Jesus said from the days of John the Baptist until now The kingdom of God has been forcefully advancing and forceful men Take hold of forceful men. What's your one? Pash I want to come at this from a little bit of a different angle this morning. Let's imagine this morning somebody offers you one million dollars If For an entire year you'll go without taking a bath
One whole year no bath one million dollars one small stipulation you can't tell anybody about the offer not your co-workers not your friends Not your spouse
I want you to imagine the first week passes You're crawling into bed with your spouse and The stench upon you. I mean, it's pretty quickly. You could see by the time you get to the second or third week The pleas for personal hygiene turn into demands After about a month your co-workers aren't gonna work with you anymore. They're gonna refuse A couple of months go by it's not that hard to imagine You could lose your job
It's not that hard to imagine you could lose Your marriage. How could you be so disrespectful? After the years up you can go and explain it to everybody. Maybe you get your job back. Maybe you wouldn't want your job back Maybe maybe your marriage could recover Maybe not Now for some of you you may be thinking million dollars is not enough Well, ten million dollars a year What about that guy yesterday who won two hundred and seven million dollars in a lot of Would you go an entire year without bathing for two hundred million dollars? I'm sure you're thinking where do you get this stuff, right? I got to betray my sources after a full day at seminary of talking about God We would sit down at the dinner table and And just talk about random questions just a event and move on and this is one of the questions we talked about one night And You know even though it's kind of goofy at the same time it gets at this issue What's your one passion? What drives you? What are you willing to trade off when you think about it for an alcoholic? Is it alcohol? Is it what alcohol provides an escape? Pleasure maybe For the work of holic Is it work or is it success? Maybe a kind of escape Maybe a sense of self-worth Significance What about for the God a holic?
What do you think makes a God a holic tick?
That's our passage this morning Philippians three is where we're going. It's page 981 in your Pew Bible We're going to pick up Sort of where we left off last week at verse 10 the Philippians three That's here God's word that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and may share his sufferings Becoming like him in his death that by any means possible. I may attain the resurrection from the dead Not that I've already obtained this or am already perfect But I press on to make it my own Because Christ Jesus has made me his own Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus This is God's word Let's pray Father this morning We ask that you would show us your face
That we would want to press on and be made like you That it would be ours In your name
For those of you who were not here last week Paul's thoughts earlier in Philippians three Against some up in three words Burn that resume Burn your resume So going into this part of the passage the natural question should be Now what now what do we do two points this morning pressed and pressing If you look at verse 12 you notice out carries this out I press on to make it my own Because Christ Jesus has made me his own I want to get this first point this morning or everything else will be wrong in our minds pressed Look at the order I press on To make it my own Because he's made me his own I press because he pressed I grab Because he grabbed me What's the order I act and then he acts He acted and that's why I act This is really important this is basic but this is very important Because for some of you I know in your mind even if you've heard the gospel a million times As Christians we naturally come in and we live our lives and we think is though I've got to earn God's love I've got to press forward I got to pull myself up by my bootstraps and work hard And then I work with teenagers and It's up y'all They know what it's like we remember when When you were rejected You made that phone call to ask somebody out and you got rejected That was an awful feeling And you know to pursue someone at link and continue to be rejected That's what we call unrequited love Where you're hoping one day just to get enough that maybe maybe It's a conditional love A love that waits to see if you're going to be good enough That's what Paul is assaulting that idea here. No way That's not what we're talking about God loves first Allegiance come down from the days of slavery in the old South In New Orleans This young beautiful woman Was on the slave trading block She was up for purchase and men were leering at her And as bidding began And the price went higher and higher And it started to become exorbitant to really sore It was obvious to everyone there That she was wanted for more than labor And the men kept bidding and finally one man won out And as he walked over to claim his prize The woman started yelling at him I'll never be yours I'll never do what you want You don't own me And when he got close enough She spit in his face And he looked her square in the eye and he said young lady I didn't buy you to use you I bought you to set you for set in that case I'm going with you Wherever you're going I'm with you When love comes first It transforms everything Instead of God's call to holiness in our life Being a cage It becomes a catapult If we see God is grabbed hold of me He doesn't wait to see If I'm good enough He's grabbed hold of me to pull me up That's what it means here Pressed God has grabbed hold of me That's important because the second point Pressing you oftentimes hear Christians talk about this As though we've just got to work really hard We've got to work on ourselves Train And now to be honest with you that word press there It's also the exact same Greek word as in verse 6 So look up in verse 6 And see if you can find Pressed I think you'll be hard Pressed to find it Ah that's a bad pulpit joke I know The word that's used there is persecute It's the same word Now how can one word mean both persecute and press
For several preachers on this It seems the meaning behind this word is to pound That Paul was pounding on the church before He was persecuted He was beating on the church As if to obliterate it to mash it out of existence And then love came and transformed him And now he pounds on himself To direct himself To shape himself To move in a particular direction It's the picture from 1 Corinthians 9 I beat my body like an athlete The train myself
