From Humility Flows Unity
Notes
Transcript
So, Jordan, my 8 year old son, just started playing indoor soccer. He’s been a joy to watch, interacting with team mates and learning a new skill.
But, you know in Genesis, when the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters, it’s like primordial soup or whatever, it’s the chaos waters?
Well, that’s what 8 year old soccer is like. Now, more than ever, I understand why God wanted to create order in the universe.
Because let me tell you, indoor child’s soccer is chaos. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea.
Our first two games happened to line up with all the snow we had gotten earlier this year, so our team went into two games without ever meeting, no practice nothing.
Sans practice, they tell all these elementary kids to go out and kick the ball.
And let me tell you, they kick the ball. You have like 20 kids all running around, eyes down toward the ground focused on the soccer ball, and their entire goal in life is to kick that ball in any direction as hard as they possibly can.
Doesn’t matter who’s in the way, where their goal is, there was a poor grandpa who go beaned in the stands last week.
There’s one kid who’s about 50 pound heaver than all the others, and he’ll just plant and kick until the crowd moves.
I honestly can’t believe more kids don’t get hurt.
But 100% in their own little world, they’re trying their best with good intentions, but both teams just end up kicking the ball in a random direction, no regard for their teammates or scoring a goal.
This is what happens with a lack of practice, a lack of discipline, a lack of knowing the mission, and a lack of the sense of teamwork.
And let me tell you, this feeling translates off the soccer field, I know you’ve experienced it. If you’ve ever tried to climb the cooperate ladder, there are a myriad of people planting and kicking per se, trying to climb their way up and willing axe anyone in their way.
Heck, even just driving down the road you can see this attitude: everyone is so focused on their own destination, it doesn’t matter who’s in the way. Whoever is in the other car, they’re going too fast, too slow, and it’s their fault when we almost collide, never mine.
And unfortunately, we have centuries of this mindset in the church. That my own ideals should outweigh everyone else’s.
That if I feel hurt, it’s always someone else’s fault. If someone has a different perspective or frame of mind, well that’s okay one day they’ll be right like me.
It’s the mindset that I should walk into the church building on a Sunday morning and be treated and pampered and catered to, and if that doesn’t happen, well then I’m out.
And this is a sickness that stems from our constant need to be the main character of our world. As if there’s a movie camera following us around, and everyone else is a supporting actor in my own life, there to serve and please me as I see fit.
And what this results in is chaos. Disunity. A bunch of children running around, perhaps doing their best, but hurting each other and being all but productive.
This is what Paul I believe is getting at in our passage this week. He’s calling these Philippians to a higher standard, which is humility and unity.
So, let’s take a look at where Paul starts this argument. And what Paul starts with is this series of if then statements, and this is what we can call the catalyst of the passage, or the cause.
The Cause
The Cause
Now, pay close attention to the first two words: if, then.
This may seem innocuous to us, but what Paul is doing here is connecting back to the former passage in chapter 1, especially verses 27-30.
Let’s read those to remind ourselves:
27 Just one thing: As citizens of heaven, live your life worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or am absent, I will hear about you that you are standing firm in one spirit, in one accord, contending together for the faith of the gospel, 28 not being frightened in any way by your opponents. This is a sign of destruction for them, but of your salvation—and this is from God. 29 For it has been granted to you on Christ’s behalf not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, 30 since you are engaged in the same struggle that you saw I had and now hear that I have.
So, look, whatever Paul is about to say in chapter 2, verses 1-4, it’s in the light of living your life as a citizen of heaven. A higher calling.
It’s in the light of standing firm, in one spirit and accord, and it’s in light of believing and suffering, but being okay with suffering because it means we are suffering with Christ.
In that context, I think we can make sense of what follows, which are four distinct phrases:
1 If, then, there is any encouragement in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any affection and mercy,
Encouragement in Christ.
Consolation of love.
Fellowship with the Spirit.
Affection and mercy.
And on first read, this is actually pretty hard to understand, because it’s just not exactly clear in the English, maybe I’m just a dummy, but just follow along with the dummy for a few seconds.
