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Good morning. Have you uh ever passed a reader board that you just can't forget some of them good . Some of them bad that you just can't get them out of, out of your mind. Uh

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There was a, um, church reader board when I was growing up that we passed often as a family and as you know, church reader boards are the worst. And I'm sorry if you were the

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person who, who replaces the letters on your church reader board. But, um, some of the signs that we passed became family lore. We uh we once passed the, the sign of this church

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that shall remain nameless that uh that said come to the hanging of the greens. And my dad dryly remarked, I, I, I wonder what the greens did to deserve hanging either way. It's not

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a church I want to visit. Um, Austin is the home of uh some epic reader boards. As you may be aware, maybe the most famous being the uh restaurant El Arroyo. Have you,

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have you seen the reader boards for Arroyo? Um where the Py sings on the reader board are, are probably better than the tacos, but Um But they're so good that they inspire uh books uh in

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, in collection. And I even have a Christmas ornament that hangs on my, on my tree. That's an Arroyo reader board sign. If you haven't seen some of these, there are thousands of them

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but, but some of them go like this. Uh My favorite childhood memory is having energy. I , I feel that I need to teach my facial expressions how to use their inside voice. Some of

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us suffer from that. I'm so tired of babysitting my mom's grandkids. Think about that one for a while. Uh My personal favorite, I don't always whoop. But when I do there, it is

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uh it's a good thing that farting isn't contagious like yawning, especially in, in this company, right ? Like uh don't want yawning to uh to happen and turn into something else or in the midst of

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the pandemic. One of my favorite Arroyo signs was if you're ugly with pretty eyes, this is your moment and uh I'll leave you with one more uh wisdom for the ages. There is no angry way

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to say bubbles. Try it sometime. It's just impossible. But the reader board sign I most often dwell on wasn't from the El Arroyo. Uh In fact, I can't remember what business it was even

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at this point, but I remember passing it uh in my early twenties and it simply said this life is a story. But how do you tell yours . Life is a story. But how do you

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tell yours? And the implication isn't just that life is a story, but there are different ways to tell your unique story and actually started to make it a point in my ministry with kids to sit down

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with them when I first got to know them and , and be like, so what's, what's your story? Because I wanted to listen, not just to the facts of their lives, but specifically the

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way that they narrated their lives, I could ask them where they went to school and how old they were and all those things. But I wanted to understand how they narrated their lives. To ask someone

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to tell their story is to ask who they are . What defines your values and your hopes. Where did you come from and where are you going? What's your story? And how any of this relates

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to our passage from Philippians three this morning? Is this that I believe that Paul, what he's doing here is telling his readers that the way they tell their stories along with their values and hopes and future

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needs to be refigured. This passage starts with Paul saying if anyone else has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more. And what Paul is about to launch into here is this laundry list

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of definers, a list of the things that have defined his story, the kinds of things Paul is about to list here is what British theologian David Ford , in his book, Self and Salvation has called

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The Knots of Life. The Knots of life events and accomplishments, people, relationships happenings after which the strands of life from beginning to end are changed. And there's a knot in the trajectory of your life

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. It makes sense. Ford's Ford writes to talk about events and occurrences in our lives where significant strands of life converge so as to affect the shape of our history decisively, some events are more important than

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others. He continues and this is a real quote , marrying my wife being more significant than dropping my pencil end quote. Now, his example is a bit extreme. But it makes the point though.

