Pressing on to the Goal
(Claiming your Spiritual Style Part 2)
Philippians 3:4b-14
I think perhaps one of the most dangerous things in life is the human tendency to rest on our laurels. We can learn and accomplish great things, but then once we’re there we get comfortable, with where we are at… and we coast… spending the rest of our time trying to re-live or re-capture that glory. We often see this in the entertainment industry, most tragically with individuals who become stars in their childhood or teenage years. They reach great heights of popularity and success in the early years of their life, but are not well equipped to be able to handle the real-life consequences when their time in the sun fades. It’s been in the news recently, but it’s nothing new. Even the Little Rascals had their struggles when they grew up, several of them died well before their time in tragic circumstances, and they pre-date all of us!
It happens in churches too… you’ve likely heard me tell the story of one church that I worked in that sought to recapture the glory days of the 1950’s. when they literally had hundreds of children in their Sunday School… largely thanks to the reality of the post-war Baby Boom. So enamoured with their past were they that they ended up spending $15,000 on a program that was fraudulently sold to them as being the magic bullet that would restore the glory days. Ironically, it actually did more to accelerate their decline. It had completely removed the children from the worship service, and as such they didn’t feel a part of things and they didn’t want to come. It also used a massive amount of volunteers, and was burning them out at a rate faster than I have ever experienced at any church. When I was there, my role ended up bringing this program to an end, and trying to salvage what was left into something workable with what was realistic, that looked forward, not to the past glory days. When I checked out their website this week, I was pleased to see that 10 years later, the Sunday School has managed to bounce back and has stabilized.
And then there’s Paul… and it’s such a wonderful contrast to all of this. He speaks of his own accomplishments in life, and yet he is not content to sit on his laurels. He tells the church in Philippi that he has a lot to brag about, but he doesn’t because he’s not one to bask in the glory of past accomplishments, far from it. He talks about constantly “pressing on to the goal” and has some interesting and rather crude things to say about his own past accomplishments.
But what does this have to do with Claiming your Spiritual Style? A lot more than we realize… because as we discover, learning and growing in faith is not an end product, but an ongoing process...
Two weeks ago, I put up a slide showing a three colour image as a symbol for the Trinity in how God choose to reveal to us. It’s called the “Trinitarian” Compass. For those of you who weren’t here, roughly put, Green as God as creator, Red as God in Jesus Christ, and Blue as God as revealed in the Holy Spirit. Every one of us will tend to lean towards one colour or another in the way in which we explore and experience our faith. Not all of us lean in the same way… and each of us is subtly different in how we understand and express our faith. As I mentioned two weeks ago, the Rev. Christian Schwarz has described nine different styles to show the different ways in which we express our faith. Two in each colour, and one on the borderline between the colours. It’s not definitive to be sure… but part of the method to the madness is to show how some styles are opposites to each other. It helps me understand why I am not comfortable in Pentecostal church, but put me in a lecture hall with Biblical Scholars and I am really in my element.
The danger for me is to simply stay on the Green side of things… in fact, the real danger is when we become too comfortable or complacent in our own element, and we begin sliding away from the middle. With any one of these styles, slide too far in one direction, and we lose our focus, and believe that our perspective is the only correct one. We become so out of balance that we begin to subconsciously worship our own Spiritual style, and not God. We become complacent and lose sight of the goal.
Knowing and claiming our own spiritual style is only the very first step on what really is a life-long journey. Ultimately, the goal that we are striving for is a sense of balance with God at the center of it all. After all, the totality of God is at the center of these colours. When you combine Red, Green, and Blue light together, you get white light… Our own personal style is our starting point, and will shape the direction we take, but ultimately, we’re seeking balance in a healthy relationship with God. To grow in our Spiritual life, we can learn from the strengths of the other styles to improve… and never be content to let ourselves get too comfortable with where we are.
I think that’s what Paul was after in his letter to Philippians… here he was in prison, with a lot more time on his hand to think about what really matters in his life. Paul himself was a going concern, a deep thinker, someone who was very much concerned about his faith being grounded and real. When working with the early church communities, many of the typical human problems would arise. One of the most common would be about status and personalities… and frankly that’s a constant within our churches. Not everybody is going to get along… but Paul was particularly concerned about how one’s personal accomplishments, one’s status and position could have as a negative impact on the life of the church community.
