What Does Philippians 3:13 Mean?

(13) **I count not myself . . .**—The “I” is emphatic, evidently in contrast with some of those who thought themselves “perfect.” (See Philippians 3:15.) Not only does St. Paul refuse to count that he has ever yet “attained;” he will not allow that he is yet in a position even to grasp at the prize. (Comp. 1Corinthians 9:27.) **Forgetting those things which are behind . . .**—The precept is absolutely general, applying to past blessings, past achievements, even past sins. The ineradicable instinct of hope, which the wisdom of the world (not unreasonably if this life be all) holds to be a delusion, or at best a condescension to weakness, is sanctioned in the gospel as an anticipation of immortality. Accordingly hope is made a rational principle, and is always declared to be, not only a privilege, but a high Christian duty, co-ordinate with faith and love (as in 1Corinthians 13:13; Ephesians 4:4). St. Paul does not scruple to say that, if we have it not, for the next life as well as this, we Christians are “of all men most miserable” (1Corinthians 15:19). Hence past blessing is but an earnest of the future; past achievements of good are stepping-stones to greater things; past sins are viewed in that true repentance which differs from remorse—“the sorrow of this world which worketh death” (2Corinthians 7:10)—in having a sure and certain hope of the final conquest of all sin. The “eternal life” in Christ is a present gift, but one test of its reality in the present is its possession of the promise of the future.