The Example of Jesus
What did Jesus do when he died on the cross?
The answer to that question is the heart of the gospel.
It’s the most important thing that we could know about God — and the good news about the heart of the good news is that God has made it clear to us in the Scriptures. At the cross, we know that … “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” — Galatians 3:13. For our sake, “[God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” — 2 Corinthians 5:21. “Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God…” — 1 Peter 3:18.
The theological term for this is “substitutionary atonement.” It means that Jesus died for us, in our place. That is the main fact of the cross that we must understand and cling to, and when we do — when we cling to substitution as the main fact of the cross — then we can begin to see that it wasn’t the only fact of the cross. Jesus was mainly our substitute, but he was also our example.
One way to say it is that … Jesus as our substitute means he went to the cross so that we wouldn’t have to. Jesus as our example means he went to the cross so that we would join him there.
Both are true — and in today’s passage, the call is that we join him there. In Philippians 2, verses 5–11, Paul shows us the example of Jesus, and he tells us to be like him.
And I don’t think we could overstate just how amazing these verses are. Most commentators say that this is the most important passage in Philippians — the first part of the letter flows into it, and the second part of the letter flows out of it. One commentator says that not only is this passage the centerpiece of Philippians, but it’s the centerpiece of the entire New Testament!
So I just wanna say: I’m so glad that God saved me and let’s me do what I get to do right now. I can’t believe I get to show you the things I get to show you today. There are three things I want us to see. They are three truths about the example of Jesus. Let’s pray and we’ll get started:
Father, thank you for all of this, for this morning and this moment. Give us, now, eager hearts to receive what you have for us. By your Spirit and his power, show us the glory of Jesus. Help us to see him more clearly than ever before. In his name, amen.
Three truths about the example of Jesus:
1) The example of Jesus is practical.
When I say “practical” I mean that it’s immediately relevant. And this is important to keep in mind because by verse 6, the theological depth of this passage is overwhelming. Paul is mining the mystery of how Jesus thought in his pre-incarnate existence as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. So this is deep! There’s a lot here!
Which means we have to be careful that we don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. Because what Paul says here about Jesus is meant to serve a direct purpose — which is what he’s just been talking about in verses 3 and 4: the topic is humility.
We saw this last week, verse 3:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit…”
That word “conceit” is extra special; it’s the Greek word kenodoxia, which means literally empty glory — some English translations put it as “vain conceit.” Acting like you’ve got something when really it’s a big bag of nothing. Empty glory. You get the idea. Remember that word.
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”
Then in verse 4, Paul just restates that same idea:
“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
Paul is describing humility here, and it’s humility for the sake of what? … You remember? Real church unity.
We see the topic of unity in verses 1 and 2 and it goes back to the end of Chapter 1.
Bringing It All Together
Paul exhorts this church to be united, to have real church unity, which is not unity for its own sake. This is Holy Spirit unity that displays that we’re living as citizens of heaven worthy of the gospel of Christ — Chapter 1, verse 27.
So just for a second here, I want to bring together this passage with the end of Chapter 1. This is bringing together our last four weeks …
First, our primary calling as a local church is to live together in this world as a witness to the all-satisfying value of Jesus … And that life together is manifest through real church unity … And though it’s embattled unity from the outside and the inside, real church unity comes through humility — And if we want to know about humility, we look to Jesus.
That’s Paul’s train of thought that leads us to verse 5.
So we need to remember that the example of Jesus in verses 5–11 is meant to be practical. Jesus has modeled for us how to be humble, and being humble is absolutely necessary if people are going to get along.
Good for Marriage
That’s why this passage is my favorite passage to preach at a wedding (getting along is helpful if you’re married). I’ve preached these verses maybe 20 times at weddings (which means some of you have had to hear it a lot).
This is no joke. A few years ago there was one couple, I officiated their wedding at the beginning of the year, preached Philippians 2, and then I did three other weddings later than year where I also preached Philippians 2, and that couple was at all those weddings. By the fourth time, I saw the couple before the wedding started, and I went up to them and said, Look, I think God is trying to tell you something.
