The Humility of Christ.

Some days I'm amazed by grace. Not many days, to be honest. Most of the time I'm amazed by things much less awe-worthy. Jeans on sale. A green light. Finding my keys. But sometimes I'm awed by grace. Right now is one of those times.

Every time I ask Him for help He answers! Seriously. See, I've written a few sermons for my own glory. You know, for the pat on the back, the "wow, you're an excellent preacher" comment, the inner feeling of satisfaction. But those sermons never bring me to a point of realizing how incredible and magnificent His Word is. Right now, I'm working on a sermon for the youth group tomorrow night. It's a familiar passage: Philipians 2:5-11. It teaches the humility of Christ in becoming human and dying and talks about how God glorified him for it. But have you ever stopped to think about that?

^{Jesus did not cling to His divine form but relinquished His divine privileges, coming to earth in the form of a lowly man. T}he verb “taking” doesn’t imply an exchange of one thing for another, but an addition to something. Jesus did not give up His Deity to become human. Rather He added human nature to His divine nature. He added human likeness to His God-likeness. God cannot stop being God but He could take on the form of a human servant, He could take on a lowly position, He could bend in humility and take on man flesh.

And He did.

Like the Prince and the Pauper. Jesus could not stop being who He was, but He relinquished His grip on being in the form of God and humbled Himself to becoming human. Think on this: The infinite One was constrained to hours and minutes, the limitless One was bound Himself to the limits of ligaments and limbs, the Bread of Life allowed Himself to become hungry, and do you know why? Because of humility…and our Text doesn’t stop there. “He humbled Himself to the point of death”… Because He did not consider being in the form of God something He needed to grasp onto.

Jesus took on human form and He carried His humanity through to the furthest extent: death. He died. Now let’s try to grasp this for even an iota of what it’s worth: Jesus, god Himself, came to earth and humbled himself to human limitations. And then the God-Man allowed Himself to die. Death of the Divine. Life himself allowed the breath to leave His lungs. That which was not possible for Him before submitting Himself to being human, He experienced. Death. Piling humiliation upon humiliation, Christ not only died but He was submissive to “death on a cross”. the Jews hated crucifixion because it was reserved for foreigners and slaves. Ironic, isn’t it. The death reserved for foreigners was applied to the only One whose home was not in this world; the only death executed on slaves was given to the One who made Himself a servant of all. Niche said “God is Dead” and we resist the controversy of the statement. It’s conflicting and confusing, and only God could make it so. And He did.

For that reason, God exalted Him. The Greek verb here is "hyperypsosen" which means “super exalted” . Everything Jesus gave up was restored to Him, and then some. Because Jesus stooped low, the Father lifted Him up high. Jesus was God’s self-expression to humanity. God communicated to the humans in a language they could understand: a human! So deity himself took on a body, walked our earth in our dirt so that we could understand. There was a veil there: his flesh. He looked human. He sounded human. He was human. But he was also divine. And that is why the Father has lifted Him up.

Do you see the tremendous humility of Christ? Do you see the lowliness of our human nature? It’s all we know, but He had to choose to know it experientially. And He did. The humiliation of humanity. What an irony: humiliation, what we run from, is exactly what has saved us. Humiliation, what we avoid, is the cause of our rejoicing.

Man... is our God awesome or what?