The wise person looks at everything in life, measures it against the value of the loss of his eternal soul, and says it isn't worth it. I will give this up to gain my eternal soul. Every person faces that choice when they confront Christ.
Some people say yes, some people say no. Their eternal destiny is determined by what they say. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. In just a minute, John MacArthur will continue his look at why knowing Jesus Christ is worth more than all of your greatest accomplishments, all of your closest relationships, all of the things you possess.
We call this study from Philippians chapter 3, The Road to Nowhere. But before we get to the lesson, John, I want to talk to you for a minute about all that it takes for Grace to You to reach men and women and families with biblical truth. Our staff here at Grace to You headquarters and all the people at this radio station are essential. They all play an important role, of course. But our listeners may not fully realize how important their own role is. Well, their role is absolutely vital. If we don't have the support of our listeners, this doesn't exist. They are the lifeblood of this ministry.
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But first, here's John to continue his study, The Road to Nowhere. Philippians chapter 3, verses 8 through 11. Here Paul writes, More than that, I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings being conformed to His death in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. That's a very personal passage, by the way. The word I appears a number of times.
The word my appears in it as well. He is speaking very personally from the viewpoint of a first-person testimony. This, in fact, is Paul's testimony of what was going on in his heart at the time of his conversion. But before we look specifically at it, let me remind you of one of the greatest statements that ever fell from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is recorded for us in a number of places in the gospels. It was a significant enough statement that the Holy Spirit recorded it in several different gospels. But for us, we'll look at Matthew 16, verses 25 and 26. Here is a familiar saying of Jesus.
Listen to it. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it. For what will a man be profited if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
Now Jesus was talking about an exchange. He was talking about losing something to gain something. What He said was that in order for you to gain, you would have to lose your life. If you want to gain your soul, it will cost you your life. If you desire to save your life, it will cost you your soul. In other words, if you hold on to the things that to you are precious and reject the things that to God are precious, it will cost you your eternal soul.
That's the exchange. And Jesus said, what good is it if you have gained everything the world has to offer and lost your eternal soul? You would be much better off to make some exchange of what you have in this life for what God offers you in the life to come. Whatever exchange you need to make to gain your eternal soul, you ought to do that.
That's a very significant spiritual principle. There is an exchange in salvation. There is an exchange of all that I am for all that Christ is. There is an exchange of all my religious activities, ceremonies, righteous works for the person of Jesus Christ. There's a sense in which I may have spent all my life in religious achievement, but I have to lose it all in order to gain Christ. Whatever it is that I have spent my life accumulating, even if I gained the world, it would mean nothing if I lost Christ.
So I will exchange it all for Him. That's what Jesus is saying. The wise person looks at everything in life, measures it against the value of the loss of his eternal soul, and says it isn't worth it, I will give this up to gain my eternal soul. Every person faces that choice when they confront Christ. Here is Jesus Christ, and He says, I will save your eternal soul if you will give up everything else you're putting your trust in.
Some people say yes, some people say no, their eternal destiny is determined by what they say. One man who said a resounding yes was Paul, and we just heard that yes in this text. Paul is saying here, I looked at everything I had, I said it's loss, I'll exchange it for Christ.
That's exactly what he said. And if you ask Paul, what will a man give in exchange for his soul, Paul, Paul says, I'll give everything in exchange for my soul. My soul is that valuable. He was willing to give up everything, and that is what he expresses here.
The heart of the text is verse 7, Whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ, I will exchange everything for the pearl, I will exchange everything for the treasure, I will give up everything for Christ, I will make any transaction to save my eternal soul. And so you have the great record of the conversion of Paul. If you want the historic record, look with me for a moment at Acts chapter 9. In Acts chapter 9, Luke records the observable record of Paul's conversion.
That is to say what actually happened. Saul, verse 1 of Acts 9, was breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. So he went to the high priest and asked for letters, that is authority, from him to the synagogues at Damascus so that if he found any belonging to the way, that's what they call Christianity, because Jesus said he was the way, both men and women he might bring them down to Jerusalem. So Paul went and got authority to go and kill Christians.
It came about, verse 3, as he journeyed, he was approaching Damascus and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.
Now, here you have on the Damascus road, the Apostle Paul is confronted with Christ...Christ. Up to this point he has counted all of his religion as profit and Christ as loss. That's why he's killing Christians.
All of his religious achievements asset Christ's liability. We've got to get rid of Christ. We've got to get rid of Christianity.
We've got to get rid of Christians. But now he meets Christ. Luke, in recording this particular incident, does not tell us anything about what was going on inside of Paul.
Luke simply records what was heard, what was seen, what took place. But in the process of reading down through chapter 9, it is obvious that Saul was converted. It is obvious because by the time you get to verse 11, Saul is praying. He's praying. By the time you get to verse 15, he is called to be an apostle.