Seriously. Young married couples listen up — also old married couples — and everybody in-between … you wanna know a secret to a good marriage? Learn humility.
If I could be personal for just a minute, today is March 3, 2024 which means that as of today, I’ve been married to my wife for 17 years.
And look, 17 years ago, I thought I was riding into our marriage on a white horse, but it wasn’t long before Jesus told me that I was on his horse and I needed to get off. Humility changed my life and my marriage … and I’m not pretending to be the expert on humility [the expert on humility around here is David Mathis — bro wrote a book titled Humbled] — I’ll just say that whatever I know about humility, I learned it from Jesus, and this is the passage.
Philippians 2:5, “Have this mind — the mindset just described in verses 3–4 — have this humble mindset among yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.
So get ready. We’re about to learn humility from Jesus.
2) The example of Jesus shows us true humility.
This is gonna be clear in the passage, but I think we could also just use our heads to figure out that if we want to learn about humility, we’re looking at the right place. Just think with me here, theologically. Two questions:
Who is the humblest person to ever live? [Jesus]
When was Jesus his most humblest? [at the cross]
So add this up: we know the humblest person to ever live AND we know when he was his most humblest, so then whatever we think about humility, it should be shaped by that — right?! Of course!
And that’s where Paul takes us, starting in verse 6. This is the humility of “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.”
The cross of Christ is the paragon of humility — and I hope we never think about humility again without thinking about the cross. (That’s one of my little goals for this sermon.)
The cross was the ultimate, definitive display of humility by the humblest person to ever live — and so let’s see how Jesus got there. We’re gonna work our way backwards from verse 8.
The end of verse 8: “even death on a cross.” That’s the lowest. But before Jesus got there, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. And before Jesus got to that obedience, he became human — but not just a human, he became a slave — And what led him to do that? Verse 6:
“he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself.”
The Headwaters
And right there in verse 6, in that counting (that calculating) — that is the headwaters of Jesus’s humility. Verses 7 and 8 flows from that counting in verse 6. So what does it mean? What does it mean to “not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.”
A lot of it has to do with that word “a thing to be grasped.” Let’s focus in on that in verse 6, those words “to be grasped.”
Now we know that Jesus is equal with God. He is God. The Bible teaches us that Jesus, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, is eternally begotten of God the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and these three real persons are of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence is undivided.
Jesus is God! That’s who he is. That’s his identity — so then what’s it mean that he did not count that as something “to be grasped”?
This word here is only used this one time in the entire Bible, and so we have to look around in classical Greek to see how it was used there to try to figure out what Paul is saying.
Well the word could also be translated as “seize” or “take advantage of.” It means to seize or to take or to lay claim to something that’s rightfully yours. Jesus didn’t do that with his ‘God-ness’ — his glory. He knew who he was, but he didn’t take advantage of his identity, instead, he emptied himself.
And that word “emptied himself” should send us back to verse 3, “vain conceit” (kenodoxia, empty glory). Part of the same Greek word in verse 3 that means “empty” is used here, but see here Jesus didn’t have vain conceit, he didn’t have “empty glory” — he emptied himself of the rights of his true glory. … There’s a little play on words going on — Jesus didn’t act like he had something but it was a big bag of nothing; Jesus had everything and he made himself nothing.
He emptied himself of the truest glory of all.
Jesus, being eternally God, his glory is immense and incomprehensible. He is almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute. He has always worked all things according to the counsel of his most righteous will, and he said: I don’t have to seize that.
I don’t have to take advantage of the rights of my true glory, so … I’ll become a man, I’ll become a slave, I’ll become obedient to the very end, suffering to the point of death, I’ll even die on a cross.
A cross — There could be no more extreme opposite to his glory. Nobody — not a single Jew and not a single Philippian shaped by the values of the Roman Empire — nobody would have ever thought that the man on the cross could be God. There was no category for that. Not for that kind of shame.
