Joy and the Incarnation
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
If I were to ask you what would bring you joy during this Christmas season, what would be your answer? Some of the obvious answers might be the end of the pandemic, or peace in the world (Russian troops on the Ukranian border), or maybe just a chance to get some rest. But at the bottom line, I think both Christians and non-Christians realize that Christmas is about relationships. Oddly, Christmas is the one holiday that almost everyone celebrates here in the United States regardless of religious beliefs because there is something universal about the purpose of this holiday. Even secular songs and artists seem to understand at least in part, what the spirit of Christmas should be.
I'll be home for Christmas
You can plan on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents by the tree
Christmas eve will find me
Where the love light gleams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams
Understandably, some of us are looking forward to going home because you have great relationships with friends and family. You can’t wait to get together and find time to catch up and have a meal together. Others of us, are not as excited about the holidays because of some conflict in our relationships. Your relationships may not have been a source of joy for you in this past year but regardless of your situation, there is at least this sentimental longing to be surrounded by those whom you love if only in your dreams. There is a deep longing in the human heart for relationships that are not only conflict free but filled with love, with those who share a common life purpose, and who understand the world in similar ways.
Now the way that we try to satisfy this universal longing for these deep relational connections is where we all tend to diverge depending on your values, how you were raised, the priorities that you have in life. But for the Christian, there is a definitive way by which we were meant to achieve this relational harmony. There are many verses on this topic in the Bible but we are going to head back into the book of Philippians one last time this year, and look at what the apostle Paul tells us about finding the joy that we are looking for in our relationships.
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 interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 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.
Body
Body
There are there three main points that I would like us to look at from this passage:
Unity leads to joy
Pride leads to disunity
The Incarnation leads to humility
We know that one of the main reasons why Paul wrote this letter to the Philippians was the divisions that were rising up in the church and clearly it was something that was of some concern, at least enough for him to write a letter and to send a couple of leaders to evaluate the problem. On one hand, it is comforting to know that conflict and divisions have been a problem for every congregation since the very beginnings of the church. When we go through difficult seasons where relationships seem tense and there are arguments and differing opinions over seemingly every issue, we don’t need to be discouraged because this is something that has occurred throughout church history. Spiritually healthy Christians have found ways to overcome these problems in the past and will do so in the present. We don’t have to be alarmed or over react to rumors of division in the church but at the same time, we need to address these conflicts by understanding the value of unity in the church and making every effort to maintain this peace.
As we can see from the first few verses, just because we have a shared experience of Christ doesn’t mean that this will automatically lead to unity. This is why Paul says, “If you have experienced any encouragement in Christ, comfort from his love, and participation in the Spirit, and if this has stirred your affections and compassion, then make my joy complete by being of the same mind, same love, and the same soul.”
People having a relationship with Christ individually doesn’t also translate into those same people having a right relationship with one another. Especially in a culture that is becoming more and more individualistic, people often have personal experiences with God but subsequently, they have a hard time committing to a community of faith. I beleive this is a result of higher and higher numbers of people who consider themselves, spiritual but not religious. In years past, church leaders would usually equate this category of people as being new age, non-Christian seekers, but over the last ten years in SF, what I’ve seen is that this category of spiritual but not religious now applies to a growing number of self-identifying Christians.
These are people that believe in God and Jesus but they are no longer bound by the Scriptures as their rule of faith, they are not attached to the historic roots of Christianity, nor are they committed to the life of the local church. And from those trends, it’s not hard to see why there has been this tidal wave of conflict and division within the body of Christ. At the end of the day, it is isn’t secularism or the attacks of the liberals that will ultimately bring the church down in America, it is our lack of unity that will be our ultimate undoing. As Jesus stated so famously in the gospel of Mark:
And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
But why is it so important for this house to stand? And here, it should be worth noting that of all the things that could potentially fulfill his joy, Paul places the unity of believers on top of that list. He tells us that this turning of our individual spirituality into a corporate reality would complete his joy. And we need to ask ourselves, why was the unity of the church so important in the minds of these early Christian leaders? The short answer is that there are three main things that are dependent on our unity.
1. The long-term viability of Christianity. In order for Christianity to be passed down faithfully from one generation to the next, there needs to be unity on the tenents of the faith. And this isn’t limited to just our doctrines but also equally important to our practice. I learned that attending church was important becasue I saw my grandmorther doing it every week and when I became a Christian, I witnessed other believers uphold that practice. And so as a young Christian, I thought it was normative to attend church every Sunday, which is the norm historically.
