Acquiring Righteousness and Finding Purpose

Righteousness

I have lost everything and consider it all to be mere rubbish, in order that I may win Christ, and that I may be found and known as in Him, not having any self-achieved righteousness that can be called my own, based on my obedience to the Law’s demands (ritualistic uprightness and supposed right standing with God), but possessing that genuine righteousness which comes through faith in Christ—the truly right standing with God, which comes from God by faith.

Purpose

For my determined purpose is that I may know Him—that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly—and that I may in that same way come to know the power flowing from His resurrection and

(*personal note: I don’t comprehend this next bit)

that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed in spirit into His likeness even to His death in the hope that if possible I may attain to the spiritual and moral resurrection that lifts me out from among the dead—even while in the body.

Perfection

Not that I have now attained this ideal, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to lay hold of and make my own that for which Christ Jesus has laid hold of me and made me His own.

I do not consider that I have captured and made it my own yet, but it is my aspiration. Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the supreme prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward.

Philippians 3:8b-14 (paraphrased from the Amplified Bible).