When Jesus emptied himself to the point of death on a cross, he subjected himself to not only people not recognizing him as God, but he also subjected himself to everyone thinking the absolute worst of him, and he never tried to set the record straight. And that was actually the thing that they went for, if we can remember his cross.
And we have to join him there, okay … the humblest man to ever live in his most humblest moment.
It was three hours, from noon to 3pm on Good Friday. That was the humblest man’s humblest moment, but was there a most humblest moment within that humblest moment? — I don’t know — but, I can’t help but think about what the onlookers said to him.
That Is Who I Am!
First I should tell you a story (and forgive me if you’ve heard this story before) …
When I was in 5th grade I won an art contest, which was pretty cool because I won like $100 bucks and my art (it was a drawing) was gonna be displayed at this big county-wide event. There was gonna be a big exhibit, art everywhere, and my first place art was gonna be there front and center.
So my mom and dad took me to this thing so they could see the picture I drew — they had not seen it yet. So we got there, and you could see the ‘first place area’ at a distance, so we began to walk up toward my picture, and as we were walking up, the director of the exhibit was standing beside my picture talking to another kid my age — and as we got closer I realized that this kid was telling the director that my picture was his.
The director guy was super interested and he was asking this kid all about certain details in the picture, and this kid was answering all his questions! But then I was standing there with my parents and it was my name under the picture. And so what do you think I did?
With ever fiber of my being, I seized every possible fact I could to prove that the picture was mine. That’s my picture! That’s my name! That’s my school! These are my parents — Dad, show ‘em your license! That is who I am! That’s me! Don’t deny me my glory! And I grasped for it.
Do you remember what they said to Jesus at the cross?
Radical Security in God
We have to join him there.
Behold the man upon a cross,
My sin upon his shoulders;
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
What did we say? … “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (see Matthew 27:40). Which was not a request. It was a statement. The scoffers didn’t just not recognize Jesus as God, they called him a fake. A liar.
Prove to us, they said — Right now, prove to us who you are!
And do you know what he could have done?
We’ve read the Book of Exodus around here.
We know what he could have done, but what did he do?
He still did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but he emptied himself. He did not take advantage of his glory. He did not vindicate his identity, but … he yielded the vindication of his identity to God.
And that’s it. That’s true humility.
According to Jesus — the humblest person to ever live in his most humblest moment — he shows us that true humility is the faith-fueled refusal of self-vindication.
Or to say it positively, Jesus shows us that true humility is radical security in God.
Jesus was so confident that the Father would take care of him that he didn’t need to “get his.” He didn’t have to prove who he was, because he knew who he was and he knew the Father would make it plain at the right time.
So Jesus yielded … and yielded … and yielded … until he was dead on a cross … a cross.
Given the Name
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”
From the lowest possible low, death on a cross, to the highest possible high, God the Father says I’ll tell you who he is.
See, Jesus did not vindicate himself, but the Father vindicated him by raising him from the dead and declaring his name. THE NAME! The name above every name — and that name could only be one! It’s the name Yahweh. Jesus is Yahweh.
And then in verse 10 Paul quotes from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, Chapter 45. It’s a high point in Isaiah when God is declaring his unrivaled supremacy over all nations. Listen to Isaiah 45:21. This is God speaking:
“21 And there is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
there is none besides me.
22 “Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
23 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.’
God says that about himself in Isaiah 45 and now here, in Philippians 2, Paul says that’s about Jesus —
“… 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.”
And any Jewish person hearing this would get the message, but Paul is also doing something else here.
And this brings us to the third truth to see …
3) The example of Jesus changes the way we see life in this world.
Everybody focus on that sentence in verse 11, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” I want to make sure you see that word “Lord” in verse 11.
Now the word “Lord” is a word that we use today, but I want us to think about it from the standpoint of this original audience in the First Century. Track with me:
Anybody with a Jewish background would have heard the sentence “Jesus is Lord” to mean that Jesus is Yahweh.
That’s because the word “Lord” was the word substituted for the divine name “Yahweh” in the Old Testament.
