The Journey

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The Lifelong Journey

Phil. 3:12-16

“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do; forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

                  “Are we there yet!”  was the question we would incessantly ask our parents when traveling on an exciting vacation.  Sometimes, we would become so excited about where we were going that we forgot to enjoy the journey.  The same is true in our Christian life.  It is easy to become impatient and want to be at the end, to want to achieve the perfection that God promised to accomplish in us.  However, Paul points out that the Christian life is not an event, it is a journey, a journey of faith and transformation as we lay aside the former life we lived and embrace the new life that we have in Christ.  In these verses, Paul reminds us of several important truths we must recognize regarding the journey.

                  First, the Christian life is a journey of transformation.  While we are fully justified at the moment of our salvation, we are not wholly sanctified until the end of the trip.  Justification is the term used to describe the reality that when we accept Christ we are declared righteous because the righteousness of Christ is given to us.  However, while we are declared righteous in the sight of God, we still struggle to obey Christ.  The word sanctification refers to the process in which we grow in our faith and become more like Christ in thought and action.  It is this process that Paul is referring to in this passage.  We need to recognize that the Christian life is one of spiritual growth, so we increasingly manifest the character of Christ in us.  The tragedy is that many become content and passive in their Christian life.   They stop growing and become stagnant.  We are to always live with the recognition that we have not yet fully attained God’s purpose in us, which is to make us entirely like Christ.

                  Second, to grow in Christ, we need to leave the past behind. We have events in the past that define us and become a chain around our necks, hindering us from growing.  But Paul reminds us to forget the past because God has redeemed us from past failures and sins.  As Paul points out in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”  In Christ, we have a new hope and new identity. 

                  Last, we need to have a clear focus on what we are to become.  The goal of our life is to become like Christ by manifesting His character in our obedience to His words.  Salvation is not just being delivered from sin and judgment but transformed to be like Christ.  This is Paul’s obsession and what he strived to obtain.  The Christian life is one of continual growth, so Christ lives through us.  God’s purpose and will for our life is to be like Jesus, to act like Jesus, to love like Jesus, and to be holy like Jesus in all our thoughts and actions.  We are not there yet, but we look forward to the day when we will be, which is the greatest destination of all. 

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