The Loss of All Things for Christ's Sake

Next Part The Loss of All Things for Christ's Sake 2

"Yes doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but rubbish, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." Philippians 3:8, 9

Every saved sinner is a miracle of grace; and I believe in my very heart and conscience, that the Lord will make every saved sinner know, feel, and acknowledge it; for he will give him from time to time such deep discoveries of what he is in the Adam fall, as will convince him beyond all question and all controversy that nothing but the rich, sovereign, distinguishing, and super-abounding grace of God can save his soul from the bottomless pit.

But though this is true in the case of every vessel of mercy, yet, as if to establish our faith more clearly and fully in the sovereignty of grace, the Lord has given us two special instances in the Scriptures wherein the miracles of his grace seem to shine forth in the most distinguished luster and glory; and as if to make the contrast greater, they are of two characters exactly opposite. Yet the grace of God shines so conspicuously in both, that I hardly know to which I can assign the preference. These two characters are– one; the thief upon the cross; the other, Saul of Tarsus. Let us view them separately.

First, I look at the thief upon the cross. I see there a hardened malefactor, for he was no doubt one of the gang of Barabbas, and selected, when he was spared, as one of the worst, to stamp the Redeemer's crucifixion by his side with the deeper ignominy. I trace him, then, through his life of violence and crime, and see him imbruing his hands in the blood of the innocent. I see him year after year sinning to the utmost stretch of all his faculties, until at last brought to suffer just punishment for his crimes against the laws of his fellow man. I see him amid all his sufferings at first joining his brother thief in blaspheming the Lamb of God, who was hanging between them upon the cross; for I read that "the thieves that were crucified with him cast the same into his teeth." (Matt. 27:44.)

But the appointed time arrives, the predestinated moment strikes, and I see the grace of God, as a lightning flash, not to destroy, but to save, enter into his heart, as if just at the last gasp, to snatch him from the gates of death and the very jaws of hell. I see it communicate to his soul conviction of sin and repentance of his crimes, for he acknowledged them to God and man. I see how the Holy Spirit raised up in that dying malefactor's soul a faith in the Person, work, kingdom, grace, and power of the Son of God– a faith so strong that I can hardly find a parallel to it, unless in that of Abraham offering up his son Isaac as a burnt offering. When the very disciples forsook Jesus and fled; when his cruel enemies were celebrating their highest triumph; when earth shook to its center and the sun withdrew its light; at the lowest depth of the Redeemer's shame and sorrow– O, miracle of grace!– here was a poor dying thief acknowledging Jesus as King in Zion, and praying, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." O, my soul, have you not prayed the same prayer to the same King of kings and Lord of lords?

But now I turn and see another character– Saul of Tarsus. I view a man trained up in the strictest form of religion then known, living the most austere, upright, unblemished life. I see him repeating prayer after prayer and making vow after vow, ever setting before his eyes day after day the law of Moses, and directing by that his life and conduct. I next see him, in the height of his zeal, ravaging the church of God, as a wolf devastates a fold, until satiated with blood. I see him holding the garments of the witnesses against the martyred Stephen. I view him rejoicing as with fiendish joy as stone after stone was fiercely hurled, and fell with crushing violence upon the martyr's head.

But O what a change! I see him now fallen to the earth at Damascus' gate, under the power of that light from heaven above the brightness of the sun which shone round about him; and I hear him saying, all trembling and astonished– "Lord, what will you have me to do?" (Acts 9:6.) Free will, where were you at Damascus' gate? Were you not hurrying him on to deeds of blood? Was he not doing your bidding when he was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord? Did your voice arrest his hand? Free grace, was not the conquest wholly, solely yours?

Now can you tell me which of these two saved sinners, shall carry the palm the highest or sing the song the loudest? Can you, you saints of God, decide in which of these two men the grace of God shines forth the more conspicuously? Was it in touching the heart of the malefactor on the cross, or that of the hardened pharisee? I freely confess I can hardly pronounce an opinion, for my mind hovers between the two; but of the two, I should give Saul the preference, for to bring down the proud, self-satisfied self-righteous pharisee, seems almost a greater miracle of grace than to convert a dying malefactor, especially when we take into account what the grace of God afterwards made him, and how it wrought in him to be such a saint and such an apostle.

