What if we thought like Jesus?

Are you out of your mind?
Have you ever said something or done something you wished you had not done or said, and as you reflected on why, the only explanation you could give was, “I was just not thinking well”? I think we all know the answer is “yes.”

Paul writes, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
What if we thought like Jesus? What would Jesus think?
If we want to be better we must think better. We are going to dive into one of the most amazingly rich passages of Scripture, Philippians 2:5-11. It is a Divine Invitation to think like Jesus! This is going to be good.

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Grace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
Series: The “What Ifs” of Faith
October 20, 2013

What If We Thought Like Jesus?
Philippians 2:5-11

If you’re here this morning and you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. We want to put a Bible in your hand. When you get that Bible, open it up to Philippians, chapter 2. We’ve been doing this series on the book of Philippians. We’re calling it the The “What Ifs” of Faith. We’ve looked at a lot of different perspectives.

We started off with how the church at Philippi began, and we talked about…What if the church really engaged the city? What if the church really just said, “You know what? Let’s reach the city”? Philippi was where the church broke over into Europe. It was just an amazing thing that happened.

We went from there and looked at Paul’s description of how he prayed for his friends at Philippi. We talked about…What if we really interceded for one another? What if we really prayed for one another, and what should we pray for one another? We looked at Paul’s imprisonment, and we talked about…What if trouble is really God’s way of trailblazing, cutting a pioneer pathway for the kingdom gospel to reach into places you and I would have never reached otherwise?

We’ve been working our way through Philippians, and we’re coming to this passage in Philippians, chapter 2. We started last week with…What if we looked out and loved one another? Verse 5 (I’m reading out of a New Living Translation) makes a statement that is… Phenomenal doesn’t do it justice. It says, “You must have the mind that Christ had.” That you have the mind of Christ.
Then it goes down through here. I don’t know if you mark in your Bibles, but I have in my Bible, starting in verse 5 going down through verse 11, kind of parentheses there, because what you’re looking at here is one of the early hymns of the church. This is what they sung when they came together.

Now there are numbers of hymns in the Scriptures. Many of the psalms are songs, and you have the song of Moses, and you have great songs that embrace great events that took place. What you have here is a very dense doctrinal statement about the nature of God. If you’ve been in church for a long time, I am sure you have read this and talked about this, because it’s one of the mountain peaks of what Jesus did and who Jesus was. Let me just read it through.

“Have this mind in you that was in Jesus Christ. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on the cross. Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, 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 is Lord, to the glory of the Father.” (Philippians 2:5-11)

Have you ever had someone say to you, “Are you out of your mind?” I’m thinking that means yes. Have you ever said something to someone and, as you said the words, it was like you wanted to grab them and push them back in your mouth? You knew those weren’t really the right words to say, and as you reflected on it… Maybe you were even asked about it, and you answered the question by saying, “I just wasn’t thinking very well.”

Paul writes here a statement that, by all human calculations, is really unbelievable. He says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” The question of faith we’re asking this morning is…What would the church look like, what would our lives look like, if we had the mind of Christ? I think I know (at least I know about my own life) it would look different on many occasions.

What we find here is this divine invitation to think like Jesus. The sheer magnitude of that invitation… The doctrinal implications are absolutely immeasurable. Now for some people, the thought of doctrine is a bit distasteful. It’s kind of like going to listen to a lecture on how the transmission of your car works. You really don’t care how it works; you just care when it starts to slip or it grinds.

Have any of you had your transmission where you just go, “Oh, third gear is gone”? Then you care, but you don’t really… You take it in to get it worked on, but you don’t expect the mechanic to go, “Okay, before I’m going to fix your transmission, you need to come to a class, and I’m going to tell you how transmissions work.” All you want to do is change gears and move forward.

But what we believe about God really matters. It matters not only how we behave; it matters what we think. Do any of you read A.W. Tozer? He’s like ancient, and he’s dead. Like a long time ago. But he made some phenomenal statements, and one of the statements that haunts my brain is that if you could tell what the church at any given time really believed about God, their true concept of God, the thoughts they had of God, you could, with good precision, predict the direction of the church in 20 years, where it was headed.

In Jeremiah 9:23-24 it says, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, says the Lord.'” (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

What is he talking about there? He’s talking about that we really know God. Oftentimes, we talk about God like there’s this God of the Old Testament, but Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” That’s really important. A lot of times we look back through the Old Testament and we think the Father is different than the Son, but he says, “This is the lens by which you understand the heart of the Father: when you look at the Son.”

What you find in this particular passage is the entire scope of what Jesus did and the celebration the church had in the contemplation of what Jesus did. Now if you look at verse 6 down through verse 11 you find some propositional realities. “He didn’t cling to his privileges. He humbled himself. He became a servant. He became man. He became obedient. He died on the cross. He was elevated to the highest honor.”

You could make those statements in a propositional manner, but what are given here are not just the propositions of what happened, but also the drama of the event, the stories. Now I know people sometimes in church are uncomfortable thinking of the Bible as story, but it is. It’s divine epics. It’s real events, but it’s told in the manner of a story with a beginning and an end and a central part. It leaves us to grasp the point of the story.

Jody and I met in college. We were working up in the inner city of Chicago with a lot of gangs, and we were just really good friends. She worked in a ministry that I led, and I just loved her heart for God. I really liked her as a person, and I had a habit (and I try to continue that habit) of telling people I love that I love them. How many think that’s a good idea? There’s actually a song about this. We had a debate in the first service about who wrote it.
[Song] Shower the people you love with love
Show them the way that you feel…
[End of song] That’s good enough. In the early service we had this debate whether that was Cat Stevens, but no, actually it’s James Taylor. Sometimes we’re hesitant about telling people. We love somebody, and we don’t really express that. So I had told Jody I loved her numbers of times, but I started recognizing I didn’t just love her and like her but I was in love with her. There is a difference.
One fall day (about like this; this time of year) after chapel I said, “Let’s go for a walk.” So we were walking around the lake. We were talking about some things, and I said, “I need to tell you something. I’m in love with you.” She noticed the difference of “I love you” and “I’m in love with you.” She turned and looked at me, and she said, “Did you say you’re in love with me?”
Now we had been really good friends for a long time, and she knew I had never told a girl that I was in love with her and I had made a commitment to myself that I would never tell a girl I was in love with her unless my intentions were to marry her. So when she heard me say I was in love with her, she knew I was at least indirectly saying, “Will you marry me?”

She looked at me and said, “I’m going to have to think about that.” Now guys, I’m going to tell you this right now. The goal is to marry over your head. Amen? I mean, really. You really do want to marry somebody who probably the first time you say it goes, “Hmm, I don’t know.” Now she has a whole different perspective on that. If you talk to Jody about it, it’s much longer.

To some degree, I think it’s like the Gospels. It’s not one is true and one is false. Mark looked at something and said, “This is what happened,” and John looked at it and said, “This is what happened.” Both of them happened; they’re just from different perspectives. (I don’t know where I was going with that. I always get lost when I start thinking about Jody. It’s true. I can be preaching a sermon, and if she walks in the back door, I just kind of go, “Ooh. I know why I married you.”)

This passage is a deeply, densely-packed hymn of the early church. If you noticed, we were singing these Christmas songs. It’s because if you look at the passage, verse 6 is really about creation. I’ll come back and explain to you why it’s about creation. Look at verse 6: “Though he was God, he did not think equality with God as something to cling to.” (Philippians 2:6) That passage is about creation, and it’s echoing back. It’s even using the same words that are used in creation and the fall.

When Satan came to Adam and Eve in the garden… God had said to Adam and Eve, “Listen, you are not to eat of this tree. This is the Tree of Life. You can eat freely from all of the other trees, but this tree you are not to eat of.” Then Satan comes in temptation and says, “Listen, God told you not to eat of that tree because he knows that when you eat of that tree, you’re going to become like God. You’re going to become gods yourselves.”

Do you see that word grasp? They reached out and took the fruit of the tree they were not supposed to take. What is being described here is this creation drama, that Jesus came to reverse the curse, to undo what Adam did. Paul talks about this a lot in the book of Romans and in the book of 1 Corinthians, that he is the new Adam, the new humanity. He came to undo. He came to break that hold Satan had against man.

Now be very careful when you think about what happened in the garden of Eden. It’s incredibly important. I know there are all kinds of debates about “Is that seven days? Is there a gap theory? Where do the dinosaurs belong?” All of those things. I’m just going to tell you right now it’s “Adventures in Missing the Point.”

“In the beginning God created.” That’s the point. How did he do it? Look at me. Do I look like a scientist? I really don’t know. You say, “If you don’t believe in the seven days of creation, then I’m leaving the church.” Well, maybe it is seven days, but maybe there was something that happened between verses 1 and 2. I know extremely conservative scholars who believe it was… Listen, when you go there, you really do miss the point. “In the beginning God created.”

The guy who oversaw the Genome Project for America talks about how intricately the DNA… He actually wrote a book called The Language of God. You know what? I don’t want to go here. What I want to say is when you read that passage, there are three things that are really, really emphasized. One is the importance of truth, that God said… This Book we hold in our hands is a book we can trust. God said and it’s true. What God says is true.
One of the things he says in this creation… I love this about that whole creation account. He says, “And God created, and he said, ‘It was good.'” It’s the most repeated part of the creation account. “And God said it was good. And God said it was good. And God said it was good.” Do you know what I like about that? First, I like the fact God talks to himself. He had to say it was good because that’s the kind of work he does. He does really good work.

Now there’s good in terms of performance. You can say, “Georgia did not play very good this weekend.” We won’t think about that, though. There’s another kind of good that is not just something that is good versus bad. There’s a passage in Psalms. I love this passage. It says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Do you know what that means? That means God tastes good. If your experience with God is not good, something is wrong. Your life may not be good, people may not treat you good, but God is good. He does good work.

There’s a tradition in our family. It’s this chocolate cake that has been passed down through the family line. Different family members do it better than others. It’s not an exact art, and sometimes it turns out a little too sugary. But chocolate is always somewhat good. Sometimes you just hit the mark and it’s like, “Wow. This may set a new standard for the Hoffman chocolate cake tradition.” God is good. God is so good. God is really good.

Not only is he true and good, he says things like, “And it was beautiful to the eyes.” Beautiful. Do you understand that God created beauty? He likes beautiful things. Now in that creation story… Really, this is the right reaction to Genesis 1. Let me just say, “Wow.” Did anybody see the moon last night? Did anybody go “Wow”? Do you know why God made the moon like that? Because he wants you to clap. I don’t know why he likes it, but he does. He does stuff to impress us. He does stuff to grab our emotions, where we just go, “That is good. That is beautiful. That is true. Yes!”

I was talking to somebody here this morning. She hasn’t announced it to all of her friends but she’s pregnant. She had the biggest smile on her face. You can just guess. Maybe it’s your wife. That’s going to get you thinking all day, isn’t it? She’s going to announce it. It’s going to be big news. But you could just see. It was like, “Oh, this is good.” Do you know why God does those things for us? Because he wants us to be captivated by his glory.

So you find creation in verse 6. I have to move forward. Where he tells them not to take of the tree and they take it based on Satan’s advice, we always call that the fall. I really think we should change our terminology and call it treason. Mankind exchanged the kingdom of God for the kingdom of darkness, and we took that which was beautiful and made it brutal and bloody.

We took that which was true and made it twisted and a lie. We took that which was good, and it became something ugly. We live in this time of broken, twisted, messed-up stuff. The second passage there in verse 7, where he says, “Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form…” (Philippians 2:7)

The second big doctrinal truth of this redemption story is the incarnation. If you want to keep it alliterated in all of the same letters, you can call it Christmas or the cradle. It’s like Sesame Street today. The sermon is brought to you by the letter “C.” Just as creation is beyond our minds to even fully comprehend, the reality is the incarnation is beyond our minds to really comprehend.

John, chapter 1 is one of the most mind-boggling passages of Scripture, where it says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It is beyond imagination. This is why, if you’re into the doctrinal kind of debate, deep thinking about Scripture, this particular passage is the kenosis. It’s the emptying of himself, and in what way did God become man, the God-man? The Holy One became the human one.
This is incredibly important to understand: Jesus came and was born. He was born a real baby. When you look at those Renaissance pictures and you see those halos over Jesus’ head in the manger, it wasn’t like that. That’s not the way it was. I don’t know how many times I’ve walked the streets of Bethlehem and just contemplated the birth of Jesus.

There’s a song (I think Andrew Peterson did it) about how it wasn’t a quiet night and there was blood on the ground and sweet Mary delivered this baby into the world who was a real baby. We sometimes romanticize those realities of what Jesus did for us, and when we do, we really are amiss in our doctrine. It’s almost what the early church dealt with with agnosticism, that Jesus was kind of a super-being.

No, Jesus was a real baby. He had to learn to speak. He had to learn to walk. He had to be changed. He had to be fed. Jesus grew in knowledge and wisdom. How does that work? Listen carefully to what I’m going to say to you. I don’t have a clue. Not even a slight clue. But the fact that I can’t explain it and even comprehend it doesn’t mean it’s not true, and it doesn’t mean it doesn’t capture my heart.

It was a rescue mission of God himself. Have you ever been in a situation where you were in trouble and somebody had to come after you, and you were so glad to see that face or those faces because you knew there was no way out of the situation you were in? Listen. It’s a rescue mission. This is what Jesus said. “I’ve come to seek and save the lost.” That’s you and me.

We have this amazing message. God came after us. He became one of us. How did he do that? He just did it. You know what? Nobody gets to tell God what to do. So you have the creation, and he reverses this curse. He’s the new Adam. He enters earth and becomes a baby in a slave position, born of a human being. He announces the kingdom has broken in.

In verse 8, it moves from the cradle all the way over to the crucifixion. That’s verse 8. “He humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on the cross.” (Philippians 2:8) If this doesn’t overwhelm you, you just aren’t thinking well. Jesus, God in human flesh, hung upon a cross to pay for the sins of you and me.

“He who knew no sin was made sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Do you understand this? You and I, guilty, grasping, treasonous, unworthy… God came, announced the kingdom, and was crucified, and all the righteousness of Jesus was put in our account. Do you understand how rich you are? You’re rich in righteousness.

Some of you think, because you were raised in these legalistic environments, that God is going to get you, that you’re going to get to heaven and there’s going to be this big film going off and everything you’ve ever done wrong is going to be on that film. It’s going to show the whole world everything you’ve ever done wrong, which, for some of you, is going to be like a feature-length film.

If Jesus is your King and you have trusted this King of Kings, if you have come into this kingdom, when they pull up your file they see not just “Paid in full”; they see, “See Jesus.” Well, that’s a pretty good reference. I had this guy tell me one time he dreamed he went to heaven. He said, “I got to heaven, and I was standing there, and there was this big gate.”

He says, “The door opened and it wasn’t Peter; it was Jesus.” He said, “I was so scared and trembling, and Jesus just put his arms around me and said, ‘Listen, I’m going to take you in and I’m going to introduce you to the Father, but you know that stuff you did down there that you weren’t supposed to? He doesn’t know about that. I took care of it.'” Wow. We should be convicted of our righteousness. The goodness of God leads us to salvation.

