Philippians 3:1-14

In this next week of our True ID series, we’ll continue to explore how that glorious and spiritually dense phrase in Christ shapes how we think about identity (who am I, really?).  This week, a dive into Philippians 3.

Is your identity just something you’re born with, something that was given to you?  After all, you didn’t choose your genes, gender, parents, siblings, ethnic heritage, birthplace, personality, temperament, or a host of other personal features.

Or is your identity something you have to discover and create on your own? Is the most important thing in life to express your unique individualism, as you understand it—you be you, as only you know you to be?

Or are the most important aspects of your identity where you are “located” in society in terms of race, class, gender, economic and educational status, and power or lack thereof, with a special emphasis on why and how you are nearer the top of the heap or the bottom?

These are not new questions, though every age and culture wrestles with them in unique ways.

Paul starts Philippians 3 with some first-century “identity politics”: who are the real-deal, on-the-inside followers of Jesus?  Some in Paul’s churches reasoned something like this: Jesus was Jewish.  Jesus is the Messiah of Israel.  When we worship, we read the Jewish Scriptures.  He is the Son of David, the new Moses, the One promised by Law and Prophets. Therefore, in order to be really, truly, fully a “Messiah’s man or woman,” you needed to commit to keeping the Law of Moses.

Paul counters by saying, “If you want to compare ‘Jewish credentials,’ I win!  But then Paul immediately says the Gospel flips all of this on its head.  Your identity is not in what you are known by, but by whom you are known.  Not by what you know, but whom you know: I consider everything (including my Jewish pedigree and credentials) a loss, compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord …” (3:7-8).

Jesus said that if we seek to find and keep our lives according to the terms set for us by our culture, we will lose our lives.  Paul is following Jesus in all this.  All those former markers of who I am, where I belong in society, what I am entitled to?  “I now count them as loss,” Paul writes, “for the sake of knowing and following Jesus.”  And not just “loss” – dung, garbage, rubbish!

What are the marks of this new identity in Christ?  “I want to know Jesus,” Paul says.  “I want to know the power of his resurrection AND the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.  I want to become like him in his death so that I can become like him in his resurrection life” (3:10-11).

Knowing him.  Knowing the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.  Knowing how to live a cross-shaped life that we might learn to live resurrection-empowered life.  That’s what defines us, it’s who we are—in Christ.

Read Philippians 3:1-14 thoughtfully.  What “true identity in Christ” words or phrases particularly stand out for you?