God’s Presence Embodied

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Transcript:

A few weeks ago, the kids and I were in a store, and a song came over their radio, and it was one of those songs that’s catchy like a virus. You know, you don’t really care for it, but you can’t get rid of it for two or three days after that. And if some of you like this song and that offends you, I’m sorry.

But this song came on and they were singing, I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at your door. And you notice I did not try to sing the song and you’re welcome for that. But I think that’s kind of what passed for a love song back in the 80s.

And I thought about the song as I was listening to it, that the man was singing about all the things he’s willing to give up just for the chance to be with this woman. And then I started thinking about how many of our songs say something similar. I think it was Percy Sledge who sang about when a man loves a woman.

He talked about spending his very last dime, talked about turning his back on his best friend, all for the sake of this woman. Abba talked about being willing to wait forever. They said, if you change your mind, I’m the first in line.

All right. And don’t get me started on the country songs because there’s too many to name. Right.

They all talk about, oh, I’m willing to give up so much, whatever it takes just to be with you because I love you. I’ll give up whatever it takes. A lot of our songs are that way, and they’re popular.

Those songs end up being popular because they’re telling a story. They’re telling this love story where somebody loves somebody so much that they’re willing to lay down all this stuff. They’re willing to give up all this stuff, willing to surrender and to sacrifice whatever it takes, it seems like, for the love of this other person.

And we like that because there’s something compelling about the idea of somebody that loves us that much that they’d be willing to do almost anything. From time to time, Charla asked me, will you do something for me? And I’ll say, for you, I’ll do two things.

You know, I love you that much. We like the idea of somebody who’s willing to sacrifice for our sake. But as I listen to these stories, as I listen to these songs, I realize there’s probably a limit on what of us would be willing to do for love because we’re human and we’re selfish.

And the more I thought about it, I realized all these popular songs that talk about sacrificing for love, there’s not one of those people. There’s not one love story where the people are willing to sacrifice enough to hold a candle to the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made out of love for us. And so this morning, we’re going to look at this concept of this sacrificial love that He has.

We’re going to look at what He gave up for us. We’re going to look at it in Philippians chapter 2. We’re continuing on with our series that we’re doing through the month of December about God with us.

And about what it means that when Jesus came to earth at Bethlehem, that God was with us and that God is with us as a result of what Jesus Christ did. Jesus made sacrifices to fulfill the Father’s promises. As we read about last week in Isaiah chapter 7, God promised 700 years before, He promised to send a child who would be God with us, who would be the evidence that God is with us.

But for Jesus to actually be God with us, it cost Him a lot. And I know we think from time to time about what it cost Him on the cross. But folks, the sacrifice started even before that.

That sacrifice on the cross is all it took for our salvation. That’s where He purchased our salvation from first to last. But His sacrifices on our behalf, out of love for us, started well before that. And so when we get to Philippians 2, Paul’s writing to the church at Philippi, and he holds up Jesus and what he did as this ultimate example of sacrificial love.

Because he’s talking to the church at Philippi about putting others’ needs ahead of their own. He’s talking to them about humility, about servanthood, about sacrifice. And he was talking to a church that was pretty good at those things.

He wasn’t writing to correct them so much as He was writing to encourage them in the things that they were already doing well and saying, but there’s room to grow here. And in order for them to do that and to understand that, He held up Jesus as this picture, this ultimate example of what it means to sacrifice ourselves for the love of somebody else. So let’s look at Philippians 2, starting in verse 5.

It says, Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus. who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead, He emptied Himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity, and when He had come as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

For this reason, God highly exalted Him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. So Jesus’ mission, his whole reason for coming to earth was to be God with us so that he could, as he said in Luke 19. 10, seek and save that which was lost. He came to be God with us so he could seek us, so that he could save us, and that he could bring us back into fellowship with God.

But it cost him. He did that. He did it.

The Bible’s clear that when Jesus Christ came, he was literally the presence of God walking around in a human body in our midst. He was God with us. Hebrews 1 calls Him the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of His nature. Paul told Timothy that Jesus was God manifested in the flesh in 1 Timothy 3.

And the apostle John said Jesus was God in the flesh who revealed the Father to mankind. So he came and he was God with us. But it cost him.

It cost him tremendously to do that. He sacrificed in order to be that for us. And for us to really appreciate the sacrifice that he made, not just at Calvary, but going back to Bethlehem, for us to really appreciate the sacrifice that he made, we need to understand what he deserved and what he gave up, what he should have had.

what he should have never had to give up if it weren’t for our sin. Think about what he deserved and what he gave up for us. And we see here in verse 6 of this passage that Jesus is God.

