Questions to Shape Your Life | Philippians 3:7-11

Philippians 3:7-11  |  Cody Hale

Transcript

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If you have your Bible, start with me to Philippians chapter 3. Philippians chapter 3. We're going to read the first 11 verses. Andrew preached on the first seven last week. We're going to focus on verses 7 through 11 this morning, but it all fits together. So if you have your Bibles, let's see what kind of trouble we can get into together this morning. God's word says, Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. Look out for the dogs. 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 and 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 count it 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 from the dead. Let's pray the Lord together. Heavenly Father, this morning we are gathered together because we are intent by any means possible to attain the resurrection from the dead. We bring in all kinds of idols and all kinds of treasures. And Lord, I pray this morning that whatever we bring in with us that is not of you, that does not move us closer to you, that today you would move in our hearts to lay them down. That you would uncover more of the image of Jesus in us. So, Lord, we come with wrong treasures. Lord, let us leave with the right treasure. We come with wrong definitions of success. Let us leave with the right definition. We come with the wrong expectations. Oh Lord, set for us the right expectations. Do a work in our hearts that when we leave, we know it was only a work, an encounter with a living God. We ask these things now in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated. The three most powerful figures where I'm from are Jesus, Nick Saban, and Bear Bryant. Now, it's usually in that order, but it depends on who you talk to, right? And so when I was growing up playing football, I grew up really before the Nick Saban era. And so all the coaches that I had, they believed that they were Bear Bryant, right? And they thought that our Pee-wee football team were the junction boys. And so they would come out and they would always speak in these bearisms, right? And the one that I remember them repeating the most and that stands out the most to me is they would always say, boys, boys, this game out here, now we might get beat by six touchdowns, but they would always tell us the same thing. This is this game tonight, boys, is gonna come down to about five plays. Who wants those five plays more than everybody else, right? And I used to think that was kind of silly. I would think, here we are, all right, we're running in the sun, we're lifting weights, we're practicing, we're bashing our heads in, and we're doing it for five plays, right? But the longer I played, and the more I was around the game, and the more I've watched the game, the more I've realized that it really is true. That in a game, if you have two essentially evenly matched teams, you may have 100, 120 snaps in that game, but the game's gonna boil down to about five defining moments in which one team is gonna out-execute or outperform the other team. You know, life is a lot like that, isn't it? Life is a lot like that. You know, they say that if you add together all of the subconscious decisions and the conscious decisions that you make in a day, it comes to about 35,000 decisions a day that you make. That if you just focus on the conscious decisions, the decisions that you're making deliberately, you're making about 500 to 1,000 of those every day. But here's the tension. The tension is that not all of those 35,000 decisions are equally important. And not all of those 35,000 uh decisions equally shape your life. No, the truth is that you're gonna be shaped by just a handful of them, aren't you? That it's gonna be a few key decisions during a few key moments that's gonna set the direction of your life overall. Well, in our passage this morning, Paul is here and he's walking us through the decisions that have really shaped his life. He's letting us know exactly why it is that his life has taken the shape that it's taken, and why his life was so dramatically reshaped after he encountered the risen Christ on the Damascus Road. And in the process, what he's gonna do is he's gonna show us the answer to three questions that shape our lives. They shaped his first, and now they'll shape ours. The first of those questions that I want us to look at this morning is where is your treasure? Where is your treasure? In Matthew chapter 6, Jesus said, For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That your treasure shapes how you see yourself. It shapes how you understand the world, it shapes the choices and the decisions that you make on a daily basis. So we might summarize what Jesus said and what I think Paul is here and demonstrating by his own story is saying that the location of your treasure will determine the direction of your life. The location of your treasure will determine the direction of your life, that we can think of our treasure as a type of GPS, that your treasure is the GPS that navigates you through life with turn-by-turn commands. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Maybe you grew up in a family that treasures achievement. And so you discovered at seven, eight, nine years old that if you were to receive the affirmation and the acceptance of your family, the enthusiasm maybe of your family that you were longing for, that they primarily came as a result of you winning and achieving. And so over time, what happened is achievement became the destination toward which the GPS of your life was aimed. So your feelings about yourself and your feelings about life and your feelings about other are connected to how successful you feel. And it may not even be anything tangible, it may not be even a reality, but a perception of reality. Your beliefs about people and life and money are interpreted through a grid of successful or unsuccessful. You make decisions based upon the likelihood of adding to your success or not taking away from your success. Your marriage and your education and your hobbies, even your walk with God is processed through a lens of continual and ongoing need for winning and for achievement. And the point is that this treasure of achievement is now determining the direction of the life that you're living, the decisions that you're making, the interpretations, even that you're making. And it doesn't have to be achievement, it could be quite literally anything. It could be acceptance or it could be pleasure or it could be influence. And we're seeing this principle lived out in Paul's life when he says, Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Then, what we're seeing in Paul first is the abandonment of an old treasure. If you think back to the verses that uh Andrew preached so well last week, verses four through six, Paul's kind of giving his spiritual resume, isn't it? And what we're learning about Paul is that Paul was a man that was determined to make something of himself. He had the pedigree and he had the zeal, he said. He had the opportunity and he had the drive. He was born into old money and he was determined that he was gonna live up to the family name. He was not going to rest on his laurels. So Paul says that he was of the tribe of Benjamin, uh a Hebrew of Hebrews. You can you can feel Paul puffing out his chest as he says it, can't you? You can you can feel the family pride. What he's saying is, I was a Kennedy, I was a Rockefeller. Like everybody cared about my family, and everybody cared about me. And so he had all of the kinds of responsibilities and the privileges and the pressures that come along with having a name like that. So whenever he says, whatever gain I had, what we should understand if we think about it in the lens of a Kennedy or a Rockefeller, the whatever he's talking about is significant. It's very significant that Paul is talking about the fact that he had an illustrious career. He was a Pharisee of Pharisees. He was on the fast track to be a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of Jerusalem. So that's like having a fast track to being a senator. It's a illustrious, privileged, esteemed career. But not only that, he had significance. He had a clear sense of his identity and where he fit in the world. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, he was a from the tribe of Benjamin. That's something that we're all looking for, isn't it? That clear identity. And he had a memorable legacy among his people. Paul was an esteemed man and an honored man. He was the kind of man that when he comes and sits down in Starbucks, you kind of elbow your wife and like, hey, let me tell you who that guy is. Let me tell you what he's accomplished. This is who Paul is. And that's the treasures that most of us are chasing, isn't it? The treasures that Paul is counting as lost are the very ones that most of us are living our lives in pursuit of. An illustrious career, a clear identity, and a memorable legacy. And yet Paul deliberately, intentionally says, I counted. This is a deliberate action. This is a decisive moment. I counted as loss everything that I had previously counted as gain. You know, Paul, like most of our families, he had inherited his treasure. That's probably how you got your treasure too, or at least the one that you've been dealing with all of your life. And that's the reason that we all find security and money and purpose and achievement and value and acceptance, is because our families did. And so we inherited the rubric through which we begin to interpret all of our lives through the lens and the rubric of this treasure. But unlike Paul, what most of us never actually do is we never actually question it. We never stop to ask whether or not the treasure that we've been living for and the treasure that's been setting the direction of our life is actually worthy of our lives. If it's worthy of the aim of our life, if it's worthy of all of the energy and all of the attention and all of the focus that we've given to it. This is what Jesus is getting to in the Sermon on the Mount. You'll remember he compares two kinds of treasures that we can have. He says, on one hand, you can have the kind of treasure that everybody else is pursuing, the illustrious career, the memorable legacy, the high esteem in the eyes of your peers. You can pursue all of those treasures, but those are things that rust and moths destroy. Or you can pursue another treasure. You can pursue the kind of treasure that is in the kingdom, the kind of treasure that is imperishable, the kind that you won't just enjoy in the here and now, but you'll enjoy in the hereafter. You'll enjoy in all of