April 2022 | Philippians pt. 3
Philippians 2 | “he humbled himself”
Start this study by reading through Philippians chapter 2 — but before you do, take a few moments to slow down and connect with yourself and God’s Spirit. I encourage you to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, feeling with your body as you breathe. As you breathe in and out, note that Spirit is present, is with you, and is experiencing God’s Word with you.
As the first chapter of Philippians comes to a close, Paul emphasizes a main idea through several different applications - the way we live ought to reflect the gospel of Christ. For as he says in chapter 1 verse 29, he writes it has been “granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” That is to say, whether through trial or ease, we are given an opportunity to live in a way that is still good news to the world, non-disciples, etc. This is what would have been radical to the church’s “opponents”, as Paul mentions towards the end of chapter 1. How we live is crucial for the sake of expressing the gospel of Jesus.
Paul focuses on the concept of humility as a way the church can faithfully express the way he calls them to live in light of the gospel (radical unity) at the end of chapter 1. They are to share a mutual “understanding” and have the same “inner-perspective” that connects to the outward behavior characterizing their lives. Yet he introduces these themes of inner-perspective and humble, outward characteristics by first focusing on the felt-experience of the Philippian church. What if we were to do the same?
Read the first verse of chapter 2 again and slowly walk yourself through this exercise -
Reflect / Think of a time you felt encouraged by the love of Christ - a time you felt supported and cared for, that Christ distinctly saw you and loved you.
What was that like? How did it make you feel?
What happened in your body as you took in the love and support of Jesus and knew you weren’t alone?
And how did that shape your life; i.e., how did your actions express all that you were experiencing inside?
Cool. Good job! How was that for you? What did it bring up inside for you to ‘go’ to that experience?
I love questions like these because they help us cue into our inner experiences and what actually happens inside for us - and if you’re anything like me, slowing down that process and becoming more in-tune with it can feel so different. I would say I’ve always been an empathetic and emotional person, but I’ve not always been vulnerable. I’m not someone who’s really even known how to feel and share my more vulnerable experiences until my more recent years. Until I started counseling, my husband has always been the more emotionally feeling and expressive one; it’s only through practice and attention that I’ve become more in-tune with myself.
So as I read Scripture and read passages like this one, I can’t help but be thankful for the practice of self-reflection. I believe becoming aware of and connected to our inner worlds is crucial to help us actually put into practice the way of life Jesus calls us to. That doesn’t mean we have to know the answers, by no means; really, I think it means we are given an opportunity to be aware of our own inner process.
Does that make sense? Let me give an example –
I have this ‘thing’ where I get really defensive if I feel condescended. Do y’all have ‘things’ like that? They’re experiences that when you find them happening, between you and your partner or you and a friend, etc., they completely take over the relationship in that moment. And then all you can say to yourself is that ‘the thing is happening!!’ and it totally drives what you feel and how you respond.
A few weeks ago, I was in a group text message with some friends and received a text from someone in that group. It was in response to a question I had asked about bread, and when I got the text back, I felt talked down to - cue my internal moment of “uh oh, this thing is happening right now!!”.
Now, of course, looking back I can see some big holes in my emotional process. Is this friend one of my closest friends probably ever? Yes, for sure. Does my friend care if I feel embarrassed and about my feelings in general? Yes, 100%! Do those things hold their normal weight to me during the moment? Hmmm.. not so much.
Embarrassed and defensive, I responded back in the group message with a short, terse sentence that evvvver so slightly walked the line between snarky and informative. Almost immediately after I hit send, I felt guilty - how could I have just responded to my friend that way, with so much importance on not looking weak, dumb, etc.? Although it felt good in the moment of my defensiveness, it quickly didn’t feel good in my friendship.
I quickly planned a phone call with my friend for an hour or so later. I’d never shared about this ‘thing’ of being condescended with a friend before, so, I didn’t really know what to say or how to do it right. But I knew leaving it at my response text wasn’t right, either — so, during the phone call, I just let her into my experience. I said something like, “When I get your text, I felt really embarrassed and scared you thought I was dumb. So then I responded how I did because I felt defensive, and I’m really sorry for sending you that text.”
And the thing is, as we both shared our experiences in that conversation, a simple, “here’s what to do next time” didn’t emerge - at least not in the way you might think. There was no “don’t text me about bread ever again” or “don’t text when you’re angry again” resolutions. Simply, we just got to hear each other’s experiences. And I know that for me, through sharing my emotional process with her, she was able to speak to my fear - and that felt really good. And really, it felt so different for me than from ending our conversation with a low-key snarky text!
I hope this experience resonates or just “makes sense” to you, because it revealed something so important to me - that before we can experience change in our relationships, or even change in our inner worlds, we are first given an opportunity to touch our own emotional process - and potentially even let someone else into it.
Because even that alone can be a huge change.
Let’s think about it - as we read passages like this one in Philippians, it’s so easy to imagine change just sort of happening. But if we don’t embrace the opportunity we have to get our own process, how else will we stay in relationships when things get hard and not let automatic, old patterns take over? Or to stick with my story, how will I ever feel connected to friends if I keep feeling condescended, retaliating, and then having texting standoffs?
The answer is, I won’t.
But by staying in and naming the present - accessing our own emotional experience and sharing it with others - we gain access to the potential of different experiences and the ways this difference can empower us as disciples of Jesus.
So, how do we connect with our inner experiences? We see Paul address the multiple aspects or ‘parts’ of the Philippian church as he wrote to them, encouraged them, taught them, etc. From his words, we see that living an integrated life cannot be earned through only understanding more information or even focusing on changing our behavior in hopes of internal change. Nor does it necessarily come through ‘inner work’ alone. Even though these are all good things, Scripture is revealing to us that integrated living comes through a relationship with Jesus.
Let us consider the way Paul describes Jesus in verses 5-11:
“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.”
The church has historically called these six verses "the hymn of Christ". Scholars believe this “hymn” comes from an early Christian confession of faith, which makes sense - it tells us the story of Jesus, the one in whom we have faith! And as Lynn Cohick shares in her Philippians Commentary, this early confession of faith “describes the person of Jesus Christ, and in so doing, develops a vision for what it means to be fully human before God.”
And as we consider these verses in the context of Paul's letter, we see that the humanity of Jesus inherently creates a safe place for us, as humans. The person of Jesus invites us to embrace and therefore experience our humanity - and just as Paul writes, this includes all parts of us. As humans, made in the image of God, our very DNA helps tell the story of our Savior, who became a man for the sake of redeeming humanity and offering a way for not only our souls, but our bodies and souls, to live forever with him in eternity. So being connected with our lived experiences is actually a worthy component to our discipleship. For as we look to obeying the exhortations of Paul, as we seek to have a deep inner understanding of our unity and live out the gospel, it means we must do so as humans. And this means all that comes with being human - our highs and our lows, when we feel strong and when we feel at our lowest - all of these experiences have a purpose and can serve to tell the story of Jesus.
Reflection:
What does the phrase “fully human” mean to you?
Picture some moments when you feel yourself being fully human. Describe them. What are those moments like for you?
In your experience, what’s it been like to be human before God? How do you believe God views your humanity?