OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION:
2. THE HIGHER CALLING – TO BE NOTHING
3. BACKGROUND ON PHILIPPIANS
4. PAUL ADDRESSES POSSIBLE CONFLICT WITHIN THE COMMUNITY
5. PAUL’S APPROACH – HAVE THE ATTITUDE OF CHRIST
6. BECOME NOTHING – KENOSIS EXPLAINED
7. COMMUNITY APPLICATION – HUMILITY, SUBMISSION, AND SELF-DENIAL
You know when you eat a lot of turkey you get kind of sleepy? I got sleepy, and the bad news about that is it means I have nothing prepared today. That doesn’t mean you get to get up and leave. It only means that you get to hear about nothing. You get to hear specifically how Christ became nothing for our sake and our salvation and taught us how to be nothing. There is actually a word that describes this nothingness and that word is a fancy Greek word called kenosis. We are going to learn about that today. If you have your Bibles, please open up to the Book of Philippians 2:1. If you are visiting with us today or you haven’t been here for a while, you may not know that we have been going through what we call the four core values of a church, which are worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.
Today, we are going to revisit this idea of community. Keep in mind when I say community, I am not talking about the larger community of Bellevue or Pittsburgh. I am talking about the church community. The body of Christ on earth. The people that have been called out from the world to live in community together. Not called out to live in isolation but called out to be different. As we read through this passage in Philippians today, we see that that is what Paul is trying to say. In a world where everybody is trying to jockey for position, where everybody is trying to be something, what Paul is saying is no. The higher calling is to be nothing. That is what we are going to see in today’s passage. I am going to read through Philippians chapter 2 all the way down to verse 11. (Scripture read here.)
A little bit of background on this particular letter. This is one of what they call Paul’s prison letters. He is writing from prison to this church in Philippi. This is a different type of letter than some of the other letters in that this letter is really not addressing any particularly church crisis. This letter is actually meant to be a word of encouragement to the people. Basically telling people to maintain their joy, their hope, their sense of holiness, their unity all within the midst of intense persecution. Even though it is meant to be just an encouragement letter, we also get hints that there is something else going on in that church in Philippi. We see that Paul is beginning to address that. There is some sort of conflict going on, so in order to keep it from spreading, he begins to address it. He starts out the letter by saying if you’ve got any encouragement from being united with Christ, if you’ve got any comfort of his love, if you have that fellowship with the spirit, then make my joy complete, being likeminded and being of single purpose. In other words, what he is saying is since you have all these things, since you are solid in your faith, make my joy complete. Basically, he is saying get along. He goes on to say “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interest but also to the interest of others.” Now if Paul is saying this, what it means is that there are probably people that are not doing this. There are people that are actually complaining. There are people that are actually exalting themselves, maybe jockeying for some sort of position within the church. People that are acting out of pride.
Now we don’t know the exact situation, but we get a hint of it when we look all the way back in Chapter 4 of this passage because we see the story of two women who seem to not be able to get along. Two women with funny names. I always mispronounce them, Euodias and Syntyche. In Chapter 4, we read out of The Message Translation he says “I urge Euodias and Syntyche to iron out their differences and make up. God doesn’t want his children holding grudges.” That is a loose translation but that gives you a pretty good idea that there is something going on. There is a little bit of bickering going on in the house. Paul wants to deal with that. As a side note, it is kind of sad that this is the only place that these two women are mentioned in the entire Bible. It’s sad to think the only mention has to do with the fact that they could not get along. That is a said thing. So Paul is saying do nothing out of conceit. Think of other people and that sort of thing. He is kind of ordering them to act in a certain way. But we know Paul, and Paul doesn’t just make these blanket commands. Paul tends to ground his request, ground his commands in the work of Jesus Christ. That is what he is doing here. Basically, he is going to ground it in the humility of Jesus Christ.
He goes on to say “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus who, being in very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing. Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” Now this passage here is very, very rich in theological meaning. There is commentary. There are books. There are all sorts of things written about this passage because this passage gets to the heart of what most Christians believe. I don’t have time to unpack it totally, but the idea where it says “who being in the very nature of God” what they are saying is that Christ was God. Christ was equaled with the Father. It basically alludes to the whole concept of the Triune God, the Trinity if you are from a Catholic tradition. The idea that we believe in one God who is eternally existent in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We don’t believe in three gods. One God eternal existence in three persons. That is the doctrine of the Trinity. There is an equal nature there. There is an equal nature between Father and Son and Spirit.
Then he goes on to say something interesting that is really hard to sometimes figure out. He says He “did not consider equality with God something to be used to be grasped.” This is kind of a strange way of saying he didn’t see the need to hold, to cling too tightly to that divine nature that he had. In other words, he was willing to give it up for the benefit of us. For our sake and our salvation, he made himself nothing. “Taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” This idea of nothing. The underlying word here is that weird Greek word called kenosis. It is basically the idea of emptying, of becoming nothing. If you want the fancy definition, it says kenosis refers to the self-emptying of the preexistent eternal Son to become the human Jesus. The self-emptying involved the setting aside of the independent use of his divine attributes. This is heavy stuff for a Sunday morning but don’t get caught up in it. He just decided I am going to set aside my independent use of it. I am going to set aside my independent use of these attributes. In other words, I am going to make myself nothing for man. In fact, I am going to assume the very form of man. Keep in mind, that doesn’t mean that he stopped being God. It just meant that he took on, on top of that, the nature of man. Another core teaching of Christianity is that Jesus Christ was not only fully God but he was fully man. I don’t have time to really unpack that, but that is the core teaching of the Christian faith. In fact, packed up in that passage, you see Christmas basically incarnation. You see Good Friday. If we were to read back you would see Easter Sunday. All packed in those 11 verses.
You might be thinking that is all well and good, but what does that have to do with community? It has everything to do with community. As we go back and we think about the situation here, Paul was dealing with some people that couldn’t get along. So what he does is he draws this idea of the kenosis, of the being nothing, and he makes that the foundation of behavior within a church. Really, when you think about the idea of what is being made nothing, there are several words that come into play. One word is humility. Another word is submit or submission. A couple other words are self-denial. Those three words basically unpack what it means to become nothing. Those words are not popular in today’s culture, and they were not popular back in that first century in the Greek culture either. In fact, in the Greek culture they were all about getting honor and avoiding shame. We don’t think about that but honor was a big deal in that first century among the philosophers. Their whole thing was to get public honor and avoid public shame. They didn’t care what they had to do to get the honor. They just wanted that public honor. Their biggest fear was that their kids would bring some sort of dishonor upon the family. Words like humility, submission, or self-denial, they would not be part of the vocabulary. This was a radical way of thinking about things. It’s the same way today. In our culture, we don’t use words like humility, like submission, we don’t use words like self-denial. We use words like pride. We use words like ambition and authority and power and getting everything you want. But we don’t use those types of words. Think, for example, of the word humility. Its basic meaning is modest or low opinion of one’s own importance, rank, or status. Thinking again about Jesus Christ, he was the most humble man that ever lived because he was willing to set aside his divine attributes and come to this earth and take on the form of man. That was a radical thing that he did. So radical that following the resurrection the entire community began to change.
Particularly this new community called Christians or Christianity, at that time it was actually just called The Way, began to really change. What you saw was a leveling out of all the people. In other words, you saw status and rank and importance just being thrown out the window. You saw it happening in the local churches there. I said a few weeks ago the typical family unit in that first century was often made of parents, grandma, grandpa and kids, but it also often included a slave and a master. What happened following Christianity, things began to change. All these social classes begin to go away. The slaves still often worked for the master, but when they would come to church, or in their case a home, the difference in class was gone. The field was leveled. The master and the slave could sit side by side in worship and serve together. You start seeing hints of that and the fact that they were willing to do that, the fact that that began to happen in the homes, is the fact that that first century church was able to continue to grow.