I know some people will say, hey, he never claimed to be God. Oh, he absolutely did. He absolutely did.

Numerous occasions. The one that always sticks out in my mind is when he told the Pharisees, I’m telling you before Abraham was, I am. So he’s saying before Abraham, I’m older than Abraham, and that had been some 2,000 years earlier.

I’m older than Abraham, and he said before Abraham was, I am. He was identifying himself with the God of the Old Testament, the one who told Moses, I am that I am. You read through the Gospels and you can’t help.

I mean, unless you start with the premise, oh, he’s not God, and you try to explain all these things away. If you read them in the way they would have been understood by the people he was talking to, he was telling them a lot who he was and that that was God. And Paul here said Jesus is God.

He said in verse 6, Jesus existing in the form of God. He was God and he always has been. Because if you go back to John 1, it said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

That’s John 1. 1. And then John 1.

14 explains who the Word was. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That can only be describing Jesus Christ. So then you apply that back to John 1.

1. He was there from the very beginning. He was with God, meaning He was with the Father.

And He was God, meaning He was God the Son. So for us to appreciate His sacrifice, we need to understand first of all that He’s God. and then that shapes our full understanding of what it was that he deserved.

Because if he’s God, there’s no limit to what he deserves. And I want to be very clear here. This is not in my notes, so this is a little detour.

But I understand we have questions from time to time, and maybe that’s my fault for not being precise enough. Because it can be kind of confusing if I say, well, Jesus is the Son of God, but Jesus is also God. As Christians in the mainstream of historical Christianity, we believe in the Trinity.

We believe that there’s one God who has revealed himself in three eternally distinct and co-equal persons. What that means, eternally distinct, there are three persons who are God. There’s still only one God, but three persons who are God.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. When I say they’re eternally distinct, I mean, it’s not just one God who shows up at various times as these different people. I had a friend in high school whose church taught there’s only Jesus, and sometimes Jesus manifested Himself as the Father.

Sometimes He showed up as the Son, and now He shows up as the Holy Spirit. But there’s still just Jesus, and there’s only one person at a given time that He is. We believe there’s the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and they all exist all the time because, for one thing, we have the example of Jesus’ baptism where the Son was there in the water.

The voice of the Father is heard at the same time saying, This is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased. And the Holy Spirit, like a dove, at the same time comes down and lands on Jesus. We see all three cooperating there.

So when I say Jesus is God, but I say he’s the son of God, I’m probably not being as clear as I ought to be on my terminology. Jesus is God. He’s God the son.

He’s the second person of the Trinity. But a lot of times when we refer to God without any other kind of clarification, we’re talking about God the father. So when I say Jesus is God and he’s God’s son, I don’t mean he’s his own son.

I mean, He’s God the Son, and He’s the Son of God the Father. Does that make any kind of sense? All right, I shouldn’t ask that.

Does the Trinity make sense? Does that help at all, I guess is what I should say. So He’s God.

He’s the second person of the Trinity. And He’s also equal with God. This is important for us to understand.

As God the Son, He’s equal with God the Father. Verse 6 says, He did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. He didn’t consider his equality with God as something to be misused or used for the wrong motivations.

And what that tells us is that he is equal with God. He’s equal with the Father. What I mean by that is that Jesus Christ, God the Son, is and always has been every bit as much God as the Father is.

Nobody looks at the Bible and says, oh, the Father, the Father’s not really God. If you believe the Bible and you believe in God, you accept that the Father’s God. Nobody disputes that.

But some people who believe in God and believe in the Bible will look at the Bible and interpret it funny and say, well, Jesus isn’t quite God. No, no, the picture the Bible paints is that Jesus is every bit as much God as the Father is. If Jesus was not God, then the Father’s not God.

This says he was equal with God. He had this equality with God that he chose not to use for the wrong reasons. So what does he deserve?

He’s God and he’s equal with the Father. He’s not some half God. I’ve known people.

I’ve talked with people who’ve referred to Jesus as a demigod, a half God. Some of the missionaries that may show up at your door believe that Jesus is a God, but not quite the God. No, no. He’s every bit as much God as God the Father.

And we see also that because of this, He deserved His place in heaven. He deserved to be enthroned in all the glory and all the splendor that the universe could ever muster. He deserved to be seated there at the right hand of the Father.

He deserved to be worshipped and glorified by the angels. He deserved to be served by them. He deserved to have us down here on earth singing His praises constantly.

