Experiencing Nothing Tabor College 8.5.19 Phil 2:1-13
Introduction
Since human beings were made for the most intense of spiritual experiences (Isa 43:6) it’s not surprising that religious structures, from soaring cathedrals with their huge organs and superb choirs able to fill the whole space with a beautiful presence, through to the “theatre churches” of today, with their darkened interiors, professional lighting systems and smoke machines, have sought to create an atmosphere evoking the presence of God. The cultural narcissism of our time, accelerated by social technology, make such efforts very hard to resist. If fallenness is really a turning in on oneself (incurvitas in se Augustine, Luther, Barth) we are moving towards a new extreme of spiritual inwardness in the Church that should alarm us all. As a young pastor who had experienced scintillating sensations of heavenly joy and a peace so overpowering I thought it was going to kill me I often submitted to the temptation of preaching experience centred sermons. Ignorant of what it really means to have Christ as our righteousness (1 Cor 1:30) I looked for special experiences from my preaching to assure me, and the hearers, that we were right with the Lord. Such things have become far far more blatant in recent times.
When leaders of fast growing movements speak openly of “franchising” their way of doing Church we are in danger of building a spiritual monoculture, or “monster”, which is the antithesis of the stated purpose of the Church where “the manifold wisdom/many coloured wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” (Eph 3:10; Gen 37:3). S. African prophetic evangelist Peter Pollock is right to say that spiritual gifts + musical talent + money can deliver an assured spiritual experience.
My great concern is about what we have done to Jesus. To reduce the Lord to the boundaries of my personal experience is idolatry that manifests itself in an up and down spirituality. As a quite new Christian I remember coming out of a meeting one day and looking at a friend and we spontaneously said to one another, “We come here Sunday by Sunday, say ‘Praise the Lord, Hallelujah’ but we are not changed”. It took me decades to realise that the purpose of every one of my experiences was to make me more like Christ (Col 1:16). The true centre of every experience is Jesus as revealed in the scriptures (Gal 4:19). The shape of Christ’s life is wonderfully laid out in the most concise form in Paul’s famous hymn in Philippians 2.
The Pattern
The passage begins with a simple “in Christ” formula, “if there is any encouragement in Christ”. This “being united with Christ” is the key to understanding Paul’s whole theology of salvation. Everything a Christian is to be or do comes from Jesus sharing his life with us so we might share our lives with him. The exhortation to have “one mind” is, for example, only possible as we have communion in the Spirit with the oneness the Son has with the Father (John 17:11, 20; 2 Cor 13:14). Our total dependency on being united to Christ is laid bare when Paul exhorts, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves”. Selfish ambition is universal and demonic, it is the opposite of the lowliness of Christ and I believe the Lord once spoke clearly to me about this attitude as the greatest obstacle to ongoing revival in Western Australia (James 3:13-18). Revivals, like many mission teams, break down because of selfish ambition. It is not possible for us in our ordinary humanity to value others more than ourselves, but we can through Christ when it’s revealed (cf. 2 Cor 5:14), as Thomas Torrance puts it, “God loves us more than he loves himself.” What does this mean? If love is shown by sacrifice the cross shows us God puts himself out for us in a way that he never existed in before.
Paul’s exhortation in v. 5, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” is a statement of fact. We are told in 1 Corinthians “you have the mind of Christ” (2:16). In union with the life of Jesus we already have his attitude to life and godliness. Which is why I become distressed in Church meetings and people pray something like, “Please Lord, make us one.” There is only one body (Eph 4:4-6), even if we need to live out what that looks like. Now at the heart of our passage Paul expounds what the mind of Jesus in terms of the shape of the history of his humanity.
v. 6 “who being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” (NIV).
This text has unfortunately often been mistranslated (ESV, NASAB, NLT, NRSV,TPT), “Christ Jesus, though [not in the Greek text] he was in the form of God, emptied himself” as if the humility of God expressed in Jesus was something unexpected of his divinity. No – the Incarnation of the Son of God reveals that by nature God is a giver rather than a getter and a servant of all (Mark 10:45). God’s essential nature is one of lowliness which is why I long for the day when the Church in Perth pursues the lowliness, humility, poverty and simplicity which are “in Christ”. Only through these attitudes can we share the experience of Christ with others for it is through them that Jesus shared in our human experiences (Matt 5:3-8; 6:22; 11:25, 29; Luke 11:34). I am often moved to pray for lowliness for it is such an excellent attribute.
v7. “but emptied himself/made himself nothing, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
The “form of a servant” is as real of Christ as his being in “the form of God”, Jesus didn’t just serve, he became a servant. But of what did Christ empty himself/make himself nothing. In becoming a single cell in the womb of Mary, a fragile human child and someone subject to weakness, suffering and death he emptied himself of the manifestation of his natural glory as God. The Son of God gave up his eternal experience of the Father in heaven so that through obedience his own humanity might be transformed and enabled to receive the eternal glory of God. By his suffering in humanity he perfectly understands us in ways we don’t understand ourselves. This is a very powerful pastoral truth. The KJV translates this verse as, “he made himself of no reputation”. I once quoted this text to a prominent Christian lady in the context of adultery and it freed her from all her shame. Sharing in the voluntary nothingness of Jesus is the key to spiritual transformation.
