Part 1: Why It’s Important | Part 2: Why It’s OK to Moralize, This Time | Part 3: Aligning Your Values | Part 4: Aligning Your Focus | Part 5: Letting Go

If the first exemplary action Christ took was to divest himself of something valuable (more on that in a moment), the second action was to humble himself (Php 2.7); as the NASB puts it, he “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.”

As I noted last time, the theology gets a little complicated here. Paul says that Christ “emptied himself.” Emptied himself of what? What did he throw overboard on the way from heaven to earth?

Did he give up his equality with God—his deity?

Well, we know that can’t be right, for several reasons. As a visible, corporeal human being, he said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8.58). He perfectly revealed the Father (Jn 14.9; Col 1.15; Heb 1.3). The fullness of the Godhead was in him bodily (Col 2.9). He was God with us (Mt 1.23). One of his disciples called him God, and he didn’t correct him (Jn 20.28). He forgave sins (Mk 2.7). He offered an infinite sacrifice, sufficient for all the sins of all the humans who have ever lived.

Only God could do those things.

So how did he empty himself? What did he throw overboard?

Our passage doesn’t actually say that he threw anything overboard; it says that “he emptied himself” by “taking the form of a bondservant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Php. 2.7). He didn’t lose anything he had; he added something burdensome.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of running a three-legged race. (I’ll bet it was at a church picnic, wasn’t it?).

How was your time in the 40 in that race? Better or worse than usual?

Worse?! How could that be? You had an extra leg, didn’t you?

In this case, having an extra leg doesn’t make you faster. It’s an added burden.

I said last time that no metaphors about God work perfectly, and the three-legged race is deficient as well—Jesus’ act of bearing both human and divine natures simultaneously was (and is) not clumsy or comical—but it serves well enough for our purpose. He took on a human nature, and that weighed him down in some sense. As Darrell Bock has observed, the incarnation “was subtraction by humble addition”; and as we learned in elementary school, subtraction is simply the addition of a negative number.

So Christ, valuing our need more than himself, refused to view his equality with God as something he had to hold and protect, but took the drastic step of becoming a man, becoming in form like a slave. That step had eternal ramifications for him as well as us. He is still a man, with a body, apparently forever bearing the scars (Jn 20.27) of his corporeal humiliation. That move did not cost him his equality with God, but it did cost him a lifetime of humiliation, disgust, and pain.

If you’re a believer, sacrificing yourself for others is not going to cost you anything eternal; you’ll still be God’s child, and you’ll still be secure in his love. But it will cost you other things, including your own will and your own way. It’ll probably cost you some respect, and it may even cost you some money. For some, it has even cost them their life. But if you take Jesus’ view, you won’t value those things, certainly not more than following his example.

Get low. Humble yourself. Set aside things you care too much about. Rest in the confidence of God’s plan and care for you, and take some risks.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: Why It’s Important | Part 2: Why It’s OK to Moralize, This Time | Part 3: Aligning Your Values | Part 4: Aligning Your Focus

The first two steps in becoming more like Christ, as Paul lays them out in Philippians 2.3ff, involve changing the way you think; you align your values with Christ’s, and then you focus on what he focused on.

Jesus himself teaches us that actions result from thoughts; “out of the heart the mouth speaks” (Mt 12.34). Our next step is going to involve changing our actions, but we’re not going to be able to do that unless we take those first two steps first, changing the way we think. History is filled with failures on that score.

Beginning with Philippians 2.5, Paul turns to Christ as an example of the ideas he’s laid out in verses 3-4; Christ’s actions, which we can see, are examples of the kind of thinking he’s asking us to pursue. I’d like to suggest that there are three steps—action steps—that Christ took in the behavior Paul describes here.

To begin with, Jesus divested himself—he let go of what he had.

Now, we’re getting into some complex and incomprehensible theological concepts here, so we want to be careful how we describe what Jesus did. Though we are in God’s image, God is fundamentally unlike us, and unlike anyone or anything else—that’s essentially what we mean when we say that God is “holy”—and consequently we can’t describe him accurately with a metaphor, which is one of the primary ways we come to understand things. So we’re working at a significant disadvantage here. Let’s proceed cautiously.

The text says that Jesus was “in the form of God” (Php 2.6). In English that sounds like he looked like God, but he actually wasn’t. And that’s a badly mistaken reading of what Paul is saying here. Jesus is the same shape as God; he’s like God in every respect. He is distinct from the Father but equal to him.

Now, Paul says, in that situation, Jesus didn’t regard his equality with God—which he did indeed have—as something that he needed to hold onto for dear life, the way a drowning man holds desperately to his rescuer. Why? Because equality with God is inherently his. He doesn’t have to fight for it or to fight off challenges to it. He’s confident; he’s in his natural state. This is just the way he is.

In the next verse this situation is going to get pretty sticky—but that’s for the next post. The key point here is that Jesus didn’t feel as though he had to hang on to what he had.

We’re not like that. We want what we have, and we hold these things insecurely, and we’re terrified of losing them. As I write this, we’re still in the midst of this pandemic business, and some of my friends are trying desperately to hang on to their health, while others are trying desperately to hang on to their rights, and come, um, high water and even worse stuff, nobody’s going to let go; this is a tug of war to the death. Don’t give an inch. If we lose what we have, we’ll never get it back.

That’s a sign of weakness.

It’s like the teacher who really won’t smile before Thanksgiving, because he’s afraid that he’ll lose control of the class. He’s incompetent, or he fears that he is, and his militancy is a cover for his insecurity.

Jesus isn’t like that. He doesn’t hang on to anything for fear of losing it. He’s willing to divest himself of whatever he has, for the benefit of those whose well-being he values. (Did he “divest himself” of his equality with God? Be patient; that’s for next time.)

Whatever you have—time, money, energy, whatever—you hold loosely, ready to drop it in an instant if by doing so you can serve others.

How do we act that out in a day of Covid?

I’m not your governor, and I’m not going to tell you what to do specifically.

Be like Jesus.

Here’s what he didn’t do. He didn’t say, “I’ll be glad to help you out, as long as it doesn’t, like, cost me anything.”

Someday the crisis of the day will be a distant memory, but the people you serve will still be conscious, in this life or the next, and they’ll still be valuable. Invest what you have, by God’s grace, in them, not in yourself.

Imagine if Jesus hadn’t done that for you.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: Why It’s Important | Part 2: Why It’s OK to Moralize, This Time | Part 3: Aligning Your Values

Paul’s first principle in his description of being like Jesus (Php 2.3-8) is to change your values—specifically, to regard others as more important than yourself (Php 2.3). In this post we turn to the second, complementary principle—we need to change what we focus on:

Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others (Php 2.4).

As I’ve noted, this is complementary; it builds on the first principle. We begin by valuing others more than ourselves, and that change in valuation prompts us to “look out for” the interests of those we value.

I suppose the best illustration of this is parents with their children. In most cases this radical shift in focus happens naturally; it’s the rare exception when a mother feels no natural instinct to care for her infant, and indeed to put the infant’s well-being ahead of her own. Parents routinely sacrifice sleep for their newborn, and often they take on extra work to provide for the child’s needs, and further to provide things that may not be needs but that they consider important to the child’s success.

I well remember my last year in public school. I was in 7^th grade, in a junior high (that’s what we called them in those days) in a Boston suburb where the leadership was trying all the latest fads in educational theory. There were no grades; there was no discipline; and I was headed for trouble in several obvious ways. My parents decided that my Mom would go to work—she had excellent secretarial skills—and in doing that they were able to pay for tuition in a Christian school several towns over. For the next 4 years I rode to work with my parents, caught a city bus to the next town, walked half a mile down a hill to the private school bus stop, and rode to school on Mr. Dutton’s bus. Reversed the process in the afternoon, studied at Mom’s office till 5, and then drove home with my parents.

Mom didn’t have to do that. I could have kept on going to school for free, catching a bus right down at the corner nearest my house.

But like pretty much all parents, my parents were willing to upend their lives to my advantage, because, at root, they valued me above themselves.

That’s natural, or so it seems. We value our children, and so we focus on their success.

Now, here’s the thing.

We need to do that with everybody.

Everybody.

The ones we don’t naturally feel any special attachment to.

The ones who don’t seem to be as valuable as we are.

And to our minds, that’s pretty much everybody outside our friends and family—and maybe some people within our friends and family as well.

You know who I’m talking about. 🙂

The emphasis in our current verse (Php 2.4) is on focus, on looking around, on paying attention. It’s on noticing need and then acting on it.

You can’t notice if you’re not paying attention—indeed, if you haven’t developed the habit of paying attention.

You can’t notice if your nose is buried in your phone as you’re walking down the sidewalk.

You won’t notice if, like me, you’re such a list-obsessed person that all you normally think about is the thing you’re working on right now, and the next thing, and the next.

Stop. Look around. Pay attention. Notice.

Sure, fellow list-makers, make your list; see to your responsibilities; make each day count; be strategic.

But as you’re doing that, value those around you, and watch them, looking for their needs, ready to be interrupted, and planning how you can help meet them.

When Jesus started his earthly ministry, he had three years to save the world. That’s a pretty big to-do list.

How would you have started?