eternity. And what Jesus is doing is he's establishing for us the proper perspective of a healthy treasure. You know, the day that you quit your illustrious job, you know what they're gonna do? No matter how long you've worked there, no matter how much you've sacrificed, no matter how many long days you've done, no matter how weekends you work, you know what they're gonna do? They're gonna take your name off the door. They're gonna take your name off the door. No matter how much earthly esteem and significance that you have, you know how long it's gonna last? As long as you do. The Bible says in James that our life is like a mist, it's it's a vapor, it's up and it quickly dissipates. Isaiah says that it's like grass that that grows in the season, turns green, and then quickly withers away. That's the esteem that we're pursuing. The legacy that we're all pursuing, you want a cold dose of reality? Most of our great-great-grandchildren won't even know our names. Boy, that's encouraging, isn't it? They won't even know who we are. Y'all, we are living our lives for things that won't outlive us. We are living and expending all of our energy and all of our anxiety and all of our effort and all of our resources for things that rusts and moths will destroy. So Paul is saying, I'm abandoning all of that. I'm I'm counting whatever gain I have as lost because what I have done is I have discovered a better treasure. See, Paul doesn't see himself fundamentally as a man of deprivation. That's important as you're interpreting and understanding what he's writing throughout the book of Philippians. No, he doesn't see himself fundamentally as a man of deprivation. He sees himself fundamentally as a man who has discovered a greater gain. That's the important interpretive key for the whole book. So, sure, he's leaving behind a lot. Basically, he's leaving behind everything that he's done. But he's doing it because it's the only reasonable response when you're trying to hold on to a few tarnished pennies and you discover an incalculable fortune. That's why he says, whatever gain he had, he counted as loss. You'll notice there's a because in verse 8. Those are the kinds of words that when you're studying the Bible on your own, you should pay attention to. He's telling you the purpose behind what he's saying when he says, because. So he says, whatever gain he had, he counted as loss. Why? Because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. That what he realizes is that the sum total of his entire life couldn't compare to that which he had discovered and found in the person of Christ. So he didn't have to chase pennies anymore. No, no, no, no. You don't chase pennies when now you possess for yourself the mints. What we're witnessing here is the recalibration of the heart's GPS. That following Christ changed the direction, and changing the direction, changing the destination had changed his direction. So what Paul had to do is he had to let go of what he was taught to value. Man, that's tough, isn't it? It's hard to let go of inherited values. Paul had to let go of who he thought of himself to be. He had to let go of the sense of identity that he had. Paul had to let go of the very principles and rules that had led him to having a successful life in his culture. And that's tough, isn't it? That's tough. But it's the total recalibration that is brought about when you discover a greater treasure, a treasure unlike anything that you've ever seen before. And this is how the discovery of Christ is always playing out in the lives of the disciples who discover him. This morning, I wonder what your treasure is. I wonder what your treasure is. Maybe, maybe you're not even sure what your treasure is. Well, if the location of your treasure determines the direction of your life, then that enables us to begin to reverse engineer the principle so that we can discover what it is that we're living after. That you just have to pull up the search history on your GPS, because then the direction of your life will lead you into the direction of whatever it is that you're treasuring. So maybe we should stop for just a minute and say, okay, how do we know we're treasure? Well, what would our calendar and our and our uh what would our calendar and our alarm clock say that it is? What would our credit card and bank statements say that it is? What if we brought our children and we asked them, all right, what if mom and dad value most in the world and they were to tell us honestly, what would they say that it is? And then when you discover what it is that you're treasuring, the next question becomes, is this worthy of what you're giving it? Is it actually worthy of your life? Is it actually worthy of pursuing? Is it actually worthy of living for? Is it worthy of your life, or is it just what you inherited? Is it what you should be doing, or is it just the only thing that you know how to do? Is it where you intended to go, or is it just where you've been drifting over time? See how you enter the location of your treasure will determine the shape of your life. And so, well, the next question what is success? What is success? I like this because Paul is here and he's talking to the Philippians the way that a good dad does. They're being tempted by the Judaizers to add lawkeeping to grace as the basis of salvation. So, in other words, they're