is safe to say that, above a certain age, we have all to varying degrees, experienced SOME loss in our lives, and as far as that goes, we have an IDEA of what it would be like to suffer the loss of all things … but we’re just not able to completely wrap our minds around that experience short of living it.

Paul’s point wasn’t to boast about what he’d gone through. His point was what was at his center.

10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,

So the question for us this morning is that: what … or rather … WHO is at OUR center? Would we be able to write down a similar statement if we were to have given up what in essence was our ENTIRE identity in order to follow Christ?

How compelling is Christ’s call on our lives? Is it so compelling as to cause us to want to change even our very NAMES in order to signify how radical and complete the change has been? How much we are breaking from who we were prior to knowing Jesus, to who we are now that we DO know him?

Living in the area of the country we live in, especially living in the shadow cast by those who’ve gone before and who have been faithful in THEIR obedience to teach us and guide us in the way that leads to life, we are recipients of an incredibly rich blessing in the way of … an atmosphere of faith – not all, but most of us here today don’t remember a time when going to church wasn’t a part of our lives, we can’t remember a time when we didn’t consider ourselves ‘Christian’ in some way, even in a nominal way. We can easily recall things we’ve DONE that weren’t exactly … exemplary of what a Christian would say and do, but on balance, we have to ask ourselves the question: did becoming a Christian change my life all that much?

If your answer is yes, then there is much to be grateful for.

If your answer is no, we can study that from a couple of perspectives. There’s the perspective that we were so steeped in what it was to live the life of a Christian that the official ‘mark’ at which you made the decision to accept Christ was more a … confirmation of what you’d been growing to believe all your life.

The other perspective is that both the life you lived prior to professing Christ as Lord and the life you live now are neither very reflective of the Lordship of Christ. Simply put, in a moment of passion you promised, but you have yet to truly engage the life of a follower of Christ.

So the question is out there: Who is at our center? I ask it both on an individual level and at a congregational level. Is what you’ve done all your life, and what you continue to DO at your center, or is Christ? Is a hundred and seventy-five years of history and what we continue to DO BECAUSE OF THAT HISTORY at the center of Jerusalem or is Christ? In asking those questions, I don’t want to create a false dichotomy – an unnecessary division – in our perception of ourselves and our family of faith. I DO want us to examine – and reexamine – continually, if need be, the ongoing relationship we have with Christ. Not to be examining our belly-buttons, but to keep tabs on who we are as individuals and as a faith family. We must be willing to give an honest and humble assessment of ourselves at any time, to speak frankly about how we are going about this journey, especially now, in the season of Lent.

As we approach Holy Week, we are made more and more aware of our complicity in an event that took place nearly two thousand years ago. That on a spiritual level, Christ died for the sins that we’ve committed today and will commit tomorrow and the next day.

So we engage in a sometimes painful round of self-examination. It may feel like we are beating ourselves up at times. There can be an unrelenting quality to the exercise – in truth, I think we are all VERY aware of the ways in which we fall short of the mark; the words, the actions, the inactions that do nothing more than pound the nails into the tree at every turn. And as humans, we have this amazing ability to deny what is right in front of us, that blinds us to what we are doing. But with a little prodding, with a little coaxing, we CAN uncover our true selves, our fallenness, and our weaknesses.

In the darkening shadows, hear the good news of the Gospel: God’s grace in the blood of Christ covers it all.

Let’s pray.