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Understanding and Embracing

the Gospel, Part 5:
A Gospel Picture of the
Apostle Paul
Philippians 3:3-10

Introduction

The plague of mankind is summed up in one hyphenated

word: self-righteousness. It is common to each and
every single individual on the face of the earth. Self-
righteousness is defined in the dictionary as that state of
mind in which you think you are more righteous than
others. What this means is that in order for you to think
you are more righteous than someone else, you must
have a standard different from someone else. And what
makes this a plague is that almost everyone has a
different standard from everyone else. So we’re all
judging each other by each other’s differing standards.
It’s a plague because we never measure up to each
other and the result is strife, ambition, division, murder,
stealing, cheating, lying, divorce, and every other vice
that plagues us so horribly now.

I recall one individual, a deacon in a Baptist church, who

is a small-business owner. He actually stole the answers
to a government-operated Pre-K screening test so that
he could drill his child beforehand to make sure his child
would grade higher and get into better Pre-K classes.
When a believing employee asked him, “do you think it’s
okay to cheat?” he responded, “if it helps.”

Now at the same time, I am willing to bet that this man,

who considers himself to be a follower of Christ, would
absolutely hate it if a customer cheated him. Why?
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Because cheating is fine to the business-owner as long
as it doesn’t hurt him. But cheating is wrong if he gets
hurt. If that happened, you can bet the whole town
would hear about the man who cheated him, yet you
would never hear from the business owner, and church
deacon how he cheated the state government to get his
kid into better Pre-K classes.

You see, when the standard of righteousness is

ourselves, self-righteousness is born. When the
standard is us, we judge others by us. And when we do
that, we are sure to come out on top, aren’t we?
Everyone one else pales in comparison to us. The
problem is, God is looking down from heaven, mocking
our self-righteousness. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:12,
“But they are only comparing themselves with each
other, and measuring themselves by themselves. What
foolishness!”

It is foolishness because it like squabbling over happy

meal toy. Have you ever seen kids fight over a happy
meal toy in McDonald’s? A happy meal toy is without a
doubt one of the most useless things on the planet, and
they usually end up in our trash can. Yet my kids think
they are the most valuable thing on the earth and they
will squabble over them sometimes. The difference is,
parents will look at their kids squabbling over a toy and
consider them so childish, while the mom and dad
squabble over something equally insignificant.

All humans are just like that. They have no sense of

what is truly valuable. They put high value on that
which they themselves have considered to be valuable
to them. And this, beloved, is the standard of self-
righteousness. Self-righteousness will always have the
standard of what is most important to self. If what is
most important is getting your kid into better Pre-K
classes, then cheating is okay. If what is most important
is getting your hands on that happy meal toy, then
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fighting is okay. And in the mean time you’ll look down
your noses at anyone who confronts you about your
behavior because they have attacked what you consider
to be important to you.

Here’s the real problem though. If we step out of our

little world and step into the real world, God’s world, we
find that the reality of the situation is that every single
human being has a higher estimation of themselves than
God does. There are different kinds of people who do
this.

1. Some are Pharisees. This was another

definition of “self-righteousness” in the
dictionary, by the way. Interesting, isn’t it.
Pharisaism is the practice of telling others to
follow your picky little rules and then not
following them yourself. It is not practicing
what you preach. These are the worst of the
self-righteous club, because they are so
arrogant, and they think they hold the key to
your life and your future, so you’d better watch
out! You find these folks most of the time in
leadership of churches – pastors, deacons,
elders, leading laymen, etc.

2. Some are genuine. What I mean by this is that

while they have constructed their own little
system of self-righteousness, they are at least
consistent with it. These folks consider things
like schooling preferences, church
denominations, parenting philosophies, dating
preferences, etc. to be the mark of
righteousness, and they follow them to the
letter of the law that is taught therein.

3. Some are deceived. What I mean by this is that

there are the group who have little if any “self-
esteem,” the misfits, those who don’t fit in with
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others, and they rightly identify self-
righteousness in others around them who treat
them with such meanness and neglect. But at
the same time, these folks are deceived
because while they judge the self-righteousness
of others, they themselves have by default
developed their own self-righteousness because
they do not consider themselves to be as big a
jerk as others are.

