TL;DR: In this sermon, preached October 4, 2026, at First Christian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, Loren Richmond Jr. reflects on Philippians 3:4–14 and our fear of being found out as less faithful, righteous, or capable than we appear. Rather than working harder to “look the part,” Paul points us toward the faithfulness of Christ. We can press on not because we will never be found lacking, but because Christ has made us his own and is already at work within us.
Philippians 3:4-14 NRSV
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. 8More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 12Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Excited for a new shirt
Have you ever had an item of clothing, perhaps a new shirt, a jacket, an outfit that you’re really excited to wear on a first day of school, first day of work, for a social event, only for that outfit to be spoiled before you could get to events.
When I was growing up, in my family money was kind of tight, so shopping at second-hand stores or getting hand-me-downs was a fairly regular occurrence. Now I didn’t really know any different, so it didn’t really bother me. That is until one day in fifth grade.
I attended a Christian school where my mom taught, and another family, perhaps knowing we could use them, offered us some hand-me-down clothes.
Again, I had nothing against hand-me-downs, and for me the excitement of getting something new, whether it was technically new or just new to me, overwrote any sorts of unease I might have about it belonging previously to someone else.
And in this particular bag I found a real treasure.
A crisp white Colorado t-shirt.
I remember it.
I remember seeing it had Colorado emblazoned across the front, I think in turquoise letters with perhaps a mountain background, but best of all, it was my size.
So I grabbed it and I was excited to put it into my drawer, in my dresser drawer, and put it into my weekly rotation of wearing to school. A few days later I put it on and I felt proud. I felt confident.
I felt like I looked the part.
Then at recess, a girl walked up to me and said:
That used to be my shirt.
Every bit of confidence left my body.
I didn’t know whether she had told anyone else, but honestly it did not matter.
Fifth grade me had just discovered that the shirt I had proudly worn to school had been once a girl’s shirt. No offense. Girls, females in the room.
Somehow, somehow, I made it through the rest of the day. I went home and I took off the shirt and I stuffed it deep into the recesses of my dresser.
Never, never to be worn again.
The thing I had been proud and excited to wear had suddenly become a source of shame and embarrassment. The shirt itself had not changed.
What changed was that I had been found out.
For a few hours I felt confident, I felt like I belonged, I felt like I looked the part. Then one sentence changed something, exposed something that I did not know I was hiding.
That used to be my shirt.
Have you ever experienced something like that?
Have you ever worked hard to appear confident, qualified, worthy, all while fearing that someone might expose you or discover you as lacking?
What if someone sees through the surface? What if someone finds me as lacking?
What if I’m found out?
Looking the Part
The same fear I think can creep into our Christian faith.
Growing up myself as a conservative Christian, I learned that looking the part often meant being a good kid. Not cussing, not listening to secular music, certainly not smoking or drinking. Being a good Christian meant not doing certain things.
But beneath all those rules was a fear of being found out.
What if I made a mistake? What if I did something wrong? What if people discover that I’m not nearly as good as I’m trying to be?
Now that I find myself more often in progressive Christian contexts, the expectations may be different, but I think the fear is remarkably similar.
Looking the part can mean using the right language, supporting the right causes, condemning certain actions. And once again, the fear is being found out.
Except now, when your fifth grade classmate walks up to you and says, “That used to be my shirt,” she’s not just telling you.
She’s also taking a video of it and blasting it all over the internet for you to be publicly shamed.
You may not be merely found out, you might be publicly also called out.
What if I say the wrong thing? What if I’ve not kept up with the right language? What if people discover that I am not on the right side of an issue?
In one version of Christianity we fear being exposed as sinners, in another version of Christianity we fear being exposed as being on the wrong side.
I think the expectations are different, but I think that the anxiety is remarkably similar.
What if people discover that I’m not nearly as good, faithful, or righteous as I’m trying to appear?
We work so hard to look the part, I think, because we’re afraid of being found out.
Now again, the point is not that avoiding destructive behavior is bad, nor is the point that pursuing justice is unfaithful. The problem is when we expect those things to establish our righteousness, to assure us that we’re good enough on our own.
