Again, "we exult in Christ Jesus." Our glad and animated happiness lies in nothing short of HIM as its cause. We are thankful for noble religious traditions and institutions, and for holy parentage, and for all which makes Christianity correspond in practice to its name. But we are watchful not to let even these blessings take the unique place of "Christ Jesus" in our "exultation." "In all things He must have the pre-eminence." Piety itself without Him, if it can be found, is not a body but a statue. All the privileges of the Church of God, without Him, though we reverently cherish every teaching and every ordinance that is Christian indeed, are but the frame without the picture, the casket without the stone.
Then again, "not in the flesh are we confident." We have learnt a deep distrust of everything which St Paul classes under that word "flesh." It is always offering itself to us, in one Protean shape or another, to be our comfort and our repose. Sometimes it takes the form of our supposed usefulness and diligence; sometimes of our strict and exemplary observances; sometimes, putting on a disguise still more subtle, it sets before the Christian the depth, or the length, of his spiritual experience. Or it grows bolder, and is content with coarser masks; it tempts us to a miserable reliance on some imagined betterness when we compare ourselves, forsooth, with some one else. I knew long ago an old shepherd, in my father's parish, who based a hope for eternity on the fact (if such it was) that he was never tipsy on a Sunday. We are amused, or we are shocked. But this was only an extreme type of a vast phenomenon, to be found lurking in countless hearts, when God lets in the light; the "reliance" on our being somehow, so we think, "not as other men are." And from this whole world of delusion, in all its continents and islands, the Lord calls us away here by His Apostle. He bids us migrate as it were to another planet, laying our whole confidence, not part of it, on HIM; let that other world, our old world, roll along without us.
Christ presents to us Himself (as we follow out this rich Philippian passage) as all our Righteousness, in His precious justifying Merit, offered for the acceptance of the very simplest faith. And He presents Himself as all our Power, for deliverance and for service, in His resurrection Life; coming to reveal Himself to us in the divine beauty of His sufferings, His death, through which he has passed for us into "indissoluble life" (Heb. vii. 16). Our Righteousness—it is HE, "the propitiation for our sins." Our Sanctification—it is still HE, in "the power of His resurrection, and fellowship with His sufferings, and assimilation to His death." Our Redemption, from the power of the grave—it is still "this same Jesus," in union with whom alone we "attain unto the resurrection which is out from the dead."
Even so, Lord Jesus Christ; let us thus be "found in Thee"; worshipping, exulting, confiding; resting on Thee, abiding in Thee, with an accepting faith which only grows more simple and single as the years move on and gather "since we believed."
"Help us, O Christ, to grasp each truth
With hand as firm and true
As when we clasp'd it first to heart
A treasure fresh and new;
"To name Thy name, Thyself to own,
With voice unfaltering,
And faces bold and unashamed
As in our Christian spring." [1]
But St Paul is again dictating, and we must follow. He has confessed and affirmed, once for all, his standing and fixity in the Lord, and in Him alone. Now he must emphasize another aspect of the living truth, his progress in the Lord; the non-finality of any given attainment in union with Him.
Ver. 12. +Not as though I had already received+ (elabon) the crown of accomplished glory, +or had been already perfected+, with the perfection which shall be when "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." +No, I am pressing on+ (diôkô de), as on the racer's course, +if indeed+, if as a fact, in blessed finality, +I may seize+ (katalabô) +that+ promised crown +with a view to which[2] I was actually+ (kai) +seized by Christ Jesus+, when in His mercy He as it were laid violent hands upon me, to pluck me from ruin, and to constrain me into His salvation and His service. Yes, "I press on" to "seize" that crown, with the animating thought that it was on purpose that I might "seize" it that the Lord "seized" me; and that so every stage in the upward and onward course of faith runs straight in the line of His will whose mighty, gracious grasp is on me as I go. +Brethren+,
Ver. 13. (I speak the word of pause and of appeal, as if I could stand by you, and lay my hand upon your arm,) +I+ (egô), whatever others may think and do about _them_selves, +do not account myself+ (emauton, emphatic like egô) +to have seized+ the crown as yet; no, one thing (en de)—my thoughts, my purposes, are all concentrated on this one thing—+the things behind forgetting+, as one experience after another falls behind me into the past, +and towards the things in front stretching out and onward+ (epekteinomenos), like the eager racer, with head thrown forward and body bent towards his object, seeking for more and yet more, in the grace and power of my unchangeable
Ver. 14. Saviour, +goal-ward I press on+ (kata skopon diôkô), "not uncertainly," with no faltering or divided aim, +unto+ (eis), till I actually touch, +the prize+ (brabeion, 1 Cor. ix. 24), the victor's wreath,[3] the prize +of+, offered by, made possible through, +the high call of God+, the voice of His prevailing grace[2] coming from the heights (anô) of glory and leading the believer at length up thither, +in Christ Jesus+; for through Him comes the "call," and its blessed effect is to unite the "called," the converted, sinner to Him, so that he lives here and hereafter in Him. +So let all+