Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith - that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:2-8
This is a great Biblical passage from one of Saint Paul’s letters to the Christian believers - ‘saints’ - in Philippi - following the Jewish usage of the time, all Christians are called saints in the New Testament, not just believers with an exemplary life - see the footnote1 for a more detailed explanation.
Philippi is a city on the Mediterranean in what is northeastern Greece today.
From Wikipedia:
Interestingly, when Paul says “For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him,” the word translated ‘rubbish’ in this translation, or sometimes ‘dung’ in some translations, is a Greek swear word, σκύβαλα, which is much closer to the English word ‘sh#t’ than any of the euphemisms usually used in modern Biblical translations: apart from this letter of Paul’s, σκύβαλα is only ever found on Ostraka (broken pottery shards used as sort of notepads) and graffiti in the first century, never polite letters or documents. Paul is making a point here: whatever is not done because of faith in Jesus Christ is more than a useless waste of time, it is completely worthless shite.
I wonder if some people who have suffered the loss of all things (Tess Lawrie comes to mind, who suffered great losses for having blown the whistle on the suppression of ivermectin), people who might not be Christians, might yet discover that their sacrifice was actually in fact for Jesus, at heart, for He is the one who said truly “I am the way the truth and the life”. I don’t know if this is so; but I hope it is, I hope they come to know this… I hope everyone comes to know Jesus!!!
But at the end of the day, we can’t stand on the laurels of our own good deeds in relation to God: we can only stand on the righteousness of Christ. This is great news, because otherwise, we’re all stuffed: none of us can claim to have lived a righteous life in comparison with the perfect life of Jesus Christ. The only true righteousness is the righteousness of faith in Christ, wherein His righteousness becomes ours, through His sacrifice for the sins of the whole world ... (John 3:16)
In any case, Paul directs us to look not the past, to what we have left behind, but to the future, to the hope of sharing Christ’s resurrection, since he is determined to follow Him and thereby inevitably will have a share in Jesus’ sufferings now, in return for a far greater joy in the future.
just as all Jews are called ‘holy ones’ in Daniel and in the intertestamental literature such as 1 Enoch, all Christians are called ‘saints’ in the New Testament, a direct translation of the Hebrew ‘holy ones’ , which is logical for the first generation of Jewish believers, who rightly believed they had inherited the kingdom of God through faith in the Messiah (or ‘Christ’ - the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Meshiach, Messiah) Jesus
Thankyou well said...and no amount of grafting grabbing, heaving, intellectualising of developing 'a Christ consciousness' will make a shite of difference unless our faith and trust is not in and of ourselves but 'in Him'.