Click here to go to Philippians 3
Philippians is such a great book! This chapter has one of my favorite passages:
12 I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. 13 No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it,[d] but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us. (NLT)
I love what The Voice did with this passage:
12) I'm not there yet, nor have I become perfect; but I am charging on to gain anything and everything the Anointed One, Jesus, has in store for me - and nothing will stand in my way because He has grabbed me and won't let me go. 13) Brothers and sisters, as I said, I know I have not arrived; but there's one thing I am doing: I'm leaving my old life behind, putting everything on the line for this mission. 14) I am sprinting toward the only goal that counts: to cross the line,to win the prize, and hear God's call to resurrection life found exclusively in Jesus the Anointed.
So good so encouraging!
"5 I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin—a real Hebrew if there ever was one! I was a member of the Pharisees, who demand the strictest obedience to the Jewish law. 6 I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church. And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault.
ReplyDelete7 I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done."
Seriously. Cutting the skin on the penis or Christ's sacrifice? The two are not comparable, yet so many in those days treated circumcision as if it was the ultimate savior.
What do we treat as the "savior" these days? Our elected leaders? More money? Doctors? Psychologists? Prozac? We have so many worldly things we look to as saviors. And yet, we are let down by them over and over. Jesus never lets us down.
Philippians 3
ReplyDelete7-11 These things that I once considered valuable, I now consider worthless for Christ. It’s far more than that! I consider everything else worthless because I’m much better off knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. It’s because of him that I think of everything as worthless. I threw it all away in order to gain Christ and to have a relationship with him. This means that I didn’t receive God’s approval by obeying his laws. The opposite is true! I have God’s approval through faith in Christ. This is the approval that comes from God and is based on faith that knows Christ. Faith knows the power that his coming back to life gives and what it means to share his suffering. In this way I’m becoming like him in his death, with the confidence that I’ll come back to life from the dead.
In Him I live and move and have my being.