2. Our on-going witness to the world. Churches in America have long been plagued by the notion that if we compromise on some areas of Biblical truth, we’ll become more attractive to the non-believing world but it has the reverse effect because unbeknown to us is the simple fact that unity of love serves as the most important witness to the world. As we have learned from the book of Philippians, Paul was all about the spread of the gospel and the united church has always been the most powerful tool in sharing the gospel with the world.
3. Our capacity to effectively care for one another. I want to spend a chunk of time addressing this last bullet point. As I mentioned at the beginning of the message, everyone is looking for relationships that they can call home and that longing has increased as this pandemic has drawn out longer than any of us could have imagined.
Even before the pandemic, social psychologists were warning us about the epidemic of loneliness and I can only imagine what two years of isolation and disconnection has done to our collective psyche. According to the latest Barna surveys, nearly 1/3 of young adults in America (defined as those between the ages of 18-35) experience loneliness on a regular basis, meaning at least once a day. I think that it is safe to say that loneliness is one of the main reasons for a lack of joy in this generation. It’s hard to be joyful when you are lonely.
And what I found to be the most meaningful result from these surveys conducted during the first year of the pandemic is found in this particular chart. At the beginning of the pandemic, practicing Christians, meaning those who went to church regularly, seemed to have higher levels of acute loneliness than non-practicing Christians and non-believers. But in the springtime of 2020, the levels of loneliness dropped among practicing Christians and those who answered that they were not lonely at all increased significantly. Conversely, the levels of loneliness for nonpracticing Christians and non-believers either remained the same or increased slightly.
There are probably many ways to interpret this data but one things it tells me is that the church has the means to help with the problem of loneliness and it’s not because the church is a conflict-free zone, impervious to the divisions we see in society at large. What we have going for us is the simple fact that the church is designed to deal with the root causes of loneliness when we choose to do so. Obviously curing loneliness is not the main goal of Christian community, but loving our neighbors as ourselves is clearly a biblical priority. And dealing with people’s loneliness is at least a subset of loving our neighbors. If we love each other and our neighbors then it makes sense that this would naturally help with the growing social problem of loneliness.
Psalm 68:5–6 (NIV)
Father of the fatherless and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
God settles the lonely in families;
This fall, we have talked extensively about what it means to be a family of God. Unlike our natural biological families, the church needs to be a place where those who are struggling with loneliness can find a new family, a place that feels like home. But the thing is, most people don’t want to replace one dysfunctional family with another one and so it’s imperative that we deal with the root problems that can potentially create more confict and disunity.
In verse 3 of our passage, we see that pride expresses iself in two ways that become the main factors for not only disunity in the church but more broadly to all of our relational conflicts.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Selfish ambition and conceit, better translated as vain glory are two sides of the same coin that feed into each another to destroy human relationships.
In his commentary on this passage, Gordon Fee writes:
“Selfish ambition” stands at the heart of human fallenness, where self-interest and self-aggrandizement at the expense of others primarily dictate values and behavior.”
An unhealthy desire for success leads to a trail of broken relationships. If you are driven by envy, by your insecurities, and an inordinate need to be recongized by others, you will at one point or another sacrifice relationships to satisfy those desires. When I was a freshmen in high school, I had this insatiable need to become popular which drove me to changing the way I dressed and in fact, I was best dressed by my senior year. I changed the way I did my hair and spent hundreds of dollars getting it colored and styling it just right. I was Kpop before Kpop but the worst thing of it all was I changed my friendships, which even to this day is something I regret. I had a good friend who unfortunately was a bit nerdy and he didn’t share my hopes for popularity and eventually, I had to distance myself from him in order to fulfill my selfish ambitions. What’s interesting is that adults do this all the time but we simply fail to recognize when we are doing it. It’s important to pause once in a while and ask yourself, how much of what I do is motivated by love and how much is motivated for my own personal agenda?
If we are honest with ourselves, there is a great pull, especially in a place like the Bay Area, to do things just for personal gain and the reason for that is the other side of the coin which is our vain conceit. The Greek word that is translated as conceit literally means to be empty of glory. This describes those who give appearances of glory that have no real basis for projecting that sense of self-importance. But the problem, human beings are all born with a need to fill this emptiness. We are all glory seekers because we are all empty of glory. We are in essence, what Tim Keller calls glory starved. This is why we feel insulted when we are overlooked for a promotion. This is why its hard for us to let go of a position or a title which we don’t even really want it. (Oddly, I found myself struggling with this during our AMI pastor’s conference. I have been serving as part of the LT that oversees the whole network of churches for the past 3 years and it was time to rotate other pastors in to the postion and I found myself not wanting to let go of the position even though I knew I was tired.)
