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

Philippians 3:10-11

It is the greatest of all gifts, according to the apostle Paul in today’s second reading (Philippians 3:4-14). Not the gift of life. Not the gift of our salvation. Not even the gift of eternal life. None of that would matter without this one, great gift. It is the gift of “surpassing value,” Paul writes. For the sake of this gift, he regards everything else as rubbish, even his own life. Whatever gains he has had in his life, he now regards a loss. Nothing matters more than this one thing: To know Christ. To really know him. That is the greatest of all gifts. To know God’s only Son, our Lord and our God, our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

What is this life but an opportunity to come to know Jesus, more and more? For that matter, what is the next life but an ongoing opportunity to do the same, to know Jesus more and more? Nothing, Paul teaches us, matters more than this one thing: to know Christ Jesus our Lord. 

“I regard everything as loss,” Paul writes, “because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” It is the prize that he is straining forward to, the goal of his life. Not salvation, not heaven, but knowing Jesus. “I want to know Christ,” he says, “and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Paul’s Great Discovery 

Paul is the perfect person to teach us this. Like the preacher in Ecclesiastes, Paul had it all, and discovered that it was all vanity, all a chasing after the wind. “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh,” Paul writes, “I have more.” He was “a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” a Pharisee, and under the law he was blameless. He was doing everything right, it would seem. And in his zeal, he was persecuting those who weren’t, especially those in this new movement, the church. 

So what happened? We know what happened, because Paul tells us in his Letter to the Galatians and Luke tells us in his Acts of the Apostles. God “revealed his Son” to Paul (Galatians 1:15-17). It was on the road to Damascus, we learn in Acts (Acts 9:1-9). Paul was headed there in search of the disciples of the Lord. And on the way, he saw a light from heaven flash around him. “He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus.’” 

Paul met the risen Jesus on the road that day, and his life was forever changed. Everything that he thought was important, he realized, was rubbish, as he himself put it in today’s passage from Philippians. It was all just a chasing after the wind. None of it really mattered. Not anymore. 

Our Little Discoveries 

But what about us? Most of us do not have such dramatic conversion experiences. But I believe that we all have little moments. We can call them Damascus Road moments. They are those experiences we have when a coincidence seems like more than just a coincidence, when we receive a sign that can’t be just chance. Or we even experience a moment of transcendence, an experience that lifts our eyes beyond the here and now. Or, sometimes life just knocks us off our horse – we might not see a light from heaven, but we are reminded to re-focus ourselves on what is truly important in life. God speaks to us in many and various ways, as Scripture teaches us. And one of these ways is through people like Paul, whose life was forever changed when he met the risen Jesus. And that is what Paul wants for us all. 

Paul wants our lives to be changed by meeting the risen Jesus. Or, if we have already met him, as we all surely have, Paul urges us to get to know Jesus more. There is nothing more important. And Paul wants us to learn for ourselves that there is nothing that matters more. He wants us to see for ourselves that everything else in this world is rubbish compared to the “surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus” our Lord. 

But how, we might ask? How do we come to know Jesus? If we don’t have a dramatic experience like Paul, how do we come to know Jesus? There is a way. Paul describes it in this letter. 

Getting to Know Someone 

But first, let’s think for a few moments about how you get to know anyone. If you wanted to get to know me, for example, you could stop by my office. My door’s almost always open, and I am always happy to welcome visitors. But that’s not the only way to get to know me. You could talk to my wife – you’d certainly learn more about me that way. Talk to others who know me. You could keep digging – watch more of my sermons on our YouTube channel, read some of my writing on my blog. Or, you could join me on a run sometime. Play some Pickleball with me. Attend our midweek Bible study, or our book club. Spend time with me. 

Doing each of these would help you get to know me more and more. But it wouldn’t be a quick process, would it? It takes years to really get to know someone. I have been married 33 years now, but I feel as though I am still getting to know my wife. And that’s a good thing! I love that about marriage, and about long relationships in general. They are books without endings; new chapters always being written; twists and turns all along the way. They are adventures, because we don’t know where they are heading. 

And if all that is true for our human relationships, how much more true is it for our relationship with Jesus? It is such a wonderful adventure that this life alone will not be enough for us to truly get to know Jesus. It will take eternity. And that’s a good thing! But, of course, we can get started in this lifetime. 

We can get to know Jesus now by spending time with him; by learning from others who have come to know him; by reading about him, especially in the gospels; and by doing what he does. And all of these are ways to get to know Jesus. But Paul offers us another way, and a surprising one, at that. It is the one that I want to spend the remainder of our time looking at today. In Philippians 3:10, Paul shares these words: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Getting to Know Christ

So, the question is: How does this help us to know Christ? And especially, how does “becoming like him in his death” help us to know him and the power of his resurrection? First, it is good to remember that Paul says something like this a lot. In Romans 8, for example: “We are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Or, in Second Corinthians: “We are afflicted in every way but not crushed … always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” And not only that, but Paul is really just saying something that Jesus himself often said. For example, in Matthew 16: “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” 

If we want to know Christ, we can’t just read about him. We can’t just spend time with him. We also must learn to die with him, to become like him in his death, to lose our life for his sake so that we find true life in him. How do we do this? Paul gives us a wonderful insight into this a chapter earlier, in a passage we heard last Sunday. It is arguably the key to this whole letter, and the key to knowing Christ. Paul wrote: 

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5-8).

To me, this is the key, if we want to know Christ, if we want to share in his sufferings and become like him in his death. The way to do this is to become like him, to think like him and to live like him. How? By emptying ourselves, as he did, by learning to put God above all else. By letting our old, sinful self be “buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). By taking up our cross and following the One who died for us. This is the path that we must walk if we are to know Christ. If we are to find the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus, we must learn to live for Christ Jesus by becoming like him, learning to think like him and act like him and live for him. 

Closing – The Gift Unsurpassed

Spend our lives on this earth striving to become more and more like Jesus. That is what Paul urges us to do in this powerful letter. And the more we do that, Paul goes on to remind us, the more we receive what Jesus wants to give us all: the peace that surpasses all understanding, the abundance of life, now and forevermore, the joy of the gospel, and the love that is the greatest of all of these. All of this comes through our friendship with Jesus. When we give our lives to him, he gives us more than we could ever ask for or even imagine. This is the life to which Jesus invites us, the life that Paul received and was eager to share, and it all begins with a simple, life-changing step: Getting to know Christ, more and more and more. May we each take this step and walk this path always, to the glory of God. Amen.