For all these groups, self-righteousness is sneaky and

subtle. It is rooted in pride which takes so many
different forms and shapes that it is almost next to
impossible to pinpoint it and get rid of it. Just when you
think you are free from pride, you are at that very
moment entrapped by it. Richard Baxter, one of my
favorite English Puritans of the 1600’s said that pride
was the disease that leaves you thinking you don’t have
a disease.

It creeps in and somehow works it devilish little magic to

make you think you are better than you really are, to
count your upbringing, your income level, your job, your
religion, your church denomination, your Bible version,
your style of music, your financial lifestyle, your clothing
tastes, your child-rearing principles, your schooling
preferences, your drinking preferences, your hair
preferences, your worship preferences, etc. as the
standard by which God judges you and by which others
must approve or disapprove of you.

Yet we find that in Scriptures, and especially in the book

of Romans, and especially with the apostle Paul, none of
these things really matter. Placing value and emphasis
on these things is what sends people to hell. It sends
them to hell because they live by these things, trusting
that if they follow these principles and preferences then
they will be pleasing to God. It sends them to hell
because there is no Jesus Christ in any of it. There is
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only a day-by-day and moment-by-moment trusting in
themselves and their efforts and their principles and
preferences rather than in the person and work of Jesus
Christ.

This lifestyle, practiced by many who call themselves

Christians, is damning because it counts the
righteousness of God as rubbish while clinging to a man-
manufactured righteousness. The righteousness that
God wants is that kind of righteousness which is in
perfect submission and conformity to His holy standards.
And since none of us measures up to this, God provided
a way in which we can still be found in that
righteousness even though we don’t live like it. It is the
righteousness of God provided through Jesus Christ.

He lived a life of perfect conformity to God’s righteous

Law, and He died to suffer the punishment for our
unrighteousness so that we could be recipients of God’s
blessings. Therefore, the righteousness of God through
Jesus Christ must become the Christian’s only pursuit.

Transition

It was this mentality that led Paul to write what he did in

Philippians 3:2 and following as he battled those Jewish
false teachers who continued to perpetuate the heresy
that circumcision is what God really cares about. He was
battling the false teaching that outward conformity to
external standards pleases God. In the end, Paul knew
that only Christ pleased God, and the main pursuit in life
then was to be found in Christ and not in conformity to
principles and preferences.

What I want to do this morning is to take the doctrine of

the righteousness of God that I have preached to you
the last four weeks and illustrate it for you. I want to
illustrate it using real persons who are discussed in the
Bible. This will bring the doctrine from the abstract to
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the tangible. I want you to be able to see what it looks
like when it is embraced in a person’s life. The first
person I will tell you about this morning will be the
apostle Paul. This is only fitting since we’ve been
working through the doctrine of God’s righteousness that
he taught in Romans. After this one, I want to deal next
time with the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18.
In so doing, my aim is that you will be able to see real
life examples and have something by which to measure
your own experience.

So turn in your Bibles to Philippians 3 and we will begin

at verse 2. I’ll be reading from the New Living
Translation.

Now, based on the reading of verse 3, I’m going to

suggest two parts for the message this morning. Paul
speaks of putting confidence in human effort, and then
he speak of boasting about what Christ Jesus has done
for us. Let’s look at the first one which I’ve entitled

I. God Doesn’t Care About Who You Are or

What You Have Accomplished.

Don’t put any confidence in or take any

delight in who you are or what you have
accomplished.

When Paul says that he put no confidence in human

effort, or as some of your translations may say,
“confidence in the flesh,” he uses the Greek word
kaukomai for our English word “confidence.” The word
means to take delight in, to rejoice or boast in. In
classical Greek the word was use in tragedies and
orations to refer to pluming oneself, much like a peacock
would strut its plume. It was further used in this time
period to refer to one who would vaunt himself against
someone else or treat them in a derogatory or
contemptuous manner.
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This particular understanding of the word was adopted in

Koine Greek, which was the kind of Greek that the world
at that time spoke. Classical Greek would be akin to the
King’s English, and Koine Greek could be compared to
basic street English. Paul adopted the classical
understanding in order to convey his doctrine of
righteousness and justification.

