Disciples leave everything to follow Jesus

⁷But these assets I have come to regard as liabilities because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I now regard all things as liabilities compared to the far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things —indeed, I regard them as dung!—that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not because I have my own righteousness derived from the law, but because I have the righteousness that comes by way of Christ’s faithfulness—a righteousness from God that is in fact based on Christ’s faithfulness. ¹⁰My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death, ¹¹and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

¹²Not that I have already attained this—that is, I have not already been perfected—but I strive to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus also laid hold of me. ¹³Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have attained this. Instead I am single-minded: Forgetting the things that are behind and reaching out for the things that are ahead, ¹⁴with this goal in mind, I strive toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.