The Unity of the Church & the Humility of Christ

I recently rejoined Facebook after over two years away – two glorious, productive, un-outraged years. But like many of you, the quarantine and social distancing was beginning to wear me down. Even an introvert like myself needs to interact with people from time to time, if for nothing else than to keep myself from going so far down the rabbit hole of my own thoughts and going crazy.

It was a week before Easter when I officially logged back in, and I was genuinely encouraged by so many of my friends posting about Jesus and all that he meant to them. There were countless encouragements, pictures, and posts about both the crucifixion and resurrection. Everyone was excitedly sharing what their church was doing during Holy Week. I was like, “Wow! Why did I ever leave this site? Everyone is so great and uplifting.”

And then Monday came. Sadly, it was back to normal for many of us because out came the politics. Here comes the outrage, the name-calling, the straw-manning, and the bad-faith arguments. On Sunday, a follower of Jesus would say, “He is risen,” and her brother-in-Christ would respond, “He is risen indeed!” But then on Monday she would say, “This politician is a disgrace and every Christian who voted for them ought to be ashamed.” And that same brother-in-Christ would respond, “No, you’re the disgrace and your political views prove you’re not a real Christian.”

What are we doing? And listen, I’ve been there, and I’ve done it, and Jesus I repent of that. Do you know what Jesus wants more than anything else from his people? The right politics… No, I’m kidding, that’s not the right answer. If you want to know what Jesus wants for his people more than anything else, take a look at what he prays for on his last night on earth.

John 17:20-23

“My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Jesus wants his people to be unified. He wants our relationships to be so united, and so bonded in love, that they resemble the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. He wants us to be one, because our unity is a message, a proof, to the unbelieving world that God the Father sent Jesus Christ into the world because of his great love for the world. Our unity is a demonstration of the character, love, and actions of God. In other words, we play a part in answering the last prayer of Jesus.

Our text for today is Philippians 2:1-11. Like Jesus, Paul also took the unity of the Church very seriously. He clearly saw how important Christian unity is for, among many other things, the mission of the Gospel. Our unity validates our message. Likewise, our division invalidates our message. That’s why Paul is pleading so strongly with the Christians in Philippi.

Philippians 2:1-4

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

Many of us have worked in places that offer fringe benefits. Notice that it is “fringe” benefits, and not, as I used to believe, “French” benefits. A fringe benefit is something that you get from your employer over and above standard compensation. I used to work at a place that had well stocked refrigerators and candy dishes all over the office. Let me tell you, an ice cold Mountain Dew and a handful of mini Milky Ways at 10 am is a very nice fringe benefit. Also, at 1 pm. And again at 4.

But anyway, right off the top of this passage Paul runs through four fringe benefits that we gain from Christ, over and above the salvation that he promises us. The first fringe benefit is encouragement from being united with Christ. We gain courage to face hard times from being with Jesus. Right now, we’re all going through a hard and scary time because of COVID-19 and all of the physical and economic turmoil it’s causing. But your connection to Jesus is meant to be a channel through which he sends you courage to face your fears. Being united with Christ means that he is near you at all times, even though you can’t see him. He is with you, and he is walking this road beside you, and the good news is that there is no road that we walk that he hasn’t already walked before. You can draw courage from being united with Jesus.

The second fringe benefit is drawing comfort from his love. When you are grieving, when you feel alone, when you are anxious, know that Jesus loves you. As someone who has been through a lot of hell on earth, I can testify that the love of Christ has always been a source of great comfort for me. In Jesus we see that God has not rejected us. God has not abandoned us. God does not despise us. God loves us. He loves you. And no matter what you’re going through or dealing with, the circumstances of your life cannot take away God’s love for you.

The third fringe benefit is community in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit lives within every individual believer, and he also dwells in the midst of every faithful congregation. We are bound to each other because we each have the same Spirit of God within us. No matter how old you are, how much money you have, what your family of origin is, or what you’ve done in your life, the same Spirit lives in every person who calls on the name of Jesus. And this Spirit binds us together in love. We have community because of the Spirit of God.

The last fringe benefit is a softened heart, or as Paul says specifically, tenderness and compassion. Our family’s verse is Ezekiel 11:19, and it says:

Ezekiel 11:19

I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

God gives us soft hearts filled with tenderness and compassion for others. He makes us kind and empathetic. He makes us understanding and gracious.

These are four significant fringe benefits, a lot more significant than Mountain Dew and Milky Ways. In Christ, you have access to encouragement, comfort, community, and a soft heart. Those things are yours.

