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This is perhaps one of the most well-known texts in Scripture:
the “one thing I do” autobiographical sketch of Paul. The “one
thing” is central to the victorious Christian life for it shapes how
all other things fall into place.
The end of the passage describes an ambition in life that is
completely oriented towards the life and call of God. This kind of sole focus
in life Paul identifies with the mature Christian life. The believer, no matter
where along the journey they are, should be striving and aiming for this same
kind of sold-out intensity and vision. But what brings this about?
The catalyst for the end of passage is at the start of it. Paul
doesn’t come right out and paint a neat picture for us about what is
happening; he just dives right in to telling the people how to respond to
it. But given what we are, we can imagine. There was then, as there is now,
controversy and debate over how one goes about the act of engaging in the
divine life.
Paul’s world was engaged in an often-volatile religious
argument just within the Christian-Jewish world. The debate was concerned
with the necessary steps any Gentile convert should have to take to be acceptable
within the movement. The belief was strongly held by many that new believers
could join the fellowship as long as they looked (literally in one aspect,
for males) like the old guard; more specifically, Gentiles had to be circumcised
in order to be Christians, so the argument went.
Paul was so vocally opposed because he saw this is a severe
distortion of Christ’s work. If a physical (cultural) requirement was
a greater barrier than the presence of the Spirit, it makes Christ something
secondary to salvation. This was an inversion of all of Paul’s theology.
In his view, the very center of life itself, personally and corporately, was
the person of Jesus Christ. It was only through a person’s encounter
with him that one was made a part of the family; but that was all that it
took.
Human effort and ritual is never sufficient to bring us into
the freedom of life in Christ, yet it occupies so much of the church’s
attention. Paul was all too familiar with this way of thinking; it was his
own background. Hence his brief autobiography: if anyone could enter into
the life of true faith based on effort and human parameters, it would be him.
Yet, the contrast is unmistakable. Life means nothing unless everything is
being driven by the desire to be transformed into His image.
At stake here is the clear truth of the gospel. It is through
faith in Christ that we live and are sustained. That simple yet profound reality
is the apex of all of Scripture. Knowing Christ and sharing in his life is
the one thing to which we are called. Strip that fact aside and all of life
becomes distorted and twisted into something that eventually self-destructs.
The assault on orthodox Christian faith is more vicious than
ever. The world in which we are raising our children is a veritable intellectual
and philosophical gauntlet. At every point, from entertainment to the local
school board to the workplace the conflict between the fundamental assumptions
of Christian truth and the spirituality of the world becomes more and more
real. Like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the flaming
arrows of destructive and alluring humanism threaten our families, marriages,
relationships, and churches.
Paul quickly undercuts the notion that the life in the Spirit
has anything to do with our own agendas, ideas, or efforts no matter how well-intentioned
and spiritual. Righteousness is never the product of self-improvement or self-attainment.
To the contrary, it is a whole-hearted and full-orbed response to Christ’s
personal invitation to enter into his life. Life is about becoming like the
Holy person, a real being who makes everything else fit together around him.
Living that life at a sustained level of deep commitment like
Paul speaks about consists of two actions: laying aside the old life and embracing
the new. This is how you keep your balance in a world where everything changes
and anything goes. The idea of balance does not refer to staying mid-way between
two things but to remaining in a fixed, upright position regardless of the
terrain. A preacher recently quoted another writer when he said, “There
are many angles at which you can fall. There is only one at which you can
stand up straight.” Standing firm in the world in which we live is living
righteous. Righteousness means living “standing up straight.” This
is the heart of the holiness message: a deeper life in freedom with Christ.
That’s exactly what we see in Paul here: living tall and bold focused
on one thing.
Paul also speaks of effort; there is indeed effort in the most
mature of Christian life but it’s the nature of that effort that stands
in contrast to self-spiritualization. The effort Paul is exerting is positive,
forward-moving, effort to grow as deep and strong as possible. It is not effort
exerted to just squeak by or barely survive; Paul exerts no effort to know
salvation. His vision of what life is about has long transcended the issue
of stepping over the line.
Paul has long ago left the up-and-down Christian life behind
and instead has become consumed with the biggest and best reality Christ offers.
He passionately calls his listeners to do the same. This is a wonderful personal
glimpse into the holy life. Holiness does not produce people who are obsessed
with cultural and religious guidelines; rather, it produces people who know
one thing and do it with all their heart: “You shall the love the Lord
your God with all . . . you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
(Matthew 22:37)
The old saying says to “keep the main thing the main thing.”
Our lives are full of colliding truths and philosophies that can quickly tear
down our faith or get us off into the wrong things in life. We need help to
remain committed to the core reality of the holy life so that we can become
all the people God has called us to be. We need to discover clear ways to
keep that “one thing” clearly before us. The more turbulent and
chaotic our world becomes the more we need a bold and clear experience with
Christ that empowers us to lay everything of our old life aside and move fully
and wholeheartedly into his future.
There is only one thing that brings us to the life of holy passion
and commitment: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For Paul, this
is the drum he beats incessantly; there is nothing else. Through the Holy
Spirit, Jesus brings us into his life and, as Paul earlier wrote, has made
old things pass away and given us new life in Christ. The question is how
to fully become God’s people. The Answer to that question, as all questions
in the life of faith, is the person of Jesus. Not what he does, not what he
gives, but himself, who he is.
Paul’s declaration here is one of great contrasts. There
is a clear delineation between the reality of a life of knowing Jesus intimately
and all other religious pursuit. Sometimes we are more content to blur these
lines than we should. It is often tempting to seek stability by having multiple
main priorities. Jesus gets shared with the education, the career opportunities,
the leisure time. When that happens, we become the weed-strangled seed growth
of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13. This text calls us to a clear decision
and radical response to move away from one kind of life and fully into another.
(For the full manuscript of this sermon
go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons”)
In this original sermon, I took the tact of building on the athletic language Paul uses. A highly right-brain approach could revolve around the theme of running a race. In that mode, you could examine the things that hinder the runner, the things that accelerate the runner, or where/what the finish line is. Whatever theme you use to develop the sermon around, it should reflect the primary structure of the bigger picture: the contrast between self-improvement and self-abandonment.