Philippians 2:1-11 - The Mind of Christ
Tom Shrader examines Philippians 2:1-11, focusing on Paul's call for believers to adopt the attitude of Christ who emptied Himself and took the form of a servant. He emphasizes that Christ's humility in becoming incarnate and dying on the cross provides the ultimate example for how Christians should relate to one another. The teaching challenges believers to move beyond natural selfishness to supernatural humility, putting others' interests above their own in all relationships.
“Jesus came to this earth for a specific reason, to do for you what you couldn't do for yourself.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Philippians
Recorded: October 13, 2016
Duration: 39 min
Themes: humility, service, selflessness, attitude, sacrifice, obedience, incarnation, relationships, struggling with pride, seeking to serve others, new believer, parent, mentor, navigating conflict, young adult, feeling selfish
Scripture: Philippians 2:1-11, Philippians 1:27, John 1:1, John 1:14, Isaiah 14, Isaiah 6, 2 Corinthians 5:21, 2 Corinthians 1:3, James 5:11
Theological Themes: christology, incarnation, kenosis, emptying, servant leadership, exaltation, lordship, theological anthropology
Full Transcript
We're in chapter 2 of the book of Philippians. I got back Tuesday night and then had to teach Wednesday morning, so I got all excited about this section. As you look at Philippians chapter 2, you'll see in verse 5 through 11 a classic passage. I used the phrase yesterday that it's a passage that's very familiar to you, and then I backed it off to say it's very familiar to many of you. I'm super sensitive to the person who would be here and say I'm not familiar with this passage at all. I'm much more concerned about speaking to you than I am the people that have memorized the passage.
It is an amazing, brief, but theologically packed section, and let's just read it. Verse 5: "Have this attitude in you in yourselves which is also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but He emptied Himself taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in the appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that the name of Jesus every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."
The Incarnation of Christ
It is a passage that brings more theological punch to a section that we read around Christmastime every year. Gospel of John chapter 1 verse 1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, apart from Him came nothing into being that's come into being." John chapter 1 verse 14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
When you're dealing with this section of scripture, it is about the incarnation of Jesus Christ and we'll unpack a little bit of it. I want to do two things. One, resist the temptation to just unpack this and spend the whole day doing it. Obviously volumes have been written about these verses. I want to make sure we see it in the context of the bigger picture of what Paul's trying to communicate.
The idea here is God dwelling among us, Emmanuel. In Isaiah chapter 14, God is speaking and He is dealing with Lucifer, and He's saying here's how Lucifer became the devil. He said, "I will ascend to the heavens, I will ascend," and that's the picture of pride: I will ascend. Jesus is saying, I will descend. I will become a human being. I'll come to this earth for a specific purpose and we're going to unpack it.
More Than a Role Model
I'm going to come and I'm going to live, and more than a role model. Once on the ship that we were on, you had limited television. So you had the first four channels, they're all selling excursion trips, and then there's a picture out the front of the boat. There's just a lot of water in the ocean. This sounds really dumb, but I would say, look at this. There's just water everywhere. The other thing was, there's no moon. It's so dark. It's vast.
So you got so many shows and so many things you can do. Well, the TV had True TV Channel, which is like the world's dumbest stuff, and then it had TBS, TNT, and then ESPN, and then it had a bunch of MSNBC stuff. So I actually saw more of that than I've seen in a long time. Then there was Fox News, then there was BBC, boring. Then it got into a movie channel with just terrible movies.
So I'm there and I'm watching the thing on the Pope. It's exciting in the sense of the tradition of it, and I come from a Catholic background, so the white smoke comes out, and they try to figure out who it is, and then they see who it is. And now if I say to you, we'll do word association, one word. If I say to you, give me a word to describe this Pope, what would you say? Some guy on the first broadcast said humble, then everybody said humble, and an hour later they're interviewing a guy at St. Patrick's Cathedral who didn't even know who this guy was an hour ago, and he said, "He's such a humble man."
Now he may be, but it's been interesting to watch people who have said, "He's going to bring us back, Jesus as a role model, he's going to bring back this spirit of humility." Well what you're bringing back is works salvation, that's what you're bringing back. Should we be humble? Yes, that's the whole point of this section today, but not as a means of salvation, that's what Jesus did. You get that? It is that Jesus came to this earth for a specific reason, to do for you what you couldn't do for yourself.
