Well, hey, good morning, church. How are we doing? Everybody all right? Okay. Grab your Bibles, if you would: Philippians chapter 3. If you're new to church or new to the Bible, the Bible really is one book that's a collection of books. So if you're new to that, there's a table of contents you can open at the front. It says Old Testament, New Testament. We're going to be in the New Testament, in the book of Philippians. It's a letter that a guy named Paul wrote to this church, and he encourages them to keep on going. 

We're in a series in Philippians right now. We're in part five of this series, and we're moving toward the end of it. Last week, Jeff preached about how to keep growing, how to keep working out your salvation because God's working in you, and how to keep obeying him, keep trusting him, keep shining like stars. So: keep growing. 

This morning, I want to talk about how to keep going and not stop and not get lax in your pursuit of Jesus and your devotion to him. It's very tempting, I think, for us to do that. We get tired. We get exhausted. We get tired of believing but not seeing. We want our faith to become sight. We get tired of praying with no answers. We just get weary. So giving up looks attractive to us. But Paul's saying that light that once was shining and burning with joy for Jesus and devotion to him, don't let that dim. Light that up and keep going. Keep pressing forward and running toward him with all of your might, with all of your energy, with your eyes fixed on him. Keep going toward the goal and the prize. 

Here's what that is. If you want to know what we're doing as Christians, what we're running after, I think there's no better verse than what Paul says here in verse 10 of chapter 3. Here's what Paul says his ambition was, what he's running after. He says this: "I want to know Christ." I want to know him. "Yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead." 

Now, there's a lot of mystery in what Paul's saying. Here's what he's saying, I think, in a nutshell: I want to know all of him. I want all of Jesus. I don't just want part of him or half of him or just barely enough to still be called a Christian. I want him. I want to know what it is to be like him and run after him. This means that your entire existence, your whole life, is bound up in this one singular devotion, and it's to run after Jesus. That's what Paul wants. That's what you should want if you're a believer: to run after him and to want more and more of him. 

Now, if you're not there yet, and I'm guessing many of us aren't, you're in good company, because Paul says he's not there yet. Verse 12, he says, "Not that I have already obtained all this." So if you think Paul's there, Paul's not. Paul ain't there. You ain't there. I'm not there. "Or have already arrived at my goal," of knowing Christ fully. "But I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me." 

So Paul's not there yet. Paul has not arrived at fully knowing Christ in this way. That's why Paul's running and reaching and going after this. That's what Paul longs for. And he says he's longing to take hold of what took hold of him. This is the Christian life. You're trying to grab on to what grabbed you. Jesus Christ already grabbed you. If you're a Christian, he reached down into your misery and brokenness and guilt and shame, lifted you up, called you his own, and forgave you forever. Now you're just trying to run after that, to be more like him, to be caught up in who he is. 

So Paul says, "I press on." There's a word Paul uses here. Paul wrote in Greek, so if it's all Greek to you, it's all Greek to everybody. There's a word he uses that we translate "press on." It's diōkō. This would be a great tattoo, by the way. Not that you should be shopping for one. But if you are, this would be a good one. Let me spell it for you, otherwise you might regret it later. 

In different contexts, the word means to pursue, to persecute. It means to hunt. There you go, guys. It's coming. Deer season is on the way. Just hang on. But it means to hunt. It means to chase. I'll show you a few references. Philippians 3:6, just a few verses earlier, Paul says, "As for zeal," my energy, my effort, "persecuting the church." He's going after them. He's diōkō-ing the church. In Acts 26, one translation says, "I even hunted them down," meaning the Christians. He's trying to stop Christianity. 

So this word means to hunt, to chase, to persecute, to press. And this is brilliant. Paul is saying, before I met Christ, I tried to chase and hunt down the church. Now that I've met Christ, I just want to chase him. I just want to go after him. I want to be like him and know him and press into him as fully as I know how in this life, so that in the next life I see him and become like him. That's what Paul's longing for here. But he says, I haven't already obtained it. I haven't taken hold of that which took hold of me. 

So the question is, how do you get there? How do you keep going in this way and keep pressing on, and not give up and throw in the towel and hit the eject button? By the way, this is not to achieve your salvation. It's to align yourself with your salvation. You already have it. You're just growing into it, pressing into it, and running after him. 

So how do you do it? Paul actually tells us very specifically: three things. Forgetting, straining, and waiting. You do this, you will keep going. These all build on each other, so I want to show you how this works. You really can't have one without the others. So I need you to lock in, okay? I know it's raining. I know the Braves lost. I'm sad, too. We're going to make it, though. All right, let's get to work. 

