Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor and gave him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Dear friends, you always followed my instructions when I was with you. And now that I am away, it is even more important. Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. Philippians 2:1-13
Talk about
extremes! The very best place to be is
in a church that is unified and handling well the threats to unity. The very worst is a church that is
splintered, full of cliques and getting worse each year. The unified church is a healthy, risk-taking
place, where people dare to love unconditionally. In a splintered church factions center on
personal preferences, rather than ministry.
Paul wrote
to the Philippian believers, specifically requesting they be unified in their
relationships and purpose.
Paul did not
just put words on paper to fill a library shelf, he wrote to human beings. And he wrote knowing there would be threats
to unity. Common sense tells us that,
with humans, good and evil will eventually clash, because as it is with
darkness and light, they are mortal enemies.
Throughout
the last two thousand years churches have really had only one main problem –
disunity.
God speaks
to us today through the apostle's plea – he advises:
To
remain in God's will you must be in unity.
Our
question, of course is:
How
in the world can we do that?
The answer
to unity isn't easy, but it can be easily stated:
To Have Unity,
Be Christ-like!
…and so, Paul
spells-out that which constitutes Christ-likeness…5 ESSENTIALS:
1.
Communion with Christ
It is
impossible to ACT LIKE Christ if you do
not WALK WITH Christ!
This (above
all things) could solve the problems of churches around the world in any
age. Believers who get away from a close
walk with the Master cannot reproduce Christ-likeness in the flesh.
Paul said
that the encouragement (or strength) he received from the Philippian church was
because they were united, or in communion with Christ.
Belonging to
Christ will produce a natural sense of belonging to each
other that transcends our sinful nature.
It’s like the old saying: Everybody
who belongs to Christ belongs to everybody who belongs to Christ. In short, communion begets communion. This spiritual principle holds that it is
impossible to be in genuine fellowship with Christ when you are out of
fellowship with anyone for whom Christ died.
It’s a syllogism you can state backwards or forwards; you can start with
the negative or positive:
Love
your brother/love Christ;
Hate
your brother/impossible to love Christ.
2.
Compassion for People
Tenderness
and compassion are the same word in Greek.
They are from the root word which, in English, is spleen. You have that little organ which helps purify
your blood. It’s located in the visceral
area and the ancient Greeks thought of it as the center or seat of
emotion. After all, when you get upset,
the first place you're liable to feel bad is the mid-section.
Christian
compassion is a matter of being vulnerable enough with each other and the needs
of the world's lost, so that we are moved viscerally and volitionally
to do something about those needs.
When Jesus stood
looking out over Jerusalem, he wept over the people who'd disowned Him
throughout the ages. Compassion is a
by-product of unconditional love for people.
3.
Cooperation in the Spirit
Cooperation
is when you are one in spirit and purpose.
Our methods may conflict at times, but our goal will always keep us
united. Did you know that you can take
100 pianos and tune them to the same tuning fork, and each of those pianos will
then be in tune with each other? They’re
in tune NOT because they decided to be just like one another – but because they
were all set to the standard of one tuning fork. A.W. Tozer shared this in his wonderful
little book The Pursuit of God, and he likened the pianos
to worshippers in a church body:
…worshipers [meeting] together, each one looking away to
Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were
they to become ‘unity’ conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive
for closer fellowship.
This is
fairly simple when you get your pre-conceived notions of church out of the
way. When you keep your eyes on Christ
you will be in unity. If unity at any
cost becomes your God, you will fight like two cats with their tails tied
together.
4.
Consideration of Other’s Needs
There are a
few things that need to come to an end in any church that wishes to be Christ-like;
one of those is SELFISHNESS!
The end of
selfishness comes with the beginning of humility.
The word humility
comes from two words, dust and midriff. You get the drift? You can't call yourself humble unless you're
willing to crawl on your belly through the dust ...for the least of these my
brethren.
Paul
wrote: Don’t look out only for your
own interests, but take an interest in others, too. That doesn't mean we ought to be nosy
busybodies. It means we ought to see to
meeting the needs of others, particularly the outcasts and the lost of our
community. It is a call to press forward
with actions that will be meaningful in meeting those needs.
In every
church fellowship there are those who wish to be prominent, petted, or
pacified. Everything we do at Mt Zion
and Pleasant Hill should not seek to please anyone but Christ. All people here are treated the same – we are
lost sinners, saved by grace; we are brothers and sisters. There are no special considerations other
than what will please Christ.
This is
Christ’s church, not a social club.
Consideration is a matter of putting your brother’s needs above your own
preferences.
