Philippians 2:1-11 • Humble Joy
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
Let me ask that you would look in your Bibles this morning at Philippians chapter 2, Philippians chapter 2 as we'll be considering verses 1 through 11. Paul is writing from prison saying there are two assured things that will happen if you're committed to Jesus Christ.
One that you will suffer. It is the way the master went. It is the way his servants will go as well. Not only will you face suffering, second thing is you will need the support of fellow believers as side by side we are called to serve Christ and one another together. That twofold obligation is echoed in Philippians chapter 2 verses 1 through 11. Let's look at it and let's stand to receive God's Word together.
The Apostle Paul writes, "So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Let each of you look not only to his own interest but also to the interest of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name so 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's pray together.
Holy Father, we would pray that by the testimony of your people and the work of your Holy Spirit we would be the instruments by which every knee would bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father who sent him. That this would not just be the words of church or the words of the moment, but the expression of our lives that the world would look on and say, "Whoever is their Lord, I want to be my Lord."
May the love, the power, the compassion of Jesus Christ roll through us so that his rule would be known for all who need him. This we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Please be seated.
I was raised in a Hindu home, writes Christian writer, author, Matali Perkins.
She says, "In that Christian home, my dad taught that God was a divine spirit of love.
And I believed in this good God until high school when a friend was killed in a car accident involving a drunk driver.
My friend's death opened my adolescent eyes to a world of suffering.
What kind of a God would allow this and then, according to my Hinduism, reincarnate us back into that same painful world?
I grieve for my friend and put my questions and God aside for the rest of high school.
During my midwinter break of my junior year in college, however, a few student friends invited me to join them in Russia to study art history.
I went believing that I would gain some objective perspective on Western religions by looking at a culture that had become atheistic, at least officially.
The Russian tour led us through prisons, cemeteries, and churches with histories of massacres and torture where ancient icons displayed the crucifixion over and over. I felt overwhelmed by evil.
How could God, if God existed, leave humanity to suffer so much?
One afternoon we headed to the Hermitage, the world-renowned museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Again, many of the paintings depicted Jesus' life and death and resurrection. I stood on the edge of the group, not wanting to participate, but my mind racing with questions.
As our group was about to leave, the museum official pulled me aside.
"What are you thinking about so deeply?" he asked in a low voice.
I was surprised into telling the truth.
A loving God, human suffering.
How can these two coexist?
The museum official said, "You are at the intersection of choice.
Whether you decide that Jesus is the Son of God or you turn your back on Him, you must decide.
But how can you choose a God, the same one who just wrote to us?
It has been given to you not only to believe, but also to suffer for Christ's sake." How can belief in a good God and suffering coexist? In order to answer that question, we would have to say, "How can God be good and have a purpose in suffering? And at the same time, how can He give us help in enduring the suffering?"
Those questions are not questions the writers of the Bible shy away from. To the question of why does suffering endure, even Jesus Himself answered in Matthew 13, the parable of the wheat and the weeds, or if you're a King James person, the parable of the wheat and the tares.
There Jesus Himself tells the story of what happened when sin entered our world and the corruptions and the evil and all the repercussions that followed. He said it's like an opponent who entered a field of wheat and began to spread seeds of weeds all through it, spread the dandelion seeds. And at some point, the seeds of the wheat and the weeds germinate together.
Why wouldn't the farmer just pull up the weeds?
Because to pull up the weeds, he would actually pull up the wheat before it was ready for harvest as well. And Jesus says so is the action of God. Once sin has entered our world by the corruption of our first parents, by our own selfishness, it begins to affect other people. Why doesn't God just get rid of all the evil?
Number one, it would get rid of all the helping professions, right? If all the evil were gone, no more police, no more doctors, no more nurses, no need of them. But if God were really to pull up all evil, also no need of you.
We ourselves, sinful by nature, sinners by actions, we ourselves would be uprooted. And so God in His wisdom allows the evil and the good until the time of the harvest when Christ Himself comes to teach our souls of our need of Him and not uproot us too soon. I mean, it may make some logical sense, but I would confess to you, it strains credulity and faith itself to believe that the reason that we continue to exist in the world, despite our fallows, despite our sin, is because of God's special love for each one of us.