being tempted here to revert back to an old definition of success, one in which you can kind of know and quantify your standing with God based on the metrics of your own performance. And so, Paul, like a good dad does, goes and he sits down, he's like, Y'all, my children, I've tried that. I've tried that. It doesn't work. I've tried that, it ruins your life. Please learn from me. I've tried all the things that you're trying, and none of that works. Please learn from somebody that went through it the hard way. Learn from me and see that there is a better way to live. So what he does is he begins comparing for them losses and gains, what we might think of as successes and failures. And he reminds them that the wrong definition of success can waste your life. But he does so in a way that lets us know that Paul doesn't have on rose-colored glasses. He knows that life is complex, he knows that life hurts. And so he lets them know that success can feel a lot like surgery. You know, I've been, I've had the distinct privilege of having several surgeries in the course of my life. And one of the moments that I think is the funniest is you'll be coming out of, you know, the doctor will come in and you're kind of coming out of anesthesia, you're you're pretty much half out of it, and they'll come in and say, All right, Mr. Hell, the surgery was a success. And you're sitting there, you've got tubes coming out of you, you got, you know, gaping wounds, you're like, success, success, this is success, right? Because it doesn't feel like success. Surgery never feels successful, does it? No, surgery feels like a gaping wound. It feels like gnawing pain. Well, this is exactly what Paul is getting at that success is not based on short-term comfort, it's based on long-term gain. It's based not on your short-term pain, but on your long-term prognosis. This is what happens when you're calibrating your life in pursuit of a greater treasure. When Paul says, I have suffered the loss of all things, I want you to think about that. Not some things, not a few things. I've suffered the loss of all things. And what Paul is saying is that this treasure recalibration in his life, this change of direction, this change of values and priorities, it had essentially decimated Paul's life. I think we sometimes become so familiar with Paul's testimony and story that we become desensitized to it. We stop thinking about how personal and painful this actually was for Paul. But think about this. He brought, when he made the decision to follow after Christ, he brought shame onto his father. He brought shame onto his family name. Think about how that sits on you. Think about the weightiness of that. Paul, to become a Christian, had grown up as a Pharisee of Pharisees. He had been, he had studied under the best teachers. He was one of the most educated men in all of Israel. People had high hopes for him that he was going to be a leader in Jerusalem. And so all of these people that he's all of his life been seeking their approval. He's been seeking to impress them. He's been seeking to get stature with them. He has to betray them and turn his back on them. Think about how that would, how that would have wired his nervous system. Think about how his body would have been trying to tell him that he was in danger, that he was threatened, that none of this was okay. Now he's having to disappoint all the people that have always mattered to him. Not only that, but he's having to put to death the dream that he's had for his life since he was a boy. And he had accomplished his dream and realized his dream. And now he's got to put all of that down. Now, for Paul, y'all, this is hard. And if we don't think this hurt him, that's not fair to Paul. And quite honestly, it's not a realistic, realistic expectation for our own lives as we really recalibrate our lives. See, his point isn't that there's no pain. His point is that he's convinced that the pain that he is experiencing is worth it. In fact, he believes that it's worth it the same way that a painful surgery is worth it when it helps you to recover and enjoy the best years of your life that you would have missed out on otherwise. The word suffering that Paul uses when he says, I have suffered the loss of all things, it's often translated, maybe even more often translated in the New Testament as the word forfeit. I have forfeited all things. And it's the exact same word that Jesus uses in Mark chapter 8, verse 36. Says this, for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and here's our word forfeit his soul? That it seems quite likely that Paul is here and he's bringing to his mind the realities of the teachings of Jesus. And Paul has experienced firsthand personally in real life the implications, the gravity, the pain, even the agony of what it means to follow after Jesus. But here is Paul, and he's saying, I will not sacrifice my soul to gain the world. In fact, I will count the entire world as lost. I will count all of it and forfeit every accolade and every achievement and every privilege that I would have Christ, that I could take hold of Christ, that I could know Christ, and that I could enjoy him. See, for Paul, he recognizes that it can fulfill that success can feel like surgery because it requires the right definition. He's helping us to consider something that most of us don't think about. All