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I doubt that senti sentiment would uh play well on an anniversary card. Uh Marrying you has been more important than dropping my pencil. But, but his point is that there are things that happen in our

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lives, right? These knots in life where our life is tied into a knot where we remember it and it's never the same when we have births and graduations and relationships, joyous things that happen in our

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lives, then they are nuts where all the threads of our life are tied together. But knots can also be less joyous things after which life is no longer the same death. The end of a relationship

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, trauma, moving away from friends, our lives have a beginning and they have an end and it's through the knots along the way that we're able to tell our stories, to understand who we are,

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to understand where we've come from and where we're going . And so here in Philippians, three Paul lists out the knots in his life. These were the knots through which Paul had once told his life story

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. And these things had been incredibly valuable to him , though, to our modern gentile ears, they sound rather foreign. If anyone else has reasons to be confident in the flesh, I have more circumcised

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. 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 as to zeal a persecutor of the church as

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to righteousness under the law blameless. Well, again , it's difficult for us to understand why Paul might be so proud of these knots of life. That's not the perspective of his first readers. It's not

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the perspective they would have had. Many of them would have been stunned by what he is about to say that he has come to consider these things rubbish . But nevertheless, these were the knots of Paul's

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life. And again, knots can be good knots . Happy knots, bad knots, traumatic knots. When I met Sarah, she was 14 and her life was already full of knots. Some of you

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who have heard me preach before have heard me speak about, about Sarah and some of the knots that she had in her life, these knots uh had become things through which she told her story and through

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which she understood who she was and where she was going. Sarah's defining knot was that she had been repeatedly abused by a friend of her older brother over a period of multiple years. And when she finally

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told her parents what was happening, they stopped inviting the boy over. But because he came from a prominent family in the community, they swept the whole matter under the rug and they told Sarah to forget

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about it and that it was now the past. But for Sarah, it wasn't the past. It was knots knots in her life. And by the time I met Sarah, the knot of abuse had

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come to define every other knot along the way on the rope of her life, it defined where she came from and where she saw herself going. When I asked her what she wanted for her future,

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she looked at me and then all seriousness said future . I don't have any future. I'm just gonna live alone with cats. That was the only feature she could imagine for herself because the knot of abuse

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had come to define all the knots that had been tied already and any that she could imagine. For her future. In the past several decades, psychologists have begun to talk about the idea of narrative identity

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theory. Narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or her life. Your narrative identity is essentially the way that you tell the

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story of who you are by arranging both past events and your imagined future into a story that you can tell of yourselves. And you can tell others as well about where you've been and where you believe your

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life is going. People begin to put lives into narrative form in adolescence. But the process of narrative identity continues on across the lifespan. From adolescence. On what I find particularly interesting about narrative identity is

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that one's anticipated future. One's personal eschatology of sorts strongly influences the way that past events and the entire story are told at the same time, past events can often deeply influence our anticipated future. In other

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words, the past events of our lives can determine what we think is where we're headed and where we think our lives are headed can in turn be read back upon past events. And this can become a

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hopeful cycle or it can in Sarah's case, become a vicious cycle. Ultimately, our autobiographical narrative, the story we tell of ourselves, our personal identity becomes controlled by a knot that gives meaning to all

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the other knots. This is quite literally the knot of knots and while Sarah needed justice and she needed counseling and therapy, one of the things she needed the most was a new way to understand her story

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for the knot of abuse had become her knot of knots. The not defined all the others and controlled what all the others meant. Let's move back to Paul for a moment. What Paul talks about in

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verses seven through 11 in this passage is a change of his story or what modern psychologists would term a shift in his autobiographical narrative. But notice that this doesn't happen through the untying of knots. He can't

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undo the fact fact that he was circumcised on the eighth day or that he was a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Those are knots that will always be in Paul's past. Nor is there a shift

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in Paul's identity by forgetting some portion of his story ? He doesn't hide or try to forget the knots of his life. He calls out the fact that he'd been a persecutor of the church rather he has

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come to a radical change of perspective. Something has happened that allows him to understand the meaning of the knots in his life differently, whatever gains he says I had these, I've come to regard as loss

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because of Christ more 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

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them as rubbish. Now, the Greek word that um Paul uses here for rubbish was the favorite Greek word of my ninth grade boys group for several years . Um, they had, yes, they had

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a favorite Greek word. Um It was also the only Greek word that they knew, but it was a favorite and, and the Greek word here is sin and the reason that they love this word,