There are a number of ways that pride in the form of vain glory creates disunity by fracturing our relationships.
1. Empty glory is the root cause of unhealthy competition and even wanting to be recognized as something that you are really not so that you can appear better than others.
2. Pride in the form of empty glory causes us to project a false image of ourselves as more important than we truly are. The biblical understanding of pride is the human ego being puffed up with the appearance of strength, but underneath there is no substance. This is what leads to the anxiety of being found out and our struggles with impostor syndrome.
3. Pride in this form makes us incredibly fragile and sensitive. This is why some people cannot take even the slightest bit of criticism and correction because everything becomes a threat to their perfectly manicured projection of themselves. Ironically, religious people fall into this trap especially when there is a lack of self-awarenes. (If you run into the same problem over and over again in your relationships with people, the problem is not them, it’s you!)
The biblical command for us to consider others to be more signicant than ourselves and to look out not only for our own interest but for the interest of others is an impossible task unless you first deal with your glory problem. Since the beginning of the creation of humanity through Adam and Eve, mankind has tried to fill this emptiness by taking for ourselves the glory of God, taking unto ourselves what does not belong to us. And against this perpetual human desire to be gods unto ourselves, God declares in Isaiah 42:8, “My glory, I will not share with another.”
But that doesn’t mean He won’t give us another form of glory, and to those who are humble enough to recognize their own place in this universe, God bestows great glory. Mary, the mother of Jesus, recognized this after realizing who was in her womb:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
The human struggle of being empty of glory and the ensuing pride that comes with it can only be solved by following the example of Christ who was and is full of glory. “And though, he was in very narture God, He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of man.”
At a high level, the incarnation was meant to reveal the glory of God. For this very reason, the angels and the host of heaven sang to the shepherds in Luke 2:14, “Glory to God in the highest” at the birth of Christ. But in the eyes of the world, the incarnation seems to be a very puzzling way of revealing God’s glory. As one agnostic shared with me, it feels like God is trying to confuse us all. If he is really trying to reveal himself, why not just come down from heaven in blazing light and give us irrefutable evidence? On the surface, this would seem to make more sense but for those of us have come to know God, we understand that this would go against his nature and would not reveal the fullness of His glory but would instead diminish it because God’s glory is not just raw power, it is full of grace and humility.
Through the incarnation of Christ, God changes the way humanity understands glory and hence the way we relate to God and how we can better relate to one another. Jesus was born in the likeness of man so that He could show us that we were created in the image of God. As Genesis describes God’s work of creation, all the other creatures are described as being made in swarms, herds, and multitudes but when it comes to the creation of man, he names two individuals as if to say, each person will have their own unique glory. Everyone will be uniquely known and loved by his or her Creator. But for some reason, we fight against that, and we’re always looking for a glory that is not ours and we are not willing to wait for God to exalt us.
CS Lewis describes the incarnation as the grand miracle. It is the miracle that every other miracle is dependant on. And Lewis describes the true miracle of Christmas in this way, “In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity…But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.”
CS Lewis goes onto point out that in nature, we see this pattern of descending and reascending all around us. For example, everything needed for the growth of a mighty oak tree is found in a small acorn but that acorn has to descend into the earth before it can blossom into new life. The beginnings of human life also follow this pattern as two simple cells, the egg and the sperm descend into the womb only to ascend into an unimaginably complex living organism. This pattern exists in Nature because it is first found in the heart of God.
Conclusion
Conclusion
In his book Mere Christianity, CS Lewis gives us some remarkable insight on humility and how it should look. The genuinely humble person isn’t some self-loathing or self-deprecating individual. In fact, he says that if you meet an authentically humble person, you don’t leave thinking that he or she is humble, you leave the interaction feeling like you’ve been loved and heard. And the reason for this is that a humble person doesn’t simply think less of himself, he just think of himself less. A person with a healthy sense of ego no longer is focused on himself for the better or worse, he is more focused on others. In other words, their attention is drawn outwards and not inwards. They are aware of themselves but they are not consumed by themselves. The Christmas season is the perfect to grow in this type of humility, the type displayed by our Savior.