What you see going on Philippians is a response to

Judaizers, a sect of Jews who claimed to be followers of
Christ, but required their followers to be circumcised
before they could become a Christian. They would put
confidence in this act. They took gleeful delight in
telling everyone that they were circumcised Christians.
It impressed people because it meant that we follow the
Law of Moses and Christ at the same time. They taught
that you could be a Christian and perfectly obey the Law
of God at the same time. The net effect of their teaching
was that man got the glory in salvation instead of God.
Their teaching became all about what they had done to
please God and this impressed people as you can well
imagine.

But in keeping with the meaning of the word, these

Judaizers would not only vaunt themselves and their
theology and teachings before everyone else, but they
would also treat those who disagreed with them on a
derogatory or contemptuous manner. That’s just what
they did with the apostle Paul. In fact, these same folks
followed him around throughout his entire ministry
trying to undo what he had taught new believers in new
church plants, trying to kill him, trying to stain his
reputation. These were the group he referred to in
Philippians 1:15 who were preaching Christ out of
jealousy and rivalry, and those preaching without pure
motives. Paul says in verse 17, “They preach with
selfish ambition, not sincerely…”
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So that’s the kind of confidence Paul is referring to here
in Philippians 3:3,4. And he says he wants nothing to do
with that kind of confidence. He says in verse 3 that
those who have this kind of confidence are not truly
worshiping God. But what follows is a common form of
argumentation known as accommodation. This is the
practice of accommodating your opponent by assuming
his argumentation, following it to its logical extent, and
then showing the false conclusion to which it leads.

This is just what Paul does in verse 4. He is basically

saying here, “If you Judaizers think you’ve got something
to brag about with regard to your salvation, I’ve got you
topped by a mile! Let me tell you about who I was and
what I accomplished.” He uses this form of
argumentation to show that if God was really pleased
with human efforts and accomplishments, surely He
would have been pleased with Paul. But in fact, in the
end, it amounted to nothing.

What I and other commentators, pastors and scholars

have seen in this text is a division of Paul’s pre-
conversion life into two parts. There are seven things in
all that Paul lists for us here. The first four
characteristics he mentions are things he has inherited.
The last three are things he has earned. In verse 9 he
ends up describing these things as “a righteousness of
my own derived from the Law.” He considered these
two categories of things to be his own righteousness
derived from the Law of God rather than God’s
righteousness derived from the Son of God. Let’s look at
these briefly these two categories.

A. Who He Was – The “Righteousness” He Had

Inherited

1. Circumcised on the 8th day. See Genesis 17:11

and Exodus 12:48. He was circumcised in keeping
with the covenant God made with Abraham and in
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keeping with the day God prescribed to Moses. He
as not the son of a proselyte. Proselytes were
circumcised later in life, but Israelites were
circumcised strictly in keeping with the law of
Moses.

2. Of the people of Israel. See Genesis 17:12.

Israel, was of course, the covenant name of God’s
people. Paul is claiming to be a member of the
covenant people. Further, his family lineage didn’t
come by being grafted in as a proselyte. He and
his family had descended from original stock.