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uh and they used it regularly and I was rather proud of that fact. Um Is that, well , it's quite nearly a vulgarity in the Greek. Um It quite literally means dung or excrement or as

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Duke biblical scholar, Richard Hayes prefers to translate it crap. Scalin crap. I consider all these things as crap in light of Christ effectively. Paul is saying I regard all of these things, all these

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things in which I used to root my story, my pride, my righteousness, my sense of identity , all these things now are just crap. Paul's first readers would have been surely dumbfounded. Not that

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Paul uses the word skee ball in, but that he's willing to call all of these things that have defined his life, crap rubbish, the things he most dearly valued and through which he's understood who he

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is and where he's going. How can you call that rubbish? And he gives the answer because the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ, Jesus, my Lord , I want to know Christ and the power of

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his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death. If somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead on the road to Damascus, where Saul has this radical encounter with

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Jesus. It's not merely that his name is changed to Paul. It's that his entire story is changed . Not because his past is wiped away, nor because he forgets his past. His knots are not

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untied, but because Jesus becomes the knot of knots in Paul's life through which he comes to interpret the meaning of all past knots. He also now has the ability to reinterpret his future and who he is

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when Sarah first told us about the abuse that she'd suffered, we sought justice for her. I sat outside the room where she detailed the incidents for police investigators and there were arrests and arrest. There was

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an arrest made. We helped her find the therapist who worked with her for for many years. But it was not these things alone that allowed her to change her story, her narrative identity, just like

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in Paul's life, Jesus slowly became the knot of knots in Sarah's life, the way that she understood her life, her story, her past and her future came to be defined by Christ who promised her

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a future, who promised his future. Let me be clear, Jesus did not take away the memory of abuse for Sarah, nor did Jesus take away the reality that it happened. But all that had

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defined Sarah's life became defined by Christ and the knots of Sarah's life took on new meaning. Christ became her beginning in her end, Christ gave her a hope and a future Christ redefined what had happened and

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Christ redefined her pursuits and her story. I think this is quite similar to what Paul describes in this morning's text from Philippians that all that had once defined and controlled his story has now been redefined by Christ

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. His entire story has changed. I think one of Paul's points here in Philippians three is that Christ should not be a knot in our lives, but thee not the knot of knots that tells us the

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value and meaning of all the other things in our life. There's a subtle shift in Paul's language. In verse nine, he shifts from the active voice to the passive. He says, I consider them

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rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him that passive voice. The story of Paul's life had previously been found in his accomplishments and his reasons to boast in the flesh. But now Paul found

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in Christ that his story becomes wrapped up in Christ's story. I don't know what nots currently tell your story. Whether the knots of great value and pride like Paul's knots, accomplishments, jobs, degrees,

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getting into the right school coming from the right family or whether they are knots that are painful to recall like Sarah's. But Paul's message to the Philippians is that your story needs to be found in Christ to

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be able to rejoice in the Lord requires not that Jesus is a, not in your story. But that Jesus defines and redefines your story. My fear for us, sometimes my fear for myself especially is

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that I value a lot of crap. A lot of Cuba and the story of our lives is often defined by pursuits and dreams and values that are at the end of the day s ballin just crap.

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How do we escape this? How does Jesus become the knot of our lives that allow us to tell our stories differently? How do we go about living a peculiar God story in a world that tempts us

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to live with Skubal? And at the center becomes clear as you read in the Philippians that this story doesn't happen all at once. This change of story doesn't happen overnight but a little bit at a time

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every day ongoing. Paul admits this. He says he considers everything alas compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ, Jesus and the verb he uses in the Greek indicates that he does this and he continues

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to do it. It's an ongoing process. It seems that Jesus becomes the knot that defines all others when we dwell on Christ daily. Or as David Ford suggests when we enter a habitus in which Christ

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ref figures time and our lives around the knot of his own death and resurrection and life that he offers