Opportunity Costs

Opportunity Costs Philippians 3:1-11 Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI May 25th, 2008 In economics, there is a fundamental principle that helps entrepreneurs, CEO's, and committees make decisions concerning the use of resources. The principle is known as opportunity costs.

Opportunity costs are those hidden

costs that don’t show up on the price tag – the cost of the item itself PLUS the costs of what you had to give up in order to buy or produce the item. An example of this would be say you wanted to buy a new bike to ride to work or school every day. You settle on two bikes that are about one hundred bucks apart in price, but you are fifty bucks short of more expensive one. If you buy the lower priced one, you have enough money to take it home right away and buy a helmet and saddle bags. But you also get a lower quality bike with only a six month warranty, which means after that period you would have to pay for any repairs. That's a hidden cost you have to figure into your selection. If you wait a couple weeks you can come back when you have the money for the more expensive bike with a two year warranty, but you don't get the helmet and the saddle bags, plus you have to figure in the cost of the extra wear and tear your shoes take by walking the distance to work or school. Or you have to figure in the cost of bus fare. Either way, you have to consider the additional costs to you above and beyond the fifty bucks needed to buy the more expensive bike. So as you can see, everything costs a little bit more than what

the price tag says it costs. The cost is affected by our choices. Paul talks a bit about this in our passage this morning. In the Letter to the Philippians Paul has been addressing both the internal and external strife present in the church so it is no surp[rise when he sets the warning bells off with some pretty strong language. Look at vv. 1-2. Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again and it is a safeguard for you. Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. Paul is warning his beloved friends about his most hated enemy. He had to defend his gospel against them in Galatia and Corinth, so now he prepares the Philippian church ahead of time so that they can stand against the claims of the Judaizers. Judaizers were Jews who accepted Christ's teachings, but believed that full acceptance before God required circumcision and Law observance – they were necessary for salvation. In other words, according to them, salvation was not by grace alone. What do think Paul means when calls the Judaizers "men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh"?

The reference here is circumcision; Paul is

pointing out that those that call for circumcision are asking for a worthless rite. For them, circumcision means nothing because the new covenant is in the blood of Jesus Christ, not the blood of the foreskin. You see, the danger lies in being able to do something to own the salvation given to us. Our bent for independence from God pushes us to think in terms of what we can do to earn the Father's favor. We want to believe that we

are somehow responsible for choosing Christ. That somewhere in some corner of our hearts there is this place of pure goodness that suddenly wells up and says "Yes!" to Christ. We want to believe that we are holy, obedient children. We obey the letter of the Law so that we can say on that day, "We made it!" When in fact, without the working of the Holy Spirit on the inner man, we would have run away. This is the problem, says Paul, with teaching that we must add our own obedience to grace for salvation.

It lures us in to thinking we have a

righteousness all our own before God, when in fact without the intercession of Christ before the throne, without the groanings of the Holy Spirit too deep to understand, our every effort is like menstrual rags before God; filthy and useless for anything but to be thrown in the fire. We cannot put our confidence in the flesh, in what we can accomplish through your own efforts! Paul says, place your confidence in Jesus Christ and him alone. Only he can save. Only he can satisfy. Make your boast in Christ Jesus, not yourself. Boasting in yourself is useless and I ought to know. For if anyone has a reason to boast it is me. Picking up in v.5. ....circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. Paul runs off a pedigree that few can rival. He is no johnny-come-lately to the God of Israel. He is a man who would make any Jewish mother proud! In fact, one might argue Paul as saying, "If anyone in the world knows about these

things, I would." Paul places his heritage out there as a challenge. He wants the Philippians to know that if anyone comes to them claiming to know a better way, they need to check the person's credentials against Paul's. I want to take a quick look at this pedigree because there is much in it that escapes our notice if we don't pay attention. The first thing you notice is that Paul's life is marked by obedience. His parents, in obedience to the law, had him circumcised on the eighth day.

He is of Abraham's physical seed, and of

Benjamin to boot. Remember, it was the tribe of Benjamin that stayed faithful to the throne of David when the nation split. He was a Pharisee which meant he not only obeyed the written law the Torah, but also the oral law, the tradition passed down known as the Talmud.

In the Talmud, the law of Moses was

interpreted to the nth degree, leading to greatly detailed instructions on how to obey the law. His zeal for the law and the God of Israel led to him persecuting of the church. In fact, Paul was empowered to enforce the will of the high priest against the church. In all things, Paul obeyed. He was righteous in the eyes of man. But, Paul says in v.7. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. You know, in my Christian life, I have so blithely let this verse roll off my tongue without really thinking of the cost Paul is speaking about here. There were an immense amount of opportunity costs involved in Paul's conversion. Personal costs. We read this and we think, "Wow, Paul gave up a life of religious

rigor to come into the glorious freedom of the children of God. Yeah, he gave up all he knew, but look at what he gained." But to read this passage that simplistically is not only to de-value what Paul gave up, but what he gave it for. Think about it moment. In considering the pedigree he just rambled off as loss in order to gain Christ, he gave up more than just his credentials as a Jew, he gave up his identity. He gave up his family, his friends. His becoming a Christian ensured that they would never speak to him again.

