Philippians 3:7 - When assets are liabilities...

"But rather whatever gains were to me, these i have ruled, because of the Christ, loss."

-The words Paul employs here are normally used in an economic sense of profit and loss.  The same words are used in Matthew 16.26 - what if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?  Similarly Paul here is referring to a sense of spiritual profit.  All the things he has just listed - anything that might have been a ‘gain’ for him, those which from a worldly perspective might be seen as padding his spiritual portfolio, spiritual assets so to speak - as far as he is concerned these things are collectively worth nothing.  In fact they are negatives - spiritual liabilities.  It is singular, actually - one big loss.  In essence the more a person has going for them in the flesh, the greater the potential degree of ‘loss’ and spiritual need.  Nothing that we are born with or acquire or attain or do can commend us to God - and especially not if we want Christ.  He is the only accepted currency for spiritual transacting.  Paul knew that, in and of himself, he was a nobody (2Corinthians 12.11, 2Corinthians 10.12), and he truly brought nothing to the table (1Corinthians 3.7).  He was a spiritual pauper, totally bankrupt.  It wasn’t just lip service for Paul - he really understood this truth deep down.  Whatever he was that was worth something to God was only because of Christ.  Who we are, what we are worth, is based solely on who and what we are in Christ.  All of Warren Buffet’s billions won’t buy him one ounce of favor with God.  But when you trust in Christ, you win the spiritual lottery!

-hegeomai is what a leader/ruler/governor does.  In this case we are talking about a decision such as might be made by a leader, a considered and deliberate judgment, externally-based, made on a careful weighing of facts.  It is not based on inner feeling or sentiment.  There are things which we might do or achieve or be born with that give us (and others?) occasion to compare us favorably with our fellow man, and it is definitely a constant temptation to take credit for or to put stock in these things, or to mistakenly assume that they could somehow commend us to God.  Paul had deliberately chosen to not do this.  The verb is in the perfect tense, which means that at some point in the past, Paul made a decisive choice to categorize all of his worldly assets as one big loss.  The results of that decision carried into his present, and no doubt he found occasion to have to continue to choose to base his identity and worth not on what the world would say is important but on his identity in Christ. 

-Anything and everything we might have going for us or might want to have going for us is found in Jesus Christ.