My friend Ian Shelton told a story about lowliness recently. There was a revival in Fiji associated with the leadership of a certain pastor (Ratu Vuniani Nakauyaca). Coral reefs were being revitalised, polluted streams turning pure, fish were coming back, marijuana crops were being destroyed, the power of witchcraft broken. In the presence of international media, the PM flew in by helicopter all the while this man of God said very little. When asked about his quietness he replied to Ian, “I celebrate my nothingness.” Is this your mind?
Nothingness “in Christ” isn’t the nothingness of a vacuum or “I am a worm” mentality, its being stripped of all self-glorifying so we might be filled with the fulness of God (Eph 3:19). When the Church stops taking the glory that belongs only to the Lord, she will experience this fulness (Isa 42:8). Wise Christians long to abide in the nothingness of the cross. The cross was the extreme self-emptying of the Son of God for at the cross Jesus was emptied even of consciousness of his Father (Mark 15:34).
Several decades ago I was in a prayer meeting that went for a week, close to its end people started to leave saying things like, “Nothing is happening here.” But it was exactly in that atmosphere that some of us pressed on, first under a weight that made it almost impossible to pray, but then there was a manifestation of the ascended Jesus “restoring all things” as Lord (Acts 3:19-21). God gave us a share in the humiliation and exaltation of his Son.
v. 8 “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
“even death on a cross” is well conveyed by the sentiments of the Roman orator Cicero, “the mere name of the cross, should be far removed, not only from the persons of Roman citizens—from their thoughts, and eyes, and ears”. To die on a cross was the most shameful of deaths; but it was precisely this form of death the Father lovingly, wisely and sovereignly appointed for his Son (Heb 12:2) so that he might become the perfect redeemer. Jesus had stripped himself of his heavenly glories then through submission to the Father allowed himself to be stripped of all earthly glory so that he might deliver us from our wretched fallen state. Now our passage takes a U turn.
v.9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The glory of the exaltation of Jesus is symmetrical to the lowliness of his humiliation. In the order of God emptiness and humiliation is the way to fulness and exaltation. (If you understand this, you understand everything.) As the resurrected Jesus explained to his dumbfounded disciples, “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”” (Luke 24:26). As he explained to Paul, ““My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”” (2 Cor 12:9). Or as Peter puts it, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (1 Pet 5:6). Glory, power and exaltation flow from Christ to us in our weakness for this is how the Father filled him.
The Father has lifted up “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5) to the point that he shares “the name above every name”. And since Paul’s statement that every name will bow at the Lordship of Jesus is a quotation about Yahweh in the Old Testament (Isa 45:23) it is the name of God that the divine-human Jesus has inherited (cf. Heb 1:2ff.). A human being has been placed at the very summit of the universe and ‘in Christ’ we also are located in the very centre of all things!” (T.F. Torrance).
Christ in Us
Unfortunately many expositions of the Philippians 2 stop at verse 11 and do not read, “12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
“Therefore” means that the form of Jesus’ life as a descent for an ascent must be the shape of our lives also. Everything that has happened and ever will happen to you has one great purpose, to conform you to the image of his beloved Son (Rom 8:29). The people of God must understand that since the Father wants to grow us in Christ-likeness he will always bring us low – physically, relationally, economically etc., so that he might raise us up. The exhortation “work out your salvation” mean working with the Lord to bear fruit, for as Jesus said, “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The “fear and trembling” Paul hopes his hearers will possess is a share in the fear and trembling Jesus went through for us in the Gethsemane (Heb 5:7-8) as he obeyed the will of his Father and so entered into his good pleasure through resurrection from the death. This is the infinite joy he delights to share with us (Heb 1:9; 12:2). The holy “fear and trembling” in Christ the Church needs today isn’t that we might lose our religious freedom, but that we might rob God of the glory he deserves.
The way God is at work in us isn’t something mysterious, he works in exactly the same way, he worked in the humiliation and exaltation of the humanity of his Son. The underlying problem behind the discipleship crisis in the Western Church is that we have made ordinary human experience more central than the human experience of the Son of God (2 Cor 5:16).
Conclusion
The human spirit is capable of amazing feats and the most intense experiences, but these are “not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (Rom 8:18). Immersed in a culture addicted to immediate experience few believers seem to appreciate this today. The stumbling block between an impressive Church whose life is animated by the senses and a Church which loves Christ’s nothingness is the cross. The power of the cross puts every element of elevated thinking, willing and feeling, every ordinary human awareness and sensation, to death for the glory of God (cf. Gal 2:20). Paul teaches we are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” (Rom 8:17). God’s purposes in all sorts of suffering is to reduce us to nothing in ourselves, to take us down to the point where we don’t trust our own reason, volition or emotion but only the mind, will and affections of the Father revealed and imparted to us in Christ by his Spirit. Jesus said, “I can do nothing of myself” (John 5:30). This word is a window into the inmost heart of Jesus and, like Philippians 2, it reveals the most wonderful beauty of his humanity and deity. Anyone whose had a revelation of such things wants to be like Jesus, wants to be nothing. When monks and mystics try to make themselves nothing they act as if they are God. Since however humanity has already been taken up into God for us, “in Christ” we can submit to the will of God as it is impressed on us again and again, through life’s circumstances, through scripture and in the Church. There is an inexpressible irreducible and indestructible delight in such submission (1 Pet 1:8) that once encountered moves us past all seductive religious structures. I believe we coming to the end of a spiritual cycle of individualism and addiction to personal experience and entering into the true state of the Church as the fulness of Christ (Eph 1:22-23). May the Lord do it, and speedily.