The Humility of Jesus

By looking to Jesus and taking on the humility of Christ, proud, self-focused sinners are transformed into a humble, servant community.

Well, this morning we are returning to our series in Philippines, picking up where we left off in chapter two. We are at the point of the letter that has been so beloved by the church through the centuries, the great hymn of the humility and exaltation of Jesus. It’s one of the most helpful passages that we have in Scripture for understanding the nature of Jesus as both God and man. It’s right up there with First John. The word became flesh and dwelled among us. So there’s some very rich theology coming at you this morning. There’s going to be a lot of lot of heavy theology. You think that the dual nature of Jesus as both God and man would be enough for one sermon? But wait, there’s more. This whole thing is a is used as an illustration, as an example of the humility that we are to have when we interact with each other. Early on in my Christian life, I was taught that if I wanted to know what God wanted me to do, I should look to Jesus and see what He would do. I became a Christian in the age of the “What would Jesus do?” bracelet. I have one of these. Did you have one of these? Yeah, how many WWJD’s at? Yeah, that’s right. Everybody was rocking the WWJD bracelet at one point. Mine was green and white because Spartan’s. Because I had to represent my college and my God at the same time, that was very important to me to do that.

If you’re not familiar, this was a fad for about 10 minutes in the history of the church. You’d wear it, and it would remind you throughout the day to make decisions by asking the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ And as fads go, I would say that this actually wasn’t a bad one. It was better than skinny jeans. Wouldn’t we agree? I mean, it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually kind of a good idea. And if I’m going to follow Jesus and I’m going to watch Jesus at work in Scripture, well, then I should then emulate Jesus in what He does. Now, the question isn’t exactly right every time, because some of the things that Jesus does He does for us. Sometimes the more appropriate question is, ‘what did Jesus say?’, or ‘what did He command of us to be obedient?’ But I am not here to quibble this morning, as an ambassador for Christ in this world, a representative of Jesus Himself, it is very important for Christians to consistently look to the example that is set by Christ. That’s important not just for us as individuals, but for us as a community. As a church community. If this church is the body of Christ in the world, as we’re called by God to be, what we have to ask the question, how do we embody these characteristics? How do we embody the characteristics of our head of Jesus? And the answer is simple: we look to Jesus.

That’s what the Apostle Paul tells us to do in our passage this morning. He tells us in Philippians 2:2 that we’ve already looked at. He said this: “to be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind”. How is that possible? How can, in our case, 500 plus people representing every generation and multiple cultures have one mind about anything? By looking to Jesus and taking on the humility of Christ, proud, self-focused sinners are transformed into humble servants. We become a humble servant community.

Go ahead and open your Bibles, if you would, to Philippians chapter 2. I will have it on the screen as well, but you may want to follow along by cracking open one of those new ESV’s, they’re in front of you in the seatback, in front of you and follow along. To tell us how to be single-minded together. Paul gives us, first of all, some instructions. And then he gives us an example that we are to emulate. So that’s how we’re going to look at it first at the instructions, and then at the example.

Let’s begin with the instructions: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others”. So if we were going to write a training manual on how to create one-mindedness in a church community, we might start with how we treat each other. That might be where we would go first. We might go to the Fruit of the Spirit and talk about how we’re to treat each other with love and kindness, gentleness. We might go to skills we might look first at communication skills and how to have good communication skills like listening to each other. Well, after all, you you can’t share the same thoughts and find common ground if you don’t listen to other people carefully. But Paul does something very interesting here. He doesn’t start with either of those places. He doesn’t start with how we actually interact with other people at all. He starts by having us as individuals question our own motivations. He starts in here. He says, I want you to first look at yourself. Don’t do anything out of selfish motivation or conceit. Selfish motivation is exactly what it sounds like. It’s doing something for the sole purpose of getting something for yourself. Now, I’m going to qualify that here in just a minute. The first thing to do in building a one-minded community of Christ is to search your heart and to ask yourself, is getting something for myself the primary factor in the decisions that I make and the actions that I do? Is that what I’m after? I’m after something for myself, first and foremost, that selfish motivation.

