Most of us (if you are anything like me) tend to focus on short term goals. The older I get, the more that seems to reduce to just getting through today with no aggravations! Lofty – eh? (Lord help me!)
But then there are those among us who think in terms of a much longer timeline. Finishing High School, on to College, and then a chosen career. Good and fitting stuff. Such people tend to be more satisfied with life overall. No stones to be thrown here.
And then there some like the Apostle Paul. He had plenty of short terms goals; going to this community or that area to evangelize and establish a church, and then on to others. Wanting to be in Jerusalem at a specific time when about his other business, etc. You see it throughout the book of Acts and in his letters. Again, good stuff. Necessary stuff. Wise living.
But Paul was not lashed to his short-term goals either. So at times he changes course. Sometimes he plans to go to X and do Y, but is prevented by The Spirit or some other providence. And then he is led on to somewhere else and to serve in some other capacity. So we see that by the end of his life, his delight in evangelizing regions and planting churches is narrowed to evangelizing his immediate circle in Rome, and writing letters.
And then there is Paul’s revealed looooong-term goal. It comes out in Techi-color in his letter to the saints at Philippi – and most pointedly in the 3rd chapter of that letter.
Catch this: “More than that, I count all things as loss compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.” (Phil. 3:8-13)
Here Paul reveals his ever-present preoccupation with searching out the unsearchable depths of what it means to have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ, Jesus himself, and the glory to come. Everything else he does comes under this umbrella. And we might summarize it like this:
1. To fully know Jesus Christ. His person and work – His faithfulness which purchased my salvation.
2. To fully know what has been bequeathed to me as a Believer by His resurrection – especially the power of the resurrection in the Spirit.
3. To embrace the finished work of His sufferings for my salvation, and thus to regard my own sufferings as an honor as a result.
4. To be as given up to the Father’s will, even unto death as He was. To share in that same devotion to the Father.
i.e. (12) I want to know, to investigate, to experience, to fully possess everything Christ was aiming at for me, in saving me.
There is a long-term goal which we will spend eternity aiming at. What a privilege then to be about it in the short term, so that our hearts and minds are anchored in eternal verities, rather than in the temporal chaos of this world. And we will never come to the end of it. It is indescribably deep and rich and wondrous. And how little we consider it or spend time meditating upon it and searching it out. No wonder the World finds us so easily distracted. Contrary to Paul we think we’ve already “obtained” it. That we know all there is to know about our salvation.
Not so Beloved, not even close.
What a great salvation this is!