The Problem with Self-Salvation
John Kennedy looked around at the world and said, "We got ourselves into these problems, we'll get ourselves out of them," and while that may or may not be true of many things, it's clearly not true of salvation, but we approach it and immediately flip into, "I can fix this." That's why religion is so appealing. Intuitively, when you get in your mind that something's wrong with the world, which takes about a nanosecond to figure out, but then if you have any power of reflection at all, you look at your own life and you go, "Uh-oh, something's wrong with me and I want to fix it."
This will be my first Easter where I haven't taught in 22 years, which is good. I did it seven or eight years ago, I did an Easter message and I was so frustrated with meetings all week of, "We don't have enough parking, what do we do with these people," that my
Religion says work really hard, do the best you can possibly do, and everybody's going to get to heaven, other than your ex-wife, but other than that, everybody will get there somehow. If that were true, we wouldn't have this section. Jesus would not have come to earth.
So let's unpack it just a little bit. He said, "Have this attitude in you which is in Christ Jesus." We're coming back to it. He's going to talk about Christ and what He did.
Christ's Divine Nature and Humble Sacrifice
"Who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped." That word translated "grasped" means to hang on to something and protect it against every offense against it. He said He didn't hang on to this. He was God and remained God. He didn't give up His deity, but He did give up His glory. He emptied Himself of that position.
So in Isaiah chapter 6, that classic passage, when Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, the train of His robe filling the temple, that's the pre-incarnate Christ. He set aside that. He yields Himself. He becomes a servant, not just a servant, but He becomes a bondservant.
In that strata of slave, there were slaves who were actually kind of employees, slaves of different rank. The lowest rank was bondservant. That was somebody who was utterly and completely dependent upon their master for everything. They existed for one reason and that was to satisfy and be available to the beck and call of the master.
The Humiliation and Death of Christ
So He takes the form of a man. He becomes a servant, not just a servant, a bondservant. He's found in verse 8 in the appearance of man and He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, but not just any death - death on a cross. He wasn't beheaded.
Somebody asked me the other day, "What if Jesus would have died of natural causes?" And I said, "Why do you people exist? I mean there's brackets to fill out for March Madness, there's a lot of things we could be doing." Well He didn't. He didn't die of natural causes, nor was He going to. He was going to die on a cross, the most humiliating way, the most excruciating way to die, and also very public.
So He becomes obedient, and He becomes obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Why Christ Died
Now let me try to tie that with what we talked about just a few minutes ago, and that's why He died. That He died is not "stop-the-press" stuff. I even checked it out on Wikipedia, and Wikipedia said that Jesus existed and died, and died on a cross. What the Bible tells us is He died on a cross for a reason. For what? For our sin.
In that moment, in this great exchange, my hero Larry Wright wrote a poem about the great exchange, and it's where we trade our sin and guilt, and we receive His forgiveness and His righteousness. It's 2 Corinthians 5:21: "He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf." It was not that Jesus sinned, but He, the perfect sacrifice, at that moment, was treated by God as though He were guilty of every sin that every believer would ever commit. That's the agony of the cross.
When He said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" That's the agony of the cross. The agony of the cross was not the physical component to it. Lots of people, maybe many, died more physically excruciating deaths than Jesus, but no one ever died in your place and experienced that punishment, that wrath of God that was poured out on Christ at that moment.
The Resurrection and Its Implications
Jesus empties Himself, takes the form of a man, He becomes a bondservant, and He becomes obedient to the point of death. And for this reason, for the reason of Jesus' death, because of His resurrection, that's the big thing. To me, at Easter, I finally, after 22 years, honed my Easter message, that became this: Jesus rose from the dead, and if He did, and I believe that He did, and I think if you honestly look at the evidence, don't come with some preconceived notion, just look at the facts, I think you're going to step away and go, "Wow, Jesus rose from the dead."
My point is this, and it's really simple: if He really did, then this demands that I listen to what He had to say. If He really rose from the dead, and it's not just the empty tomb - an empty tomb on Easter morning, in and of itself, doesn't prove that He rose from the dead, certainly evidence for it - but then we see the risen Christ. He's alive today. I better listen to what He has to say.
Christ's Exaltation
And for that reason, God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that's above every name. It's not "Jesus" that's above every name, it's the idea that every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, that Jesus is Lord, the Master. It's who He is.
Now that's a magnificent section. I want to get at the section, but I'm kind of looking at the second part first, and without a ton of detail, but enough to get that point, so we get it. You see what He's saying there. Now put it in the context of what we're looking at.