As I think about our church, I think we are blessed because in many ways we do look like that first century church. I think we truly do reflect the community at large because I think that our demographic is made up of people the poorest of poor, the richest of rich, and everything in between. People with education, people with no education. People with money, people with no money. People of different ethnicities. We look like the church. We look like the first century church. We are humbled before each other, which is a great thing. But before we pat ourselves on the back, we have to realize that just outward appearances don’t always tell the whole story. I suspect if we could read people’s hearts, we may see a different story. We may see people that are still bringing in issues of status, bringing in issues of pride, bringing in issues of prejudice. Those things begin to creep in and if they are left unchecked, they can cause problems in the church. They can eventually evolve into things like jealousy and envy and strife.
As a side note, I am not going to mention names, but many of you know that this last year we were hiring a new student minister. In the process, we interviewed probably a dozen or so candidates. In those candidates, we had some people in the local area. To make a long story short, there were four people who applied for that job, didn’t get that job, but they chose to remain in the church and some of them hadn’t even started to go to church here yet. They chose to assume a posture of service to the children and to the youth. That was awesome because, to be honest, I am not sure if I would do that. If was to go interview at some other church for the pastor position and they said no we can’t use you as pastor, I am not sure I would stick around and say use me wherever you can. I am just here to serve. That is what these four individuals were doing. That to me is a picture of humility. That is a picture of making yourself nothing. You are demonstrating that the kids, the mission of the church, the children and teens are more important than your own personal pride, position, or status. So humility is a key component of becoming nothing.
The second component to think about when you want to think about becoming nothing is this idea of submitting. Submit is to yield to the authority or opinion of another. We know Christ was the picture of submission. His whole life was one submission after another but especially during that last week. He submitted to the guards in the garden when they came to arrest him. He didn’t resist that at all. He submitted to Pilot when Pilot condemned him to carry his cross through Jerusalem, which was a form of submission to the Roman government. Then we know that he submitted when he allowed himself to be placed upon that terrible cross to be crucified. It was a picture of submission. Some people, especially if you are not a Christian, may say that is a picture of weakness. That he would allow himself to submit to that sort of agony, that sort of shame. But to Christ it was a picture of strength. It was strength that was under control. Another word for that is meekness. It is saying you’ve got the power to react, but you willfully chose not to react. That is stronger than the resistance that he could have done. Really, when you think about submission, for the Christian there is no such thing as forced submission. There is no such thing. For the Christian, it is always a matter of the heart. It is a willingness to submit to others. You willfully give it to somebody else. One of my favorite pastors and authors, Jack Hayford, I love the way that he puts it. He says “True submission can never be forced because foremost submission is an inner attitude, a heart issue. It can never be required. It can only be volunteered, given as a willing gift.” Not used to hearing that but that is what Christ did. He gave it as a willing gift really to us. Consequently, if we are to practice submission that means we have to learn how to submit to each other. In fact, Paul writes later in Ephesians “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ”. Not because of the person you are working for or whatever. You are doing it out of reverence for Christ. What you are doing is responding to his submission and you are doing the same thing. He is the example of submission. You begin to think how might that look in a local church? How might that help things in a local church? There are many ways to think about how submission would work out in a local church but the most obvious one to me was this idea of submitting to leadership. Now when I say leadership I am not just talking about the pastors. I am not talking about the elders, and I am not talking about the deacons. I am talking about anybody who has been granted a position of authority because of their giftedness. That means if you are either working in the nursery or supervising the nursery schedule all the way up to being an elder and me going off to try and cast out a vision. Those are all positions of authority that have been given because of the giftedness. Another thing is that this authority, this leadership is a fluid thing in the church. On one hand, sometimes I get to be the big shot and cast the vision and everybody is supposed to follow me. When I am outside helping in the yard work, I am going to follow, I am going to submit to the property ministry leadership. If I am downstairs helping out cooking, I am going to submit to whoever is in charge of the cooking. You see how it is a constant fluid thing. So that whole leadership and authority and submission change constantly within a church.