of us are operating with a definition of success. Maybe you can't write it down, maybe you don't have a bulletin board up with family success in your home. Maybe you couldn't articulate it even if I asked you, but but all of us do. It's shaping your life, it's shaping your decisions, it's shaping what you chase and what you sacrifice and what you're willing to lose. But the truth is, is you don't have to try to lose those things, do you? You're gonna lose stuff. You're gonna lose people that matter to you, you're gonna lose things that matter to you, you're gonna you're gonna lose opportunities that matter to you. All of us are going to experience loss, but our definition of success determines how it is that we experience those losses. In fact, our definition of success will decide for us what losses are acceptable and what losses are unacceptable. That's what Paul's getting at when he says, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as rubbish, as garbage, as house garbage. I render them completely without value. That it's those losses in his mind, they were losses, but they weren't failures. They were successes. They were just successes in the same way that surgery is a success. In order that I may gain Christ, he says. Those losses didn't define him because for Paul, Christ had already in his life redefined what success was. Before Christ, it was all about achievement. Before Christ, it was building up his resume. It was being a Hebrew of Hebrews, it was being a zealous persecutor, it was it was measuring up in all of the eyes of his culture and all the eyes of his society. But after Christ, success is simply being found in him and going deeper and deeper with him, as deep in him as you could possibly go. See, that's the shift, Orchard Church. That's the shift. That's the shift away from anxiety and into purpose. That's the shift away from aimlessness and into significance. That's the shift away from spinning out of control and spending all of your life striving and stepping into something that you know, you know is purposeful and intentional. When the definition begins to move from I succeed if I prove myself, to I succeed if I come to Christ, you begin to recognize that now, with that definition, so long as you are living on mission, you can't you can't fail. That if following Jesus costs you a promotion, you didn't fail. If obedience makes life harder, you didn't lose. If you're overlooked and misunderstood because you have Christ, you are still successful, even if that success feels a lot like a successful surgery. In fact, in fact, the momentary pain can lead you to deeper reliance upon Christ, and deeper reliance upon Christ only adds to greater success in your life now by your new definition. So for Paul, suffering isn't an enemy to success, it isn't an obstacle to success. Suffering actually becomes a means to our success. Recently, you guys know that we've we've moved and we were going through some boxes and unpacking everything. And I came to this box, when I opened it up, it was filled with all of my old trophies and certificates from high school. And when I was looking at them, I allowed myself to go back and remember how life and death all of those things felt back then, right? It just felt like on awards day that it was judgment day, right? Like I was trying in some way to prove that I was smart or prove that I was popular, or prove that I belonged, or to maybe impress my mom and dad, whatever the thing was. And so you would go and you would wait for your name to be called, and if it was, you'd you know, you kind of strut up there a little bit, but then you'd go back and there'd be another one, and there would be another one. And even though I had gotten a few, the ones I remember thinking the most about were the ones that I'd missed out on, the ones I had not gotten. And so I remember all of the anxiety that I had, but then I had a realization. I had not opened that box in 20 years. 20 years. It had in the moment, it felt like my life was hanging in the balance. But 20 years later, it feels completely irrelevant and insignificant. So, you know what I did? Y'all don't tell my mom if she comes into town. I threw them all in the trash. I threw them all in the trash. I don't need that stuff anymore. That'll teach us something that Paul's trying to say. Today's trophies are just tomorrow's garbage, y'all. Today's trophies are just tomorrow's garbage. That's why Paul calls them rubbish. But the problem is that so many of us are still living like those trophies are life and death. We're chasing recognition and chasing approval and chasing achievement. But what we're actually chasing is the answer to a single question. Do I matter? Am I actually successful? See, my guess is that many of us here this morning have lived our lives. No matter what our bank accounts say, no matter what our colleagues would say, no matter what our parents would say, we're living our lives with a gnawing sense of failure that has haunted us all of our lives. Because we're measuring ourselves by how many trophies it is that we can accumulate. It's a definition of success that we inherited, but y'all, if we're not careful, it's a definition of success that we're gonna hand down to our kids too. Today's trophies are tomorrow's garbage. Can that set into our hearts? Can that reframe our lives? Winning these