Philippians 3:8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,

Do we have any cooking show fans out there? Deconstruct is a term for taking a well known dish and tearing it apart into its component parts and then putting them back together again to construct a new dish. The reason I use this term here is that the elements are not lost, just used in a new way.

Paul declares all but lost and all but dung here in Philippians. That means they are not lost and they are not dung. He has had to deconstruct his former life, his former training, his former thinking and put them into a new perspective, a new order, a newness of life, but they are not lost on him.

We all have a past. We all have done things we want to forget. We all had errors in our beliefs. It is a truth that this past life, while gone, while forsaken is not lost to us. Many of us find it difficult to do this very thing that Paul has done, to deconstruct in order to glorify God.

Galatians 1:17-18 Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

While it is true in Acts 9 that Paul had a conversion story, the effort to deconstruct took much longer, at least three years. That being true, we need to understand that unlearning what we thought we knew is not as easy as merely changing our minds.

We suffered a past to glorify God and learning how to do that isn’t easy or instant.