Because there will always be another rule to follow, there will always be another statement to make, there will always be another way to be found lacking.
And no matter how good the appearance becomes, the fear remains:
What happens if I am found out?
Paul Looked the Part
The Apostle Paul was writing, as I read this morning, to a group of early Christians. In the passage we read, he’s pushing back against some teachers who insisted that following Jesus meant looking the part through practices such as circumcision.
In verse 2, before the section we read this morning, Paul is actually suggesting that such practices can become destructive.
Paul then lists all the ways he looks the part. He came from the right family, he went to the right schools, he advocated for all the right causes.
If anyone’s credentials could withstand scrutiny, it was the Apostle Paul’s. If anyone could be confident that they would not be found lacking, it was Paul.
Yet he said that none of those credentials could give him what he found in Christ.
Compared with knowing Christ, Paul considered it all rubbish.
Looking the part could establish Paul’s reputation, but it could not establish his righteousness. What mattered to him was gaining Christ, knowing Christ, and sharing in Christ’s suffering.
But if we’re not careful, we can turn even this into yet another requirement, a religious performance, another way of looking the part.
We can stop trying to look righteous through the law and instead begin trying to look righteous through the strength of our faith.
But still the same fear remains.
Have I believed strongly enough? Have I been faithful enough?
But what if I am still found lacking?
The Faith of Christ
And this is where another reading of the text I think becomes intriguing.
In verse nine, the NRSV in the footnotes suggests that the passage that the righteousness comes not from the law but through faith in Christ.
Now again, I think at first glance this can sound like yet another requirement. Now I need to believe hard enough. I need to have enough faith.
And once again, how do I prove that I have enough faith?
Through my own actions.
But as the footnote in the NRSV suggests, that same phrase can also be translated, the faith of Christ.
And I think this is helpful, at least to me, because it is so easy for me to read what follows as yet another encouragement for me to press on, to try harder, to look the part, to not be found out.
Now, to be clear, faith in Christ is not a wrong translation, but many of us have been taught, including myself, to hear Christian faith primarily in terms of our own efforts.
Like I remember seeing Philippians 3:14 as motivational posters at my Christian school posted on the wall.
I press on towards the goal.
The message I received was kind of simple.
Work harder.
Keep trying, become a better Christian.
Not bad things per se. But Paul says that his righteousness comes neither from following the law or from believing hard enough.
It comes through the faithfulness of Christ and what Christ has already accomplished.
Now this may seem like a small distinction, but I think it changes so much.
Because if righteousness depends on our actions, on our ability to perform, our ability to press on, then Paul is simply exchanging one set of rules for another.
And we are left with the same exhausting fear that we might eventually be found lacking.
But our participation in Christ does not depend on our own efforts alone. It begins with Christ’s faithful action already completed within us and at work within us.
How does this happen though? How does this happen within us?
How does the life of Christ become active within our lives?
Permeation
Again, as I shared when I was growing up in church, I heard Paul’s instructions to press on as another way of looking the part.
Growing up Baptist, we would have never said that salvation is something we had to earn.
But sometimes we lived as if we need to prove that we were truly Christian and to make sure we were never found out otherwise.
Like I don’t think this is what Paul is saying. He’s not telling us to try harder to look the part.
As one commentator writes, God’s agency accompanies and interpenetrates human agency.
Another source describes this like:
Permeation.
Permeation is what happens when a fluid spreads through and penetrates something, sort of like a wood stain.
A good wood stain does not merely rest on the surface. That’s paint.
A wood stain moves through something and throughout something and soaks in.
And I think this image can help us grasp what Paul is saying here.
Christ’s faithfulness is not merely painted over us, the life of Christ is now at work within us.
Our righteousness does not depend on maintaining surface appearance.
Christ has made us his own, and the life of Christ is now permeating our lives. Christ is at work within us, beneath the surface, transforming us from within.
And to me, this is really good news.
Because we may be afraid that once the layers of our surface level are pulled back, we will be exposed as lacking, our inadequacies will be exposed.
And while beneath the surface there will be imperfections, blemishes, knots even.
God’s grace is not a paint that can be simply peeled away.
God’s grace has soaked into the grains of our lives.
And when the surface is stripped away, what is revealed is not our imperfections. What is revealed is Christ already at work within us.
Christ has made us his own.
Christ is permeating our lives.
And this is why pressing on is not another religious performance. We’re not manufacturing faithfulness. Christ is producing faithfulness within us.
And because Christ is still at work within us, we are still in process.
On the Other Side of the Door
As Dennis shared, I work as a part-time hospital chaplain. Every Thursday evening I walk the halls of St. Anthony North Hospital in Westminster, Colorado as a chaplain.
Now as someone who is fairly introverted, how about the other chaplains in the room? But speaking for myself, walking into a room of strangers is not something I enjoy at all.
But I am helped by the fact that I somewhat look the part.
From when I began my chaplaincy training, even as recently as a month ago, I am sometimes mistaken for a doctor.
Now certainly that reflects some measure of privilege, but I will take whatever help I can get.
Because for me, walking into a room full of strangers, dealing with pain, suffering, and trauma is not my idea of a good time whatsoever.
And it’s even more so scary when the door is closed.
There’s something about an open door that makes the whole thing feel far more invited. When the door’s open, again I don’t know about y’all here, but when the door is open, you know, I can kinda walk by, peek inside, get a sense of what’s going on in the room.
And if I really need to, I can take another lap around the unit to work up some courage to go in.
And then I can walk in.
But when the door is closed, that is like an entirely different story.
Most of us here, and obviously our fellow chaplains, have spent some time in the hospital. And I don’t know about you, but I imagine that if hospital doors are anything like they are in Colorado here, they can be quite imposing, especially when they’re closed.
And my job requires me to walk up to one of those closed doors, knowing only the slightest bit about what might be happening on the other side of that door, and enter in the hope of offering some measure of spiritual support.
A few weeks ago I was paged to support a family after death.
It was about ten thirty at night, and I had just begun settling down into the sleep room. I changed clothes, I think I was sitting in bed, and all of a sudden the pager went off.
Beep, beep, beep.
Something like that, right?
I called the nurse and learned that someone had just passed.
Put my clothes back on, walked upstairs, and checked in at the nurse’s station. The nurse pointed me towards the room.
And sure enough, closed door.
Say some portion of the prayer of Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
I rub some sanitizer on my hands, I knocked, and I slowly enter.
“Hello, my name is Loren. I’m a chaplain here. I’m sorry for your loss and I’m here to support you in any way I can and offer you some guidance as you navigate the next steps.”
Part of, for me, what makes that closed door so intimidating is the fear of being found out.
What if I don’t know what to say? What if I can’t provide what this family needs? What if I’m not as capable or qualified as my badge makes me appear?
Looking the part does me very little good once I cross the threshold.
A badge, title, or professional appearance cannot itself give comfort to a grieving family. The closed door strips away the appearance and exposes my own limitations too.
But I think it also reveals something else.
That I don’t enter that room alone.
I trust that Christ is already at work within me and that God is already present on the other side of that door.
I’m not carrying God into that room.
I’m entering a room where God is already at work.
And that knowledge and certainty alone gives me confidence to enter quite scary rooms.
Just this past Thursday, I walked into a room, thankfully in this case, it was the ED and the doors were clear, so I could see a sense of what was happening.
But into that room I walked into a young man writhing in the bed as he was strapped down.
Yet I walked in not trusting my own appearance or my own capacities, but that I carried Christ with me and that Christ was already active within that room.
Certainly looking the part gets me to the door.
But it cannot carry me through the door.
What carries me through is not the confidence that I will never be found lacking.
What carries me through is the promise that Christ is already at work both within me and within that room.
And the trust that when my limitations are exposed, as they most certainly will be, Christ will still be at work both within me and within that room.
Because Christ has made me his own.
Christ is already at work within me, and God is waiting on the other side.
And that’s what I believe it means to press on.
We press on not because we look the part.
We press on not because we will never be found lacking.
We press on because Christ has made us his own, and Christ is already at work within us.
Thanks be to God, thanks be to God for this unspeakable gift.