Gaining By Losing (Part 1)

Look at chapter 3, beginning in verse 1.

! Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord.! To write the same thing to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.! Look out for the dog. 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 in 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 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 of the dead.

May God add a blessing to the reading of his word. Would you please be seated? At times, men and women will see their children differently as they're growing up.

A man, I think, often raises his son thinking about the type of man that he will one day be. And so the way he parents him is often with the view that he's preparing him for manhood.

That one day his little boy will be a man. Mothers, on the other hand, tend to see their son as their precious little boy.

She's more focused on the fact that he's not yet a man. Not ready yet for that responsibility. And she understands that sometimes a little boy just needs to be treated like the little boy that he is.

So, for example, when you might see this is when a little boy is crying. And as often as the case, the father will go over to him and kind of nudge him on the shoulder.

Why are you crying? Stop crying. Why are you crying? Right? Whereas a mother takes a different approach to her crying son. Where she'll come and say, are you hurt?

How can I make it better? What happened? Where are you hurt? Let me kiss it. I'll make it feel all better. Right? We're different in the way that we view our little boys. And I think it's good because a son needs both of those influences.

Both of those, mother and father, and their approaches in his life to help him grow. But daughters, I think, are a little bit different. In their case, the father isn't preoccupied or concerned so much with the type of woman that she will one day be, as much as he's concerned with the type of man that she will one day marry.

And fear and concern that that man is unable to attain to the expectations that he has for any man who would marry his daughter.

And so, in my case, with my daughter, who's only two, will be three in July, I know already that Hazel is going to find it very difficult to find a man who's capable of meeting the expectations that I'll have for him.

And it's kind of weird because it's almost as if I have higher expectations for her potential man, husband, than I do even for my own son.

And the thing about Jack is he's got an excuse because he's related to me. Right? So, if he doesn't measure up to those expectations, I know, well, it's because you've got my blood in you.

Right? But this guy, if it's God's will for Hazel that she marry, this man, whomever he is, he doesn't have that excuse. So, you can go ahead and start praying for Hazel and I beginning now because it's going to be interesting.

As high as my expectations are for Hazel's, again, future man, should that be the Lord's will for her life, they pale in comparison to the expectations, the impossible standards by the law of God to achieve a righteousness or a righteous standing before him.

In Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, he uttered these staggering words. He said, and you probably know them well, You, therefore, must be what? Perfect.

Blameless. As your heavenly Father is perfect. These words come at the end of a section where Jesus corrects his listeners' understanding of the law.

In Matthew 5.20, Jesus says to his hearers that if they want to enter the kingdom of heaven, then their righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees who were the experts in the law.

This is a high calling. Then in Matthew 5.21-48, he proceeds to radically redefine the law.

Not from mere outward conformity, right? Not just from what you do, but what you think. What motivates your actions.

He says that obeying the law requires more than simply not killing people. It's more than simply not committing adultery or telling lies. It also requires that you not hate anyone.

That you not have any kind of lustful thoughts. Not just some time, but all the time. Every single time.

Every moment of your entire life. He says that to keep the law perfectly, you must not only obey it with your external actions, but again, with your every thought and your every motivation.

So at this point, the natural response to hearing such a thing would be this. I'm not perfect. I'm not capable of doing that.

Even if I tried, it wouldn't be long before I didn't measure up. Then later in Matthew's gospel, Jesus says that the law of God can be summed up in two commandments.

You remember? He says this, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. And then the second commandment is this, love your neighbor as yourself.

So now we might be thinking, okay, great. Only two rules? Only two commands? I can do that. Well, actually, no, you can't.

None of us can. Think about it. The truth of the matter is that we can't possibly live up to this perfect standard that our Heavenly Father has set according to His law.

Because we don't truly love God with all our heart all the time, with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our strength, every single moment of our lives. We don't really love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves.

We have a problem. And that problem is sin. We are born with it. And we cannot overcome the effects of it in our own lives by our own doing.

And it affects every single thing that we do. What we say. What we think. It taints everything about us.

Therefore, no matter how good we try to be, it will never measure up to God's perfect standard. The Bible says that all of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.

Our own righteousness is simply not good enough. It never will be. It never could be. No matter how hard we try, nobody is perfect.