I mean, the message that Christ is saying is simply this, that the fact that you and I continue to exist in a world of suffering is in itself evidence of a God who is enduring in His affection for you, who continues to see a purpose for you upon this planet. The very fact that you continue is evidence of a God's undying love for you.
But because it strains credulity and faith to believe that, we begin to say, "What evidence do we have that a loving God is still operative through this suffering?"
And the answer that the Apostle Paul is giving is the evidence in itself that God is still loving through the suffering is that He entered the suffering, that God Himself came into a world of pain. The words of verse 5, "Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though He was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man."
That God in Himself entered our world, being born, coming the likeness of humanity.
Because I'm a grandparent, I'm kind of attuned to grandparent stories these days, and one that caught my attention recently was of a grandpa who was distressed because his grandchild had been confined to a crib for throwing food. And as that child got more distressed and more upset and more angry, grandpa knew it was wrong to let the child out of the crib too early, but still was so upset that the child was crying in the crib that grandpa decided he would get in the crib.
Jesus got in the manger.
That what He was willing to do as God was to give up heavenly glory and come to the human painful world that you and I experience. And that in itself is some evidence of His not being remote, not being uncaring, not being abstract in His affection for us, but willing to enter to show His affection is real and loving for us. He did not have to experience any of that. And it wasn't just that He began to experience what it meant not to be God in the manger itself, but the humiliations continued. Our Reformation forefathers write it this way, "Christ's humiliation, consistent as being born, but that in a low condition," after all, it was among the animal stalls that the king of the universe had his birth on this planet. Not only was he born in that in a low condition, he was made under the law. He followed the same rules that you and I are expected to follow. He underwent the miseries of this life, experienced the wrath of God on the cross, the death on the cross in being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time.
Every dimension of that human suffering Christ experienced in our behalf to say, "I am willing to enter your world in all of its hardness, in all of its dimensions, so that you can't say, I don't care for you." That Christ entry is part of the expression of that great care and it's the uniqueness of the Christian message.
When I returned from China just a few weeks ago, I told you the account of being allowed to tour some of the temples of that island where folk religions still dominate.
And as the taxi driver was taking my translator and I to the various temples, at some point the taxi driver asked us, "Well, why are you here?" And my translator said, "You know, we're here because we are speaking for Jesus Christ."
And as we had been to these various temples that were recognizing and honoring ancestors or animals, the taxi driver said to us, "Well, I hope someday you'll get a temple to your Jesus."
It was a nice thing to say, but it was the point of entry for my translator to explain the gospel.
He said all of these temples which are basically taking what is flesh, ancestors or animals, and honoring them as God is the opposite of what Jesus did. He was not flesh made God. He was God who became flesh.
He put on flesh for our sakes. He experienced the miseries of this life. He experienced all that it would take to tell us how great is His love.
It's not just theory. It's not just abstraction. It's not just explaining our faith to other people. It's what we need to call upon at the hours of our greatest distress.
I've told you before of a time that I was at a conference and being picked up at the airport by a long-term friend of mine. And as he picked me up and I got in his car and we were driving to the church, he began to ask me questions. He said, "Brian, my oldest son who I adopted because I felt that was honoring to God is now in prison.
My church where you're going to be speaking is being torn apart by conflict.
And the leaders and the pastor of that church whom I've respected and love have themselves been guilty of such sin, I can respect them no more.
We are hurting so much. How do we believe in a God of love?"
Now, I don't know about you, but when I'm asked questions that directly, I just get kind of tongue-tied. I don't know what to say. But somehow the Holy Spirit gave words to say, "My friend, if you just look at your circumstances, I do not know how you could believe in a God of love.
But if you will look at the cross, I do not know how you could not believe in a God of love."
