The Berean Table

Philippians 3:1–11 — The Surpassing Worth of Knowing Christ

Companion: Summary Handout

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FieldDetail
PericopePhilippians 3:1–11
ThemeEvery human credential is loss beside the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, whose righteousness comes to us by faith alone.

Passage: Philippians 3:1–11. Read the full text in your Bible or a Bible app as you work through this study.

Opening Prayer

Gracious and sovereign Father, we come to Your Word as those who have nothing to bring but the need that You alone can meet. You have spoken in the Scriptures by Your Spirit, and without that same Spirit we cannot see what You have written. Open our eyes, then, to behold Christ in these verses. Your servant Paul counted every credential he possessed as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord; teach us to reckon as he reckoned. Expose the confidence in the flesh that hides so easily in our religious habits, our family histories, our moral records, and our doctrinal precision. Strip us of every righteousness of our own, and clothe us again in the righteousness that comes from You through faith in Christ. Grant that we would know Him, and not merely know about Him, in the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. Convict us where we have trusted ourselves, comfort us where we have despaired, and conform us to the likeness of Your Son, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, we thank You for the truth You have set before us in this passage. You are the surpassing treasure, and every gain we have clutched is loss beside You. We confess that we have too often rejoiced in ourselves rather than in the Lord, that we have quietly trusted our pedigree, our performance, and our precision, and that we have wanted a righteousness of our own to show You. Forgive us, and thank You that our forgiveness rests not on how well we repent but on Your finished work. We are found in You, clothed in a righteousness that is Yours and not ours, received through faith alone. Give us grace to count as rubbish whatever competes with knowing You. Make us willing to share Your sufferings and to be conformed to Your death, confident that the power of Your resurrection is already at work in us. Fix our hope on the resurrection from the dead, and keep us pressing on until we see Your face. In Your name we pray. Amen.

Timeline Context

The letter. Philippians is Paul’s warmest letter, written to the first church he planted on European soil. Philippi was a Roman colony in eastern Macedonia, refounded by Octavian after the battle of 42 BC and settled with veteran soldiers; it sat astride the Via Egnatia, the great military road linking the Adriatic to Byzantium. Its citizens held Roman citizenship, spoke Latin in public life, and prized their status as a “little Rome.” There was no synagogue: when Paul arrived on the second missionary journey (c. AD 49–50) he found only a handful of God-fearing women praying by the river, and the church was born from Lydia’s household, a delivered slave girl, and a jailer’s family (Acts 16:11–40). Paul now writes from prison, most probably in Rome around AD 60–62 (Ephesus and Caesarea have been proposed as alternatives), to thank the Philippians for a gift sent by Epaphroditus and to steady them under pressure from outside and friction within.

The chapter’s place in the letter’s argument. The letter’s centre is the mind of Christ. Paul has described his own imprisonment as an advance of the gospel (1:12–26), called the church to a manner of life worthy of the gospel and to a single-minded humility (1:27–2:18), and set before them the great hymn of Christ’s self-emptying and exaltation (2:5–11). He then commends two living examples of that mind, Timothy and Epaphroditus (2:19–30), men who did not seek their own interests. Chapter 3 supplies a third example: Paul himself. Where Christ laid aside the prerogatives of divine glory, Paul lays aside the prerogatives of Jewish privilege. The chapter then presses on to the race not yet finished (3:12–16), the contrast between enemies of the cross and citizens of heaven (3:17–21), and the practical exhortations of chapter 4.

Where the pericope falls. Philippians 3:1–11 is the hinge on which the letter turns from example to warning and back to example. Immediately before it, Paul has finished commending Epaphroditus, “honor such men” (2:29), and the reader expects the letter to close; “finally” (3:1) sounds like the beginning of a farewell. Instead the tone changes sharply. The threefold “look out” (v. 2) introduces the only polemic in the letter, aimed at Judaizing teachers who insisted that Gentile converts be circumcised. There is no evidence that such teachers had yet reached Philippi; Paul is inoculating a church he loves against a danger he had watched devastate Galatia. Having named the danger, he answers it not with an argument but with an autobiography: seven credentials (vv. 4–6), a reckoning of their worth (vv. 7–8), the righteousness that replaced them (v. 9), and the knowledge of Christ that is now his single aim (vv. 10–11). Immediately after the pericope, “not that I have already obtained this” (3:12) guards the testimony against any impression of finished perfection and turns it into the image of a runner straining toward the prize. The unit thus functions as the doctrinal heart of the chapter: it defines the true people of God (v. 3), sets out the gospel of justification by faith (v. 9), and describes the shape of the Christian life as union with Christ in death and resurrection (vv. 10–11). Everything in 3:12–21 is an application of it.

Historical and political setting. Two currents meet in this passage. The first is the Judaizing controversy that had occupied Paul since the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:1–29) and the letter to the Galatians, in which Jewish-Christian teachers taught that Gentiles must “be circumcised according to the custom of Moses” to be saved (Acts 15:1). The second is Philippi’s own culture of status. A Roman colony ran on honour: citizenship, tribe, family, rank, and public benefaction. Paul’s list of credentials reads like a Roman cursus honorum transposed into Jewish terms, and his renunciation of it would have struck a status-conscious city as a startling inversion of everything it valued, much as Christ’s self-emptying in 2:6–8 did.

Redemptive-historical placement. The passage stands at the moment when the old covenant sign, circumcision, gives way to the reality it foreshadowed. Circumcision was given to Abraham as the seal of a righteousness he had by faith (Genesis 17:10–11; Romans 4:11); the prophets had promised a circumcision of the heart by God’s own hand (Deuteronomy 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4; Ezekiel 36:26–27). Paul declares that this promise is now fulfilled in a people made up of Jew and Gentile who worship by the Spirit and glory in Christ (v. 3). The righteousness “from God” (v. 9) that Israel sought and did not attain (Romans 9:30–10:4) has arrived in the crucified and risen Messiah, and the resurrection that closes the passage (v. 11) is the last-day hope of the whole story, already begun in Christ’s rising and awaited in ours.

Historical-Grammatical Study

Genre. Philippians is a letter of friendship and exhortation, written from prison to a partner church, and it moves easily between thanksgiving, report, hymn, and appeal. The pericope itself combines three sub-genres. Verses 1–3 are exhortation with polemic, a sharp warning followed by a definition of the true people of God. Verses 4–6 are an autobiographical catalogue of credentials, a form familiar from Greco-Roman self-commendation and from Paul’s own “boasting” in 2 Corinthians 11:21–29. Verses 7–11 are testimony, the language of the ledger applied to a life, culminating in a purpose clause that reads almost like a creed. The whole unit is Paul’s own version of the Christ-hymn of 2:6–11: a descent from privilege to loss, undertaken so that Christ may be gained.

Key grammatical and syntactical elements.

  • To loipon (v. 1), “finally,” is a transitional formula meaning “as for the rest” or “beyond this,” not necessarily a signal that the letter is ending; Paul uses it again in 4:8. The present imperative chairete en kyriō, “rejoice in the Lord,” names the sphere of Christian joy, and asphales, “safe,” describes the protective function of the repetition Paul is about to give.
  • Blepete (v. 2), “look out for,” is repeated three times in anaphora, each time with an article and a noun: tous kynas (the dogs), tous kakous ergatas (the evil workers), tēn katatomēn (the mutilation). The threefold hammer identifies one group under three names, not three groups.
  • Katatomē (v. 2) and peritomē (v. 3) form a deliberate wordplay. Peritomē is the ordinary word for circumcision, “a cutting around”; katatomē means “a cutting down” or “mutilation” and echoes the Septuagint’s term for pagan self-laceration (compare Leviticus 21:5; 1 Kings 18:28). Circumcision severed from Christ, Paul says, is no better than the gashing of Baal’s prophets.
  • Verse 3 defines the true circumcision by three present participles: latreuontes, “worshipping” or “serving,” Israel’s own word for covenant service (Exodus 3:12; Romans 9:4), here qualified by pneumati theou, “by the Spirit of God”; kauchōmenoi en Christō Iēsou, “glorying” or “boasting in Christ Jesus”; and ouk en sarki pepoithotes, “not having put confidence in the flesh,” a perfect participle describing a settled stance.
  • Pepoithēsis en sarki (vv. 3–4), “confidence in the flesh,” uses sarx not for the body as such but for human nature and human achievement considered apart from God, the sphere in which the Judaizers’ hope rested.
  • The catalogue of vv. 5–6 lists seven items, four inherited and three achieved, with the achieved items each introduced by kata, “as to”: kata nomon (as to the law), kata zēlos (as to zeal), kata dikaiosynēn tēn en nomō (as to righteousness in the law). The climactic adjective is amemptos, “blameless.”
  • Hēgeomai (vv. 7–8), “count, reckon,” is the language of accounting. Verse 7 uses the perfect hēgēmai, a verdict reached in the past and still standing; verse 8 twice uses the present hēgoumai, a verdict continually renewed. The nouns kerdē (gains, plural) and zēmia (loss, singular) show many assets collapsed into a single debit.
  • To hyperechon tēs gnōseōs Christou Iēsou tou kyriou mou (v. 8), literally “the surpassing thing of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord,” makes a neuter participle into a noun; the knowledge is not merely greater but of a wholly different order. Skybala (v. 8), “rubbish,” is a coarse word for refuse or dung.
  • Verse 9 sets two righteousnesses side by side with careful prepositions: emēn dikaiosynēn tēn ek nomou, “my own righteousness, the one from the law,” against tēn dia pisteōs Christou, “the one through faith in Christ,” further defined as tēn ek theou dikaiosynēn epi tē pistei, “the righteousness from God, resting on faith.” The phrase pistis Christou has been debated (objective genitive, “faith in Christ,” or subjective genitive, “the faithfulness of Christ”); the ESV’s objective rendering fits the surrounding contrast between trusting the flesh and trusting Christ, and the closing phrase epi tē pistei confirms that the believer’s faith is in view.
  • Tou gnōnai auton (v. 10), an articular infinitive of purpose, “in order to know him,” is then unpacked by two coordinated objects, “the power of his resurrection” and “the fellowship (koinōnia) of his sufferings,” and by a present passive participle, symmorphizomenos, “being conformed” to his death. Exanastasis (v. 11), “resurrection out from,” occurs only here in the New Testament; with ei pōs, “if somehow,” it expresses humble expectation, not doubt.

First-century Jewish background. Circumcision on the eighth day (Genesis 17:12; Leviticus 12:3) marked a child born into the covenant rather than a proselyte circumcised as an adult. The tribe of Benjamin gave Israel its first king and, with Judah, remained loyal to the Davidic house and the temple; Jerusalem lay within its borders. “A Hebrew of Hebrews” most likely denotes a family that retained Hebrew and Aramaic and Palestinian customs even in the Diaspora (Acts 22:2–3). The Pharisees were the most exact interpreters of the law (Acts 26:5), and “zeal” was the celebrated virtue of Phinehas (Numbers 25:11–13; Psalm 106:30–31) and the Maccabees, a readiness to act violently for the law’s honour. Paul’s persecution of the church was, in his former estimation, this zeal in its highest form (Galatians 1:13–14; Acts 22:3–4).

