Gordan Fee sums up this passage by saying, the Christian life “means to be finished with one’s religious past as having value before God or as a means of right relationship with God; it means to trust wholly in Christ as God’s means to righteousness. But such righteousness has as its ultimate aim the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord; and knowing Christ means to experience the power of his resurrection now through the Spirit, as God’s empowering presence for present participation in his sufferings, as those sufferings are in conformity with his death…To know Christ in the present means to be conformed to his death, so that all of Christian life is stamped with the divine imprint of the cross as we live out the gospel in the present age, while we await the hope of resurrection.”
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