The Forward Lean

Living Into the Excellence of Christ

“Forgetting what is behind and reaching out for what is ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 3:13–14

Paul didn’t discard his credentials because they were false. They were real. Impressive. Hard-earned. They represented years of devotion, study, discipline, and sincere longing to please God. The problem wasn’t that Paul had learned nothing—it was that what he had learned could no longer carry the weight of what God had now revealed in Christ.

Those credentials belonged to an earlier chapter. They were faithful for their time, but they were no longer sufficient. They described a life built on law-keeping and boundary-drawing, on proving righteousness rather than receiving it. When Christ met Paul, he didn’t erase Paul’s past; he exposed its limits. What once felt like solid ground suddenly felt small, incomplete—outpaced by grace.

So in The Message, Paul says he threw it all out with the trash. Not because it had no value, but because compared to knowing Christ, it had lost its claim to be central. It was an old map for a road God was no longer asking him to walk. What Paul discovered was not better information, but a better way of being human—life no longer managed by performance, but animated by relationship. As Billy Graham said, Christ demands first place. Not as a rival to our achievements, but as the fulfillment they could never reach on their own.

Choosing life begins right there: when we stop leaning on what once defined us and start trusting the One who now calls us forward. At the foot of the cross, resumes don’t matter. Titles don’t travel well into resurrection life. The ground is level, and grace sets the terms.

Paul is careful to say he hasn’t mastered this yet. Faith, for him, is not completion but direction. “I’m not saying that I have this all together,” he writes in The Message, “but I am well on my way.” He keeps moving because Christ has already taken hold of him. That forward motion requires a kind of holy forgetting—not erasing the past, but refusing to let it run the present. D. L. Moody put it plainly: we cannot be filled if we are already full. Even good things, once absolutized, can keep us from receiving what God wants to give next.

So Paul lets go—of past failures, yes, but also of past successes. He doesn’t look back to measure himself by who he was. He leans forward, trusting who Christ is still shaping him to become. He is off and running, and he will not turn back.

When Christ becomes the center, we don’t lose what truly matters. We gain clarity. We gain freedom. We gain a life no longer propped up by self-made righteousness, but carried by grace. This passage quietly asks us: what knowledge, habits, or achievements—good in their time—are we still clinging to as if they were ultimate?

D. L. Moody once said the world has yet to see what God can do with someone fully surrendered. Paul would add that surrender often means letting even our best religious accomplishments take their rightful place. As we live up to the light we have already received, we discover that the prize is not merely a future reward. It is Christ himself—present, active, and transforming us from the inside as we press on, heavenward, step by faithful step.

Lord Jesus,
loosen our grip on what once defined us—
even the good things we’ve outgrown.
Teach us to value knowing You
more than proving ourselves.
Help us forget what weighs us down
and lean forward into Your grace,
pressing on with humble hearts
toward the life You are calling us into.
Amen.