Philippians 3:4b-14 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
The Fifth Sunday in Lent Sunday, April 6, 2025 “Knowing Christ Is Worth Far More”
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Since at least the 1800s, people have realized, recognized, and written about this truth. There are lots of value judgments in life that are quite individual and subjective. You might visit a yard sale or a garage sale, and some of the items out for sale are just things that the sellers want out of their house. They want the space back. They want the clutter out of the way. But maybe you could use that desk or that dresser or that pot or pan. Maybe its something that needs a little work and with the right attention given to it, it can be transformed from trash to treasure, but it takes someone to realize it. The theme of our service this morning talks about God, our loving Father, putting the greatest treasures of all in the trash, where they hide. But the point isn’t quite the same as the yard sale example. It’s not that you can make treasure out of someone else’s trash by your efforts or skill or wisdom. The point is really that our whole idea of what is trash and what is treasure is changed by God giving us true insight. Some things appear to be trash. The people of the world treat them as such: they ignore and reject them. The Christian whose heart and soul and life have been changed by God’s Holy Spirit working through Word and Sacrament recognizes them as true treasure. The Christian realizes that even and especially when God’s gifts don’t seem appealing and don’t capture the attention of the world, they have unspeakable value. There is real treasure hiding in what so many consider trash. Paul’s letter to the Philippians itself exemplifies this truth. From prison he writes to the Christian congregation in Philippi about joy. He finds treasure to be rejoiced over even in his trashy circumstances. But he also writes to warn about false teachers who were attacking and threatening the Philippians. There were people insisting that the Philippians needed to do certain things in order to be true Christians and to be saved. They wanted the Philippians to obey Old Testament laws and rules. These teachers expected Christians to be circumcised like Old Testament believers were. They viewed this physical thing to be incredibly important. They thought people should look to themselves and fleshly things for their confidence. Paul starts the section of God’s Word in front of us today by explaining that if people wanted to focus on these outward things, wanted to focus on the Jewish religious priorities, he could play that game better than anyone. In fact, he had. He had been a zealous Jew to the point of persecuting Christianity. That’s how he first came to the attention of most people. He lists his qualifications that the false teachers would have considered treasure: he was circumcised as a child, on the eighth day, just as the regulations required. He could trace his line to the original sons of Israel, specifically to Benjamin. He had been a member of the strictly law-abiding Pharisees. He could say with honest confidence: If anyone else thinks that he has grounds for confidence in the flesh, I have more. But God had led him to realize that what he viewed as important, what he viewed as profit, what he viewed as treasure, was really loss. It was trash. All of the confidence that he placed on these things was misplaced. All of it was worthless. Every reason for confidence in the flesh was loss because of Christ. All of Paul’s confidence should have been in Christ, none of it should have ever been on fleshly or earthly things. But that’s not an easy lesson to learn, is it? Our flesh is powerful. Our sinful nature is strong. It thinks that physical and earthly and fleshly things are true treasure. It says that these are the things on which we should place our confidence. So, at times, we do. We look for the things that we need to do in order to have confidence that God loves us, that we are saved. We focus less on Christ, our true treasure, and at so many times on things that are ultimately trash. We focus on money and our bank accounts and our retirement savings. We focus on the president and his colleagues and opponents as if