Embracing Christ's Humility in Our Relationships

If Jesus is fully God, then Jesus reveals who God is, period. God is Jesus. As 21st century Christians, we can come to Christianity with a bunch of preconceived notions about who God is. And oftentimes, we look at Jesus, when we start with God, and we say, hmm, too many inconsistencies here. Jesus can't be God, because God's different than me, different than that. He's angrier. I know him as... angrier. I know him as a punisher. He can't be Jesus. These two things don't fit. Jesus doesn't seem to fit into the parameters of our culturally built God box. However, we have started in the wrong place if we start with God and try to figure out if Jesus is God. We actually have to start with the character of Jesus because he is the only man to have ever walked this earth, died and come back to life. [00:19:38] (72 seconds)  #JesusRevealsGod

``God is unknown but Jesus is known and this is the whole point of the New Testament. It's as if the New Testament writers are saying you have no clue what God is like so let me tell you by talking about this person named Jesus. He was the morphe, the very essence of God. This means that God is humble, that he does not consider divinity as an advantage or something to be used against us mere mortals. This means that God is a servant, that he came to serve you. This means that God is willing to lay down his life for you to die so that you could have life. And that's a kind of gospel that changes the world around us. [00:21:01] (54 seconds)  #GodIsServantKing

It is only when we really understand the very love that Jesus, the fullest revelation of God, divinity has for us that we can learn to love just as sacrificially as he did. Jesus sums it up well when he says in John chapter 15 verse 12, love one another as I have loved you. We cannot hope to love in our relationships until we fully understand the God who chose to love us. [00:22:14] (35 seconds)  #LoveCostsSacrifice

But here is the catch. That's a big catch. Jesus, the fullest revelation of God, his love for you cost him and it's going to cost you. I have met, I've yet to met someone or yet to meet someone who doesn't desire deep relationships and friendships, like the stuff of movies. Everybody wants that, right? But the problem for most people is that the idea of love and the ability to pay the price for love are not the same thing. Love's cost. Relationships cost. Friendship costs. And we learn this from the person of Jesus who loved us more and who has loved more than anyone we could ever imagine. [00:22:49] (54 seconds)  #LoveThroughEmpathy

He understood that the level of love that he has for you and me costs. And that it'll cost you as well if you choose it. Because if we pick up our cross and follow Jesus daily, we have to know that there will inevitably be people who nail us to said cross. There are individuals who will inevitably hurt us. Who will require a lot from us. And those are the people we're called to love and serve. [00:23:53] (34 seconds)  #JesusTookHumanForm

As someone once said, there's no one really to attribute this to. Love begins when someone else's needs are more important than my own. And this is why Paul says in verse 7 that Jesus took on the very nature of a servant. A better translation for this would be Jesus took on the form of a slave. The Greek word used here again for nature or form is morphe. This means that Jesus' essential form was not just God but human or even more crass, a slave. Jesus wasn't acting. He wasn't just trying on a human costume. He was truly a man, truly a servant, truly a slave. [00:25:11] (47 seconds)  #ServantKingHeals

And it's this kind of humiliating, self-sacrificing service that he is calling us to in our relationships with other people. Jesus sums it up well when he says in John chapter 15 verse 13, greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends. To give all of it up. As Paul is saying here, be Christ-minded in your relationships by being a servant. [00:27:02] (35 seconds)  #JesusIsTheMainCharacter

The goal of all relationships is pointing people to the master of all relationships. Jesus Jesus the Lord, the one who loves each of us far more than we could love each other or far more than we could ever ask, think, imagine, or fathom. The great paradox of Paul's poem here is that the greatest became the least for us. The most powerful surrenders power to become a servant for us. The one who sets reality into motion is healing reality for us. Not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Our world will be healed by the king who would become a slave. The king who stepped into the messiness of life with his people because of his love for you. [00:28:56] (58 seconds)  #TransformThroughJesusLove

But perhaps the beauty of Paul's poetry is so much more simpler than that. Perhaps Paul is simply inviting us to look to Jesus. To make him the main character of our story. To spend time with him. To dwell on his humility and his kindness. To try and comprehend his sacrifice for us in the world. To maybe imagine him washing our feet. Making us a meal. Hosting us in our homes. For although this passage is about relationships with others. It really is first and foremost about understanding Christ's relationship with us. [00:31:24] (54 seconds)