Covenantal themes and patterns. The passage traces the transfer of the covenant sign from flesh to Spirit. Circumcision was always a sign of something beyond itself, a righteousness that Abraham had by faith before he was circumcised (Romans 4:9–12) and a heart-circumcision the law itself demanded (Deuteronomy 10:16). Paul’s “we are the circumcision” (v. 3) claims that the church of Jew and Gentile is the true continuation of Abraham’s family. The contrast of two righteousnesses in v. 9 is the contrast between the works principle, “the person who does the commandments shall live by them” (Romans 10:5; Leviticus 18:5), and the promise principle, “the righteous shall live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4; Galatians 3:11). And the pattern of vv. 10–11, suffering and then glory, death and then resurrection, is the pattern of the covenant Head, into whose experience his people are drawn (Romans 8:17).

Expanded Outline

Section 1 — Rejoice in the Lord and Be on Guard (Philippians 3:1–2)

Key Insight

“Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord” (v. 1). The word rendered “finally” (to loipon) is less a signal of closing than a pivot, “as for what remains,” and what remains is the theme that runs through the whole letter: joy. But it is joy with an address. Paul does not say “rejoice,” full stop; he says “rejoice in the Lord.” Christian joy is not a temperament or a mood but a location. It is the gladness of a person whose standing, safety, and future are all found in Christ, and it can therefore survive prison (1:18), the prospect of death (2:17), and, as the next verse shows, the threat of false teaching. Matthew Henry remarks that joy in God is of great consequence in the Christian life, and Paul treats it exactly so, as a command that guards the soul.

“To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you” (v. 1). Whether “the same things” refers to the call to rejoice or to warnings previously delivered in person, the principle is the same: repetition is a pastoral safeguard. The gospel is not learned once. A church that rejoices in the Lord is inoculated against those who would relocate its confidence, and Paul is content to say the old things again for the church’s safety (asphales).

Then the tone turns. “Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh” (v. 2). Three times blepete, three times the article, three names for one danger. The “dogs” (kynas) were, to a first-century Jew, the Gentiles: unclean scavengers outside the covenant, “it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Matthew 15:26). Paul turns the epithet around. Those who would force circumcision on Gentile believers are themselves the outsiders, prowling the flock. The “evildoers” (kakous ergatas, “evil workers”) is bitter irony: those who preach works are the true workers of evil, because their work unravels the gospel of grace (Galatians 5:4). The “mutilation” (katatomē) is a wordplay on circumcision (peritomē): a cutting around has become a mere cutting up, the self-gashing of pagan devotees (1 Kings 18:28). Calvin puts it plainly: circumcision demanded after Christ has come is nothing more than a cutting of the body, because the sign has been severed from the thing signified.

The warning is against Judaizing teachers, Jewish Christians who taught that Gentiles must be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to belong fully to God’s people (Acts 15:1; Galatians 6:12–13). There is no sign they had reached Philippi; Paul is warning ahead of the danger. The Christological point is already visible: joy is “in the Lord,” and any teaching that adds a human credential to Christ is not a supplement to the gospel but an assault on it. Where confidence is placed decides whether the covenant sign is circumcision or mutilation.

Application

The connection between verse 1 and verse 2 is the first thing to apply. Paul places “rejoice in the Lord” immediately before “look out,” because joy in Christ is the church’s best defence against legalism. People who are glad in what Christ has done for them are hard to sell a supplement to. Conversely, a joyless church, one that has come to think of the Christian life as a burden to be carried, is exactly the church that will welcome a teacher who offers a more rigorous way to secure God’s approval. The practical question, then, is whether our congregations and our own hearts are marked by settled gladness in Christ or by anxious striving. When gladness fades, the answer is not first more discipline but a fresh look at the Lord in whom joy lives.

Second, the passage dignifies repetition. Paul does not apologise for saying “the same things.” Preachers should not apologise for returning to the gospel week after week, and Christians should not resent hearing again what they already know. Growth in grace is not movement beyond the gospel but deeper into it (Colossians 2:6–7). The believer who finds the basics tiresome has misunderstood their function; they are “safe for you.”

Third, Paul teaches discernment with edge. The same apostle who calls the Philippians “my brothers” and “my joy and crown” (4:1) calls the Judaizers dogs. Tenderness toward the flock and sharpness toward those who would harm it are not in tension; they are the same love facing two directions (Acts 20:28–31). Elders who will not name a danger because naming is unpleasant are not being gentle; they are being negligent.

A warning against misapplication: Paul’s severity is aimed at a specific error, the addition of a human credential to Christ as a condition of belonging to God, and it is not a licence for calling every Christian with whom we differ a “dog.” The strength of his language is proportionate to the stakes, which were the gospel itself. To borrow that language for secondary disputes is to cheapen it and to miss the joy the passage commands.

Application Question 1: Where does your joy actually rest: in the Lord, or in your standing, performance, or reputation as a Christian?

Answer: Paul’s command is not simply to rejoice but to rejoice “in the Lord” (v. 1), and the location matters because joy takes the shape of whatever it rests on. Joy resting on our own record rises and falls with the record; it is buoyant after a good week and collapses after a bad one. Joy resting on Christ rests on something finished. Paul could rejoice in prison (1:18) and in the face of death (2:17–18) because neither touched the ground of his gladness. A useful diagnostic is to notice what deflates us: if criticism, failure, or being overlooked drains our joy, then our joy was resting there. The psalmist locates his gladness in God himself, “you have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Psalm 4:7), and Jesus tells the disciples to rejoice not in successful ministry but that “your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). To rejoice in the Lord is to keep returning our gladness to its proper object, so that it survives whatever the week brings.

Why is this question important? A person who has never asked where joy rests will assume it rests in Christ while it quietly rests elsewhere, and will discover the truth only when the substitute fails. The question surfaces the substitute before it fails.

Application Question 2: Do you welcome hearing “the same things” of the gospel repeated, or do you find yourself restless for something new?

Answer: Paul says that repeating himself is “no trouble to me and is safe for you” (v. 1), and the second half of that sentence is a diagnosis of our need. We are not safe when we drift from the gospel, and we drift more easily than we think. Peter writes to remind his readers of things “though you know them and are established in the truth that you have” (2 Peter 1:12), because knowing a truth and being held by it are different things. Restlessness for novelty in doctrine is often a symptom that the old truths have become familiar without becoming precious. The remedy is not to manufacture excitement but to look again at what is being repeated: that Christ died for sinners, that righteousness is a gift, that our names are secure. The mature believer does not outgrow the gospel; he grows down into it (Colossians 2:6–7). Practically, this means receiving the weekly proclamation of Christ as food rather than review, and building personal habits (Scripture, prayer, the Lord’s Supper) that say the same things to the soul again and again.

Why is this question important? The desire for something beyond the gospel is the soil in which every “dog” of verse 2 plants. Judaizers, then and now, offer novelty and rigour to people bored with grace; the question exposes the appetite before it is exploited.

Deep Study Question 1: Why does Paul move directly from “rejoice in the Lord” to a threefold warning, and what does the sequence teach about the relationship between joy and doctrine?

Answer: The abruptness is deliberate. Verse 1 names the sphere of Christian joy, “in the Lord,” and verse 2 names the people who would relocate it. The Judaizers did not deny Christ; they added to him, insisting that Gentiles be circumcised (Acts 15:1). But an addition to Christ as the ground of standing before God is a subtraction from Christ, “you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace” (Galatians 5:4). Joy is therefore a doctrinal matter: it depends on where confidence is placed, and any teaching that moves confidence from Christ to the flesh will, in time, destroy joy, because the flesh cannot bear the weight. The sequence also shows that the positive command is the primary defence. Paul does not first refute the Judaizers and then permit joy; he commands joy and then names its enemies. A church that rejoices in the Lord has already rejected the premise of legalism, that something must be added to Christ. Doctrine guards joy, and joy is the evidence that doctrine has been received rather than merely affirmed (Romans 15:13).

Why is this question important? Christians often treat doctrine and joy as belonging to different temperaments, the careful and the warm. Paul’s sequence shows that they are inseparable; a study of justification that does not produce joy has not been understood, and a joy without doctrinal roots will not survive the first plausible teacher who offers something more.

Deep Study Question 2: What is the force of Paul’s wordplay between “mutilation” (katatomē) and “circumcision” (peritomē), and how does it define the Judaizers’ error?

Answer: Circumcision was God’s own sign, given to Abraham as “a sign of the covenant” (Genesis 17:11) and, Paul says elsewhere, “a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised” (Romans 4:11). The sign pointed to something beyond itself: a heart set apart for God, “circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16), which God himself promised to accomplish (Deuteronomy 30:6). The Judaizers’ error was to demand the sign while ignoring the arrival of the thing signified. Once Christ had come and the Spirit had been poured out on uncircumcised Gentiles (Acts 10:44–47), to insist on the physical rite as a condition of belonging was to treat the shadow as the substance. Paul’s word katatomē is the Septuagint’s language for pagan self-laceration, the gashing of Baal’s prophets (1 Kings 18:28) and the cutting forbidden to Israel (Leviticus 21:5). A covenant sign detached from Christ is not a lesser form of obedience but a form of paganism, a cutting of the flesh that trusts the cutting. The error is not that they valued circumcision but that they valued it apart from Christ, and so emptied it of the only meaning it ever had (Galatians 6:15).

Why is this question important? The same error recurs whenever any God-given sign, baptism, church membership, a confession, a family heritage, is trusted as a ground of standing rather than received as a pointer to Christ. Understanding the wordplay equips us to see mutilation where we might have seen piety.

Section 2 — The True Circumcision (Philippians 3:3)

Key Insight

“For we are the circumcision” (v. 3). Having named the counterfeit, Paul names the genuine article, and he does so with a claim that would have been audacious to Jewish ears. The “we” includes the Philippians, a congregation of uncircumcised Gentiles gathered in a Roman colony without a synagogue. Paul does not say that the church has replaced circumcision or made it unnecessary; he says the church is the circumcision. The people who bear the reality to which the old sign pointed are the true heirs of the sign (Romans 2:28–29; Colossians 2:11). This is the New Testament’s consistent claim: not that God has abandoned Israel for a new people, but that the one people of God, promised to Abraham as a blessing for all nations (Genesis 12:3; Galatians 3:7–9), has come to its intended form in Christ.

Three participles describe that people, and the three together form a Trinitarian portrait. First, they are those “who worship by the Spirit of God.” The verb latreuō is Israel’s own word for covenant service, the priestly service of the tabernacle and the temple (Exodus 3:12; Romans 9:4). Paul claims that service for the church, but relocates its power: it is worship “by the Spirit,” the Spirit whom the prophets promised would be given in the new covenant to write the law on the heart (Ezekiel 36:26–27; Jeremiah 31:33). Jesus said the same to a Samaritan woman: “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23).

Second, they “glory in Christ Jesus.” The verb kauchaomai, “to boast,” is one of Paul’s most theologically loaded words. Boasting is not wrong in itself; the question is its object. “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom … but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me” (Jeremiah 9:23–24), which Paul applies directly to Christ: “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31; compare Galatians 6:14). The true circumcision’s boast is Christ, not their circumcision, their tribe, or their obedience.

Third, they “put no confidence in the flesh.” The perfect participle pepoithotes describes a settled stance. “Flesh” here is not the body but humanity in its own strength and achievements considered apart from God, and the phrase governs the whole pericope: verse 4 will pick it up as the theme of Paul’s autobiography. Sinclair Ferguson observes that the entire chapter turns on the question of where trust is placed; the true people of God are defined negatively by what they refuse to trust and positively by whom they glory in.

Christ is the centre of the verse. The Spirit’s worship is worship of the Father through the Son; the boast is Christ; the refusal of the flesh is possible only because Christ is a sufficient object of confidence. The true circumcision is not a better version of the old Israel but Israel’s promised heart-circumcision realised in the people united to the Messiah (Deuteronomy 30:6).