We have been blessed because we have so many great volunteers. Percentage-wise, I would have to say 60, 70, 80% of the people are somehow involved in volunteering in the church. That is good. But the bad thing is that we spend a lot of time, we being the staff, the leadership, the elders, talking about how we can engage the volunteers, how we can recruit new volunteers, and how we can get the existing volunteers to follow through on their commitments. This is where I am going to start touching on some toes. But before I start touching the toes, realize that this applies to me too. Basically, when you take a volunteer position, in every form there is a responsibility that says you are going to follow through with this thing. By not following through with it, what you are doing is participating in a very subtle form of resistance. I won’t go as far as saying rebellion but resistance is the opposite of submission. You say well what might that look like? It is very subtle. Sometimes you don’t even know you are doing it. When you volunteer to do something and you just choose not to show up and not to inform anybody that you are not showing up that is a form of resistance. In some ways, it is passive resistance. It could be that you have been asked to attend a meeting or two. Or you have been assigned to do something following a meeting. By not doing that, that is a failure to submit to the person who asked you to do that. That is a form of resistance. That is a form, in a minor way, of rebellion. You go to a home group or somewhere. You sign up to attend a class. In that class there is homework to do. The leader goes and does all this prep work, puts in all this time, and asks you to do a half hour of homework and you don’t do it. That is a form of resistance. That is a form of rebellion. What you are saying is you don’t feel it is significant enough. You don’t feel this person is significant to follow through, to submit to their leadership. I say all that knowing that life happens. We are all guilty of something coming up to where we just can’t get somebody to replace us or we can’t follow through with our commitment or we can’t get our homework done. But if day after day, week after week, year after year, we are constantly forgetting our responsibility, we are shirking our responsibility that we have agreed to under the leadership of somebody, what happens is, at a minimum, that is disrespect for the person who is put in authority. At a maximum, it is irreverent for Christ because he says it. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Those things just come in. I know there are people that would never be late to work. People that would never think of not doing what they are called to do at work. Wouldn’t think twice about it at church. Oh, it’s just church. They will get somebody else. That is a failure to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Those are tough words and they apply to me too. Those are true. Over time, what happens is they undermine the unity and the vision of the church. People say why don’t you do more stuff? We would if more people would follow through on their commitments. We can’t unless you want to hire a bunch of people. In that case, you have to give more money, but that is something you don’t want to do probably. You have to just follow through on your commitments. When you think about becoming nothing in the church, it means practicing humility, leveling out the playing field, but it also means submitting to the people that God or the other leaders have placed in charge. That creates this whole sense of unity.
The third thing and the final thing I want to address is this idea of denial. Specifically, self-denial. Self-denial is the sacrifice of one’s own desires. It basically means to be unselfish. Pretty straightforward. We know that Jesus, too, was the model of self-denial. He was God and he chose to put away his own desires. Really where it comes into play is when he became man. Because when he became man, he was subject to all the temptations of man and woman. He was subject to all the base-level desires of man and woman. Yet he chose to put aside those desires and the only desire he had was to please the Father. That was his sole desire. His self-denial became a model for how his disciples should live. In fact, there is a passage that I think is contained in most of the Gospels, but here in Luke it says “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” You may recognize that passage. That is the passage when we do membership here, when we give you the cross (we don’t give you a certificate, we give you a cross), and we say just remember this passage. Because if you remember this passage, you won’t come in with a mound of expectations and an own personal agenda. You will just be fine. You will just be there to deny yourself and serve and submit and whatever it takes. In theory it sounds good, but in actuality we find people that place membership and the first thing they want to do is bring out their list, their items that they think we need to change because what they are doing is trying to make their wants, their desires a priority, and they don’t really care about the churches desires. They don’t really care about God’s desires for the church. They are worried about their wants and their desires. What happens is, over time if those desires are not met, frustration happens. Pretty soon, people begin to talk negatively about it. Then the negative talk turns into gossip. The gossip turns into fighting and quarrels. Potentially, it turns into a church split. James said it best back in the Book of James when he says “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it.” He nailed it. It is these desires that often times are really base-level desires. The things that you want a lot of times don’t have anything to do with the common good of the church. They are satisfying some sort of desire that you are lacking in your own life. When you don’t get that, that causes problems. When enough people don’t get it, it causes a lot of problems, and it turns into possibly a church split. Contrary to what some people believe, the church is not this big gumball machine where you go in and put a quarter and get all your desires met, all your wants met. It is not going to meet your base desires. Hopefully, it will meet your spiritual desires, but really it is not about meeting your desires. It is about meeting God’s desires. Specifically, it is about meeting Jesus Christ’s agenda on earth which we found that back in the Book of Luke where he talked about the whole idea of giving sight to the blind, setting the captives free, of proclaiming the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. Those are the desires that we should be trying to get. The funny thing is, when we are doing that work, and we are freeing ourselves up of the need to get our wants fulfilled, we are actually happier people. We actually experience the freedom of allowing that the highest goal in our life is not to get our personal wants met. I like how Richard Foster said it. He says “Self-denial is simply a way of coming to understand that we do not have to have our own way. Our happiness is not dependent upon getting what we want.” We spend our entire life stressed out because we can’t get our way. We can’t get what we want. Let go. Let it go. It’s not that important. When you are able to do that in the context of the church what happens is you establish not only you are in a better place yourself, but the church is in a better place because there are not people constantly fighting over their desires or mixed desires that have little or no bearing on the desires of the church.
