Part 1: No Such Thing | Part 2: Eternal Values | Part 3: Healthy Distrust of Self | Part 4: A Clear and Uncontested Goal | Part 5: All In. Every Day.

There’s one more element in Paul’s description of his spiritual walk that tells us volumes about his success as a believer.

In the last letter he wrote that’s been preserved, Paul is in prison in Rome. This is the second time for him. Last time, he was upbeat about his prospects—

• In his letter to Philemon, likely written early in that 2-year imprisonment, he expects to prevail in his appeal to Caesar (Ac 25.10-11) and thus to be released; he tells Philemon to prepare him a place to stay when he comes to visit (Phm 1.22).
• When he writes to the Philippians, likely toward the end of the imprisonment, he still expects to visit the church there in Philippi (Php 1.25; 2.24).

But this time is different. Rather than being under house arrest in rented, and relatively comfortable, residential quarters (Ac 28.30), Paul is now in a prison—traditionally the Mamartine prison, a dungeon—and is clearly not expecting to be released (2Ti 4.6-8). He is largely alone (2Ti 4.9-11) and in need of supplies (2Ti 4.13). He is settling his affairs (2Ti 4.14-15).

But he is not discouraged or depressed. He expects the Lord’s work on his behalf (2Ti 4.18) and eventual eternal reward, in the Lord’s timing (2Ti 4.8).

Victorious to the end, regardless of the challenging circumstances.

And in this context, in this epistle, in these circumstances, we find one more clue.

I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day (2Ti 1.3).

He prays.

He communes with his Father, drawing spiritual strength to thrive in all those challenging circumstances, ones that would very likely do us in.

He’s really serious about this; he prays “without ceasing … night and day.”

I’d have trouble with that—especially the night part. In those times, I fall asleep.

I’m not the only one—right?

And I note something further here, something that sheds more light on his outlook.

He doesn’t speak of praying for himself; he asks others to do that (Co 4.3; 1Th 5.25; 2Th 3.1). He prays for others, for Timothy, his “dearly beloved son” in the faith (2Ti 1.2). Even in extremity, his thoughts, his concerns, are for others.

He follows his Lord’s example in this. Jesus prayed for long sessions (Mt 14.23), sometimes all night (Lk 6.12); and in his greatest extremity, he prayed for others, for those who believed in him (Jn 17.6-26).

This kind of prayer is hard work, both because it is lengthy and because it is on behalf of others. Paul describes such prayer—in this case the prayer offered by his coworker Epaphras—as “labor”—

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God (Co 4.12).

The Greek word rendered “laboring” here is agonizomai, which we all recognize as the etymological origin of our word agonize. It’s used of athletes in competition, on Game Day, who are leaving it all on the field (1Co 9.25). Specifically it’s used of boxers (1Ti 6.12, 2Ti 4.7). And more significantly, it’s used of soldiers (Jn 18.36), who are fighting for their lives.

We’re not often called up to fight like that. And we don’t often pray like that.

Paul prayed “without ceasing … night and day.”

This was not formal prayer, grace before dinner, after which someone at the table asks, “Did we pray?” It’s constant, mindful, effortful communication with God.

The Christian life is not easy for anyone; there are no “naturally gifted athletes” in the Christian race. It means rejecting your natural self and renewing the battle every day. It means staying in constant communication with “headquarters.” It’s a tough battle.

There are no Super Christians. There are just people who fight the battle every day.

Re-enlist.

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Part 1: No Such Thing | Part 2: Eternal Values | Part 3: Healthy Distrust of Self | Part 4: A Clear and Uncontested Goal

There’s another element in Paul’s spiritual life that we non-super Christians should seek to emulate.

Paul was into his relationship with Christ for the long haul, and he knew that reaching the end of that road meant staying on it every day, every mile.

