"Getting to Know You"--Philippians 3:8-11

When I was in first grade, I had the opportunity to be in my local high school’s production of the musical “The King and I.” I played one of the many children of the King of Siam, which introduced a slight problem—I was supposed to be Oriental, but I had extremely blonde hair at the time. But of course, in theatre, they have ways of overcoming such obstacles, so they just sprayed my hair with this black gunk every night and away I went. I had only one line in the whole production: toward the very end, when Miss Anna was preparing to head back home to England, I stood up and said “We will be afraid without you!”

One of the most beloved songs from that musical is the song “Getting to Know You.” Even if you’ve never seen the musical, I’ll bet you’ve heard at least a portion of that song. One of the more famous verses of that song says, “Getting to know you/getting to know all about you/Getting to like you/getting to hope you like me.” I think that verse captures very well the excitement and the uneasiness that are both present as you’re getting to know someone for the first time.

Getting to know someone can be a very exciting process. You get to learn about a new person, find out about their life story, perhaps find out about some common interests that the two of you might have. But it can also be an uneasy time as well because we all want to be well-liked and accepted by other people. The other person is getting to know us as well, and we want them to like us.

I think this excitement and uneasiness also exist as we get to know Jesus more and more. Obviously, there is excitement as we learn more about His deep love for us and the peace that we can experience in our lives by following His example. But there’s some uneasiness as well as we get to know Jesus—not because of what He learns about us, because we know that He already knows everything about us. No, there’s some uneasiness because of what we learn about ourselves in light of Him. We start to realize how sinful we really are; we see our attitudes and our actions in light of God’s holiness, and that can be a very unsettling thing.

But however unsettling it may be to gain a more intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ, according to Scripture the value of such a knowledge far surpasses anything that might be compared to it. In our study of Philippians today, we are going to see the value of knowing Christ in every manner of life. We’ll see that:

Knowing Jesus in every way is worth more than everything.

Would you turn with me please to Philippians 3:8–11? Last week we saw how Paul had a change in his values when he became a Christian. He used to think that his religious resume was a source of gain in his relationship with God. He used to think that his heritage and his own accomplishments had made him right with God, but when he embraced Christ he realized that his former perspective was actually a net loss to him because it was actually a hindrance in his relationship with God. Today we will see what Paul now considers to be valuable in his Christian life. Let’s start reading in v. 7, and then we’ll study the message of vv. 8–11 [READ 3:7–11]

Let’s take a look first of all at the value of knowing Jesus, and then we’ll look at what that knowledge involves.

I. Nothing compares to the value of an intimate knowledge of Jesus (vv. 8–9)

In v. 7, Paul had said that he now considers his former mindset about his religious resume to be a hindrance to his relationship with Christ. He broadens that idea now in v. 8 when he says, “More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Now note carefully what Paul is saying here—he is not taking an ascetic view of life which says that nothing has any value. He’s not saying, “Possessions? Relationships? It’s all worthless.” No—he’s talking about comparative value. He is saying that whatever value we may assign to the various parts of our lives, there is an infinite chasm between the value of those things and the value of an intimate knowledge of Jesus. (Now Paul is obviously talking about a born-again person gaining a more intimate understanding of Jesus. The idea here is not conversion but spiritual growth for someone who is already converted).

You can picture in your mind a set of old-fashioned scales where two objects were placed on either side of the scale to determine its weight as compared to the other object. What Paul is saying is that if you could place an intimate understanding of Jesus on one side, there is nothing that you could place on the other side that would even come close to the same value—not material things, not a fat bank account, not social status or power, not even earthly relationships.

And Paul goes on in the rest of v. 8 to describe just how wide the gulf really is. We see that the actions of his life show it when he says, “for whom I have suffered the loss of all things.” If Paul was exaggerating here, it wasn’t by much. Paul had lost pretty much everything in his service for Jesus. He had once had a pretty good social standing within the Jewish community, but he lost that when he embraced Jesus. He seems to have lost whatever possessions he may have had throughout his life. He may have lost his relationships with family members when he converted. At this point, he had lost his freedom as we awaited trial in Rome.

Paul really had lost everything, but his attitude reveals that he still had his sights set on the most valuable thing of all—knowing Jesus through and through. At the end of verse 8 he says, “[I] count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.” The old King James Version says, “I count them but dung.” That really captures the graphic nature of this word. He is basically thinking of household waste—be it human waste, table scraps, spoiled food—anything that is fit only to be thrown out and discarded. So when Paul contemplates the possibility of gaining a more intimate knowledge of Christ, that’s how he thinks about everything else so that there will be no competition in his mind with the goal of knowing Christ.

Now that sounds pretty extreme to our modern minds, but perhaps that’s just because we’re constantly told to place our highest value on other things. We are bombarded every day by a billion-dollar industry called the advertising industry that tells us how much value to place on everything from a new car to deodorant. It’s hard for us to cut through all of that, but perhaps that’s why the Lord allowed Paul to lose everything—so that he might see clearly in order to teach the rest of us.

Now in v. 9 he goes on to reiterate that he doesn’t want to slip back into his old mindset of basing his standing before God on his own efforts to obey the rules [READ v. 9]. Here again is the fundamental difference in mindset that Paul described in v. 7—the basis for his relationship with God was faith in Jesus Christ, not his own efforts to follow the rules. And Paul wanted at every moment to be found in Christ—to be found in that mindset of dependence on Jesus.

So now we’ve seen the value of knowing Jesus, but what does that knowledge involve?