Living Worthy of the Gospel
We said we started in chapter 2 verse 1, and it begins with the word "therefore," so when we see that word, we know that there's a connecting thought here. What we've been studying and really focusing on: look at chapter 1 verse 27, "Conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ." So here you go, He's saying you're a follower of Christ, now live like it.
One of the things that struck me, I took a ukulele class, and all you did was learn to play a C and an A minor and an F and a G, and you take the class for five days, and then they have a graduation.
ceremony, they don't have you play anything. I'm so glad they had us as a group play, and I stood next to one lady in there who was worse than me. I kept going, "Look at her, that sounds bad from over here, do something with her, it's not tuned."
At the graduation you got a certificate—mine's on the refrigerator—and you had to say your name, where you're from, and what you did. So I said, "I'm Tom, I'm from Phoenix, Arizona" because I don't want to answer what Gilbert is, "and I'm a pastor." The gal who taught the class afterwards came over and said, "I could tell by how mild-mannered and soft-spoken you are."
Living as Representatives of Christ
It's a great reminder to me that once this is out there, people are going to look at you, and they're going to evaluate you. It's not just true of me, it's true of you. When you run into somebody today, and they say, "Hey how you doing, how was your morning?" "Great." "Why was it great?" "Well I started it with this inspirational Bible study." "Oh, you go to a Bible study?"
I had a client one day who said, "I'd like to meet," and this was when I was going to Larry's study with you on Thursday. He said, "Can we meet Thursday morning early?" I said, "I can't." He said, "Why?" I said, "I go to a Bible study." I've been doing business with this guy, and he said, "It never occurred to me that a guy like you would go to a Bible study."
I thought, well I have to ask myself some hard questions. Either one, I'm behaving in such a way that it's contrary to how Christ would have me live, or two, he had a misconception—he didn't think that cool guys went to Bible study. I presume it's the latter, but it just reminded me of that lesson over and over again.
Conduct Worthy of the Gospel
What Paul's saying is not isolated to this passage, but it's a constant message we see in the book of Ephesians, book of Colossians. Paul's writing, he said, "Listen, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel." If you say that you're a Christian, live like it.
When we're raising our kids, we used to say, "Listen, if you're a Schrader, you represent the Schrader family. You're a Schrader, live like it." Get your C's, be average—I never wanted to excel too much. But it comes to this: He's going, "Listen, you're a Christian, now act like it. You're an ambassador, you represent me."
What he's talking about here in this context is not as it represents itself to the world, but as it represents itself within the body of Christ. "Whether I come or I'm absent, I will hear that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel." He said, there's going to be a unity here, there's going to be a oneness here. I want you to understand that you represent Christ in this process, and that people are going to look at you.
The Only Bible Some People Read
We go to the world and say, "We're followers of Christ, we're new creatures, we're different." If our life does not match up with that, there's a sense in which we negate the whole message. My friend Larry Wright used to say, "You may be the only Bible that some people ever read." Now I want to be careful, I don't want to build a theology around that—it doesn't relieve that person from the responsibility of it. But many of you are here, or have people in your life that you looked at them and you said, "There's something unique and different there, there's something compelling about this."
We had a kid on the cruise. They had a lot of—I always thought that being like a stand-up comedian or something would be competitive or difficult, but apparently not, because there were a lot of bad acts. But there was this one guy, his name was David Klinkenberg. Anybody ever heard of him? He was a fiddler guy. He walked out, and I said to Sandy, "I love this guy." All he did was walk out and fiddle around, he played some song, and then he's talking.
I said to Sandy, "He's got this awesome spirit. This kid's just his demeanor and the way he walked." Then he turned around and it looked like he had a cross on the back of his jacket—couldn't tell, but he had this sweet demeanor. I said to Sandy, "I'll bet you anything this guy's a believer." He was awesome with this fiddle violin—he said the difference between a fiddle and a violin is the number of teeth on the guy that's playing it, which I thought was a pretty good line. This guy was awesome, this kid was, and I wanted to meet him, and he doesn't know me from Adam, and I'm going to sound like a doofus. But it was there, and you see it.
When People Evaluate Everything
Once that statement is made, now they're going to evaluate everything. They're going to evaluate how you go through the buffet line. They're going to evaluate how you speak to one another, whether you're mild-mannered and soft-spoken.
When you tell them, "Listen, our life is different," but our family's out of control, or my finance is out of control—this is not to throw guilt on you. This is to simply say, all of that impacts that message. To say that I'm different, it'd be like me giving a lecture on nutrition and health, or Bill Clinton on ethics and morals. I mean, it's lost in the messenger.
