Our Only Confidence

Sermon Transcript

We ask you to stand for a lot of these services, but when the sermon comes you always get to sit down. And when we tell you you may be seated, you all do so very compliantly; well done everyone. I’ve been a pastor here for 9 years, and in those 9 years, I can’t think of a time when we told everyone to be seated, and someone just stood there for a bit and thought to themselves, “Now, if I sit down in this chair, how do I know it will really hold my weight?” I’ve never seen that before. Instead, you all just sit down, and what that reveals is you have confidence in doing so, confidence in the chair, that it will hold your weight. In fact, you have more confidence in it than you have in yourself. When we come to the point in the service where we tell you you may be seated, I’ve never seen someone choose to just squat instead of sitting in a chair. You’ve probably never even considered it, because you assume without even thinking about it that the chair will be better able to support your weight than your leg muscles for the duration of the coming sermon. So you don’t squat, you don’t try to put half your weight on the chair and half the weight on one leg. Without even thinking about it, you just sit down. That’s confidence.

 

The passage on which we’re focusing in the book of Philippians today is about confidence, but not a confidence in something to hold our body’s weight. This passage is about our confidence before God. In other words, just like you sit down in your chair without even thinking about it because you’re confident in the chair, what enables us to draw near to God, to pray to him, to worship him like we’re doing this morning in this gathering, to even just live in the world he made and over which he rules with peace without even thinking about it? What gives us confidence before God? This text gives us two basic options for how to answer that question: You can be confident in yourself, that there is something about you that gives you good reason to assume that you can draw near to God with confidence. Or, you can be confident in Christ, that there is something about him that gives you good reason to assume that you can draw near to God with confidence if you draw near to him in Christ. Paul was writing to a church, people who had become Christians, and we’re going to see in this passage that the essence of becoming a Christian is shifting your confidence before God from yourself to Christ. Some of you in this room today may call yourselves Christians, but still have your confidence in yourself. Others of you truly have put your confidence in Christ, like the Philippians did, and yet it is still so easy for us to exchange that confidence in Christ for a confidence in ourselves, to move some of our weight off the chair, as it were. Paul knows that, and so he warns us here: Don’t exchange Christ-confidence for self-confidence, and he gives us three reasons in this passage: Some will tempt you to, your best self is your worst enemy, and salvation is in Christ alone.

 

Some will tempt you to

 

The passage on which we’re focusing today begins in verse 2, where we read this warning: Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. The “dogs” here is not just an insult; a dog was considered an unclean animal by the Jews, and ironically in this verse Paul is referring to Jews who likely professed faith in Christ, but still taught that you must be circumcised to be declared righteous or accepted in God’s sight. That’s why Paul refers to them here as “those who mutilate the flesh”. And their teaching was understandable on one level: God himself had instituted circumcision as the mark of his people all the way back in Genesis 17, very close to the beginning of the Bible, over a thousand years before the time when Paul was writing this letter, and for a thousand years God had told his people that they must circumcise their sons, and that if any male from outside Israel wanted to become one of God’s people, they had to get circumcised, even as adults.

 

So what was circumcision intended by God to do? It was intended by God to mark those who were in covenant with him, his people. But in the hands of sinful people over the centuries that followed and in the hands of the “dogs” as Paul calls them here, circumcision went from being a sign of God’s covenant to being the thing in which they placed their confidence. Essentially what they did with it is they did evil; notice Paul calls them evildoers in verse 2, but while doing evil, they remained confident before God, and why? Because they were circumcised. They neglected what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law,” justice and mercy and faithfulness (Matt 23:23), but hey, they were circumcised, and that gave them confidence before God.

