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In the musical The Sound of Music, Maria, a Catholic nun in training was on her way to an interview to become a nanny for the aristocratic Von Trapp family. She was feeling quite nervous and unsure of herself, so to boost her confidence she belted out a song, "I have confidence in confidence alone…" Apparently, it must have helped her for she landed the job.
But what is confidence? The dictionary tells us that confidence is self-reliance, self-assurance, or a feeling of certainty and trust. To be sure, confidence is not a bad thing. It can be very helpful when it is placed in the right thing or in the right person. In matters of health, it is great to have confidence in one's doctor. In matters of money, it is a good to have confidence in one's financial advisors. However, sometimes our confidence can be misplaced. The people, organizations, or institutions in which we place our confidence or trust can disappoint us, and this is surely true in the area of faith.
Down through history, untold numbers of pilgrims seeking spiritual truth have been disappointed or spiritually wounded by pastors, ministers, churches, and religious institutions in which they placed their confidence or trust. In Philippians 3:4-14 the Apostle Paul shares his story of misplaced confidence. Paul was seeking spiritual truth. He was seeking to win God's favor, because he believed he would earn a place in God's Kingdom and a reservation in heaven. But, according to his own testimony, he misplaced his confidence, and what Paul did more than two thousand years ago, many still do today. So as we listen to Paul's story notice several things.
1. Notice where Paul incorrectly placed his confidence. He misplaced his confidence in his personal credentials. During Paul's young adult years, he believed the way to win God's favor was through his own self-efforts and his own goodness. Paul worked harder than anyone else and was more determined than anyone else to excel in his personal character and in his religion.
Paul placed his confidence in his personal ancestry. He had great confidence that his physical genealogy would put him in favor with God because he was descended from Abraham. He was circumcised on the eighth day, meaning that he was born a Jew and followed the Jewish rituals from the very beginning. He was of the people of Israel, meaning that he was not a Gentile converted to Judaism. Rather, he was by birth a member of God's chosen people and a physical descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was of the tribe of Benjamin, meaning that Paul was of the elite in Israel. Benjamin alone was born in the land of promise. The first king of Israel came from this tribe, and it was faithful to the Davidic dynasty when the kingdom split. Surely Paul thought that this would impress God.
But not only did Paul place his confidence in his personal ancestry, but also in his personal achievements. Paul said that he was the Hebrew of Hebrews, meaning that he lived according to Jewish Traditions. He did not seek to break away from his heritage. He remained committed to the language, the customs, and the practices of Orthodox Judaism. He was, in regard to the law, a Pharisee, meaning he had committed his life completely to the laws of God. He committed his life not only to know the laws and traditions, but also to obey them and abide by them. He was, in regard to zeal, a persecutor of the church, meaning that Paul not only loved the laws of God, but also hated anything and anyone who, in his mind, undermined the law and his faith.
Consequently, Paul enthusiastically opposed the church of Jesus Christ, which he believed was the enemy. And finally, Paul was, in regard to legalistic righteousness, flawless. In other words, by all outward appearances, Paul was a good, righteous, committed, religious man who loved God and the faith of his fathers.
This is to say, if ever a person had the external credentials to win God's favor and to be given a reservation in heaven, it was Paul. Through his privileged birth and his sincere religious efforts, Paul felt confident that his soul was safe, that he was on the right road, going in the right direction. However, Paul discovered he had been wrong. He discovered that he was on the wrong road, going in the wrong direction. He discovered that his confidence and trust had been misplaced. In fact, those things, which Paul thought, were so important in gaining God's favor proved to be worthless and useless.
Notice the words Paul used, "But whatever was to my profit (his ancestry and his religious achievements) I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. I consider them rubbish (garbage) that I may gain Christ and be found in him." Now, this did not mean that Paul was ashamed of his heritage or his accomplishments, but that those outward things were of no value or use as far as winning God's favor was concerned. You see, like so many others, Paul had placed his confidence in the wrong things. So the question remains--If this great religious man could not place his confidence in external works of righteousness to discover spiritual truth and eternal life, where did he place it? Where can we place our confidence and trust?
2. Notice where Paul correctly placed his confidence. He placed his confidence in the Divine Christ whom he met on that hot and dusty road leading to Damascus where he intended to further persecute Christians. It was that encounter and experience with Jesus Christ, which enabled this man to see and understand. Ironically, according to Luke's account in Acts 8, this experience with Christ blinded Paul temporarily, but through that blindness Paul was given sight. He came to see that favor with God could not be earned, bought, or merited. Rather, it could only be received as a gift from God when he placed his confidence (faith) in Jesus Christ. And when Paul did place his faith in Christ, he was given confidence and assurance that now he was on the right road, going in the right direction.
