3:1 To the rest of you, sisters and brothers: Be happy as those who belong to the Master! I don’t get tired of repeating that, because it is for your safety.

3:2 Watch out for those “dogs,” those evildoers! They are the “discarded”

3:3 but we are the “circumcision” by the Spirit of God, offering divine service and being proud of Anointed Jesus instead of having confidence in the flesh.

3:4 And if anyone is to be confident in the flesh, I certainly qualify. I have more credentials than anyone:

3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew among Hebrews, and a Pharisee regarding the Law.

3:6 You want enthusiasm? I persecuted the Congregations. You want cold, hard justice? I was blameless.

3:7 But whatever I had gained, through the Anointed I consider it lost.

3:8 Without a doubt I gave it all up for something superior: knowing Anointed Jesus my Master. I lost it all for him and now view it as nothing but a pile of manure, in order to gain the Anointed.

3:9 I want to belong to him— not having a righteousness of my own from the law but by means of the faith of the Anointed, the righteousness that comes from faith in God.

3:10 And I want to know him, the power of his resurrection, and the partnership of his sufferings. Then I will conform to his death,

3:11 and perhaps even attain the resurrection from the dead.

3:12 Now it isn’t as though I have already arrived or finished, but only that I am chasing after it in order to acquire that for which Anointed Jesus surely acquired me.

3:13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have acquired it, but I have this one thing in mind: Forgetting what is behind me, I stretch out for what is in front of me

3:14 toward the goal I’m after: the prize of the calling of God above in Anointed Jesus.

3:15 So then, whoever is mature will agree with this, and if anyone doesn’t, God will reveal it to you.

3:16 Regardless of the level we’ve reached, let’s all pull in the same direction.

3:17 Imitate me, sisters and brothers, and take note of those who continue with the model we presented to you.

3:18 For I often told you about many— and I say this with tears— who go around as enemies of the cross of the Anointed.

3:19 They will be destroyed in the end; their god is their appetite; they celebrate their shame.Their attention is on the earth,

3:20 but our citizenship is in the heavens, an inheritance we await from Master Jesus the Anointed.

3:21 He will transform our lowly body into one like his majestic body, with the power that enables him to uphold everything.