 

So, given that the very source of their confidence before God was their circumcision, how do you think they will treat those who seem confident before God, but aren’t circumcised? They’re going to tell them, “Hey; what’s the matter with you? Why are you praying and rejoicing and living as though God loves you when you haven’t even been circumcised?” Let’s say you’re working at your company at an entry-level job, but you’re really hoping to move up to management. You know you can’t just bank on your charm for that, so you work really hard, putting in extra hours throughout the week, signing on on the weekends, really going the extra mile to chum up to existing management, and finally, 5 years later, you get the promotion. You move in to the corner office, you get a nice pay bump, and you start giving orders to your direct reports. But then one day as you’re reclining at your desk basking in the glory of it all, you look across the hall and see someone else doing the same thing at their management-level office desk, only you realize: “Wait a second. They haven’t done half the work I’ve done! They’re late half the time and the work they do is mediocre at best. Who are they to start giving orders and sitting in a corner office and making the kind of money I make? Hey, hey you over there, why don’t you get your feet off your desk and do some actual work for once?” When your confidence is in yourself in some way, you will tend to feel a need to make others do the same things. Their confidence without your thing actually becomes a threat to your confidence.

 

Seeing Christians who were confident before God but weren’t circumcised threatened their confidence in their circumcision. If your confidence is in your whiteness, you will tend to want to impose white majority culture norms on everyone. If your confidence is in your morality, you will tend to want to impose that morality on everyone. If your confidence is how tolerant and open-minded you are, you will (ironically) want to impose tolerance and open-mindedness on everyone, and so on.

 

Now I doubt I need to tell you today to look out for those who are telling you you need to get circumcised to be declared righteous in God’s sight, but you’re naïve if you think nobody is tempting you to exchange Christ-confidence for self-confidence. Plenty of authors are publishing books and plenty of speakers are packing venues and plenty of podcasters and social media influencers, even under the name of Christ, are promoting the idea that the real path to peace and joy, the place to which to look for confidence, is in yourself. Consider titles like this: Confidently You. That’s a real title from a real author who claims to be a Christian pastor. Or how about these? Speak the Blessings, Your Best Life Now, Winning the War in Your Mind. What do they all suggest? You can do it! Our world is practically screaming at us to put our confidence in ourselves.

 

And it’s hard to overstate how easy it is even for Christians to descend into self-confidence. How can you tell when it’s happening? Well the obvious way is when you are doing what the dogs of verse 2 did: Violating God’s commandments but still praying and coming to church like all is well because you were baptized, you’re not as bad as some really bad people, you grew up in a Christian family, or you asked Jesus into your heart once. More subtly, though, you can detect self-confidence when you find yourself drawn to do things like pray and come to church only in seasons of life where you feel like you’re doing a lot for God. So let’s say you have a week in which you sleep through your morning time with God a few times, family devotions never happen, you don’t feel like having anyone over, and you were kind of a jerk with your wife. Do you still want to draw near to God in prayer and gather with his people after a week like that? If the answer is no, it’s good evidence that your confidence has subtly shifted from Christ to yourself. And if you find you can only rejoice in the Lord when you’re sticking to your diet or succeeding in your career or when your kids are obedient, it’s good evidence that your confidence has subtly shifted from Christ to those things, which are just other manifestations of self-confidence. Don’t exchange Christ-confidence for self-confidence because some will tempt you to do just that. And don’t do it because even your best self is actually your worst enemy.

 

Your best self is your worst enemy

 

Ok, so what’s the alternative to these dogs, these evildoers, those who mutilate the flesh? Paul says in verse 3 that “we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.” So there’s your contrast: You can put confidence in the flesh, the self, or you can “glory in”, that is, put your confidence in, Christ, and the true circumcision, the true people of God, are those who put their confidence in him. Now, if you were one of the dogs, and you heard Paul telling everyone not to put their confidence in themselves, what might you say in response? “He’s just saying that because he doesn’t have much in himself in which to put his confidence.” Is that true?

 

No, it’s not. In fact, Paul goes on to say in verse 4 that if anyone thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, he has more, and then he lists off things about himself that would have been impressive to any religious first-century Jew. Not only was he circumcised; he was circumcised on the eighth day, in exact observance of God’s law. And he wasn’t some Gentile convert; he was a born and bred Israelite from a prestigious tribe. Nor was he some liberal with respect to God’s law; as to the law he was a Pharisee, a sect of priests in the first century known for their strict and price observance of the literal meaning of God’s law. He wasn’t lazy either; he says as to zeal, he went so far as to actively persecute the church itself because he thought that’s what God wanted him to do. He then says that as to righteousness under the law, he was blameless! Jewish rabbis suggest there are 613 commands God gave to his people before the coming of Christ, and Paul is saying here that if you took all 613 and then compared them to his life, you wouldn’t have been able to come up with even one about which you could say, “Yeah but you’re breaking that one.”

