[Paul writes:] "If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ." (Philippians 3:4b-7)
You can spend your entire life racking up achievements, merit badges, and accolades in the relentless quest to prove yourself "good enough," but it's a losing game.
Seriously, it's just not worth it to play, "Prove Your Worthiness to God," for two reasons: for starters, none of us can rack up enough piety points or righteousness rewards to win, and more importantly, because we never needed to earn what God was already giving away for free.
Don't take my word for it--this is from the Apostle Paul himself. As many of us heard this past Sunday in this passage from his letter to the Philippians, Paul has tried playing that game, and it was Jesus himself who led him to quit playing. As he recounts some of his former life story to the congregation in Philippi, he starts rattling off his religious credentials, and all the things he used to think were useful for earning him the acceptance of God. And that was a long list: he had been circumcised according to the Torah's instructions, and came from a good upstanding family in a respectable tribe of Israel. He was no Johnny-come-lately convert, but had come from generations upon generations of devout and observant members of the covenant people. He kept the commandments, even to the point of belonging to a particularly zealous and stringent sect called the Pharisees that strove to go above and beyond the bare-minimum requirements of the Law. He had even gotten swept up in a violent strain of fundamentalism that sought to round up Christians and either put them in prison or put them to death for what they thought were heretical beliefs. Paul had an impressive resume of biblical bona fides, all of which an earlier version of himself thought were equivalent to a student getting gold-star stickers on his report card. He didn't know it, but that version of himself was really more like a hamster running forever on a wheel that gets you nowhere. You wear yourself out constantly trying to play the game of earning your status of acceptability with God, and you don't get anywhere for all the sweating and huffing.
What happened to Paul that led him to get himself off of the hamster wheel of trying to earn his place in God's good graces? In a word, Jesus. Jesus happened to him.
The living Christ encountered Paul, even while he was dead-set again the Jesus movement and had blood on his hands from trying to snuff it out like a flame, and it was Christ's gracious embrace that changed things for Paul. He discovered that not only was the formerly-crucified Nazarene alive again, but he was claiming Paul without holding his track record of persecution against him. Christ's own enemy-embracing love had already accepted Paul, as he was, and had set aside the list of good and bad deeds on his supposed "heavenly permanent record." And instead, on the basis of Christ's own goodness, Christ's own love, and Christ's own righteousness, Paul was given the status of belonging in the family of God as a free gift.
There had never needed to be a list of accomplishments.
There had never needed to be a proving of worthiness.
There had never needed to be an endless marathon on the hamster wheel.
And of course, Paul's point as he writes these words to the Philippians is that we don't need any of those things, either. Paul's is not a special case: he is made right with God the same way any of us are--as a gift of grace. Not a one of us on God's green earth has to prove we are good enough, or make ourselves look better than someone else by comparison, or present a list of merit badges we have earned. We have been given all that is Christ's--his own goodness, his own righteousness, his own status as Child of God--as a free gift, regardless of where we were born, which family we come from, how long we have been members of the church, or how well we keep the rules. And when you realize that this is how God has really operated all along throughout all of history, then all of our attempts to impress, achieve, and earn our way into God's embrace look pretty pathetic.
What if today, we dared to leave behind the hamster wheel we've been on? What if we dared to trust that God has given us already what a paper full of gold-star-stickers never could? And what would we be freed for if we didn't have to constantly worry about whether we were getting credit for our good behaviors on some imagined permanent record?
The Apostle Paul is here to tell us, "You don't need to even say the 'What-If?' part. You are already free."
Lord Jesus, enable us to trust your free gift apart from our earning or achieving, and to step out in the world freely to love like you.
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