He said, "I want you to live this way. I want people to look at the church and look at the way that you live, and they'll go, there's something different about that." It's not just a homeowner's association, or a club, or a gathering. There's something different.
The Distinguishing Mark of Love
Now what did Jesus say would be the different characteristic? That people would look at you and know you were His disciples because you what? Love one another. That's the thing that sets it apart.
I'm not a baseball fan. I've gotten back into it because of the boys, and they're really into it. And there is something about this time of year.
Cubs are tied for first. This is so exciting. I don't think it's going to last, but we're tied for first right now. This is an inspirational moment.
I went to watch the Angels play the other day. You've got Trout, Hamilton, and Pujols. I mean, this is hard. How do you pitch around this? You get over and you look at the Blue Jays and what the Blue Jays have, and you look at these teams, but here's the deal. Here's what you still don't know. You don't know if you have chemistry in the clubhouse. You don't know if these guys are getting along.
How many times have you looked at a ball club and you go, how can these guys lose? Philadelphia Eagles, how can these guys lose? I don't know, but they do. Something's missing. What's missing? What's that thing that holds them together?
The Secret of Great Leadership
Well, it's always a strong leader, but it's a good, strong leader, and a morale, and a chemistry. How do you lead well? How do you lead firmly, in a sense, authoritatively, and yet there's something that says, but I'll follow that guy.
Bill Snyder. How does Bill Snyder coach at Kansas State and create this environment there? It's not athletes by normal evaluation. They're all three-star kids. Same thing at Boise State. What happens there? Well, there's leadership. There's a spirit, and you listen to the individual players speak, and they speak in terms of team, which means the guy at the top has to have something that we write books about, we read about, we talk about, and almost no one ever does, and that is servant leadership.
I told you, Sandy's got all my books out now, and I found a book the other day, and it was John Wooden's 25 Years at UCLA. Right before he died, I had the chance to go over and meet in his little condo for three hours and talk to him. One of the things, his office was maybe as wide as this and as long as that, and it's jammed full of junk. It's not what I expected from him at all.
Here was a picture that you'd put on your refrigerator that your grandkids drew, and next to it was the Sporting News Coach of the Century plaque. In it, there were pictures of teams, but not one picture of an individual. He didn't talk about coaching. He talked about teaching, and he didn't talk about treating 12 guys the same.
Individualized Leadership
There's the accusation against him that you had a double standard, and he said, I don't have a double standard. I have 12 standards. I deal with every kid differently. Some need to be loved gently, some respond differently. If you have two kids, I have two kids, just Sarah and Haley. If I speak forcefully to Haley, she would just crumble. If I didn't speak forcefully to Sarah, she'd go, well, he mustn't be serious about this. That's just the way they responded to me.
Well, all of a sudden, there's this thing, there's this understanding, but in any relationship, in this relationship, and he's talking about the church, but here's the big takeaway of this day. In any relationship, whether it's church, friendship, marriage, business, there has to be a spirit of humility. That's what he's saying.
The Foundation of Unity
So now let's get the context here. I want you to stand firm in one spirit with one mind. Chapter two, verse one, therefore, and then you'll see the word if four times. It's a word that might be better translated since or because. It's the idea of a first-class conditional clause that says if this is true, then this is true. If this statement's true, then this has to be true.
So he's saying if there's any encouragement in Christ, and there is, and if there's any consolation of love, and there is, if there's any fellowship of the spirit, and there is, if there's any affection and compassion, there is, make my joy complete, how? By maintaining this same love, united spirit, intent on one purpose.
He said here's this encouragement, that word that's translated there, encouragement, the idea of the encouragement and the consolation of love are very similar. It's to come alongside. It's to work together. It's the power that you have of the Holy Spirit.
In fact, there is that fellowship, Greek word koinonia, you know that. It describes more than just on the same team. There's a partnership, a mutual sharing, an intimacy, the Holy Spirit indwelling me. There's affection and compassion. There's the idea of affection. It refers to really the bowels or the inner part. It's a deep connection of longing within you, and a compassion.
God's Character of Compassion
God is a God of compassion. 2 Corinthians 1, verse three, praise be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion. James 5, 11, the Lord is full of compassion, mercy, because all of these things are true. I want you to be able to live in a way that's not natural, it's supernatural.
What's natural? Tyler picked us up at the airport on Tuesday and brought the boys. And the boys were back. You know, they're still in their seats. They have to be in car seats until they're a certain height. Yale may be going to prom in a car seat because he's got all my genes, unfortunately.