 

In modern terms, he was a good person. He was a great person! He was a very religious person. So, if anyone had God’s approval, if anyone was righteous in God’s sight, if anyone was going to heaven, it would have had to have been him, right? But then he says in verse 7 that whatever gain he had, he counted as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. In other words, he came to see that all that righteousness he had been amassing for himself, all his self-righteousness, all the reasons for confidence in himself, all that was actually in the way of something greater: The surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. His righteousness was a liability, not an asset. While constantly looking in the mirror, he wasn’t looking at Christ. But then Christ appeared to him, like literally Jesus Christ, resurrected from the dead, appeared visibly and spoke audibly to Paul when Paul was on his way to persecuting more Christians, and you can read more about that in the book of Acts chapters 9 and 22 if you are interested.

 

Paul was a good, religious person, but he still needed to be converted! He was a good, religious person, but he didn’t know Christ! I wonder how many of you in the room today that still describes. If you were to die tonight and God were to ask you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say? Take a moment and give an answer silently in your mind. If that answer was anything about you, like “I know I haven’t lived a perfect life, but I’ve generally tried to do my best and always improve myself,” it may mean that you are still putting your confidence in the flesh, and that you have not yet become a Christian.

 

This is one of the key things that makes Christianity different from every other religion. What’s religion basically trying to do? It’s basically there to help you develop your own righteousness so that you can be declared righteous by God in the end, so that you can pass the judgment, or be admitted to Nirvana, or be reincarnated to a better life, or whatever. What’s the modern religion of self-help trying to do? It’s basically trying to help you develop your own goodness so that you can be declared good by people or so you can look in the mirror and declare yourself good. It’s cut out God as the judge, but the mechanics are basically the same. That’s how all religion works, and that’s why it can be so hard for the natural man to understand Christianity. It’s why, in fact, scripture says you never will understand it unless the Spirit of God first gives you eyes to see.

 

The message of Christianity is not, “Just being a good person isn’t enough; you need to become an even better person like Christians and then and only then can you go to heaven.” The message of Christianity is more like, “There are no good people at all, so even your righteousness, far from being an asset, is a liability, because it keeps you from knowing the only who is truly good.” Like, think about Paul’s testimony here. Usually when someone shares their testimony, their story of how God saved them, like we have them do when they get baptized here, they talk about how they were sinning against God, but God forgave them because of Christ and is now in the process of changing them, and that’s as it should be. Do you see Paul’s testimony, though? “Well, honestly, I don’t really have sins to confess. I was a really, really, good guy. But I didn’t have Christ.” His best self was his worst enemy.

 

I once had the privilege to know a Christian brother who was from the Sudanese people group of Indonesia, one of the largest unreached people groups in the world, meaning less than 2% of them are Christians. But, praise God, this brother was, and he said that when American missionaries would come and talk to him about Christ they would always tell him that they used to get drunk but then God saved them and now they don’t get drunk anymore. For him that never made an impact, because guess what? He never got drunk. He was a good, religiously observant Muslim. But then someone told him that before knowing Christ, he never had peace, and that drew him out. Why? Because as long as your confidence is in yourself, you’ll never have real peace, real confidence before God. You’ll tell yourself, “Yes I’m circumcised so all is well” but you know deep down that you fall short of the weightier matters of the law, and you’ll keep your distance from God accordingly.

 

Your best self is your worst enemy too. Your righteousness is in the way of knowing Christ, just like mine is. Now what does that mean? Go try to be a bad person? No. Here’s how the late pastor Tim Keller explained it: Most modern people don’t repent at all. Most modern people think they’re basically good and that if anyone is evil, it’s someone else or some other group of which they aren’t a part. Religious people do repent, but they only repent of their bad deeds. Religious people believe God has a law, and so when they break it, they feel they must make up for it in some way, and sometimes even beat themselves up pretty badly for it. Christians also repent of their bad deeds, but what Paul says he had to do here in chapter 3 is he had to also repent of his good deeds. He had to turn, not only from his unrighteousness, but from his righteousness, the righteousness he had under the law, to put his confidence before God in Christ alone.