3. Of the Tribe of Benjamin. He shows the

certainty of his belonging to Israel by pointing to
which particular tribe he was from. This refers to
the nobility of his race, the first king of Israel being
from that tribe. See 1 Sam. 10:20,21. Further,
this was the tribe that came together with the tribe
of Judah and the house of David and to the true
worship of God at Jerusalem, after the revolt of the
ten tribes. When the northern tribes had
separated from God’s revealed religion and had
set up schismatic altars where blood sacrifices
were performed in direct violation of Leviticus 17.
That chapter says that sacrifices were to be
offered only at the great altar in Jerusalem.
Benjamin resisted this and remained loyal to the
house of David. Paul took justifiable pride in this
ancestry. Further, Benjamin was the only one of
the twelve sons of Jacob who was actually born in
the promised land. In addition, it was by means of
a Benjamite that Israel was delivered from Haman
in the book of Esther, and in which the feast of
Purim is to this day celebrated annually. Finally, it
is obvious that his repeated reference to his
former name of Saul is reference to the first king
of Israel from whom he took his name proudly and
with marked emphasis in Acts 23:21. Some church
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fathers even saw a connection between Jacob’s
blessing of Benjamin in Genesis 49:27 and Paul’s
course of persecution and division.

4. Hebrew of Hebrews. Shows his descent from

Abraham who was called “the Hebrew” in Genesis
14:13. Also points to fact that there as no mixture
of blood by marriage with foreign nations which
might be exactly known by their public registers,
in which was marked the generations of particular
families (see Ezra 2:62). He was pure-blooded,
born of Jewish parents, born a Jew from the cradle.
This also has probable reference to the fact that
there was no Hellenistic influence. After the return
to Jersualem, many pure-blooded Jews, though
remaining pure-blooded, began to adopt the
language and conform to the customs of those
around them. This was the process known as
Hellenization and it was the crux of the Maccabean
revolt in Israel during the 400 years of silence
between the Old and New Testaments. There was
no Hellenist among them, for they were strict
Hebrews in blood and lifestyle and language. Just
because a man was a Jew doesn’t mean he was a
Hebrew. A Jew was known also as a Hebrew when
he spoke the Hebrew language. So here, as in 2
Cor. 11:22, Hebrew implies something which is not
expressed in the term Israelite. He was brought
up under a great Hebrew teacher in the Hebrew
metropolis (Acts 22:3). He spoke the Hebrew
language fluently (Acts 21:40; 22:20). He quoted
frequently from the Hebrew Scriptures which he
translates for himself, thus contrasting with his
contemporaries the Jewish Philo and the Christian
writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, who
commonly use the Hellenistic version of the
Septuagint .
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B. What He Had Accomplished – The

“Righteousness” He Had Earned

1. As to the Law, a Pharisee. The most

strict profession, and one that a person entered
into by choice. This profession constituted the
most faithful of all Jewish sects in their adherence
to the law. They are the sect that constructed a
hedge around the law, made of additional
commandments, which they followed in order to
make sure they didn’t break God’s Law. So Paul is
saying here that he was strict in his obedience to
all those man-made commandments in addition to
the Law of God. And he was probably part of the
sect of the Pharisees that were more strict than
any other (see Acts 26:5).\

2. As to zeal, a persecutor of church.

He was very fervent, without any respect for
persons, which is why he persecuted the church of
God because he considered them to be destroyers
of God’s law. He was, of course, present at
Stephen’s death giving consent to it.

3. As to righteousness under the law,

blameless. As to his personal obedience to the
law, his life was blameless. He could not justifiably
be condemned by men where externals are the
standard. ‘Such righteousness as consists in law,
in obedience to formal precepts’, but not the true
righteousness: see ver. 9” (Lightfoot, p. 148).
Blameless has reference to the fact that he
omitted no observance of the law or the traditions,
no matter how trivial it may have been.

C. What He Thought About His “Righteousness”

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When it all adds up, Paul pretty much thought of all

these things as amounting to a nauseating nothing. He
describes his own thoughts about who he was and what
he accomplished in five phrases.

1. It Was Rejoicing in the Flesh

Taking delight in these things and putting confidence in

them is taking an account of what you have done and
who you think you are and totaling it all up as if it all
really mattered to God. The usage of the phrase “in the
flesh” here is intended to point to a man’s life before
Christ. This is how Paul uses it in Romans 7:5. He says
there, “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful
passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work
in the members of our body to bear fruit for death”
(NASB). To be “in the flesh” is to be living in sinful
passions. That’s why Paul says in verse 18 of Romans 7,
“For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my
flesh…” One chapter later, in 8:8, Paul writes again,
“those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” This is
followed by a clear line of demarcation in verse 9 with
reference to those who are in the Spirit. Those who are
in the Spirit are indwelt by the Spirit, and those who are
in the flesh are indwelt by sin.

