The Resume That Doesn't Matter

I grew up with a list.

No sports. No TV. No drinking, no smoking, no drugs, no sleeping around. The list was long and the boundaries were tight. And honestly, most of them served me well on this side of eternity. Discipline has a way of keeping you out of ditches…but that is for another post.

But Paul had a list too. Circumcised on the eighth day. Tribe of Benjamin. Hebrew of Hebrews. Pharisee. Zealous. Blameless under the law. If anyone had reason to put confidence in the flesh, Paul did. His religious resume was flawless.

And he called it garbage.

“Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ.” — Philippians 3:8, NLT

That word — “garbage” — is the polite translation. Paul used a word closer to refuse, dung, waste. He wasn’t being modest. He was making a point: the best credentials a religious life can produce are worthless next to knowing Christ. Not knowing about him. Knowing him.

This is the trap. You follow the rules long enough and the rules start to feel like the point. The discipline becomes the identity. The guardrails become the gospel. And somewhere along the way, the relationship that was supposed to be at the center gets replaced by the record of compliance.

Paul saw it in his own life. I see it in mine.

And I see it in the American church.

We have built God around the building. The programs, the budgets, the attendance numbers, the statements of faith printed on cardstock in the lobby. We have turned the living, breathing, mobile body of Christ into an institution with a parking lot and a 501(c)(3). And we wonder why people walk away.

The church was never the building. The church is every soul that has accepted Christ, walking around in the world, carrying the kingdom with them into grocery stores and hospital rooms and difficult conversations with family. The fact that we occasionally gather in a building is useful. It is not the point.

Paul stripped his resume down to one line: I know Christ.

Maybe we should do the same.