In Philippians 3 we saw our confidence needs to be in Jesus. This flies in the face of much popular thought today, which tells us ‘it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you believe in something’ and that ‘all roads ultimately lead to God.’ This is not what the Bible, teaches. And the Bible is our authority because it is not the words of men but it is God speaking to us.
People can be sincere in their beliefs, but be sincerely wrong. Paul found that out. He was a sincere. He was not only a Jew trusting in his heritage, but of the tribe of Benjamin (the tribe of Benjamin was one of the two tribes faithful to God, he was circumcised according to Jewish law and followed the Jewish traditions, he was a Pharisee.
Originally Paul believed Christians were wrong but Jesus set him straight when he met him on the Damascus Road,Acts 9. At that point, and in the years of teaching that followed, Paul learned what he’d sincerely believed was, in fact, wrong. There was no point having confidence in any of the former things.
In Philippians 3:7 he says, it all counted for nothing. What he needed was not confidence in all those things but confidence in Jesus. He saw that was the only thing that mattered. He had entered into a new relationship, one of knowing Jesus as his Lord, for whom he willingly ‘suffered the loss of all’ that had once been important to him, Philippians 3:8. Paul realized what he needed was righteousness and that he could not achieve on his own. He couldn’t achieve it through keeping the law. He could only achieve it ‘through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,’ verse 9. It’s the same for us.
The whole trouble with false confidence is it relies on what you and I do. True confidence is vastly different. It relies not on what you and I do, but on what Jesus has already done.
Bible verses from the New American Standard Version
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