trophies, getting these certificates, gaining those accolades is not success. Being found in Christ is success. Going deeper with Christ is to become more successful. And y'all, here's the good news of the gospel. Here's the good news of the gospel that finds you in that sense of gnawing failure and comes to lift you up. Here's the bomb that is meant to come and to comfort that exposed nerve that's been there since childhood. If that's what success is, then that means that every life with every disadvantage and every disappointment is still capable of complete and total success. That's the death of the gnawing sense of failure that's been trailing you since you were a child, is to come to Christ and say, You are my success. You are my hope. You are my esteem. You are my treasure, you are all I need. And to come to rest in Him. See, brothers and sisters, how these questions shape our lives. The first question was, what is your treasure? The second question is, what is success? The last question I want us to see this morning is, what are your expectations? What are your expectations? Christians are the only people on earth who can actually afford to be realists. And it's because we have accepted two realities already. On one hand, we have already accepted that this world is not as it ought to be. We have already accepted that this world is filled with disorder and chaos and pain and problems and brokenness and sin. We have already accepted that there is gonna be all kinds of things that we don't like, all kinds of experiences that are gonna hurt us. We've already accepted that. But we've also accepted that this world is not as it's gonna be. That Jesus is making this new, that Jesus is bringing about a redemption and he is gonna rule over a new heavens and a new earth, and that all of us who are found in it are gonna rule with him and we're gonna be satisfied with him. So we aren't the kinds of people that have to go and stick our heads in the sand and pretend like reality isn't reality. We aren't the kinds of people that have to freak out over the news. We aren't the kinds of people that have to try to act like something's different than it is, or that it doesn't hurt when it does hurt. No, we are the kinds of people that expect chaos. We are the kinds of people that expect brokenness. We are the kinds of people that expect disorder. And so Paul is using his story here to set the expectations for the Philippians in a similar way. So he's setting for them these two primary expectations that they should have as they begin to live their wife with Christ. The first expectation, and this one's super encouraging, is that they should expect to die. They should expect to die. You know, surgery taught me that the wrong expectations will ruin your life. The first major surgery I had, it was an emergency situation. I mean, they have me on a gurney and they're rolling me back to the OR and they're reading me all the patient rights like, will you accept blood in the case of emergency? Will you do this? Will you do that? Will you sign here? And they're just, they flip me over on the table and they just do it. And man, I woke up, y'all. I woke up and it was worse than anything I'd ever, I had never been in my life where I couldn't take medicine and just feel better, right? But I woke up and all of a sudden I was I felt like I was getting weaker and not stronger. For the first time in my life, I felt like things might not get better as they were going on. And the longer time went on, the more afraid I became, and then the more frustrated I became, and then the angrier I became, and then the more depressed that I became. And when I didn't just get better, y'all, I'm telling you, it felt like my life was over. Felt like my life was over. But I had a second major surgery a few years after that, and the experience was completely different. I went in, and the surgeon said, Look, Cody, here's how it's gonna happen. You're gonna wake up on the first day and you're gonna think, oh my Lord, I'm dying. I'm dying. So that's normal. He said, second, third day are gonna be worse than the first day. All right. He said, after a week, you're gonna feel like a person, a human being. He said, after a month, you're gonna feel a little bit like yourself. He said, a year is gonna go by, I'm gonna release you, you're gonna go play golf again, and you're gonna have days when you forget it happened altogether. So you know what happened? I woke up on the first day, I thought, oh my Lord, I'm gonna die. But he told me, he told me to expect this. I'm okay. I didn't freak out, right? Second, third day were worse than the first day, just like he said. Then all of a sudden I woke up one day and I didn't feel good, but I felt like a human being, right? And then I walked to the end of the road. And then all of a sudden, I started feeling like myself again and had my personality back. And then, sure enough, a year to the day after my surgery, I went and I hit a golf ball on the driving range, right? You know what happened? I didn't get I didn't get bitter, I didn't get frustrated, I had hard days. What happened is it actually served to strengthen my resolve because what I recognized is because I had the expectations set for me was that I was on schedule, not off schedule, even though it was hard. That's the difference here. Paul is here and he is