As a kid growing up in church, one of my regular highlights was baptisms on a Sunday night. Perhaps I hadn’t quite grasped the spiritual significance of these moments at the age of seven or eight, but I could spot a good story well enough.
The most thrilling were those testimonies dotted with crazy, debaucherous tales of sex, drugs, rock and roll—their addictions, failures, regrets and war wounds. My eyes got wider at that point as I leaned forward, hearing tales from another world. Like most testimonies, they were stories of self-consumption.
At some point in the story, they would encounter Jesus: His grace, forgiveness, and love. Repentance happened there, and the obedience of baptism was one of the fruits of that repentance. I quipped when speaking yesterday that sometimes it seemed as though the person became ‘sedated for Jesus’ at that point, moseying on with him through very few dangers, toils or snares. Not always, but sometimes.
In the back half of the first chapter of Galatians (and well into the second), Paul unpacks his life before Christ. He paints a similar picture at the beginning of Philippians 3.
Paul’s reasons are specific. He wants those false teachers who have infiltrated the churches of Galatia to know that if they want to play this game of works-based righteousness, his game was exceptionally strong. That might qualify him for the argument, but as he’ll spend most of the letter saying, it counts for nothing. The currency of works has no salvific value. Paul knows that to be heard by these missionaries, who are bearing witness to Jesus’ work, mixed in with a dose of works of the flesh, they needed to know his track record.
He asserts that he was ‘extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers’ – just as these false teachers are.
As he writes, Paul realises that even those actions for which he now has profound regret and remorse have become a part of the canvas through which God will display his glory. He understands that he was set apart ‘from my mother’s womb’ and ‘called by his grace’. God was ‘pleased to reveal his son to me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles’.
In all this, Paul recognises that he has been rescued from the religion for which he was so zealous. He has been rescued from people pleasing and pursuing righteousness based on the law. He has been set free to enjoy the freedom of a righteous that comes from God through faith (Philippians 3:9).
So Paul ‘forgets what was behind and presses on towards the goal’. I’ve read this before and, paired with a similar scripture in Isaiah 43, figured we shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about our backstory. While there’s some merit there, I think there’s more going on. Paul reminds himself and others to forget a life of striving for righteousness based on the law. To forget striving to be good enough for God who has loved us unconditionally in Jesus.
Paul also reminds us that we are not saved from wild and debaucherous lives to ones of sedation and mediocrity. Far from it. We are saved to enjoy the privilege of him writing his masterpiece through us (Ephesians 2:8-9). These surrendered lives are not timid but audacious, bold, humble, adventurous, and brimming with life and fruitfulness. For Paul, they were also brimming with beatings, imprisonment, persecution, shipwrecks, hunger, thirst and nakedness. None of those is particularly desirable, but they’re a long way from ‘convalescing in Christ’!
Like Paul, we’re called out. Crucified in Christ. And the life we now live is in Him, for His Kingdom.
As Petersen renders it in Romans 8, “This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?””