In these verses, Paul contrasts two kinds of righteousness. The first kind is an achieved righteousness.

This is the kind of righteousness that men try to attain for themselves by keeping the law. By trying to be good people. But as we've seen, sin prevents us from being able to achieve that kind of perfect righteousness that the law of God requires.

However, though we should know that, we've seen that there's this group called the Judaizers who are people who try to do just that.

And so they're coming to the church in Philippi and they're telling them that, you know, grace isn't enough. It's not sufficient. You can't be saved in just that way. You've got to do all these other works. Primarily, you've got to be circumcised.

If you're not circumcised, then you're not saved. And so they're coming in and they're saying, no, it's all these laws. It's all these rules. And you've got to obey the checklist. If you want to be saved.

And Paul's saying, no, that is not the case. Because you never could attain that kind of righteous, perfect standard that the law requires.

There's another kind of righteousness that Paul talks to us about here. And it's an imputed righteousness. So there's your fancy pants theological term of the day.

Write it down and you can impress your friends and your family with later on, right? Imputed righteousness. What does that mean? Well, let's look at Romans 3, 21 through 22.

There it says, So what this verse is saying to us is that it's through faith in Christ.

The righteousness of God is given to us. Again, this is called imputed righteousness. To impute something is to ascribe or to attribute something to someone.

When we place our faith in Christ, the Bible says, God ascribes the perfect righteousness of Christ to our account. And then we become perfect in his sight.

So not only are we justified. You know, a lot of people remember that justified is just as if I've never sinned. It's more than that. It's just as if I've always obeyed. That's amazing.

That's what imputed righteousness means. Let's look at 2 Corinthians 5, 21. For our sake he made him, Jesus, to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So here we see that not only is Christ's righteousness imputed to us through faith, but our sin is imputed to him. This is how Christ is able to pay the debt for our sin.

He had no sin himself. But our sin was taken from us and placed on him. As he hung on the cross, he suffered the just penalty that we deserved for our sin.

And by God's grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, we are imputed with his righteousness. What a wonderful transaction.

Amen? That's why Paul can say in Galatians 2, 20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and who gave himself for me. Which approach is better, do you think?

Paul answers that question emphatically in this text, right? It's the imputed righteousness approach. Because the other one doesn't work. And so here's the main idea for this morning's sermon.

It's this. That's the main idea.

All of us, all of us, will one day stand before the Lord in judgment. You think about that?

Every single one of us will stand before the Lord in judgment. For some of us, even, that day could come today.

We don't know. We're not guaranteed this afternoon. We're not guaranteed tomorrow. When that day comes, would you have confidence that as you stand before a holy, righteous, and perfect God, would you have confidence that you would receive his grace instead of his judgment?

In whose righteousness will you be left to trust in on that day? It will either be Christ's, or it will be your own.

And as we've seen, your own righteousness, trusting in the fact that you are basically a good person, right? That you basically think, well, for the most part, my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds.

We've seen through Scripture that that doesn't cut it. It's not going to cut it. Perfection is what is required. And all of us, all of us, fall helplessly and hopelessly short of being able to achieve that.

Let's try and experiment. Okay? This is the interactive part of the sermon this morning. How many of you have ever told a lie?

Raise your hand. Okay? If nobody's holding up their hand, it's because they're lying right now. We've all lied. Come on. So, what do we call a person who tells a lie?

A liar. They're a liar. Okay, how many of you have ever stolen something? Even if it's something small, a stick of gum when you're a little kid, right? Okay? What do we call people who steal things?

Thieves. According to the Bible, right? According to what Jesus says, if you've even hated someone in your heart, He equates that to murdering them. So, how many people here have ever hated somebody in your heart?

You don't have to tell us who it is. Just, you know, you've done it. We know that you've done it. Okay, you get the point. So, right here, by your own admission and mine, we, in this room this morning, are liars, thieves, and murderers.

And so, when we stand before the Lord Jesus, what are we going to say when it comes to why we should enter into eternal life?

And as we've seen, we've all already failed. If we're trying to attain our own righteousness, we've raised our hands and just confessed to one another that we haven't done it.

We can't do it. We've already lost that battle. We didn't have any hope. If that was the only way a person could be saved by their own righteous works.