setting the expectations for us for what it actually feels like and looks like to follow after Jesus. He says, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection. How? By sharing in his sufferings and becoming like him in his death. That Paul's goal here is to know Christ. But he understands that the process of knowing Christ means struggling like Christ. It means suffering like Christ. See, and Paul's goal here of attaining the resurrection, he realizes that the resurrection doesn't come instead of suffering. No, for the Christian, the resurrection comes to us through suffering, that I may attain the resurrection from the dead. This is the goal, right? That he's sharing with us his goal. Well, how are you going to accomplish this, Paul? He tells us just this before that, right? He says, I'm going to accomplish this how? By becoming like him in his death. That's how I'm going to attain the resurrection. The same path that leads to the cross, Paul has discovered, is the one that leads us actually to life. So we should expect to die. But through that process, we should expect to come to know Christ deeply, actually, and personally. The word know here is not a word that's used to know things in an academic sense or in an intellectual sense. It's not the idea of, you know, I have all the facts about Jesus, and so I can go and I can pass a multiple choice test the way all of us could about George Washington. The word know here is a word used to describe an intimate knowledge, an experiential knowledge, just the way that a husband knows his wife, the way a family knows one another. It's to know someone through experience. And so it's not about passing a test on Jesus, it's about knowing that Jesus is sustaining you when you feel excluded at school. It's about knowing that Jesus is providing for you when you have to put down your dream in order to make sure that your family has what they need. It's knowing that Jesus is comforting you when you have to go and lay into the ground your husband or wife of 50 years. It's knowing him. It's not just knowing him, it's knowing him, knowing him personally, knowing him deeply, knowing him by experience. You see, Paul is recognizing that we come to know Jesus best through the moments that cost us the most. And if all of us will slow down and think, what we'll realize is this is always how we come to know best, those who we can trust the most. I've talked a lot around it, not as much at it, because I don't really want to come up here and tell you my story all the time. But in 2016, I was in Africa when my intestines ruptured. John was actually with me. My intestines ruptured. As a result of that, I experienced a dire circumstance called peritonitis. So by the time I got back to the United States, I was on the verge of organ failure. And I go to the doctor, and when they discover all of this, they say, Cody, you are within 24 hours, like you will not survive the next 24 hours. We've got to operate, and we've got to operate right now. Now I've always been an extremely independent, energetic, passionate, zealous person, like the kind of person that you really just don't, you know, tell to sit in a chair and not move. But when I woke up from that surgery, I was incapacitated, y'all. Incapacitated. Like I wasn't able to put my clothes on. I wasn't able to bathe myself. I wasn't able to get myself out of a chair. I wasn't able to stay along with my kids. It was humiliating. It was emasculating, and this wasn't a day. This was this was weeks and weeks and weeks, and there I am, and I am at the lowest of lows. And it was in that moment that I learned how much Megan actually loved me. See, I'd always known it. I'd always known about it. But that's when I came to know it. She cared for me. Day and night. She waited on me, hand and foot. She slept in the chair on the couch beside my chair, never letting me out of her sight. She she treated me. So sorry. She treated me with a kind of dignity that I felt like I had lost. A kind of kindness and respect that I didn't feel like I deserved. Or that I was worthy of. When I would want to quit, she would keep me going. When I was out of patience, she was my patience. And it was in that moment that I learned the character of her love. That I learned how much I could trust her. I learned of her love through the sharing of suffering. And Paul is saying, this is how we come to know Christ. This is how we come to know Christ. That this should be what we expect to know Him, and that this knowledge through suffering shapes our lives. So we don't have to run away from our lives. And we don't have to run away from bad news. And we don't have to run away from hard times. We don't have to drink away reality. We can face it. We can face it because we know that what Paul writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 17 is true. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory that is beyond all comparison. See, we as Christians expect the cross. But we expect the cross already assured of a crown. We can face whatever comes tomorrow today because we already know what happens tomorrow. Tomorrow is resurrection. Let me ask you those three questions again. So that you can answer them from your own life. Where is your treasure? Honestly, where is your treasure? What is success? And what are your expectations? Let me pray for us.