07-14-13 That I May Know Him Pt. 2

Phil. 3:8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,

Phil. 3:9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,

Phil. 3:10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death;

Phil. 3:11 in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Last week we reentered a passage

from the writings of Paul

found in the 3^rd chapter of Philippians.

Philippians is a letter written by Paul

from Rome.

He is under house arrest,

as he waits for his trial before Caesar

on charges of treason

against the Roman government.

This is Paul the power-house,

Paul the dynamic,

Paul the blast-ahead-at-any-cost

suddenly forced to sit,

to go nowhere,

to do nothing,

to just wait,

and think,

and put his life on hold.

It is a time

when Paul slows down enough

to look back over where he has been

and what he has done,

to look at the choices he has made with his life.

This is Paul sharing not just his ideas

but his heart.

He’s not teaching

so much as he is allowing us

to look inside his soul

and see what’s really there.

And in that process

we see Paul looking honestly

at what he could have had in life,

and in the Jewish community

had he not submitted to Christ,

and then setting that next

to what He has gained as a result of

Christ’s entrance into his life.

And with power,

and passion,

and clarity he proclaims

how deeply satisfied he is

with his past,

his present,

and his future with his Lord.

This is Paul telling us,

“No matter what happens,

I WIN!”

Then, to help us better appreciate

the truth of what he is saying,

he takes the concept of gaining Christ

and breaks it down into seven statements

that help us to better understand

what he’s talking about.

The first two statements,

that I my be found in Him,

and that I may obtain the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith,

we have already looked at.

The 3^rd , “that I may know Him”

we started to look at last week.

I also mentioned last week

that one of my great concerns

as we study our way through this passage

is that the power of Paul’s overall message to us

may be lost in our efforts to dissect the passage

and look at it phrase by phrase.

We are going to continue to do that,

but in the process I also want to offer us

repeated reminders

that the overall statement Paul is making

is in no way obscure

or complicated.

He is saying simply,

“What we are looking for in this life, in this world

we will find in Christ.”

In fact, he says anything else

we might achieve or obtain in life

is like a little pile of dung by comparison.

Rather vivid language

even for the Apostle Paul,

but language that communicates well

the message he wants us to hear.

Now, with that reminder,

lets pick up where we left off last week.

We saw last week

that one of the reasons Paul values

his knowledge of Christ so highly

is because the knowledge of Christ

is the key,

the doorway through which

we are able to gain true,

accurate knowledge of ourselves.

Funny how it is -

high on the list of the reasons why

people avoid God

is the fear that the knowledge of God

will bring the knowledge of our sinfulness.

Now stay with me here,

because I find this fascinating,

and if I can communicate it correctly

I think you will too.

One of Satan’s chief lies

is his creation of a caricature of God

in which God is a righteous deity

who is deeply distressed

with the amount of sinning people are doing,

a deity whose chief concern

is to find some way of decreasing

the amount of sin in the human race.

In this caricature

the good boys and girls in the world

will be loved and accepted by God,

but the naughty ones

will do well to stay away from Him

unless or until they clean up their act.

And the underlying message in all of this

is the assumption that

the one thing drawing near to God

is certain to produce is GUILTY FEELINGS

and a sense of SHAME.

That caricature could not be

farther from the truth.

Not only does the knowledge of God

not bring guilt,

it is the only thing

that has the ability to

cleanse our guilt

and our shame

and bring us true peace

with God

and with ourselves.

Paul says in Romans 5:1

Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

And we saw last week

that so much of what we are seeking to achieve

through our positions

and possessions

and power

can only be obtained through Christ.

Do you know what we really want

when we get out of bed

and look in the mirror?

We want to like the person we see there.

We want to be at peace with ourselves.

And so we frantically spend our days

attempting to achieve things

that will coax some word of affirmation and approval

from the people who surround us.

But what our spirits really long for

is the voice of our Creator

saying to us personally,

“I love you,

you are my treasured child

and I have removed your shame

and your guilt forever.

You are carefully designed

and created by Me

for Me

and I am well pleased with who you are.”

‟For I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.” Jer. 29:11

Certainly it can be of tremendous value in our healing process

when there are human voices around us

who know us deeply

and affirm us strongly,

telling us in their own ways, their own words

that they, too, delight in us as the unique creations of God we are.

But their voices can never replace the voice of our Creator.

He alone can tell our spirits the truth about ourselves

and do it in a way that brings peace and healing.

Satan says to the world,

“Stay away from Christ! He came to bring you feelings of shame and guilt”.

Jesus said,

"... I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly (Jn 10:10)... and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. "(John 8:32)

And John says,

John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name...

Only the voice of God

has the ability to silence the voices

of guilt,

and fear,

and shame within.

Now, we are going to take two more mental steps

in the business of knowing Christ

before we leave this verse,

but before we take that next step

I just want to state the obvious:

knowing Christ is not a point,

it is a lifetime calling.

In 30 years of pastoring this church

I don’t think I have ever offered you

a memorized prayer

with the suggestion that you pray it each day.

Never, that is, until this morning.

Only, before I do this

I have one request of you -

use it only if it genuinely expresses

your heart desire

each time you pray it.

I share it with you

because it has become a part of my own life

and because it helps me refocus each day

on the one thing that matters most.

The prayer is this:

“Lord, I pray that I may know you this day.”

I have been in the kingdom of God long enough

to have learned that

when I am seeing Him correctly

everything else in my world

is also in focus,

and when the world around me

begins to look terrifying

or senseless

or chaotic

or hopeless

I can be certain

I am not seeing my Lord correctly.

But my point here

is simply to state

that knowing Him is a continual,

active,

ongoing, daily process.

And so, “Lord, I pray that I may know you this day.”

And of course I know that it’s dangerous for me to suggest the prayer

because it then raises the question,

“So how do I go about getting to know Him?”

And I know all too well

the answer to that question

handed to us by our religious community.

“Read your Bible, pray every day and you’ll grow, grow, grow.”

Let me see if I can help with a little bit.

Getting to know our God

is not a religious duty we fulfill

by having daily devotions,

getting to know our Lord is most of all

our actively seeking to develop an approach to life

in which we learn how to live in His presence,

and trust His voice,

and draw strength, and hope, and healing from Him.

Now certainly for that to take place

I need an ever growing knowledge

of what my God says to me,

which means that His written Word is a vital part of life.

But from there I then seek to cultivate an awareness of His presence with me

as I go through every event of my day.

When I hurt I tell Him about the hurt and go through it with Him.

When something happens that makes me feel good

I now see Him in it and thank Him for it and enjoy it with Him.

Last week or two ago one of our men shared with us

an event in his shop

in which he threw a paint can into the trash

and then watched as this can put on the most amazing acrobatic display

that left it standing upright on his shop floor.

And then he told us how he saw his Lord

putting all of that together

just so that the two of them could share it together.

When he shared that

it made perfect sense to me.

The truth is, either our God is involved in our lives

at the paint can level,

or He’s not there at all.

But our seeing Him, and knowing Him, and learning to live with Him at that level

is very much of a daily, growing process within us.

Now, we’ve spent quite a bit of time

on one of the results of knowing Him,

and that is that

knowing Him is the only way

to true personal identity.

The second result I want to mention

is that knowing Him

is the only way

to true personal security.

Our Lord has chosen to allow us

to live in one of the most affluent nations

in the history of humanity,

an affluence that the overwhelming majority of Americans share in.

We are surrounded by comfort,

entertainment,

and a surplus of goods far beyond our basic necessities of life.

When we receive what we have been given

with a heart of gratitude

and thankfulness to our Lord

we’re on solid ground.

But it is very difficult

for the human personality

to have access to possessions

without facing the temptation

of allowing those possessions

to become our source of security.

And you don’t need me to tell you this,

but I’ll say it anyway -

there never has been

and never can be

any true sense of security

in anything we possess.

Can our possessions give us one more day of life?

Can they guarantee our health?

What do we possess

that cannot be threatened

by one major earthquake,

or by a prolonged power outage,

or by another round of world-wide financial chaos?

The kind of security our spirits long for

can only be found

in knowing Him -

knowing His love for us,

knowing He will never leave us,

never forsake us,

never remove us from the palm of His hand,

and never compromise His promise to us

that He will daily supply our needs according to His riches in Christ Jesus.

I remember so well that first fall when Sandee and I returned home to Alaska

after having dropped off our daughter for her first year in college in British Columbia.

When Sandee and I got back

I half-jokingly told her

that she and I would have to divide up the areas of worry

because there were so many of them

and one person just couldn’t cover them all adequately.

Sandee would focus on the dorm and campus concerns,

while I would handle the fiery crashes on the freeways,

the muggings,

and other life-threatening disasters.

It’s not that we doubted our daughter’s good judgment.

It’s just that,

for 18 years we had lived with the illusion

that we could somehow help protect her from bad things happening.

But in the end

the true sense of security

could only be found in the knowledge of our Lord.

Did He love our little girl?

Infinitely more than we do.

Did He know her future,

and hold that future in His hands?

Ps. 139:16 Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.

The only source of true security

-for my daughter then, or now,

or for my wife,

or for myself,

is found in the knowledge of my God.

That does not mean

that we will not hurt at times

as we move through this deeply corrupted world.

It doesn’t mean He will deliver us

from the effect of every evil.

In fact,

this is jumping ahead a little,

but as Paul progresses in his list

of the things he gains

when he gains Christ,

the 5^th one on the list

is what he calls,

“the fellowship of his sufferings”.

Now doesn’t that sound fun!

We may spend more time on this

a week or two down the line,

but for now let me just state the obvious,

that there is a unique quality of fellowship

both with God

and with our fellow Christians

that can only be ours

through pain,

through whatever suffering

God allows into our walk with Him.

And sometimes there will be pain.

And looking back I must admit

that there was some very intense pain for us as a family

during Joni’s first year away from home.

Having a natural aversion to pain

for both myself

and those I love

I could have wished that

that pain would not have been there.

But I’ll tell you

I love what happened

in our little family unit

as a result of that pain.

I loved the kind of communication

and closeness

and unity

that we shared

as a direct result of the suffering.

And the truth is without exception

the deepest friendships I’ve every known in life

are the ones in which my friend has allowed me into their pain

or I have allowed them into mine.

It creates a depth of trust and respect and security within the friendship

that simply cannot come any other way.

The security that comes

from the knowledge of our God

does not mean

that we will not hurt.

It doesn’t mean He will deliver us

from the effect of every evil.

But it does mean

that nothing touches the child of God

without God’s knowledge

and His involvement.

And we have His certain pledge

that whatever we go through

we go through with Him.

That is security.

I wanted to also talk a little bit

about the effect the knowledge of Christ

has on our behavior,

but it would be best

if we save that until next week.