To show what grace taught and made him we need go no farther than this very chapter. I see here what the grace of God did in this man's heart, and as I read the blessed record of his experience as here, it poured itself forth in a stream of life and feeling from his very soul, I read in every line– I might say in every word– what a mighty revolution must have been wrought in him to make him now so dearly love that Jesus whom he had once abhorred, that for his sake he counted all things but rubbish that he might know, win, and be found in him, and that the righteousness he had once despised he now felt was his only justification before, and his only acceptance with God.

If, then, the same grace that touched the heart of the dying malefactor and of Saul the pharisee, has touched your heart and mine– and it needs the same grace to save and sanctify us as saved and sanctified them– we shall be able, at least in some measure, to speak for ourselves the language of the text, and which, with God's blessing, I shall now proceed to open. In doing which I shall endeavor–

I. First, to trace out the mind of the Holy Spirit in the expression of the Apostle– "For whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish."

II. Secondly, the reason why he had suffered the loss of all things and counted them so mean and low. It was "the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord."

III. Thirdly, the intense desire in his soul to "win Christ and to be found in him."

IV. And fourthly, his full conviction that if found in Jesus, his happy soul would be found clothed, not in his own righteousness, which is of the law, but "that which is through faith in Christ– the righteousness which is of God by faith."

I. The Apostle in the beginning of this chapter gives us a long catalogue, which I will not enter into, of certain religious privileges which were his by inheritance, and of certain, as were in that day considered, great attainments in religion which he had made by his own exertions, for he had advanced by great strictness of conduct to the highest pitch of legal holiness. He could say, what few of us can, that "touching the righteousness which is in the law," which here means its external righteousness, he was "blameless." The Apostle's meaning here is often much mistaken. He does not mean the spirit of the law, but the letter– an external, not an internal obedience– a fulfillment of the law merely as regards the abstaining from idolatry, Sabbath-breaking, murder, theft, and adultery; not an inward loving of God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, but a strict, undeviating uprightness of walk and conversation from his infancy upward; and as such, in, the eyes of man he was blameless.

A. "Yes doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." But a time came, according to God's purpose– a time never to be forgotten– when the invincible grace of God touched his heart and brought down his pride into the dust. He tells us (Romans 7.) what his feelings and experience were under the first work of grace upon his heart, and what he learned and found under the sharp discipline into which he was then introduced. I was alive," he says, "without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died; and the commandment which was ordained to life I found to be unto death." (Rom. 7:9, 10.) He was "alive, without the law once." That is, when unacquainted with the spirituality of the law and the wrath of God revealed therein he was "alive," because it had not killed him and laid him dead under its curse. He could read, fast, and pray; he could run on the errands that the law sent him, work at the winch to which it tied him, and perform, at least in the letter, the tasks which it set him. In this sense, he was alive, and lively too, for his zeal was all in a flame to waste the church of Christ as with fire and sword, for he tells us himself that he was exceedingly zealous of the traditions of his fathers (Gal. 1:14), and displayed this zeal in persecuting the church (Phil. 3:6), or as the Holy Spirit more expressly tells, "As for Saul, he made havoc of the Church, entering into every house, and taking men and women, committed them to prison." (Acts 8:3.)

But when the law entered his conscience, it killed him as to all hopes of salvation by his own obedience; and when God was pleased to reveal his dear Son in him (Gal. 1:16), he saw and felt such beauty and blessedness in his glorious Person as God-Man, and such pardon and peace, acceptance and justification by and in his blood and righteousness, that all his once fancied gains sank into utter loss. He was thus like a merchant or tradesman who by some convulsion in business is ruined at a stroke. He may have on the debtor side of his ledger a large amount of money due to him for goods supplied, but finds to his dismay that all the sums he was expecting to receive, in order to meet his engagements with, are bad debts, or more confounding still, are to be transferred to the other side of the ledger, so that he must pay where he expected to be paid. So with Saul. He was continually making his calculations, that the law owed him as a debt life and happiness, with the special favor of God, on account of his strict obedience to it; but to his utmost consternation, when the Lord opened his eyes, and the law seized him as it were by the throat, saying– "Pay me what you owe!" he found that the law was not his debtor but his creditor, and that instead of it owing him life, he owed it death. Thus his gains were turned into loss, and his profits into debts.