By properly placing his confidence in the right place, Paul became the recipient of four precious gifts.
(A) He was given knowledge of Christ. Now, this was more than an intellectual knowledge. It was more than being able to spout out facts about Christ, about who He was or what He did. Rather it was a personal, experiential knowledge. I recently returned home from a mission trip to Nicaragua. During those two weeks, more than thirty of our church members led Bible School, distributed food and medicines, taught Bible studies, and helped renovate homes and schools. Prior to this trip, I had a knowledge of most of them, primarily because they regularly attended worship on Sundays, but after spending two weeks with them--working, laughing, singing, crying, praying, sweating, and traveling, I knew them--and they knew me. Prior to Paul's Damascus Road experience with Jesus Christ he may have known about him, but after that experience, he really knew him and declared such knowledge was of incomparable worth.
(B) He was also given the righteousness of Christ. For most of Paul's young adult life and perhaps earlier, he was trying to measure up to the high standards of his faith. He did everything humanly possible to become righteous enough to stand in the presence of his Holy God, but like swimming upstream, against the current, the harder he tried, the more ground he lost. But when Paul placed his confidence in Jesus Christ, he was justified. He was declared to be righteous, not on the basis of anything Paul had done, but on the basis of what Jesus had done on the cross. It has been said that after the War Between the States was over, someone asked President Abraham Lincoln how he was going to treat the rebellious South. Lincoln responded, "Ill treat them as if they have never been away." Paul discovered that same grace. Even though he had fallen short of God's glory and was in fact unrighteous, he was pronounced righteous so that God would accept him. What a gift!
(C) He was given the power of Christ. Paul had experienced the weakness of the law as well as the weakness of the flesh. Thus, he yearned to experience the resurrection power of the Risen Savior, and he did. When Paul wrote this epistle to the Philippians he had been a Christian and an Apostle for many years. He had been beaten, whipped, imprisoned, stoned, and shipwrecked. He had been lied about, cursed at, mocked, and rejected. He had met the enemy, but in Christ he was given the power to be more than a conqueror. He knew that the same power, which raised Jesus victoriously from the dead, would also bring him victory.
(D) He was also given the privilege to pursue the purpose of Christ for his life. No one, not even Paul, is saved just to experience the privileges and blessings of the redeemed. All of God's Children are saved in order to serve and glorify God. But here's the thing. In serving God, in following God's purpose, for our lives, we are incredibly blessed. For Paul God's purpose included apostleship. It included taking the gospel to the Gentile world. And to that purpose Paul gave his life. Thus, he said, "This one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining forward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Next to knowing Jesus personally, the apostle's greatest joy was to serve Christ faithfully as he fulfilled his purpose.
My friends, in the area of spirituality and faith, where should we place our confidence? According to Paul's experience, not in the world, not in religion itself, not in human effort, but in the person of Jesus Christ. Quoting W. E. Henley's famous line in the well known Invictus, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul," John Stevenson reminds us that there is something ego affirming in the idea that we can make our own way, that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But this is often a myth. He reflects the following story.
A man was traveling on his donkey when he came upon a small fuzzy object lying in the road. He dismounted to look more closely and found a sparrow lying on its back with its scrawny legs thrust upward. At first he thought the bird was dead, but closer investigation proved it to be very much alive. The man asked the sparrow if he was all right. The sparrow replied, "Yes" The man asked, "What are you doing lying on your back with your legs pointed towards the sky?" The sparrow responded that he had heard a rumor that the shy was falling, and so he was holding his legs up to catch it. The man retorted, "You surely don't think that you're going to hold it up with those two scrawny legs, do you?" The sparrow, with a very solemn look, replied, "One does the best he can."
Our problem is much like the problem of the sparrow. We might try to do the best we can, but our best is not good enough. Indeed our most noble efforts seem altogether puny compared with what is really needed. When the sky is falling, our reaction might be to lift our hands to stop it, but it will do us no good.
The issue here is not the falling of the sky, but the falling of God's judgment. A man's natural response is not to lift his arm or his legs, but his good deeds in an effort to save himself. This passage teaches that salvation is an act of God's free grace.
It is not the result of placing one's faith or confidence in oneself or in one's own efforts, but rather in the person of Jesus Christ. Where are you placing your confidence?
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