The Christian Estimate of Gain and Loss.
The Christian man keeps an accurate account-book; he reckons up with an intelligent and enlightened judgment his gains and his losses. And most important is it that those who would be Christian men should be rightly informed and rightly minded upon this great question, this question which takes precedence of other questions, inasmuch as it is preliminary and introductory to all.
I. I need not say what answer the world would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the natural heart would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the religion of many persons would return to this inquiry. You will find health entered as a clear gain, and money as a clear gain; comfort, ease, tranquillity of mind and life, prosperity in business, a sufficient and growing income, all these things will be found at once carried to the side of profit, and no hesitation, and no further question asked concerning them. And you will as surely find sickness, disappointment, contraction of the means of pleasure, sorrow, pain, bereavement, entered in the same reckoning as an undoubted and unmixed loss.
II. St. Paul says that for Christ's sake he now accounts as loss all that he had once accounted gain. The reason why he calls his apparent gains a loss is that they had too great a tendency to make him trust in them; to make him look to outward things as his passport to heaven; to make him build on a foundation of his own, and not upon the rock of another's righteousness. What do we know of the thought, Things which were gain to me, these I have accounted for Christ's sake loss? I say it sorrowfully, but with deep truth, that many of us live and die on the strength of a gospel which has no Christ in it, no demolition of self, whether in the form of self-confidence or self-seeking, and no exaltation of Christ upon the ruins of self either as our Saviour or as our Lord.
C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians,p. 183.