He was all in.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Jesus made it clear that following him is no casual commitment. After he had fed the 5000 men and their families—something that brought out of the woodwork a whole lot of uncommitted hangers-on (Jn 6.22-66)—Jesus warned his disciples that hard times were coming, including official rejection and even execution (Lk 9.22), things that were not for the faint of heart. It was at this moment that he told them,

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me (Lk 9.23).

Following Jesus means dying to self—that’s what “taking up a cross” means—and doing that every day. Commitment. Discipline. Reliability. Without fail.

This daily faithfulness is hard.

I teach an undergraduate systematic theology class that requires a lot of Bible memorization. I tell my students on the first day that I know they’re intimidated, but that pretty much anybody can do the memorization—but there’s only one way to do it, and cramming is not it.

Memorization requires Regular. Spaced. Repetition.

You go over the material every day. Doesn’t have to take long—just a few minutes—but it has to be every day. Over time, as you pull the material out of your brain at constant intervals, it becomes yours. In the end, it’s not really an intellectual or intelligence problem; it’s a character problem.

Every day.

When a student is doing significantly worse on his verse quizzes than the other material, I ask him to tell me how he’s studying for those quizzes. Are you doing what I told you on day one? Well, no, but I’m really busy.

Well, this is how cramming turns out. You have the time—just 5 minutes a day. But every day. It works.

Right now I’m memorizing lines for a play. I was hesitant to accept the role, frankly, because I’m 68, and the old brain ain’t what it used to be, and I’ve blanked out on stage before, and that’s a really unpleasant experience for me and all the other actors trying to work with me to present something intelligible and esthetically pleasing.

So I know I need to go over the lines. Every day. If I miss a day, I’ve set myself back more than just a day.

Thinking about that feeling of blanking out in front of an audience is a powerful incentive to be faithful.

Now, this play is a farce, and its long-term value is negligible.

How much more seriously should my students take the task of memorizing God’s Word in a way that will plant that theological database in their heads for the rest of their lives?

And how much more seriously even than that should Christ’s followers, all of them, take the daily task of taking up our cross and following him?

Jesus didn’t say this just once.

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. ²⁷ And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple (Lk 14.26-27).

Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple (Lk 14.33).

No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God (Lk 9.62).

Nor did Paul.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward [man] is renewed day by day (2Co 4.16).

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me (Ga 2.20).

Reenter the battle. Every day. All in.

Follow Jesus.

Part 6: Pray. Hard.

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Part 1: No Such Thing | Part 2: Eternal Values | Part 3: Healthy Distrust of Self

We’ve seen two characteristics of the spiritual life of Paul, who was not a super Christian, that led to his spiritual success. As we read his personal reflections, we find another, one that shouldn’t surprise us: he was going somewhere, and he knew where that was.

In his brief autobiography in Philippians 3, we find that Paul had accomplishments that many people would be proud of:

• He had observant Jewish parents, who had him circumcised on the 8^th day after his birth, in accordance with the Mosaic Law (Php 3.5; cf Le 12.1-3). He was “an eighth-day one,” as the Greek literally says. He was no late-blooming proselyte with wasted early years. From his very birth, he was in a God-fearing home, with both parents cooperating for his spiritual benefit. He had the most auspicious of beginnings.
• He was “of the stock of Israel” (Php 3.5)—no Gentile blood in him. His people were God’s chosen, the ones God held close to his heart.
• He was of the tribe of Benjamin (Php 3.5). He knew his ancestry, all the way back to the patriarchs. And he was related to Israel’s first king, the tall one, the one God’s people had chosen from among all their people. Indeed, he was most likely named for him. During the civil war following the death of King David, Benjamin was the only tribe to join with Judah on Rehoboam’s side (2Ch 11.1). He had an enviable pedigree.
• He was “a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Php 3.5). Commentators suggest a couple of things that this phrase might mean:
  • He was not a Hellenist, one open to the customs of the Greek culture that surrounded Israel; he was no compromiser. (I’m not inclined to this view; Paul seems familiar with Hellenistic thinking in his writing.)
  • He was able to read the Hebrew Scriptures in the original Hebrew—without vowels, which meant essentially memorizing the text—and to speak the related language of Aramaic; he didn’t need to read it in the Greek of the Septuagint. He had access to all the sources available, including the original Hebrew words of God himself.
• He was a Pharisee (Php 3.5), the strictest of the Jewish sects, absolutely devoted to the keeping of the Law in the minutest detail. The Pharisees even tithed their herbs (Mt 23.23; Lk 11.42). No one was more pious than Saul and his friends. Indeed he was so zealous a Pharisee that he set out to arrest and kill the followers of the lunatic heretic Jesus, who had been executed as a criminal.
• He was, by his own testimony, blameless before the Law (Php 3.6). That’s an astonishing claim; it had to involve endless washings, endless sacrifices, endless arduous journeys from Tarsus to Jerusalem, endless climbing to the Temple Mount to present his offering to the priest whose course was on duty that month. He was focused like a laser on the endless picayune requirements.