Application

Verse 3 gives the church its identity, and identity governs conduct. Christians in a status-conscious world, like the Roman colony of Philippi and like our own, are constantly invited to think of themselves in terms of what they have inherited or achieved. Paul says we are to think of ourselves as the true circumcision: a people set apart by God’s own hand, marked not in the flesh but in the heart, with a standing that no pedigree conferred and no failure can revoke. The practical consequence is a freedom from the anxious comparison that governs so much of religious life. If we are what God has made us in Christ, we have nothing to prove.

The three marks are also a test. First, is our worship by the Spirit? It is possible to attend the right services, sing the right psalms, and hold the right order of worship while the heart is elsewhere. Worship by the Spirit is not a style or a degree of emotional intensity; it is dependence, the acknowledgment that we cannot approach God in our own strength and must be brought (Romans 8:26–27). Second, what do we glory in? Listen to how we talk about our church, our tradition, our children, our theological precision. If the boast is anywhere but Christ, the flesh has crept back in. Third, where is our confidence? The honest answer is often “in Christ, and also in a few other things,” and Paul’s “no confidence” leaves no room for the “also.”

A warning against misapplication: “put no confidence in the flesh” does not mean that the body, the sacraments, or visible church membership are worthless. God still commands baptism and the Supper, still gathers a visible church, and still works through ordinary means; Paul’s point is that none of these may be trusted as the ground of our standing before God. Nor does “we are the circumcision” licence contempt for the Jewish people; Paul’s next verses are a Jew’s testimony, and Romans 9–11 is his lament and hope for his kinsmen.

Application Question 1: When you are honest about what you boast in, even quietly, is it Christ Jesus, or something about yourself, your church, or your background?

Answer: Paul defines the true people of God as those who “glory in Christ Jesus” (v. 3), and the word he uses means to boast, to take pride and find one’s identity in something. Everyone boasts; the only question is the object. Jeremiah forbids boasting in wisdom, might, or riches and commands boasting in knowing the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23–24), and Paul makes the cross the one legitimate boast: “far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14). The quiet boasts are the dangerous ones, because they go unexamined: pride in a Reformed heritage, in the seriousness of our church, in a family of believers, in years of faithful service. None of these is evil, but each becomes flesh the moment we lean on it. A practical test is to ask what we would feel we had lost if it were taken away. If the loss of a reputation or a tradition would feel like the loss of our standing with God, we have been boasting in it. The remedy is not to despise the gift but to return the boast to the Giver.

Why is this question important? Misplaced boasting is invisible to the one doing it and obvious to everyone else. The question forces the self-examination that Paul’s definition requires, so that our glory is where our salvation is.

Application Question 2: Is your worship truly “by the Spirit of God,” a dependence on him, or has it settled into a practised form that no longer requires him?

Answer: Paul’s first mark of the true circumcision is worship “by the Spirit of God” (v. 3), and the phrase describes not a style of worship but its power source. The Israelite who brought the right sacrifice with the wrong heart was rejected (Isaiah 1:11–15; Psalm 51:16–17), and Jesus insisted that the Father seeks those who worship “in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). Form is not the enemy; formality that has forgotten its need of the Spirit is. The test is whether we come to worship conscious that we cannot pray, sing, hear, or believe rightly without the Spirit’s help (Romans 8:26), or whether we come confident in our familiarity with the service. Reformed worship, precisely because it is ordered and Scriptural, can be performed competently without any dependence at all. The remedy is prayer before worship, asking for the Spirit’s presence, and attention during it, treating the Word read and preached as God’s own address. Worship by the Spirit is worship that knows it is being carried, and that gladness in being carried is the mark of the true circumcision.

Why is this question important? A church can retain every outward mark of faithfulness and lose the Spirit’s life, becoming a new Judaism of correct forms. The question keeps dependence at the centre of even the most orderly worship.

Deep Study Question 1: In what sense can Paul say that a largely Gentile church “is the circumcision,” and how does this relate to Israel and the Old Testament promises?

Answer: Paul’s claim rests on what circumcision always meant. It was given to Abraham after he had been counted righteous by faith, as “a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised,” so that he might be “the father of all who believe without being circumcised” (Romans 4:11). The sign was never the substance; faith was. The law itself demanded a circumcision of the heart (Deuteronomy 10:16), and Moses promised that God would one day perform it: “the LORD your God will circumcise your heart … so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:6). Paul teaches that this promise is fulfilled in Christ, “in him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands … the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11), and that “a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit” (Romans 2:29). The church is therefore not a replacement for Israel but the promised form of Israel, the one olive tree into which Gentile branches have been grafted (Romans 11:17–24). Gentile believers are not honorary Israelites; they are Abraham’s offspring by faith (Galatians 3:29), sharing with believing Jews the heart-circumcision that was the goal of the sign from the start.

Why is this question important? How one reads this verse shapes one’s whole understanding of the relationship between the testaments and between Israel and the church. Seeing continuity of the one people of God, rather than replacement or permanent separation, honours both the promises to Abraham and their fulfilment in Christ.

Deep Study Question 2: How do the three participles of verse 3 present a Trinitarian shape of the Christian life, and why does that matter for the argument against the Judaizers?

Answer: The true circumcision worships “by the Spirit of God,” glories “in Christ Jesus,” and puts “no confidence in the flesh.” The third phrase implies its opposite, confidence in God, so that the verse describes a people whose worship is empowered by the Spirit, whose boast is the Son, and whose trust is in the Father rather than in themselves. This is not decorative; it is the structure of salvation. The Father sends the Son, the Son accomplishes righteousness, and the Spirit applies it, and at no point does human achievement enter as a ground (Titus 3:4–7; Ephesians 2:18). The Judaizers’ scheme, by contrast, required a fourth contributor, the flesh, and thereby broke the Trinitarian shape: worship became human performance, boasting became boasting in circumcision (Galatians 6:13), and confidence was divided between God and self. Paul’s argument, then, is not merely that circumcision is unnecessary but that trusting it dishonours all three Persons of the Godhead. Any doctrine of salvation that gives the flesh a share of the credit has misdescribed God. The Trinitarian shape of verse 3 is the theological foundation for the personal testimony that follows: Paul abandons the flesh because God alone saves.

Why is this question important? Legalism is usually treated as a practical problem, a matter of attitude. Seeing that it distorts the doctrine of God itself raises the stakes and explains why Paul uses such severe language in verse 2.

Section 3 — Confidence in the Flesh: Paul’s Pedigree (Philippians 3:4–6)

Key Insight

“Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also” (v. 4). The Judaizers’ claim was that Gentiles lacked the credentials that mattered. Paul answers not from weakness but from strength: he possessed every credential they prized, and more (egō mallon, “I more”). He plays their game in order to show that winning it is worthless. The list that follows is not a confession of former sins but a résumé of former glories, and its power lies precisely in the fact that every item on it was, by the standards of Judaism, genuinely good.

The seven credentials fall into two groups. The first four were inherited. “Circumcised on the eighth day” (v. 5): not a proselyte circumcised as an adult, nor an Ishmaelite circumcised at thirteen (Genesis 17:25), but a son of the covenant marked as the law required (Leviticus 12:3). “Of the people of Israel”: a member of the covenant nation by birth, bearer of “the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Romans 9:4). “Of the tribe of Benjamin”: a tribe with a known genealogy, which had given Israel its first king (whose name Paul bore) and within whose borders Jerusalem stood. “A Hebrew of Hebrews”: a Hebrew-speaking son of Hebrew-speaking parents, raised in the language and customs of the homeland rather than assimilated to the Greek Diaspora (Acts 22:2–3; 2 Corinthians 11:22).

The last three were achieved, each introduced by “as to.” “As to the law, a Pharisee” (v. 5): a member of the strictest party of Judaism (Acts 26:5), “educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law” (Acts 22:3). “As to zeal, a persecutor of the church” (v. 6): in Jewish eyes this was not a crime but a distinction, the zeal of Phinehas (Numbers 25:11–13) and of the Maccabees turned against a sect that seemed to threaten the law; Paul had “advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age” precisely in this (Galatians 1:13–14). “As to righteousness under the law, blameless” (amemptos): not a claim of sinlessness but of meticulous observance, a record no one could fault (compare Luke 1:6).

Two things must be seen. First, Paul was sincere. He was not a hypocrite pretending to a righteousness he did not have; he was a devout man who believed his record commended him to God. This is what makes the passage searching: the flesh’s confidence is at its most dangerous in the religiously serious. Second, the whole list is governed by the phrase “confidence in the flesh.” Calvin observes that Paul condemns not the things themselves but the confidence placed in them. The credentials were gifts; the trust was the sin. Christologically, the list prepares for the great reversal: the man who held these things as gain will, in the next verse, meet a Lord beside whom they are loss, and the one who bore Saul’s name from Benjamin will be made the servant of David’s greater Son.

Application

Paul’s résumé invites us to write our own. Every Christian has a list, and the Reformed Christian’s list can be remarkably similar to Paul’s. Inherited: baptised as an infant in a covenant home, raised in a Bible-believing church, a member of a family that has been Presbyterian for four generations, catechised from childhood. Achieved: an elder or deacon, a faithful attender, a serious student of the confessions, a defender of the faith against error, blameless in the eyes of the congregation. None of these is bad; all of them are gifts. But each of them can quietly become the thing we lean on, and the leaning is nearly invisible because the things are so good. The practical discipline is to name our credentials honestly and then ask, one by one, whether we are trusting them.

The passage also exposes the particular danger of religious zeal. Paul’s persecution of the church was, in his own former estimation, his finest hour. Zeal for orthodoxy, for purity of worship, for the defence of the truth, can be flesh in its most flattering costume. The test is whether our zeal humbles us or exalts us, whether it is a way of serving Christ or of proving ourselves. Zeal that leaves a trail of wounded brothers may be Saul’s zeal rather than Paul’s.

Finally, Paul’s honesty about his past should shape how we regard sincere unbelief. The most religious people we know may be the furthest from Christ, because their very sincerity assures them that they need nothing. Prayer for them should be not that they become more religious but that they be shown, as Paul was, a Lord beside whom their goodness is loss.

A warning against misapplication: the passage does not teach that heritage, education, or zeal are evils to be discarded. God gave Paul his covenant birth and his training and used both in the apostle’s ministry (Acts 22:3; 26:4–7). The sin is not possessing credentials but trusting them; a Christian who despises his covenant upbringing has misread the text as badly as one who leans on it.

Application Question 1: What items are on your own résumé of “confidence in the flesh,” inherited or achieved, and which of them do you find hardest to stop leaning on?

Answer: Paul’s list had two halves, what he was born into and what he accomplished (vv. 5–6), and honesty requires that we fill in both. The inherited credentials are the hardest to see because we did nothing to gain them: a Christian home, early baptism, a tradition of orthodoxy, a name respected in the church. The achieved credentials are harder to release because we did work for them: office, reputation, knowledge, years of unbroken service. The way to find the ones we lean on is to notice which ones we mention when we feel threatened, and which ones we would be most reluctant to see counted as loss. Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men (Luke 18:11–12) shows that religious credentials can be recited in prayer without any awareness that they have become the ground of standing. The remedy is not to hate the gifts but to move our weight off them and onto Christ, so that we would be no less secure if every one of them were taken away (Habakkuk 3:17–18).

Why is this question important? Confidence in the flesh is most dangerous when it hides in genuinely good things. The question forces us to look at our best assets, where the danger is, rather than at our obvious sins, where it is not.