And that
leads us naturally into the next essential for Christ-likeness:
5.
Cross-Bearing for the Sake of
Others
Paul reminds
the church that the man who died on Calvary wasn't like any other man; HE was God!
Paul says Jesus made himself nothing. The King James Version says he emptied
himself; this is a picture of sacrifice.
In the
temple a sacrifice of an animal was made for sin. The blood and water were poured on the altar
- an emptying. The animal’s life-blood
was emptied-out, poured on the altar, satisfying the death-demand of sin.
Jesus, as
the perfect Lamb was with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit; existing as one
God; we call that the Trinity. Like a glass contains water and can be
emptied, so God poured Himself into the form of a man and died for us.
W. E.
Orchard said: It may take a
crucified church to take a crucified Christ before the eyes of the world. If a church is to be Christ-like (and
therefore unified) it will be through cross-bearing.
• Our
comfortable seats in our air-conditioned auditoriums are not cross-bearing.
• Paying
our tithes is not cross-bearing.
• Serving
on committees, workdays and kitchens aren't cross-bearing.
Cross-bearing is dying for others.
• Do you have Christ-likeness,
ready to give yourself up for this community?
• How about people of
different race, language, or any other barrier?
• What about the
unchurched and uncaring?
• What
about the dirty street people?
So…we have these 5 essentials:
Communion
with Christ, Compassion for People, Cooperation in the Spirit, Consideration of Other’s Needs, and
Cross-Bearing for the Sake of Others. These are the essentials for Christ-like
living in the Kingdom of God. And they
lead to:
6.
Crown-Wearing
Paul uses a
play on the sound of words in today’s Scripture. He wrote that Jesus …humbled himself and became obedient
to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. Therefore, God elevated
him to the place of highest honor. Three of those words tell us something
incredibly important in making sense of all this compassion, cooperation,
consideration of other’s needs, even to the point of bearing another’s
cross. Two of the words, humbled and
obedient come from the same basic word, while exalted sounds just
like them. Paul is telling us there is a
definite and proportionate relationship to these. The principle is as follows:
YOU
WILL BE LIFTED BY CHRIST IN HEAVEN
TO
THE SAME DEGREE YOU HAVE LIFTED HIM HERE ON EARTH.
Cross-bearing
and crown-wearing always go hand in hand.
Jesus bore the cross before he wore the crown. Don't forget that the spiritual issues of
life far outweigh the material or natural, and in the spiritual realm things
are always reversed from the way they were in the natural; the last being
first, and so on.
Christ
likeness is the goal. If friends, or a
family, church, or even a nation would be unified, enjoying genuine fellowship,
then Christ-likeness is what we seek.
This also means God will not honor anything we do if our hearts resist
living a Christ-like life. It is the
reason marriages fall apart, churches die, and nations crumble. God rejects the
pride of self. He wants us to deny self,
like Jesus did.
Paul gave a ringing, stinging piece of advice for any member
of any church, anywhere, and at any time – work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
Beloved,
this isn’t a matter of how to GET saved,
it’s
how you live when you ARE saved.
Working on
genuinely living-out your salvation to the fullest is a matter of letting
Christ have complete control of your heart…giving Him your life’s steering
wheel so His impact on you totally transforms the way you live.
Back in the
mid-90’s Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn and
shook hands on national TV. The
worldwide press corps went wild over the Jewish and Arab leaders making
peace. What they skipped over was “…the
fact that the two leaders had been invited to have dinner together with the
Clintons at the White House, and they refused.
What matters in the Middle East is eating together. You cannot kill someone you have shared a
meal with.” The handshake was a
formality…and the following decades have proven that deception and hatred were
still in their hearts!
In the same
way, the church can settle for having a show of unity, a handshake on the
Whitehouse lawn – OR we can push on to the real thing. Shows of unity are displays of handshakes and
smiles and ceremonies. Real unity is
when there is Christ-likeness because we care more about pleasing God than man.
And if the
church in America and around the world ever gets done with people demanding
their own way, but rather looking to Christ for its marching orders, the Christ-like
unity we discover will cause the kind of tears of joy none of us have ever
experienced before!
Our Prayer
Father, it’s
not the heroes we see on television and the stage we wish to follow; help us to
reject that hollow form of life; let us have the power to live Christ-like
lives, honoring to all You have planned for us.
For the
glory, honor, and praise to which You alone are worthy, o Lord, we pray in the
Name of the Son, cooperating with the Spirit, to honor and exalt the Majesty of
the Father. Let it be so in each of our
lives…Amen!
Title Image: via Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation
