Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5)

Our passage this morning is one of the most clear and direct in the New Testament in describing not only who Jesus is and what He has done, but also in leading us to the next step to demonstrate how the example of His life should impact our daily lives. Written in a Greek poetic form, these verses are a response to practical problems of disunity in the Church, by focusing on the humility and servant hood of Christ as our example and as the solution to our self-centeredness.

Apart from the grace of God, we tend to spend our lives focused on selfish ambition, effectively striving to become our own god. The root of all sin may be said to the worship of self, the desire to be free of any authority above our own will, the desire for our own glorification. This placing of self at the center of all things is the opposite of what is expected of a Christian, namely, the practice of humility.

St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the Western Fathers of the Church, compared the Christian's need for need for self abasement with those of persuasive public speaking. (Letters 113.3.22) quoted by John Calvin, Institutes, 2.2.11). He writes, "When a certain rhetorician [Demosthenes] was asked what was the chief rule in eloquence, he replied, 'Delivery'; what was the second rule, 'Delivery'; what was the third rule, 'Delivery'"; in the same way, says Augustine, "if you ask me concerning the [chief] precepts of the Christian religion, I would answer first, second, third, and always, 'Humility.'"

Perhaps you have heard of a Puritan minister named Jonathan Edwards, who went on to become the president of Princeton. He is best known today for a sermon preached in 1741. That sermon, on the subject of sin judgment included speaks of "Sinners in the hand of an angry God," and declares that the unredeemed are doomed to "the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked... the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would gladly lay hold on them, and swallow them up..." (If you search on Google for the phrase "sinners in the hand of an angry God, you get 1, 110,000 hits) Less well known is this quote from Jonathan Edwards, "Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil's reach as humility..." [from Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), Part IV, Section I, Banner of Truth Reprint]

This virtue of "humility," which is spoken of so positively by Jonathan Edwards and Augustine, is the theme that lies at the heart of both of today's Scripture Lessons. True humility has always been a rare commodity, but it is an inseparable part of the Christian life. The goal in life for those who follow Jesus should be humbly submitting to the will of God and "serving" others in contrast to our all-too-human tendency towards spiritual pride and arrogance.

Recall in Micah 6:8 that it is declared: "And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Remember when Jesus' disciples, the brothers James and John, were arguing over who would be greater in Christ's kingdom? Jesus answered them in Matthew 20:25-26 when he said: "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister. Jesus lived this out dramatically when He Himself washed the disciple's feet in the Upper Room.

Jesus, the Son of God, lived in humility throughout his life and ministry. Indeed, the apostle Paul proclaims in his letter to the Christian community in Philippi, in northern Greece, that Jesus is the perfect example of what constitutes genuine humility is and of what humbleness means. According to St. Paul, Christ Jesus, of His own free will, suffered death on a cross, the most humiliating form of public execution that then existed and did so in silence and humility.

Now, the Greco-Roman world of which Philippi was a part, definitely did not consider humility to be a virtue. And, of course, neither does our own nation, America. Try to find stories in the newspaper of the media about humility as a virtue. Humility is counter-cultural in a society that worships swaggering athletes, ego-centric actors and musicians, and arrogant societal elitists. But this is nothing new. The humility that Paul calls for in his letter to the Philippians was as counter-cultural and "against the grain" in New Testament times as it is today. Yet Paul entreats his readers to "let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" (vs. 5) – that is, Paul asks us to try to cultivate a mindset of humble obedience to God, a mindset that refuses the temptation to ego-centric, self-serving ambition and every form of arrogance – especially, spiritual arrogance and, instead, to emulate Christ.