By the time you get to verse 20, he is proclaiming Jesus everywhere, saying He's the Son of God. So we know he was converted but it doesn't ever say anything about what he was thinking or what was going on in his mind. And so you might conclude, well, conversion is sort of this supernatural event, you know. You're just going along in life and whammo, you're saved. All of a sudden, you pick yourself up, spit the dirt out of your mouth, you're blind, God saves you and you carry on as an apostle. And you might therefore conclude that somehow in the sovereign act of salvation, human faculties are obliterated, annihilated or bypassed. And that you have nothing to do with it. And I have nothing to do with it.
That's not true. The corollary to Acts 9 is Philippians 3. What you don't have in Acts 9, you do have in Philippians 3. You have the external observable incident in Acts 9.
You have the internal response of Paul in Philippians 3. This is what was going on in his heart when he ran into Christ. You say, well, did he understand who Christ claimed to be? Yes, that's why he was killing Christians.
He understood clearly who he claimed to be. He claimed to be the Messiah. He claimed to die as a sacrifice for sin.
He claimed to rise from the dead. He knew the facts. He also knew what Christians preached. He knew they preached a gospel of grace, not a gospel of law, and that was something he thought was heresy also. Factually, he understood who Christ was. He understood the facts of his life. He also understood the facts of the gospel that were being preached by Christians. That's why he persecuted them because he thought it was heresy and he wouldn't have persecuted a heresy that he didn't understand. So he understood it. So he knew about Christ and he knew the gospel. But that's different than being confronted with Christ, isn't it? And when on the Damascus road, Jesus stopped him in his tracks and he was confronted by Christ, and the Holy Spirit began to illuminate his hard heart and take the shield off of his understanding, he began to consider Christ for the first time.
Please note this. Salvation is a sovereign act of God by which he invades the sinner's darkness, gives him light, and saves him. But salvation does not annihilate, obliterate, destroy, or bypass human faculties. It stimulates human faculties. And so what you have in Philippians 3 is the record of what was going on in Paul's mind and emotion and will on the inside as these days in Damascus were passing. What was he experiencing?
What was he feeling? Well, he had always put all his confidence in his flesh, that phrase back in verses 3 and 4. He had always put all his confidence in his own human ability, his religion, his sincerity, his race, his tribe, his rank, his self-righteousness. And he had it all in the prophet column, all in the asset column. And that's where all his confidence was for salvation. He believed that he was saved because of his religious privilege and his religious achievement. And now all of a sudden he confronts Christ, the Spirit of God gives him understanding, and he sees Christ for the first time as the true value, the real pearl, the treasure.
And then he sees the loss that is in this column he once identified as assets. And he's willing to throw the whole thing into one bag and trash it all and take Christ. Because Christ is of surpassing value.
He made the right exchange. What will a man give in exchange for his soul? Paul gave everything. Paul sold all to buy the treasure, sold all to buy the pearl. So this is the personal, internal description of what Paul did when he gave his life to Christ. This is a tremendously significant portion of Scripture.
As I said earlier, the key is in verse 7. He said, I counted as loss everything that I once counted as gain when I saw Christ. Because God showed me so clearly the glories of Jesus Christ. Because God showed me so clearly that only Christ could save. And only Christ could provide the way into God's kingdom. And only Christ could provide eternal life. And because God showed me that I could receive that by faith only, not by works. I am willing to trash everything else for Christ.
And beloved, that's the message here. If you're counting on anything for your salvation other than Christ, you're deceived. Salvation isn't in anything else but Christ. There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved than the name Jesus Christ, says Acts 4.12. No other name, no other Savior. Now remember, Paul says, look, I've accumulated a lot of things. Go back to verse 4.
He said, if anybody should be confident in the flesh, I could. Verse 5, I was circumcised the eighth day. I'm of the nation Israel. I'm of the tribe of Benjamin, the esteemed tribe.
I am a Hebrew child of Hebrew parents. I've kept the tradition as to the law. I am a Pharisee. I've gone to the limit, the ultimate commitment to law keeping. As to zeal or sincerity, I have persecuted the church.
That's how sincere I am. And as to righteousness which is in the law, no one has ever found me externally blameworthy. And he says, for all these years my salvation has been built on my ritual, my race, my rank, my tradition, my religion, my sincerity and my works. And then I met Christ and I saw that it was all liability, it was all loss, and I gladly gave it up for the sake of Christ, for the sake of Christ.
That's so basic. That day, on a Damascus road, the living Christ broke through the incredible blindness of Saul of Tarsus, who was a Pharisee, who was a legalist, who was a works righteousness worker, and shattered his confidence in all his religious accomplishments. And the root of self-confidence was forever plucked from his heart and he made Jesus Christ his own. He sold all to gain Christ.
May I note one other thing? He didn't say, I had something good, this is better. He said, this is loss. This is not asset, this is liability. That's not neutral, that's not good, that's negative, that's bad. Liabilities are bad.
That's a loss, not a profit. What do you mean by that? I mean to say that all of that stuff isn't good and Christ is better, all of that stuff is bad. You say, now wait a minute, is it bad to be circumcised the eighth day, bad to be a Jew, bad to be a tribe of Benjamin, bad to be a Hebrew of the Hebrews, bad to be religious, bad to be zealous?