Now this is a lesson that all must learn spiritually and experimentally who are to know Christ, believe in Christ, and win Christ. But we formerly went the wrong way to work– we once thought that we could gain heaven by our own righteousness. We strictly attended to our religious duties, and sought by these and various other means to recommend ourselves to the favor of God, and induce him to reward us with heaven for our sincere attempts to obey his commandments; and by these religious performances we thought, in the days of our ignorance, we would surely be able to make a ladder whereby we might climb up to heaven. This was our tower of Babel, whose top was to reach unto heaven, and by mounting which we thought to scale the stars, and, like the proud king of Babylon, "to ascend above the heights of the clouds and be like the Most High." (Isaiah 14:14.)

But the same Lord who stopped the further building of the tower of Babel, by confounding their speech and scattering them abroad on the face of the earth, began to confound our speech so that we could not pray, or talk, or boast as before, and to scatter all our religion like the chaff of the summer threshing floors. Our mouths were stopped; we became guilty before God; and the bricks and the mortar became a pile of confusion. When, then, the Lord was pleased to discover to our souls by faith his being, majesty, greatness, holiness, and purity, and thus gave us a corresponding sense of our filthiness and folly, then all our creature religion and natural piety which we once counted as gain, we began to see was but loss– that our very religious duties and observances, so far from being for us, were actually against us, and instead of pleading for us before God as so many deeds of righteousness, were so polluted and defiled by sin perpetually mixed with them, that our very prayers were enough to sink us into hell, had we no other iniquities to answer for in heart, lip or life.

Thus "our tables"– and among them the Lord's table which we attended so constantly– "became a snare, and that which should have been for our welfare"– as we fondly conceived our religious duties were– "became a trap" in which we were caught as in the very act of sinning, and from which there was no escape by any exertion of our own. (Psalm 69:22)

But when we had a view by faith of the Person, work, blood, love, and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, then we began more plainly, and clearly to see with what religious toys we had been so long amusing ourselves, and what is far worse, mocking God by them. We had been secretly despising Jesus and his sufferings, Jesus and his blood, Jesus and his righteousness, and setting up the poor, miserable, paltry doings of a polluted worm in the place of the finished work of the Son of God. But compared with him, well may we now say, with Paul, "But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ."

B. But the Apostle adds, "For whom I have suffered the loss of all things;"meaning thereby not only all his creature religion and fancied righteousness, but everything else which had come into competition with the Lord Jesus.

1. We have to experience the same loss for ourselves. When the Lord, by his Spirit's divine operations, is pleased to make our conscience increasingly tender, planting his fear more deeply in the heart; when he condescends to strengthen that which he has already wrought in us by his power, and to bring forth the graces of his Spirit into more vivid exercise and more powerful efficiency, we begin to find that there are many things hitherto indulged, which we must sacrifice if we would maintain an honest conscience and walk before the Lord in all well-pleasing. We begin to see that we cannot hold the WORLD with one hand and Christ with the other; and that to follow Jesus requires taking up a daily cross and denying ourselves of much which the flesh admires and loves!