So what does he do? He invokes his own personal accomplishments and status, reminding the people that his credibility is rock solid… particularly in his life within the Jewish traditions. This was particularly important to the Philippian community, because there were many who believe one needed to become Jewish first in order to be Christian. Paul himself, who is Jewish by all standards, and has all the credibility to be well recognized. He calls himself a Pharisee quite proudly, when it comes to the law, he has sympathies with the Zealots, and even goes so far as to identify himself as blameless under the law…
Wow… that’s awfully presumptive…
…but then watch what he does. After quickly establishing his credibility, he demolishes it with just a few words. “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” He even does so far as to describe all of his gains as rubbish… well… in the original Greek, he’s actually much more crude… So crude in fact that I would get complaints if I actually use the best equivalent word in English. I’ll let you think about that for a moment, rather than stepping in it myself.
Paul establishes his credibility with his short list, and then immediately puts it aside to say that the most important thing in his life is striving for what lies ahead. It is also curious as to how he talks about his own faith, his own spiritual life. Keep in mind that this is a leader in the early church, one whose writings were so foundational to the Christian faith that they became sacred. Yet when Paul writes about himself in verse twelve, listen to what he says: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached this goal; but I press on to make it my own.”
Paul is careful to say that he hasn’t got it all. There is still more. There’s more to learn, more to explore, more to experience… and the core reason that he presses on is not because he’s trying to earn favour with Jesus… but because of what Christ has already done for us. It is out of a deep sense of gratitude for what
If maybe I haven’t been clear before, that’s something that we don’t really highlight enough in our churches. Paul’s personal faith is far more accessible than we realize. As we often do, we put him on a pedestal, thinking that he’s got it all figured out… and yet when we read a passage like this, we realize that Paul is merely a companion on our own journey of faith. He’s striving for something more, for a better balance, for a deeper relationship with God, not to earn it, but because of what God has already done in Jesus Christ. So focused on this, that he is willing to forget about all of his personal past glories, and strive for something more and better. Maybe, when we find ourselves tempted to rest on our own laurels, that maybe we need to go have a walk with Paul, and press on to the goal.
Amen.
Philippians 3:4b-14
I think perhaps one of the most dangerous things in life is the human tendency to rest on our laurels. We can learn and accomplish great things, but then once we’re there we get comfortable, with where we are at… and we coast… spending the rest of our time trying to re-live or re-capture that glory. We often see this in the entertainment industry, most tragically with individuals who become stars in their childhood or teenage years. They reach great heights of popularity and success in the early years of their life, but are not well equipped to be able to handle the real-life consequences when their time in the sun fades. It’s been in the news recently, but it’s nothing new. Even the Little Rascals had their struggles when they grew up, several of them died well before their time in tragic circumstances, and they pre-date all of us!
It happens in churches too… you’ve likely heard me tell the story of one church that I worked in that sought to recapture the glory days of the 1950’s. when they literally had hundreds of children in their Sunday School… largely thanks to the reality of the post-war Baby Boom. So enamoured with their past were they that they ended up spending $15,000 on a program that was fraudulently sold to them as being the magic bullet that would restore the glory days. Ironically, it actually did more to accelerate their decline. It had completely removed the children from the worship service, and as such they didn’t feel a part of things and they didn’t want to come. It also used a massive amount of volunteers, and was burning them out at a rate faster than I have ever experienced at any church. When I was there, my role ended up bringing this program to an end, and trying to salvage what was left into something workable with what was realistic, that looked forward, not to the past glory days. When I checked out their website this week, I was pleased to see that 10 years later, the Sunday School has managed to bounce back and has stabilized.
And then there’s Paul… and it’s such a wonderful contrast to all of this. He speaks of his own accomplishments in life, and yet he is not content to sit on his laurels. He tells the church in Philippi that he has a lot to brag about, but he doesn’t because he’s not one to bask in the glory of past accomplishments, far from it. He talks about constantly “pressing on to the goal” and has some interesting and rather crude things to say about his own past accomplishments.
But what does this have to do with Claiming your Spiritual Style? A lot more than we realize… because as we discover, learning and growing in faith is not an end product, but an ongoing process...
Two weeks ago, I put up a slide showing a three colour image as a symbol for the Trinity in how God choose to reveal to us. It’s called the “Trinitarian” Compass. For those of you who weren’t here, roughly put, Green as God as creator, Red as God in Jesus Christ, and Blue as God as revealed in the Holy Spirit. Every one of us will tend to lean towards one colour or another in the way in which we explore and experience our faith. Not all of us lean in the same way… and each of us is subtly different in how we understand and express our faith. As I mentioned two weeks ago, the Rev. Christian Schwarz has described nine different styles to show the different ways in which we express our faith. Two in each colour, and one on the borderline between the colours. It’s not definitive to be sure… but part of the method to the madness is to show how some styles are opposites to each other. It helps me understand why I am not comfortable in Pentecostal church, but put me in a lecture hall with Biblical Scholars and I am really in my element.
The danger for me is to simply stay on the Green side of things… in fact, the real danger is when we become too comfortable or complacent in our own element, and we begin sliding away from the middle. With any one of these styles, slide too far in one direction, and we lose our focus, and believe that our perspective is the only correct one. We become so out of balance that we begin to subconsciously worship our own Spiritual style, and not God. We become complacent and lose sight of the goal.
Knowing and claiming our own spiritual style is only the very first step on what really is a life-long journey. Ultimately, the goal that we are striving for is a sense of balance with God at the center of it all. After all, the totality of God is at the center of these colours. When you combine Red, Green, and Blue light together, you get white light… Our own personal style is our starting point, and will shape the direction we take, but ultimately, we’re seeking balance in a healthy relationship with God. To grow in our Spiritual life, we can learn from the strengths of the other styles to improve… and never be content to let ourselves get too comfortable with where we are.
I think that’s what Paul was after in his letter to Philippians… here he was in prison, with a lot more time on his hand to think about what really matters in his life. Paul himself was a going concern, a deep thinker, someone who was very much concerned about his faith being grounded and real. When working with the early church communities, many of the typical human problems would arise. One of the most common would be about status and personalities… and frankly that’s a constant within our churches. Not everybody is going to get along… but Paul was particularly concerned about how one’s personal accomplishments, one’s status and position could have as a negative impact on the life of the church community.
So what does he do? He invokes his own personal accomplishments and status, reminding the people that his credibility is rock solid… particularly in his life within the Jewish traditions. This was particularly important to the Philippian community, because there were many who believe one needed to become Jewish first in order to be Christian. Paul himself, who is Jewish by all standards, and has all the credibility to be well recognized. He calls himself a Pharisee quite proudly, when it comes to the law, he has sympathies with the Zealots, and even goes so far as to identify himself as blameless under the law…
Wow… that’s awfully presumptive…
…but then watch what he does. After quickly establishing his credibility, he demolishes it with just a few words. “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” He even does so far as to describe all of his gains as rubbish… well… in the original Greek, he’s actually much more crude… So crude in fact that I would get complaints if I actually use the best equivalent word in English. I’ll let you think about that for a moment, rather than stepping in it myself.
Paul establishes his credibility with his short list, and then immediately puts it aside to say that the most important thing in his life is striving for what lies ahead. It is also curious as to how he talks about his own faith, his own spiritual life. Keep in mind that this is a leader in the early church, one whose writings were so foundational to the Christian faith that they became sacred. Yet when Paul writes about himself in verse twelve, listen to what he says: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached this goal; but I press on to make it my own.”
Paul is careful to say that he hasn’t got it all. There is still more. There’s more to learn, more to explore, more to experience… and the core reason that he presses on is not because he’s trying to earn favour with Jesus… but because of what Christ has already done for us. It is out of a deep sense of gratitude for what
If maybe I haven’t been clear before, that’s something that we don’t really highlight enough in our churches. Paul’s personal faith is far more accessible than we realize. As we often do, we put him on a pedestal, thinking that he’s got it all figured out… and yet when we read a passage like this, we realize that Paul is merely a companion on our own journey of faith. He’s striving for something more, for a better balance, for a deeper relationship with God, not to earn it, but because of what God has already done in Jesus Christ. So focused on this, that he is willing to forget about all of his personal past glories, and strive for something more and better. Maybe, when we find ourselves tempted to rest on our own laurels, that maybe we need to go have a walk with Paul, and press on to the goal.
Amen.
Comments