Sandy said, well, I'll sit back with the boys. So she goes back there and I hear them laughing and they're kidding around. So we're at, I don't know, some island, Hawaii. And they said, we'd better take something back for the kids. And she said, the boys will love this. And there were coconuts cut out in like a bag. She said, the boys are going to love these.
So they're back there. So I hear her back there and I hear one of them say, what did you bring us? And Sandy said, ah, nothing. We have suitcases and we couldn't get stuff in them. I don't know. Well, maybe something got in there. Well, what is it? Sandy said, well, you know, we'll look at it later.
And so yesterday, last night after the game, we give them these coconuts and I'm thinking, they're going to go, this is stupid. And they said, this is like the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's a bank. We put money in it. Did you put any money in it for us? No, you greedy little kid. I'm not an ATM, you know. But that's the mentality.
You come in, and I give a gift to Sarah and Haley says, "What about me?" I give a gift to Haley and Sarah says, "What about me?" Here it is—we're all born like that. What we all have in us is this "what about me?" It's why you look around.
I walked off that cruise ship more in love with Sandy than when I got on it, which I thought was a win. But I walked off very discouraged by the human race. They would say, "Okay, we got to get dinner and we got this. Everybody get in line over here." And these people go, "I'm not going to get in line over there. I paid to be on this ship." It's the same thing you see at church so often. "I'm not a member. I'm a season ticket holder here. I've been paying my dues and sitting in this chair and I'll be damned if I'm not going to sit in this chair again. Now preach to me about love."
The Epidemic of Self-Focus
That's that mentality and we bring it to everything. That's why you're watching the country implode because you now have a generation—the greatest generation, which I've always been suspicious of, frankly—saying, "What about me?" Sandy made a comment about this lady, this old lady in front of us. Old, I mean, way older—as old as some of you. That's how old this lady was, really old. She was defiant and obnoxious.
Sandy's comment was this: "How can you have any expectation of her grandkids if grandma reacts that way?" Have we got a generation of kids that are screwed up? They really are. You know why? Because the parents are so screwed up. Because the parents and the grandparents and everybody in this whole game is saying, "What about me? What about me? You owe me this sense of entitlement."
It's not a sense of entitlement that's related to those of you because a bunch of you are white middle-class Republicans who want to blame all the poor people. "What about me?" It's "what about you?" You have the same entitlement. "Why is this street closed? Why is this over here? Why not?"
Moving from Natural to Supernatural
Here's the point: it's absolutely natural. It's totally natural. What Paul's saying is, but you're not a natural being anymore. You're supernatural. So the fruit of the Spirit is in you to act in a way that's supernatural, and the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.
So that you're motivated now by verse 3: "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit." I can't pull that off. Everything about me is filled with selfishness and empty conceit. That's the way I've lived.
I got into this a couple years ago. I was into humility before humility was cool, okay? I got into this a couple years ago when I read this one little sentence in a book that said as Paul sat down to write about humility in verse 3 of chapter 2 of the book of Philippians, there was not a word in the Latin vocabulary or the Greek vocabulary for humility. He had to create one because it was viewed as a sign of weakness.
The Christian Advantage in the Workplace
Even now we kind of look at it. I talked to guys who are running businesses and they're always afraid of the Christian. "I said if I get a Christian, is He going to have that killer instinct?" Well, I don't know. But if He's a follower of Christ, here's what He's going to do: show up on time and really care about people and be willing to do a hard, fair day's work for a fair day's pay. That should be what we're all about if servant leadership is important.
I got—and I don't know where I put it—but Sandy got a blast email from a headhunter the other day. They were talking about, "We're looking for people. Here's the people we want," and it was like you were describing a follower of Christ to the T. Your greatest asset in the world is your Christian faith.
True Humility and Genuine Care
So now we said I want you to be motivated here not from selfishness or empty conceit, but still in verse 3, "but with humility of mind I want you to regard one another as more important than themselves." It's this idea—it's not pretend that they're more important.
I'm watching television the other day and—sorry to be political but it illustrates the point—it's CPAC. So it's "my tax cuts bigger than your tax cut." It's all the conservatives getting together and the overarching theme was "How are we going to have the Latino community think we really care about them?" Okay, I can answer that question. I can name that song in one note: really care about them. Now that would be a step forward, not simply pass some sort of bill.
Rush was arguing the other day, "We passed immigration in '83 and didn't get the percentage," because you can smell it a mile away. It's to really get—and that's what He's saying. I want you to really care about people.