He started by going over to Bashan and getting baptized. Then he went to a wedding, and when they ran out of wine, he provided some more.

And after 3 years of seeing and acting on other people’s needs, he saved the world.

Follow him.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: Why It’s Important | Part 2: Why It’s OK to Moralize, This Time

In beginning this series I said that we should pattern ourselves after Christ, because it is into his image that the Father is transforming us during the lifelong process of sanctification (2Co 3.18). Of many biblical passages in which we can find information about Christ’s character and attributes, I’ve chosen to look at just one, the well-known, lyrical description in Philippians 2:

³ Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; ⁴ do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. ⁵ Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. ⁸ Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Before this passage gets to a description of Christ’s thinking and consequent actions, it begins with a couple of direct imperatives for Paul’s readers. Verse 3 addresses the mindset that should underlie our decisions, while verse 4 speaks of where our thinking should be focused. I’d like to take a post to deal with each of these imperatives. I’d suggest that verses 5 to 8, the description of Christ’s thinking and action, serve simply as an example of these two imperatives in practice—and so the imperatives are the underlying principles that more or less define Christ-likeness.

The first underlying principle—the first characteristic of Christ’s thinking and decision-making—is to “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves.”

The principle is straightforward and uncomplicated: we’re to consider others as more important than ourselves.

Are they? Actually, the passage doesn’t say that. The Scripture is clear that we’re all—equally—in the image of God (Gen 1.26-27). the Creator has made each of us to be remarkable examples of living design, and we all have a place in his plan. You really are special—that statement isn’t just pandering psychobabble—and you know what? I’m just as special as you are.

But no human being has enough mass to be the center of the universe. God is the Center, and we as his creatures are designed to fulfill his purposes for this life and the life to come. Life goes badly when we consider ourselves the center of it. We are designed—and, here, instructed—to consider others as more valuable than ourselves.

In fact, Paul goes so far as to say that self-centeredness—the Greek word rendered “conceit” here means “glory”—is “empty”; there’s just nothing to it, like a cheese curl, or a soap bubble floating in a light summer breeze. All of our effort to bring glory to ourselves will simply come to nothing; in fact, it will likely encourage people to admire us less rather than more.

So instead of puffing ourselves up, ordering our affairs around our own advantage and interests, what does Paul call us to do?

Choose humility.

We’re funny about this; we admire humility in everyone except ourselves. We genuinely admire people who are genuinely humble, but we seem to think that those we admire will admire us more if we call attention to ourselves, grab the spotlight, make a big impression.

Nope.

I’ve taken several teams of students to Africa, involving all different kinds of kids. I’ve found things to admire about all of them.

But you know who made the biggest impression on me?

It was the one on the trip to Tanzania where we were out of running water for 5 weeks, and we had to cart 5-gallon buckets of water to two different houses for cooking and bathing. And whenever there was a moment, I’d see Jack (not his real name), without being told, carting 2 5-gallon buckets at a time over to the girls’ house to refill their water supply. Jack was a lot bigger and younger and stronger than I was, and he was using his gift to make a difference.

Be like Jack.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: Why It’s Important

Like many of my colleagues and fellow travelers, I’m leery of moralizing on deep theological passages. Gideon’s story is not about being watchful when you drink from a river, and the death of Goliath is not about “only a boy named David” and those “five little stones he took.”

Those passages are about the might of Israel’s God, and his faithful, loving covenant loyalty (hesed). In the main, the Scripture is about God, not us, and we do a disservice to its Author when we turn it into a self-help book.

I had an experience years ago that drove this idea home to me.

One Christmas my family was visiting my sisters in New England. Not far from one sister’s house was a colonial-era church, which is well known for its architecture. Built in 1719, it has the box pews and the pulpit sounding board that were common design features in those days. As it happens, a painting of the building was included in one of the BJU Press textbooks back in my days with the Press, and when I left the Press to join the BJU faculty, my boss, who knew how much I loved that illustration, gave me the original artwork (by John Roberts—no, not the Chief Justice), and it hangs in our dining room today.

I really wanted to visit that church.

We showed up for the Sunday morning service just before Christmas. The minister presented a homily on Mary’s Magnificat (Lk 1.39-56).

Now, I knew this church was theologically liberal, and I later learned that it had embraced liberal theology not long after it was founded; it was liberal before liberal was cool. But even knowing that, I was floored by the homily.

