01-27-13 God’s Pathway to Honor

Philippians 2:5-11

We are studying the book of Philippians,

and our study has brought us to verse 5

of Philippians chapter 2.

We are going to be looking at verses 5-11

during the next few minutes,

but in order to handle this passage correctly

we are going to need to approach it

from two separate perspectives.

We need to look at it

both from the perspective of DOCTRINE

and from the perspective of APPLICATION.

These 7 verses are a truly remarkable passage of Scripture

for so many reasons.

Let me read the verses

and then we’ll start digging into them.

Philippians 2:5-11 reads:

Phil. 2:5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,

Phil. 2:6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

Phil. 2:7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.

Phil. 2:8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Phil. 2:9 Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,

Phil. 2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth,

Phil. 2:11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Before we even begin to look at the content here

I want to mention something

that I find fascinating.

These seven verses are one of the most crucial doctrinal passages

in the entire New Testament,

revealing to us vital pieces of knowledge about the Person of Christ.

In these few verses

we are given remarkable insight

into Christ’s history prior to His birth,

as well as important knowledge about

what was going on while He was on earth

and even a perspective on events in the future

that will impact every human being ever born.

In a few brief words

Paul sketches for us a razor sharp

panoramic picture of the Person of Christ that is staggering

both in its scope

and in its significance and implications.

In fact if we could have only seven verses

from the entire Bible

concerning the Person of Christ

to help us understand who He is

and what He was doing,

these seven verses right here

would be prime candidates.

But look at the way in which

these verses show up in the passage.

I mean, why were they included at all?

Why did Paul even bring these things up in the first place?

Well, look at verse 5 again...

Phil. 2:5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who...

Paul introduced these comments about Christ simply as an illustration,

an example of how he wanted

the Philippian Christians to relate to one another.

OK now look at this -

Paul is revealing knowledge to his readers about the Person of Christ

within the context of his ongoing

friendship with them.

So?

My point is - that is typical

of the way our Lord always goes about

teaching us about Himself.

When I was in school

I took a class on Bible doctrine.

In that class we systematically studied

many of the major doctrines in the Bible.

There was a chapter in that course

on the attributes of God Himself.

In that study I learned that God was

omniscient - that He knows all things,

and omnipotent - all powerful,

and that He is omnipresent - that He is everywhere.

I learned a bunch of other stuff

like that as well -

all of it true,

and all of it as dry as dust.

You see, that’s how many teachers go about

teaching about God.

Everything is organized,

and systematized,

and categorized,

and everything is included on the test.

But that is not how God goes about

teaching us about Himself.

He teaches us about Himself

in the context of His living relationship with us.

He did not hand us a book

with chapters entitled “Attributes of Deity”

with a list of all of His qualities

in alphabetical order.

Instead,

well, instead ... the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

In others words, when God set about

teaching us about Himself

He simply moved into the neighborhood,

into our neighborhood,

into our life,

and then began to build a friendship with us,

allowing us to discover what He’s like

by our just hanging out with Him.

God’s approach to teaching us about Himself

is to do so within the context

of our growing relationship with Him.

You see, its one thing to sit in a church

or in a classroom and be told that

our God is omnipresent,

but it’s a very different thing

to find yourself thousands of miles from home

in a place you’ve never been before

with every face you see a stranger,

and then to hear your God saying,

“My beloved child, I’ll never leave you,

I’ll never forsake you.

I’m always right here with you,

and nothing can ever separate you

from my love.”

Our God is fundamentally

and eternally

and profoundly relational,

and He has designed His approach to us

so that what we learn about Him

grows out of our relationship with Him.

Do you know what all true Christian doctrine really is?

It is our intellectual response

to God’s revelation of Himself.

It is our attempt to explain

who God is,

and what He’s like

based on how He has chosen to reveal Himself to us,

and involve Himself in our lives,

and in our world.

You see, I don’t believe any doctrine about God

was ever intended to be learned

or taught apart from our living,

growing,

personal interaction with Him.

And just as the goal of all true spiritual growth

centers on developing

a growing friendship with Christ Himself,

so all doctrine should be

rooted in that friendship and grow out of it.

Our knowledge about God on the intellectual level

should be a natural result of

our knowledge of God that grows out of what’s happening between Him and us in real life.

And since I’ve gotten into this,

I’d like to take it a step farther

and apply it to our relationship with others Christians

and especially younger Christians in our life.