What we see in Philippians 3:3,4 then is a person who is

bragging about who they are and what they have
accomplished, and yet the things they brag about do not
please God. There is nothing good about them
whatsoever. There is nothing in them that makes God
sit up a take notice. Paul considers who he was and
what he accomplished to be simply rejoicing in that
which is unredeemed, not indwelt by the Spirit, and
basically amounting to nothing. It is just that – it is flesh.

This statement of boasting in the flesh or putting

confidence in human effort stands in stark contrast to
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glorying in Christ Jesus in verse 3. We must glory and
rejoice and boast in and put our confidence in Jesus
Christ – Who He is and What He has accomplished –
rather than in ourselves. Christ is the only thing that
pleases God. He is the only one who is good. Oh, that
we would be found in Him, and rejoice in Him, and boast
in Him, delight in Him, trust in Him, and put our
confidence in Him rather than in our good for nothing
selves!

2. It All Amounted to Nothing

The next way Paul describes who he was and what he

had accomplished was with the word “loss” which he
uses three times. He uses the word once in verse 7 and
then twice in verse 8. A. T. Robertson, the famous
Baptist Greek scholar, suggested that in using this word,
Paul was simply saying that whatever he thought was on
the credit side of his ledger was now on the debit side.

In verse 7, he uses the phrase “counted as loss.” This

verb “counted” is in the perfect middle, for you Greek
students. For the rest of you that simply means that
once these things were put on the debit side of his
ledger, they stayed there. That is, not only did Paul
consider all his assets to be spiritual liabilities when it
came to salvation, but he continued to consider them as
just that. What we learn from the usage of this Greek
verb is that Paul never stopped considering who he was
and what he accomplished as amounting to nothing.
They never meant anything to God and they never will.
They never were assets to attain heaven, and they never
will be. They will always remain debits, and if I desire to
live by them, then God will hold them against me and I
will have to pay up for the rest of eternity.

Now, watch what Paul does next. This is a beautiful

attestation to the need for knowing the original
languages because in our English Bibles there is no trace
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at all of a change in the Greek tense for the word
“counted” in verse 8. Same English word, same Greek
word, but different Greek tense. Here the tense is
present middle. He said in verse 7, “I counted it loss and
it remains as loss to this day.” And he reemphasizes it
in verse 8, “In fact, I still consider it all to be loss and will
continue to think of it all that way.”

3. Counting it All as Nothing Cost Him

Everything

The next usage of the word loss in verse 8 is the same

Greek verb but in a different form this time. What you
see Paul doing is building forward with this word. In
verse 7 he counted it as loss. In verse 8, he still counts
it as loss. And here in verse 8, he will continue to count
it as loss no matter what it costs him. He absolutely
refused to allow who he was or what he had
accomplished to mean anything at all when it came to
the gospel.

The verb here is defined as giving up the point of injury.

Paul gave up who he was and what he accomplished,
and in so doing it ruined his reputation among his peers,
and it ended up eventually costing him his life. He
forfeited all of that to get something far better,
something eternal. He counted the forfeiting of his
inheritance and accomplishments to be worthy of
suffering for in order to gain the person of Jesus Christ
for all eternity. Can the same be said of you?

As I said before, in verse 9 Paul refers to all of these

things as his own righteousness, derived from the Law.
The problem is God doesn’t determine righteousness by
the Law. If He did, Paul was in great shape, wasn’t he?
He had nothing to fear, if God judged people by His Law.
But God doesn’t judge people by the Law. He judges
them by His righteousness in Jesus Christ. If you have
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the Law and have no Christ, you’re condemned. You’re
condemned because everything you present to God in
an effort to be justified before Him amounts to a
nauseating nothing. Look at how Paul describes these
seven characteristics about himself.