One: forgetting. This is going to mess with you a little bit. I've been dealing with this all week, trying to figure out how to say it the right way. Here's how he keeps on going. He says, "Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it," meaning this prize of knowing Christ fully. "But one thing I do." And Paul's a preacher. Paul says, "Here's one thing," and then gives you five things. But here's the one thing Paul does: "Forgetting what is behind." 

If you're going to keep running toward Jesus, you have to learn this really unique practice of forgetting. Forgetting what lies behind, forgetting your past, and moving. Now, when I say forget the past, I think many people think that means ignore it and pretend the past did not happen. Push it deep, deep down and never revisit it. Keep everything on the surface. You can't change it, so what's the point of going back into it and working through it? I don't think it's that simple. 

Paul thought about his past a lot. Paul reflected very, very deeply on his past. I think what Paul's talking about here is the power our past has over us. Paul tried to stop Christianity. He tried to kill the whole movement, and this weighed on him. And as Paul reflects on this, we see him over the years just letting it go. He releases it. So I think what Paul means is it has no power over him. The past doesn't define him any longer. What he did, what happened to him, and the sins he committed against Jesus no longer define him, and he moves on and forgets that. 

This is the practice of forgetting, and we have to wrestle with it. For many of you, that could mean going back into your story and working through some things: confessing and processing and asking questions and healing and restoring and reconciling and forgiving. But whatever it is, it means we have to learn to forget the past. That means things we've done, sins we've committed, mistakes we've made, failures in our story, but also things done to us, how we've been let down, how someone sinned against us. All of this counts as what lies behind us, and we have to wrestle with it. 

Listen, it only has the power over you that you give it. If you're a Christian, your past only has the power over you now that you allow it to have, because Jesus has taken care of it. I'm convinced, though, that we give it too much power. I can easily think back into my own story and let it grab me by the throat and weigh me down. I think we just give it too much power, too much sway, too much of a voice in our lives, and it keeps us from moving forward. 

Here's how I think that happens. We use language sometimes that shows we identify with our past too much. We'll say things like, "I'm divorced." I get that's common vernacular. That's just everyday speech. But think about that phrase: "I am divorced." That is an identity statement. You're saying, this is who I am. But listen, if you're a Christian, that's not who you are. It might have happened to you. You might have gone through a divorce, but you are not a divorce. That's not how God sees you. God does not look at you and see a big neon sign over your head that says "divorced." He sees son. He sees daughter. He sees child of. That's who God sees. 

But we say things that show we're still identifying with what happened in the past. We say, "I'm an addict. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a loser. I'm a liar. I'm a cheater." You ever say things like this to yourself? You're identifying with it. Now, that might have been the case. That might have happened to you. You might have done those things, but that's not who you are. God sees you as his. You're his treasured possession, his sons, his daughters, chosen, called, new. That's how God sees you. So part of forgetting is recognizing we don't identify with our past in this way any longer. 

Or we'll say things like this, and I've said this, and I've felt this, and I'm almost certain every person here has felt this: "I know God forgives me. I just can't forgive myself." You ever say that? "I've let myself down. I wish I could go back and change this. I can't forgive myself for doing this." Can I tell you, as gently as I possibly can, that that is a lie? You're believing a lie. 

Now, I'm not even certain that self-forgiveness is a thing. I don't know if it is or not. I have no text that says it. I feel it. I'm sure you feel it at times. Let's just say that it is. The God of the universe, who dwells in eternal glory, stepped down into history and died in your place to forgive you forever and call you his own, and you're going to hold yourself hostage to your own unforgiveness? Do you realize that if he did all that, you're forgiven even of your own unforgiveness toward yourself? You're forgiven of that, too. So why are you still bringing this back up? God's not counting this against you any longer, so why are you counting it? You aren't the scorekeeper here. 

Listen, you don't run GameChanger for your soul. GameChanger is an app. It's a travel ball thing. The parents that... never mind, I can't go there. But you don't get to keep the score here. God's the one who keeps the score, and God has declared you forgiven and righteous. You can get over your past. 

Or maybe in all of this, the past for you is just an excuse. Here's where it gets a little harder to wrestle with. We don't want to let go of the past because if we do, we lose our leverage. We lose some power we have over some people, and we kind of like that. That bitterness and resentment you're holding on to, that grudge you're holding on to, it just feels powerful. And if you let it go, you have no power over that any longer. But can I just say, it is so corrosive to your heart. It's eroding your joy and your life and your ability to serve and bless others. 

