Righteousness Through Faith

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning Thrive. It's good to be here. Well, not in person as you can see, and I'll explain. This last week we had a wonderful time, the 12 of us, who went to Passion in Atlanta, Georgia, where 55,000 college students gathered at the Mercedes Benz Stadium for a great time of exhortation and growth and worship and challenge. It was wonderfully inspiring and at the same time totally exhausting. When I got home on Tuesday night at 9 o'clock, things were fine. I felt pretty good. By Wednesday evening my health, I started to have a cold of some type, and then it just kept progressing. So either I have a cold, I may have a mild case of the flu, or it could be a breakthrough case of COVID from the Omicron variant. You never thought you'd have to learn the Greek alphabet and how to even pronounce a word like Omicron before, but now we are. It's pretty amazing. So I decided to record the message in advance. Actually, early Sunday morning here, I'm in Unit 3, and to not be present because I didn't want my health or what I might have to impact anyone in the congregation. That does mean also that our hangout tonight is canceled, and next week hopefully we'll have it, and I'm hoping that even as this is being presented on Sunday morning or sometime today, I'll be able to find a place where I can get tested to see if I do have COVID. Anyways, thank you so much for understanding the situation, and I hope you all are doing well, staying healthy. Please pray, as we've mentioned on our prayer chain for Jeff Blankenship, one of our members who does have COVID and has been in the ICU this week. So hopefully he's getting out today from the ICU, and keep on praying. So in this series, we're focusing on the new normal and welcome to it. Here 2022 has already started in a way I never expected, and now we're going to face many situations in 2022 we never expect. We're never quite sure what the future is going to bring, and we are definitely not going back to, quote, the way things were. So what do we need to know in this, quote, new normal? That's kind of what this series has been all about. We started it last week. Carl did a great job on that, and this week we continue with a passage from Philippians chapter 3. You can follow along, by the way, in the Bible app. There are notes for this there. The outline, as well as the quotes that I may make in the Bible passages. So Philippians 3, 7 to 11. But whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ to be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead. From this text, we're going to learn these three points. The revaluation of all values, number one. Number two, the righteousness that matters. And number three, the relationships that last. First of all, the revaluation of all values. Paul says it this way in Philippians 3, 7 to 8, as we read, whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ. Now, Paul doesn't just say that he considers things that used to be good on his list of priorities, on his values, number one, two, three, four, five. Now, we're going to be pushed down a few notches, and number one is Jesus, number two is this, number three is that, number four is that. No. It's not like a football ranking where, oop, the team had a loss, and now we're just going to move them down a few steps. No, not at all. Paul is saying anything that I considered good, not the bad things in my life, but the good that I was doing, are considered garbage. And the word, as I preached before, many of you know, you probably already have said it, or to yourself, you could say it aloud with me, it's the Greek word skoubalon, which is another word for manure, garbage. You can come up with other words that say it. It is a very graphic word, and you can think of the worst smelling putrid thing you can, and you got close to what skoubalon is. And that's what he is saying. Now, what are the things that Paul said he now considers loss? Okay, what are those things that were once considered good, and now considered skoubalon? And he actually mentions a number of them right before this in this text, in Philippians 3, 4 th...