Christ Above All

How important is your relationship with Christ to you? 

Do you prize Him above everything else in this world? Is He the center of your life personally?Could we say "I don't care what I lose in this life, even if it is my own life, because Christ is all that matters to me"? 

Paul truly prized Christ above all else in his life, "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things." (Philippians 3:8) 

Right before this verse Paul said how he had more reason to boast in his flesh than anyone. He said he was so "righteous", yet he found all that he had to be loss compared to knowing Christ. 

I am just realizing how important our relationship with Christ really is. I am realizing how all the people that I know here on earth are only temporary. All the relationships, all the "things" that I have here(and that is everything). There is a purpose for those relationships though. And that is what I talked about in the last post. How we admonish and teach one another to build up each others' faith. 

The people in our lives are here to lift us up and hold us accountable in our relationship with Christ to help us become closer to Him. And we do the same for others. This is why it is so important not to "love the world or anything in the world" (1 John 2:15). 

Christ is everything. Our personal relationship with Him is all that matters when it comes down to it all. "I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Christ". Everything. 

It is when we begin to realize the temporariness of all that is here in this world and the importance of our personal relationship with Christ that we "forget what is behind and strain toward what is ahead... the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philip 3:14)

John Piper says it well, "Whenever something is of tremendous value to you, and you cherish its beauty or power or uniqueness, you want to draw other's attention to it and waken in them the same joy. That is why Paul's all-consuming goal in life was for Christ to be magnified. Christ was of infinite value to Paul, and so Paul longed for others to see and savor this value. That is what it means to magnify Christ-to show the magnitude of his value."