It is laid with weight and power upon our conscience that if we would be Christians inwardly as well as outwardly, have the power of godliness and not merely the form, we must part with many things which we have loved as our very life's blood. This is the grand test which distinguishes the real from the nominal Christian– the possessor from the professor. I speak from experience. I was myself called upon to make such sacrifices. It may not be your part, nor may the same necessity be laid upon you; but when I was a minister of the Church of England rather more than 23 years ago, I was called upon to sacrifice all my earthly prospects, and with Moses count the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. I repeat it– this may not be your case, (for I am not laying down myself as an example), but I felt I could not hold my position and office as a minister of that church, because that position called upon me to say and do things which I could not say and do, without standing before the God of heaven with what I believed to be a lie in my mouth and in my right hand. I do not judge other men's consciences, but I felt I must either retain my position with a weight continually resting upon my mind, and thus mock, as I believed, a holy, heart-searching God, or make the sacrifice. I chose the latter; nor have I ever repented the choice, as I can now serve the Lord and preach his truth with a good conscience.

But all of you must sacrifice something, if, with Paul, you are "to suffer the loss of ALL things." It may happen that you are placed, for instance, in a situation extremely advantageous to your temporal interests, and one which is fast leading you to a position of worldly ease and respectability. But if you are compelled, in occupying this position, to do things which gall and grieve a tender conscience– things inconsistent with the fear of God and the precepts of the Gospel, grace will compel, as well as enable you to suffer the loss of all these things, rather than live in sin, to the provocation of God, and the bringing of darkness and death into your soul.

2. But if spared this trial; if you have not to suffer in purse or position, you will certainly suffer in reputation. You must lose your good name, if you do not lose your worldly advancement, or fall into a lower social position; for no person can be a sincere follower of the Lamb and yet retain the good opinion of the world. If you walk in the fear of God, and follow in the footsteps of a persecuted and despised Jesus, the world will hate and despise you as it hated and despised him, as he himself declares– "If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you." (John 15:18.) God himself has put enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15); and nothing will secure you from the manifestation of this enmity if you are on Christ's side. Neither rank, nor property, nor learning, nor education, nor amiability, nor the profusest deeds of liberality, nor the greatest uprightness of conduct, will stave off the scorn of men, if you are a sincere follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and carry out in practice what you hold in principle.

You may manage to carry on a mere profession of religion, and shun by worldly compliances the shame of the cross; but to retain the respect of the world with a firm holding of the distinguishing doctrines of grace, a living experience of their power, and a godly obedience of life, is utterly impossible. You may contrive by time-serving, by concealing your real views, and by shunning the company of God's people, to escape the cross; but take care, lest in escaping the cross you escape the crown. If you are not conformed to Jesus here in his suffering image, you will most certainly not be conformed to Jesus hereafter in his glorified likeness.

But if by living for and unto Jesus and his cross, your name is cast out as evil, wear it as your distinguishing badge, your war medal, as adorning the breast of a Christian warrior. If men misrepresent your motives or actions, and seek to hunt you down with every calumny that the basest malignity can invent, do not heed it as long as you are innocent. They cannot find you a better or more honorable crown, if indeed your godly life provoke the cruel lie. It is a crown that your Master bore before you, when they crowned his head with thorns. If you feel as I have felt, you will at times count yourself even unworthy to suffer persecution for his name's sake.

3. You may be called upon to suffer the loss of relations or friends,if not by bereavement, by what is sometimes more painful– separation and alienation. The Lord himself said, "For I have come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." (Matt. 10:35.) Thus you may have to suffer in this sense the loss of father, mother, wife, sister, child– of your nearest and dearest ties; the grace of God producing that separation between you and them, as shall make them alienated to you, and you to them.

4. But this is not all; these are mainly outward matters. There is something more inward of which you must also suffer loss. I mean the loss of all your fancied holiness, of all your vaunted strength, of all your natural or acquired wisdom, of all your boasted knowledge; in a word, of everything in creature religion of which the heart is proud, and in which it takes delight. All, all must be counted loss for Christ's sake; all, all must be sacrificed to his bleeding, dying love– our dearest joys, our fondest hopes, our most cherished idols, must all sink and give way to the grace, blood, and love of an incarnate God. And not only must they be counted as "loss," but lower still must they sink, worse still must they become– they must be counted as rubbish, as street offal, or according to the literal meaning of the word, as garbage of the slaughterhouse cast to dogs. What a strong expression of the Apostle! How great the grace, how ardent the affection, that made him so abhor himself and love Jesus!

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