Now, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? God has expectations for his people. The fringe benefits are great, but they also point to a responsibility that we have to God and one another. In fact, the four fringe benefits lead to four responsibilities.

The first responsibility is to be like-minded. In his translation of the New Testament, N.T. Wright puts it this way: “Bring your thinking into line with one another.” To some of you that sounds like groupthink, and in a way it is. But it’s different from traditional groupthink because it’s not about what you think, it’s about how you think. People who follow Jesus need to think like Jesus. And we’ll get into that in a few minutes.

The second responsibility is to have the same love. There are a lot of different loves. There are a lot of different kinds of love. There are a lot of sources of love. There are an almost infinite number of things to love.

One of the things that I really enjoy about living in central Ohio is the near universal shared love that we have for the Buckeyes. I know there are some heretics among us, but we tolerate you because we are so gracious and not ever obnoxious. But there’s a real community that’s built around this quasi- idolatrous shared love, and if you have that love, it’s great. And if you don’t, you can always move.

But the love that we have, the love that binds us together for eternity, is the love of God revealed in Jesus. The bond of sports won’t last forever, but Jesus is forever. The bond of politics will choke us all, but Jesus holds us in his loving arms. When you can’t hold onto anything else, the love of God in Christ will hold onto you. We need to place this love at the center of our community.

The third responsibility is to be one in spirit. Again from N.T. Wright: “Bring your innermost lives into harmony.” I don’t know a lot about music, but there’s nothing quite as powerful, in my mind, as a spot-on multi-part harmony of human voices. It just moves me, and I can’t explain it. That’s what our inner lives are supposed to be like. Christian unity means our inner lives are harmonizing with each other, and if God could get goosebumps, then that’s what would give him goosebumps.

The fourth responsibility is to be one in mind. This means that we are all giving our primary attention to the same object. Jesus must be the common object of our attention and our affection. Few things are worthy of that, but Jesus is at the top of the list. That’s a lot of responsibilities, isn’t it? How can we do that? Because I can’t go home and work on this myself, hoping that the next time we run into each other our inner lives have harmonized. This is something we have to do together. The common benefits demand a common responsibility. How do we do that? How can we build this unity that Paul demands, and Jesus prayed for?

Well, there’s not a shortcut to unity, but there is a path. There is a simple path to unity. It’s not an easy path, but it’s a simple path because it’s not complicated. This is the path to unity: humility. Humility creates unity. Look again at verses 3 and 4.

Philippians 2:3-4

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

Humility is God’s favorite harmony. Humility is valuing others above yourself. It’s not having a low value of yourself; it’s having a high value of others. Like C.S. Lewis said, “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”

As a young man I had to learn that putting myself down all the time, thinking that I was weak, pitiful, or worthless – none of that was humility. That was just self-hatred. Self-hatred is not humility, it’s just the inverse of arrogance. I was still thinking of myself all the time. I was still the center of my own universe, but instead of that center being a glorious, radiant sun, it was a life-sucking black hole.

God wants you to stop thinking about yourself all the time. Think about the interests and needs of other people. Fix your attention on Jesus. Be defined by the love of God in Christ. Sing your part of the harmony of humility that gives God such great pleasure.

I’ve come to believe that humility is the secret of life. Humility is the fuel that properly powers the universe, and the fundamental reason that creation is broken is because we put pride in the engine. We have tried to fuel creation with pride, power, and control, and it just doesn’t work that way. We just keep breaking it, and the only thing that will fix it is humility. And I say that because of what we’re about to read.

Philippians 2:5-8

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!

The New Testament consistently tells us that Jesus is the perfect and complete image, picture, representation, word of God. All the fullness of the Deity lived in him. He is the exact representation of God’s being. Everything we need to know about God, everything that is true about God, we see in Jesus. There is nothing about God that Jesus has not revealed to us. And what do we see, most fundamentally, in Jesus? Humility. The essence of divinity is humility.

The actions of Jesus reveal the attitude of the Trinity. The things that the Son did show us what is in the heart of God. And what did the Son do? What was his path? From God to human to slave to corpse. Jesus did not value his divinity above the well-being of humanity. His attitude toward his own divine nature was to say, “I am not God for my own sake, but for the sake of my creatures.” Humility is the essence of divinity.

Like many of you, our family has watched the entire first season of The Chosen while under quarantine. The Chosen is a new, independent television series portraying the life of Jesus, and it’s really good. It’s like Netflix good, even though it’s not on Netflix. There’s no cheese, no schmaltz, no overacting. I cannot recommend it to you highly enough.

It’s such a different, compelling experience to see the stories of the Gospels portrayed the way that they are. You get a really strong sense for how the things that made their way into Scripture fit into the larger context of the lives of Jesus and his disciples. One thing that stood out to me was, from the perspective of the Roman authorities, as well as the Jewish religious leaders, Jesus is very dispensable. In the eyes of the powerful, Jesus was just another Jewish peasant. It would cost them nothing to get rid of him, which of course they ultimately did.

But that’s the position that God put himself in. God made himself dispensable to the powerful. He made himself of no consequence to the people who set the rules of society. Can you imagine demanding that God pay taxes? Can you imagine a Roman soldier pushing Jesus out of the way, as though he were no more important than an inconveniently located tree branch? This is what God chose to do. This is the position he willingly put himself into.

Jesus could not have descended any further than he did, and the fact that the Son of God could tolerate such a condescension speaks to the humility that was eternally present in his essence. There is nothing in the Gospel texts to tell us that Jesus was resentful about his incarnation. He did not consider his humanity a prison from which he would soon escape. He was no Gnostic. He didn’t despise his flesh; he sanctified it.

From the throne of heaven to the cross of Calvary, Jesus passed through poverty, familial shame, living as a refugee in Egypt. He was a tradesman, and when he left his trade to become a teacher, he was homeless. He had no sponsors. He knew hunger and exhaustion. His life was harder than ours, by a lot. And on top of all this, he still endured the suffering and shame of the cross. From the beginning to the end, he did all of this by choice. He decided to endure all these things so that we might be saved.

Which brings us to the end of this passage.

Philippians 2:9-11

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The humility of Jesus created the conditions of his exaltation. Because he went from God to human to slave to corpse, God brought him from corpse to resurrected body to ascension to exaltation. Because Jesus got low, the Father lifted him high. And who benefits from this? Those who follow him. Those who receive him as both King and Savior. Jesus lowered himself deeper than our own depths so that we might be raised up to his own height.

And one day, every intelligent being is going to see this. Whether spirit or human, whether living or dead, every knee will bow at the name of Jesus. Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

There’s something really important happening here in this passage that I want you to get. Paul was Jewish, and the Jewish people take the name of God very seriously – so seriously, in fact, that they do not say God’s name out loud. Instead, they might say Adonai, which means Lord, or Ha-Shem, which means The Name. For Paul, the name that is above every name is the name of God. It’s the name that God revealed to Moses – YHWH.

But what will happen on this day that is coming, this great day of the Lord, is that God the Father, whose name is YHWH, will let the name of his Son, Jesus, be the name that is above every name. And letting the name by which God is known now be Jesus will bring infinite glory to the Father. Why? Because humility is the essence of divinity. Even God the Father doesn’t want to make his own name great, he wants the name of Jesus to be the name that is above every name.

Jesus often talked about how, in the kingdom of God, the greatest are the least. The last are first. And he lived that, didn’t he? Jesus got low. He got low enough to lift us up. Jesus became the least of the last, and now the Father has made him greatest of the first. And it’s at his name that all creation will worship.

This is the mindset we’re supposed to have. Humility fosters unity. God wants unity. We have to be humble. Of course, other than Jesus, there are no experts in humility. No one has figured this out, and if they had they wouldn’t know it. But it’s still important to try, so I want to leave you with three ways to change your mindset to be more like the attitude of Jesus.

First, change your mindset from “getting ahead” to “getting low.” We’re taught to get ahead in life, but what if, instead of breeding competition in our hearts we fostered compassion? What if we saw our position in life as something to be used in the service of others? That’s the kind of mindset that builds unity. Humble people are natural unifiers.

Second, change your mindset from getting to giving. Jesus emptied himself because he viewed his divinity as something to be used in the service of others. He was a giver. He gave everything for us. That’s the approach we should take with one another, so flip that switch in your mind from getting to giving. Finally, and I think most practically, change your mindset from “political victory” to “Christian unity.” Do you value unity enough to lose an argument in order to keep a friend? So you won some Facebook argument. What did it cost you? What did it cost the body of Christ? Your constant outrage is not bonding you to your fellow believers in the love of Christ. Jesus loosened his grip on his divine rights in order to unite us to himself and one another. Will you loosen your grip on your politics in order to protect the unity that Jesus prayed we would have?

At the end of all things, the name of your political party isn’t going to matter. The name of the person you voted for won’t be remembered. The only name that will matter is the name of God, the name above all names, at the sound of which the knee of every intelligent creature will bend. The only name that matters is the name of Jesus.