What Paul seems to be saying here can be paraphrased like this: You Philippians, after I shared Christ with you and you accepted him as your Lord, then you’ve received encouragement.
You’ve received consolation of love, you have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, you have affection and mercy.
What Paul is doing is reminding them of these things. These traits that are completley unique to a new life in Christ.
NT Wright, renowned Pauline scholar, translates it like this:
1 So if our shared life in the king brings you any comfort; if love still has the power to make you cheerful; if we really do have a partnership in the spirit; if your hearts are at all moved with affection and sympathy—
See, Paul is bringing up these reminders to build into an amazing divine purpose and command.
Because let’s be honest, it’s easy to forget. We can go into our normal everyday lives and forget, well one that we’re even followers of Christ, but also everything that entails.
We forget that we have encouragement in Christ. And that word, encouragement, it may mean emboldening, exhorting, but more than likely it means comfort, if you look back into the Greek.
It means lifting of another’s spirit. It’s a refreshing, the oasis in the desert.
It’s the same word used in Philemon 7,
7 For I have great joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother.
This is one way God is described in the Psalms:
4 Even when I go through the darkest valley, I fear no danger, for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me.
This is what Paul is playing on, that there’s a comfort, a peace, and encouragement in following Christ, because we know the suffering in this life is for a greater purpose.
If there’s any consolation of love. And consolation is basically a relief, aka solace afforded by love, that their common love is relieving, it’s a joy.
If any fellowship with the Spirit, because we are all connected by the indwelling and embodying of the same Holy God with us, the Holy Spirit, which connects us not only to God, but one another.
We are empowered by God, who replaces us from the inside out.
And finally, if there is any affection and mercy, which is again another appeal to their unity in Christ and their love and affection for one another, which is extremely unique to followers of Christ.
Paul is reminding the Philippians of these. And I don’t think this is a “well, if you don’t have this list then you never really accepted Christ”.
That’s not at all what he’s saying.
Instead, it’s a confirmation. It’s a “if you, Philippian community, have accepted Christ, you’re experiencing these, and let me remind you that they’re good”.
Remember, Paul knows these people, he’s seen Christ working in them. These aren’t hypothetical what ifs, they’re reality.
And this reality is what causes the effect:
The Effect
The Effect
2 make my joy complete by thinking the same way, having the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.
Paul is overjoyed that the Philippians are experiencing this encouragement, this comfort, the peace, consolation, fellowship,
But notice that joy is incomplete. Because it’s not good enough to sit back and enjoy the fruits of Jesus without living in a radically different way because of those fruits.
Make my joy complete, by what?
Thinking the same way.
Having the same love.
United in spirit.
Intent on one purpose.
And here we get to the point of failure. Because this isn’t often how we would describe any group of people, let alone any body of believers, any church, right?
When is the last time you’ve looked at any gathering of people, whether it be political parties, jobs, families, organizations, churches, and you been like:
Wow, they’re thinking the same way. Wow, they’re having the same love, united in spirit.
They are so intent on one purpose.
Not often. This is perhaps one of the biggest struggles of humanity, living together in harmony.
I think we all know the United States was born in 1776. That means this year, our great country will be 250 years old.
Do you know how many total years the US has been without war? Top end estimate-17 total years.
In the entirety of recorded human history, historians estimate a whopping zero years of peace, not a single year without war or mass conflict, they’ve even found mass graves from battle dating back 10,000 years.
Just read the Old Testament, most stories are centered around conflict.
Humans have an amazing ability to be prideful and stubborn, even if means killing your brother just to prove you’re right.
What Paul is urging here is the opposite of that.
The Philippian church, the people need to be united, in harmony.
They need to think the same way - and this isn’t thinking like all my ideas are the exact same as everyone elses.
Like I said last week, that’s a cult, and I don’t wanna be in a cult.
As Creed Bratton says, you make more money as a leader, but you have more fun as a follower.
But thinking means setting your mind on the right thing. We are all to set our minds on the things above.
Paul writes something similar in Colossians:
1 So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.
See, in Jewish thought, there was no separation of mind, soul, body, heart, whatever. Everything that was seen in your life was an extension of you.