Spiritual arrogance – or, as earlier generations called it, spiritual pride – that is what Jonathan Edwards so graphically and aptly described in his sermon on pride as "the main door by which the devil comes into the hearts of those who are zealous for the advancement of religion. [Spiritual pride]," he says, "is the chief inlet of smoke from the bottomless pit, to darken the mind and mislead the judgment. [It] is the main handle by which the devil has hold of religious persons, and the chief source of all the mischief that [the devil]

In the same sermon, Edwards says: "Pure Christian humility disposes a person to take notice of everything that is good in others ... and to diminish their failings.... Pure Christian humility has no such thing as roughness, or contempt, or fierceness, or bitterness in its nature; [humility] makes a person like a little child, harmless and innocent, [whom] none need to be afraid of, or like a lamb, destitute of all bitterness, wrath, anger, and clamor..." (from Some Thoughts, Part IV, Section I, paragraphs 6, 11)

Yes, as Edwards says, there truly is nothing that "sets a person so much out of the devil's reach as humility..." We who are called into covenant by grace, and grafted into the household of God by adoption in our baptism, must never think for a moment that this makes us somehow better than other men and women. On the contrary, being redeemed and forgiven must make us more deeply aware of our own unworthiness to be purchased at such a price as the death of the Son of God on the cross and must bring about a new direction in our lives.

Paul uses the example of Christ to demonstrate how God works his purpose through humility. The first evidence of humility in Christ is in his Incarnation, the sharing of our humanity.

When the King James translation that Christ is " in the form of God," it fails to fully capture the Greek word morphe, which means "the very nature". We think of "form" to mean an outward appearance. But in Greek "morphe" refers to the essential nature of something.. So to say a caterpillar changes (morphs) into a butterfly, we affirm that the nature of a caterpillar and a butterfly is the same. In the movies, computer generated scenes enable characters to "morphe," yet the fundamental character remains the same. There was a time when ever person is a baby, a child, teenager and eventually becomes a grown man or woman. The appearance changes, but the person is the same.

Properly understood, this is one of the strongest statements regarding who Jesus is (in the sense of his divinity) in the entire New Testament. Jesus Christ has the same nature, the unique and identical qualities as God the Father. Jesus is of the very substance of God, not merely having the characteristics of God. He is God in the same sense that God the Father is God. In fact Paul declares that Jesus Christ is "equal with God."

That is a very bold statement. His relationship to the Godhead is explained in the word isos. This term means "exactly the same, in size, quality, quantity, character and number." We use it this way in English, for example: Isomer is a chemical molecule having a slightly different structure from another molecule but being identical with it in terms of its chemical elements and weight. Isometric is equal in number. Isosceles triangle is one with two equal sides. Is God omniscient? Then so is Jesus Christ. Is God omnipresent? Then so is Jesus Christ. Is God omnipotent? Then so is Jesus Christ. Is God the Creator? Then so is Jesus Christ. Is God the beginning and end? Then so is Jesus Christ.

Yet, St. Paul states that Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, did not rely upon that equality with the Father as the primary source of His authority. Christ never used His position as a means of getting more, but as a means to give more. So the mind of Christ is not a life based upon getting, but upon giving.

Although He was and is, fully God, at the Incarnation, Christ made Himself nothing. St. Paul writes that "Christ emptied Himself" when He became a man. Theologians call this the kenosis; Christ's emptying Himself when He took on flesh in the incarnation. Unfortunately, the concept of God emptying Himself is difficult for us.

To "empty" in New Testament means to deprive something of its proper place and use. Christ could not set aside attributes of the Godhead, but He could hide His glory, not lessening it in any actual way, but concealing it. He emptied Himself not by subtraction of His divine attributes but by the assumption, the addition of human nature.

In taking on our humanity, Christ did not diminish His divinity, He did not set aside any attribute which is part of being God. He remained all through the Incarnation the Second Person of the Trinity. To empty Himself of any aspect of deity is to cease being God. If that were the case, His work on the Cross ceases to have any effect. Rather, Christ emptying Himself means that He did what none of us would ever consider doing: He veiled His glory, His majesty and condescended to become a human being. The emptying is the humiliation of the Incarnation. When He became a man, He laid aside the brilliant manifestation of His glory, except for one brief moment on the mount of Transfiguration. He veiled His glory in that He did not demonstrate His attributes.

In the Kenosis, Christ veiled His pre-incarnate glory by taking on humanity, but He did not diminish or destroy any part of it. When the sun is obscured by a cloud, there is no real change of its glory, nor are its beams extinguished, nor is the sun itself in any measure changed, only our perception of it is diminished.