What I’m about to share with you

will not be what many of you may expect,

but it goes to the heart of what I consider to be

the only truly effective way of passing on the life of faith

from one generation to another.

I have been involved in the lives of younger Christians for most of my life.

Even back in my now very distant college days

I had several fellow students a year or two younger than I was

who, to some degree, used me as their model

of what it meant to live with Christ.

For many years I simply accepted the commonly offered belief

that the key to Christian growth was knowledge

and the more knowledge we could accumulate

and the more knowledge we could pass on to the next generation

the more effective we would be in our ability to produce

and then reproduce quality Christian living.

Of course I’m not suggesting that correct knowledge about our God doesn’t matter.

Look what I’ve done with my life!

Every week I do the best I know how

to publicly communicate correct knowledge about our King.

But as I look back over the results

of what is now nearly 50 years of my own walk with my Lord,

it is not the knowledge I’ve been able to communicate

that has had the power to impact the lives of others.

The few times when I have come away

knowing that I’ve truly, at some level been able to reproduce myself

have always been the result of just two things.

They are two things that should not have surprised me

if I would have looked honestly at the life of my Lord Jesus Christ when He was here,

but things I could not see clearly for many years

because of the fog of knowledge-based systems floating around the church world.

But in the end

the two things that have been more effective

than everything else put together

in my efforts to pass on my own relationship with Christ are these -

First, my willingness and ability to truly love the person I’m trying to reach.

Several months ago I exchanged several e-mails

with a man who had found a copy of The Grace Exchange

at a used book store.

From his comments to me in his note

it was obvious that he wanted to figure out

how to live a truly effective Christian life

and how to impact the next generation.

At one point in those exchanges he said,

“I need to invest in others more. How do I do so without being presumptuous? I am blessed to know a lot of younger, single men, but is it weird to approach them if I am presuming to guide them somewhere or is it better to have them come to you and ask for counsel?”

I responded to him with this:

Don’t attempt to guide anyone anywhere... Just build a friendship. That’s all. Just love those God gives you a heart for, just as they are, right where they are, without any agenda, without any expectations. Go golfing with them, go out to lunch, play racquet ball, go fishing, change the oil in your cars,...just build a friendship. If they sense you have an agenda or expectations or some system you’re trying to pass on it will never work. If they discover that you truly love them, care about them, enjoy them, like being with them, they will let you into their life and they will model themselves after you. If you don’t really love them, if you’re just looking for some way to fulfill a religious duty of discipleship, don’t even try. It won’t work.

There simply is nothing more powerful in all the world

than the power of truly, deeply, honestly caring about another person.

It is the only thing I know of

that allows us to gain access to their life

in a way that gives them the willingness to receive from us.

And then the second essential ingredient

is my willingness to let them see me honestly -

both what’s working and what’s not in my own life.

And this is perhaps the most difficult of all

because we have such a longing to create and maintain a good image,

a facade.

But one of the great discoveries of my life

was when I found out that, when I allow another person to see

where I’m struggling, or wounded, or in need of help,

when I stop trying to project some sort of super-Christian facade

and openly acknowledge that we are all just children in the hands of our God

trying, one step, one day at a time to understand His grace and His life within us,

it makes it far easier for them to trust me when I say, “This I know to be true!”

And if I really do love them

and if I truly live honestly before them

then passing on knowledge is easy

because it’s passed on framed by my own life.

Of course it means that the only knowledge I can effectively pass on

is the knowledge I have, at some level, really integrated into my own life.

But that’s all we can ever do anyway.

Whenever we attempt to communicate some truth or principle or knowledge about God

that we have not yet incorporated into our own walk with the King,

it has no power to penetrate another person’s life.

This is certainly true with our children.

We can never take them beyond our own level of faith.

They may, and often do surpass us,

but only because God’s Spirit has found other tools in their lives.

But I brought all of this up

because this is exactly what Paul is doing

as he encourages his fellow Christians in their growth.

He doesn’t take them to knowledge about Christ,

he takes them to the living illustration of the life of Christ Himself.

What I am trying to say, though,

is that all true knowledge about our God,

all knowledge that has the power

to reshape our lives

and rebuild our broken places

is learned within the context

of a living, growing relationship

with our Lord,

and with those who have risked being sufficiently honest

to illustrate Him to us through their own life.

The source of our knowledge is

what our Lord tells us about Himself

through His word.

But the crucial thing

is to recognize that He really is

saying it TO US

in the context of our personal relationships with Him and with others.

And I see that being illustrated

here in Paul’s comments in Phil. 2.

The knowledge Paul shares about Christ

is vital knowledge for us,

but, here again, it is presented

simply in the context of his friendship

with his Philippian friends.

And since I’m clearly wandering a bit here,

I want add one more thought that may help.

Just as we learn who our God is

through our personal growing interaction with Him,

the most powerful tool we will ever have

for teaching a younger Christian about Christ

is through our choosing to relate to them

as closely as possible to the way our Lord relates to us.

And what does that mean?

Our Lord loves us unconditionally,

not for what we have done or not done,

but simply because He delights in and treasures our perfect uniqueness.

He takes us right where we are, just as we are.

And then he offers us “this grace in which we stand” (Rom. 5:2),

a friendship with Him that is bathed in His grace toward us.

And it is that pattern that He calls us to reproduce

in our relationships with one another.

OK, Paul is encouraging his readers

to follow the example of Christ.

But then, as he shares the example of Christ

we discover some things about our Lord

that are truly remarkable.

First of all, Paul tells us that, prior to His birth Jesus...

Existed in the form of God...

Without getting excessively academic

the words Paul uses here clearly

communicate that prior His birth

Christ held the identical nature,

and attributes,

and eternal existence

as does God the Father,

with all of the omniscience

and omnipotence

and omnipresence

and all the rest of it that comes with being God.

He was absolutely equal to

and identical with God the Father.

2. The next thing Paul shares with us

is that Christ:

...did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

Phil. 2:7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.

Now, when Paul says that Christ did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped,

he is saying that Christ did not choose to hang onto

or cling to what was rightfully His.

There was nothing in the justice

or purity or moral character

and perfect integrity of God

that demanded that Christ do what He did.

When He emptied Himself

of all of the attributes that were rightfully His as God

and became a Man, He did so

not because He had to,

or because it was required of Him

by God the Father.

He did so because His love for you and for me

made Him want to.

Paul sets up a contrast in verses 6 and 7

that he wants us see -

in verse 6 he tells us that Christ existed

in the FORM OF GOD.

In verse 7 he tells us that he took on the FORM OF A BOND-SERVANT.

There simply are no two greater extremes.

He went from absolute equality and strength

to absolute submission and weakness

in His relationship with the God the Father.

And to emphasis the degree of that submission

and the weakness

Paul says in verse 8:

Phil. 2:8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

During His years on this earth

Christ was totally dependant upon the leadership of the Father,

and totally submitted to the will of the Father.

He did not live with this secret inner knowledge of the future,

or some kind of superhuman inner power

or ability to temporarily pull out of the body

and take a 30 minute break from humanity.

He lived each day

dependant upon the leadership

and guidance of the Holy Spirit,

inching His way through life

one step

and one issue at a time

just like we do.

We know that because of statements such as this in Luke 5:17 And it came about one day that He was teaching; and there were some Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem; and the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing.

OK, Paul tells us that Christ:

1. Existed co-equal in all respects

to God the Father.

2. That He emptied Himself of all the qualities that are a part of the divine nature

and chose to take on human form

living under total submission to

the daily leadership of the Father,

a submission that extended

to His own death on the cross.

3.And then Paul goes on in verses 9-11

to complete the picture.

Phil. 2:9 Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,

Phil. 2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth,

Phil. 2:11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Christ’s submission and obedience

resulted in God the Father establishing

Christ in the position of absolute

and total supremacy over all of Creation

forever.

We’re out of time,

so we’ll have to wait until next week

to talk about how all of this applies

to our relationships with one another.

But I can’t close without making one additional observation.

What we have just seen and heard Paul share with us

is another one of those places

where the world of the flesh and life in the Spirit

are as opposite as anything could ever be.

We know all too well what’s required

in order to gain dominance and prominence in our society.

We need to push ourselves to the front,

we need to conquer and control those who stand in our way.

We need to win by the world’s standards.

But in this passage,

through the example of our King,

our God is telling us that for those who trust Him,

for those who submit to Him,

for those who take on the heart of a servant

He Himself will, at the proper time and in exactly the right way,

elevate them and honor them in ways that only God can do.

Peter said it perfectly.

Pe 5:6 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time,

1Pe 5:7 casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.

1Pe 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

1Pe 5:9 But resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experiences of suffering are being accomplished by your brethren who are in the world.

1Pe 5:10 After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.

And when God honors a person

it is an honor without regret,

an honor that causes the human spirit

to overflow with gratitude.