He gave himself for you. It's the explanation ultimately that we need, that we have to have, not just people out there somewhere. Our own hearts will require it. John Stott, the great British evangelist said this, "I could never myself believe in God were it not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as a God who would be on a cross. If he did not get on the cross, I don't know what to believe about him. I look at my world, my circumstances, my suffering, but when I say, "But he loved me enough to enter that world," it becomes the proof to me that the God that I would revere cares about me, even though the world is full of suffering because of the corruptions of our own hearts, because of the things that are here. We know it, but God shows me, "I cared enough about your pain to enter it." And he did not merely enter our pain, his design was to save us from that pain.
He says clearly in verse 8, "Not only did God empty himself in the form of Jesus, but being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." He became obedient.
He was obeying somebody. It was the will of the Father, says Isaiah, to crush him. It wasn't just a force of fate, he wasn't just the victim of circumstances. It was the will of God to crush him so that in his death he might become an offering for our sin, that the corruptions of the world caused by our first parent's sin that begin to spread all the selfishness. We don't just need the explanation of what happened to Adam and Eve, I mean we just look at our own lives.
After all, so often we think the reason that I'm hurt by somebody else, the reason I'm suffering is somebody else's selfishness. They did what was good for them and did not bother to think about me.
But then our deeper pain is the shame of recognizing. So often the pain of the people around me are because I thought of me more than of them.
I wanted to satisfy my ambition, my pleasure, my anger, whatever it was, they are hurting because I put my priority above theirs.
And what Jesus did when he suffered upon the cross was obey the will of the Father to pay the penalty for my sin, for my selfishness, so that ultimately I would recognize not only did he enter my pain, he was willing to do something about it. He was willing to suffer in my behalf to put that pain aside and the shame aside. It was what he was doing at the will of the Father, which must prove a love beyond some remote abstract God.
Matali Perkins continues her personal account of her move from Hinduism to Christianity this way.
When we returned to Vienna, I decided to go to the original source of the story in the New Testament.
Soon I was encountering a Jew who had olive-colored skin, black hair, dark eyes like me. This Middle Eastern man healed foreign women. He knew what it was to feel lonely and rejected. He became like me. He entered my world.
And then he enraged religious and political leaders by claiming divine authority.
They killed him.
He let them.
I was stunned. If he were telling the truth, then this was God submitting to the four enemies of humanity.
Pain, grief, evil, and death. He submitted to them in order to destroy them on our behalf. The cross was where a loving God and the suffering of humanity could be reconciled.
"I finally made my decision.
I would follow Jesus," she wrote.
It's what virtually every single person in this room who names Jesus as Lord has done.
At some point we recognize responsibility for the pain and the shame. And we recognize we were not going to reconcile ourselves to God in that because of that cause. God had to do something in our behalf. And what he did was he not only entered this world of our pain to say, "I love you enough to come to you," but he loved us enough to pay the price that our sins deserved. And in doing so he was reconciling his love to our brokenness, to our broken world, to our pain, to our suffering, to our evil. And even that's not the end of the story. Because he wasn't just providing reconciliation, ultimately he was providing a rescue from that world of pain as well. It's what this account is saying as well. God doesn't just enter our world, he doesn't just save us from its shame.
But ultimately he is promising to deliver his people to a better world.
Verse 9, "God has highly exalted him," that is Jesus, "bestowed on him the name is above every name." So 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.
What is God doing to deliver us? He first exalts Jesus. The word that the apostle uses in verse 9 to say, "God has highly exalted Christ," is a word that simply means to raise up.
But the apostle puts a special prefix on it to mean very highly raise up. And it's an intentional pun, a recognition of what God has done in Christ Jesus. Do some of you remember when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, he said, "Even as Moses raised up, lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. He must be raised." He was raised upon a cross that was that raising that was exalting Christ, but that was not the end of the raising.
He was buried and on the third day he rose again. And it's that understanding that here is the proof that the shame, the pain, the penalty has been crushed, that the consequences of the sin has been crushed as well. And Jesus had victory over death, meaning he has victory over my sin and your sin. There was new life in him. And that high exaltation results in something that is this. He has the name that is above every name. But speaking of the crowning of Jesus, you know, in our tradition we don't talk so much about the ascension of Jesus, his enthronement after his resurrection. And when we talk about the crucifixion and we talk about resurrection and we talk about ultimate consummation when Jesus returns, but we forget the importance of the ascension.
God gave past tense, Jesus the name that is above every name. In the book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul in the first chapter explains exactly what that means. "God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in his right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in this age but in the age to come.
Already Christ has the name that is above every power, above every authority in this world, in the heavenly kingdom, in this age and in the age to come. He is already the king.
And because he is already the king, not only do you and I have an advocate with the Father in our time of suffering, but even now all things are being worked together for good until that great day of the final harvest in which Jesus says, "It's time now. The wheat is ripe. It is time to pull up the weeds with the wheat." But even now everything is being coordinated until the timing of that great day so that our hearts are turning toward him. The hearts of those that we love are seeing our witness before him until everything has been arranged for Christ's coming. But he's doing the arranging now. He is our advocate and our suffering and he is the king of glory even now. And for that reason all things are being worked together for good. God is exalting him. He is the name that is above every name. And because he is working toward the grand conclusion, what should that be? It is verse 10 and 11. "Ultimately at the name of Jesus every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Where is the day coming when there will be nothing that hinders his rule anymore? No more weeds, no more darkness, nothing anymore but he will be the absolute king with none of the hindrances of the earth, none of the corruptions and evidence anymore. Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." And that means ultimately the deed is done, the harvest is in, and Christ is ruler over all in every way.
You know, Pastor Carey and I, we were driving to Chicago for a meeting this week and at some point as we were driving we got this picture perfect view of three combines in one field harvesting the corn. Blue sky, wonderful sunny day. And here was the corn coming out of the combines into the harvest wagons beautifully golden and pure. We recognize what had happened, right? The husk had been torn away. The stalks were gone. The weeds were gone. Here was the corn without husk or weed or rot or blight. It was the pure corn coming into the harvest wagon and it's the picture of what is happening for us at that great day. No more husk, no more blight, no more weeds, no more rot, everything made right. What does that look like for you and me? I think of what I was just doing this past week. I'm on a commission of this church in which we deal with the issues of churches or people in conflict throughout our denomination and all of these ugly, awful cases are bought to this final court of appeal and we're listening to these awful tensions and grievances among God's people.
And I have a friend who sat with me on those commissions for many years and as he is writing, you know, all of the horror and getting ready for the...he writes and we email back and he always signs his letter at the end of all these discussions, "Heaven soon."
Something better is coming and it's not just the end of our conflict among and between one another. It's the end of the hurting that we feel in so many ways. As he and I were talking in a breakfast meeting, kind of getting ready for all the things that we were about to face, we talked about some mutual friends that we had and one is a dad
who has raised a severely handicapped daughter into her adulthood.
And my friend told me that that parent had recently had his daughter in the wheelchair in a park on a sunny day like we were experiencing and he said, he said, "Brian," Jenny looked up at her dad and she said, "Daddy, I'm ready to go to heaven now."
There's no more.
Handicaps, no more. Conflict, no more. I was reading this week one of the reports from our wonderful chaplains in this church who visit people in the hospital and one of the reports from somebody who's been there a long time with a lot of hurt and a lot of suffering, the simple report was, "He's just very tired now."
He's no more.
Tired no more.
Separation from Jesus, no more. It's what we all have to look forward to. If we just take the images and we say, "Husk, no more. Weeds, no more.
Rot, no more. Blight, no more." We have to put it in the human terms that Christ is saying, what would it mean if every knee bows, every tongue confesses that Jesus is Lord and there's nothing anymore hindering the lordship of Christ upon this earth? What would that mean? It would mean pain, no more. Crying, no more. I don't have to do this myself. You help me here. It would mean shame, what? It would mean wheelchairs. It would mean cancer.
It would be sin.
It would be loneliness.
It would be longing.
Shattered dreams.
No more. It's the great declaration of the Lord on that last day. No more of this earth. No more of your sin. No more of your shame. God is saying, does he care for you? Yes, he not only entered this world. He not only provides a way for your shame and pain to be put aside. Ultimately he says, "I will deliver it from you all and all that has hurt you and all that cause you to wither and cry." No more.
And it is the great day that is ahead for the people of God even as we are. Having our way through this world in all of its fallenness and hurt even now. How do people know about that? I mean, how's anybody going to ultimately learn about that great plan of God?
Well it is verse 1.
So if there's any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, writes Paul, complete my joy by being of the same God, having the same love, being in full accordant of one mind. Verse 5, "Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus.
Have this mind in you which was exemplified in Christ." It's the attitude of his selflessness, being able to put others in front of him because he loves so much that he put his interest aside for the interest of those that he wanted to be touched by the grace of God. Verse 3 in itself is so important, "Do nothing." It's not just attitude, ultimately it's action. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." In the Greek that word "count" is actually the word for "lead." Lead by letting others' interests lead you.
Lead by putting them first. It's a deep irony which expresses the gospel so well. It's what Jesus did. He became Lord by suffering in our behalf. He became the God of all glory with the name that's above every name by putting himself second and beneath us all. And now Paul says, "Have this mind in you, have this attitude reflected in actions that's willing to do the same."
I think of a friend of mine recently who was recording what it meant when our church, our first denomination back in the 1960s, actually made a declaration from Scripture that the separation of the races on the back, as though it was biblical in some way, was unbiblical. That the notion there was a church for one race of people, one ethnicity of people, and another church for other people, we said was scripturally wrong.
And in the car on the way home from that meeting, that man, his name was Rudy Schmidt, said, "Well, if that's the mind of God, we better do something about it.
It's action that's meant to follow upon that mind." What would it look like in this church if what it meant was we had the mind in us that was also in Christ Jesus putting the interest of others above our own?
It would look like serving children in Sunday school.
It would look like arriving early and setting aside time and studying in their behalf to recognize that in those Sunday school classes are eternal souls of children.
And even as our Savior served the eternal souls of these earthly children, we would have the mind in us that was also in Christ Jesus. I mean, the celebration we had recently as we celebrated a man and a woman who 50 years had been serving children in the Sunday school, I mean, what a blessing.
And what a calling to say God is calling us to serve one another. It looks like a church that would build a special wing, a special room for special needs adults.
And there would be adults from this congregation who every Sunday with no return to themselves are ministering to special needs adults who cannot serve them back, who cannot in any way give recompense for what's being given to them, but they simply have the mind of Christ coming into action to serve special needs adults Sunday after Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.
It would look like people opening their homes at midweek to have other people come in so they could pray together and study scripture, knowing in any given week it doesn't seem to be doing much, but there will come the time that we need each other side by side,
that we need to know each other and we need to walk through the crises and walk through the parenting issues and walk through all the difficult because we've opened our homes and we don't mind that we didn't dust that day. Hey, we suffer for Christ's sake.
And we do it because we want the mind of Christ to exemplify what it means to be in service to one another. It would look like adults with grown up families continuing to meet weekly with young adults and high schoolers to say, "We will disciple. We will mentor. We will just be here for you because somebody did it for us years ago and it is the mind of Christ."
It would look like finance committee members looking at figures and books and trends and dollars and weighing it all out and enduring the second guessing of other people and simply saying we are doing this for the sake of Christ.
After the first service, I had a man say, "You know, it's not just in the church.
It's being a doctor and not retiring when it's my time because there's nobody else in this community who's able to take my place to serve the people that I serve. I'm giving up my retirement, my ease. For the sake of other people, I believe I have a witness in this community and for their sake I'm going to keep doing what I'd rather not do because the mind of Christ is mine." It looks like all of us thinking carefully and I hope you recognize even today as we begin to intersperse our worship practices, having hymns and contemporary music and beginning to generationally consider others more than ourselves. I'm not just going to be here to serve me. It's not just my preferences that I think about worship and giving and prayer and the wonderful prayer team that came up here last week and they'll come up again this week, by the way, and say, "We just want to come." We could leave and not be concerned, but we just want to come and let other people come and share their needs and their hearts and their hurts with us and to believe that Christ is honored in that because what we are showing is that by putting other interests above our own interests, what we are in fact doing is showing Christ, demonstrating the gospel. It's not political correctness. It's not even niceness.