In His time among us, Christ was never diminished in glory, He only veiled His glory. This union of God and man is called the hypostatic union from a Greek word, hypostasis which means: "substance or essence." So the doctrine of the hypostatic union is the doctrine of the personal union of the two natures, the divine and the human, of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is 100% God and 100% man.

Martin Luther wrote: "Reason cannot comprehend this. But we believe it; and this is also the testimony of Scripture: that Christ is true God and that He also became a man". Furthermore, the extent of Christ's obedience is seen in His willingness to die; it was His choice; He humbled Himself.

No human being seeks humiliation, rather it is seen something forced on us. Yet Christ humbled Himself; His was a willful choice. But the goal of His humiliation was death, a death difficult for us to consider. He chose the death of a malefactor, a slave exposed as a public spectacle. There was no greater way in which people of the first century could express their utter disgust with a human being than by crucifying him. It was the chief, the most extreme form of human degradation that existed. It was in the fullest sense of the word an obscenity. In polite Roman society, the word "cross" was not to be uttered in conversation.

Cicero said, "Let the very name of the cross be far removed not only from the body of a Roman citizen, but even from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears." By Jewish law, anyone who was crucified died under the curse of God.

By worldly standards, what kind of kind of life is that? What kind of thinking does this entail?

If we are to think as Christ, if our attitude is to be the same as His, this means that any perceived status and superiority we have apart from God must be scrapped. Our thinking about ourselves should only entail ways in which we can not grasp our station in life, but empty ourselves of what we think adds glory to our names so that we can serve others. This kind of thinking hurts; it is thinking that leads to obedience, which may well include suffering. Christ is our example of humility. In verses 6-8, Christ descends into humiliation. We can't copy His deity, incarnation, perfection or redemptive work, but we are called to copy His humility.

The kingship of Christ did not depend on the crowd, literally the mob that shouted hosanna, it was the same mob that later cried out "Let Him be crucified." Jesus status did not come from men, but from obedience to the will of His Father, who is our Father also. Therefore, we must realize that our status before God is not dependent on what others say, what they think of us, but is bound up in our humility and Christ centered faith.

In verses 9-11, we read that the response of the Father to Christ's perfect obedience and humility is exaltation. This great passage moves us from the humiliation of Christ to the exaltation of Christ. This exaltation is the Father's response to the obedience and humility of Christ. As Jesus did not seek His own glory, but set it aside so that we could be made sons and daughters of God, so the Father raises Jesus to an exceeding height. Christ lowered Himself, so the Father raises Him up. The last word belongs to the Father, as though to emphasize that now in Christ, pre-existing, incarnate and humiliated, and exalted, God and the world are united and a new segment of humanity, a microcosm of God's new order for the universe is born.

Thus St. Paul can write in Ephesians that the very Name of Jesus is exalted, at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow… The one who was humiliated before the world hung on the cross of shame – but His name no longer is associated with shame and agony, but with power, glory, authority and dominion over the whole world. With these two verses the scenario comes full circle. The one who is God and chose to become an object of scorn is now worshipped by all creation. The one who was obedient to death receives obedience and homage.

We must contemplate Christ's sacrifice for us so that we order our lives in a way that is pleasing to the Father. But Paul uses this passage not just as an example. We are called to imitate the selfless giving of Christ because it is in His sacrifice that we find the power to serve. Paul says that we are to be "in Christ", that is, we are His body and He is the head. In light of that, our thinking as a church should be based upon what it means to be "in Christ." Our mind-set in serving each other must reflect our mind-set regarding Jesus Christ. To be proud, to be divisive, to seek worldly approval instead of God's will, is to reject what profess to be true of Christ.

For this reason Paul launches into a recounting of what Christ accomplished for us, what we can never do ourselves. While from the beginning of all things, Christ was always God, He humbled Himself to become a man and to offer Himself up to die in our place. The result is that He is exalted and in Him we are reconciled to God. Finally our union with Christ should lead to the imitation of Christ. There is no genuine life in Christ that is not at the same time, by the power of the Holy Spirit, being regularly transformed into the likeness of Christ. A Gospel of grace which omits obedience denies the power of grace to transform our lives to live in obedience to the Father.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.