Application Question 2: Has your zeal for the truth ever become a way of proving yourself rather than a way of serving Christ, and how would you know the difference?

Answer: Paul lists “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church” (v. 6) among his credentials, and the shock of the line is that he once counted the harm he did to Christ’s people as evidence of his devotion to God. Zeal is no proof of grace; its object and its fruit are. Paul later describes Israel as having “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2), a zeal that sought to establish its own righteousness. The difference between zeal that serves Christ and zeal that serves the self shows in several places: whether we are as zealous for our own holiness as for others’ errors; whether correcting a brother leaves us grieved or gratified; whether we can lose an argument without feeling we have lost our standing; whether our zeal produces “the fruit of the Spirit,” including gentleness and patience (Galatians 5:22–23), or produces “rivalries, dissensions, divisions” (Galatians 5:20). Zeal that is of Christ builds up the church; zeal that is of the flesh persecutes it, even in the name of purity. Where we find the second, the answer is the same as Paul’s: to be met by Christ and to count it loss.

Why is this question important? Reformed churches are especially susceptible to zeal that has become flesh, because doctrinal seriousness is a genuine good. The question distinguishes the zeal of Phinehas from the zeal of Saul before the damage is done.

Deep Study Question 1: In what sense could Paul call himself “blameless” as to righteousness under the law, when he elsewhere confesses himself the foremost of sinners?

Answer: The two statements measure different things. “Blameless” (amemptos) in verse 6 describes Paul’s record as judged by the observable standard of Torah observance among his peers: he kept the commandments, the festivals, the food laws, and the traditions with a thoroughness no one could fault, much as Luke describes Zechariah and Elizabeth as “walking blamelessly in all the commandments” (Luke 1:6). It is a claim about external conformity, not about the heart. It was the very righteousness Paul had, not one he pretended to, and it is that real righteousness he counts as loss. When Paul calls himself “the foremost” of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15) he is speaking as one who has seen the law’s true demand. Romans 7:7–11 records the discovery: the commandment “You shall not covet” reached where outward observance could not, and “sin came alive and I died.” The law, rightly understood, demands love from the whole heart (Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:37), and by that standard no one is blameless (Romans 3:20). Paul’s blamelessness was real at the level where the Judaizers kept score, and worthless at the level where God does (1 Samuel 16:7). That is why the passage is so devastating to self-righteousness: the best possible record is still loss.

Why is this question important? If Paul’s “blameless” were mere hyperbole, the argument would lose its force; the point is that a genuinely excellent religious record cannot justify. The question protects both the honesty of Paul’s testimony and the depth of the law’s demand.

Deep Study Question 2: How does Paul’s autobiography in verses 4–6 function as a parallel to Christ’s self-emptying in Philippians 2:5–11?

Answer: The letter’s central appeal is “have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), followed by the hymn of the One who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:6–7). The verb “count” (hēgeomai) in 2:6 is the same verb Paul will use of himself in 3:7–8, “I counted as loss.” Chapter 3 is Paul’s own enactment of the mind of Christ. Where Christ possessed the highest privilege of all, equality with God, and did not exploit it, Paul possessed the highest privileges available to a Jew and refused to lean on them. Where Christ “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (2:7), Paul suffered “the loss of all things” (3:8). And where Christ’s humiliation was followed by exaltation, “therefore God has highly exalted him” (2:9), Paul’s loss is followed by gaining Christ and the hope of resurrection (3:8–11). The parallel is not that Paul’s sacrifice equals Christ’s, which would be absurd, but that union with Christ reproduces Christ’s pattern in his people: descent from self-confidence, and glory received rather than grasped. This is why the chapter’s later warning against those who “walk as enemies of the cross” (3:18) is so severe; to trust the flesh is to refuse the mind of Christ.

Why is this question important? Reading chapter 3 in the light of chapter 2 turns Paul’s autobiography from an interesting aside into the letter’s chief illustration of its central command, and shows that justification by faith and the humility of Christ are one doctrine seen from two sides.

Section 4 — Counting All as Loss for Christ (Philippians 3:7–8)

Key Insight

“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (v. 7). The “but” is the hinge of the autobiography. Paul now takes the seven credentials, which he has called “gains” (kerdē, plural), and enters them on the other side of the ledger as a single “loss” (zēmia, singular). The language is that of accounting. Hēgeomai means to reckon, to reach a considered verdict, and the tense in verse 7 is perfect: “I have counted,” a judgment made once, on the Damascus road, and still in force. Everything Paul had trusted was moved from the credit column to the debit column, and the reason is given in three words: “for the sake of Christ.”

Verse 8 widens and intensifies the claim in three steps. First, the scope widens: “Indeed, I count everything as loss.” Not only the seven credentials but “everything,” panta, every conceivable ground of confidence, is now loss. Second, the tense shifts to the present: “I count,” a verdict continually renewed; the reckoning of the conversion is the reckoning of every day since. Third, the reason is expanded: “because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” The Greek makes a neuter participle into a noun, to hyperechon, “the surpassing thing,” the thing that towers over every rival. What towers is gnōsis, knowledge, and not knowledge about Christ but knowledge of him, personal, covenantal, the “knowing” that Jeremiah promised for the new covenant, “they shall all know me” (Jeremiah 31:34), and that Jesus defined as eternal life itself (John 17:3). The object is named with a possessive that occurs nowhere else in Paul’s letters: “Christ Jesus my Lord.” The apostle who counted his pedigree as loss did so because he had met a Person.

“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things” (v. 8). The verb is aorist passive, ezēmiōthēn: Paul did not so much throw his credentials away as have them taken from him at the moment he met Christ, and he has never wanted them back. “And count them as rubbish”: skybala is a blunt word, refuse, the scraps thrown to dogs, dung. Spurgeon preached on this verse that Paul enters his own righteousness as a minus quantity, and the arithmetic is exactly that: the very things that once counted for him now count against him, because anything trusted alongside Christ is a rival to Christ.

The purpose clause ends the verse: “in order that I may gain Christ.” The word for gain, kerdēsō, is the same root as the “gains” of verse 7. The trade is not gain for loss but lesser gain for infinitely greater gain. Calvin comments that Paul does not merely prefer Christ to his former righteousness but treats that righteousness as an obstacle, since whoever retains any trust in his own righteousness cannot rest in Christ. Christ is not the best item in the ledger; he is the reason the ledger is redrawn.

Application

The passage teaches a way of reckoning, and reckoning is something we do, not something that happens to us. Paul does not say that he felt his credentials to be worthless; he says he counted them so, a deliberate verdict reached in the light of Christ and renewed daily. Christians are called to the same accounting. The first step is to know what we have been treating as gain: the things we are proud of, the things we reach for when we feel small, the things whose loss would feel like the loss of ourselves. The second step is to set them beside Christ and ask, honestly, which is worth more. The third step is to enter the verdict and to keep entering it, because the old columns reassert themselves every morning.

The passage also reorders the emotional life. Paul’s loss was not grudging; “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” made it obvious. When Christians find renunciation bitter, when giving up a sin, a comfort, a reputation, or a plan feels like pure deprivation, the trouble is usually not weak willpower but a weak sight of Christ. The way to make loss light is not to grit our teeth but to look harder at what is gained. John Piper has often said that the pursuit of joy in God is the engine of self-denial, and this verse is his text.

Finally, the passage tells us what knowing Christ is: not a set of true propositions, though it includes them, but a relationship with “my Lord.” Doctrine that does not lead to knowing him is a new pedigree. The test of a Reformed education is whether it has made Christ more surpassing to us or merely made us more confident that we are right.

A warning against misapplication: Paul does not teach that good gifts are rubbish in themselves. His covenant birth, his education, and his zeal were given by God and were later used by God (Acts 26:4–7). What is rubbish is any of these treated as a ground of standing before God or as a rival to Christ. Nor is the passage a call to manufacture renunciations in order to earn Christ; Paul lost his credentials because he found Christ, not in order to find him.

Application Question 1: What would you have to count as loss today in order to say honestly, with Paul, that knowing Christ is of surpassing worth?

Answer: Paul’s reckoning began with his best assets, not his worst sins (vv. 7–8), and ours must begin there too. The things hardest to count as loss are the good things we have made ultimate: a career that gives us identity, a reputation for godliness, the approval of a parent, a plan for our children, financial security, or a theological tradition we are prouder of than we are of Christ. Jesus said the kingdom is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man “in his joy” sells everything to buy (Matthew 13:44), and the joy is the point. Counting something as loss is not the same as hating it; it is refusing to let it compete with Christ, and being willing to let it go if it does. Practically, we can ask: if this were taken from me tomorrow, would Christ still be enough? If the honest answer is no, we have found what must be counted as loss. The verdict is not a feeling waited for but a judgment entered, and it is renewed every day, “I count” (v. 8), because the ledger does not stay balanced on its own.

Why is this question important? Without a specific answer, “counting all as loss” remains a beautiful sentiment that changes nothing. The question turns Paul’s testimony into our own accounting, item by item.

Application Question 2: When renunciation feels bitter to you, is the problem weak resolve or a weak sight of Christ, and what would it mean to address the second rather than the first?

Answer: Paul does not describe his loss as a grim duty. He describes it as the obvious response to “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8), and the word “surpassing” explains the ease. A loss is only bitter when we cannot see what we gain by it. The merchant in Jesus’ parable did not resent selling everything for the pearl; he had seen the pearl (Matthew 13:45–46). When obedience feels like pure deprivation, the deeper issue is usually that Christ has grown small in our sight while the rival has grown large. Addressing the second problem rather than the first means turning from the struggle to the Saviour: meditating on who he is, what he has done, and what it means to be his (Colossians 3:1–4), and asking the Spirit to make him surpassing to us again. Moses “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward” (Hebrews 11:26); the looking made the considering possible. Self-denial is a fruit of seeing Christ, not a substitute for it, and a Christian who tries to renounce by willpower alone will either fail or become proud of succeeding.

Why is this question important? Much Christian struggle is misdirected at the will when the real deficiency is in vision. The question redirects effort toward beholding Christ, which is the only power that ever made loss feel like gain.

Deep Study Question 1: What is the significance of the shift from the perfect tense “I counted” in verse 7 to the present tense “I count” in verse 8?

Answer: The perfect tense in verse 7 describes a completed action with continuing results: at a definite point, the Damascus road, Paul reached a verdict on his credentials, and that verdict still stands. The present tense in verse 8, used twice, describes an action in progress: the verdict is being renewed now, as he writes, some twenty-five years later. Conversion is a decisive reckoning, and the Christian life is that reckoning repeated. The two tenses guard against two errors. Against the notion that a past decision settles everything, the present tense insists that confidence in the flesh must be refused daily, because the flesh does not stay refused (Luke 9:23, “take up his cross daily”). Against the notion that the Christian life is a perpetual re-conversion, the perfect tense insists that the decisive verdict was reached once and holds. The same pattern appears in Paul’s teaching on sanctification: believers have died with Christ once (Romans 6:2–4) and must therefore “consider yourselves dead to sin” continually (Romans 6:11), the same verb of reckoning. The past verdict is the ground; the present reckoning is the practice. Notice, too, that the scope grows between the verses, from “whatever gain I had” to “everything”; the present reckoning is not smaller than the first but wider.

Why is this question important? The tenses supply the shape of assurance and of perseverance together: a settled past that gives confidence, and a present activity that gives vigilance. A believer who has only one of the two will drift into either presumption or anxiety.

Deep Study Question 2: What does Paul mean by “knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” and how does this knowledge differ from knowledge about Christ?

Answer: The word is gnōsis, and in Paul’s Jewish frame it carries the Old Testament sense of covenant knowledge, the intimate, personal, mutual knowing of a relationship rather than the possession of information. The new covenant promise was precisely this: “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:34). Jesus defines eternal life as knowing “you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3), and Paul, having said “I know whom I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12), speaks of being “known by God” as the deeper reality behind our knowing him (Galatians 4:9). Knowledge of Christ includes truths about him but is not exhausted by them; the demons know true things about Christ and are not saved (James 2:19). The possessive “my Lord,” unique in Paul, marks the difference: this is a knowledge that involves belonging, trust, and submission. Verse 10 will unpack it as knowing “the power of his resurrection” and “sharing his sufferings,” an experiential union rather than an academic mastery. To know Christ is to be joined to him so that his life becomes the shape of ours. That is why it surpasses every credential; credentials describe us, but this knowledge unites us to him.

Why is this question important? A tradition that prizes doctrine can mistake accuracy about Christ for knowledge of him. The question guards the necessary place of doctrine while insisting that its goal is a Person, not a system.

Section 5 — A Righteousness Not My Own (Philippians 3:9)

Key Insight

“And be found in him” (v. 9). The purpose clause of verse 8, “that I may gain Christ,” continues here with a second verb, and it is passive: heurethō, “be found.” Paul does not speak of finding Christ but of being found in him, and the language is eschatological: the day is coming when every person will be found somewhere, and Paul’s whole hope is to be found in Christ (compare 2 Corinthians 5:3; 1 John 2:28). To be “in him” is Paul’s characteristic description of salvation, union with Christ, and it is the frame within which everything else in the verse is set.

The verse then contrasts two righteousnesses with the exactness of a legal document. The first is “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” (emēn dikaiosynēn tēn ek nomou). This is the “blameless” record of verse 6, and its defect is named in two words: it is “my own,” and it is “from the law.” A righteousness of one’s own can never be more than the sum of one’s own doings, and the law, which demands perfect love, exposes rather than supplies that righteousness (Romans 3:20; Galatians 3:10). Paul’s language echoes his description of Israel, who, “seeking to establish their own [righteousness], did not submit to God’s righteousness” (Romans 10:3).

The second righteousness is described twice. It is “that which comes through faith in Christ” (tēn dia pisteōs Christou), and it is “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (tēn ek theou dikaiosynēn epi tē pistei). The prepositions carry the doctrine. This righteousness is ek theou, “from God,” in origin: God is its author and giver, not the sinner. It is dia pisteōs, “through faith,” in its instrument: faith is the channel by which it is received, not the ground on which it is deserved. And it rests epi tē pistei, “on faith,” in its foundation: the believer’s whole weight is placed on trust in Christ, not on performance. This is what the Reformation called an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is ours by gift and imputation, not by achievement (Romans 4:5–6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). Calvin writes that Paul renounces his own righteousness in order to obtain the righteousness of God, a righteousness that is not from ourselves but given by God.

On the phrase pistis Christou, some scholars read a subjective genitive, “the faithfulness of Christ.” The ESV’s objective rendering, “faith in Christ,” is confirmed by the context: the contrast is between confidence in the flesh and confidence in Christ, and the closing phrase, “that depends on faith,” unmistakably refers to the believer’s trust. Christ’s own obedience is indeed the ground of the righteousness (Romans 5:19), but this clause names the means of receiving it. Christ is the whole content of the verse: the One in whom Paul is found, the object of the faith by which righteousness comes, and the Righteous One whose obedience is credited to the believer.

Application

The most important application of this verse is assurance. If our standing before God rested on a righteousness of our own, no honest Christian could ever be sure of it, because every day adds new evidence against us. Paul’s hope is to be found in Christ with a righteousness that is not his own. That righteousness does not fluctuate with our performance; it was complete when Christ finished his work (John 19:30). The believer who has had a bad week is exactly as righteous before God as the believer who has had a good one, because the righteousness is Christ’s. This is not a licence for bad weeks; it is the only ground on which a Christian can face God without either despair or pretence.

The verse also exposes the subtlety of self-righteousness. Paul’s “righteousness of my own” was not a righteousness of sins but of law-keeping. The Christian equivalent is not gross sin but the quiet feeling that God is a little more pleased with us because of our orthodoxy, our discipline, or our years of service. Whenever we approach God with a sense of entitlement based on anything in us, we have reverted to verse 6. The remedy is to come, every time, “not having a righteousness of my own.”

Finally, the verse shapes how we counsel guilt. When a fellow Christian is crushed by failure, the temptation is to reassure them that they are not so bad. The gospel does something better: it agrees that they are that bad, and points to a righteousness that does not depend on them at all. Only an alien righteousness can comfort a conscience that has seen itself clearly.

A crucial warning against misapplication: “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” does not mean that the law is bad, that obedience is optional, or that the justified believer may live as he pleases. The same apostle insists that faith works through love (Galatians 5:6) and that those found in Christ are conformed to him (v. 10). Nor is faith itself a work that earns righteousness; faith is the empty hand that receives, and a faith proud of itself has become another righteousness of one’s own.

Application Question 1: When you come before God, do you come with a sense of entitlement based on your record, or “not having a righteousness of my own”?

Answer: Paul’s language in verse 9 is the posture of a man approaching God with empty hands, and the posture is harder to maintain than it sounds. Most self-righteousness is not a claim to be sinless but a feeling of being deserving: a sense, after a faithful week, that God owes us a hearing, or, after a poor one, that we had better not pray until we have improved. Both feelings reveal that we have been bringing a righteousness of our own. Jesus’ parable sets the two postures side by side: the Pharisee who thanked God for his record and the tax collector who would not lift his eyes but said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” and it was the second who “went down to his house justified” (Luke 18:13–14). The practical remedy is to begin every approach to God, in prayer, in worship, at the Table, with a conscious renunciation of our own record and a conscious reliance on Christ’s. We are welcome at the throne because of the Righteous One, never because of the week we have had (Hebrews 4:14–16). That renunciation is not gloomy; it is the only thing that makes access sure.

Why is this question important? Entitlement before God is the most common form that confidence in the flesh takes among serious Christians. The question catches it at the point where it does the most damage, the moment of approach.

Application Question 2: How would you counsel a fellow believer crushed by guilt, using the righteousness “from God that depends on faith” rather than minimising their sin?

Answer: The worldly comfort for guilt is to lower the standard: “you are not so bad; everyone struggles.” The gospel comfort is to raise the standard to its full height and then point to a righteousness that meets it. Paul does not deny that his own righteousness fell short; he abandons it entirely for one “from God” (v. 9). The comfort of the gospel is not that our sin is small but that Christ’s righteousness is complete. To counsel a crushed believer, then, we begin by agreeing with their conscience where it speaks truly, because “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8), and then we point them away from themselves altogether to Christ, whom God “made … to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). We remind them that justification was never grounded in their performance and so cannot be undone by their failure, and that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). A conscience that has seen itself clearly can be comforted only by a righteousness it did not produce, and that is exactly what verse 9 offers.

Why is this question important? Believers who can articulate justification in the abstract often revert to minimising sin when comforting others. The question trains us to apply the doctrine pastorally, where it is most needed.

Deep Study Question 1: What do the three prepositional phrases of verse 9 (“through faith in Christ,” “from God,” “depends on faith”) teach about the origin, instrument, and ground of the believer’s righteousness?

Answer: Paul’s prepositions are precise. The righteousness is “from God” (ek theou): its origin is God himself, who provides it, and not the sinner, who cannot (Romans 3:21–22; Isaiah 45:24). It comes “through faith in Christ” (dia pisteōs Christou): faith is the instrument by which it is received, the channel and not the source, so that faith contributes nothing to the righteousness but only lays hold of it (Romans 4:5; Ephesians 2:8). And it “depends on faith” (epi tē pistei), literally “rests upon faith”: the believer’s whole confidence is placed there and nowhere else. Together the phrases exclude every human contribution from the righteousness by which we are justified. Paul’s own righteousness was “from the law,” originating in his obedience; the new righteousness originates in God, is grounded in Christ’s obedience (Romans 5:19), and is received by trust. This is why the Reformers spoke of an imputed, alien righteousness: it is credited to the believer as Abraham’s faith “was counted to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3). Faith is not the righteousness but the hand that receives it; to make faith itself meritorious would be to reintroduce a righteousness of one’s own by another door.

Why is this question important? The whole difference between the gospel and every religion of merit lies in these prepositions. A believer who grasps them can neither despair, since the righteousness is God’s, nor boast, since faith merely receives.

Deep Study Question 2: Why does Paul frame justification within being “found in him,” and what does this show about the relationship between union with Christ and imputed righteousness?

Answer: The order of the verse matters. Before Paul says anything about righteousness he says “be found in him,” and the righteousness that follows is the righteousness of those who are in Christ. Imputation is not a transaction between strangers; it is the sharing of what belongs to the One we are joined to. Because believers are united to Christ by faith, what is his is reckoned theirs: “he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21), and “Christ Jesus … became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). The image of the vine and the branches (John 15:1–5) and of the head and the body (Ephesians 1:22–23) express the same reality: the life, standing, and inheritance of the head are the possession of the members. This is why Paul’s righteousness can be truly his without being “his own”; it is his by union, as a wife’s share in her husband’s estate is truly hers without being earned. Union with Christ is the root; justification and sanctification are its fruits, distinct but inseparable, which is why verse 9 (righteousness by faith) flows immediately into verse 10 (conformity to his death). No one is found in Christ for righteousness who is not also being conformed to him.

Why is this question important? Separating imputation from union produces either a cold legal fiction or a moralism that fears free justification. Holding them together, as Paul does, makes justification both entirely gracious and inseparable from a transformed life.

Section 6 — To Know Him: Resurrection Power, Shared Suffering, and the Hope of Rising (Philippians 3:10–11)

Key Insight

“That I may know him” (v. 10). The Greek is an articular infinitive of purpose, tou gnōnai auton, and it resumes the “knowing” of verse 8: the surpassing worth that made every credential loss is now unfolded. Justification is not the end of the Christian story but its foundation, and what is built on it is knowing Christ. The infinitive is followed by two coordinated objects and a participle, and together they describe what it means to know him: “the power of his resurrection,” “sharing his sufferings,” and “becoming like him in his death.”

The order is striking. Paul names the power of his resurrection before his sufferings, though in Christ’s own history the cross preceded the empty tomb. The reason is that the believer meets the risen Christ first; the power that raised Jesus is already at work in those who believe (Ephesians 1:19–20), and it is that power that enables them to suffer. This is not the power to avoid suffering but the power to endure it and to be transformed by it.

“And may share his sufferings”: the word is koinōnia, fellowship, partnership, the same word Paul used for the Philippians’ partnership in the gospel (1:5). Believers do not suffer in imitation of Christ from a distance; they suffer in fellowship with him, drawn into the pattern of his life. Paul had been told at his conversion, “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16), and he came to see that suffering as a privilege granted (1:29).

“Becoming like him in his death” (symmorphizomenos tō thanatō autou): a present passive participle, an ongoing conformity worked in the believer by God. To be conformed to Christ’s death is to have his self-giving, his obedience “to the point of death” (2:8), reproduced in us (Romans 6:5; 2 Corinthians 4:10–11). Sinclair Ferguson observes that the whole Christian life is the outworking of union with Christ in his death and resurrection, so that the pattern of Good Friday and Easter becomes the pattern of every believer’s existence.

