Yes, everything else is worthless compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Philippians 3:8
The less you have, the more you grow. That kind of math only works in one place.
God’s Kingdom has been called an “upside down” kind of place. Jesus taught that the first will be last, and the least will be greatest (Matthew 20:16, Luke 9:48). Growth here doesn’t come from ease. It comes from loss.
A woman named Larianna knows something about that. She and her husband fled Ukraine with their two sons when the country was invaded. She says: “Everybody wants to have a stable life. A lovely pillow, a lovely everything. But for your soul to grow? Your faith to grow? You sometimes need to lose something. [If you] live all your life in one house and never lose anything, it’s hard to grow your faith. Because you always have your stable life.”[1]
Loss forces us to realize what we’ve been holding onto. Jesus taught, “Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys, and where thieves break in and steal … ” (Matthew 6:19-21). We could add: where armies invade, beauty fades, precious ones age and die, businesses fail, and dreams are dashed.
Paul, a follower of Jesus, discovered the same thing after losing his reputation and status. He said: “Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).
Larianna would agree. She reminds us: “If you lose things, if you lose everything, your faith grows and God becomes everything. It doesn’t matter if you’re with food, without food, with roof, without roof. What matters is that you have heaven, that you have God. This is the only way to happiness.”[2]
[1] Ann Voskamp, “The Will of God Is a Place,” Christianity Today, November/December 2025, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/11/the-will-of-god-is-a-place/.
[2] Ibid.
