Under construction

I need you to repeat after me, out loud if you can. Every follower of Christ on earth is a work in progress.

Now say the second part. I have not arrived.

That is not defeat talking. That is sanity. There are still areas in my heart, and my mind, and my life, some that I am conscious of and some that I may not be conscious of at all, that stand in need of the sanctifying work and grace of God. The same is true of you.

And if that sounds like a low view of the Christian life, look at who says it in our text.

Not that I have already obtained it … but I press on.

That is Paul: one of the godliest men who has ever lived, the Spirit-empowered instrument who penned significant portions of your New Testament, a church planter, a missionary, an apostle. And he stands up in the middle of his own letter and admits that he is still in need of further progress.

Brothers and sisters, if Paul had not arrived, what in the world are you and I doing acting like we have? You think about that.

Notice something else. Paul does not say, I have not obtained it, therefore I am discouraged. He says, I have not obtained it, but I press on. The honest admission and the forward motion belong together in the same sentence. In fact, the admission is what makes the motion possible. You cannot press on toward something you have already convinced yourself you possess.

So we start here: not with a program, not with seven steps, but with a confession. Make it before you turn the page. Lord, I have not arrived.

Father, I confess that I am under construction. Thank You that You have not abandoned the work. Where I have grown comfortable, disturb me. Where I have grown discouraged, steady me. In Jesus' name, amen.

The lethal comfort of good enough

Some of you have scaled mountains of attitudinal change by the grace of God. Some of you have reached mountaintops of victory over ingrained habits by the grace of God. The Lord Jesus saved you, gave you the gift of eternal life, transformed your life, and reoriented your destiny for all eternity.

Hallelujah. And there is still a not yet that characterizes your life.

Now here is where I have to be a pastor to you and not just a professor. Some of you may be satisfied with where you are in your walk with God. You may actually think, where I am is good enough. I want to suggest to you that such satisfaction is a form of complacency, and complacency is lethal to our ongoing growth and development as followers of Christ.

Lethal. I chose that word carefully. Complacency does not announce itself. Nobody wakes up and decides to stop growing. It happens the way rust happens: quietly, in the places nobody is looking, on equipment that still appears to be working fine.

I have watched it happen to gifted people across decades of ministry. Preachers who are still preaching last decade's freshness. Believers with a testimony so old they have to reach back twenty years to find it. Leaders who are managing a reputation instead of pursuing a Person.

The mountaintop is a wonderful place to stand. It is a terrible place to move into.

So ask yourself the honest question. Are you unsatisfied with your progress? Not miserable about it. Paul is not miserable. He is running. But he is unsatisfied, and a holy dissatisfaction with your own progress is one mark that the Spirit of God is still at work in a life.

Lord, deliver me from good enough. Give me a holy dissatisfaction that drives me to You rather than a restlessness that drives me away from You. Amen.

Keeping honest books

I prayed over this text on my knees before I preached it, and I told God plainly: I am embarrassed by the passion of the apostle.

Read the passage and you will understand why. Paul is doing accounting. Whatever things were gain to him, he has moved into the loss column. And what a column it was: pedigree, tribe, training, blamelessness under the law, and zeal that could be measured. Real assets, not junk.

And he says that when they are set beside Christ, the scale is not close.

the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord

Do not miss what Paul is and is not saying. He is not saying his heritage was worthless in itself. He is saying that anything, however good, becomes a liability the moment it competes with Christ for the center of a life. Good things go bad in that position. That is the whole argument.

And do not miss the hinge in verse nine. Paul is not after a righteousness of his own derived from the law, but the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith. Hold on to that as you read the rest of these days. Everything Paul does in this chapter, the counting, the pressing, the straining, he does as a man already clothed in a righteousness he did not earn. He is not running to get in. He is running because he is in.

Then he tells us what he is after: that he may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings. Notice that he asks for all three in the same breath. We want the knowing. We will take the power. We would like to skip the fellowship of His sufferings and get on to the resurrection, and Paul will not let us have it that way. You do not get an intimacy with Christ that costs you nothing.

Here is my concern for you, and I say it with love. It is possible to be busy in ministry, faithful in attendance, sound in doctrine, and to have quietly stopped finding Christ Himself of surpassing value. The work about Him replaces Him. I have seen it in seminary faculty. I have felt the pull of it in my own study.

So let me ask you what I ask myself. If you took away the platform, the position, the title, and the role you play, would knowing Him still be worth it?

Lord Jesus, I want to want You the way Paul wanted You. Where I have made good things ultimate, correct my accounting. Let knowing You be the surpassing thing. Amen.

Laid hold of

There is a phrase in verse twelve that has kept me company for decades, and I want to hand it to you today.

that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus

Read that again. Paul is pursuing, but he is pursuing because he was first pursued. He is laying hold because he was laid hold of. On the Damascus road he was not seeking. He was hunting. And Christ reached down and took him.

So before this becomes a devotional about your effort, let it be a devotional about His grip. You did not initiate this. You are not sustaining this. Christ laid hold of you, and He has not let go.

Now come the questions that Paul's phrase forces on us, and I want you to sit with them rather than answer them quickly. Why did God call you? Why did Jesus save you? Why did Jesus lay His hands upon you? Paul's lifelong quest was to lay hold of the very thing for which Christ had laid hold of him. He was not wandering. He was closing the gap between the purpose Christ had for him and the life he was actually living.

That gap is where most of us live, is it not? We know we were grasped for something. We are just not sure we are living in it.

Let me be careful here, because this is where people stumble. The thing Christ laid hold of you for is first and finally Christ Himself: to be conformed to His image, and one day raised with Him. That is the prize. Your particular assignment is how that one purpose gets worked out in your one life. It is never a substitute for it.

