First Love

No matter how far along on the journey, you never progress beyond this core aspiration: I want to know Christ. It is ever in front of us. It can take time to get there; and be even more challenging to stay there. So why would we make such a declaration? Only one reason—Jesus has already made this kind of declaration toward us. This is the invitation. Paul believed because Jesus had attained to the resurrection of the dead in this life, that it was somehow possible for him and us—to attain it now. It’s why Paul wrote things in the letter to the Philippians like, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (1:21). Paul accelerated his own death, allowing it to become subsumed in the death of Jesus, and thereby abandoning his whole life to Jesus. For Paul there was only ever this: I want to know Christ. To know Jesus is to know everything else.