 

That’s the essence of Christian conversion. You turn from your sins, yes you must, but you also turn from your righteousness. It’s downright weird, isn’t it? I sometimes have this experience with people when I’m trying to explain to them why it doesn’t seem like they are a Christian even though they are basically decent people who even go to church sometimes. They’re kinda like, “Ok so what are you saying I need to do? I need to go to church more? I need to start reading the Bible? I need to stop sinning?” Well yeah on one level if you don’t really care to go to church or read the Bible or repent of sin that does suggest you aren’t a Christian, but no that’s not really the issue. Ok, so then what do I need to do? Go be a missionary or something? No; becoming a Christian isn’t something you most fundamentally do. It’s not a work. It’s a shift, an exchange, inside you, in your soul, from confidence in yourself before God to confidence in Christ before God. And that’s why your best self is actually your worst enemy. The better you think you are in yourself the less likely you are to ever know Christ. And, finally, don’t exchange Christ-confidence for self-confidence because salvation is in Christ alone.

 

Salvation is in Christ alone

 

So what’s the big deal? So what that Paul’s righteousness was in the way of him knowing Christ? What’s so great about knowing Christ anyway? What is of such “surpassing worth” as Paul puts it about knowing Christ Jesus my Lord? Basically the reasons Paul gives in the rest of the passage is because there is real salvation in Christ, but before I get into those, I better explain briefly why your own righteousness can never save you. First, your own righteousness can never save you because you’re already guilty. Like, none of us can actually say, “Yeah measure me against all 613 commandments and you won’t find one that I’ve broken.” And honestly, Paul couldn’t either. He persecuted the church of Jesus Christ. And he testifies elsewhere that although you wouldn’t have been able to look at his life and find where he was guilty, God’s law cut deeper. In God’s law he found a commandment like, “You shall not covet” and then found in himself all sorts of covetousness (Rom 7:7-8). Now, if you’ve already broken God’s commandments, what makes you think doing better in the future can make up for that? If someone commits murder, goes to trial, and tells the judge, “Ok but I promise I won’t do it again,” should the judge really say, “Well in that case let’s not waste our time with this whole sentencing thing”? No; there is a demand of justice against violations of the law, namely that those violations be punished. No righteousness of your own can save you from that punishment because you are already guilty.

 

Furthermore, a righteousness of your won can’t save you because it won’t be truly righteous! You and I aren’t just already guilty; we’re corrupt! We don’t naturally obey the first and greatest commandment of the law, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and therefore even our good works are to him as filthy rags apart from Christ, the prophet Isaiah tells us (Isa 64:6). Imagine two ways of rebelling against a king if you are one of the king’s subjects: You can spit in his face, tell him you hate him, and set fire to the palace. Or, you can be really nice to the king, do what he tells you, bring him his food when he wants it, tell him how great he is, and all the while you’re plotting his assassination. Now, if the king finds out about your plot, is he really going to say, “It’s ok. You did bring me dinner after all”? No! In fact, he’s going to see all those dinners for what they were: Part of your rebellion against him! And that’s how our righteousness appears before God apart from our coming to him through Christ. You can’t make yourself a lover of God. Go ahead, try to just decide to change what you love. You can’t do it. Your righteousness can’t solve your legal problem: You’re guilty. And it can’t solve your heart problem: You’re corrupt.

 

But here’s the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. He saves you from both. Look at verse 9. Why does Paul so want to gain Christ? So that he might be found in him, not having a righteousness of his own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. He wants God to look at him in Christ, not having a righteousness of his own, but having the righteousness that God has provided in Christ, that comes to all who exchange their confidence in themselves to their confidence in Christ. Paul’s righteousness couldn’t make him righteous because he was already guilty, but guess whose righteousness could? Christ’s. He was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. Christ had no guilt of his own. And yet on the cross, Christ took the guilt of his people and suffered the punishment that God’s justice demanded for their sins. If you could just be “in him” then, if you could just be united to him in some way, then you could have a righteousness that actually saves. You could have his perfect obedience and his full payment for your sins credited to you, and the glory of the gospel, the message of Christianity, is that such a thing is actually possible by faith. The righteousness from God that Paul speaks of in verse 9 depends on faith as the verse says. If you exchange your self-confidence for Christ-confidence, you will be found in him having the one righteousness that can truly save: Christ’s.