Looking Beyond Yourself
Verse 4: "Don't merely look out for your own personal interest, but for the interest of others," which says literally you don't have—I don't have to tell you to look out for yourself. You'll do that naturally. I want you to regard other people not to pretend that they're more important than you, but to see them that way.
I will never serve someone that I'm looking down on. I may serve them externally, but my heart will never be in this. If anything, I'll be looking inside and going, "I'm a heck of a guy because look at the way I'm serving this guy that I'm obviously better than this person."
The Example of Christ
So now He's coming and saying, "I want you to bring this now. I'm going to give you an example here, a role model that you can follow to some extent, and it's Jesus." Well, wait a minute. You said earlier He's not a role model. Well, He's not a role model in the sense of you're going to substitutionarily die for somebody else. But He said have this attitude—it's a worldview, it's a way of thinking—"have this attitude in you, which is in Christ who humbled Himself."
All of a sudden, if your life is filled with all sorts of relational tension, I can tell you—I guarantee you—it'll diminish if not almost completely go away if you simply adopt this.
Sandy and I started dating, and I was really nervous about this because I hadn't planned on dating. She hadn't had a date in eight years, which made me suspicious, really honestly. So I vetted her hard. I knew her blood type. I said, "Tell me about your insurance. How are your teeth?" I asked her every question there was.
One Saturday we're talking on the phone, and she said, "I've noticed that you've asked me about everything except my dog." She had a dog—half St. Bernard mixed with a bigger dog. Ron Turcotte could have rode this thing in the Belmont one year. My whole thought was this: I think I really like this girl. She moved out from St. Louis with this dog. It's her only thing, and people get attached to big dogs. I don't think I want to tell her because I don't—dogs are fine, I'm not saying anything critical—I just don't want to live with one. I don't think I'll make the dog an issue till she's been won over by all of my charm.
So I said, "Well, I don't know. I'm not a dog fan. I'm not anti-dog. I'm just not a dog fan." Long pause on that. Yeah, I knew it. I'm going to blow this over a dog. But if I take the dog in, I'm going to regret this dog. I know I'm going to regret this.
Love's True Priority
She said, "Well, obviously it's an issue for you. I knew that because you haven't talked about it. Let me tell you how I view the dog. The most important thing in the world is Jesus. If we decide we're going to get serious about this relationship, and if we're going to get married, then the second most important thing in the world to me is you. The dog is a dog."
It's amazing how many people I've told this story to, and they go, "I wouldn't give up a dog for a guy." Which I get, and I wouldn't either. But when I heard her say that, I thought, "Okay, this is the chick for me." Because if she can put the dog aside, then she's going to be able to put up with a lot of other stuff that I haven't sprung on her quite yet—and some of it we're going to keep a secret until the honeymoon.
The Simple Spirit of Relationships
That's so simple. That's such a simple spirit. Yet if you get two people—the marriage thing is really simple. You need to find, if you're a guy, a gal that loves Jesus more than you. Or a girl, you need to find a guy that loves Jesus more than you, and the rest of this stuff will work out.
I know that sounds trite, and I'm just saying you can't screw up a relationship where you have two people that are not moving from selfishness or empty conceit but are looking out for the other person's interest. That's Paul's point in this section. It's not to give just a dissertation on the incarnation of Christ. It's to talk about this is the way to live. How you do that, you're going to have to start applying that in your own life. I can't do all those. But do you see that? That's the relational aspect of it.
The Way of Love and Humility
I was watching some YouTube on John Wooden the other day. It's him sitting with some players, and they're talking about how he was really hard to play for in the sense that he was very demanding, and it was his way or the highway. But you knew he was doing it for your benefit, not for his. It's like when you spank that kid and say, "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you," and they're going, "I don't think so." But it is, because I'm doing this difficult thing because I love you.
That's the way we're to live. Our world is to be marked by humility and love and yielding. There are all sorts of subsets of that, but if you get that figured out, we can start dealing with the other questions. You can take that to work. You can take that to the homeowners association. You can take that into every relationship there is.
Let's pray. Father, thank You for the amazing truth and the call—really the demand in our life—that we live in a way that's supernatural by very definition. We can't do it naturally. I want to say, "What about me?" And even when I come to You, I want to say, "What about me?" You've got to change our hearts and our minds and our attitudes that we're thinking first about You, secondly about others, and if there's any time left, we'll take care of ourselves. You've got to do that in our life. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen.