Background 

As we start this third episode in studying Philippians, we have gained a picture of the situation that Paul is describing very clearly from the first two episodes. Paul experienced about five years of intense difficulty, mostly in prison, and then more recently under house arrest in Rome. The church in Philippi, which is a long way away in Macedonia, has helped him. There is a great connection of love, partnership and affection between Paul the Apostle and a church that he had planted 10 years earlier. They very generously sent a financial gift and also sent one of their members, a man called Epaphroditus, to spend some time with Paul in Rome, supporting and helping him, and who was now going back to Philippi with a letter that Paul had written. We have seen the story of Paul's incredible courage, witnessing for Christ even while he was imprisoned in the house, and how the soldiers went to the Imperial Palace and shared the story of Paul's faith. Paul has persevered in very difficult circumstances. 

Worship of Jesus 

In the first half of chapter 2 comes something truly beautiful and wonderful. We are going to see how Paul bases all these realities - of faith, perseverance, discipleship and dealing with suffering - on a worship of Jesus and an awareness of what Jesus has done for us. Everything is founded on Christ himself. That is the beauty of this episode. We are moving away from thinking about the immediate circumstances that Paul was in, and the Philippian Church was in, and thinking about what it is that really motivates Christians. The ultimate motivation of Christians is the love, worship and adoration we have for Jesus himself - our thanksgiving for his life and his incredible sacrifice. 

The Benefits of Salvation 

We start out this passage with the individual benefits of salvation: being united with Christ, having comfort from his love and sharing in the Spirit. These are some of the things that people feel when they first become Christians and some of the things they talk about when people are baptised: how wonderful it is to be connected to Christ, how wonderful it is to know his love and to experience the power of the Holy Spirit. The Philippians had experienced the Holy Spirit moving in power in their lives when Paul came to them and in the subsequent years. Paul remembers these things with affection and suggests they are very important. He also makes a point in verse 2 that people need to be in community; they need to be together. Christian faith is designed to be lived in community, not as individuals on our own.  

Humility 

In verses 3 and 4, he goes on to emphasise the importance of humility in the Christian life. Paul is a remarkable example - so humble. He always considered himself to be the servant of his churches. He wanted to help them, to give to them, and he was always aware of his total dependence on Christ. Humility is the key to fellowship life. We are not in the Christian community just for our own benefit, we are there to give to others. We need to take our place in the community in a humble way; we should not be pushing our own agenda. 

We find this in Jesus, and in Jesus' mother, Mary, in a most remarkable way. She was someone who had incredible access to Jesus, knew a great deal, but she never sought any status in the early church. We should be thinking realistically about our own gifts and contributions. In Romans 12: 3, it says, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought but rather think of yourself with sober judgment.” Paul wanted everybody in the Philippian church to take their place in the community - not seeking status or leadership, or prominence or importance or fame.  

I remember as a teenager, I loved playing football like so many people do. I always wanted to be at the front of the football team, to be nearest to the goal, so that I could score the goal and get all the status, and play in the role at the centre, which is called centre forward. I always put myself in that position whenever I could, but I wasn't really good enough to be in that position. It was suggested to me that I should play in the middle of the team, in the midfield, which I accepted rather reluctantly. Then a few years later when I went to college, I was trained by a highly qualified, football professional in the team, and he said, “You're not good enough to be a forward. You're not really good enough to be a midfield. You should be at the back, defending the goal and kicking the ball out of the goal because you are quite good at doing that, but you are not very creative.” Humility doesn't come easily. I have not scored very many goals in my life because I was never at the front. I fancied being in a role that wasn't really the right one for me. So often in the church, and in Christian relationships, it can be like that, can't it? We want status, influence and importance. Paul said, “Let go of those things. Serve one another and love one another, having the same love.”  

Love 

He was writing to a church which was a very mature and loving already, and he was merely encouraging them to do the things that they were already doing. 

