friends of the cross/enemies of the cross

This past Sunday we came to this passage in our series on Philippians:

Philippians 3:17~21
Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you
have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I
tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame;
their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we
are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation so that
it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things
subject to himself.

In this passage we meet Paul with a broken heart. Why is his heart broken? Because many have chosen a life of stubbornly resisting God's love found in the cross of Christ. For Paul, there are two ways to live: to glory in oneself or in the cross of Christ (or, as Bob Dylan put it, "you got to serve somebody; it may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you got to serve somebody".) To glory in the the cross is to acknowledge regularly our need for forgiveness and love; and to confess that our reason and desires left to our own understanding will lead us to self-destruction. To glory in the cross is to offer our desire to love and be loved to the one who can love us the best. To glory in the cross is to desire Jesus' self-giving love to come to control our choices and attitudes more and more, having the same mind as Christ Jesus => that he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but gave himself away even to death on the cross. And, to glory in the cross is to repent of the occasions when we attempt to find in cheap substitutes the life and love that only God can give.

My colleague, Chuck DeGroat of City Church San Francisco, through a discussion of the fruits of the spirit has offered a helpful way of understanding the difference between the true life Christ offers and the life where we attempt to create our own glory and satisfaction to our shame:

Chuck: "I’ve found that my prayer in recent years has become a simple one: Hide my life in yours, Jesus. It comes from St. Paul: For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. This is vintage ‘New Exodus’ Paul. It’s the death-to-life pattern of Jesus, living out the Exodus pattern of Israel. We were lost in the wilderness, but now we’re found – found to God, found to others, found to ourselves.


I hide in a thousand other things. I avoid God, and in doing so avoid myself in the many false selves and false identities I live out of. After a while, I’ve forgotten myself, and feel lost to God. Descending into the wilderness, I am stripped of these counter-identities, and reminded of my Eden-born identity as God’s image, never completely lost but hidden as a treasure in God’s heart. The lessons of the wilderness are hard. I find that I’m stripped of reputation, identity-through-achievement, love when I want it, progress on my terms, and more. But as we’ve said before, it is a stripping down which actually reveals our hidden life in God, our real selves, our deepest identity.

The journey up and out of the wilderness leads to the freedom of life as it was meant to be lived. And St. Paul gives definition to that, as well. He calls it “fruit” – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Love, once mis-directed to a thousand false loves, is now re-directed and renewed in its First Love. Joy, once found in a temporary pleasure that could be bought or controlled at will, is now found in longing, sometimes without immediate gratification, for the greater Joy. Peace, defined as conflict avoidance and repressed desire, now becomes a verb – the renewal of shalom, the re-ordering of relationships and the reconciliation of those at war with one another. Patience, replaced by remote-controls that falsely convince us that we can control pleasure and quick spiritual fixes which sell us on 3 steps to our best life, now finds renewal in a heart that waits longingly for a deeper satisfaction. Kindness, domesticated in fixed smiles on Christian faces, now becomes a risky compassion (suffering with another) that deepens relationship and bestows dignity on another. Faithfulness, crushed into definitions mandating dogmatic certainty at the expense of relationship, now flourishes in commitment to living out (delightfully) the command to love our neighbors and relentlessly pursue (rather than demonize) those we differ with. Gentleness, exposing our need to power over and control, invites a vulnerability which may in fact expose our weakness but show Christ’s strength. Self-control, rather than a behavioral call to pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps, actually manifests in surrender to God, which can feel like being out-of-control to control freaks like me.

These are the fruits of the New Exodus journey." - From drchuckdegroat.wordpress.com

Questions for discussion:


1. Paul urges and imitation of him as a way of not being an enemy of the cross. But what does the one who said that he regards everything as loss have to imitate? Use this passage as a way of thinking about what imitating Paul would like:


"Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard 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 one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith." Philippians 3:7-9


2. Pick one of the fruits of the spirit that Chuck talks about above and use it as a framework for talking about why it is difficult to embrace life according to God's gracious rule and provision. In other words, why do we prefer our own fruit to God's?


3. Paul says that he is weeping over those who are enemies of the cross. How does his emotional response help you think about your own emotional responses to your sin and the sins of others?