4. It All Amounted to Scraps and Crumbs

Paul continues to build forward in verse 8 describing who

he was and what he accomplished as skubala, which is
Greek for dung, rubbish, trash, scraps, etc. He has back
to the present middle here saying in effect, “I counted at
loss, I continue to count it as loss, I will count it as loss
no matter what it costs me, and in fact I will continue to
count it all as scraps and crumbs.”

Some scholars say that this Greek word refers to human

excrement. While there are usages of this word in
Koine, I don’t think that’s what Paul had in mind. Not
because it is gross, but because it doesn’t fit the context
and flow of argument.

A second usage of the word in Koine Greek had to do

with refuse, leftovers from a banquet, or food scraps
thrown away from the table and given to the dogs. I
believe that it is this meaning that Paul has in mind here.
The Judaizers always spoke of themselves as those
sitting at a banquet table feasting at the Father’s table,
while the Gentile Christians were the dogs squabbling
under the table for the scraps and crumbs that fell to the
ground. In contrast, what Paul is probably after here is
that the Gentiles in reality are the ones sitting at the
Father’s banquet table and the crumbs and scraps that
fall from the table are the ordinances and traditions of
the Judaizers, things like circumcision, which they value
so highly.

In essence, Paul is saying, “everything you Judaizers

count as so valuable in all actuality amounts to a few
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crumbs and scraps that fall from the table, and you guys
are the dogs squabbling under the table for those
crumbs.”

Skubala is not even something worth “pack-ratting.” I’m

a pack-rat. I save everything. And I’m one of those guys
who does in fact eventually use it. Ask my wife. She’ll
tell you how I’ve used the oddest things to fix the most
common things. But who I am and what I’ve
accomplished is not even something that is valuable
enough to pack-rat. It is a chewing gum wrapper on the
side of the road. Better yet, it is a cigarette butt. What
can you do with a cigarette butt. Absolutely nothing!
And that’s Paul’s point with reference to who he was and
what he accomplished. Who you are and what you have
accomplished, beloved, is absolutely useless to God. It
is like offering God a handful of cigarette butts! As one
scholar put it:

“All such things which I used to count up as distinct

items with a miserly greed and reckon to my credit –
these I have massed together under one general head as
loss” (Lightfoot, p. 148).

5. It’s All Self-Righteousness

The fifth and final phrase Paul uses to describe who he

was and what he accomplished was one that we have
already referred to in verse 9. He saw it has a
righteousness of his own. It seems that there is the
comparison here. He doesn’t want his own
righteousness because, as one familiar with the prophet
Isaiah, he knew his own righteousness to be like filthy
rags.

He has compared his righteousness to loss and

nothingness. He has compared it also to scraps and
crumbs. He doesn’t want to be found on that day of
judgment to have worthlessness to present to God as
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justification for entrance into heaven. That earns
immediate damnation in hell. The righteousness he
wants is something outside of himself, yet something he
wishes to possess for himself. It is what theologians
have appropriately called an “alien righteousness”
because it is found only in Christ, thus those who belong
to him possess not only Christ but His righteousness as
well.

This is the righteousness you need, beloved. You must

have a righteousness which is outside of yourself. You
cannot please God with your own works, your own
status, who you are or what you have accomplished.
God cares only about Christ, and if you wish to unit
yourself to Him, He will care for you too.

Transition Illustration

Its amazing how many people will find themselves at the

judgment seat on the last day and present what they
have done and who they are as justification for getting
into heaven. It is as if they think who they are and what
they have accomplished is the divine currency.

I recall my first exposure to monopoly. It was thrilling.