“That by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (v. 11). The word exanastasis, “resurrection out from,” is found only here in the New Testament; with “from the dead,” it points to the bodily resurrection of believers at Christ’s return (3:20–21). The phrase “if by any means” (ei pōs) has troubled some readers as though Paul doubted his salvation. It does not; Paul elsewhere expresses complete confidence (1:6; 1:23; Romans 8:38–39). The expression is one of humility, not uncertainty: Paul does not presume on the path, and he knows the goal lies through death and cannot be reached by any route of his own choosing. Matthew Henry remarks that the apostle is not questioning his salvation but expressing his humility and his diligence in pursuing it. The Christological arc is complete: Paul’s life is being shaped by Christ’s death so that it may end in Christ’s resurrection.

Application

The passage settles the shape of the Christian life: union with Christ in death and resurrection. Christians should not be surprised by suffering, still less resentful of it, as though God had failed to deliver on a promise. The promise was never exemption. It was fellowship: “it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (1:29). When affliction comes, illness, bereavement, opposition, the slow losses of age, the believer is invited to see it not as an interruption of knowing Christ but as one of its forms. This changes the prayer we pray in suffering, from “take this away” alone to “let me know you in this.”

The order of the verse teaches where the power for suffering comes from. Paul names resurrection power before the sufferings, because the strength to endure is not summoned from within but supplied from the risen Christ. Practically, this means that our preparation for hard days is not stoic self-training but deepening acquaintance with the One whose power raised him from the dead and now dwells in us (Romans 8:11). The Christian who wants to be ready for suffering should give attention to the resurrection.

The passage also sets the hope that makes present conformity to Christ’s death bearable: “the resurrection from the dead.” Every loss counted, every suffering shared, every dying to self is oriented toward a morning. Reformed Christians, rightly careful not to overpromise present deliverance, should be equally careful to preach the bodily resurrection with full confidence, because it is the goal of the whole passage.

A warning against misapplication: sharing Christ’s sufferings is not a call to seek suffering, to romanticise it, or to regard self-inflicted hardship as spiritual attainment. Paul did not choose his afflictions; he received them in the course of obedience. Nor does “if by any means possible” teach that the believer’s resurrection is uncertain; it expresses humble diligence, not doubt, and to read anxiety into it contradicts Paul’s own confidence in 1:6.

Application Question 1: When suffering comes, do you treat it as an interruption of your relationship with Christ or as one of the ways you come to know him?

Answer: Paul lists “sharing his sufferings” as part of what it means to “know him” (v. 10), not as a regrettable obstacle to it. Suffering is one of the appointed places where Christ is known, because it is there that the believer is drawn most closely into the pattern of his Lord’s life. This does not make suffering good in itself, and Paul never pretends it is painless; he calls it loss and death. But he has learned to ask a different question in it. Instead of only “how do I get out of this?” he asks “how may I know him in this?” Peter says the same: “rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). Practically, this means bringing our affliction to Christ as a place of fellowship rather than of abandonment, expecting him to be present in it as he was present with Paul in prison, and looking for the ways in which it is conforming us to him, weaning us from the flesh, deepening our dependence, teaching us to comfort others (2 Corinthians 1:4). The believer who knows Christ in suffering has found what the passage calls surpassing worth in the very place the world sees only loss.

Why is this question important? How a Christian interprets suffering determines whether it produces bitterness or intimacy with Christ. The question offers Paul’s interpretation before the suffering arrives, when it can still be received.

Application Question 2: How are you drawing on “the power of his resurrection” now, before hardship comes, so that you are ready to share his sufferings when it does?

Answer: Paul names resurrection power before suffering (v. 10), and the order is a lesson in preparation. The strength to endure is not stored up by us but supplied by the risen Christ, and it is drawn on by acquaintance with him. Paul prays that the Ephesians would know “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19–20), and he tells the Romans that the Spirit who raised Jesus “dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Drawing on that power now means several ordinary things: meditating on the resurrection as a present reality and not only an Easter doctrine; asking in prayer for the strength that raised Christ to be at work in our weakness; treating each small dying to self, a forgiven insult, a surrendered plan, a resisted temptation, as practice in the pattern of death and rising; and staying close to the means through which Christ gives himself, the Word, prayer, the sacraments, and the fellowship of his body. A Christian who is walking in resurrection power on ordinary days will not be a stranger to it on the hard ones.

Why is this question important? Believers often discover in crisis that they have never learned to lean on Christ’s power. The question moves that discovery earlier, to the days when the leaning can be learned.

Deep Study Question 1: Why does Paul name the power of Christ’s resurrection before the fellowship of his sufferings, when Christ’s own history ran the other way?

Answer: In Christ’s experience the cross came first and the resurrection followed; in the believer’s experience the order is reversed, because the believer meets Christ as already risen. The Christian does not suffer toward resurrection power but from it. The power that raised Jesus from the dead is already at work in those who are united to him (Ephesians 1:19–20; Romans 6:4), and it is that power which makes fellowship in his sufferings possible rather than crushing. Paul’s own life shows the sequence: he was “afflicted in every way, but not crushed … struck down, but not destroyed, always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Corinthians 4:8–10). The resurrection life is present in the very midst of the dying. The order also guards the doctrine of grace: if suffering came first as a condition of receiving power, the Christian life would become a new works principle, resurrection earned by endurance. Paul’s order makes power the gift and suffering the field in which the gift is exercised. Resurrection power is not the reward for sharing Christ’s sufferings; it is the means by which we share them, and the final resurrection of verse 11 is the consummation of a power already possessed.

Why is this question important? Christians who reverse the order approach suffering as something they must survive on their own before God helps, and either despair or grow proud. The right order locates the strength in Christ from the first moment.

Deep Study Question 2: Does “that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” express uncertainty about Paul’s salvation, and how should the phrase be understood in the light of the rest of the letter?

Answer: The phrase ei pōs, “if somehow,” expresses expectation with humility, not doubt. Three considerations settle this. First, the letter itself is full of assurance: “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (1:6), and Paul is confident that to die is “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (1:23). Second, Paul’s assurance elsewhere is unambiguous: nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). Third, the immediate context (3:12–14) describes a runner pressing toward a prize he is sure of but has not yet reached; the humility concerns the path, not the destination. Paul is certain of the goal and uncertain only of the route, whether by martyrdom, by natural death, or by Christ’s return (compare 1:20–23). The “by any means” is the language of a man who will not dictate to God how he is to be brought home. This humility is itself a fruit of the passage: a man who has put no confidence in the flesh will not presume even on his own perseverance as though it were his achievement, while resting entirely on the God who raises the dead. Assurance and humility are not rivals; both flow from trusting Christ rather than oneself.

Why is this question important? Misreading the phrase as doubt undermines the assurance the passage is built to give, while ignoring its humility invites presumption. Reading it rightly models how a confident Christian speaks of the future: sure of Christ, unassuming about self.

Cross References

Comparative Gospel Study

Not Applicable as Direct Comparison — Philippians is a New Testament epistle, a letter of friendship and exhortation written from prison, not Gospel narrative. However, Philippians 3:1–11 anticipates key Gospel themes:

  • The Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14). Jesus’ parable sets a man who recites his religious credentials beside a man who has none and asks only for mercy, and declares the second justified rather than the first. Paul’s autobiography is the Pharisee’s prayer spoken by a converted Pharisee, and his verdict on it, “loss,” is the parable’s verdict. Both texts locate justification in God’s gift rather than in the worshipper’s record.
  • The treasure and the pearl (Matthew 13:44–46). The man who finds treasure hidden in a field sells all that he has “in his joy,” and the merchant sells everything for one pearl of great value. Paul’s “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” (v. 8) is the same reckoning: the exchange is not a sacrifice grimly borne but a bargain gladly seized, because the value of what is gained makes the cost trivial.
  • Losing life to save it (Mark 8:34–37). Jesus teaches that whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for his sake and the gospel’s will save it; “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” The vocabulary of gain and loss (kerdainō, zēmioō) is precisely Paul’s in verses 7–8, and the pattern of dying with Christ in order to live (vv. 10–11) is the cross-bearing Jesus commands.
  • Beware the leaven of the Pharisees (Matthew 16:6; Luke 12:1). Jesus warns his disciples to “watch and beware” of the teaching of the Pharisees, which spreads quietly through a whole lump. Paul’s threefold “look out” (v. 2) is the same pastoral alarm, sounded against a teaching that would leaven the church with confidence in the flesh.
  • The dogs and the children’s bread (Matthew 15:21–28). Jesus’ exchange with the Canaanite woman turns on the Jewish epithet “dogs” for Gentiles, and ends with a Gentile commended for great faith and given the children’s bread. Paul’s reversal of the epithet in verse 2, applied now to those who would exclude Gentiles, presupposes what the Gospel scene shows: that faith, not descent, marks the children.
  • Eternal life as knowing Christ (John 17:3). In his high-priestly prayer Jesus defines eternal life as knowing “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Paul’s “surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8) and his single aim “that I may know him” (v. 10) take the Gospel’s definition as their own: the goal of salvation is not a status but a Person known.

Old Testament Connections

Pentateuch. Circumcision was given to Abraham as “a sign of the covenant” (Genesis 17:10–14) after he had already been counted righteous by faith (Genesis 15:6), which is the whole logic of Paul’s argument that the sign was never the ground. The eighth-day requirement (Genesis 17:12; Leviticus 12:3) is the first item of Paul’s pedigree. The law’s own demand for a circumcised heart (Deuteronomy 10:16) and its promise that God would circumcise the heart so that Israel would love him (Deuteronomy 30:6) are the roots of “we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit” (v. 3). The prohibition of cutting the flesh in pagan mourning (Leviticus 19:28; 21:5) supplies the background for Paul’s word “mutilation.” Phinehas’s zeal, “counted to him as righteousness” (Numbers 25:11–13; Psalm 106:31), is the model for Paul’s “as to zeal, a persecutor” (v. 6). And the works principle, “if a person does them, he shall live by them” (Leviticus 18:5), is the righteousness “from the law” that Paul renounces (v. 9).

Historical Books. The tribe of Benjamin (v. 5) gave Israel its first king, Saul (1 Samuel 9:1–2, 21), whose name the apostle bore, and remained with Judah when the kingdom divided (1 Kings 12:21). The prophets of Baal who “cut themselves after their custom with swords and lances” (1 Kings 18:28) illustrate the self-laceration behind katatomē. Samuel’s word to Saul, “the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), states the principle by which Paul’s blameless record is weighed and found wanting. Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s reforms on intermarriage and Sabbath (Ezra 9–10; Nehemiah 13) show the seriousness of covenant boundary-markers that the Judaizers inherited and misapplied.

Wisdom Literature. “Dogs” as a term for the wicked who surround the righteous sufferer appears in Psalm 22:16, the psalm of the cross. The psalmist’s joy located in God rather than in prosperity (Psalm 4:7) and his confession that God is his only portion, “whom have I in heaven but you?” (Psalm 73:25–26), anticipate “rejoice in the Lord” and “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ.” Psalm 32:1–2, quoted by Paul for the imputation of righteousness apart from works (Romans 4:6–8), underlies verse 9. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5) is the wisdom form of “put no confidence in the flesh.” Psalm 16:9–11, with its confidence that God will not abandon his holy one to Sheol, is the Old Testament seed of the resurrection hope in verse 11.

