05 - Let This Mind Be In You 2012 By Pastor Jeff Wickwire Notes

We saw last time that Christians are to be of the same mind and have the same love for one another. Unity is essential to victory over Satan’s forces.

We also saw that we are called to look out for the interests of others (2:4), which is to have the mind of Christ. We begin this time with what has been called “the most conspicuous and magnificent of the dogmatic utterances of the New Testament.”

In fact, what we are about to read lays out for us beyond all certainty that Jesus Christ is genuinely divine as He is genuinely human. It begins with an exhortation:

2:5 “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,”

It is important to note that Paul uses the Messianic title “Christ Jesus.” The order of the names and titles of the Lord is always a matter of precision in the New Testament. “Christ Jesus” places the emphasis on the exalted One who “emptied Himself.”

The order is switched to “Jesus Christ” in order to describe the despised and rejected One who was afterward glorified. It testifies of His resurrection. “Christ Jesus” suggests His grace, “Jesus Christ” suggests His glory.

As the Christ, Jesus was the anointed One, the Messiah so long promised in the Scriptures and awaited by the Jews. The Lord never gloried in His position, but He never denied it either, and that is important!

Phil. 2:5 tells us that the mind of the Christ is to be the mind of the Christian. The word translated “let (this) mind be” is the word meaning “to think of, to be mindful of.” Hence, we are to think as He did.

Next we come to Paul’s Christology. First, the Son as Very God:

2:6 “…who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,”

First, Paul tells us that Christ Jesus was “in the form of God.” The word for “form” is morphe, meaning “the essential form, the essence of.” It means “the whole nature and essence of Deity.” As Jesus once told Philip, “Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Let’s put this in layman’s terms. He who came to be man in every sense of the word, was also God in every sense of the word. Jesus was all man and all God. He was the God-Man.

And it is important to clarify that in becoming a man, Jesus never yielded up or lost one iota of His Divinity. Christ’s incarnation was not an emptying of Himself of His deity, but a clothing of Himself in humanity—in order to be a servant.

Why should it matter? It matters because there is a great battle raging in our culture today as to Who Jesus really was. His death, burial and resurrection are questioned every year at this time of Easter.

And cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses tell people every day that Jesus was not God. They deny the Trinity, deny that Jesus is or ever was Almighty God, and reduce Him to only a good man on earth.

But this is not the testimony of Scripture. When He was born of a virgin He was all God, all Man. As He grew up in Joseph’s carpenter shop He was all God, all Man. Following His water baptism when the Spirit descended He was all God, all Man. Throughout His three year ministry He was all God, all Man. And while hanging on the cross taking your sins and mine upon Himself, He remained all God, all Man.

When Jesus became a man He did not and could not cease to be God. As God He was the eternal, uncreated, self-existing Creator of the universe, the One whom angels worshiped.

Because Christ was God and had always been God, He did not think it an “act of robbery to be equal with God.” Put another way, Jesus “counted it not as a prize that He was on an equality with God.”

Next, Paul focuses on His Servanthood:

2:7 “…but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant...”

Paul says that He became a Man in order to be a servant. The phrase “made Himself of no reputation,” means “emptied.” So Jesus literally “emptied Himself.” But again, not of His deity.

In eternity past Christ was not only equal with God; He existed in the essential form (morphe) of God. In the act of becoming a servant, the Lord Jesus deliberately abandoned the glory and majesty He had with the Father before the world began.

The Lord did not empty Himself of His divine attributes. He did not cease to be God even though He took upon Himself the outward characteristics of a servant. Commentator John Phillips writes, “He assumed all that was essentially human without relinquishing anything that was essentially divine.”

The word for “servant” is the Greek word doulos which usually means “slave.” But Jesus was no man’s slave. He became the bondservant of His Father. He came to always do the things that pleased the Father (John 8:29). His prayer was first and always, “Thy will be done” (Matt. 6:10).

Paul went on to say,

“…and was made in the likeness of men.” (2:7b)

Stop and think a moment. When God said, “Let us make man,” He added, “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen.1:26). Man was created to be as much like God as a creature could be. God endowed him with intellect, emotions, and will. He gave him a body so that he could see, hear, taste, smell, and feel.

But then God gave him something that set him completely apart from all of the created order. He gave to him a spirit. His body made him conscious of the things around him. His soul made him self-conscious—aware that he was a distinct individual with attributes, nature, personality, potential responsibilities and accountability.

His spirit made him God-conscious—aware that he existed to worship and serve his Creator. On top of all that, the Holy Spirit indwelt his human spirit; he was a creature inhabited by God.

When God created the animals He made them to be controlled by instinct. An animal does what it does because it is what it is. Dogs, birds, reptiles, fish, insects all behave in certain ways because they are locked into those ways of behaving by instinctive, God-given inner drives.

But not man. Man was not to be controlled by instinct, but was to be inhabited by God. His code of behavior was to be dictated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Thus, man lived and moved and had his being in God (Acts 17:28). Man existed to demonstrate what God is like.

When Adam sinned, the Holy Spirit vacated the human spirit and man began to be controlled by the principle of sin instead of God. His body became subject to disease and death; his senses were marred by imperfection and were subject to lust;

His intellect, emotions, and will were impaired and darkened, becoming easy prey to evil and wrong. As Paul wrote elsewhere, “And they are dark in their intellects and are aliens to the Life of God, because there is no knowledge in them and because of the blindness of their heart,” (Eph.4:18).

Put bluntly: Man in sin is a distortion of man in the image of God.

No wonder Jesus said, “You must be born again” (John 3:7). Without this miracle, we are born in the flesh, born in sin, shaped in iniquity, spiritually dead. When we turn to Christ, the blood of Jesus cleanses away all of our sin. The Holy Spirit comes back into our human spirit and regenerates it.

The Bible says, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). All of this background information is important to understand what Paul meant when he said that Jesus “was made in the likeness of men.”

Jesus was man as God intended him to be in the beginning. His spirit was always ruled by the Holy Spirit. Christ’s intellect, emotions, will and nature, personality and physical powers were all under the control of the Holy Spirit. What Adam lost in his fall into sin, Christ gave back to us in His perfect life.

So, Phil.2:5-7 can be summed up this way:

The Son of God became the Son of man so that the sons of men might become the sons of God.

So, the Lord Jesus deliberately abandoned the glory and majesty He had with the Father before the world began that we might be restored to the glory we lost through Adam.

Our spiritual life, eternal life, and godly minds were all restored through Christ. But Paul goes further in describing Jesus:

2:8 “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”

What had bothered Paul most before he was converted was the cross. He could not accept the claims of the church and mercilessly persecuted her. To him the cross was the impossible thing about Christianity.

The life, teachings, and miracles of Jesus were extraordinary, but Scripture said, “Cursed is every one that hangs on a tree” (Gal.3:13). The idea that the man who claimed to be Israel’s Messiah should die an accursed death—cursed by the law, cursed by God—was not just outrageous to Paul, it was blasphemous.

Then one day Saul met the risen Christ, blinded by the brightness of His glory. Paul (Saul) heard his voice and surrendered instantly to His claims. From then on, what had seemed the most impossible thing about Christianity became the most impressive thing about Christianity.

The converted Paul wrote, “He…became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” The Apostle’s theme song wherever he went was the cross:

“But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal.6:14).

He told the Corinthians, “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

The cross of Jesus Christ was the central theme of Paul’s message, the core of every sermon he delivered to the lost. For the church to cease preaching the cross is nothing short of gutting the Christian message of its essence. If we took the sun from our solar system, all would be plunged into darkness and death. So it is to take the cross from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Next time, Paul takes us from the horror of the cross to the heights of Christ’s exaltation!

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