So what is it for you? What is it that, when your mind goes back there, it just pulls you down? You have to fight, and as Paul says, forget what lies behind and keep on going. You have to wrestle with this. 

So here's how I think you do it, and this is going to be helpful: The way you forget is by remembering. You want to forget? You remember. What I mean is you remember what God has done for you. You remember all that it took for God to save you and reconcile you, to make you right with himself. You remember that. That's how you forget. 

Let me try to show you this with a story. Luke 15 is a world-famous parable that's often called the parable of the prodigal son. A man had two sons. The younger brother always gets the attention, though. The younger brother says to his dad, "I want my inheritance early," which is his way of saying, "I wish you were dead." So he takes his money and goes off to Vegas. I'm paraphrasing here for you Bible nerds. He goes off to Vegas and lets it rip. Every impulse, every party, everything he desires, he spends all his money on it. 

One day he wakes up, and it's like The Hangover. Everything is destroyed. Oh, you saw that? There's a tiger in the bathroom. He's broken, busted up, bleeding. He has nothing and no one. He has no idea what's happened. And he comes to his senses, and he's living in a pigpen. The text says unclean animals. And he thinks, I wonder if my dad will hire me. He is at the absolute bottom, and he wonders, maybe Dad will hire me as a servant. So he begins this long, slow walk back. 

I hope you know the story, but here's maybe the greatest verse in the Bible: When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. That means the father's on the porch waiting for him. He saw him, and his heart's pounding. I love how The Message translates that: his heart pounding. He ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. 

Kenneth Bailey, who's an expert on Middle Eastern culture and a New Testament scholar, has a long article on this. He argues that something cultural was going on with the father. Men in that culture did not run, which I identify with. I hate running. Some of you runners: The runner's high is a lie. You're lying to all of us. I always feel worse. I quit running. But men in that day did not run unless there was an Olympic game or a war. It was undignified for the father of the house to run. 

What Bailey argues is that there was a custom in that culture, and there are Old Testament laws about this. It said that if a son rebels against his parents and goes off into wild living, if he does come back, at the very least the entire village would disown him. At the worst, they'd stone him to death. There are Old Testament laws about this. This is an honor-shame culture. I know it's severe. This young man has shamed his entire family, left them in financial jeopardy, and disgraced his father. And Bailey says the father is running out there for this reason: If they want to stone him, they can't. You want to know why? Because the dad's in the way. 

That's what's happening here. And by the way, he runs out planning a party. He's saying, "Get the butcher, kill the calf, fire up the Blackstone, bring all the robes, all the rings." He showers his son with blessing and love and rejoices over him. He was dead, he says, and now he's alive. 

Do you realize that is your story right there? That's the gospel right there. Some of you were a long way off. You were way out there. And we deserve the stones of God's wrath, of a just God who has to deal with sin and laws broken against him. But what does he do? He puts Jesus in the way. Jesus got in the way. Jesus took all of the wrath and punishment and judgment that should have been hurled at us. He took that into his very body. And now all you get is the party. You get invited into this glorious feast. 

That's your story. You want to forget your past? Think about that. See that father running out to you in your mind's eye, because this is exactly what happened. God saw you. God ran out there to you. You'd wasted everything, and he ran out to you. If you see that in your mind's eye, you must insert that story into your story, into your past. That's how you forget it. That's how you heal and process and move on and leave rejoicing. Do you realize that for all the mistakes, failures, and sins, because of Christ, God now sees you as having Jesus' obedience in your place? 

By the way, Paul says "forgetting." Notice it's ongoing here. It's not a one-time thing. You're constantly having to fight through this. Whether it's a decade ago or last Tuesday, you're learning to forget. So you've got to wrestle with this one. 

All right, number two, and I'll be a little faster on this: straining. This is the effort piece. I don't know where it got said that Christians don't use effort. The grace of God is not opposed to effort. It's opposed to earning. We don't earn our salvation, but you'd better bet we use effort to press on and go forward. 

So Paul says, "One thing I do." Again, here's preacher Paul. "Forgetting what is behind," and this is one coin, two sides. The other side of the coin is "straining toward what is ahead." I'm reaching, Paul says. You're forgetting all of this behind you, like a runner, and you're running toward this. You're straining and reaching. Paul is using every word he can think of to say you've got to keep going. Fight to keep going, because we just want to quit. 

We get distracted and tempted, and we go through seasons. Seasons of doubt. I don't know if you've ever had a long season of doubt. It is painful to walk through when you start asking questions: Is this real? Is the Bible true? Is God who he says he is? It's hard to walk through that. You have seasons where you can't shake a certain sin that keeps coming back and coming back and coming back, and you're doing everything you can and you can't seem to shake it. Or times when it seems like God's far away. The Psalms are filled with passages saying, "God, where are you?" So if you're feeling that, a lot of the people who wrote the Bible felt that, too. You're in good company. But it gets hard, and we have to strain at times. We get weary and exhausted. It gets confusing. 