Yes, in this sense, if you count on that to save you, then it's bad. Why? Because it is so self-deceiving. You know the hardest person to reach in the world for Christ is the person who is religious.
And the more religious they are, and the more sincere they are, and the more stuck in tradition they are, and the more ceremonial they are, the harder they are to reach. Why? Because all their confidence is in that stuff. And consequently, they count on that for their salvation. Paul says that is not just good and this is better, that is bad.
Why? Because religion damns the soul. False religion deceives the mind and damns the soul. So he said, when I saw the truth, that all of that wasn't good, it was bad, it was damning my soul, it was a false assurance, a false hope, a false salvation. I trashed it all and I took Christ. Now, what did he gain?
Five things he gained. These are profound, all-encompassing truths. Five things that you gain when you come to Christ. When you jettison all the other garbage and come to Christ. These five, knowledge, righteousness, power, fellowship, glory.
Stay with me, we're going to fly through these. Oh, are they rich. In fact, they're so rich that they fill the New Testament.
We could spend a lifetime on these five. Number one, salvation begins with the knowledge of Jesus Christ. That's the first thing he gained. He gained the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
He gained the knowledge of Jesus Christ. By the way, God is impressed with these things. He's not impressed with verses five and six. But God is impressed with this. He's not impressed with our rank, our race, our tradition, our sincerity.
He's impressed with this. First of all, the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Look at verse 8. More than that, I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ. Right in the middle he says, the surpassing value of knowing Christ. That's the point here. Knowing Christ so far surpasses those other things.
I'll gladly get rid of those to know Him. In fact, he wants to make the point so strong that he starts out verse 8. Your Bible and the NAS may say more than that. Every edition says something different.
The reason is it's untranslatable. What you have there is a strange sequence of five little particles. And if you read them actually in Greek they would go like this, but rather therefore at least even.
Just a pile of particles looked like they were thrown together at random. And what he is trying to do with those particles is to make a strong point stronger. In verse 7 he said, I have counted everything that was gained to me as loss for the sake of Christ, but rather therefore at least even. You know, what he's trying to say, summing it up is, but way beyond that I count all things to be lost. Not only those things, he uses the phrase those things in verse 7 and he refers back to what he said in 5 and 6. It's not only those things that I see as loss, but I see everything as loss compared to Christ. You can't trust in anything, not just those things, but your own wisdom, your own intellect, your own mind, your own religious instincts.
You can't trust anything. I counted all liability. So he says, look, not only I have counted, that's a perfect tense verb in the past, but verse 8, I am counting present tense in the present. I have counted everything loss that I mentioned in 5 and 6, I now continually count everything else in my life as loss.
It's an ongoing thing. It's all loss. It just can't compare with Christ.
There's nothing in life that can, no achievements, no religious activities. So he's really saying, I continue to resist the recurring temptation to rely on my works rather than God's grace for my standing. Why do you do that, Paul?
How can you make such a total wholesale break with everything? I'll tell you why. Because, verse 8, of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of the fact that knowing Christ surpasses everything else.
I give it all up to know Christ. Now the word here, the surpassing value, just means that. Some Bibles translated excellency. Some translated all surpassing greatness.
That's what it means. The word for knowing Christ is actually a substantive, not a verb. It is the knowledge of Christ.
The knowledge. And the word is gnosis, gnosis. Very important word. Let me tell you what it means because it implies very, very strong things in this text. It is from ginosko, which means to know experimentally, or to know experientially, or to know personally, or to know by personal involvement with. That's what he's saying. Now it's very basic to Christianity that being a Christian is called knowing Christ.
Right? Those who are Christians know Christ. John 10 is the great chapter on the Good Shepherd. Jesus says, I know my sheep and they know me.
Knowing Christ. When Jesus prayed in the high priestly prayer of John 17 and verse 3, his prayer for the believers, those who were alive and those who were yet to be born and redeemed, is very simply summed up in that concept. It says this, this is eternal life that they may know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Eternal life is connected with knowing God by knowing Christ. In 1 John, there is a tremendous statement made. In 1 John chapter 5, right at the end of the epistle, verse 20, we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding in order that we might know Him who is true, even Jesus Christ. Salvation is knowing Christ.
It's not knowing about Him intellectually, it's knowing Him experientially. That's John MacArthur, pastor, author, and chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today he continued his current study here on Grace to You titled, The Road to Nowhere. Now friend, as John mentioned before the lesson, we're able to broadcast lessons like the one you heard today because of friends like you who give and who tell others about us and who pray for our ministry. If you're benefiting from Grace to You and you want to help others benefit, express your support today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412, or you can express your support when you call us at 800-55-GRACE.
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Simply log on to gty.org and start downloading. And friend, if John's teaching has helped convict you of sin and increase your love for God's truth, if it's helped you understand a particular passage and explain it to others, let us know. Your feedback is more important than you may realize. You can drop a note to Box 4000, Panorama City, California 91412, or you can email us at letters at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for listening today and be back tomorrow as John continues his study, The Road to Nowhere, with a look at how you can experience the surpassing value of knowing Christ. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