 

One of my friends in college did Air Force ROTC, which means his entire college was paid for. He graduated with zero debt, and then married a girl who went to Penn State from Boston, which means she paid out-of-state tuition to do so. She had over $100,000 of debt. But the day she married my friend, all her debt became his, and in the years that followed, all his assets became hers. That’s what happens to those who are in Christ by faith. All the debt of our sin becomes his, and it is expunged, because he already paid for it, and all the asset of his righteousness becomes ours. We begin to relate to God, to pray to God, to worship God, to obey God, as though he has already declared us righteous, as though he has already accepted us, because we are confident that he does in Christ.

 

So verse 9 explains how Christ solves the guilt problem, but remember that we also have a corruption problem, and verse 10 addresses it. Here Paul says he doesn’t want to just be declared righteous because of Christ’s righteousness; he also wants to know the power of his resurrection, share his suffering, and become like him in his death. In other words, he doesn’t just want God to view him in Christ; he also wants to know Christ, and become like him, even in his sufferings. The girl who married my friend didn’t just want my friend’s assets; she wanted him. Paul wants to know and experience the power of Christ’s resurrection, the very power by which Jesus rose from the dead, working in him to overcome all that corruption that was in him. Not only is there a righteousness in him that we could never attain, but there is power in him to overcome all our corruption and to enable us to live the glorious lives God created us to live. But the path to that in this life is through suffering.

 

Earlier in Philippians, in chapter 1:29 Paul said to the Philippians that “it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” It’s a privilege to suffer for the sake of Christ, and so Paul expresses here a desire to share in Christ’s sufferings and to be made like Christ in his death. He realizes that his best self needs to die, and suffering and death are God’s appointed means of killing it. Do you realize that about yourself? It’s a common conversation I have with men who are married or especially with men who are parenting for the first time. Perhaps especially men in America, before they get married, are used to orienting their lives around themselves. Yes, we go to work, but then we get home, and we have hours upon hours to spend on whatever we choose. Then you get married, and you pretty soon realize that now you have to give at least some of those hours to serving the interests of your wife. Then you have kids, and you learn more than you ever realized just how many hours you were spending on yourself.

 

And what’s the temptation men face in such situations? “Get me out of here!” I know I’ve felt that and still do at times. But Paul is saying here, “Get me in to there!” In fact, those sufferings are pretty minor. Paul is saying, “Get me in to sharing Christ’s sufferings, get me into a life of self-denial, where the power of the resurrection of Christ is so working in me that people start to hate me for it, just like they hated Jesus, and keep me loving Christ and loving my enemies like he did, that I might die the way he did.” Is that your aspiration for your life on earth? Maybe you do want to know the power of Christ’s resurrection, but are you willing to suffer and die with Christ? Because that’s where you’ll really see the power of his resurrection at work. There are many ways in which if you simply follow Christ in this life, it will bring greater suffering and difficulty into your life. But if you don’t engineer your life around avoiding that suffering, if you don’t numb that suffering with substances or try to simply grit it out with a stiff upper lip, but if you walk through the suffering in conscious fellowship with Jesus Christ your Lord, who you personally know, then you will know the power of his resurrection working in you and even through you. Here’s how Paul describes it elsewhere: “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Cor 6:8-10).

 

And where does that resurrection power finally lead? Verse 11: That by any means possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead. Paul wants to live again with God forever after he dies, and none of his righteousness under the law could have attained that. Later in chapter 3, he speaks of how Jesus will come again and transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body (Phil 3:21). As we become like him in his death, so we will become like him in his resurrection. The Bible calls this “glorification,” because of how glorious you will be in that day. Brothers and sisters, this is the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus: In him there is a righteousness not our own that actually renders us righteous in God’s sight, in him there is resurrection power to overcome all our corruption, and in him there will be resurrection life for our bodies that are now destined to perish.

 

And yet, none of it will be yours if you exchange Christ-confidence for self-confidence, because Christ will not be yours. Your best self is your worst enemy. Count all your greatest achievements, spiritual or not, as loss, compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus your Lord.