Pressing on

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Well, I feel sort of sorry for my wife. Some of y’all are already laughing at that. That’s not nice.

I feel sorry for her because the jobs that she tends to do around our house are never finished. She does most of the laundry and most of the dishes. And understand, before you feel too bad for her, it’s not that I’m unwilling to help.

It’s that she doesn’t like the way I do it. So, okay, you do it. I do help with stuff around the house.

As a matter of fact, we were telling Madeline this week, find you a man who will scrub the grout in the shower. As Charles said, I don’t like doing that. I don’t like doing it either, but it’s got to be done.

Anyway, she does all this laundry and does all these dishes, and no matter how much of the day she spends doing them, they are never caught up. There’s an infinite supply of dishes and laundry, it seems like. She got close to being done last night, and then there were more clothes, because there are seven people in our house.

Somebody’s always wearing something or eating something. You know, it never ends. And the jobs that I have at our house, which incidentally I enjoy doing much more than she enjoys doing the laundry, the jobs I have at our house, you know, you can at least see some light at the end of the tunnel sometimes.

I know some of you still think it’s crazy that I enjoy working outside. Like, I will do that for fun. But I enjoy being able to go and work outside see that you’ve actually accomplished something.

As much as I love my job, as much as I love being in ministry, you know, you can work for years on end and never be sure what exactly you’ve accomplished because the Lord only knows what He’s doing in people’s lives and how He’s using you. And so I like to get out and do something with my hands that I can see at the end of the day that I’ve actually accomplished something. And yet I’ve realized that no matter how well I mow the yard, eventually is going to need to be mowed again.

No matter how clean the chicken coop is, eventually they’re going to make a mess of it again. It’s going to be gross all over, you know. It’s going to be gross all over again.

I may get a little interval in there where she doesn’t, but the work is never done. And it’s probably that way at your house too. There are jobs that are never done.

Even if it’s as simple as, well, I dust it and it’s dusty again. Or maybe you’ve just given up and said I’m just going to live in the dust. Sometimes we do that, don’t we? I tell Charlie, I can’t dust the house.

I’ll die. Allergies. We debate over who gets to do that one.

But we all have things that they seem like they’re never going to end as long as we’re here on this earth. And that’s not always a bad thing. Now, sometimes it can feel like it depending on what the job is.

but it’s not always a bad thing. I want to look this morning at what the Apostle Paul said about this when it comes to the Christian life. And I know I’ve already been told by some of you, I’ve thrown you for a loop because we’re not in the book of Mark.

Early in the week, I sensed God leading me in a different direction and I thought I knew what it was. So I’d written a message from 2 Corinthians. I was almost done with it.

And then we got to Wednesday night, Thursday morning, and the Lord said, uh-uh, no, this is what you. . .

So I knew he was leading me in a different direction. I just jumped the gun on where he was taking me. We’re going to be in Philippians this morning, Philippians chapter 3.

And I want us to look together at what the Apostle Paul said about this concept of our Christian life being an ongoing job, one that never ends, one that we are never finished from as long as we’re in this life. So we’ll be in Philippians chapter 3 this morning. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn there with me to Philippians chapter 3.

If you don’t have it or can’t find Philippians, it’ll be on the screen for you here. Just a few verses we’re going to look at, and once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. This is part of a larger section where he’s talking about the Christian life and the sacrifices and the joys of it, but I really want us to focus here on verses 12 through 16 this morning.

Here’s what he says, not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I lay hold of that for which I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, have this attitude.

And if in anything you have a different attitude, God will reveal that also to you. However, let us keep living by that same standard to which we have attained. And you may be seated.

So Paul here under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is talking about our Christian walk and our Christian service and how it’s supposed to continue. And our first takeaway from this this morning is that our Christian service is never finished in this life. There is no retirement for us as believers.

I remember growing up hearing my pastor say, in the kingdom of God, it’s not retirement, it’s just reassignment. You may step from one area of service into another, but some of the most miserable people I’ve ever met have been believers who always say, well, I used to do this. I used to do that.

Well, what are you doing for the Lord? I’ve done my time. Because what it leads to, in my experience in talking with people that have that mindset, and I can’t think of anybody in this room, So if you’re thinking, who’s he talking about?

Nobody in this room that I know of. That I know of. Maybe you’re having these conversations with the Lord, though.

But the folks I’ve talked to that have that mindset, what it boils down to, if you decide you’ve done everything you’re going to do for the kingdom, there’s nothing left for you to work toward. There’s nothing left for you to pursue. You’re just sitting waiting to die.

That’s what retirement is in the kingdom. And so we don’t want to look for retirement in the kingdom. We don’t want to get to a point where we think, well, I’ve done everything I can do.

If you’ve done everything you could do, the Lord would take you home. The very fact that He’s left you here is evidence He still has something for you to do. And I think somebody in here, again, I don’t know who, but somebody in here needs to hear that.

Because we all get to a point where we think, what does He need me for? What good am I? And in reality, the answer, what does God need me for?

Nothing. God doesn’t need me. God isn’t relying on me, but God chooses to use me.

God chooses to use you, and He has a purpose for you, and it’s more for your benefit than for His that He uses you. And so Paul, by the time we get to verse 12 here, he has been explaining to the church at Philippi the importance of spiritual growth and maturity. As a matter of fact, if you read back over verses 1 through 11, he talks about the cost of everything that he has given up in order to pursue that.

The things that he was willing to set on the back burner in order to pursue spiritual growth and spiritual maturity and serving the kingdom. He talks about all of his credentials and all of his achievements and all the things he’s earned. And he says, but I set those things aside because if that’s what it cost for me to pursue Christ was to let go of all those things, then let them go.

And then he comes after those 11 verses to verse 12 where he says, not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, because he’d been talking about in the previous verses, wanting to be found in him in verse 9, 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. He said, I want to be counted righteous in God’s sight and not because of anything I’ve done, but because of the righteousness of Christ that I know is in me. And he says that I may know him in verse 10, that I may know him in the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings and being conformed to his death in order that I may attain to the resurrection of the dead.

He’s talking about here wanting to grow in his knowledge of Christ, to grow not just in the things he knows in his mind, but his experiential knowledge of what it means to walk with Christ. And he wants to walk with him right up until the end, until he attains the resurrection from the dead. Until God raises him at the last day, Paul says, I want to continue pursuing Christ. And that’s where we picked up in verse 12 where he says, I don’t stand here and pretend that I’m already there. I don’t stand there and pretend I’m everything that I’m supposed to be.

And that’s important for us to look at because the man wrote the majority of the books in the New Testament. We look at him as this incredible, super spiritual, super human guy that none of us could be like. And the apostle Paul says, I don’t even consider that I’m everything I need to be.

I don’t consider that I’m there yet. His spiritual growth and his Christian service were still in progress, even with everything that he had done up to this point. And he says in the beginning of verse 13, brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it.

And he’s making the same point here. He just says it twice. And Paul has this habit throughout his writings because he will throw things out to people that sound like, oh, maybe he didn’t mean that.

That’s a pretty bold claim. And Paul will state the thing a second time so they know, oh, he didn’t just write that in a moment of rash boldness. He really meant that.

Like in Galatians, when he says, if anybody comes preaching any other gospel than what you’ve received, let him be accursed. And then he says it louder for the people in the back so they don’t think he just spoke out of haste. He said, I really mean that.

Let them be accursed. Here he says, I don’t count myself to have attained this. And then in verse 13, he says the same thing again, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it.

He says, I am not there yet. This is not false modesty. This is a man who understands that God still has work for him to do and that God still has work to do in him.

It’s a realistic acknowledgement that there’s still more. And we look at this and it’s a tremendous example for us to realize if the Apostle Paul says, I’m not everything I need to be. It’s not time for me to sit down and stop running yet.

If even the Apostle Paul looks at life that way, then you and I certainly are not where we need to be. And I’m not saying that to knock you, because there are some incredibly godly, wise servants of the Lord in this room. But none of us are the Apostle Paul.

And if he said, I’m not there yet, you and I need to realize we’re not there yet. It’s dangerous to convince ourselves that we’re everything we need to be. I mean, if I asked for a show of hands this morning and said, who in here is everything they need to be in the Lord’s service?

I don’t think any hands would go up, and if they did, we’d probably kind of chuckle under our breath because we know it’s not true, right? And yet we can kind of convince ourselves that that’s the case. I’ve done all the growing I need to.

It’s dangerous to convince ourselves we’re everything that we need to be, that we’re fine just as we are, that we’ve done everything we have to do before the Lord is ready to call us home. And by the way, I’ll make this point in a little more depth later, but I want to be clear, what I’m not talking about here is a way of salvation. It’s saying you have to work harder, do more in order to earn God’s love and forgiveness.

This is addressed to people who were already followers of Jesus Christ. This is addressed to people who were already believers and saying, as a result of what Jesus has done in us, we now have this not only responsibility, but this privilege of pursuing Jesus Christ and pursuing the life that he has for us until he calls us home. And he decides where the finish line is. Paul many times compares this to an athletic race.

He was very clear, Paul was very clear in his writing to the Philippians here, not just about the fact that he’s still working, that he is still pursuing Jesus, that he is still seeking to grow spiritually. But he’s clear about what the goal is here, what the goal is that he had in mind. And his goal ultimately was Jesus.

And the goal of his walk, the goal of his life, was to glorify Jesus with every moment he had. And that should be our goal as Christians as well. Not to get to a point where we say, I’ve done everything I could do.

Yeah, I served the Lord 40 years ago, but now I’m tired. Well, you might be. You might be if you’re trying to serve the Lord in the same way now that you served the Lord 40 years ago.

Unless he’s told you to do that today, it doesn’t mean you have to do the same thing you did 40 years ago. But what you don’t do is sit back and say, I’m not going to serve him anymore because I served him 40 years ago. The goal is to take every moment we have and to glorify Jesus Christ with that.

That’s why he says in verse 14, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. And here he’s talking about a race. He’s talking about running a race and not giving up partway through the race.

Now, this is kind of foreign to me. I am not athletic. I know y’all are shocked.

There’s not an athletic bone in my body. I ran a 5K. My dad is a marathon runner.

I ran a 5K with him one time. One time. I was the last person to finish the race who was not being pushed in a stroller.

Okay. But I can relate this to other pursuits. You know, my oldest son was on the academic team at school this year, and I helped out with their team.

That’s more my speed, buzzing in and answering questions. I did that in high school, so I worked with them. And I went to some of the tournaments and some of the meets, and they had trained, and Benjamin asked me, going into the first tournament, he said, do you think we’re going to win?

And I said, no. He was shocked. Okay, aren’t we honest in our house? I’m going to tell you the truth.

Well, why do you not think we’re going to win? Because you all don’t take it seriously at practice. And then we got, by the way, they did really well by the time the year was over.

But we got to the first tournament, and they come into the first match, and one of them buzzes in and gets a question wrong, and they just quit. You could see it on their faces. They all just shut off.

And they got spanked. They got spanked like Mama saw them with their hand in the cookie jar. I mean, it was ugly.

And so I was talking to him later, trying to encourage him, and saying, you can’t just stop. You missed a question. You can’t just stop what you’re doing.

you keep going. And again, I’m not athletic, but I assume the same thing is true in a race. You trip and fall, you get back up and you keep going.

Same is true in any pursuit. If you want to get where you’re going, you get back up. And the goal here is not to get to a point where we get halfway through the match or the race or whatever you want to compare it to and say, well, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, and we sit down.

We never get to the finish line that way. And he describes Jesus here as the prize in verse 14. He presses on, he keeps running toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

And so describing Jesus as the prize, he’s tying that in with the calling of God in Christ Jesus. So when he talks about Jesus being the prize, he’s not talking about Jesus being the prize in the sense of earning Jesus, that if we if we run hard enough and we run fast enough and we run long enough, we’ll earn Jesus. That’s not what he’s talking about.

He’s talking about Jesus in the sense that he is the motivation. Jesus is the reason why we run. That one 5k I ran with dad, they had Chick-fil-A sandwiches at the end.

And I knew whether I won or not, I would get a Chick-fil-A sandwich as long as they hadn’t packed up and gone home by the time I got there. I wanted that. I did not have to earn that by coming in a certain place or even getting across the finish line.

You know what? If somebody had put me in their stroller and wheeled me across the finish line, I still could have had the chicken sandwich. But that was part of my motivation.

That was part of my motivation. Because you get to a certain point and it would be longer to turn back and go get the chicken sandwich. So I just kept running and staggering and whatever else you want to call it.

And Jesus is our motivation. We don’t run because we have to earn Him, but we run with Him in mind. Thinking about our service to Him, thinking about our love for Him.

And it was the desire to please Jesus. It was the desire to bring Him glory. It was a desire to live out the calling that God had placed on Paul that motivated Paul to keep running.

And if you’re not familiar with Paul’s life, let me be clear what I’m talking about when I say keep running. Paul was beaten in numerous cities for preaching about Jesus. And he kept doing it.

He was run out of numerous cities. There were assassination plots. He was thrown in prison.

He was placed under house arrest. His life was threatened on numerous occasions. And he still kept going. So if we want to talk about tripping and falling, or we want to talk about the hardships of running, the hardships of serving Christ, that’s what I’m talking about for Paul.

And yet his love for Jesus, his passion for Jesus, was so strong that that’s what motivated him to keep going. And he says in verse 12, I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which I was also laid hold of by Christ Jesus. That might be a little confusing if we don’t break it down.

So he says, what I was laid hold of, that for which I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. He’s talking about the purpose that Jesus has called him into and pulled him into. He’s talking about the calling that Jesus placed on his life as a believer.

And he says, I press on so that I may lay hold of that. again not earning Jesus but living out the thing that Jesus has put him there to do talks about how Jesus laid hold of him for a purpose that purpose was to bring glory to Jesus and when he says he presses on in order to lay hold of that he means he presses on he keeps going in order to do that in order to glorify Jesus and that’s an important motivator for us in our in our day-to-day service in our day-to-day struggles you may think from time to time what what good am I doing I don’t see the fruits of my own labors. I don’t understand who this is helping.

Nobody notices. Nobody notices what I’m doing. Listen, if you’re serving Jesus and bringing glory to Jesus, it doesn’t matter who notices.

If the goal is to bring glory to Jesus, then you’re doing what he’s put you here to do. And the purpose of our lives is to glorify Jesus. By the way, there’s no expiration date on that job description.

There’s not. I hope that by the time I’m the age some of you are, that I’m still running as hard as some of you are. And I know some of you in this room to have heard your stories, you’re running harder now, you’re serving harder now than you ever have before.

And I’m amazed by that. I give glory to God for that. I give you credit for that.

And from time to time, I’ll talk with somebody that’s really struggling with it because they’ve stepped away from something they used to do. I feel guilty that I’m not doing this. But you stepped into doing this.

You haven’t quit. You’re just letting God use you in a different area, and there’s no shame in that. The bottom line is that however we’re glorifying Jesus is not our job description.

Glorifying Jesus is our job description. There’s no expiration date on that. Just let him use you however he wants to to make that happen.

It applies to our lives as individual believers, but we can’t overlook the fact that he’s writing to a church. And I think that’s why this passage caught my attention again. If you’ve not been with us on Wednesday nights, we’ve been doing a study.

Brother Rodney and I have been trading off leading this study on the seven churches in Revelation and the letters that Jesus wrote to each church. Well, based on that, we’ve been going back the last few weeks and saying, what can we apply to us? What might Jesus say to our church?

And we’ve broadened it out. What might Jesus say to churches in America? That’s been an interesting conversation.

What might Jesus say to churches in America? What might Jesus say to our church? What might Jesus say to me?

And we’ve been talking about how the Lord might lead us going forward to continue serving Him. We’ve had some good conversations about that. I shared with that group a couple of weeks ago that I went back and looked at some of our historical stuff that the church has in a room here.

Because not too far off, this church is going to be celebrating its hundredth year of ministry here in Lawton. And so I went back and looked at how this church got started, and it got started out of a prayer meeting that met in an elementary school here in town. And out of this prayer meeting, they said, why can’t we start a church where the Bible is preached and a spirit of love prevails?

And I thought, if there’s anything I’ve known about this church for as long as I’ve known about this church, it’s those two things. That the specific ministries that this church does, they’ve changed throughout the years. They’ve changed throughout the last hundred years.

We’re that we did in the 1920s. The building, the congregation, they don’t look the same way they did 100 years ago. But I am so thankful to look and see that this church has never sat down and said we’re done.

We’ve done all we can do. Almost 100 years later, that’s still our goal to make sure God’s word is preached and His love is shown to the community. And as we were talking, every church goes through struggles and ups and downs, And we talked about years ago when there were hundreds of people here.

And are we doing something wrong? Is there something wrong here? Sometimes if you drop off a bunch of people, it can indicate something’s wrong.

It also seems to be the way our culture is going. But the point I tried to get across was this. We’re here faithfully doing our job.

And whether God brings people through here to stay, or whether God gives us the opportunity to minister to people, and then they go out and serve somewhere else, which happens all the time. People pass through here for a couple months with the military, sometimes people that are on the street. We don’t know, and we minister to them while they’re here, and then they go serve the Lord somewhere else.

But we’re here faithfully serving Him. Our job, folks, is not to grow the church to thousands and thousands of people. I think we’d love it if we had more people.

But our job is not to build a megachurch. Our job is not to tickle the ears of the culture around us. Our job is not to be the most entertaining place in town.

Our job is to glorify Jesus Christ. And we do that specifically by preaching His Word and loving people. And so we’re going to continue doing that. If our motivation in everything we do as a church, just like everything we do as a believer, as an individual believer, is to bring glory to Him, then He’s going to take care of the outcome.

It’s like Charles Stanley always said, obey God and leave the results to Him. As long as we stay focused on glorifying Him, with however long He keeps any one of us here or keeps all of us here, as long as we’re focused on glorifying Him and we keep running toward that goal, then He’s going to bless it and He’s going to use it. And in order to do that, we build on the past and we look ahead to the future.

He says in verses 13 and 14, But one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on. And it says here, forgetting what lies behind. There are a couple of things that can kill our faithful service.

There’s probably more than a couple, but there’s a couple that stem from this. We can either rely on our past service to be enough, where we say, I’ve done my time, look at what I used to do, and that’s enough. That’ll kill us, because that’ll rob our motivation to do anything that God tells us to do from here on out.

We can also look at our past failures as disqualifiers. We can look at all the times we’ve fallen short. We can do that as a church, or we can do that as an individual. and we can look at how God wants to use us moving forward and be so distracted by the past and say, but Lord, I’ve messed up here, I’ve done that, I can’t do this over here.

Both of those things will kill our service. And I’m not sure exactly which one the Apostle Paul had in mind, maybe both of them, but the answer for both of them is the same, where Paul says forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead I press on. That doesn’t mean wiping our memories, and I’ll explain why, but I think it means keeping the past in the proper perspective.

We build on what God has done in the past, but we move beyond the past. And we know this because of what he writes in verses 15 and 16, talking about what we already have attained and continuing to live in that. He says, let us therefore as many as are perfect or complete. He’s talking about spiritual maturity here.

He says at the beginning, I’m not perfect, I’m not complete, I haven’t reached a place of spiritual maturity. But those of us who have some spiritual maturity, he says in verse 15, as many as are perfect, have this attitude. And if in anything you have a different attitude, God will reveal that also to you.

However, let us keep living by that same standard to which we have attained. So what he’s saying here is if we have any kind of spiritual maturity at all, this drive forward is going to be present in us. It’s spiritual immaturity that says, no, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do.

The closer we grow to him, the more we realize we keep pushing forward. And Paul says to the church at Philippi, and if you’re thinking about this another way, if you don’t have that mindset, I pray God’s going to convict you about it. I pray that He’ll reveal it to you.

But instead of telling them to completely forget the past, He tells them to live by the standard they’ve already attained. In other words, remember how you’ve served already. Remember what God already has done in you.

Remember what is already happening and build on that. And that’s a message we’ve seen throughout the letters to the churches in Revelation, where Jesus points out what they’re doing that’s right, what they’re doing that’s good, and says, now keep doing that. Keep going.

Keep serving. And I think it’s an important reminder for us today. As a church, as individuals, I think it’s an important reminder for me, because sometimes we just get tired.

I know some of you are tired because maybe you have hard jobs or you have situations at home that are stressing you out. Maybe some of you are tired just because you’ve been around the sun several times. I’m tired because I’ve got five kids at home and nobody ever sleeps.

Ever. I don’t know how they do it and still have so much energy. But we get tired.

We get worn out and we think, I can just coast a little bit. And I’m not telling you, the scriptures are not telling you today to work yourself to death. That’s not the answer here.

It’s to remember our motivation and remember why we press forward to glorify Jesus. Find that motivation and then you’ll want to keep going. And yes, sometimes it’s going to be hard.

Sometimes it’s going to be a lot of fun. Sometimes it’s going to be heartbreaking. There’s going to be a lot of ups and downs, but we continue to serve him because he’s worth it.

And to be clear one more time, this is not a recipe for salvation. Everything that was written in that passage was written to people who were already believers in Jesus Christ. And so if you’re sitting here this morning and you’ve never trusted Jesus as your Savior, you’ve never had a relationship with him, If you’re sitting there realizing you feel distant from God, the answer to that is not to just keep running or try harder or do better. Those are instructions for what we’re supposed to do after we know Him.

The answer to our distance from God is not try harder or do better because we can’t. We can’t do well enough, we can’t try hard enough to undo the wrong that we’ve done that separates us from a holy God. The Bible says we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And if we could do anything to fix that ourselves, then God made a tremendous mistake. Because God’s answer to that was to send His one and only Son to take responsibility for our sins. To take responsibility for everything I’ve ever done and you’ve ever done that disappointed God.

He took responsibility for that. He shed His blood on the cross and died in our place. And the world looks at that and says it’s so cruel, it’s so unjust. Jesus was a willing participant in this.

Jesus did this because He loved you and because He hated sin. And so he came and took that sin on himself and had it nailed to the cross, had it punished so that you and I could go free. Jesus did everything that was necessary for our sins to be wiped clean.

And then he rose again three days later to prove it. And the only thing left for you to do is to believe that and ask God for that forgiveness that he offers in Jesus Christ. Going to church, I mean, we’re glad you’re here today, but it’s not going to get you to heaven. Giving money, being nice to people, trying harder, it’s not going to get you there.

The only way you get there is because of what Jesus Christ has done for y