“My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is it that matters most in the end? We can offer up all sorts of different answers to that question. Various folks have pointed to money or possessions in one way or another. Most people, though, generally have a sense that isn’t the right answer. We could also point to things like relationships, good works, or renown. Here, as Paul is talking about what matters most to him, he points to something we don’t think about—even as followers of Jesus—but which should fall a whole lot more centrally on our radar. Let’s take a look at what he has to say.

Paul has just finished declaring his utter rejection of everything save knowing Christ. This is in spite of having a whole lot of things he could have embraced other than Jesus; things the world would have not only understood, but actively encouraged his embracing. He had a long resume of accomplishments that could easily have positioned him nicely for a life of luxury and ease. But as compared with knowing Jesus, none of those other things mattered to him at all. In fact, he looked at them at net losses as compared with the gain of knowing Christ.

With that attitude established, Paul here doubles down on it. He lays out what He is striving to know. Let’s break it down into four parts. “My goal is to know him.” It is worth noting from a contextual standpoint that, in the original Greek, Paul does not start a new sentence here, and the words “my goal is” aren’t there. Translators added that to smooth out the syntax in English which doesn’t tend to like the kind of exceedingly long sentences Paul often uses in his writing. The word translated “to know” conveys purpose, thus the choice to add “my goal is.” What Paul is doing is continuing the thought he began back in v. 8. He considers everything to be a loss compared with knowing Christ (v. 8) and being found in Him (v. 9). Here he comes back around to knowing Christ, but this time the idea conveyed by the idea of knowing Him has changed.

Back in v. 8, Paul was speaking more generally of knowing Christ and the Gospel. He was talking about head knowledge of being aware of those things. Without that awareness, advancing in them would not have been possible in the first place. Even being aware of the Gospel is better than having all of those other things he was repudiating. Now, Paul is speaking of a much deeper, more personal, more intimate, and directional knowledge. This is knowledge that is going to take Him somewhere.

The place it is going to take him is where Paul goes next. “My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection.” This more intimate knowledge of Jesus was going to take Paul into the power of His resurrection. If Jesus really did walk back out of that tomb on Sunday morning, everything about the world is different than if He didn’t. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, the Christian worldview would never have been unleashed on the world. And if the Christian worldview hadn’t been unleashed on the world, then the preservation of knowledge through the so-called Dark Ages (which weren’t really all that dark as it turns out) wouldn’t have happened, the Renaissance would have never come back, the Scientific Revolution would never have taken place, and we would be living today in a world not very different from the one Jesus and His disciples knew.

Paul knew there was incredible power in the resurrection, but he knew it mostly as potential. Yes, it had radically changed his own life, and that was certainly a grand personal impact, but he was writing maybe 30 years after it had taken place, and the fuller extent of that power was not known. Today, though, some 2,000 years later, we can see the fuller impact of that power on world history. We have a whole library – a thousand libraries even – of stories of lives that have been changed by the Gospel. There is power in the resurrection of Jesus beyond what we can fully conceive. There is the power of hope, of life, of love, of peace, of purpose, of eternal life itself. There is the power to totally transform a life from broken to beautiful. There is the power to set the entire world on a course to blessing and abundance.

But if we are going to experience the fullness of this power, the resurrection by itself isn’t the only thing we need to know. It’s not the only thing Paul said there. He wrote of knowing the power of Jesus’ resurrection “and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death.” Another way to render the idea conveyed by “fellowship” would be that we share in the community of His sufferings. In other words, if we are going to know the full power of the resurrection, we have to be associated with Him in His death.

This doesn’t mean we have to die like He did. No, He died so that we don’t have to. Instead, it means that we recognize and accept that He suffered and died in our place. He did that for us. We spiritually, mentally, theologically, relationally join with Him in His dying to sin. His sufferings and sacrifice were to pay the price for our sin. We must accept that and live without sin so that His death actually means for us what it was intended to mean. And, if we happen to be called into a place of suffering ourselves because of our association with Him, we accept that with courageous faithfulness, knowing that if we suffer as He did, we will surely be rewarded with life as He was.

We so often talk of the victory of Christ, and that is a good thing. But in focusing so much on His victory, we run the risk of conflating Gospel victory with worldly victory. We rejoice in Jesus’ conquest of sin and the coming defeat of His enemies and imagine ourselves living out the victorious power of His resurrection by having physical victory over all of our worldly foes. But the victory of Christ, while it will one day be a grand physical victory over all the forces of sin and death in this world, it is more often now a spiritual victory; the spiritual victory of freeing us from our sin and enabling us by that freedom to live as free people in a world of slaves to sin. Those slaves, envious of our freedom and jealous for their sin will attack us in an attempt to pull us back down into the brokenness and chaos with them. The power of Christ’s resurrection enables us to walk through that without being pulled down and instead pulling others out with us.

We do all of this, we bear all of this, we endure all of this because we know the end from the beginning. Paul sought to have communion with Jesus’ sufferings and to be conformed to His death “assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.” This is the last part and the thing that animates all of our Gospel efforts. Jesus promised us that if we believe in Him, if we follow Him, we will one day be as He is. He was going away to prepare a place for us. In Him we have access to the eternal life of God’s eternal kingdom. If we are to stand firmly on the foundation of the Gospel, that is the assumption that is going to be animating all of our decisions and actions. Our very thoughts will be driven by that one idea.

No matter what we face here and now, our end is with Him, so we can endure whatever the world throws our way. All of the enemy’s efforts to knock us off the path of righteousness and back into the brokenness of sin, no matter how vigorous they may get, we will bear with courage and boldness, refusing to yield to any of them because we know the end from the beginning. When we assume, that is, when we place our faith in the idea that we will reach the resurrection from among the dead, what happens to us in this life takes on an entirely different degree of significance than it does apart from that knowledge. It still matters in the sense that we have the chance to respond to it with Gospel boldness wrapped in humility and the gentle love of Christ, but it doesn’t matter in terms of having some sort of an impact on our ultimate outcome. As long as we know that is secure beyond all attempts to impact it, we don’t have to worry about anything else.

The only real question that remains here, then, is a simple one: Do you know this? Do you know Jesus and the power of His resurrection? Do you have communion with His sufferings? Are you living as one who has been conformed to His death? Does the assumption of your resurrection animate your life like it should? Take some time today to reflect on where you are with all of this and what changes you need to make to get yourself to where you should be. You’ll be glad you did.