And then, in blinding flash of heavenly light, he abandoned it all (Php 3.7). He viewed it as sewage, reeking of corruption (Php 3.8).

What could possibly cause that kind of turnaround? What would it take for you, or me, to toss aside our most cherished goals and accomplishments?

For Paul, it was a vision of Christ (Ac 9.1-9).

Decades later, writing to the Philippian church, he speaks of “the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Php 3.8)—that’s the same sentence where he speaks of his former accomplishments as sewage. A sentence or two later he says, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” (Php 3.10).

Paul’s goal was to know Jesus. It drove everything else out of his mind and off his radar.

As he meditated on this idea, he realized that knowing Christ came with other infinitely valuable benefits—

• Unity with Christ, being “in Him” (Php 3.9)
• The righteousness that comes from God through faith (Php 3.9)
• Having the kind of power that Christ displayed in his resurrection (Php 3.10)
• Being like him (Php 3.10)
• Being resurrected when the time comes (Php 3.11)
• And the prize: the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Php 3.14).

We live in a day when some of those who profess to follow Christ have much lower goals: personal recognition, or temporary political power, or rhetorical victory over those who disagree with them—who are, incidentally, the very people that their professed Master has sent them to reach.

What sewage.

We can know Christ.

Nothing else matters.

Part 5: All In. Every Day. | Part 6: Pray. Hard.

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Part 1: No Such Thing

Paul was no super Christian; that’s obvious from his descriptions of himself:

For I am the least of the apostles, that am not [fit] to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God (1Co 15.9).

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Ro 7.24).

[I am] less than the least of all saints (Ep 3.8).

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief (1Ti 1.15).

But throughout his epistles he scatters observations about his heart, his thinking, and his spiritual life—observations that help us understand how a person with a sinful nature can be as successful spiritually as he was. It’s worth taking a few posts to thumb through them and consider how they might help us even as they helped him.

I think it makes sense to begin with Paul’s autobiographical words in Philippians 3. He describes his spiritual condition before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, and the picture is complicated. There’s a veneer of accomplishment and respectability, but there’s emptiness and corruption at the very core:

⁵ Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; ⁶ Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; [as to] the righteousness which is in the law, blameless (Php 3.5-6).

By ordinary standards—and by that I mean according to the values of the average joe—Paul was highly successful. He was a local boy with a pedigree and respectable parents, who had followed the local customs at his birth, doing everything the right way. And as a young man he had excelled in his keeping of the Jewish traditions and Law, to the point where as an adult he was a member of an exclusive boys’ club, highly respected in the community.

He had it made.

But in the middle of that we find a problem: he was a persecutor of God’s people. Now according to the standards of the day, this only increased his respectability: he was so devoted to God that he set out to eradicate heretics, those who believed that the One True God had a Son, who had become man and—what absurdity!—actually died as a criminal.

These are people who ought to be persecuted.

But then, as we all know, Paul (Saul) met Jesus. Or rather, Jesus confronted him, identified himself with the very people he was persecuting, in the process both blinding him with his glory and opening his spiritual eyes to see Truth as the corrective to his twisted tradition.