And discovering that assignment is not a matter of waiting for a feeling or a sign in the sky. For most believers it becomes clear at the intersection of three things: the Word you keep returning to, the need that will not leave you alone, and the confirmation of a community that knows you. God usually confirms through others what He intends to do through you.

You were laid hold of on purpose. Go lay hold of it.

Lord Jesus, thank You that You laid hold of me before I ever reached for You. Now let me lay hold of what You grasped me for. Make the gap smaller this year than it was last year. Amen.

Forgetting, part two: the past that hurt

Yesterday we dealt with a past you loved. Today we deal with a past that hurt, and I am going to speak plainly, because you deserve plain speech on this subject.

Some things are so hurtful, so dangerous, so traumatic that we would consider forgetting them to be irresponsible. Elie Wiesel wrote a slim, terrible book called Night about his first night in the camps with his father, and he insists across page after page that he will never forget: not the smoke, not the silence, not the faces of the children. And he is right to insist. How do you forget that? How would it be moral to?

So let me say clearly what Paul is not asking of you. He is not asking you to pretend it did not happen. He is not asking you to delete it. He is asking that it not paralyze you in the present.

There are two kinds of past that keep believers pinned down. Let me take them in order.

First, the memory of your own sin. You may not have a skeleton in your closet, but everybody reading this has got a bone. You think about that. And it comes up. Why would God use me?

Here is what you must understand. When you trusted Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, God forgave you all your sins. He says of His people, I will remember their sins no more. That is not God having a lapse of memory. God does not forget. God decides, and He decides on the basis of the work of Christ on the cross and His literal, bodily, glorious resurrection from among the dead. There is a marked Man in glory right now, bearing the marks of Calvary in His own peerless person. On the basis of all of that redemptive work, God chooses not to bring your sins up again.

So when your forgiven sins are being paraded in front of you and used to disqualify you, understand what you are dealing with. That is not the Spirit of God. Conviction leads you toward the cross. Condemnation leads you away from it. I can say a whole lot more about that, but let me move on, because there is a second kind of past.

Second, what was done to you: the abuse some of you experienced or witnessed. I am not speaking about this from a distance. I was physically abused by my own stepfather, and it got in the way of so much.

But I want to tell you what the grace of God can do with a thing like that. As a parent I determined, and by the grace of God my wife and I held to it, that we would never verbally or physically abuse our children. Ask them. The past and all of its pain and suffering and ugliness became the springboard for liberty and growth in the present.

That is the word I want to leave with you today: springboard. In the hands of God, the very thing that was meant to break you becomes the thing that launches you into compassion, into ministry, into a home that breaks a generational pattern. It does not make the evil good. It makes God sovereign over it.

Father, You have chosen to remember my sins no more. Teach me to stop remembering what You have decided to forget. And what was done to me, take it, redeem it, and make it a springboard in Your hands. Amen.

The day you want to quit

Forgetting. Reaching. Pressing on. We come to the last two movements, and they are movements of the whole body: a runner stretched forward, leaning, everything committed to what is ahead.

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call …

And what is the goal? Not a ministry. Not a milestone. Not a platform. The goal is the Lord Jesus Himself. That is what gives us motivation and inspiration and encouragement when we want to quit.

And the time will come when you will want to quit.

When I was a young man, an older brother came to me and said, Neely, the time will come when you will want to quit. I did not believe him. And several years ago, I quit.

I was on a preaching tour with Dr. Paul Nyquist, the former president of Moody Bible Institute. He preached Friday night, and I was up Saturday morning. My practice is to go over my message on my knees in prayer. If I cannot prayerfully rehearse before God the message I am going to preach, I am not prepared to talk to you. So I was on my knees, and all of a sudden I found myself in a deep, deep, deep spiritual battle. It was awful. It was demonic.

I got up off my knees in that hotel room, still in my pajamas, looked up, and told God: I quit. I do not have the strength. I do not have the power to combat and defeat the powers of darkness. I quit.

Understand me. I was not going to do anything foolish. I was not leaving my wife. I was going to keep going to church, nod along, and write my check. But I was done with ministry.

And do you know what the Spirit of God said to me? Not audibly, but He communicated it. He said: how many friends do you have on Facebook?

I said, Lord, are You familiar with social media? He asked again. Now, I am a baby boomer, and Facebook is how I stay in touch with my former students. So I told Him I had quite a few. And He said: why don't you ask your friends to pray?

So I opened my computer and I posted the truth. I have to preach in a few minutes, I do not have the strength to do it, I am in an intense battle, and I need prayer.

Then the notifications started, one after another. Praying for you, Winfred. We are standing with you. Praying right now. It was an incredible thread of prayer support.

And then God said: now get back on your knees and talk to Me again.

I was terrified, because I had just been defeated in prayer, on my knees. The worst place a follower of Christ can be defeated is in prayer, because where else do I have to go? I was terrified because I knew I was going to have to trust God. I was going to have to take Jesus at His word. God is in the business of stretching our faith muscles.

I got back on my knees. And it was like I got saved all over again. God met me. God strengthened me.

Child of God, He will do the same thing for you.

Two things I want you to take from that hotel room. First, the man who cannot go on is not disqualified. He is being taught where the strength comes from. Second, I did not get up alone. I asked for prayer, out loud, from people who knew me. Do not wait until you are on the floor to build that thread of support. Build it now, while you can still type.

So that is the one thing. Forget. Reach. Press on. Our focus and our aim transcend this life and reach beyond this world, to the end of the contest when we see Jesus face to face in glory.

Forget. Reach. Press on. Forget. Reach. Press on, child of God, until we see Jesus face to face.

Lord, I have wanted to quit, and I have not always said so out loud. Meet me the way You met Your servant in that hotel room. Strengthen me. Surround me with people who will pray. And keep me running until I see You face to face. Amen.