Be Still And Know

Philippians 3:8–9 Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as the person “who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. His observation well describes our cynical society today. It often takes a serious illness or an accident for people to start looking hard at what is most valuable in life. Here the apostle Paul was running through this exercise for himself. His detractors said that what mattered most was obeying the Jewish law and his answer was that if they wanted to play that game then he was the runaway winner. He was circumcised on the eighth day of his life as every little Jewish boy should be. He came from the favoured tribe of Benjamin so he was, as he described himself, “a real Hebrew if ever there was one” (v5)! He was also trained as a Pharisee and was so comm