Again, the Judaizers believed that they could achieve their own righteousness based upon their own rituals, based upon their race, and based upon their religious accomplishments.

They were polluting the church with their false teachings, and so Paul is fighting back against this with the truth. Namely, that we can't be saved apart from grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ Jesus alone.

In verse 4, he says essentially to them, you know what? You guys think that your credentials are impressive? Well, let me tell you something. Mine are much more impressive than yours.

And he says, in effect, if anyone could be saved based upon their own merits, if anyone could achieve a righteous standard before God, then no one should have more confidence, if that's the case, than me.

But then he goes on to show that righteousness cannot be achieved apart from faith in Jesus Christ. And so he says, that's worthless. What a waste of time. Man is incapable of achieving his own righteousness.

So here's the thing. God wants you to be able to stand confidently before him on that day. Having believed in his son Jesus, and knowing him as your Lord and Savior.

Trusting not in yourself, but only in him. So now let's unpack these verses and see that only the imputed righteousness of Christ will enable us to stand confidently before the Lord on that day as he judges the sins of man.

These things are important for us. If we're not careful as a church, we can be caught up in the rituals, we can be caught up in the ceremonies, we can be caught up in the checklists, and if we allow that to happen, the gospel will take a back seat.

And we can't ever allow that to happen. So let's, as a church, decide today, right, that these things, though can be important, are not the main thing.

That we preach Christ crucified. We preach Christ as the way, the truth, and the life. And that it's only through him, it's only through his imputed righteousness that a person can stand before a holy God and receive grace and not his wrath.

So here we see the first thing that Paul brings up about righteousness and how we're not able to achieve it. He says righteousness is not achieved by keeping and observing rituals. So there he says that he was circumcised on the eighth day.

Literally, in the Greek, what he's saying is, I'm an eighth dayer. I'm an eighth day guy. He says my circumcision was done in the first class way. Right?

I didn't come to Judaism later on in life. I'm a lifer. I've been here since the very beginning. Which probably wasn't the case for all of those Judaizers. So he's saying, hey, I have it, and I've done it the first class way.

People today in the church put their confidence in other kinds of spiritual rituals, thinking that they save them or make them holier, right, than the Bible says that they truly are.

Or thinking that, oh, I got all these things and I can go and I can appear before the Lord and say, hey, look, I was baptized. I took communion, right? I went to Sunday school. I did all that good stuff that you like. And those are good things, but none of those things saves a person.

Are rituals wrong, though? No. Not inherently. Right? We have a lot of rituals here. Think about it. When you come to church, you've been coming here for a while, you know when our Sunday school classes meet, you know when to be here, you know what time they usually end, you know what time service begins here in the morning, and you pretty much know the outline for the service, don't you?

We're going to sing a song. I'm going to come up and pray and give announcements. We're going to sing some more songs. We're going to pray again. We're going to take offering. We're going to have a sermon, and then there'll be an invitation, and then we'll sing another song.

You guys know it. Even during the week, when we come to Awana, and I love Awana, we sing the same songs in the same order, right? A-W-A-N-A.

I want to live my life God's way. Amen? I love it. We've got the hand motions. Is there anything wrong with that? No. In fact, as a matter of fact, if we said, hey, we're finishing up with all rituals, and we came in next Sunday, and the sermon was first, and all the songs came after, you guys wouldn't be happy about that, right?

Because we're a people who enjoy rituals. So here's the thing I want to say, that rituals aren't inherently wrong, but what is wrong is when we're trusting in them for our salvation, or when they become empty, and they lose their significance.

We forget why we're doing them, and it becomes less about the fact that we're doing them to worship God than it is more, this is just what we always do, and we think God likes it, so we're just going to keep doing it.

No. God isn't impressed by our empty rituals, or our simply going through the motions. So we see that righteousness is not achieved by keeping rituals, or observing rituals.

Secondly, we see that righteousness is not achieved by belonging to a certain race. Paul continues. He says, of the people of Israel.

And so he continues to make his case, right? If anybody's going to be found righteous by their own deeds, it would be me. I belong to the right group of people. Righteousness is not achieved by belonging to a certain culture or nationality.