II. Knowing Jesus involves understanding and embracing the attitude that carried Him through His life, death, and resurrection (vv. 10–11)

Let’s read again what Paul says here in vv. 10–11 [READ vv. 10–11]. Here again in v. 10, Paul expresses his desire to know Jesus, and throughout this passage Paul has been using the Greek word that describes knowing someone through an intimate relationship with them. It is the kind of knowledge where you know what another person is thinking, you know how they will react in certain situations because you’ve been with them through the up and downs of life. It’s like the knowledge that you sometimes see that elderly couples have of each other. They’ve been together perhaps for 45 or 50 years, and they’ve shared every conceivable circumstance together, and now they can finish each other’s sentences because they know what the other one is thinking.

That’s the way that Paul wants to know Jesus, so that He would know what Jesus would think in a given situation; so that He would know how Jesus would react in a particular circumstance. And Paul goes on to further clarify this knowledge by saying that he wants to know “the power of His resurrection.” Jesus certainly exhibited tremendous power throughout his life, but never more so than when he rose from the dead. For all of our advances in this world, for all of the ways that we’ve learned to harness the power of nature and the human body, we have not and will not gain power over death. But Jesus had that power, and Paul said that he wanted to know that power in his own life, certainly in the resurrection that he looked forward to, but also in the moments of weakness in life that we all encounter. He wanted to know that power of Jesus in his moments of fear and fatigue and weakness and sickness and doubt—the same power that carried Jesus through His life and allowed Him to remain faithful to God the Father at every moment.

But then Paul says that he also wants to know “the fellowship of His sufferings.” This idea doesn’t sit with us quite as well as the idea of power does. We like the sound of power! We’d love to share in the power that Jesus had, but we don’t want the pain, do we? But nevertheless, suffering was a real part of Jesus’ life as well. He was rejected by some of His own family members, betrayed to death by one of his closest friends. He sacrificed some of the comforts of life in order to conduct his ministry. He put up with gossip and rumors and false accusations, and of course he ultimately endured even beatings and crucifixion, all because it was the plan of God the Father to show His great love for us.

And dare I say, that one of the reasons that we may lack this deep, relational knowledge of Jesus is because we don’t want to share His sufferings. We don’t want to be rejected by other people for choosing to serve God rather than choosing to make them happy. We don’t want to give up some of the creature comforts that we enjoy in order to serve other people. That whole way of thinking rubs us the wrong way because it doesn’t resonate with our sinful nature, but if we want to have a deep, relational knowledge of Jesus, sacrifice and suffering are part of the package because that was part of His life, and if we are to imitate Him, then that will part of our lives as well.

But then, I think Paul answers perhaps the biggest question we have at this point—how can we have a knowledge of Jesus like this? How can we get to know Him in this intimate way? I think the answer lies in the last phrase of v. 10—“being conformed to His death.” I really think this should be translated “by being conformed to His death;” in other words it can read “that I may know Him by being conformed to His death.” That’s a subtle part of the Greek grammar that I think is fully appropriate to bring out in the translation here.

So in other words, Paul is telling us how to gain this knowledge of Jesus—we can do so by being conformed to His death. Now I don’t think Paul is saying that we have to actually experience crucifixion; I think he is pointing our thoughts back to 2:5–11 where he described the humble attitude that Jesus had in His death, His willingness to follow the plan of God the Father even though it lead to a painful and humiliating death like crucifixion.

So therein lies the key to this intimate knowledge of Jesus—it comes as we embrace the same humble mindset that carried Him through every moment of His life. If we will embrace that mindset that made Jesus willing even to die in order to obey God the Father, then we will start to learn to think how Jesus thought about life; we will come to know what His attitude was; we’ll gain insight about how He would react in the situations that we face, and in so doing we’ll come to know Jesus more and more.

Paul then wraps up this thought in v. 11 by stating one of His purposes in gaining this knowledge of Christ. He states that he desires this knowledge “in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Now this statement sounds a bit unusual at first, as though Paul isn’t certain whether or not he actually will be raised from the dead. But if we look a bit closer, we can see that Paul is not doubting the fact of his resurrection, he is simply uncertain about the nature of his resurrection. In other words, as we know from other passages, Paul is confident that he will be resurrected, as we will all be resurrected, but he just doesn’t know yet precisely what the resurrected life has in store for him. Let me point out a couple of things that will help you understand this.

First, in this verse Paul uses a Greek word for resurrection that is slightly different from the usual Greek word for resurrection. Paul added a prefix to the word that seems to indicate that he is thinking about a smaller, unique class of resurrected people, and when we read this in light of the context of vv. 12–14, we see who Paul has in mind. In vv. 12–14, Paul talks about his passionate desire to receive the prize that God offers for faithfulness to Jesus Christ.

The New Testament makes it clear that we as God’s children will receive rewards for our faithfulness to Jesus when he establishes His kingdom on this earth. So what Paul is saying in v. 11 is that he wants to know Jesus intimately so that he might be part of that unique group of resurrected souls who hear Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Paul wants to gain those rewards in the resurrection life, and in order to do that he desires to know Jesus deeply so that he might know how he should live.

Friends, I hope you have been captivated by the vision of what it means to know Christ and the value of that knowledge. I think we can all agree that we want to pursue something in our lives that truly counts, something that has real lasting value. We don’t want to wake up one day and realize that we’ve spent our time chasing things that don’t really matter. But we can be confident that if we will pursue an intimate relationship with Jesus more than anything else, we will have sought for and found the most valuable thing upon which we could possibly base our lives, something that has value not just in this life but in the next as well.

So I think the challenge for us today is to make sure that we don’t allow anything in our lives to compete with the value that we place on our relationship with Jesus. The other aspects of our lives do have their own value, but their comparative value is nothing when we weigh them against the value of knowing Jesus. So ask the Lord today to help you see where your perspective may need to be changed, and ask Him to help you keep your value system correct.