Major Prophets. Isaiah supplies both sides of verse 9: “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6) and “he has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10), together with the Servant who “shall make many to be accounted righteous” (Isaiah 53:11). Jeremiah’s call, “circumcise yourselves to the LORD; remove the foreskin of your hearts” (Jeremiah 4:4), his prohibition of boasting in anything but knowing the Lord (Jeremiah 9:23–24), and his promise that in the new covenant “they shall all know me” (Jeremiah 31:34) run directly beneath verses 3 and 8–10. Ezekiel’s promise of a new heart and God’s Spirit within (Ezekiel 36:26–27) is the source of “worship by the Spirit of God,” and his vision of dry bones raised (Ezekiel 37:1–14) prefigures the resurrection of verse 11.

Minor Prophets. Habakkuk 2:4, “the righteous shall live by his faith,” is Paul’s foundational text for righteousness by faith (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11) and stands behind verse 9. Hosea’s “let us know; let us press on to know the LORD” (Hosea 6:3) and “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6) set the knowledge of God above religious performance, as Paul does. Micah’s question of what to bring before the Lord, answered not with sacrifices but with humility (Micah 6:6–8), and Zechariah’s vision of the high priest’s filthy garments removed and “pure vestments” given (Zechariah 3:1–5), are prophetic pictures of an alien righteousness replacing one’s own.

New Testament Fulfillment

Gospels/Acts. Luke’s account of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9:1–19), with Ananias told “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16), is the historical moment of verses 7–8 and 10. Paul’s own retellings supply the pedigree: “a Jew, born in Tarsus … brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God” (Acts 22:3), and “according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee” (Acts 26:5). The Jerusalem Council’s rejection of the demand that Gentiles “be circumcised according to the custom of Moses” (Acts 15:1–11), with Peter’s declaration that “we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will,” is the apostolic settlement that verse 3 assumes. The founding of the Philippian church (Acts 16:11–40) explains the “we” of verse 3.

Paul’s Epistles. Romans 3:21–26 gives the full exposition of “the righteousness of God … through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe,” and Romans 4:1–8 grounds it in Abraham and David: righteousness “counted” apart from works. Romans 9:30–10:4 describes Israel “seeking to establish their own” righteousness and failing to submit to God’s, “for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes,” the corporate version of Paul’s personal story. Romans 2:28–29 and Colossians 2:11–13 teach the circumcision of the heart by the Spirit and “the circumcision of Christ.” Galatians is the passage’s companion letter throughout: “we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16), “you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law” (Galatians 5:4), “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Galatians 6:15), and Paul’s own account of his zeal (Galatians 1:13–14). Romans 11:1 confirms the pedigree, “an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.” Romans 6:3–5 and 8:17, “provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him,” are the doctrinal ground of verses 10–11, and 2 Corinthians 4:10–11 their lived shape. 2 Corinthians 5:21 and 1 Corinthians 1:30 explain how Christ becomes the believer’s righteousness by union. 1 Timothy 1:12–16 is the older Paul’s reflection on the persecutor made an apostle.

General Epistles/Revelation. Hebrews 11:24–26 presents Moses as one who “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward,” the Old Testament saint who made Paul’s reckoning. Hebrews 4:14–16 grounds confident approach to God in the great high priest rather than in the worshipper. 1 Peter 4:13 calls believers to “rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings,” and 1 Peter 1:3–5 anchors their living hope in Christ’s resurrection. James 2:19 reminds us that knowledge about God is not knowing him. 1 John 2:28 speaks of not shrinking from Christ “at his coming,” the eschatological “being found” of verse 9, and 1 John 3:2 promises that “we shall be like him.” Revelation closes with the “dogs” outside the city (Revelation 22:15) and the bride “clothed with fine linen, bright and pure” (Revelation 19:8), the final scene of the two righteousnesses.

Redemptive-Historical Context

Creation. Humanity was made to know God. Adam walked with him in the garden and was given a righteousness that was his own, in the sense that he was created upright and able to obey (Ecclesiastes 7:29). The covenant of works offered life upon the condition of perfect obedience, and so long as that condition stood unbroken, a “righteousness of my own” was a real possibility and not a delusion. Knowing God and being righteous before him were one thing.

Fall. With Adam’s sin that possibility closed. The law, republished at Sinai, could now only reveal the standard and expose the failure (Romans 3:20; 5:20). Every attempt at a righteousness “from the law” after the fall is an attempt to re-enter the garden by the way that was shut, and Paul’s “blameless” record (v. 6) is the most impressive such attempt on record. Its result was not knowledge of God but persecution of God’s Son (Acts 9:4–5). Confidence in the flesh is the fallen instinct to secure standing by pedigree and performance, and circumcision detached from faith became its most respectable form.

Redemption. God did not abandon the demand for righteousness; he supplied it. To Abraham he gave a righteousness by faith before any work and sealed it with a sign (Genesis 15:6; 17:11; Romans 4:11). Through the prophets he promised a heart-circumcision, a Spirit within, and a people who would all know him (Deuteronomy 30:6; Ezekiel 36:26–27; Jeremiah 31:34). In the fullness of time he sent his Son, “born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), who rendered the obedience Adam failed to render and bore the curse the law pronounced (Galatians 3:13; Romans 5:19). Christ’s death is the end of every righteousness of one’s own, and his resurrection is God’s declaration that his righteousness is accepted and available (Romans 4:25). The righteousness “from God that depends on faith” (v. 9) is this righteousness, credited to those united to Christ. With it comes the fulfilment of the promises: the Spirit is poured out, the heart is circumcised, and a people of Jew and Gentile is constituted as “the circumcision” (v. 3). The Christian life that follows is life in union with the crucified and risen Lord, “sharing his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (v. 10), because the pattern of the Head is reproduced in the members.

Consummation. The passage ends looking forward: “the resurrection from the dead” (v. 11). The righteousness received by faith is already complete, but its public vindication and the redemption of the body await the day when Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (3:21). Here is the already and not yet of the whole pericope. Already, believers are found in Christ, righteous, worshipping by the Spirit, knowing him; not yet, they are raised, and so they still suffer, still count loss, still press on. The knowledge of Christ that is now of surpassing worth will then be face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12), and the two righteousnesses will be finally distinguished when the dogs are outside the city and the bride is clothed in linen (Revelation 19:8; 22:15). Paul’s testimony, then, is a small model of the whole story: created to know God, fallen into self-righteousness, redeemed by a righteousness not his own, and awaiting the resurrection in which knowing Christ will be complete.

Systematic Theology Connection

Justification by Faith Alone

How the passage teaches it. Philippians 3:9 is among the clearest statements of the doctrine in Scripture. Paul sets two righteousnesses in opposition: “a righteousness of my own that comes from the law” and “the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” The first is disowned entirely; the second is received “through faith in Christ.” The righteousness by which Paul hopes to be “found in him” on the last day is not produced by him, improved by him, or supplemented by him; it originates with God and is received by faith. Paul’s own record, “blameless,” is not weighed and found slightly short; it is set aside as “loss” and “rubbish.” Justification is therefore not God’s recognition of a righteousness within us but his gift of a righteousness outside us, credited to us in Christ.

Confessional statement. The Westminster Confession of Faith 11.1 teaches that God justifies those whom he effectually calls “not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself … or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness by faith.” The Shorter Catechism Q. 33 summarises: justification is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”

Practical implications. Assurance rests on Christ’s finished righteousness, not on the believer’s changing performance; the justified may approach God with confidence and without pretence. Self-righteousness is exposed as the most dangerous religious posture, precisely because it looks like devotion. Faith is kept in its place as an instrument, so that no one boasts in believing.

Scripture cross-references. Romans 3:21–28; 4:1–8; 5:1, 19; 10:3–4; Galatians 2:16; 3:10–14; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Titus 3:5–7; Isaiah 61:10; Genesis 15:6; Habakkuk 2:4.

Union with Christ

How the passage teaches it. Every benefit in the passage is located “in him.” Paul’s aim is to “gain Christ and be found in him” (vv. 8–9); the righteousness he receives is the righteousness of those who are in Christ; the life that follows is knowing “him,” sharing “his” sufferings, being conformed to “his” death, and attaining the resurrection that is first “his” (vv. 10–11). Union with Christ is thus the frame within which justification, sanctification, and glorification are held together: the believer receives Christ’s righteousness because he is joined to Christ, is conformed to Christ’s death because Christ’s life is being reproduced in him, and will rise because the risen One is his Head. The passage does not present these as separate transactions but as aspects of one relationship, knowing Christ.

Confessional statement. The Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 66 defines union with Christ as “the work of God’s grace, whereby they are spiritually and mystically, yet really and inseparably, joined to Christ as their head and husband,” and Q. 69 teaches that from this union flows communion in grace, “their partaking of the virtue of his mediation, in their justification, adoption, sanctification, and whatever else, in this life, manifests their union with him.” The Confession 26.1 adds that all saints united to Christ “have fellowship with him in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory.”

Practical implications. The Christian does not relate to Christ as a distant benefactor but as a Head to whom he is joined; every benefit is received in him and never apart from him. Suffering is understood as fellowship rather than abandonment. Justification and sanctification cannot be separated, since both flow from the one union, so that free justification never becomes licence and pursuit of holiness never becomes merit.

Scripture cross-references. John 15:1–5; Romans 6:3–11; 8:1, 17; 1 Corinthians 1:30; 2 Corinthians 5:17, 21; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 1:3–14; Colossians 2:11–13; 3:1–4.

The Church as the True Circumcision

How the passage teaches it. “We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh” (v. 3). Paul claims for a largely Gentile congregation the title of the covenant people, and defines that people not by descent or by the physical sign but by three marks: Spirit-empowered worship, boasting in Christ, and renunciation of the flesh. The church is therefore not a new religion beside Israel nor a replacement for Israel but the fulfilment of Israel’s own promise, the heart-circumcised people whom God pledged to create (Deuteronomy 30:6). The old sign has given way to the reality it signified, and to insist on the sign as a condition of belonging is now to fall back into “mutilation” (v. 2).

Confessional statement. The Westminster Confession 7.5–6 teaches that the one covenant of grace was administered under the law “by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances,” all “fore-signifying Christ to come,” and under the gospel “with more fulness, evidence, and spiritual efficacy,” so that there are “not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same.” The Confession 25.2 identifies the visible church as “the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God,” and 28.1 describes baptism as the sign of “ingrafting into Christ,” the new covenant counterpart of the old sign. The Larger Catechism Q. 34 states that the covenant was administered under the Old Testament by types “which did all fore-signify Christ then to come.”

Practical implications. Believers, Jew and Gentile, are heirs of the whole Old Testament as their own family history. Church identity rests on the Spirit, Christ, and faith, not on ethnicity, tradition, or ritual precision. Covenant signs, baptism and the Supper, are honoured as God’s ordinances but never trusted as the ground of standing.

Scripture cross-references. Genesis 17:9–14; Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4; Romans 2:28–29; 4:9–12; 11:17–24; Galatians 3:7–9, 26–29; 6:15–16; Ephesians 2:11–22; Colossians 2:11–12; 1 Peter 2:9–10.

Total Depravity and the Bankruptcy of the Flesh

How the passage teaches it. The doctrine that fallen humanity is wholly unable to commend itself to God is taught here not by a description of gross sin but by the failure of the best case. Paul’s pedigree and performance (vv. 4–6) represent the highest attainment of religious humanity: covenant birth, pure lineage, strict training, burning zeal, blameless observance. His verdict on all of it, once Christ is seen, is “loss” and “rubbish” (vv. 7–8). “Confidence in the flesh” (vv. 3–4) names the depravity that hides in religion: not the absence of morality but trust in it. The flesh cannot produce a righteousness that stands before God; its best product is a blameless persecutor of the church. Depravity, then, reaches even our righteousness, and no amount of it is a ground of standing.