Do we understand that? The Israelites didn't own God. For that matter, neither does the United States of America.

God is not just the God of our nation. Jesus Christ isn't just the Savior of Americans. God is the God of the universe, and Christ is the Savior of all.

Again, being born into a certain culture or nation doesn't impute righteousness to anyone. Christianity does not pass on through the blood stream.

It doesn't work that way. Paul is building his case, again, against the Judaizers, and he's saying, I had the rituals. I belong to the chosen race.

I'm a physical descendant of Father Abraham. I'm not a Samaritan, right? I don't have any mixing in my family line. I'm not a Gentile convert.

I'm a purebred Israelite. I've been since the beginning. But there's only one true God again, and he is God of all.

And we are called by him to go to all people, all nations, all tribes, and to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with them.

if only our church did a better job, and I'm not talking about just our church, I'm talking about the church of Christ, if only we could do a better job of reflecting here what that congregation will be like in heaven.

You know, we're people of all nations, all races, all tribes, all tongues, will be assembled in unity, together, equal, worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ.

Man, I wish our congregations and our churches would better reflect that reality here. diversity in the church displays God's power to bring together dissimilar people into genuine unity.

And especially in the times that we live in now, could you imagine if our churches reflected that diversity, the amazing testimony that that would share to the rest of our world?

Why are these people, they're so different? They don't look the same. They're different ages, right? Different backgrounds, different socioeconomic statuses. Why are they all coming together?

Well, it's because we've been united by the gospel. The gospel brings people together where Satan looks to cause division. Righteousness is not achieved through your heredity or family lineage.

He goes on to say, right, I was of the people of Israel, I was of the tribe of Benjamin, and a Hebrew of Hebrews. So again, he's saying, not only was I an Israelite, but I was a member of one of the most prestigious tribes, a Hebrew of Hebrews.

He had a rich family history. The kind that you people who spend a lot of time on Ancestry.com, you know, you're looking to see, I'm related to some king of England way back in the past or some president or vice president or who knows what.

Right? Paul can say, look, I have all of that, and I could brag about it. I could show you all the people in my family lineage that you would be impressed by, but he puts no confidence in any of those things because ultimately, those things had no value when it came to salvation.

Not only does being born in a certain culture or nation not impute righteousness to you, Christianity is also, again, not something that passes on through the bloodstream.

When a Christian man marries a Christian woman and they have children, their children will have their genes. Right? You guys have been in a science and biology class.

You understand all these things. In some of you, in your families, you have certain traits, certain physical markings or characteristics that pass on through the generations.

In my family, it's these chins, these dimple chins. I have one, my sisters have one, my father has one, my grandfather has one. My children each have one.

Their grandchildren will probably each have one. It's a distinguishing Scrivani mark. But salvation doesn't work in the same way like that, right?

We say, well, me and my wife are Christians. My parents were Christians. Her parents were Christians and on and on and on and on. So naturally, our kids will be Christians too because it just passes on through the bloodstream.

No, in fact, it does not. Salvation does not work that way. It's certainly a tremendous blessing for a child to be raised by Christian parents in a Christian home who bring them up with Christian values, but that is no guarantee that they will be saved.

Now, you might hear that and think, well, what about Proverbs 22, 6? Let's look at that. There it says, train up a child in the way that he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Okay? To Christian parents of young children, this verse could enable them to sleep well at night. because if they read it, as often people have incorrectly, they assume that, you know what, my kid's salvation is guaranteed.

All I got to do is train them up, right? And they're guaranteed to be saved. Conversely, to Christian parents who have raised their kids in this way, right, with this training, but they were prodigals.

They were rebellious. They left the church. To them, this verse cuts to the heart. It crushes them because they think, what did I do wrong?

It's all my fault. There's a wonderful lady that I had the privilege of knowing back in Kansas. She's a great grandmother.

And man, this woman was godly. This woman lived in a little shotgun house. She had next to nothing. We tried to get in there and fix her house. She wouldn't let us do it. She wouldn't let us give to her.

But she gave. She reminds me of the widow in the story that Jesus tells about the widow and her might, right? She gave her all that she had, just a little tiny coin. And he was most impressed by that.