I love this last section, and it’s the big one. It’s in verses 9-11. It says, “Therefore, God exalted him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, 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 the Father.” (Philippians 2:9-11)

This is the coronation. So you have creation, you have the Christmas incarnation, you have the crucifixion, but it doesn’t end there. It’s the coronation. There are two primary passages that tie together. One is out of Isaiah, chapter 6, which is one of my absolute, all-time favorite passages of Scripture. It’s Isaiah, and he says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.”

Uzziah was one of the best kings ever. Uzziah dies, and Isaiah just goes, “Oh, it’s terrible.” But in that terrible tragedy, that woe, that “No, this can’t happen. No, Uzziah is dead…” He says, “In that, I saw the Lord and the cherubim, and the pillars of the temple are shaken.” When he sees the Lord, do you remember what the cherubim are saying? “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I love that.

That’s the only attribute of God that is repeated thrice. Do you know why it’s that way? It’s because in the Hebrew, the way you emphasized something was repetition. In English, if you wanted something to jump off the page, you might capitalize everything. You make it all caps. (By the way, if you text in all caps, quit.)

The other thing you could do is underline it and maybe put an exclamation point so it would jump off the page. In that passage, here’s what it’s saying. “Listen. This is the primary attribute of God, that he is holy, holy, holy.” Do you know what that means? That he is in a category unto himself. There’s nobody like God. There’s nothing like God. God is God, and there’s no god but God.

That’s amazing to me. In this room we’re all human beings (or should be). In the parking lot they’re all cars. In our little bit of the solar system they’re planets, except Pluto got kicked off. Our sun is part of another grouping. They’re stars. But when it comes to God, there’s one singular entity in that category, and it’s God. There’s no god but God.
When he sees God and gets an understanding, even briefly, of his holiness, he goes, “Woe is me, for I’m not worthy.” Then God says, “Who will go for me?” and Isaiah says, “Here am I, Lord. Send me.” Now Isaiah was a great prophet, but God didn’t say, “Come up here and sit by me, Isaiah.” But when you go over to the book of Revelation and read Revelation 4 and 5, the world is crying out because there’s no redeemer, and John is weeping because there’s no redeemer. From the midst of the throne, the Lamb walks out, for he is worthy to open the books.

Then it moves into this whole realm of all creation. Then it says that from every tribe and every language, from every people group, they’re going to cry out. Do you know what they’re crying out? “Holy, holy, holy, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Don’t ever let anybody tell you the Bible doesn’t teach that Jesus is God. He is. And he’s our God. He’s our Lord and our Friend and our Savior and our righteousness.

I don’t have any idea where you are with God this morning, but let me just tell you this. He loves you, and that love was demonstrated on the cross. He wants you in the kingdom. He reversed the curse, and all you have to do is receive that gift of righteousness and recognize that you are like the Adam of old.

You are living in treason against the Creator, and you have to make up your mind which kingdom you want to live in. Do you want to live in that kingdom of darkness, of brokenness, of lies, of perversion, or do you want to live in this kingdom of beauty and glory, where God himself is going to set everything right? I am so excited about that. Amen.

We’re going to take a minute or so. We have Communion on the tables down front. We have Communion on the sides and in the back. We have a prayer team here. If you’ve never come into the kingdom, what are you waiting on? Goodness gracious. You don’t want to live the life you live now. Don’t you want the righteousness of Jesus? Just run up the white flag and say, “I surrender. I want in that kingdom. I want that.”

Lord, thank you so much for you. Lord, we pray this morning that we will be good representatives of you. Lord, we pray that these truths will be in our minds, that this mind will be in us that was also in you. Lord, if we as a church, if we as families, if we as businesses, if we as individuals, could just understand we can have the same mind through your Holy Spirit, things would change dramatically. Lord, may this mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus. Amen.