Confessional statement. The Westminster Confession 6.4 teaches that from original corruption “we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good,” and 16.5 that “we cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God,” since “as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection.” The Confession 16.7 adds that works done by unregenerate men, though they may be things God commands, “cannot please God” as grounds of acceptance. The Larger Catechism Q. 25 describes the corruption of our nature as making us “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite unto all that is spiritually good.”

Practical implications. The most religious people, including ourselves, are as dependent on grace as the most irreligious. Evangelism of the devout must aim not at more devotion but at the exposure of misplaced confidence. Reformed churches, rich in heritage and doctrine, must be especially watchful against the flesh in its orthodox costume.

Scripture cross-references. Isaiah 64:6; Jeremiah 17:9; Romans 3:9–20; 7:7–13; 8:7–8; 10:2–3; Galatians 1:13–14; Ephesians 2:1–3; Luke 18:9–14.

Sanctification as Conformity to Christ’s Death and Resurrection

How the passage teaches it. Verse 10 describes the Christian life after justification as knowing Christ in “the power of his resurrection,” “sharing his sufferings,” and “becoming like him in his death.” The participle “becoming like” is present and passive: an ongoing work done in the believer by God, conforming him to the pattern of Christ’s dying. Sanctification is therefore not a program of self-improvement but the outworking of union with Christ, in which the believer’s old self is put to death and the risen life of Christ is manifested, and it is powered not by the believer’s resolve but by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. The order of the verse, power before suffering, shows that grace precedes and enables the believer’s dying to self.

Confessional statement. The Westminster Confession 13.1 teaches that those effectually called and regenerated “are further sanctified, really and personally, through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them,” so that “the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified.” The Shorter Catechism Q. 35 defines sanctification as “the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.” The Larger Catechism Q. 75 locates this renewal in the Spirit’s “applying the death and resurrection of Christ.”

Practical implications. Holiness is pursued by drawing on Christ’s resurrection power, not by willpower alone. Suffering received in obedience is a means of conformity to Christ rather than a sign of his absence. Mortification of sin is a daily dying that is possible only because the believer has already died and risen with Christ.

Scripture cross-references. Romans 6:1–14; 8:11–13, 29; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:10–11; Galatians 2:20; 5:24; Colossians 3:1–10; 1 Peter 2:21–24; 4:1–2, 13.

The Resurrection of the Body

How the passage teaches it. The pericope ends with Paul’s hope to “attain the resurrection from the dead” (v. 11). The word exanastasis, “resurrection out from,” and the phrase “from the dead” point to the bodily resurrection of believers at Christ’s return, which the chapter will describe as the transformation of “our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (3:20–21). Paul’s whole present life, counting loss, sharing sufferings, being conformed to Christ’s death, is oriented toward this future event. The knowledge of Christ that begins now in union with the risen One is completed then in a body raised like his. “If by any means possible” expresses humble diligence about the path, not doubt about the goal; the resurrection is the sure end of those found in Christ.

Confessional statement. The Westminster Confession 32.2–3 teaches that “at the last day … all the dead shall be raised up with the self-same bodies, and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls for ever,” and that “the bodies of the just, by his Spirit, [shall be raised] unto honour, and be made conformable to his own glorious body.” The Larger Catechism Q. 87 adds that believers “being then again united to their souls for ever, shall be raised up by the Spirit of Christ, and by virtue of his resurrection as their head.”

Practical implications. Christian hope is bodily and concrete, not a vague survival of the soul. Present suffering and loss are bearable because they are oriented toward a morning of rising. Believers may speak of their own death with humility about its manner and certainty about its outcome.

Scripture cross-references. Job 19:25–27; Psalm 16:9–11; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2; John 5:28–29; 11:25–26; Romans 8:11, 23; 1 Corinthians 15:20–23, 42–49; 2 Corinthians 4:14; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; 1 John 3:2.

Reformed Theology

Reformed theology reads Philippians 3:1–11 as one of the great charter texts of the gospel of grace, and it does so within the framework of the one covenant of grace administered differently under law and gospel. Paul’s claim that the church “is the circumcision” (v. 3) is not, in Reformed reading, a replacement of Israel but the maturing of Israel: the covenant made with Abraham, sealed by a sign that pointed to a righteousness by faith, has reached the fulness the sign anticipated. Geerhardus Vos taught that the old covenant’s ordinances were “shadows” whose whole meaning lay in the coming reality, and Meredith Kline stressed that circumcision was a sign of consecration and of the cutting-off curse that Christ himself bore. On this reading, the Judaizers’ error was not that they valued circumcision but that they were living in the wrong epoch of redemptive history, demanding the shadow after the substance had come. The heart-circumcision promised in Deuteronomy 30:6 and Jeremiah 4:4, accomplished by the Spirit, is what marks the covenant people now, and baptism has taken the sign’s place as the seal of ingrafting into Christ.

At the centre of the passage stands justification by faith alone, and Reformed exegesis has always treated verse 9 as decisive. Calvin comments that Paul renounces his own righteousness not because it was worthless by human standards but because the righteousness of faith and the righteousness of works cannot stand together. The righteousness that justifies is ek theou, from God, received dia pisteōs, through faith, resting epi tē pistei, on faith; faith is the instrument and not the ground, and the righteousness is Christ’s, imputed, alien. This is the doctrine the Westminster Confession expounds in chapter 11 and the pastoral heart of the Reformation. R. C. Sproul insisted that the whole controversy of the sixteenth century could be stated in the difference between a righteousness in us and a righteousness for us, and Philippians 3:9 is the text where Paul states that difference in his own voice.

Reformed theology also insists that justification is never alone in the person justified, and the passage supports this by moving without a break from verse 9 to verse 10. Sinclair Ferguson has emphasised that all the benefits of salvation are received in union with Christ, so that the same union that gives the believer Christ’s righteousness also conforms him to Christ’s death and resurrection. Sanctification is not a second, separate gift but the outworking of the one union, powered by the Spirit of the risen Christ. John Piper draws from verses 7–8 the principle that self-denial is fuelled by seeing Christ as surpassing gain; loss is light where Christ is precious.

The passage also exhibits the typological reach of the story: Phinehas’s zeal and Saul of Benjamin are echoed in the zealous Saul of Tarsus, whose conversion overturns the type; the two righteousnesses of verse 9 restate the contrast of Leviticus 18:5 and Habakkuk 2:4; and the dying-and-rising pattern of verses 10–11 is the pattern of the Head reproduced in the body. G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson both stress that the “already and not yet” governs the whole: righteousness is already possessed, resurrection is not yet attained, and the Christian life is lived in the tension between them. Paul’s “if by any means possible” (v. 11) is, for Reformed readers, no threat to the doctrine of perseverance; it is the humility of a man who trusts God rather than himself even for his own arrival, and who knows that the God who began the good work will complete it (1:6).

Dispensational Theology

Dispensational interpreters agree with Reformed readers on the central doctrines of this passage, justification by faith apart from works, the sufficiency of Christ’s righteousness, and the bodily resurrection of believers, and they read verses 7–11 as a model of Christian devotion. C. I. Scofield treated verse 9 as a classic statement of imputed righteousness, and Charles Ryrie cited it to distinguish the righteousness God provides from any righteousness humans achieve. John Walvoord emphasised that the “resurrection from the dead” (v. 11) is the resurrection of believers, distinct in time and character from the general resurrection of the unsaved, and consistent with the premillennial scheme in which the church is raised at the rapture before the tribulation and the millennial kingdom. On the personal application of the passage, counting all as loss for Christ, dispensational preaching has been as fervent as any.

The chief divergence concerns verse 3. Where Reformed theology reads “we are the circumcision” as the church’s inheritance of Israel’s covenant identity, classic dispensationalism, committed to a consistent literal hermeneutic and to a permanent distinction between Israel and the church, reads the phrase as a spiritual metaphor rather than a transfer of covenant status. Ryrie held that the church is a distinct body, begun at Pentecost, with its own calling, and that the promises made to national Israel, land, kingdom, and Davidic throne, remain to be fulfilled literally to ethnic Israel in the millennium. On this view, Paul’s “we are the circumcision” affirms that believers possess the spiritual reality (a circumcised heart) without implying that the church has become Israel or inherited Israel’s national promises. Pentecost similarly insisted that spiritual blessings shared by the church do not cancel the distinct earthly program for Israel described in the prophets and in Romans 11.

Progressive dispensationalism, represented by Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, has moved closer to Reformed readings. It affirms that the new covenant is inaugurated now in the church, that Jew and Gentile share equally in its spiritual blessings, and that Paul’s language in verse 3 describes genuine participation in the covenant promises. It still maintains that a future national restoration of Israel is part of the not-yet, so that the church’s present enjoyment of new covenant blessing does not exhaust the promises.

Dispensational readers also give particular attention to Paul’s pedigree in verses 5–6 as evidence that Paul remained ethnically and consciously a Jew, an “Israelite” (Romans 11:1), and to his “loss” of these things as a renunciation of confidence in them rather than of Jewish identity itself; this is used to argue that Jewish believers today retain a distinct place within the one body. They emphasise, too, that the Judaizing error of verse 2 was a confusion of dispensations, the attempt to impose the Mosaic economy on the age of grace, and that a clear distinction between the dispensations of law and grace is the surest safeguard against legalism. Both traditions therefore find in this passage a warning against confidence in the flesh and a call to know Christ, while differing over whether the “circumcision” of verse 3 is a fulfilment of Israel’s identity or a spiritual blessing enjoyed alongside a still-distinct Israel.

Bibliography

Commentaries

  • Calvin, John. Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians; and to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. Translated by John Pringle. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1851.
  • Carson, D. A. Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.
  • Fee, Gordon D. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
  • Hendriksen, William. Exposition of Philippians. New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1962.
  • Henry, Matthew. Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible. Vol. 6. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991.
  • Lightfoot, J. B. Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. London: Macmillan, 1868.
  • O’Brien, Peter T. The Epistle to the Philippians. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
  • Poole, Matthew. A Commentary on the Holy Bible. Vol. 3. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1985.
  • Silva, Moisés. Philippians. 2nd ed. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

Theological and Devotional Works

  • Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Dogmatics. Vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008.
  • Beale, G. K. A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011.
  • Ferguson, Sinclair B. The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance. Wheaton: Crossway, 2016.
  • Ferguson, Sinclair B. Let’s Study Philippians. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997.
  • Kline, Meredith G. By Oath Consigned: A Reinterpretation of the Covenant Signs of Circumcision and Baptism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968.
  • Piper, John. Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011.
  • Sproul, R. C. Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995.
  • Spurgeon, Charles H. The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit. London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1861–1917.
  • Vos, Geerhardus. Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948.
  • Warfield, B. B. The Person and Work of Christ. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950.

Dispensational Works

  • Blaising, Craig A., and Darrell L. Bock. Progressive Dispensationalism. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993.
  • Pentecost, J. Dwight. Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1958.
  • Ryrie, Charles C. Dispensationalism. Rev. ed. Chicago: Moody, 2007.
  • Scofield, C. I., ed. The Scofield Reference Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1917.
  • Walvoord, John F. The Church in Prophecy. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1964.

Confessional Standards

  • The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647).
  • The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648).
  • The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648).

Scripture

  • The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton: Crossway, 2016.

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