This was that kind of a woman. She gave when she couldn't afford to give. And she was always there in church. She brought her kids, grandkids, great grandkids, but her family was wrecked, wrecked, I should say, by sin.

And their rebelliousness. And man, this verse broke her heart. And I remember her coming into my office and saying to me, you know, Pastor Mike, I've done all that I thought I could do.

I pray for them. I've brought them to church. You know, we had them baptized. And I feel like I've done something wrong and it's all my fault.

And this verse broke her heart. And I know here we're getting a little sidetracked, but this is important because this verse has been misinterpreted by parents of young children, right?

Again, who think that it's some kind of a guarantee that their kids will be saved, that their salvation is in the bag. And it's also been misunderstood by parents of prodigal children who blame themselves for their child's rebelliousness.

What is the proper interpretation of this verse? Well, to know that, we must look at the context in which it is found. This is a proverb.

A proverb is a literary device whereby a general truth is brought to bear on a specific situation. Okay?

These are wise sayings or truisms, not necessarily guarantees. For example, two verses earlier, we read in Proverbs 22, 4 that the reward of humility and the fear of the Lord are riches in honor in life.

This is certainly not a blanket promise that every Christian, right, who is humble and fears the Lord will always be rich and receive honor. And as a matter of fact, we see in Scripture of many instances where righteous men and women are persecuted for their faith and often are poor, very poor.

Furthermore, in Proverbs 10, 27, it says there, the fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked will be shortened. We know that this principle does not hold true in every case for all Christians.

Many Christians have died young, though they feared the Lord greatly. And many wicked people have lived long lives. In the same way, Proverbs 22, 6 is not a guaranteed promise for Christians to be able to claim with assurance that their children will be saved.

Also, it does not mean that rebellious children are the product of poor parenting, though that often is the case, but not always.

Consider Adam and Eve, right? God created them. They were His children. He was their Father. They were born without a nature to sin, and yet they still sinned.

Do we blame that on God? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And so we've got to understand that parents of prodigals face painful challenges, and we only add to their pain when we blame them unfairly for their children's sins.

Don't do that to them. Pray for their children instead. The great Puritan commentator Matthew Henry said of this verse, Proverbs 22, 6, he said, when they grow up, when they grow old, it is to be hoped that they will not depart from it.

Good impressions made upon them then will abide upon them all their days. Ordinarily, the vessel retains the savor with which it was first seasoned. Many indeed have departed from the good way in which they were trained up.

Solomon himself did so, but early training may be a means of their recovering themselves, as it is supposed Solomon did. At least the parents will have the comfort of having done their duty and used their means.

So, a couple of things that we've got to understand having heard this. First, parents, you cannot play the role of the Holy Spirit in your son or daughter's life.

You understand that? You're not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Not you. It's not up to you to save them.

So, do not try and coerce them into a conversion. Do not force them to be baptized before you know as best as you're capable of knowing, right, through discernment, through prayer, that they are truly saved.

Wait for them to approach you. Ask them questions. Seek my help. I would love and gladly give it. We work together as a church for the spiritual growth of our children.

Jack, my son, he's six. He wants to be baptized now. It's not that I doubt his sincerity in wanting to be baptized. It's not that I doubt him when he tells me that he loves Jesus.

Jesus. It's that I want his decision to be prompted by the Holy Spirit. It's that I want his decision to be prompted by the Holy Spirit because he's been truly saved.

I don't know when that will be. I don't know that it hasn't already happened. Maybe he should be baptized, right? He's six. He's a smart boy. Again, despite the fact that he's related to me.

I don't know when or where that will be nor do I know that it ever will be. But man, I pray for that, right?

And I look forward to that day and I trust and pray that should that time come, that I'll know. That I'll know. So we can't save our kids.

We're not the Holy Spirit. We pray for them. We certainly hope. That they are going to know Christ as their Lord and Savior. The second thing is this.

You, as a parent, have an incredibly important role and scriptural responsibility in the development and spiritual growth of your children.

It's so vitally important. It's important that you share the gospel with them. It's important that you pray for them, not just when they're off at school or someplace else, but that you kneel down with them at their bedside and pray with them.

Let them hear you pray for them. It's important that you instruct them and give them Christian guidance whenever possible.

