October 8, 2023 Text: Philippians 3:4b-14
Dear Friends in Christ,
Nada . . . Nil . . . Nothing . . . Zero. In our lives usually these words are not positives. But are they always negatives? In baseball, as a batter you don’t want a zero batting average. But as a pitcher you would love an ERA of zero. You don’t want nil in your bank account. But we all pray to have nil in our church mortgage account. You all want something. But isn’t it nice when you have nothing to do?
God wants to give you the nothing that is everything.
“NOTHING OF SELF – EVERYTHING OF HIM”
We strive to have it all. Years back that was the tag line for a beer commercial. “Who says you can’t have it all?” Is beer having it all? No, of course not, but it shows where the human heart is. It looks for the fulness of life in the stuff of this world.
In our text, in the Apostle Paul’s world, the ones trying to have it all were the Judaizers. They took great “confidence in the flesh” and in their achievements under the law. But Paul even goes behind them with his diatribe on his ethnicity. He throws in there that he was a persecutor of the church. “You think you had it all under the law. I had the zeal to take it even further. You can’t outdo me.”
In Paul’s world the focus was not so much on material possessions but on one’s accountability to God’s Law. You “had it all” if you were “right with God.” If you kept His Law, then surely the material blessings would follow.
Our secular world sees no need to be accountable to God. Our things have become our gods. Our experiences are the idols we worship. “I did this. I did that. I went here. I went there.” “Having it all” in our world is less overtly religious.
But what these two worlds have in common is this. They are both focused on self. The Judaizers were self-righteous. How could they earn God’s favor. Our world focuses on gratifying the self through our things and our experiences. In both instances it is never enough.
Where are all the toys you just had to have as a child? Where are the latest fashions that you needed to impress your high school classmates? We live thinking “if I just have this car, or this house, or take this vacation,” then I will really have it all. But does it ever work that way? You know it doesn’t. Our contentment is fleeting. Somebody is working right now in our world to make you the latest something because they know something about you – that you can’t wait to have it. Self always gets in the way.
We go on our self-fulfilling way until God’s Word gets through to us. What makes Christianity so unacceptable? We are sinful and cannot win God’s love and favor. The Judaizers thought they were keeping God’s Law. We think we are doing right with our tolerance and personal merit before God. Paul knows that these things are “rubbish” and that true righteousness comes not from the law “but that which comes through faith in Christ.”
God brings us to nil, nada, nothing so that in our nothingness we can know the all-sufficiency of Christ. We know the power of the resurrection, we share in His suffering and death. In our Baptism, dying and rising with Christ, we are united with the power of His resurrection. When the Holy Spirit allows us to empty our self and the claim that things are “mine”, grace fills us with “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
In God’s grace, our nothingness of self becomes everything in Him. We “press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (v. 14) That goal? An eternity with the Trinity. Perfect peace and rest and a resurrected body that will be in the presence of our blessed Jesus in eternal heaven.
In the TV show “M*A*S*H” the character B.J. Honeycutt gave this reason for not giving in to the temptation in the midst of the Korean War. “I live in an insane world where nothing makes sense. Everyone around me lives for the now, because there may not be a tomorrow. But I have to live for tomorrow, because for me there is no now.” For B.J. his hope was defined in seeing his family again.
Let’s transpose that to our Christian lives. Someday, we will each be called into eternity. Isn’t our hope for the future defined by what Christ has in store for us . . . in heaven? In light of Jesus’ love and what He has done for you isn’t this a better way to face the future: Nothing of Self – Everything of Him.
Amen.