Conceit is a little bit different. The old King James version translates this vainglory. You might call it empty glory. Conceit is a false, outsized view of your own importance. That’s conceit. When you do something out of conceit, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to show others how glorious you are. An extreme version of that would be narcissism. But you don’t have to be a narcissist to struggle with conceit. You could just be a people pleaser. Or you could be someone who wants credit for everything that you do, or you could even be a person who does a lot of very nice things for people. But you always do it in such a way that other people can see you, so they know how great you are. I often think of politicians who show up at the soup kitchen in a suit and an apron, and they serve just for the photo op, right? And they just want you to see how see how much I serve. And they get that apron off and they take off. Right. That’s conceit. These two problems are related, but they’re not exactly the same. With selfish motivation, we want others to give us things. And with conceit, we want others to glorify us. Now you can imagine how dysfunctional the church would be if the people in the church were motivated, first and foremost by selfishness and conceit. Imagine how difficult a church that would be to be. And can you imagine everyone trying to get what they want for themselves in the church, everyone making moves and using power to create the church that suits themselves all the time. A marriage certainly wouldn’t function well this way. It would be a difficult marriage. Can you imagine a wife motivated to get her husband to give her everything she wants all the time, and or a husband that’s motivated to get his wife to praise him all the time? Or how about a friendship where it only goes one way, it’s all one-sided. One person always gets what she wants, makes the other person suit her needs all the time. That’s not really a friendship, is it? It’s not friendship. The same is true in the church. Paul says if we’re going to be a church that Jesus has called us to be, well, we need to look inward first at the motivations that are in our hearts, because sinful motivations can actually undo a church. A one-minded church starts with the right heart-attitude of the people in it. Paul describes this attitude in two ways here.

First, he says in humility, count others more significant than yourself. That’s the opposite of conceit. Counting others more significant than yourself. And conceit says, Look at my importance. Humility says I think others are more important. This is why I cringe every time I hear the very common advice given, that tells people to build up their self-esteem. You need to think higher of yourself. A healthy view of yourself is not to tell yourself you’re so important. Okay. It’s not how you get there. I know where you’re trying to get, but that’s not how you get there. A healthy view of yourself is to rest in God’s opinion of you. That’s what we need. We need a God-vision. We need to see how God sees us. That you are fearfully and wonderfully made. That you bear his image and his likeness, and that you’ve been saved by this loving God. See? Because once you’re firm in that understanding, firm in that understanding of yourself, you can begin to count other people as more significant than you because you don’t get your significance from other people. You get it from the Lord. And so you say, you know what, God tells me I’m significant, and I know that’s true. And God says that you’re significant, and that’s true. And we can live in that vision that God has for us. And when you’re set free from the chains of having to constantly build yourself up, and focus on you all the time, well, now you’re able to be a servant to other people. Now you can serve other people. It’s hard to imagine an entire society where everybody considers everybody else to be more significant than themselves. But actually that is what the church is called to be.

The second attitude is this. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also the interests of others. That’s the opposite of selfishness. It’s slightly different from the first attitude if I’m considering others as more significant than me. Ok well then how do I act? In what way do I use my time and all of the things that God has given me? Paul says, you know how much you love the things that you like and that you need and that you want. Act in a way that shows that you care about the other interests, the interests of other people just as much. In the exact same way.

You want to know what the … you want to know what the secret is to a really fulfilling life, biblically speaking? Throw out all of the messages from the world that tell you about your own happiness and start seeking the benefit and the well-being of others. That’s the secret. Stop looking at yourself exclusively. How do I feel? How am I doing? Do I like this job? Am I happy? Is everything happening the way I want it to? Or negatively speaking, is everyone serving me? Is everyone doing what I want them to do? Is anyone mistreating me? And am I a victim in some way? I can’t tell you how much counseling begins with a person’s feeling that their needs aren’t being met. And the Herculean task is to get that thinking turned around so that they embark on a path to rest in the Gospel, to set down all of the outside and start to say, what does God think of me? And start to consider more people, others, more significant, start to care as much about the needs of others as they care about their own needs. Now, here’s the qualifier to this; here’s the qualifier. Paul isn’t telling us to ignore our needs, or not to care about our needs at all. He’s not saying that here. He’s saying that we should care about the needs of others just as much. We tend not to care very much about the needs of others, especially if they’re outside of our family and friends. And so this is an important correction for us. Church, I struggle with this just as much as you do. This is hard. This is this is a hard teaching from Paul. True selflessness is a disciplined attitude, and it requires a lifetime of cultivation. We enter into a relationship with Jesus out of a selfish bent. Usually. Usually, we even come to Christ saying, what is it that the Lord can do for me? And that’s fine. That’s a fine starting point. God has done a wonderful thing for us, as we’ll see here in just a moment. But once you know this Lord and savior, what happens is he begins to change your heart. He makes you capable by His Holy Spirit to live a life of sacrifice for the sake of others. Because he himself lived a human life for the sake of others. Let’s look at the humility of Christ. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. Even death on a cross. So earlier in verse two, he said, Be of one mind. And here he says, Have this mind among yourselves. And so we know that what follows here is an illustration of the one mind that we are to have together. And we know it’s possible to have this mind because it’s ours in Jesus Christ. So if you have Jesus Christ, if He’s your Lord and Savior, if you’re following Him, if you’ve been transformed by Him, you have this. God is not asking you to do something that that you’re incapable of achieving. He’s asking us to do something that is possible because of the regeneration of our minds, the new life that he’s given us, that he’s performed. When he brought us into his kingdom, he gave us new hearts and new minds that are tuned to him. When you came alive again in Christ, your old self died with Jesus and your new self came alive again in Jesus’ resurrection. So you have that new heart, that new spirit, that within every follower of Jesus. And one of the gifts of the Spirit is the ability to see our life and mission as a church together through the lens of the Gospel. We can be one minded because that one mindedness is a gift to us in Christ.

