What Is Jesus Worth To You?

REFERENCE: Philippians 3:8-13 Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ 9 and become one with him. . . 10 I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, 11 so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead! 12 I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. 13 No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead.

Observation: Paul makes several very powerful points here;

1.    What is the relative value of knowing Jesus? Paul says that this knowledge, this relationship is worth more than anything in the world"in fact, that it is infinite. How cheaply we trade an intimate relationship with Jesus for a moment’s pleasure or simply get to busy to even be bothered. Paul is right, it is worth trading everything we have for.

2.    If we want to experience the power of His resurrection and life, we have to be willing to experience the suffering of His death. The only way to live, in God’s economy, is to die. We have to die to our own ways of doing things, to our own desires to really, truly know Him.

3.    Jesus had something in mind for each of us when He “possessed us”. Our lifetime job is to grab a hold of that which Jesus had for us when He brought us to Himself. We have a destiny. We need to fulfill it.

4.    How much time do we waste looking backward? God calls us to forget the past and look to the future. He has great things in store for us. As Christians, we live backward. We live, not from the past into the future, but from the future (God’s plans, already settled, heaven) into the present. We are not a compilation of how we grew up and the mistakes we made, we are what we are becoming as we go into that future with Him.

Application/Confession: I hate to die. I want to nuture and feed my earthly desires. I want to know Jesus. I need to realize that I can only really get close to Him by giving up what I have and reaching for what He has for me.

PRAYER: Teach me to die. Becoming like You in Your death that I may become like You in Your life (and mine!!)