Jonathan Edwards is famously known for being a very self-disciplined individual So self-disciplined actually Well before it was popular He worked on his diet He watched his diet And he watched it So he could have better agility Not physical agility Mental agility He wanted to know what foods were best for his intellectual prowess His ability to think during the day They would maximize that gift got it given it And he ate accordingly Then he studied his sleep habits And he said how little sleep can I get away with and still function well He started getting up earlier and earlier Till he was getting up at 4 a.m. To pray and be with the Lord While the rest of the town was asleep And he planned times for him to get rest during the day just to be with his family I don't know when I think about guys like that I think What a fanatic You know I went to Uganda And it was almost like Dr. Krabindom threatened us With the possibility of sending us To a pastor who got up at 4 a.m. every morning to pray Knowing that here we are A group of young folks And we're walking around in a third world country all day long We're walking around talking to people So sleep is a premium And this guy gets up at 4 a.m. every morning To pray What a fanatic When we think of that word Fanatic What comes to mind Sports fanatic
Religious fanatic When we think of religious fanatic you think of somebody who straps a bomb to their chest Or maybe you think of the guy who stands on the corner and yells at people
That guy's fanatic Fanatic all about Some things I mean obviously he's bolder than I am And talking to people about Jesus I got to respect that But is he that bold when it comes to humility Or service Or loving his neighbor
See it's not that a fanatic Is overly committed For most of us it's too narrow A fanatic's not intense enough It should be all areas Ray Cortese tells a story Of a Kenyan Messiah tribesman Who would make fun of westerners who come over to Kenya to hunt They fly in he would say you fly in on your big plane You get on your truck and you go out on the safari And you pull the gun up to your eye you look at the scope And you pull the trigger And you call that a hunt You could take the lion The lion Spots movement in the grass out of the corner of his eye And he perks up It rises up purposefully Gently And begins to weave through the grass Without making a sound He gets close enough to smell his prey And he settles back in Muscles tense He listens carefully And then it's just the precise moment After waiting He springs into action He chases down his prey He pounces on it He goes straight for the jugular And then he looks up with blood dripping from his mouth
And this Messiah tribesman says You hunt with your eye and a finger The lion hunts with his entire being
Who hunts God like that
And who chases God that way With their entire being Who can This is one of his first point It's so important Going back to it Until we see That God hunts us With his entire being That he is ferocious Tenacious Purposeful Driven That he goes all the way in With his entire being To claim us
That's what's going to change us
Let me see if we can unpack this a little bit Because I think for many of us The thing that's hardest for me is when I mess up When I sin And then I think I'm further from God I can't I can't talk to him now Things are off between us There was a Norwegian explorer in the early 1800s Before the Arctic Sea had been mapped out thoroughly And this explorer took his crew and went out on a boat into the middle of the Arctic And they were going to do They were going to plum the depths They were going to figure out how deep It was So they had brought all the specialized equipment with them These long ropes that they had to let off And the first day he let this rope over the side And they let it go and it took hours To drop it down Waiting to see if it would hit the bottom And the journal entry for that day said Still deeper
So the next day they got out a longer rope They prepped it They put it over the side They dropped it down Let it go
The journal entry for that day says Deeper still So in the third day they got all their ropes out All of them together They tied them together And they let it go over the side
And this explorer's journal entry On the third day had three words Still deeper yet They went home without ever finding the bottom
And brothers and sisters I don't want you to know And when we tie all of our sins together And we cast them over the side to see how deep God's love is We plumb the depths You won't find the bottom Christ comes with this whole being And goes all the way down in our sins All the way And until we understand that depth of love We won't be taken to the heights Of joy The heavens With him
We are consumed By a love that now sets us free to consume We've been grabbed This hand reaches down To pull us up out of the muck and mire And the sooner we get what that hand is doing The sooner we turn and stop fighting And clasp back on
That's the gospel Justification God pulls us up out of the pit He loved us first He saves us Sanctification Pressing on I begin to want to grab onto his arm It doesn't save me but it changes me
As Philippians 2 says Work out your salvation with fear and trembling Because it is God who works in you To will and to act According to his good purpose And even another chapter earlier Paul wrote Being confident of this That he who began a good work in you He who has grabbed hold of you Will carry it on to completion
That's what I want you to know this morning We've been seized by the living God He is on the prow With his whole being after us You will not love fiercely Until you know You are fiercely loved
Presbyterians Frozen chosen God didn't make us to sit on the couch He didn't make us to sit back and say thanks for the grace
He gave us grace to be set free to live And know what life is and life abundant Since he has hunted us Let's go on the hunt Let's pray
Lord God You know I sit on the couch I can talk a good game
Lord sees us Sink your teeth in so deep and fill us with life We know you'd never let go Let us know the joy of your love That we would launch forward to share that with the world Lord show us a love that goes all the way in We thank you for how you love this Lord Show us your face this morning we pray Amen