Here’s the new mind that we have. It looks like Jesus’ ministry, Paul says. Here we have the dual nature of Christ in a hymn. So let me carefully walk through this. This is probably an early hymn of the church that Paul is quoting here. God, the son. the second member of the Trinity, was not a man before his incarnation. He was in the form of God. Now, that is not to say that he was like God. It’s to say that he was simply God in God form. He was in the form of God, meaning he was in His glorious state. He was fully recognizable as the Creator God. But this state of being equally glorious with the father and the son and the spirit was not something that the son felt he needed to maintain, to grasp, to hold on to. He it was not something that he had to hold on to and grasp without letting go. He emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Now, I cannot tell you the rabbit hole that we could jump down on what it means for Jesus to have emptied himself. This is one of those things, that for the son to have emptied himself and taken on the form of a of a man, is something the church has debated. We are in the territory of church councils and doctrinal creeds and ordination papers and all sorts of things at that point. There are a few ways you can jump into heresy on this one. What exactly does it mean that Jesus emptied himself? Well, I think that the hymn makes it actually pretty clear. Jesus doesn’t cease to be God in any way. When he became a man in this world, he simply took on a human form and he added to his deity. So that today we would say that Jesus was both fully God and fully human at the same time. And what was emptied was the glory of God when He gave up the outward form of God to take on the appearance, the outward appearance of a man. So he went from one form to another. The nature of humanity was added to the nature of deity so that Jesus could be with us. And what that did was, it obscured Jesus identity as a glorious God. And why did he do that? Why did Jesus take on this form to obscure the fact that He is the Creator God? He did that to be a servant. He was born in the likeness of men. So that he could be a servant. His ultimate act of service was his willingness to be obedient to the point of giving up his life, and in doing so, in a way that no one could ever ask or even ever expect of a glorious creator. God. See where it says that he humbled himself to the point of death? Even death on a cross. You see the word ‘even’ there. For the glorious creator God to be willing to die, as part of God’s plan, meant that he had to take on the cross, which made him into a curse. Being put on the cross was a way of showing that a dead person is God forsaken. The servant who was equal with God serves by becoming forsaken by God.

Do you see how Jesus, despite his incredible glory and value, gives his life completely over for the sake of others? Now, here’s something very interesting. You may be thinking, as I often do when I read this, wow. Look at what Jesus did for me. Look at what Jesus did for me. And there’s nothing wrong with thinking like that. This is certainly the act of sacrifice that saves us. We just celebrated that in communion. This is the act of sacrifice that saves us from our sins. He became a curse because we were cursed in our sins. But have you noticed in the first part of this hymn what there is no mention of. Us. We are not in the first part. We do not come into this hymn until the end of the song, as Carly Simon once prophesied. You’re so vain. You probably think this song is about you. Jesus’ sacrifice is a great gift, a great gift to us. But this song is not about what he accomplished for us. This is about his obedience to God, the father. See the word obedience there in verse eight. That’s the only mention of Christ’s motive for his sacrifice here. His service is to God. His obedience is to God’s plan. His incarnation is in service to God’s mission. Church, this is the ultimate reason for our focus on the importance and needs of other people as well. That’s why we serve. Of course, we’re called to love others as ourselves and serve people like Jesus served people. The Bible has a lot to say about the love and sacrifice that we are to show to each other because of our love for each other. But at the very bottom of that love, if you dig down past our focus on other people, you find a deep reverence for the Lord and obedience to His call on us to serve for the same reason Jesus served: to bring glory to God. We serve out of obedience and love for the Lord when we sacrifice our needs and our preferences for the sake of other people and sacrifice for each other. These are ultimately acts of worship. Yes, they are acts of kindness to others, but ultimately, they are acts of worship. We do them not just because we love each other, but because ultimately, we love our glorious God. That’s why we can serve and sacrifice for people who are not very lovable. That’s how we’re able to do it. Just like Jesus served in sacrifice for people who are not very lovable, it’s because of our service. Our service isn’t contingent on the of ability of others. And Jesus service wasn’t contingent on the love ability of other people like you and me. Aren’t you glad? Paul probably could have stopped at this point in the hymn because he’d made his point. But he has to quote the whole thing he has to go through in its entirety. Therefore, God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on Earth and under the Earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the Father.

Because Jesus completed the mission of giving Himself in the greatest act of sacrifice in obedience to God’s plan, God, the Father raised Jesus to life and made Him the object of the greatest glory. The one who emptied himself of glory receives it back in a way that calls people everywhere to acknowledge him. People everywhere will acknowledge the glorious God. This glory was given up willingly by the son and receive back from God. Notice that Jesus was active in pouring out His glory, but he’s passive in receiving it back. Jesus’ role was obedience and service, and it’s the father’s role to lift him up and to bestow that glory on him. This is really instructive for how we’re to think about our service in a one minded church. Our role is to be faithful in our service to each other, out of obedience to God. And we’ll leave it to God to bestow glory. See, conceit melts away. Conceit melts away when our hearts and our minds are bathed in the gospel. Every knee in heaven, on earth and under the earth will bow. And every tongue will confess the truth about Jesus because of the name that God gives to Jesus.

This is a fantastic visual of Jesus glory. But we have two questions here. Who are these people with their knees and their tongues? And what is this name they’re talking about? This section of the hymn draws on the imagery that comes from the end of Isaiah 45. You heard earlier in the service where the prophet tells us that a time is coming when the name of the Lord will be universally acknowledged, it’ll be acknowledged by those people who love the Lord and serve the Lord. It’ll be acknowledged by those who rage against him. Everyone eventually will know the truth, whether they receive it or reject it. Isaiah 45:22-23. Let me let me read this for you. Turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth. For I am God. There is no other. By myself, I have sworn from my mouth has gone out in righteousness. A word that shall not return. To me, every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance. The hymn Paul quotes replaces the word to me. With the words in the name of Jesus. Universally. Every person who is living right now, who has ever lived and will ever be created by God, will come to acknowledge that Jesus is the exalted Lord. That doesn’t mean everyone is saved by him. This is not an act of worship that’s being described here. It’s an act of acknowledgment. All creation will be subjected under the exalted authority of Jesus. Those who worship him, those who don’t. Every angel and demon, and all of the newly created heavens and Earth will acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, with his new name. And what is that name? What is the name that Jesus has received with His glory revealed? God the father doesn’t give him the name Jesus. He already has the name Jesus. He doesn’t give him the name Christ. He was already identified as the Messiah by His disciples. They know him, and he’s the one that was anointed and sent by God, which is what Christ means. No, this name is something very unexpected. Every tongue will acknowledge that Jesus Christ, the one who emptied himself of glory, the one who was willing to be obedient to the point of death on the cursed cross is none other than the Exalted Lord of Heaven and Earth. He’s the Lord of heaven and earth. He is Yahweh. He Adonai. The Lord who brought the world into existence. The Lord who spoke from the burning bush to Moses, and who shook the mountain with His glory. The one who divided the sea, the one who crushed the walls of Jericho. The one who brought fire from heaven against the prophets of Bael. That Lord humbled himself to come into our world. And he’s been restored to his place of glory.

You will notice the new design of our worship center has two unmistakable characteristics. The first is the centrality of the cross. When we look to the cross, we see the moment in human history that God humbled himself to the point of death. The God who could have remained outside of the world, who could have abandoned us in our sin, came to be with us as the man, Jesus Christ. Jesus lived the sinless life that we couldn’t live. He died the death we should have died. He became the curse that we had become. And he did it all out of obedience to the God who said that He would come and save his people. He would bring us into his kingdom. He would give us eternal life. We don’t worship the cross, but we worship the one who hung on it for us. We are redeemed because a servant was willing to empty himself of glory so that we could be lifted out of the pit. And the other characteristic, perhaps more striking because it’s new and relatively unique. Are the panels of wood that draw your eyes up to the cross. It’s a worshipful and artistic expression of the exaltation of Jesus. It is designed to draw your eyes to the beauty and the majesty of our magnificent Lord and Savior. Let it remind us to bow our knees in worship to him. Let it incline us to posture of worship so that as we open our mouths and declare Jesus as Lord to the glory of God, the Father, God is praised. Would you pray with me?