He deserved all of that. Yet he walked away from it. He gave it up.

He left it willingly. Because we see when it says he did not consider equality with God something to be exploited, that means he refused to use his godhood to his own advantage. See, when you’re God, you can use that.

You can do what you want, right? You can make that benefit you. But Jesus chose not to use to benefit Himself.

He chose to use it to benefit us. And He came here to serve us instead of being served. So for us to appreciate what He sacrificed, we need to understand that.

That’s what He deserved. But here’s what He did instead. We’re going to look at some of the ways He sacrificed.

He sacrificed by leaving heaven. He deserved to stay there and be glorified and be enthroned. He deserved that, but he willingly left.

He willingly sacrificed heaven. He left heaven. He didn’t cling to that honor that he was entitled to.

Now, we get to this phrase in verse 7, instead he emptied himself. He was entitled to heaven. He deserved heaven, but instead we get to verse 7, and he emptied himself.

And that phrase is one of those that throws people sometimes because they get off into discussions about, well, what did he empty? What did he empty himself of. And some people have said, well, he stopped being God.

Some people have said, well, no, he didn’t stop being God, but he just gave up some of the attributes of God. Some people have said, well, he didn’t give up the attributes of God, but he gave up the use of those attributes. And I don’t think any of those work, according to my reading of the Bible.

See, God by nature is eternal. If God could stop being God, he’s not God. Right? Because if you can stop being something, you’re not eternally that thing.

And I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says Jesus started being God or Jesus stopped being God. He said, before Abraham was, I am. The Bible says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Now, could He give up His attributes? That’s dangerously close to saying, well, He quit being God. Okay, if I give up the, if my truck gives up the attributes of four working tires and a working engine, it’s not really much of a truck anymore, is it?

Right? Oh, he still identifies as God, but he gave up the attributes. I’m going to try that.

I’m going to try that. We’ve got antlerless hunting season coming up in a few weeks, and I’m going to try that on the game warden. I know he looks like he’s got antlers, but he just gave up the attribute of antlerlessness.

Okay, he still identifies as antler. That’s not how anything works in the real world, is it? He gave up all the attributes of that thing, but he’s still that thing.

If he gave up the attributes of God, that’s pretty close to saying he stopped being God. And I don’t mean to make fun of anybody’s views. I’m just trying to illustrate for you.

I don’t understand how that works. And then for those who say, well, he just gave up the use of his attributes of being God. Now we see times in the Gospels where he knew what was in people’s hearts.

We see him reading minds and healing the sick and raising the dead and forgiving sins, doing things that only God could do. I don’t think he gave up his attributes. I don’t think he really gave up anything about himself.

When you look at it in context, I think there’s a really good explanation for what he emptied himself up. And D. A.

Carson, who’s a theology professor, way smarter than I’ll ever be. He was interviewed by Lee Strobel in chapter 9 of The Case for Christ about this very topic. And here’s the explanation he gave.

He said, strictly speaking, Philippians 2 does not tell us precisely what the eternal Son emptied himself of. He emptied himself. He became a nobody.

He became a nobody in the eyes of men. That’s the point here. This is not a description of what specifically about himself he gave up, but talking about him being God and this equality with God, and then he emptied himself of something, and then he came to earth.

I think it’s talking about emptying himself of his claim to the rights and privileges of heaven. He had every right to say, no, I’m going to stay here. I’m going to stay here where I’m glorified.

I’m going to stay here where I’m served. And yet he willingly said, I have that right, but I’m letting go of that right, and I’m going down to be with them. I think that’s what he emptied himself of.

He emptied himself by letting go of the privileges that he was entitled to in heaven and coming instead to deal with us. And it’s amazing when you think about him sacrificing heaven to be here with us because kings don’t typically abandon their thrones to slum it with the peasants. but that’s essentially what he did.

He walked away from his throne to go hang out in the slums with you and me. He sacrificed by leaving heaven. He also sacrificed by becoming a man.

Verse 7 tells us that he took on the likeness of humanity. Now that doesn’t mean he just looked like a man, but he did appear to us as a man. And I realize this is this too.

We’re getting into some deep theology here this morning, but I want to make sure you understand because these are things that still boggle the mind, but they’re even for me after years of studying it, but it’s so important to understand God becoming a man as much as we can, as much as our limited human minds can understand that. He is God. He has always been God and he has never stopped being God.

But at Bethlehem, he became a man as well. You say, how does that work? I grew up with my mind being totally confused about the fact that he’s 100% man and he’s 100% God.

