Opportunity Costs

Philippians 3:1-11
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
May 25th, 2008

In economics, there is a fundamental principle that helps entrepreneurs,

CEO's, and committees make decisions concerning the use of resources. The

principle is known as opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are those hidden

costs that don’t show up on the price tag – the cost of the item itself PLUS the

costs of what you had to give up in order to buy or produce the item.

An example of this would be say you wanted to buy a new bike to ride to

work or school every day. You settle on two bikes that are about one hundred

bucks apart in price, but you are fifty bucks short of more expensive one. If you

buy the lower priced one, you have enough money to take it home right away

and buy a helmet and saddle bags. But you also get a lower quality bike with

only a six month warranty, which means after that period you would have to pay

for any repairs. That's a hidden cost you have to figure into your selection.

If you wait a couple weeks you can come back when you have the

money for the more expensive bike with a two year warranty, but you don't get

the helmet and the saddle bags, plus you have to figure in the cost of the extra

wear and tear your shoes take by walking the distance to work or school. Or you

have to figure in the cost of bus fare. Either way, you have to consider the

additional costs to you above and beyond the fifty bucks needed to buy the more

expensive bike. So as you can see, everything costs a little bit more than what
the price tag says it costs. The cost is affected by our choices. Paul talks a bit

about this in our passage this morning.

In the Letter to the Philippians Paul has been addressing both the internal

and external strife present in the church so it is no surp[rise when he sets the

warning bells off with some pretty strong language. Look at vv. 1-2.

Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to

write the same things to you again and it is a safeguard for you. Watch out
for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.

Paul is warning his beloved friends about his most hated enemy. He had

to defend his gospel against them in Galatia and Corinth, so now he prepares the

Philippian church ahead of time so that they can stand against the claims of the

Judaizers. Judaizers were Jews who accepted Christ's teachings, but believed

that full acceptance before God required circumcision and Law observance –

they were necessary for salvation. In other words, according to them, salvation

was not by grace alone.

What do think Paul means when calls the Judaizers "men who do evil,

those mutilators of the flesh"? The reference here is circumcision; Paul is

pointing out that those that call for circumcision are asking for a worthless rite.

For them, circumcision means nothing because the new covenant is in the blood

of Jesus Christ, not the blood of the foreskin.

You see, the danger lies in being able to do something to own the

salvation given to us. Our bent for independence from God pushes us to think in

terms of what we can do to earn the Father's favor. We want to believe that we
are somehow responsible for choosing Christ. That somewhere in some corner

of our hearts there is this place of pure goodness that suddenly wells up and

says "Yes!" to Christ. We want to believe that we are holy, obedient children. We

obey the letter of the Law so that we can say on that day, "We made it!" When in

fact, without the working of the Holy Spirit on the inner man, we would have run

away.

This is the problem, says Paul, with teaching that we must add our own

obedience to grace for salvation. It lures us in to thinking we have a

righteousness all our own before God, when in fact without the intercession of

Christ before the throne, without the groanings of the Holy Spirit too deep to

understand, our every effort is like menstrual rags before God; filthy and useless

for anything but to be thrown in the fire.

We cannot put our confidence in the flesh, in what we can accomplish

through your own efforts! Paul says, place your confidence in Jesus Christ and

him alone. Only he can save. Only he can satisfy. Make your boast in Christ

Jesus, not yourself. Boasting in yourself is useless and I ought to know. For if

anyone has a reason to boast it is me. Picking up in v.5.

....circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe

of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for
zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.

Paul runs off a pedigree that few can rival. He is no johnny-come-lately to

the God of Israel. He is a man who would make any Jewish mother proud! In

fact, one might argue Paul as saying, "If anyone in the world knows about these
things, I would." Paul places his heritage out there as a challenge. He wants the

Philippians to know that if anyone comes to them claiming to know a better way,

they need to check the person's credentials against Paul's.

I want to take a quick look at this pedigree because there is much in it

that escapes our notice if we don't pay attention. The first thing you notice is that

Paul's life is marked by obedience. His parents, in obedience to the law, had him

circumcised on the eighth day. He is of Abraham's physical seed, and of

Benjamin to boot. Remember, it was the tribe of Benjamin that stayed faithful to

the throne of David when the nation split. He was a Pharisee which meant he

not only obeyed the written law the Torah, but also the oral law, the tradition

passed down known as the Talmud. In the Talmud, the law of Moses was

interpreted to the nth degree, leading to greatly detailed instructions on how to

obey the law. His zeal for the law and the God of Israel led to him persecuting of

the church. In fact, Paul was empowered to enforce the will of the high priest

against the church. In all things, Paul obeyed. He was righteous in the eyes of

man. But, Paul says in v.7.

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of
Christ.

You know, in my Christian life, I have so blithely let this verse roll off my

tongue without really thinking of the cost Paul is speaking about here. There

were an immense amount of opportunity costs involved in Paul's conversion.

Personal costs. We read this and we think, "Wow, Paul gave up a life of religious
rigor to come into the glorious freedom of the children of God. Yeah, he gave up

all he knew, but look at what he gained."

But to read this passage that simplistically is not only to de-value what

Paul gave up, but what he gave it for. Think about it moment. In considering the

pedigree he just rambled off as loss in order to gain Christ, he gave up more than

just his credentials as a Jew, he gave up his identity. He gave up his family, his

friends. His becoming a Christian ensured that they would never speak to him

again. In fact, he now became the one they hunted rather than hunting

Christians alongside them. He gave up his future as a rabbi among his people.

He surrendered great honor as a Pharisee. In the eyes of his people, he gave up

his place in the people of Abraham and became one of the "dogs." What is

interesting is that his sacrifice went way beyond simply giving up his identity as a

Jew among the Jews. He also gave it up among the Christians. Paul became

the apostle to the Gentiles! He became disliked even among the brethren

because he was taking his pearls and casting them before the swine! So

everything that Paul lived and breathed for he gave up, he considered it loss!

Why? For the sake of Christ; his singular passion, he gave up everything.

Now, I want to go out on a limb here and say a little something about

Paul's abandoning everything for the sake of Christ. We have a saying that "We

want to have our cake and eat it too." If there has ever been a person who could

have had the cake of salvation and made it sweeter by adding the righteousness

of his own efforts it was Paul. But Paul recognized that you can not have the
gospel PLUS anything and get salvation. You cannot have Christ PLUS anything

and know the fellowship of the Spirit and peace with God. You must abandon

everything else. You must rely on Christ alone. Trust him alone. In the words of

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die."

In a very real since we must lose our identity completely. With Paul we

must be able to say "I am crucified with Christ, therefore I no longer live, but

Jesus Christ now lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the

Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Beloved in Christ, it is

no small matter to belong to the Lord of Lords. It means complete and

unrestrained identification with him. It means that we must count all we consider

most dear to us -- our homes, our families, our jobs, our country, our church --

everything that we use to identify ourselves as rubbish in light of Christ. Now let

me qualify this by saying all of these things are a part of what God calls us to

when he brings us into his Kingdom, but we must remember that our first and

ultimate allegiance is to the Lamb.

Paul understood this and so, he continues his thought in vv. 8-9.

What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the

surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I
have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, 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 is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that
comes from God and is by faith.

I want us to recognize a few things that are important for understanding

this passage. The first concerns ""the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ
Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things." The knowing that Paul is

speaking of here is not the mystic sort of knowing of the eastern religions. No,

the knowing he is talking about is the deep, intimate knowing of the Hebrews --

the sort of knowing one has concerning his spouse or his family. One comes to

know them because of the time spent with them, there is a shared history. So

each knows how the other will respond to different situations.

You see, when Paul thinks of Christ, he has the God of the Hebrews in

mind. For him, Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the

God of Jacob. In the eyes of the apostle he has a long history with God because

of his being born into the chosen nation of God. He has heard the stories over

an over and has told them himself concerning how God made a covenant with

Abraham, and then Isaac, and then Jacob. He remembers how God delivered

the Israelites out of slavery and led them through the wilderness into the

Promised Land. He knows how God has chastened Israel through exile and

captivity, and yet that God always kept a remnant faithful to him and so himself

kept the covenant even when Israel refused to obey. It is this God that met him

on the road to Damascus and changed his life forever. Of this God Paul says

"There is nothing greater than knowing my God. For his sake, I have given up

everything that once mattered to me and have considered them nothing more

than filthy, fetid trash." This is the God Paul knows, our God. And he knows him

intimately. Why? Because he has a history with God. Let me just ask before I

move on. What is your history with God? When did it begin? Think about it a
little bit. Think about how your history with God affects your knowing God and

your faith in him.

So Paul speaks of abandoning the life he knew in order to know Christ

intimately and to be found in him. There are two things I believe Paul wants us to

recognize, the first of which we have already to discussed to some extent. That

is, Paul compares the righteousness that comes by faith and that by Torah

observance and finds the latter seriously lacking. It is lacking because it does

not have the power to put us in right-standing with God. In Romans 8:3-4 Paul

writes, "For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the

sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son ....in order that the righteous

requirements of the law be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful

nature but according to the Spirit." Only the righteousness of Jesus Christ,

imputed to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit – who circumcises our hearts

-- can put us in right-standing with God. That is why back in v.3 Paul speaks of

the believers in Jesus Christ as the real circumcision. We cannot make

ourselves part of the covenant people, we must come by God's Spirit.

The second thing I believe Paul wants us to recognize is that our

attainment is both present and future, now and not yet. Being found in Christ

means that we enjoy the encouragement of being united with him, the comfort of

his love, and the fellowship of his Spirit. Yet we also know that what God started

he will finish. So Paul says, consider all things loss in the glorious hope of being
found in Christ on that day -- the day of his return. He elaborates a little more on

this in vv. 10-11.

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the
fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and
so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Can you hear Paul’s passion here? He wants to know Christ – not just

as a rabbi and or good moral teacher but he wants to know him in his death AND

in the power of the resurrection. That means knowing the awesome power that

raised Christ from the dead at work in his own life. It means being granted to

suffer for the sake of Christ and having that common ground with Jesus of

suffering for the sake of others. It means living in hope that as Christ was raised

from the dead so he will be. And this, he said in v.1, is reason to rejoice.

The nice thing about this message is there is no need for a closing

illustration. Paul's provided all the illustration we need. For the sake of Christ

and proclaiming the gospel, he became the enemy of his own people. For our

sake, Christ humbled himself and took the sin that made us an enemy of God

and paid the penalty. If we are not moved by what we read here to love and

obey Christ, to rejoice in him, then we ought to examine ourselves, especially

since we will be celebrating communion next Sunday. We need to think hard on

whether we consider everything as rubbish that we may gain Christ or if we’re

just going through the religious motions. It's so easy to put confidence in the

flesh. Don't do it. Watch out for it. Let's center our lives on Jesus Christ, living a

life worthy of the gospel.