In fact, he now became the one they hunted rather than hunting

Christians alongside them. He gave up his future as a rabbi among his people. He surrendered great honor as a Pharisee. In the eyes of his people, he gave up his place in the people of Abraham and became one of the "dogs." What is interesting is that his sacrifice went way beyond simply giving up his identity as a Jew among the Jews. He also gave it up among the Christians. Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles!

He became disliked even among the brethren

because he was taking his pearls and casting them before the swine!

So

everything that Paul lived and breathed for he gave up, he considered it loss! Why? For the sake of Christ; his singular passion, he gave up everything. Now, I want to go out on a limb here and say a little something about Paul's abandoning everything for the sake of Christ. We have a saying that "We want to have our cake and eat it too." If there has ever been a person who could have had the cake of salvation and made it sweeter by adding the righteousness of his own efforts it was Paul. But Paul recognized that you can not have the

gospel PLUS anything and get salvation. You cannot have Christ PLUS anything and know the fellowship of the Spirit and peace with God. You must abandon everything else. You must rely on Christ alone. Trust him alone. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die." In a very real since we must lose our identity completely. With Paul we must be able to say "I am crucified with Christ, therefore I no longer live, but Jesus Christ now lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." Beloved in Christ, it is no small matter to belong to the Lord of Lords.

It means complete and

unrestrained identification with him. It means that we must count all we consider most dear to us -- our homes, our families, our jobs, our country, our church -everything that we use to identify ourselves as rubbish in light of Christ. Now let me qualify this by saying all of these things are a part of what God calls us to when he brings us into his Kingdom, but we must remember that our first and ultimate allegiance is to the Lamb. Paul understood this and so, he continues his thought in vv. 8-9. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want us to recognize a few things that are important for understanding this passage. The first concerns ""the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ

Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things." The knowing that Paul is speaking of here is not the mystic sort of knowing of the eastern religions. No, the knowing he is talking about is the deep, intimate knowing of the Hebrews -the sort of knowing one has concerning his spouse or his family. One comes to know them because of the time spent with them, there is a shared history. So each knows how the other will respond to different situations. You see, when Paul thinks of Christ, he has the God of the Hebrews in mind. For him, Jesus Christ is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. In the eyes of the apostle he has a long history with God because of his being born into the chosen nation of God. He has heard the stories over an over and has told them himself concerning how God made a covenant with Abraham, and then Isaac, and then Jacob. He remembers how God delivered the Israelites out of slavery and led them through the wilderness into the Promised Land. He knows how God has chastened Israel through exile and captivity, and yet that God always kept a remnant faithful to him and so himself kept the covenant even when Israel refused to obey. It is this God that met him on the road to Damascus and changed his life forever. Of this God Paul says "There is nothing greater than knowing my God. For his sake, I have given up everything that once mattered to me and have considered them nothing more than filthy, fetid trash." This is the God Paul knows, our God. And he knows him intimately. Why? Because he has a history with God. Let me just ask before I move on. What is your history with God? When did it begin? Think about it a

little bit. Think about how your history with God affects your knowing God and your faith in him. So Paul speaks of abandoning the life he knew in order to know Christ intimately and to be found in him. There are two things I believe Paul wants us to recognize, the first of which we have already to discussed to some extent. That is, Paul compares the righteousness that comes by faith and that by Torah observance and finds the latter seriously lacking. It is lacking because it does not have the power to put us in right-standing with God. In Romans 8:3-4 Paul writes, "For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son ....in order that the righteous requirements of the law be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit."

Only the righteousness of Jesus Christ,

imputed to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit – who circumcises our hearts -- can put us in right-standing with God. That is why back in v.3 Paul speaks of the believers in Jesus Christ as the real circumcision.

We cannot make

ourselves part of the covenant people, we must come by God's Spirit. The second thing I believe Paul wants us to recognize is that our attainment is both present and future, now and not yet. Being found in Christ means that we enjoy the encouragement of being united with him, the comfort of his love, and the fellowship of his Spirit. Yet we also know that what God started he will finish. So Paul says, consider all things loss in the glorious hope of being

found in Christ on that day -- the day of his return. He elaborates a little more on this in vv. 10-11. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Can you hear Paul’s passion here? He wants to know Christ – not just as a rabbi and or good moral teacher but he wants to know him in his death AND in the power of the resurrection. That means knowing the awesome power that raised Christ from the dead at work in his own life. It means being granted to suffer for the sake of Christ and having that common ground with Jesus of suffering for the sake of others. It means living in hope that as Christ was raised from the dead so he will be. And this, he said in v.1, is reason to rejoice. The nice thing about this message is there is no need for a closing illustration. Paul's provided all the illustration we need. For the sake of Christ and proclaiming the gospel, he became the enemy of his own people. For our sake, Christ humbled himself and took the sin that made us an enemy of God and paid the penalty. If we are not moved by what we read here to love and obey Christ, to rejoice in him, then we ought to examine ourselves, especially since we will be celebrating communion next Sunday. We need to think hard on whether we consider everything as rubbish that we may gain Christ or if we’re just going through the religious motions. It's so easy to put confidence in the flesh. Don't do it. Watch out for it. Let's center our lives on Jesus Christ, living a life worthy of the gospel.