You end up with 200% of Jesus and that doesn’t compute, right? That’s not how numbers work. Here’s how I’ve made peace with it in the last couple of years.

You stop looking at it as quantities, like a math problem, and start looking at it as qualities, like attributes of who He is. Instead of thinking, okay, He’s 100% man, 100% God, imagine it this way. Imagine it was possible for you to make a list of all of the attributes of God.

It would take you the rest of eternity, but imagine you could do that. And so you’ve got the God list over here of all the attributes of God. And imagine then, on the other hand, you could make a list of all the attributes of a sinless man.

Jesus has always had the God list. At Bethlehem, He took the man list and added it to the God list without giving up anything on the God list. Now, as far as how all those attributes work together, I don’t fully understand it. And I never will. But I know that you read through the Gospels and you see His Godhood, you see His manhood, you see them working together in perfect harmony to accomplish what the Father sent Him to do.

And maybe that’s why it works, because the Father was in control of the whole process. But try not to think about it as a math problem. Try to think of it as His attributes.

Like I said, I still don’t understand how all those attributes work together, but it makes my brain hurt a lot less than trying to think of 100 plus 100 and how that works. The Bible teaches us that he became a man. You say, why is that a sacrifice to become a man?

Do any of you have aches and pains when you wake up in the morning? It’s a rhetorical question. I know you do because you tell me.

Some of you have them so frequently you’ve named them like pets. We all have aches and pains. We all have annoyances.

Our bodies, they wear out over time. Some of you have told me that you look forward to the day when you get to go be with the Lord in that glorified body and you don’t have to mess with this mass of flesh and all its problems anymore. And I’ve never understood that.

And I hear older people talk that way in church, and I never understood that, but I’m starting to get just a little glimpse of it. I know. I’m not complaining.

I know you’ve got it worse. I know. You are older.

I wasn’t going to say it. I was being nice. You said it, not me.

You are older. But you know, I noticed at 30, I was a little more tired than I was at 20. And now at 34, I know.

I promise I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, at 34, my back hurts a little more than it did at 30. And maybe that’s because of trying to corral Charlie.

I don’t know. But I can tell, I’m not getting younger and more energetic, and neither are you. Our bodies wear out.

Now, think about being God who didn’t have to deal with any of that. And He became a man to endure all the, and I know He was 33 when He went to the cross. But He became a man and He had to deal with all the problems we deal with, all the sicknesses, all the aches and pains.

He worked in a carpenter’s shop. Imagine all the times He slammed His thumb with a hammer. He had to endure all that.

Think about the pain and the sadness, the emotional things that are involved in our humanity. Imagine being God who never had to deal with any of that. And suddenly you step into this body to become one of us.

I’d say that’s a sacrifice. And yet He became man for us. He sacrificed by leaving heaven.

By leaving heaven, He sacrificed by becoming a man. He sacrificed by becoming a servant. You know, when he came as a man, he could have come as any man he wanted to be.

He could have come as rich and powerful and strong. There’s a story I was thinking of when I was reading this last week, reading this passage. One of my favorite figures in history is Chief Pashmataha of the Choctaw Nation.

There’s an interesting story about him. He was a mighty warrior. He fought under Andrew Jackson.

He was this just well-known military man. I’ve got a picture of him in my office in a full general’s, a portrait of him in a full general’s outfit in there. Nobody knows who his family was or where he came from because he wouldn’t tell people.

He didn’t want to show any weakness by letting people know where he came from or that he used to be a baby. And so there’s a legend that went around, and maybe he started it, that said one day lightning struck an oak tree, and out he jumped fully grown and strong as a warrior. I don’t think that’s what really happened with all due respect to the great chief.

I don’t think that’s what happened. But you know what? Jesus could have pulled that off.

He could have shown up as a mighty king. He could have showed up rich and powerful. He could have been anybody he wanted to be.

But he came as a weak, vulnerable little baby born to a poor couple who couldn’t even find adequate shelter for the night in a tiny little town in a backwater of the Roman Empire. And he did that because he didn’t come to be served, but to serve. It occurred to me this week that in a very short time, he stepped out of the throne room of God and into the dining room of farm animals because he came to serve.

He sacrificed by becoming a servant. Verse 7 says, He emptied Himself by assuming the form of a servant and taking on the likeness of humanity. And He even told His disciples in Mark chapter 10, The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.

He said, I came here to serve even if it cost me everything, even if it cost me my life. He sacrificed by becoming a servant for our sake. He could have hung out in the halls of power.