It is the testimony of the gospel.
It is the purpose of Christ on display before His people.
And when that happens, the gospel just moves powerfully for Christ's sake.
I embarrassed my executive assistant, Karen Fry, this week when she walked into my office and I was crying and that made her cry. She didn't even know why I was crying. It wasn't because of the sermon. [laughter]
I was watching the live streaming of the funeral of a very dear and old friend.
Colin Schmidt was the wife of the long-term registrar, Rudy Schmidt, at Covenant College.
The two of them never had children and that caused them some significant pain.
But because they never had children, they gave themselves to the children of the rest of us in that college on the mountain.
And even in their 90s, they continued to serve. Every single one of my children has at some point stayed in their home. Every single one of my children has done their laundry in their home at some point. I don't know why, but at some point they knew it was open to them. They've invited their friends for picnics in the Schmidt's home, even in their living room.
And I think of the testimony of the gospel for people who were more committed to serving other people than themselves. I mean, they could have just retreated. And it wasn't even that they were just serving those kids on the mountain. I mean, at some point it was Rudy Schmidt that sat in the car on the way home from that General Assembly in the 1960s. If it's the mind of God that we should be together across ethnicities, we better do something about it. And the Schmitz with two other people were the first to start a Sunday school class in the urban inner city of Chattanooga.
And it was that church now mature that was having the funeral for Colin Schmidt, Rudy's wife.
Of the 150 actual nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews who attended the funeral, one wrote me after the funeral as I expressed my own condolences. The nephew wrote me saying this, "When I think of Aunt Colin and Uncle Rudy, my thoughts turn to Sundays."
That was the day they left the house early to pick up disadvantaged women and children, to go to the third street, Sunday school, and later to form New City Fellowship.
They would return from church late because they had to take all those people back home.
But that and the fact that though they were not the world's greatest cooks,
they continued to have lots of people in their homes Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, meant that they never even read the Sunday paper until Sunday evening because they were too busy serving other people during Sunday.
Aunt Colin, he wrote, wasn't all that talented, certainly not as gifted as many of her siblings, but she was faithful, persistent, inexhaustible, like a dog with a sock, even into her nieces.
Well, you don't have to read that dog with a sock thing, but you get it.
She's just determined to reflect the mind of Christ. And he wrote, "It's amazing how those traits, along with a few others, when marshaled toward the service of God, are so admired by other people and so inspire the message of Jesus Christ." I couldn't help but think of it as I watched the funeral service. Black and white together, large church now, packed for Colin's funeral, though she was 92, and that's unusual. Usually if you're 92, you outlive all the people or you come to your funeral. But there they were, packed into that church, black and white together. And the first song that they sang was, you know, kind of the English classic, "Holy, holy, holy."
But then the end of the service was the choir packing the choir loft, black and white together, singing the urban anthem. Death is ended. It was the great declaration of what Rudy wanted the world to know, what Colin wanted the world to know. Death is ended because of the work of Jesus Christ in our behalf, though we have known pain, though we have known suffering. We have known the mind of Christ, and in showing it, the world is being changed, the church is being changed, the community is being changed. God has shown us how we let other people know His love, how it changes people. He says it so clearly. Verse 5, "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." And then what will happen? Verse 10, "So that the name of Jesus, every knee would bow, and every tongue would confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." It is our privilege to have the mind of Christ and our calling to show it. May God so use us for Christ's sake as we have the mind of Christ, His humility,
for our unity and the testimony of the gospel. "Father, so work among us, I pray, that we who know what Christ has done might ourselves be willing in the hard things, the hard choices of preference and pocketbook, and time and energy, nonetheless say, if Jesus did this for me, I want to show the world what it means, and hearts of thanksgiving and gratitude, which show Christ to the world, because we will have the mind of Christ
and the works to show it." So use us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.