Week 47 Philippians
In chapter three Paul is thinking back to some of the benefits he’d had – good family, social class, education, status, employment. Things like that.
Under normal circumstances we chalk those up as advantageous.
But now Paul’s rethinking the traditional advantage-disadvantage calculus. He’s expanding its scope; adding another factor. He says: I once thought all these things were so very important, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
I get a sheet of paper and draw a table with two columns. The left-hand column is headed: Low Value, and the right column says: High Value. In Paul’s Comparative Value Table the right-hand column only has room for one item: knowing the Lord. Everything else goes on the left.
No matter how many really good things – all the under-normal-circumstances High Value things – that I’ve got going for me…all of them go under Low Value.
Of course it’s not an absolute scale (fortunately). It’s a comparative one. And the key thing for me to keep in perspective is that knowing the Lord is so stupendously, astronomically, titanically, gigantesquely more valuable than all my other advantages, skills, efforts and benefits combined that, by comparison everything else is more-or-less valueless.
Note: quote from Philippians 3:7-8 (NLT)