Bring them to church even if it means that you've got to force them to go. I was one of those kids who constantly had to be forced to go to church and I was mad at my dad for having dragged me to church many times where I didn't want to go but I can stand here today and say I'm thankful for my father's discipline and seeing how important that was when I couldn't.

bring your kids to church. The church is here to support you but it's your it's primarily your responsibility to train your kids up in God's word.

You are the Christian whom they will see the most. You are the Christian whom they will be affected by the most. it's your actions that they will most often see.

It is your words that they will most often hear more so than any other person. You are called to have the greatest influence for Christ on your children's life.

It's a great responsibility but it's also a tremendous privilege. Thirdly, we see that righteousness is not achieved by religious accomplishments.

Verses five, the rest of verse five through verse six, he continues, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Human beings love awards. We are impressed by personal achievement. Again, there's nothing wrong with them but it's allowing ourselves to determine our self-worth by them where we get in trouble.

And we determine that those things give us purpose and meaning in life. when that purpose and meaning is ultimately something that can only come to us from God. And so here Paul is attacking that notion that religious accomplishment should be something that anybody should put confidence in when it comes to their salvation.

So quickly, three things about not putting confidence in religious achievement. First of all, religious righteousness is not achieved through rule keeping.

It's not achieved through rule keeping. He says, as to the laws of Pharisee, if you remember, Pharisees loved rules. Pharisees loved rules so much that they made their own rules.

That's crazy. That's not a group I'd want to belong to. They loved the rules. They loved to keep the rules and they loved to say that anybody who is saved keeps all of these rules. Again, I'm not suggesting that breaking rules is a good thing, but that the idea that a morally upright person will go to heaven based upon their own merits is anti-Christian.

Salvation isn't by rule keeping. Righteousness is not achieved by being passionate about your beliefs. Paul says, as to zeal, I persecuted the church.

You know, the men who flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9-11 were passionate about their religion and passionate about their belief that they'd be rewarded for their horrific act.

And so we see, as Paul says, and from that horrific example, that you can be zealous and passionate about something, but that doesn't make it right and it doesn't make it true.

Paul's zeal for his rituals, his race, his religion, led him to persecute the church. Again, proving that people can be zealous for all the wrong things and for all the wrong reasons.

Also, righteousness is not achieved through obedience. As to righteousness under the law, he says, I was blameless. Not claiming sinless perfection, but that he lived an exemplary life.

He's saying that nobody could bring a charge against me, but God could. God could because God sees into the heart and he knows our every thought.

And Paul didn't measure up to the standard that was required and neither do you and neither do I apart from Jesus.

So here's the thing. And as we'll see next week, Paul will say all of these things that I once cherished, all of these things that I once trusted in, as a result of knowing Christ, I despise those things.

I don't care about any of those things. You know what I care about most? I care about knowing my Lord. I care about living my life like my Lord.

That's what I care about. I don't care about men glorifying me or praising me. I care about this life that I live now in service to the Lord and the hope that I have in the resurrection from the dead that one day I will be with Christ forever.

forever. Here's the amazing thing. As we saw right back in chapter 2 of Philippians, Jesus had all these things, did he not? Right? He's the eternal Son of God at the right hand of the Father.

And he emptied himself of all those things that men would want, right? He emptied himself. Why?

So that he could come to us. Why? To live that perfect sinless life that none of us were able to live because we can't achieve our own righteousness.

He did it for us. Being obedient in every single way, living for 30 years of his life in relative obscurity, born to a lower class family in an itty-bitty town, growing up in Nazareth, another town that people thought nothing of, what good could come out of Nazareth, living in relative obscurity, being perfect to the point.

He comes, he has his three to four year ministry, perfectness, teaching us the way, showing us the way. and then in obedience we see he goes to the cross, dying in our place for our sins, that we might have eternal life.

Jesus gave that up so that he could gain us. That's amazing. So who are we to sit here and try to gain all these other things when all we need is Jesus?

And on that day when you stand before the Lord, that's the only thing that will matter, that you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, that you've trusted in him, that you've placed your faith in him, not in your own righteousness, but in his.

And if that's the case, on that day you will stand confidently and joyfully knowing that Jesus paid it all, that Jesus has done it all, and you've been imputed with his righteousness.

Righteousness.