In the New Testament, Christians have three different commands of love. Number one, we should love our neighbours as ourselves - our non-Christian neighbours, the people that we meet along the path of life. We need to reach out to them and to care for them. We also need to love our enemies. Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, we need to show love and grace to even the people who hate us and oppose us. That is very hard. In John 13: 34 to 35 Jesus says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” This is what Paul is talking about here. Loving one another is very important. 

Who did the Philippian church need to love? They needed to love the members of their church and support them and not argue and be divided within their church. Paul also called them to give some money to the churches in Judea. When he passed through the city, he asked them to donate some money to a collection: to love Christians in another country who were poor. That is another form of Christian love. Paul also encouraged them to love their neighbouring churches - Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea. These were three cities near each other where Paul had planted churches. They needed to love their neighbouring churches. They were loving everybody in the church, showing signs of love, to Christians in other countries who are poorer, and they were loving their neighbouring churches, working with them. Then they were showing love to Paul, the Apostle and founder of the church, by sending finance and Epaphroditus, a church member, to support him. Love comes in many forms. Loving one another in the body of Christ is incredibly important and sometimes very difficult, because situations and circumstances can cause stress and tension in those relationships.  

Jesus – Our Example 

Paul was emphasising that a healthy church is one where love and humility areprominent. These things are hard to achieve. How do we achieve them? In the next few verses, we have the ultimate answer to that question - we can only imitate one person fully, and that person is Jesus. Paul didn't just give commands that the church should be doing, he asked them to think about, and meditate upon,Jesus Christ himself. This is the inspiration of our lifestyle – it is following Jesus.We have, in the next few verses, some wonderful statements about Jesus. These are verses of poetry that may well have been an early Christian hymn or song that was written in the first generation, by Christians in one of Paul's communities, or one of the other churches planted at that time. 
 
Something extraordinary happened when God the Father sent his Son to the earth. “God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son” John 3:16. The extraordinary thing was that Jesus was not in the form of a man before he came to the earth. He was just God. Jesus, the Son of God existed from all eternity in power, in heaven, at the right hand of his Father with the Holy Spirit. The Trinity - God, three in one in eternity, in eternal power. There was Jesus in the highest possible place of glory and majesty in the whole universe, and one day, just over 2000 years ago, he came from that incredible place of honour, respect, power, dignity and praise to the earth. He took on the form of a human being, in the form of a baby in the womb of Mary. The Christian story comes from that extraordinary event, which we call the incarnation. God becoming a human being. Paul wanted the Christians in Philippi to think about the significance of this extraordinary act: Jesus didn't hesitate to give up the glory, the security, the comfort, the power, the prestige of heaven, in order to come alongside us. He didn't want to grasp that power. In fact, he gave up some of those powers. He didn't give up being God but he gave up some of the powers of being God, voluntarily and for a short period of time, to come to us as a man. That is an amazing thought, isn't it? 

It is very hard to find a human example to illustrate this but imagine yourself as a senior army officer in the army of your country. You have great power. You command the soldiers to go here and to go there - a very senior commander. Then your country enters into a time of war, and there is a need for secret agents, or spies, to go into the enemy territory to find out what is going on there, to help the war effort. After being asked by an even more senior officer, you volunteer to go and be a spy in the enemy country. What do you have to do? You take off your uniform, take away your weapons, lose your status and you become just an ordinary citizen hiding away in a foreign country. You become anonymous, a nobody. You have lost all your military power: you are not at the front of parade, you have not got a beautiful uniform on, or a servant who can polish all the brass on your uniform; you are not giving commands and orders – you are there on a mission; and you are letting go of your rank. Then when you come back, having conducted your mission, you can rejoin the army and you can put your uniform on again, and take your position as a senior officer in the military council, and you can start making decisions for the army. It is like that - except it is even more dramatic than that!  

