Forgetting the Past and Entering the Future with Hope
Philippians 3
by Eric Stillman 
December 31st, 2006

Play

Download mp3

I love New Year’s.  I love New Year’s because I am someone who craves new beginnings and fresh starts.  I love having the opportunity to close the door on one chapter and to enter into a new one believing that this will be the chapter where I become all that I want to be.  This will be the year that I grow up, that I figure out how to be a husband and father and man of God.  This will be the year I get organized and plan ahead and figure out life.  This will be the year I become the pastor I want to be.  This morning, I’m not interested in giving a long sermon.  Instead, I would love to read God’s Word together, Paul’s words in Philippians 3:1-14, which is always a great text for New Years, and enter the New Year together as a church committed to knowing Christ more and becoming like Him in the way we live.

Please open your Bibles to Philippians 3:1-14.

Philippians 3:1-14 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.  ² Watch out for those dogs, those men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.  ³ For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh--  ⁴ though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more:  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;  ⁶ as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.  ⁷ But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  ⁸ 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  ⁹ 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.  ¹⁰ 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,  ¹¹ and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.  ¹² Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,  ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Prev - Next >>