Out of reverence, Jewish people would not speak the name “Yahweh” but instead, whenever “Yahweh” shows up in the Scriptures, they would say the Hebrew word Adonai (“Adonai” it a title that means “Lord”).
And so when the Greeks translated the Hebrew Old Testament, they put in their word for Adonai (Lord) which was Kyrios. So at this time, kyrios was the word Jewish people used for Yahweh. For Jews, Jesus is kyrios meant Jesus is Yahweh.
But for everybody else, for all the Gentiles, the word kyrios (lord) meant something else — because “Lord” was the title used for the Roman Emperor, the Caesar.
It is a well-documented fact by historians that people at this time called the Emperor Nero Lord. There’s evidence from things written at this time and from things found, that in a Roman colony like Philippi, there would have been what was basically propaganda all throughout the city that said “Caesar is Lord.” Historians call this the “imperial religion.” Political loyalty to Rome meant you worshiped the Roman Emperor — you called him Lord.
So for this little church at Philippi, as the Roman world around them was saying “Caesar is lord” — Paul says, No, Jesus is Lord. And you know what else?
One day, everybody will know that. One day every knee will bow in all creation — every knee including Caesar’s knee — will bow before Jesus, and every tongue — including Caesar’s tongue — will confess, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
The one who died on a cross, the one who was mocked and despised, who was called a fake — he is actually the One to whom every creature must answer. Every single creature to ever live will bow to Jesus — Jesus who is Lord … Jesus who was the slave crucified … because he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. And we’re supposed to be like him.
We Don’t Have to “Get Mine”
And this changes everything. How could we ever look at this world the same?
Especially if you’re surrounded by a world, by a culture, that is antagonistic to your faith. What if it’s a world that rejects you or even persecutes you, like the conflict that Paul and these Christians faced with the Romans. The Roman Empire had no idea who these Christians were and what that meant. And that’s actually something we have in common with them. The surrounding world has never really understood who we are.
I just was talking about this a couple of weeks ago with Pastor Mike Schumann. We were having lunch, and this place we were at was packed, and I was looking around and I said:
Nobody in here knows that we are children of God, that one day we’re gonna judge angels, that one day we’re going to inherit the whole world, one day this restaurant is gonna be ours … and nobody in here knows.
And what that means, at a very practical level, is that we don’t have to go through this life always grasping to “get ours.” There might not be a more backwards way for a Christian to think than to have a kind of anxiety-driven, self-vindicating hustle mentality.
A lot of times though we can see life this way. We can think about life the way Marshawn Lynch thought about football.
Marshawn Lynch used to be the running back for the Seattle Seahawks, and once he was asked about his mentality on the football field, and he said:
“I feel like on that field, there’s no reason I can’t run through you … I know I’m gonna get got, but I’m gon’ get mine more than I get got, though.”
I’m gon’ get mine more than I get got. That might work for an NFL running back, but not for life, not for Christians.
The example of Jesus means: I don’t have to “get mine” — Because God is going to take care of me. We don’t have to be afraid of going low, of being thought low. We don’t have to fear the cross because we know Who we are — and we know where all of this is headed. That’s what it means to be Easter people in a Good Friday World.
And that was the witness of Kayla Rigney. Kayla walked through the valley of the shadow of death and she feared no evil because she was humble like Jesus, because she knew God would take care of her. See, Kayla is good Easter people. That’s who we’re called to be. That’s the example of Jesus.
Our radical security in God is our humility. And because of Jesus, like Jesus, we can be truly humble, to the glory of God the Father.
And that’s what brings us to this Table.
The Table
If you’re here today and you’re not a Christian, I doubt any of this makes sense to you. You have to know Jesus first, and we get to know him by trusting him. And so I want to invite you to do that. If you’ve never put your faith in Jesus, would you put your faith in Jesus right now?
For those of us who have trusted in Jesus, for those of us who hope in him, let’s receive the bread and cup this morning and give him thanks. Jesus Christ is Lord! What a Savior!