When Jesus came to the earth, he didn't just become a human. Paul says, very specifically, that he ‘became a servant’. That word servant means like a slave -somebody who had to serve the people he came to. He took on the very nature of a servant. To illustrate this fact, Jesus once did something very dramatic with his disciples, which really shocked them. During the Last Supper before he died, halfway through the meal, Jesus took off his outer clothing and put a towel around himself, got some water in a bowl and said to his disciples, “I am going to come now and wash your feet.” And they said, “No, no, no, no, you can't. You can't wash our feet. That is what servants do, what the slaves do.” But Jesus said, “No. I must do it. I am here to serve you.” By that, he illustrated the point that is being made here in Philippians 2. 

Jesus “humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross!” It was a big step down for Jesus to become a human. It was even more of a step down to take the attitude of a servant, and it was even more of a step to allow himself to be killed brutally, unjustly, publicly and agonisingly by crucifixion. But he humbled himself to that place. Everybody who saw that act of crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, saw a broken body, a suffering man, a naked man on the cross, whose life was coming quickly to an end. They saw humiliation. Jesus allowed that to happen for the sake of us. 

“In your relationship with others, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.” The point of all this, is that we as Christians are here to serve one another. Our lives are to be shared: our finances generously distributed and shared; our prayers given for the benefit of others; our time given for the benefit of others. We are those who are called to look out for the weak brother or sister. We are those who are called not to look for any status or position in the church, but to say, “I'll serve here. I'll serve there. I'll do what is needed to be done.” That is what Paul was saying. The more you think about Jesus, the easier it is to adopt the attitude of a servant and not be looking for any particular status. 

But that was not the end of the story. Here is the great encouragement about the life of Jesus. Because Jesus did all these things in perfect obedience to his Father,there came a time when the Father said that the work was done. Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished!” and the Father decreed a time, on the third day when Jesus would be vindicated, where he would return to his original glory, that he would be raised from the dead, miraculously on Easter Sunday. About 40 days later, on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, with his Apostles around him, miraculously he was taken up into the heavens in a cloud of God's glory with angels present who spoke to the Apostles saying, “He is going to heaven. He is going to come back in the same way, sometime in the future.” Jesus returned to that incredible glory that God had given him, that his Father had shared with him, from all eternity; he returned to the right hand of the Father and received all the glory for the things that he had done.  

When we have a life of Christian service for others, all of this is recorded and known by God himself. Many of you, who have lived a life of Christian service, think that the things you have done have not been noticed by anybody - nobody has thanked you for the things you have done - or that the great sacrifices that you have made for the Kingdom of God are not known or understood. There is a message for you in this story. God the Father knows exactly what sacrifices you have made and how deep they are. Just like with his Son, he raised him back to glory, so on the Day of Judgment, all the good works and service that you have done will be counted in your favour and you will receive the most wonderful words that anyone can ever receive in eternity, which are, “Well done, good and faithful servant”. You will enter into glory honoured by God himself. That is the message for us. We follow the way of love and humility of Jesus, and we, like him, will follow him into glory. Those who believe and serve him will be honoured in eternity. 

Reflections  

Firstly, Paul's focus here is on strong and harmonious local churches. He is really passionate about this and Philippians is a good example of his teaching about this.The church at Philippi was a very good example of living out this life. We need to seek that in our own church situation. Where there is disharmony and division, we need to pray that God will have mercy on us, that we may find the unity of the faith again. 

The second thing to reflect on is, the way that humility sets you free and enables you to find your true self. I had to be set free from a completely wrong view of how good I was at football, but I'll tell you an interesting story. I spent two years as a young man playing in a high-quality football team as a fullback at the back. Once I had found my position, I was okay. I didn't get any glory. I didn't score any goals, but at least I could play my part in the team. Let us be servants and be humble. Let us meditate on the great example of Jesus. 

This passage is one of the most important passages that Paul ever wrote. It gives us a wonderful hymn which we should consider and reflect on regularly, as we seek to be true disciples of Jesus Christ. 

Thanks for listening to this episode and do join us for the next one.