So, transforming your mind was transforming your ways. Your thinking. What you believed in your heart. Your outward actions.
What you thought about other people, and about God. It was all connected.
It’s not that they needed to perfectly align their theology, that they all needed to get calvanism exactly right, or know how to exactly explain the trininty,
What Paul wanted was for them to free their minds of earthly things and instead focus on Jesus who is sitting in heaven. Remember, after all, they are citizens of heaven.
Having the same love. This is the love that Christ had for them.
Agape love. Self-sacrificing. Self-forgetting. Long-suffering. A brotherly and sisterly love that looked like Christ.
United in Spirit. Intent on one purpose.
They all had to be unified in that they were all in. They were truly bought in to Jesus.
So much so that they weren’t just individuals all gathered together, no they were literally soul sisters.
They were meant to be unified in every fiber of their being, almost like one organism moving together in complete harmony, spirit in spirit, soul in soul, all collectively going the same direction in mission.
I’m not sure if this is an exact parallel, but this makes me think of one of my favorite Proverbs:
6 Go to the ant, you slacker! Observe its ways and become wise. 7 Without leader, administrator, or ruler, 8 it prepares its provisions in summer; it gathers its food during harvest.
I think this is actually about being lazy, but there’s some truth we can connect here.
Consider the ant. All the ants just naturally do what ants do. And the ant only has one goal: reproduction.
That’s it. And the ant does this by growing it’s colony, gathering food, expanding it’s nest, and defending their nest.
And this is a hive-minded organism. The individual ant, it doesn’t need to be told what to do every second of every day. No, instead the ant continues on it’s path, doing what ants do.
If it faces danger, it doesn’t matter. It swarm in, head first, for the sake of the nest.
I think by now you understand what I’m trying to get at - the Christian life is supposed to look a whole lot less individual and a whole lot more as a hive.
Because then, our fate doesn’t matter so much. There’s a clear mission, and whether we live or die, whether we have a good life or not, we rest assured that our duties are clear.
Like the ant, we can move through life, knowing our work matters, even if it looks so small to us, it’s contributing to a bigger entitiy, and we know that entitiy as the Kingdom of God.
This is why Paul is so intent on unity. Because our lives are bigger than us. The Kingdom of God, thankfully, doesn’t start of stop with us.
15 As for man, his days are like grass— he blooms like a flower of the field; 16 when the wind passes over it, it vanishes, and its place is no longer known.
Wow, when you put it like that, it seems like were even less important than the ant, huh?
See, we think the world lives and dies with us. With me.
How could anyone replace me? I do all the work around here, everyone relies on me, I do the best work, how can I even have a successor.
But you know what’s happened to everyone who’s said those things? They’ve died.
And to the best of my knowledge, every person ever has been replaceable, society has moved on, and the world has kept spinning.
And this is why Paul continues with some of the most important verses in the entire Bible.
See, in the light of Christ’s gifts to us, encouragement, comfort, refreshment, peace; we are to live in unity in one mind, in harmony. And here’s how:
Consider Others More Important
Consider Others More Important
I’ve had the privilege of accompanying Brett, our former lead pastor of Valley Church, to Berlin, Germany a couple of times, and he knows the city pretty well by now, which is good because he’ll be moving his family there for full time missions later this year.
And because I’m a cheapskate, I like to fly out of the Chicago airport, because tickets are way cheaper, but that means a 3-4 hour drive before a long flight.
So naturally, Brett and I have conversations about really deep stuff, like guitar tone of the Smashing Pumpkins, why I think golf is boring, you know, guy stuff.
And then, one long drive up to Chicago, he blasts me with question: what do you think is the hardest command for people to follow in the Bible?
Wow. I had to stop and think, but if I’m honest, I didn’t take but a few seconds, because I had this verse in my head:
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. 4 Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.
And that’s what I told him. And you know what he said: I was thinking the exact same thing. We has never talked about this before, ever.
But we agreed.
These verses, especially for us here in the US, these I believe are still the biggest verses we miss, and we screw up on.
