The Paul we meet in Philippians 3 is happy to experience loss, happy to relinquish all the things, all the titles and accomplishments that he once thought made him so important. Paul is happy even to die, because he knows that on the other side of death is resurrection. He knows that in death God is still moving him forward. The whole, long journey of life, for Paul, is the forgetting of what came before and the straining forward to the ultimate goal of new, resurrected life in Christ Jesus. But this straining forward is not to say anything about his own work ethic. His striving is not exactly human striving, because just as soon as Paul has said, “I press on to make it my own,” he says in the same breath, “for Christ has made me his own.” (Philippians 3:12)
And just like that, our eyes are opened to the initiating grace of Jesus Christ. Whatever good work we do, we do because Christ did that good work in us first. Whatever direction we go in life, we go because Christ has pointed us and propelled us in that direction. We are striving to experience resurrected life in Christ because Christ has put a hunger for it in our spirit. “I press on to make it my own,” Paul says, “because Christ has made me his own.” We can’t see anything that happens in us or to us or through us without seeing that Christ was there first, speaking something into existence, waiting for us to hear it. Christ was there first, putting something in motion that would at some point put us in motion.
We desire to know Christ and to love him, because Christ is the one who has put within us the desire to know him and to love him. We did not decide on our own to pursue him. Christ is not waiting around for us to get a clue, to wake up, to start moving in his direction. We move towards Christ because Christ is moving us toward himself. We claim Christ as our own because he first claimed us. We are reaching out for Jesus because he already reached out and grabbed us. We love Jesus Christ because he has already loved us into loving him.
Back in Philippians 1 Paul said, “The one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” God is working on something in us. God is making something new of us, completely new and remade in the image of his Son. And he WILL finish that work. Whether we realize it or not, we are moving in the direction of new life in which the body of our humiliation is transformed and conformed to the body of his glory (3:21). Or, maybe it would be better to say – we are being moved in the direction of new life in which the body of our humiliation is transformed and conformed to the body of his glory.
We can no longer look at ourselves and see anything other than people whom Christ has already loved and claimed. We can no longer think of ourselves as anything other than a church within whom Christ has already begun his transforming work. To be the Church is for everything we say and do to be born out of a deep hope that Christ, who is already with us and within us, is busy with his work of remaking us completely in his image. We are nothing else but people loved and claimed by Christ, and we are pressing on to his promise of transformation, to make it our own, because he already made us his own.
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