Based on Faith

October 4, 2026

Philippians 3:4 – 14

            The issue behind our Philippians passage today is circumcision.  Circumcision, though, is what some would call the presenting problem.  It really isn’t the source of the conflict at Philippi.  The true conflict lies elsewhere.  The true conflict is what makes this passage timeless and not bound to the issue of circumcision.  Listen as God continues speaking to you today.

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            We all know how Paul pushed the envelope with the developing church of his day by taking the good news of Christ out to the Gentiles.  He caused controversy and conflict always followed in his wake.  In Paul’s day this young Christian movement was still primarily a Jewish movement… it hadn’t moved much from its roots in Judaism.  Christianity becoming more of a Gentile movement was still decades away.  For many of Paul’s fellow Jewish Christians at this time, these new Gentile Christians would never be complete as Christians if they did not follow certain Jewish laws like circumcision.  The Gentile Christians didn’t have to follow all of the Law, but some laws… like circumcision… were non-negotiable. 

            Which is why this passage really isn’t about circumcision… it is about identity markers, and who determines what those markers are.  All of us have our own identity markers… those things… those understandings that help to tell us who we are.  Culture.  Race.  Religion. Politics. Economics.  Family history.  A mish mash of this and that.  So much of our sense of meaning gets created through our identity markers… a sense of self and where we belong.  Identity markers aren’t easily given up or changed. So, this is no small matter with what is happening in the church at Philippi.  We can’t dismiss this circumcision conflict easily even if for us today the intensity of the conflict is lost because circumcision is not one of our Christian identity markers.  But think for a minute… what’s a Christian identity marker that we would fight for?

            It’s not the act of circumcision itself that’s important, but it’s the meaning behind the act.  If we go back to Genesis, God gives Abraham the command to circumcise all males “because it will be a sign of the covenant between me and you.”  Genesis 17:14 goes on to say, “Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”  This background is vital to understand what Paul has to say to us in this part of his letter.  Circumcision is a core identity marker.  What is it that made the Jews the Jews? What are those things that set them apart as God’s chosen people?  For centuries it was their faith and their particular faith practices as defined by the Law.  Jewish history is full of their enemies trying to wipe away their uniqueness as a way of destroying their identity.  Destroy their identity and you destroy their relationship with God.  This doesn’t disappear as these Jews start to follow the way of Christ.  For centuries these laws set the boundaries for the Jews… defined what God expected and accepted.  From a certain point of view… to insist that Gentile Christians be circumcised is for them an act of bringing in these Gentile Christians completely. Their motives, believe it or not… are good.  Or so I believe.  These Jewish Christians were… in their own way… being inclusive.  That was their intention.  They weren’t trying to push away the Gentiles… but were simply upholding an important standard for inclusion in God’s covenant.  

            The problem is… Paul now saw things otherwise.

            Paul could make this argument only because he was such a good Jew.  Paul was not some kind of disgruntled outsider nor was he betraying his people or his culture.  But… but… his experience of Christ was such that it completely changed him through and through.  Something else had replaced those powerful identity markers for Paul.  Paul’s Christian identity marker became centered on grace.   All of his Jewish credentials no longer had the meaning they once did because of what he had experienced… because of what he was experiencing in Christ. 

            Now, we have to be careful with what Paul is saying here.  Paul, even after his experience of Christ, never did give up the practices of Judaism.  He still considered himself a Jew.  His past was still a part of who he was, even though he was no longer beholden to it in the same way as before.  He still practiced the faith and followed the great majority of the Law.  But his identity… the core of his identity had changed.  Now Christ shaped who he was… Christ was now Lord over all of his life, even to the point of redefining his very “Jewishness”.  His past life was transformed in Christ… just as his present was being transformed in Christ.

            Think for a moment about your own identity.  What is it that makes each of you uniquely you?  Can you imagine those things that are so important to your self-understanding becoming rubbish because of your experience of Christ?  Are your identity markers subject to transformation by Christ... or do your identity markers transform Christ to their image or comfort?  Isn’t this the true conflict behind this passage? 

            In Christ, I have no doubt that Paul rediscovered the beauty of the Law… that he rediscovered much of the grace that was already to be found there.  Paul is trying to convince these Jewish Christians as well as the Gentile Christians of Philippi that something different was happening.  Jesus was more than just another religious teacher in a long line of religious teachers.  Following Christ was not a choice about which religious observance we’re going to make our own out of all the choices that are out there in the world.  Christ is not just the object of our faith; Christ is the Lord of our life.  We are not just learning a new set of rules to live by… or creating a variation on the rules of the past… but we are coming to know a person… a living person.  Listen again to Paul’s words, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”  To become like Christ is to become a part of living grace.  It is to produce the fruits of the kingdom.

            God told Abraham to circumcise as a sign that God had made these people God’s own, but with Christ… the old meaning had gone out of the symbolic action… or maybe it’s better to say that the meaning had become so much larger than what this symbol of being claimed by God could hold.  Christ had claimed Paul in such a way… by a grace that could not be captured within a mere symbolic action… that it took one’s whole life to be the new symbol of grace… of God’s choosing.  To say this one action was still necessary for faith… as a sign of God’s claim… it just didn’t make sense anymore in this new reality.  It wasn’t enough.  The claim Christ was making on Paul was not a one-time claim.  Christ was claiming Paul day by day… hour by hour… minute by minute.  The righteousness of Christ was making a claim on Paul’s life every day… and was calling him to share in that same righteousness every day… was calling him to be that daily agent of grace.  The righteousness of Christ was reshaping his identity.  He wanted the Philippians to have the same experience. Our Christian identity is not in our symbolic actions or institutional acts… our Christian identity is shaped by the fruit of Christ’s righteousness in our lives.

            Paul could have used his position over the church in Philippi to claim unquestioned obedience or given them a whole new set of symbolic actions that they had to perform to demonstrate they were a part of the newly called.  He could have given them all new identity markers and drawn clear boundaries.  But because of Christ, he followed the same teaching he gave to the people… “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”  Paul wanted them to live their life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ… and in that way they would also become the living symbol of God’s grace in Christ as each day Christ laid claim on each of them.  That’s the difficulty with a daily claim of grace… the goal is ever before us… and never behind.  A symbol like circumcision was completed and then stayed hidden away… but a life lived in Christ is shown always.  It is a symbol that cannot be hid because it’s more than words or a ritual.

            The grace in Christ knows no dividing line.  It’s always reaching for those who would be out… to bring them in… like frantically pursuing the one lost coin… or welcoming home with open arms the son who was once dead, but now is alive.  It’s never about our own standing in our own faith… about how much we have obtained a personal holiness according to our own religious precepts and symbols.  All that is rubbish.  It’s always about the straining forward to what lies ahead.  The argument for circumcision didn’t bring the gospel forward, but instead became a line for judgment.  Even if we give the Jewish Christians who were arguing for circumcision the benefit of the doubt… even if we assume their intentions were good… the result of their insistence created a dividing line… and a meaningless dividing line at that.  You were either in or you were out. You were either one of us or you were one of them.

            Paul knew his past. He honored it. But he didn’t let it define him. Christ defined him. Christ claimed him. Christ called him forward. And that is where we are too… carrying identity markers that have shaped us for years, even decades, yet discovering that grace is quietly loosening their grip and reshaping us from the inside out… or sometimes from the outside in. We live between what we have been and what Christ is making of us, between the boundaries we inherited and the love that keeps moving beyond them.  Amen.