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Howdy.

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Fancy meeting all of you here today.

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I wanted to kind of talk about what it means to repeat yourself a little bit.

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How many times have you either had to tell the kids the same thing over and over again,

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or you were the one who needed to hear something over and over again?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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No, I definitely know it's more of the view in the back row over there.

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Yeah, definitely, definitely for sure.

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When I was a kid and I'd be playing with the Legos, and every once in a while I'd be thinking,

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there's a piece, I know that this piece is somewhere here, and I need that to complete what I'm working on.

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I'd just be sitting there digging, trying to find that one piece, and then all of a sudden down the hall I'd hear,

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and I would realize two things.

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Number one, I think my dad found my Lego with his foot, and two, maybe that's the one I was missing.

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But oftentimes with that is then, my dad would remind me again, you need to pick up your Legos.

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Okay, okay, I promise I will pick up my Legos, and then what would be happening,

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sometimes the next day, sometimes later the same day.

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And time and time again, we see that we have to hear the same words over and over,

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because we keep going down the same best-up path.

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And that's what we end up seeing today with our Philippians 3 passage.

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So Paul, go ahead, switch to the next slide real quick.

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Paul is making sure that he tells everyone, I'm going to repeat this.

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It's probably going to be for your benefit.

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And the reason he says that is because this lesson is what he has to say over and over again.

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To beware of those who make the law into what we focus on,

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and those who want to ignore anything to do with the law and how we live.

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One of the things that we see here is it discusses what we see with circumcision.

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Now Paul is basically very, very upset at what people have been doing with circumcision.

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There was a group of people that were called the Judaizers.

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And they were spending so much of their time with what made them look righteous,

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rather than asking what it meant to be righteous.

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And so oftentimes they would take things that were meant to be an outward sign of worship,

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but they would substitute it for what was going on in the inside.

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So especially in those times, whenever a young boy was eight days old,

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that they would bring this child to the rabbi and go through circumcision.

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But the thing is that if it doesn't have any true meaning, then why in the world would you do that?

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And he even goes so far as to describe people as mutilators of the flesh,

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because they were cutting without any true meaning.

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And that's the thing with this, is that when we're looking at practices like this,

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is that we sometimes miss the question of what's happening on the inside.

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You see, back then they would be focusing on circumcision for the young men,

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but now we have the opportunity of bringing young children to God through baptism,

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both men and women.

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But do we do so and then just take it for granted?

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See, oftentimes we can take baptism and focus so much on it,

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and somebody might say, how do you know that God has saved you?

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And a person might say, well, I belong to this church.

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I've gone to it since I was five, whatever it might be.

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Or I was baptized on such and such a day,

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and we can take something beautiful that has planted the seed of faith,

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and we can completely misunderstand it.

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For example, if you were to look at your significant other,

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and you were to say, do you love me?

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And they were to say to you, well, I married you, didn't I?

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Would that be a really great way to start an anniversary?

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If someone is saying, well, I did it, didn't I?

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That's kind of missing the whole point, is that they want to know,

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well, tell me what's in your heart.

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And oftentimes we can do the same thing with the outward signs that we have

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with God's church and with worship,

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is we can end up missing out on what it was that baptism connected us to

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in the first place.

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You see, Paul, he had done all the things he was supposed to do.

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He was the perfect man of God in religious circles,

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and yet this very perfect person was out there killing people for following Christ.

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Completely missed the forest for the trees.

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Spent so long being grateful that he was a good Jewish man

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without asking, what in the world am I doing with God's people?

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And the thing with this is that oftentimes we can end up trying to look good.

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We can try to act good.

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There are even the times whenever we're trying to be successful,

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and not just making sure we have food on the table,

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or making sure there's a roof over our heads,

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but we need to make sure there's a certain status.

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We need to make sure that somehow we have proven that we're successful to others.

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Maybe the second home that we have, or the vacations that we took,

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or whatever it is that we may be wearing or showing to others,

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because that somehow shows that we are good at life.

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Or even more than that, even just making sure that we have a beautiful family.

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We can do the best at their sports.

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Have they managed to get into the right college?

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Have they managed to somehow get the best boyfriend, girlfriend?

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Do they know how to show everyone else that we are good parents,

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and that we know that as long as they are good kids,

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then nobody has anything to point at us for?

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We can spend so much time trying to look for the things that are on the outside

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that we miss out on asking the question of what's happening on the inside.

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I taught physics for six years, and I still remember the private school that I was at,

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and one of the pastors was on the board and had helped to found the school,

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and I would teach his kid in the back row every day,

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and I knew that of all the kids in that room,

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that was the one that was causing the most trouble.

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But you couldn't say anything about it.

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Exactly.

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Because spending so much time making sure that things looked good on the outside

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instead of asking what's happening in the kingdom of God on the inside.

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The thing is though that Paul, Paul was striving.

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Go to the next page.

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And what we see is that he puts out this idea of striving for a goal.

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Now, I want to put in front of you though,

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that sometimes we think of this as how we become good enough,

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and by so doing we miss out on what Paul is trying to get across to us.

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If you were to say that you're a musician,

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does that mean that you are a concert pianist?

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Does that mean that you have played alongside Elton John?

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If you were to say you're a musician,

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does that mean that you have a record deal?

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Does that mean that you've got your own following?