One of the most confusing things for me is prayer. Prayer is unbelievable. You pray and God answers, and it just makes you love him. You're like, I can't believe God would answer this specific prayer like this. Then there are times when you pray and pray and beg and plead and nothing seems to happen. God's not answering. What seems worse, though, is when you don't pray and things just fall into place. You ever had something like that happen? 

There are days when I wake up and I'm in a hurry. I slept in a bit. I grab my phone. It's over. Then I'm distracted. I'm rushed. I didn't pray at all. I leave the house, and the day is awesome. I feel light. I feel happy. I'm not irritable. There's no traffic. God just parts 98. I go right through it. Green lights all day. 

The next day, I get up early. I push my phone aside. I get my Bible and my coffee and the Braveheart soundtrack and some candles, and I pray and I get in the Word, and it's awesome. The day is horrible, though. I'm anxious. I'm irritable. I'm on edge. I'm fighting just to be kind of happy. I'm like, what's up with that? I have multiple situations like this in my journal. I have days where I wrote, I did nothing this day, and it was awesome. I did everything this day, and it was terrible. This happens sometimes. 

If you've ever felt something like that, this is what it means to be a Christian. Welcome to Christianity. This is what it means to walk with God. That's why you have to strain. And we start asking questions like, "Well, why even pray, then? What does it matter? Why even read my Bible if things are going to fall into place anyway? I've got bread in the pantry, stocked full. I don't need to pray for daily bread. Why even pray?" And you start asking, "Is this even true? Is this even real? Is God even here? Is Jesus actually who he said he was?" All these things happen to us. 

That's why Paul says you keep straining. Listen, if you don't strain forward, you will drift. And nobody drifts toward Jesus. You're not going to hit cruise control and just arrive at Jesus. That's not a thing. You have to strain. 

Straining looks like this: We keep on praying. No matter what, you keep praying. You keep asking God. You keep singing. I don't know if you realize what singing does to your faith. You keep worshiping. You keep reading and filling your mind with truth. You keep banking on God's promises when it looks like everything's going to fall through. You keep on trusting him. You keep fighting the sin that keeps growing back, and you press on toward him. 

So there's forgetting, there's straining, and here's maybe the best one: There's waiting. Maybe the hardest one, but the best one. We wait. We don't like waiting. I hate waiting. I don't want to wait. I used to have dial-up internet. It was 56k. You had to call the internet and wait. You were on hold for the internet. That's how it worked back in the day. Now I think our speeds are like 18,000 times faster, and I'm still like, that's too slow. Go faster. Go faster. I hate waiting. I want it now. 

So Paul's going to show us the danger of wanting it now and what that does to our spiritual lives. He tells us about a group in the city of Philippi. I don't know who these people were, but they knew of the church, they knew of the Christians, and they didn't like Christianity at all. Here's what Paul says, in verse 18: "For, as I have often told you before." So when Paul was there with them 10 years earlier, he told them there are people out there like this. "And now tell you again even with tears." Paul's weeping over this, for them not to be like these people. "Many live as enemies of the cross of Christ." What a sad phrase. Not enemies of Christ, but enemies of his cross: of self-denial, of sacrifice, of it taking that to save us. The cross says, this is how bad we are. It took that to save us. But it also says, this is how much God loves us, that he would go through that to save us. But they're enemies of this. 

 "Their destiny is destruction." And he says this: "Their god is their stomach," which I think is a way of saying their cravings, their inner impulses, are their god. Whatever their cravings want, they bow down to it. Whatever feels right, they go after it. That's what I think Paul means here. But the point is they want it now. They want immediate things, temporal things, things here. And here's the saddest part: "Their mind is set on earthly things." It's fixed; that's what that word means. That's what they're going after. They don't want to wait. They want immediate things and pleasures now, and to give in to any impulse. They don't want to wait for anything God has for them. 

But then Paul contrasts that, and he says this in the next verse: "But our citizenship is in heaven." Our life is not down here. It's up there. And here's what we're doing: We're eagerly waiting. "And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ." That's our hope. We're waiting on him. We're eagerly waiting for him to come back and do something remarkable. This is the greatest miracle in all of history, when he comes back and does something that astonishes us. 

Here's what it says he will do: "Who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control." What a great phrase. Here's what Jesus does with his absolute power over everything: He "will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body." 