Saul spent several days in physical darkness, with nothing to do but to think—to think about all the ways he had been wrong, about how everything he thought he knew was entirely backwards from the way things actually were.

A worldview upheaval.

And when Saul emerged from his darkness, he was a new man, with new values.

All those accomplishments? All that respectability?

“Those I counted loss,” he writes, “for Christ.” Indeed, “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 dung, that I may win Christ” (Php 3.8).

“Dung” is the King James word. It means what it says. That’s how he thought of the culture’s values, its standards, its respect.

Waste.

Flush it.

In short, he got his priorities straight.

Like Moses, he reckoned the things this world values most deeply as essentially worthless, transitory, trivial.

He stopped devoting time to such things—which freed up a whole lot of time to devote to things of eternal worth, things like worship and ministry and mission and evangelism.

Like us, he didn’t stop sinning. But like Paul, we can excel at the things we devote ourselves to. And if we devote ourselves to the right things, we can make a difference and enjoy victory, even though we’re not super.

Part 3: Healthy Distrust of Self | Part 4: A Clear and Uncontested Goal | Part 5: All In. Every Day. | Part 6: Pray. Hard.

Photo by James on Unsplash

Most of us think that other Christians are having a better go of it than we are. We think that we are alone in our secret temptations—that other Christians don’t find the same difficulty resisting temptation that we do. In particular, we hold a few people in particularly high esteem; we think that they enjoy consistent and daily victory and fellowship with Christ at a level higher than we’re able to maintain.

Maybe it’s a pastor or youth pastor, or a teacher, or a coach. I thought of someone that way (he’s now with the Lord), and some years later he and I were members of the same church. Working more closely with him, I never found that he had feet of clay, but I also came to realize that if he had known that I thought of him as a “super Christian,” he’d have laughed incredulously.

Some theological positions promote the idea of super Christians. The holiness movement, for example, posits a “second blessing” in which the old nature is eradicated. Wesleyans prefer to call this concept “entire sanctification.” Charles Wesley was thinking of this when he wrote,

Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heav’n, to earth come down;
Fix in us thy humble dwelling; all thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesus, thou art all compassion; pure, unbounded love thou art.
Visit us with thy salvation; enter ev’ry trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit into ev’ry troubled breast.
Let us all in thee inherit; let us find the second rest.
Take away our bent to sinning; Alpha and Omega be.
End of faith, as its beginning, set our hearts at liberty.

Come, Almighty, to deliver; let us all thy life receive.
Suddenly return, and never, nevermore thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing, serve thee as thy hosts above,
Pray, and praise thee without ceasing, glory in thy perfect love.

Finish, then, thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee.
Changed from glory into glory, till in heav’n we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love and praise.

Interestingly, John Wesley never believed that he had attained “that second rest,” though he did think that a younger friend, John Fletcher, had. I’m not aware of any historical record of Fletcher telling anyone what he thought about that.

In Scripture, however, you don’t find that God’s people have experienced this. There are only two significant people in Scripture of whom God records no evil (Samuel and Daniel)—yet we know that they were sinners, for all of Adam’s descendants are (but One). And the greatest of God’s leaders, we find, had great struggles with their own sinfulness. Moses, for example, was kept from the promised land for disobedience. David lost his family and his kingdom because of his sexual sin. And even Paul recorded the darkness of his own heart:

¹⁸ For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. ¹⁹ For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. ²⁰ Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. ²¹ So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. ²² For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, ²³ but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴ Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Ro 7).

There are no super Christians. There are only wicked people who, by the grace of God, are regenerated through faith and then find and fulfill God’s plan for them. Interestingly, the Bible tells us enough about Paul’s spiritual life that we can learn how he did it, however imperfectly.

To be continued.

Part 2: Eternal Values | Part 3: Healthy Distrust of Self | Part 4: A Clear and Uncontested Goal | Part 5: All In. Every Day. | Part 6: Pray. Hard.

Photo by James on Unsplash