REALIZING YOUR CONVICTION

REALIZING YOUR CONVICTION

"Becoming conformed unto His death."—Philippians 3:10

THIS brief passage of Scripture occurs in the midst of a wonderful piece of spiritual autobiography, in which Paul revealed the bearing of past experiences and of future expectations upon his then present life.

In the first part of the passage we are presented with a picture of the days before Christ apprehended him, as the Apostle declared to the Philippian Christians that, if there were any man who considered he had the right to boast in the flesh, he, Paul, had a greater right.

He next referred to a moment in his life when his whole outlook was changed, when his conceptions of things were radically revolutionized, so that he was able to write, "What things were gain to me these have I counted loss." It was a moment when he gathered up all the things which up to that point had been most precious to him, and casting them beneath his feet, trampled on them as worthless. It was a moment of which worldly men would speak as the occasion of a great renunciation, or of a great foolhardiness. In that hour he had turned his back upon his ambitions and upon all the things he had valued most; and they were not mean things, they were not base things, they were not dishonorable things; they were the things of nationality, of blood, of morality, and of religion. Nevertheless, the vision he saw was of such nature as to make these most sacred things of his life appear in his eyes as refuse.

He then declared that from the moment when Christ apprehended him, his one ambition, an ambition which had become an all-consuming passion, and constituted the driving force of his life, was that he might apprehend Christ.

That ambition he described in brief but suggestive words, "That I may know Him, and the power of His Resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death."

These last words do not describe the consummation of his ambition; they rather reveal his conviction as to the only condition upon which that ambition could be realized.

"Being conformed unto His death" is not the ulti­mate experience; it is the initial condition. The Apostle did not mean to say; I desire to know Him, and the power of His Resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, and then finally; I desire to be conformed unto His death. He intended rather to say: I desire "to know Him, and the power of His Resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings," by "becoming conformed unto His death."

All those who have been apprehended of Christ, who have seen the vision, and heard the voice, and known experimentally His victory over them, share the Apostle's desire to know Him, to know the power of His Resurrec­tion, to know the fellowship of His sufferings. This desire can only be fulfilled as they become "conformed unto His death." Every living experience of Christianity begins at the Cross. The experience of the Cross is not final, but it is fundamental.