to suffer loss: to forfeit or give up something, or be penalized, so that one ends up worse off
This word comes from the world of courts, markets, and account books. In everyday Greek it meant to be fined, to pay a penalty, or to take a loss on a deal. It was the standard opposite of κέρδος, the word for gain or profit, and the two were regularly set side by side, like the two columns of a ledger showing what you win and what you lose.
The New Testament almost always uses it in the passive voice, and what makes its usage striking is not a new definition but what is being lost. The item on the other side of the ledger is no longer a sum of money but something far weightier: a person's own self, a promised reward, peace of mind, or everything one owns.
So the different uses hang together as one accounting picture. Jesus asks what a person gains by winning the whole world if the price is forfeiting his own life. Paul, running the same books in reverse, says he wrote off everything he once counted as profit and marked it down as loss for the sake of Christ. In each case something is handed over at real cost.
Nuances
The force of the passive verb in Philippians 3:8, "I have suffered the loss of all things."
- contestedA plain passive: Paul really did lose his social, religious, and economic standing when he came to Christ.; Gordon D. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians (NICNT); Gerald F. Hawthorne, Philippians (WBC)
- contestedA divine passive: God brought the loss about as part of Paul's calling.; Peter T. O'Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians (NIGTC)
- contestedA self-referring sense: Paul willingly chose to give everything up.; Heinrich A. W. Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Handbook to the Epistle to the Philippians
What the builder forfeits when his work is burned up in 1 Corinthians 3:15.
- majorityThe loss is of a reward or wage: the builder is kept safe but goes without the prize promised in the previous verse.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC)
- minorityThe loss is of the work itself: the labor is destroyed rather than a positive prize withheld.; John Gill, An Exposition of the New Testament