The Surpassing Worth
In a café in 2014 I met with a pastor, and it changed my life. I’d become a Christian but my life was in disarray due to a spectacular combination of sin and stupidity. I had made the painful journey through the initial stages of a biblical self-understanding. I was a sinner hiding in plain sight under the gaze of a holy and righteous God. And I had not – contrary to my long-held opinion – been simply improvising my life. I had been manipulating others, preserving myself and pursuing my pleasures with skill and consistency. I had lied to people habitually both in what I said and how I presented myself.
My disposition towards God was shameful. In my most “spiritual” moments God was my personal albeit incompetent servant. In my least spiritual moments He probably didn’t exist. And all this, and several additional pages of sin, had crystalized in my bathroom mirror over the course of a few days. I’d been listening to Jesus’ words in the sermon on the mount… daily. I had learned that the person I was getting to loathe in my mirror was just the sort of person Jesus went to the cross to die for. The paradox of the experience was breathtaking. No fall could have been harder. But I knew this was exactly where I had to fall to survive the landing.
But now it was time to right the ship. It was time to turn things the right way up. Little did I know the seriousness of a problem becomes even clearer once one seeks to make correction. But I was provided for in the form of a generous pastor who met with me. We sat in the café. I’d been reading the Bible and finding for direction for the first time in my life. My Bible fell open to Philippians. “You have been reading Philippians,” he said (I’d shared with him some of the verses that had spoken to me in the days leading up to our meeting). That same Bible (now 11 or 12 years old) is sitting open in front of me now. Judging from the earliest markings I put in it I’d been arrested by 1:27.
I’d also been gripped by 2:3.
Talk about the grass being greener. Talk about a sea change. This way of being could not be further from who I had been for years leading up to this day. But on closer inspection it wasn’t just new a way of being I’d seen in these verses. It was a new line of doing. The very first word of 2:3 gave it away. And this wise pastor saw it. And he did the most fitting, the most loving, and the most significant thing anyone could have done for me at that time. He gently silenced my ethical ambitions, “No, no, no. Dan…” And pointing across the page of my Bible, he read these words:
And then he asked me the question. What did Paul discover that would make him speak like this? And that was it. A window of wonder opened to me in that moment that remains open today. And I don’t expect anyone or anything will be able to close it. Paul did not discover a new type of doing. He had plenty of that (see verses 4-6 of this very chapter). He did not even discover a new way of being. Not primarily. He discovered the doing of another. He discovered the work of someone else. And this doing, this work, revealed a person so magnificent and so precious that nothing was worth keeping if it meant not gaining him.
My café pastor (I wasn’t actually attending his church) did something so important for me. He told me, in his gentle way, that my primary focus should not be on my work for Christ, but on His work for me. To put it another way, there are two great grammatical moods in the Bible: the indicative and the imperative. Understandably, I was drawn to the imperative. I’d been building the furniture of my life without the instructions for many years. Now that I finally had the instructions open I should like to screw in a few bolts.
But this is not what I needed. And it’s not what I or any Christian ever needs primarily. What I needed was to discover the indicative realities of the Bible. Everything Christ is. All the things God has done. Here I find love that dies for sinners. Here I find grace that forgives transgressions. Here I find power that raises the dead. Here I find hope of new life.
And, of course, the work God did yesterday goes to work in people today, and they go on to walk in good works (just as He planned). Gazing into grace does not produce what gazing into a navel does. Grace trains. Grace transforms. But only a right heart can put the feet right, and it’s grace that puts the heart right. And once the feet are put right (as you probably know) everything else will follow.