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No, a musician is somebody who plays music.

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Someone who is growing in their craft,

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someone who wants to learn more, who wants to pursue it,

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but it's not a question of how far you've gotten in it,

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it's just a question of which direction are you going?

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And that's the thing about what Paul is trying to get across here,

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is to not focus on where you've gotten, but rather is saying who it is that you're following.

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Because here's the thing about Paul, he says,

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I'm going to let go of the past.

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But why is it so important to let go of the past?

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Because remember, this is the person that every time he preaches,

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and the Jewish community sees him,

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they see the guy who helped them put Christians to death.

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Every time that he speaks to a church or an apostle,

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and he knows that he may very well have persecuted their friend or family.

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And that every time he is living out his faith,

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he still has that thing nagging in the back of his mind.

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Don't we oftentimes have that, that thing that nags us,

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that as much as we get over it, it's still somehow there,

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it's still somehow gets us.

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But you see, there's another side of this that Paul wants us to be wary of.

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Go ahead and flip to the next slide real quick.

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Is that God is showing us truth,

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is making sure that we are aware of what he wants us to see.

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You see, more than that, is that following after Paul is meant to be following after Christ.

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You see, sometimes we can spend all of our time thinking about,

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have I done everything perfectly?

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But let's be honest, there are other times in our life,

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times where we're really not that concerned about what we do or don't do in our life.

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It oftentimes happens at the end of high school, through college,

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the times where your parents call you up, how are you doing,

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oh, I'm just fine, you don't really want to tell them where you were partying the night before,

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and you don't really want to tell them what's been going on, yeah.

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But it oftentimes continues throughout our life.

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Is that we will have times where we say, this doesn't matter, this is okay.

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We'll take little boxes in our life and say, you know what, this isn't so great, but you know what, it's okay.

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That part's acceptable.

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And if someone were to say, well, yeah, but don't you want to grow through that,

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oh, I'm saved, Christ has done everything.

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I'm sure he understands that this part, that's just not always going to be good.

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But every time that we look at giving in to the cravings that we have,

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the desires, the things that we focus on, where we can't get over it,

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the times where it might be something physical or something emotional, something mental,

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something where you just have to have what you want.

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But we sometimes separate that from what our life is in Christ.

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You see, God is not looking to just make sure that we've gotten marked and then we're done.

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But our entire life is to grow and to change.

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See, that's the thing about what we see with following after God, but also with his community.

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There's a really weird guy in my life who sells mortgages.

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I try not to compliment him too often because he's going to get a big head and it's already kind of big.

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But he recommended that I read the book Atomic Habits.

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I'm about through nine chapters of it.

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And one of the things that he keeps bringing up in there is that oftentimes we end up living up

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to the expectations of those who are around us.

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Whoever it is that we surround ourselves with, those are the ones that we end up living up to.

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Think about this.

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The times whenever you have struggled the most in your life, who was it that was around you?

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And that's the thing is that oftentimes we end up getting egged on.

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But that's the thing about Christ bringing us together as his people,

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that we're meant to encourage the best with each other, not to just sit around and laugh about all the dumb, stupid things

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and then just kind of leave it at that, yeah, we have our moments, yeah, we have our ups and downs,

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but when we hear somebody going down a path that we know is going to hurt them, do we just laugh at it?

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Or do we actually encourage them to grow through it?

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And that's kind of the hard part, because sometimes then we have to say what nobody else has said.

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See, we've got a lot of the small groups that we've been building up, not just the classes on Sundays,

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but during the week.

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But one of the things we try to make sure is that it's not just go sit in a room and read the Bible

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and make sure you've understood it and then you move on, but also have you actually talked to the people there?

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Have you actually connected with them and what they're going through?

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A few weeks ago, there was a friend of mine who's in ministry who had to send out an email saying,

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hey, you know this person that we've been volunteering with for the last few years?

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He murdered his wife in front of his kid.

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And knowing that the person that was right next to us, I'm in pictures with this guy

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and that I had no idea what he was going through that led up to this moment

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that I cannot possibly explain.

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And that's the thing that we see here is that Paul is looking at a community saying,

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your life matters.

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And we're here to encourage that with one another.

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And that's the piece that I want to leave you all with here,

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is that oftentimes we can focus so much on did I get you into church on Sunday?

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Did we make sure you came and took communion? Did we make sure that you checked off wherever the box is?

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And you know, those are good things.

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But if we haven't actually connected with you as a person,

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if we haven't actually cared for you and your life in Christ, then we've let you down.

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So for that, I'm sorry if we've done that.

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I'm hoping and praying that we do better.

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Not because we're ever going to get to some point where we say we've got it all figured out,

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because that's what we should strive for.

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We should strive for that as a community and we should strive for that in our own lives.

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So if you've had a chance to connect with us and we've been able to do that with you,

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really, really glad and I hope you can do that for others.

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But if you haven't, come find us.

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You don't need to do life by yourself.

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As God's people, as fellow believers, we get a chance to bring joy to one another,

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not by ignoring the issues around us, but by walking through them together.

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So with our last slide, we acknowledge to you that whatever you may be struggling with,

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whether worrying that you haven't gotten everything perfectly down yet,

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or ignoring what life in Christ might be, as the people of God,

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may we bring you back to our Messiah who has saved you and gives you a new life in His name.

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Thanks be to God.