Did you know that? I'm not certain that we know this or think about this: Our hope is not just for us to die and go up there, though that's part of it. Our hope is for up there to come down here. It's for Christ to rend the heavens and come down and make our bodies like his and make all things right. Make everything as it should be. That's what we're waiting on. The theology here is that he was resurrected and given this glorious body, and we will be resurrected. Our bodies will be made new to be like his. This is what we're hoping for. 

So we will have bodies that cannot die. Bodies that cannot get sick. Bodies that cannot sin and cheat and lie and steal. Bodies that cannot be insecure. That can't be afraid of anything. Imagine having no fear of anything any longer. We can't even fathom that. Bodies that cannot break down. Bodies that cannot get cancer and have heart attacks and need surgery. No more miscarriages, no more paralysis and disease. Bodies that can't get out of shape. They won't need diets and supplements and surgeries. I'm so sick of dieting. Aren't you? I hate it more than anything in the world. We won't need to do this. This is what's coming for us. 

And listen, here's what this means: All that you lost in this life, all that you gave, all that you had to say no to, all that you missed out on in this life, and that could be a long list for many of us, when this happens, it's all filled up with glory and overflowing with joy. 

I hope you believe this, because there is a longing in every person for this: for resurrection, for all things to be as they should, for things to be made right forever. This is our hope. 

I don't know if you saw this, but Marvel just re-released Avengers: Endgame. It's three and a half hours long, so when you have that time to spare, go watch it. It is incredible. There's a famous scene in that movie called "Portals." If you don't know the story of any of this Marvel stuff, this was a decade-plus in the making. In the film before this, Thanos, whose name means death or something like death, gets all this power, gets all of these stones, snaps his fingers, and wipes out half the universe. So half the Avengers are gone. The good guys lost, and they lost badly. All these Avengers, Spider-Man and Falcon and Black Panther, the Guardians, are all gone, vanished. 

If you watched that first one, it's called Infinity War, we left the theater pretty depressed. We're die-hard fans here. We left going, how are they going to reverse this? What's going to happen now? So for a year and a half, we're depressed, waiting on the next movie. The next one comes out, and there's this scene in Avengers: Endgame called "Portals," where all these heroes, these Avengers, are brought back. The curse is reversed, and they figure out how to bring them back. These portals open up, and they all come flying out. 

I've seen this four times in the theater, by the way. You can do the math on that. It's like 12 hours of my life. But I loved every second. Every time the scene comes on, the place loses it. In fact, you can watch videos on YouTube called portal reaction videos. People losing their minds over this scene. Grown men, 40 years old, in pajamas, just weeping when Spider-Man pops out. Finally, he's back. They're resurrected. You can't tell me we don't long for resurrection. This scene is incredible, and I'll be honest with you, it gets me every time. So let's just watch it. Here's the portal scene. 

[Video clip: "Portals" scene from Avengers: Endgame] 

Yeah, I'm going to see it again soon. So if you're down, let me know. 

I'm not sure if the writers of these stories have read the Bible, but they're dipping into something that is at the very heart of every human. It's this longing for resurrection. We long for things to be set right. And when Christ comes back again and rends the heavens, he will set us right and everything else, and put down death and suffering and pain and the enemy forever. That's what we're hoping for. 

Even if you're not a Christian, I know you long for this. You know the world is not as it ought to be, and that you aren't as you ought to be, and you long for resurrection. Here's how you can be sure this happens to you: You go to him. You go to the one who was raised from the dead, who conquered death forever, who can never die again. He will come back to make all things right. 

So wait on it, church. We're eager. We're hoping. We're looking for this with our gaze fixed toward the heavens. He's the one we're waiting on. He's the prize. So let's forget what lies behind. Let's keep straining. Let's keep going, keep fighting, and let's wait on him. 

Let me pray for us. As we close it out, maybe you just need to think through and reflect on what this means for you. I'll give you some space to do that. I'm certain there are things in your past that have weighed you down that God is saying to let go of and trust him with. Maybe there are ways you feel like you've slacked off and you're not straining toward him. You're straining toward your career and your hobbies and everything else, but you're not straining toward him. Would you offer that up to him this morning and confess that? 

God, we thank you for hope, that as hard as this life gets, there is a day coming when you make everything right. I pray that our hope is fixed on that. God, I pray that we can believe, even though the world around us says this is just some fairy tale, just some fiction, that this is true. We long for this, and that says something about who we are and who you are, that you've put this longing in us for all things to be made right. So cause us to fix our eyes on it, and God, help us to keep going. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.