Because we don’t do this.
We all have this thing called main character syndrome. Have you heard of it? It’s where every room you walk in, you’re the main character.
The universe caters to you. You are Jim Carey in the Truman Show.
You know this type of person, you’re thinking of them right now!
They treat everyone as either a barrier to something they want, or a gateway to something they need.
It’s kind of like everyone is an NPC, a non-playable character in a video game. Gosh, this is the second sermon in a row that I’ve referenced video games, I promise I’m a normal guy,
But NPCs, they’re either background people or they give our a quest to do, or they just say the same two lines on repeat the entire game.
As our pastor way back in the day Mark Tobey used to say, we need to stop treating people as scenery.
Because that’s how we treat people, right?
We treat them out of selfish ambition, aka, we interact with others for our own gain.
We treat them with conceit, which excessive pride or vanity, characterized by an inflated self-image.
We consider ourselves more important.
We look to our own interests rather than the interests of others.
See, we love the idea of unity, and harmony, as long as we are the sun and everyone else is orbiting around us. Out of our way, but still in our control.
We place our own lives in the judgement seat.
I think Jesus has a really great teaching on this, and it might not be an obvious connection, but just hear me out for a second.
Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount:
21 “You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. 22 But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Whoever insults his brother or sister, will be subject to the court. Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be subject to hellfire.
Wow, that escalated fast. It goes from murder, to anger, to a simple insult, to an seemingly innocent passing phrase.
To us, those are deescalating sins, yet the punishment does from judgement, to the court, and finally to hellfire. What in the world is going on?
I believe it’s the concept of contempt. Contempt is a destructive, universal emotion that signals extreme disrespect and perceived moral superiority over another person.
See, murder is contempt. It’s placing your life over another persons life, quite literally, you think you’re so superior that you take another person’s life in your hands. You are the final judge of them.
And what Jesus does is he connects this to anger. Unrighteous anger, to be exact.
Then an insult. Then saying “you fool”.
What you’re doing in those states is you’re placing yourself in the judgement seat. And last time I checked, that seat is filled and reserved for God alone.
This is what Paul is getting at - you cannot be both unified and prideful.
You Cannot Be Unified and Prideful
You Cannot Be Unified and Prideful
Once you start living in a world where contempt is your normal, true unity becomes impossible.
This is not what God wants for His bride, for His church.
Too often, we look at everything from the view of us, or as Pastor Brett would say, from the prism of self.
Everything is filtered through that.
It started in the garden, the first sin ever recorded was pride, it was wanting more than we already had. And to this day, we feel the effects of selfishness.
I’m sure you can feel it - how difficult it is to truly say sorry when we’ve wronged. How hard it is to face God when we screw up.
How much easier it is to scream at our kids than to show grace. How we want to get our money back when we feel cheated, get retribution when we’re wronged.
See, we want to shown the attitude in verses 3 and 4, but we don’t want to show it.
And what this results in is chaos. It results in flailing and kicking, and chasing a soccer ball without a care in the world about those around us.
This doesn’t fulfill the mission of Christ, it doesn’t promote unity, and it doesn’t result in a Church that can be described as one mind, united in love, intent on one mission.
And here’s the hard part - I don’t have a 10 step plan to fulfil this. I don’t have three solid points to help us through.
But the good news is, Paul does. And he says says it better than I ever could.
So, my exhortation to you today, assuming you would like to live in harmony with those around you, fulfil the mission of God, and build the unified church and kingdom of God:
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. 4 Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.
I told you I didn’t have 10 steps, but I do have one challenge.
Memorize this. Memorize these verses, repeat them to yourself over and over.
Because this is the basis of Christian life, our faith.
Internalize it.
Then, when someone wrongs you,
When someone treats you unfairly,
When someone gets in your way,
When you encounter someone else, someone that’s not like you,
We need to take this verse, and live like Jesus. We need to touch the untouchables, the outcasts, people who aren’t like us.
We need to stop treating people like scenery, stop looking through the prism of self, and consider others.
This is how the church achieves unity, and fulfills her mission. Through the grace of God.
Let’s pray.