As students of the Scripture know, the Magnificat presents some really remarkable features—

• To begin with, it exhibits extensive parallels with Hannah’s prayer of thanks after the birth of Samuel (1Sam 2.1ff), and it is delivered extemporaneously—which indicates that Mary was thoroughly familiar with Hannah’s song, having probably studied and memorized and meditated over it, in a day when most girls were never taught to read. As a literary work alone, it’s worthy of extensive study.
• Further, it develops significant theological themes involving multiple divine attributes and works, demonstrating both his greatness and his goodness. Again, this is surprising in an age when women were generally not educated or included in theological discussions—all the more so if, as we suspect, Mary was a teenager at the time.

If it’s Christmas-time, and you’re preaching on the Magnificat, there’s no lack of substantive material to present. The hard part is deciding what to include in just one sermon.

So what was the homily about on this Christmas Sunday morning?

Mary said these things after her cousin Elisabeth had greeted her with uplifting words (Lk 1.42-45). So we should say uplifting words to one another, thereby encouraging one another to produce wonderful creative things.*

My friends, I’m all for encouraging people—even poets!—but that is not what the Magnificat is about. When we deal with biblical theology, we need to make it about what it’s about, not our own good feelings about ourselves.

So here in Philippians 2 we have a significant Christological passage, the classic biblical passage on Christ’s humiliation and exaltation. The deity and humanity of Christ are in here, and the divine plan involving the cross, and eventual obeisance of all life—human, both regenerate and unregenerate, and nonhuman as well—and the absolute and eternal lordship of Jesus Christ.

It’s not about us.

But—it is about us. The very reason Paul has (apparently) pulled this ancient hymn into this particular epistle to a particular church in Macedonia is that he wants to moralize on the theology it contains. He wants us to do what Jesus did—to humble ourselves, to serve others. He wants us to break the passage down and live it out—not just by worshiping the Great Lord Jesus, but by imitating him. We are to “let this mind be in [us]” (Php 2.5).

We’ll take a few posts to explore what that means.

* For some reason, I can remember the liberal sermons I’ve heard better than the conservative ones. I guess the horror makes the experience more memorable over the long term.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

We don’t know her name, because she was only 15 at the time, and the police won’t tell us. She was a student at Richmond High School just north of San Francisco. It was a Saturday in October, the night of the homecoming dance. 

About 9:30 that night, just after the dance ended, a group of students gathered in the darkness of a courtyard on the school property. Several of the boys turned on the girl, who was drunk, and began to beat her, throw her around, and rape her. There were at least 7 attackers, and the attack went on for more than 2 hours. 

They weren’t alone in the courtyard. They were surrounded by other students, at least two dozen, and someone as old as in his 40s.

No one called the police.

Several of them allegedly recorded the attack on their cell phones. Eventually a young woman nearby heard what was going on and called 911. Police rescued the girl, and she was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. 

What would you have done?

Would you have called the police? Would you have stepped in and tried to help? Would you have risked your own safety to defend a helpless victim?

Would you have thought of her, or of yourself? 

What would you have done?

How do you know? 

You can’t know what you’ll do in a crisis. What you’ll do is react—you’ll go with your most primal instincts. You’ll act out what you are deep inside, in your core. 

And what is that? Your core is the sum of a thousand decisions you make every day, in the course of ordinary life. Today—and every other day—you’re turning into who you are. 

So. You and I ought to spend our days, and our decisions, becoming what matters—the most important things. 

And what are they? 

The Bible answers that question for us: 

• God is taking the entire span of our lives to turn us into imitators of Christ:
  • But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit (2Cor 3.18). 
• When Christ was asked what really matters, He said it very simply: love God, and love your neighbor (Mk 12.29-31). 

So my decisions today, and your decisions, should be about placing more value on others than on ourselves. We need to decide every moment, in important decisions and in little tiny ones, to think as though it’s not about us.

This—thinking “otherly” in the tiny decisions—is the only way to be reasonably sure that when the really big decisions come, when there’s no time to evaluate or to do anything other than just react, we’ll do the right thing.

Why do I say that? Because doing the right thing—especially when it’s costly—is unnatural for us. We need a lot of practice, a lot of repetition, a lot of imprinting.

What does thinking “otherly” look like? If God’s lifelong work in us is conforming us to the likeness of Christ, then of course Jesus himself is our example.

There are many places in Scripture where we can get information on how Jesus thought and acted. Of course we could start with the Gospels, which we could call primary sources in the historical sense. And then there are numerous Christological passages in the epistles that would be informative—Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians come immediately to mind.

But I’d like to spend a few posts delving into Philippians 2, where Paul lays out a classic passage on Christ’s humiliation and exaltation—a passage some scholars think was an early hymn of the church. (It does appear to have the structure and lyricism one would expect in a hymn.)

Now that we have a text to study, I’ll spend a post justifying using a text that’s talking about Jesus to direct our own personal decisions—and then we’ll get to the text itself.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash