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Wednesday November 4, 2026

You are an adult, be one.

“Paul finally puts these three stages of our relationship with God into the words of his own personal experience in perhaps the richest and profoundest outline of the spiritual pilgrimage ever written in a few short sentences, in his Philippians letter (3:7-11).

In place of the vanity of his self-righteousness, he has now found Christ’s rightesouness (v. 7). This was infancy. To know Christ excelling all else as his indwelling Lord so captured him that from henceforth it was to be all for all. This was adolescence (v. 8). At first the transference was painful, he ‘suffered the loss of all things.’ Then a change began. What once seemed costly to lose now became offensive to think of maintaining. A great reversal, and the change was from interest in a Christ who was a benefit to him, to interest in a Christ to whom he should be a benefit, or at least a sharer of and collaborator in His interests.

That he might ‘win Christ’ because his ambition. To win a person is to gain an entrance into his inner heart where he can freely share his most intimate interests with you. Christ’s interests are the redemption of the world, so Paul moves with Christ from being redeemed to being a co-redeemer. He secures himself en route by stating (v. 9) that this is not to be sought or gained by his own self-effort, but is as much and only at the disposal of appropriating faith as were all his former benefits through Christ. But this now meant for him, in the power of a personal resurrection by which the Spirit of self-giving was joined to Him, that he shared with Him the vicarious sufferings unto death as a co-savior, which would result in a resurrection not merely of his own body, but, as with Jesus, bringing many sons unto glory.

It was the same in the life of Jesus on earth. His infancy and adolescence were completed when the Holy Spirit came on Him at His baptism and drove Him into the wilderness to settle it once for all, under the fires of temptation, that He was not for self but for God. He had ‘graduated.’ From that moment onward, everything that happened to Him was in no case for His benefit, for His maturing, for His testing. It was all in every detail something for others. There was no other meaning to every incident, without exception. And so with us. Now in our adult life not one incident, not one situation, is related to something for our benefit or trial or enlargement; it is wholly for God’s saving purposes by us in others.”

Taken from: The Spontaneous You

By Norman Grubb

Pages 91-93