In closing, when we think about becoming nothing, we have to think about this idea of humility. Leveling out the surface. Of not bringing in status, pride, position. We have to think about this idea of the willingness to submit. To be able to submit to the leadership in the church. To be able to step aside. We think about this idea of self-denial and how it’s important to be able to set aside our own desires for the desires of God in His church. We think, well, that’s easy, right? Wrong. It’s the hardest thing we have to deal with because at our heart, at our sinful nature, we are a fallen people. Everybody in this room, including me, struggles with issues probably of pride, or submission, or self-denial. Everyone does because we live in a fallen, broken world. Those things of humility and submission and self-denial, they go against the very grain of the world. Out in the world, it is not about being humble. It is about being prideful. It’s about having power. It is not about submission. It’s about having authority and authority over people. It is not about stifling your desires. It is not about self-denial. It is about going after the gusto and getting everything you can. I hope you see that that is what part of the problem is with the world. The worst thing that can happen is that those ideas would begin to come into the church community because it could destroy a church very quickly. What would a church look like that is full of prideful people, people that are all about maintaining status and position? What would a church be like where nobody is willing to submit? Everybody is about authority. Everybody wants that authority. Or a church that never is willing to stifle or set aside their own personal desires. I hope you wouldn’t want to be at a church like that. You might as well just stay in the world because that is what the world looks like.
On the other hand, think about a church where people come in and they are really, maybe not perfect, but working on themselves. They are trying to develop this humble heart. They might be a prided position out in the world, but they know when they come to the church, everybody is a brother or sister in the Lord. It doesn’t matter if you are a beggar on the street or an executive of a place downtown. It doesn’t matter. They are all equal. If everybody started to have that attitude, what would the church look like? What would the church look like if people were willing to submit to one another not with an attitude but out of reverence for Christ? If they were willing to put aside their own desire for authority, and just say, you know what, I am going to recognize that this person is more gifted in this area. I am going to recognize that God has given this person a position. I am going to respect that position. I am not going to show up late. If I volunteer for something, I’m going to show up. I’m going to follow through on my commitments. How would a church look like that? How far could a church go if it was full of volunteers like that? What would a church look like that was full of people that were not interested in getting their own personal desires and their personal wants met but was totally focused on the desires of Christ and the church to become a missional church in the world, to be expanded out in the world? That is the kind of church I would hope you would want to be part of. That is the church that I want to be part of. A church that is able to do those things in a consistent manner becomes a picture of this idea of kenosis. It becomes a picture of basically this idea of nothingness. A church that understands that Christ was the most highest man that has ever lived, on par and equal with God, was willing to become low. An individual that practices it or a church that practices it, they too understand the value of nothingness. They understand the value of kenosis. They understand that just as Christ was lifted up, Christ was exalted because of his willingness to go low, the church, the individual of the church, the corporate reality of the church will also be exalted because of its willingness to individually and collectively go low. The last passage there says “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 confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” Amen. Let us pray.
