Apostles Church

Gain. In this passage, Paul tells us that Christ is the Ultimate Gain – the greatest pursuit of life. You have to define what is the ultimate gain and be careful, because how you define it will chart the course of your life. Paul is trying to get us to see that Christ is gain, the surpassing the value; the great treasure. He shows us that Jesus is our Righteousness, our only hope of being in the right with God and that Jesus is the greatest Joy – he is our only confidence before God and he is our only hope for contentment. Three exhortations.

Christ is our Righteousness. Our only hope of God’s approval and acceptance is that Christ would stand in our place; that he would stand in our place and bear our judgment and that he would stand in our place and be our righteousness. This is the point Paul is making. Our righteousness is not sufficient. We need perfect righteousness and that is only found in Christ. This confronts the self-righteous and religious. It also comforts the irreligious and rebel in shame. Christ is sufficient. 

Christ our Joy. Christ is the surpassing value. Suffered the loss of all things and count them skubala. Knowing him in personal relationship and experiencing the power of His risen life is the greatest gain. This experience of knowing Christ far surpasses any comfort, pleasure or desire that can be found outside of Him. It is not simply that one is right and the other pleasures are wrong, but that Christ is surpassing, far better – knowing Christ is deeply satisfying and all pleasures fall short of the fullness and sufficiency of the joy that Christ gives.
    This is the key to experiencing the life that God envisions for you. This is the key to overcoming self-focused living and sinful patterns. Lust greed, envy and every sin is the pursuit of a pleasure and when Christ outshines every pleasure and when knowing him outweighs the joy of any other fulfilled desire, then those sinful patterns lose their power; those desires weaken and you pursue Christ with more focus and intensity than you have ever pursued anything else in your life. We don’t overcome sin by trying to stop – simply by moving away from those sins, but by moving toward Christ; not simply by denying sin but by enjoying Christ, experiencing and delighting in all he is for you. To you who really want to experience the life that God has for you in Christ, the problem is not that there are just too many temptations, too many pleasures in this life wooing us away from Christ as if Christ were an ugly woman in a room full of supermodels. The problem is that we fail to see that all those pleasures are inferior to the fullness of joy that is found in Christ who is the surpassing value. When we choose any pleasure, comfort or desire over Christ we are trading in the surpassing value we were created to know in our daily experience for Skubala – in the words of Jeremiah, we have forsaken the fountain of living water to dig for ourselves broken wells that hold no water.
    What this comes down to is reality vs. our experience. My personal experience: Christ is the greatest thing I could live for and go hard after – the uniqueness of his life, the beauty of his death, the power of his resurrection and ascension and the hope of his return prove that for me. But I don’t always experience Him as the greatest thing. I experience certain things in life as better. This is our problem – we find cash and clothes and shopping and TV and movies and sex and art and food and internet to be better than Jesus. So we live for these things and go hard after them and rob ourselves of the surpassing value, of the greater treasure, the joy indescribable. These things are gifts from God that are to be enjoyed, but not to be ultimate. They are to make us think Great things about Christ who has provided them for us. But we make them ultimate. Augustine described it like a bride who is given a wedding ring by her groom and remains fixated on the ring and says, “I have no need of him, I have this ring.” Don’t make the gifts ultimate because when they become ultimate they turn on us and steal our attention away from what is Ultimate. We need God to open our eyes and see the surpassing value of Jesus and then lead us into the experience of knowing and enjoying Christ as our greatest treasure. This is why your devotional life is so important – to think upon Christ and see him in the word and feel the weight of his person and his salvation causing your heart to explode with joy and outshining any competing pleasure that would seek to draw you away from him.

Some of us are in verse 7 and some of us are in verse 8. Counted (v7) - past tense refers to conversion. Paul suffered great loss when he came to Christ. Count (v8) – present tense; daily consider Christ as the greatest treasure.