Pursuing Christ, and letting righteousness follow

In Philippians 3, Paul writes of the surpassing greatness of the knowledge of Christ - how to know Christ is so much better than anything else that all those other things can be considered rubbish or even loss in comparison. What seems incredible to me is that knowing Christ is this much better even than being righteous. God wants us to be righteous (indeed, He commands us to be), and we have to be righteous to be in His presence with joy and love instead of terror and condemnation, but ultimately righteousness is not the highest goal. That distinction goes to knowing Christ. And it is so much more important and more wonderful to know Christ that all the labor and time we have invested into becoming righteous through the efforts of our flesh in submission to the law, even if it has made us as near perfect as humans can be, is loss.

What God desires is for us to know Him as He knows us, and becoming righteous is a part of that process. But sometimes I think we mistake the ends and the means, and we treat knowing God as a means to becoming righteous - we make our own perfection the goal we seek, and use our relationship with God as a tool in our labors toward that end. I know I sometimes think and act this way, anyways. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. God doesn't allow Himself to be used as a means to any other end (at least not for very long), because He is the only end in which we will find joy and fulfillment, and He wants us, if we will, to find the true happiness and meaning for which we were created. So in the end, if we have not sought to know Him first and wholeheartedly, we will lose all that we thought we had gained instead of Him. The castles of righteousness we had built so proudly on our own will come crashing down, because they were built on the foundation of our sinful nature rather than on the foundation of Christ. But if we seek Him - if we press forward toward that goal, the goal of knowing Christ, with all our heart and mind and strength - then we will find that we have not only found Christ and come to know Him, but have attained to righteousness as well: the righteousness which is from God by faith. And this righteousness obtained in this way is the only righteousness that will not someday be a loss to us, that will be in the end of any worth.