When Paul looked back over the circumstances of his life, he could declare, as he does in the third chapter of Philippians, that he was born a Hebrew of the Hebrews, an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, and circumcised on the eighth day. Then, in addition to all of those things that he had inherited, there was the fact that he was a Pharisee, the strictest sect of the Jews, and that he was zealous in this tradition, which he demonstrated by persecuting the church. As far as the righteousness that was in the law, as the Pharisees understood it, he stood before God blameless.
But then he met Jesus Christ, and he realized that when he thought most that he was doing the work of God, he was actually opposing it. He was fighting Jesus, the Son of God Himself. Paul recognized what a sinful man he was. Consequently, there is never a point in his writings where he begins to talk about what God did in his life that he does not in some way, as he does here, express the utmost humility of character. So we find Paul describing himself in our passage as the least of the apostles, who in fact does not even deserve to be called an apostle because he persecuted the church of God (v. 9). Yet he knew that he was indeed an apostle because of the grace of God.
That is what the Gospel core leads us to. If you do not think in terms of the Lord Jesus Christ dying for your sin, being buried, and then being raised on the third day according to the Scriptures to declare in a public way that God has accepted His sacrifice on your behalf, then you are like Paul before his conversion. You will boast in your supposed good works and think God has to take note of that. You have that kind of religious pride that has been one of the curses of human history. When you recognize that your sin was such a terrible thing in the sight of God that God Himself in the person of His Son had to come and die for you in submitting to the death of the cross on your behalf, then you are humbled before Him. You can say, “It is only by the grace of God that I am what I am.” That is what people need to hear today. People have a way of putting it off, and one way they put it off is to relativize truth by claiming that the truth of the Gospel might be true for somebody else but not for them.
I once spoke at a church in Memphis and said something along that line. About a week later, I got a letter from a man who said, “Just after you spoke, I was on the way to California. I was sitting next to a man on the plane, and we began to talk about spiritual things. And when I began to witness about Christ and His resurrection, his reply to me was just what you had said in your message. The man responded, ‘Well, that’s a wonderful thing. I’m glad it’s meaningful to you. That just isn’t my bag.’”
In his letter the man went on to ask how you deal with a situation like that. I wrote back and said that it is hard to deal with that kind of a situation today. It is one of the devil’s triumphs that he has so relativized truth that the claims of Christianity can be heard by people and shrugged off as if it does not make any difference whether a thing is true or not. We have to keep stating these claims. We keep pressing them home again and again, that by the grace of God those truths will work their way into the human heart and demand a response.
It did in Christ’s day. Jesus spoke the truth, and people wanted to dismiss it. Nevertheless, He continued to speak it. They were faced with that great crisis, whether they were going to hear the truth as it came from the lips of Him who is the truth itself and submit to it by confessing their sins and believing on Him as their Savior, or else setting their face against that truth and opposing Him and His claims. Paul experienced the same opposition, and that is essentially what we face today.
Christianity says that Gospel teaching is not merely a philosophy, but truth. It is historical truth. Jesus, the Son of God, died on the cross for your sin. He was then buried, and rose again from the dead on the third day. And there were many witnesses of these things. You have to come to terms with all that. Is it true? If it is true, then Jesus is who He claimed to be. He is the Lord and you must submit to Him. If you do not think it is true, then you need to have reasons to dismiss it. The great challenge of life is to dismiss a claim like that. I do not think you can. It is far better to bow the knee to Christ, accept Him on His terms, and enter into the joy of His salvation.