He could have hung out with the rich and famous, but he got in trouble with the authorities, by the religious authorities, for hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes. He hung around with lepers, the people that nobody else in the religious establishment would care for. He spent his time serving them.

And you know what? This whole coming to earth was an exercise in serving us who were just in the sight of a holy God. Filthy sinners.

You may be saying this morning, I’m not that bad. Compare it to God’s holiness and we are that bad. And yet He came here for us.

And then He sacrificed by laying down His life. He came here. All of the sacrifices He made are incredible.

From Bethlehem on, it’s just incredible. But the most incredible thing to me is that He came here knowing He was going to die. He knew that coming here was going to cost Him His life and He did it anyway.

There are things that I know serving others are going to cause me a mild inconvenience, and I dread it. I’m just being honest. I’m a human. I’m selfish at times.

And sometimes I try to talk myself out of doing things that are minor inconvenience. Jesus knew it was going to cost him his life, and he came willingly for us. Verse 8 tells us how He bore the weight of the cross in this amazing obedience and humility.

It says He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on the cross. He didn’t just humble Himself. He humbled Himself enough to obey the Father.

He didn’t just obey the Father. He obeyed the Father to the point of death. And it wasn’t just any death that He obeyed the Father to.

He obeyed the Father to the point of death on the cross, which was the most agonizing and humiliating way that the Romans in their twisted minds had come up with to put somebody to death. But He was willing to do it out of obedience to the Father and out of a willingness to serve and to save us. From Bethlehem on to Calvary, He was sacrificing for us.

But it was that sacrifice of the cross that was His greatest of all. Because without that, we’d have no hope of a relationship with God. We’d have no hope of eternal life in heaven.

See, if He’d just come and given us a good example, then the Bible’s answer to us would be, try harder. Jesus taught you the way, try harder. But instead, Jesus’ message to us was, you can’t try hard enough, so I came to do it for you.

I came to purchase your salvation with my life, with my blood. I laid those things down. I shed my blood for you so that you could be saved, so that you could be forgiven.

He bore the punishment that we deserved so that we could be forgiven. He came to be God with us and to lay down His life for us. He came to be God with us so that we could be with God.

As we think about this Christmas story, this month especially, and we think about Him coming to earth and we talk to our kids and grandkids about how He came to earth, how He was born at Bethlehem, as we sing about what happened that night, we need to realize the sacrifices that Jesus Christ was making on our behalf, not because we deserved it, but out of love for us, out of love for sinners, even then, even there at Bethlehem, the sacrifices that He was making for us. But this isn’t written just for us to ponder it. What we do with this depends.

. . We do one of two things, depending on where you are this morning in your relationship with God.

If you’re a believer, if you’re somebody who’s trusted in Christ already, entirely in Christ to forgive your sins, if you’ve acknowledged Him as your Lord and you’ve trusted in Him as your Savior, then your response to this this morning is what he says in verse 5. He says, adopt this attitude. Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus.

The way He came to serve, if we’re following Him and trying to become like Him, we can’t do it without the same attitude. And when we adopt that attitude that’s in Him, we glorify Him. The way it describes in verses 9 through 11, For this reason God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every name.

So at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. It describes the glory that He deserves. And us adopting the same attitude of sacrifice and servanthood and humility is not a way for us to earn our salvation, but it’s a way to glorify the one who saved us.

Now the other opportunity to respond to this this morning, the other thing that you would do with this is if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I want you to understand this morning how deeply you are loved by Jesus Christ. How deeply you are loved by the God of this universe that He sent His only Son, that Jesus Christ came willingly. The sacrifices didn’t start at Calvary. He started all the way back at Bethlehem.

Think about the things that He deserved and the things that He gave up to be God with us. All culminating in Him laying down His life on the cross, being nailed to that cross, taking responsibility for our sins, shedding His blood and dying so that we could be forgiven. And if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, I can’t think of anything in the world that would keep you or should keep you from receiving the love of a Savior who sacrificed so much for you.

And so this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, there’s nothing for you to earn or deserve. There’s no good works or religious rituals for you to perform. What needs to happen is you need to understand that you’ve sinned against a holy God and that you’re separated from Him because of that sin.

Any time we are disobedient toward God, whether it’s in our words, our thoughts, our actions, our attitudes, any of it, it’s sin and it separates us from a holy God. And there’s no way that we could do anything to undo that, to purchase our forgiveness. Jesus Christ paid it all on the cross.

And this morning, if you recognize that you’ve sinned against Him, if you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins in full, and you believe that He rose again from the dead to prove it, then this morning you can ask God’s forgiveness and you can be saved.