Everything Already
“I lost everything.”
When someone utters these words, few words will be of consolation. What do you say? If you’ve ever said this, you know the feeling. It’s unexplainable. It’s crippling. It’s paralyzing. Facing tomorrow is hard, when it seems that your heart is taken from you. It’s hard to keep moving when the thing you held onto so tightly slips from your grasp. Rising to your feet feels impossible when you lose the thing you wanted most. How do you keep going, how do you keep moving forward when you come to a place where you’ve lost everything?
In his letter to the Philippians, Paul admits that he’s in a pretty difficult spot. Specifically, he finds himself imprisoned (Phil. 1:12-13). For many American readers, Paul had lost what we would imagine to be his everything: his freedom. While freedom may not have been that for Paul, the apostle still found himself in a tough place. However, through his letter, Paul teaches the Philippians an important truth, the lens through which he saw both his imprisonment and purpose in it: Christ was his everything.
Paul understood that his imprisonment was “for Christ” and “served to advance the gospel” (Phil. 1:12-13, ESV). To Paul, his fate would honor Christ, “whether by life or by death” (Phil. 1:20). He considered death to be of gain for him (Phil. 1:21). Why? He would experience Christ’s presence (Phil. 1:23). All of Paul’s reasons for confidence in life, namely his heritage as one of God’s chosen people, the Jews, and all that came with it…he counted as loss (Phil. 3:4-7). Faith in Christ was the only confidence that Paul needed and wanted (Phil. 3:8-11). All else faded for Paul in comparison to his relationship to Christ (Phil. 3:7-8). For Paul, to “gain Christ and be found in Him,” with any suffering suffered for Christ’s sake in humble service, was worth it, because Christ and the promise for those in Christ was everything to him (Phil. 3:8-11). In Paul’s eyes, any gain or loss faded in the glorious light of Christ. Why? Because Paul had everything already.
As Christ was Paul’s everything, the imprisoned apostle revealed the paradigm-shifting, seemingly “too good to be true” secret to weathering any circumstance. The prisoner wrote, “Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phil. 4:11–12). How was this possible? In prison, Paul had found contentment. When most people would have been on their knees, lamenting having lost everything, Paul claimed contentment due to the secret that he had discovered. What could this secret possibly be?
It is here, in this light, that Paul penned these famous words: “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). Christ was his answer. In the midst of his imprisonment, Paul knew a certain truth. In relationship with and service to Christ, gain and loss lost their edge. In Christ, Paul had true confidence and contentment, regardless of his circumstances. How could this be? In Christ, Paul had everything already.
Years ago, someone thought it was important enough to give a young 18 year-old me a little book, called The Pursuit of God, by A. W. Tozer. In the pages of this book, I encountered a simple truth that radically challenged my outlook on life. In the second chapter, titled The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing, Tozer wrote these words in reflection of Jesus’ teachings about denying the self and losing one’s life for the kingdom: “The blessed ones who possess the kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing…though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.””1
There it was. Unexpected, paradoxical, and simply beautiful. The key to contentment in the journey of life, in all its earthly gains and losses, was to lose the craving for possession entirely, and, in its place, to remember what I had already gained, something of eternal worth and present significance. I had gained Christ and His kingdom. Regardless of what life brought my way, regardless of what I gained or lost on the journey, I had everything already.
Pitted against any reason that he had to boast or be confident, regardless of any circumstance that came his way, even when compared to life itself, Paul tried to teach this same life-altering truth to the church of Philippi: Christ was his everything and the reason for contentment and perseverance in everything that came his way. Paul had everything already.
As I write these words, I am years older. The older I get, the more I learn that gains and losses are an ever-present part of the human experience. I fondly recall the confidence and contentment that the truth of “everything already” had brought into the life of that 18 year-old boy that was my younger self. However, I have also learned that it is easy to hold fast to such confidence and contentment when we experience gains, whether big or small. It is even fairly easy to hold fast to confidence and contentment when we experience losses that seem insignificant, or replaceable with other gains.
However, there are some losses that make holding fast much harder. There are some losses that feel too significant, too earth-shattering, too life-changing. The weight of holding fast is not really felt until it feels like we’ve lost everything.
When it feels like you have lost everything, the reality of your confidence and contentment is tested in a way that rocks every part of who you are. Even the fear of losing your everything can be crippling. However, the wisdom learned by that 18 year-old boy many years ago carries its same promise. What the apostle Paul proclaimed, author A. W. Tozer described, and what that 18 year-old boy had learned was that to have and live for Christ means to have everything, regardless of what we gain and what we lose in this life. In Christ, we have everything already.
Additionally, there are good gifts, certain gains, that we are given in life that become very precious to us. We may fear losing such wonderful blessings. We can become so attached, so desperate to keep these gifts, that we may struggle to see a life without them. At this point, we must be aware that such good gifts can become dangerous to us. Once we replace our contentment in Christ with contentment in the gifts that He has given us, they have become everything to us. Once we approach this threshold, we must surrender and entrust such gifts into the arms of the Good Giver. In this surrender, a surrender that may seem impossible to us, may the pastoral words of A. W. Tozer both comfort and challenge us: “Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.”2 Even in such surrender, regardless of what comes, whether we get to keep the gift or not, we must remember: we have everything already.
Brothers and sisters, turn your gaze from the things and circumstances of this life and to the only source of true contentment and confidence. Tear down any idols that have become everything to you. Entrust your future to God when it feels that you have lost everything. Release control to the One who is sovereign over all things. Let Christ be your everything. Live content and confident in the truth that, for the Christian, we have everything already, and forever.
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Footnotes
1 A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 29-30.
2 Ibid., 34.