A Plan to Lose

A Plan to Lose--November 18, 2016

"More than that, I regard everything as a 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…" [Philippians 3:8-9a]

In one of my favorite songs by the band Switchfoot (a list which, I will confess, is a long one), Jon Foreman sings, “Only the losers win—they’ve got nothing to prove.  They leave the world with nothing to lose,” and then he comes to the chorus, “I’ve got a plan to lose it all.  I’ve got a contract pending on eternity.  If I haven’t already given it away, I’ve got a plan to lose it all.”

A plan to lose… everything.  It hardly sounds sensible.

We usually use the word “lose” to describe something accidental and unintentional, something regrettable and pitiable… not something you have a plan for.  We say things like, “I lost my wristwatch again—can someone help me look for it?”  or “I have felt just awful since I lost that gift they gave me. What a shame.”  We talk about the stock market losing points on the day, when of course everyone would rather see a day when the markets close up for the day.  We lament about losing time, losing chances, losing profits, and losing our minds—none of them very positive situations. 

And in those rare and precious moments when we do bring ourselves to part with something intentionally, we reach for other verbs than “lose.”  Your offering check put in the plate is a donation, or a gift or a tithe, but I don’t know anyone who says, “I lost money to the church today.”  Losing sounds like surrender.  Losing sounds like defeat.  Losing sounds like something you stumbled into because of absent-mindedness (the misplaced wristwatch) or risky investing… not something you set out to accomplish when you get up in the morning.

Unless you have met Jesus, of course.  Jesus is the reason that Paul, and the songwriter Jon Foreman, and countless disciples over two thousand years, have been willing to talk about—and sing about, too, I guess—our plans to lose it all.  Paul talks about loss the way a personal trainer talks about the extra twenty pounds or so we are all carrying around that we could stand to shed.  You do have to consciously plan to lose that kind of weigh, which is precisely dead weight.  You do have to say, “This is something I need to get rid of, something I need to lose, and something that is only holding me back and comparatively a waste.”   

Of course, when we are just picturing twenty pounds of excess weight—read fat—from our bodies, it’s easy to say, “I want to be rid of that!”  The really radical thing about Paul is that he is willing to talk about things he used to think were great, and now to call them “rubbish.”  Actually, he calls them something even more graphic in his original Greek—something that could be politely translated as “dung.”  Paul isn’t talking about spiritual love-handles or a flabby soul—something that anybody might easily say, “This needs to go!” about.  Paul is talking about all of who he used to be before Christ was a part of his life.  His trophies and medals, his scorecards and gold-stars.  All of it is so much garbage that ought to go to the junk heap.  All of it requires a plan to lose.

That flies in the face of our natural impulses.  We all cling to the things we think give us worth, and here Paul is convinced that the grace of God changes all that. We are much more likely to want to try and preserve whatever we thought of as our accomplishments, rather than to be willing to let go of them.  It's the frustrated early retiree, who worked hard at his job, only to be forced out when the business dried up, and all he can do now is lash out in emasculated anger at all the people he blames for his troubles, while he conjures up wishes for reliving his glory days.  It's the sad, lonely mogul, who did great in business and made a fortune, but comes to a point where he realizes his money didn't make him happy and all his millions or billions were a waste of a lifetime since he feels empty inside. It's Al Bundy, reliving his high school football career and "that time I scored four touchdowns in a single game" because he is afraid to admit that none of that matters anymore.  All of us are like that to some degree--we don't dare say that our best and most important achievements are "rubbish," because we are have a hard time believing that grace really does get the last word, and that in the end there will be no proving of our worth--only the free gift of God's love that is already yours before you've done a thing.


It is hard to do what Paul does here in Philippians, because we are afraid of admitting our best and greatest weren't all that great, and we would much rather clutch onto the things we thought gave us value and worth.  It is hard to accept that I am beloved and precious and of infinite worth to God... even if my job went away, even if my industry is disappearing, even if I have had to be on unemployment, even if I need the help of others, even if nobody else remembers the four touchdowns in a single game from high school.  But the New Testament does indeed dare us to quit putting our trust and our worth in those accomplishments, and instead to make a plan to lose them all.

Every so often in our lives we have those turning-a-new-chapter rummage-clearing times of our lives, when we sort through the “stuff” that has accumulated and decide what we need to keep and what we do not need.  We might fill up a back of clothes for goodwill, or finally get rid of those broken small appliances we had been meaning to get around to.  Or we might find something that had gotten buried at the bottom of a closet or storage tub and rediscover something of value.  It does happen.

But then there are the markers of achievement. The collected report cards or merit badges from childhood. The certificates of achievement from work or letters of commendation from our supervisors.  The actual plastic trophies from childhood wins and school victories.  When we win them—the big trophy for the year your team won the championship, or the perfect attendance award from your fourth-grade class—they seem like they are of great value and that we will never want to part with them.  Funny, though, how by the time you have to move a couple times in life, you get tired of unboxing and re-boxing the same pieces of tarnished, gaudy plastic with stick-on nameplates.  Funny how these things that once seemed so important become one more piece of junk you are willing to part with—to pitch because it is of no use to anybody else, and because your present-tense life doesn’t need it anymore.  I remember the day I finally parted with my second-grade Pinewood Derby trophy from my short-lived Cub Scout career—and the way I looked at the yellowing faux-gold of its plastic topper and said to myself, “Who do I think I need to impress with this anymore… and am I really fooling myself to think that it would impress them?”  Pitching the trophy was loss, in some sense of the word, but it was also really freeing, because it meant I was losing one more instance of trying to make myself good enough to be acceptable.  One more idol dethroned.

There comes a point where the new life you are standing in is worth more than the trophies from your past that mark where you used to be.  There comes a point when you realize you would rather have a few more free moments now than the time it takes to dust your old school trophies.  And so, at some point… out they go.  It’s a loss, but not a pitiable one.  Nobody says, “Oh, what a shame—I wish I had more of the faded clutter from my childhood that rewarded me for meaningless contests.”  But it does take the conscious action, the chosen willingness, to pitch them when it’s time.  It takes a plan.

The Christian life is like that.  It is the conscious plan of disciples of Jesus to do an ongoing inventory of our lives and to be free enough to pitch the clutter of personal points and tired trophies which never really earned us anything in the first place.  It is the daring plot to pin our whole lives on Christ and to see that in this present moment with Christ we no longer need gold stars to be loved.  In fact, we never did. 

When that becomes real for us—when the reality of grace smacks us upside the head like that—all of a sudden we find ourselves free to lose it all… because we recognize that, more importantly, we have been found.

Lord Jesus, you have claimed us as we are.  Let us dare to trust it and plan to lose the dead weight we have been carrying around.