Grabbing up property and collecting rent, buying houses
and hotels, it was everything that promoted the greed
and covetousness in a child’s heart! I was old enough to
get the point of the game, but I was young enough to
miss a very important feature. It was only a game. I
figured this out one day when I tried to go to the toy
store and spend my monopoly money. It’s fake. The
real world requires a different kind of money. And in the
same way, God requires a different kind of
righteousness. He requires real righteousness, not
manufactured or fake righteousness. Monopoly money
in the real world is absolutely useless. And my
righteousness before God is absolutely useless.
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But how do you tell the difference between my
righteousness and God’s righteousness? Let me
illustrate once more, yet still with my youthful ignorance
regarding money. The same sort of thing happened a
few years later, when my grandfather gave me some
confederate money. It looked like real money, and it felt
like real money. So I tried to spend it to. I suppose I
tried to spend pretty much everything when I was
young! But when I gave it to the man at a novelty shop
one day, he laughed and said, “that money isn’t any
good here.” It looked like money, but the man who was
taking the money said it wasn’t real money. He was the
boss. And God is the boss. I can tell the difference
between my righteousness and God’s righteousness by
listening to what He tells me. And He tells me that Jesus
Christ, His Son, is the only righteousness that is
acceptable to Him. Jesus Christ is the only genuine
currency of heaven, so to speak. Christ has already
bought God’s forgiveness against my sin, and if I don’t
spend what Christ has bought, I’m buying forgiveness
with my own works and my own righteousness and my
own efforts. I must use His currency. My goodness, my
accomplishments, my family lineage, my father’s role as
a pastor or my granddaddy’s position as a deacon all
have no value in heaven.

II. God Only Cares About Jesus Christ and What He

Has Accomplished.

What is desired is Jesus Christ and everything

that comes with Him. It’s not about us…It’s all
about Him.

Listen to how Paul describes what it is he wants so

badly.

• V. 3 – “glory in Christ Jesus…”

• V. 7 – “for the sake of Christ…”
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• V. 8 – “because of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord.”
• V. 8 – “For his sake…”
• V. 8 – “in order that I may gain Christ.”
• V. 9 – “and be found in him…”
• V. 9 – “having a righteousness…which comes through
faith in Christ…”
• V. 10 – “that I may know him…”
• V. 10 – “and the power of his resurrection…”
• V. 10 – “and may share in his sufferings…”
• V. 10 – “becoming like him in his death…”

For Paul all he wanted was Jesus Christ. He wanted

nothing to do with Himself any longer because he knew
it was worthless. This mindset was expressed by the
Scottish preacher David Dickson who on his deathbed at
80 years old in 1663 said,

“I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds,

and cast them through each other in a heap before the
Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord
Jesus Christ, and in Him I have peace.”

III.How to Obtain God’s Righteousness in Jesus

Christ

What is desired is Christ’s righteousness and it

is obtained through faith, through believing in
the work God has done in Christ and not
through believing in yourself.

Look at verse 9 closely and you’ll see two phrases of

eternal significance for you this morning. The first
phrase is, “not having a righteousness of my own that
comes from the law, but that which comes through faith
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in Christ.” The second phrase is “the righteousness of
God that depends on faith.”

God has never been and never will be satisfied with any
kind of righteousness which you may try to conjur up
and present to him. God has always been and always
will be satisfied only with His own righteousness,
because it is genuine righteousness. And while this
standard is unreachable, God knows that and yet still
mercifully provided something that is presented to every
person – Jesus Christ and His work on the cross and in
the grave. Through Jesus Christ God offers His own
righteousness freely to all who believe in Christ.

When Paul uses the phrases,“through faith in Christ…

depends on faith,” he knows that the faith referred to
here is the only thing that will please God, as Hebrews
11:6 teaches. Faith is the instrument through which we
are saved, according to Ephesians 2:8. But we must
identify and define this faith on which our eternity
hangs.

A. What Faith is Not

James Montgomery Boice has made three observations

on what faith is not (Philippians, pp. 207-209).

1. It is not a delusion. This is believing in

something that you know is not true. This is
pictured today by many “word-faith” healers
and those who follow them. They know that
merely speaking something into existence
cannot really happen, but they teach it and
follow it anyway. That’s not faith.

2. It is not credulity. Credulity is believing that

something is true despite the lack of sufficient
evidence. It is believing in something simply
because you wish it were true. I can personally
 21
relate to this one in recent weeks. It is amazing
how people will desire to believe something
about you, despite the lack of evidence, simply
because they want it to be true for some
strange reason. That’s not faith at all.

3. It is not subjectivity. This is the worst of all.

This is what drives religion today, for most. I
remember talking to a gentleman some weeks
ago about an area of his life where he was
struggling. When I pointed out what the
Scriptures said about what he was doing, and
when I stated to him that he could not be a
follower of Christ and act like this, he closed my
Bible and responded, “the Word of God is in my
heart.” What he meant was that it didn’t
matter what he read. All that mattered was
what he felt. And if he felt that Jesus was in his
heart, then he was a Christian. His faith was
grounded solely and completely on feeling.
That’s not faith either.

B. What Faith Is

Jim Atkinson left me with a wonderful illustration of faith

last week, based on the definition I gave you. Last week
I defined faith for you as believing, and I defined belief
as acting like God’s promises are true, even when you
don’t feel like it. Marriage is like that. You promised to
love your wife no matter what, men. And you must keep
this promise even when you don’t feel like it. You must
act like the promise you made was true, because it was
true, even though you don’t feel like it was true. We
don’t live our lives based on feeling, yet this is what
Christians do far too much, including me. What if I woke
up one morning and didn’t feel like I was married. Well,
as Jim Atkinson said last week, that’d be fine…as long as
I didn’t start acting like I wasn’t married! And you get
the point. As Christians we must act and behave and
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talk and think based upon what is true and not based
upon what we feel.

“The only difference between the kind of faith that men

exercise every day and saving faith is that saving faith is
absolutely certain, for it is faith in the only One in the
universe who is absolutely faithful and who never breaks
His promises” (Boice, Philippians, p. 209).

C. Elements of Saving Faith.

If faith is believing God’s promises, what are the

promises you must believe if you are to be saved.

1. First, as Paul referred to in Phil. 3:9, you must

believe that you have no righteousness of your
own. And you must also believe that if you
continue to hold on to your own supposed
righteousness you will go to hell. God promised in
Romans 6:23 that the wages of sin is eternal
condemnation.

2. Second, as Paul referred to in Phil. 3:9, you must

believe that Jesus Christ is the only righteousness
God will accept. Only Christ was good enough to
please God. And this means you must believe in
the promise that if you put your faith in Christ you
will have eternal life, as Jesus Himself promises in
John 3:16.

3. Third, you must believe that God loves sinners

despite their sin, and that He has acted to remove
that sin and offer forgiveness and reconciliation.
Paul referred to God’s promise in Romans 5:8
which says that God showed his love for us in that
while we were sinners Christ died for us. And
 23
again in John 3:16, God loved the world so much
that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in
Him won’t die but will have eternal life.

Again, this belief is thinking and acting like these things

are true. If you really believe these things are true, that
these promises are true, then you are a Christian. The
moment you stop believing you are good enough to
please God and the moment you decide to trust only in
the goodness of God in Christ to please God, that is the
precise moment at which you become a Christian.

Conclusion

“Paul came to the point where he opened his ledger

book. And after he had looked at all of the things that
he had accumulated by inheritance and by his efforts, he
reflected that these things had actually kept him from
Christ. He then took the entire list and placed it where it
belonged – under the list of liabilities. He called it ‘loss.’
And under assets he wrote, ‘Jesus Christ alone’…Is that
true of you? Have you exchanged your assets for Christ?
Or are you trusting in the kind of goodness that will
never be accepted by God? If you are, let me give you a
warning. That goodness will take you to hell. Hell is full
of it. But if you lay your goodness aside, counting it loss,
God will credit Jesus Christ to your account ‘who of God
is made unto us wisdom and righteousness, and
sanctification and redemption’ (1 Cor. 1:30). This has
always been the heart of Christian experience, and it has
been embodied in many of our hymns. One of them
says:

Nothing in my hands I bring,

Simply to the cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress,
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
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Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hid myself in Thee.

Will you pray that prayer? If you do, God will provide the
washing, and Christ will be reckoned as your one
sufficient asset forever” (J. M. Boice, Philippians, pp. 198-
99).