The Way Up Is Down

This passage brings in my mind at least a principle to the fore.

You know, as you go through life, what I find is you learn all kinds of lessons.

At least we're supposed to, I think.

Um all kinds of lessons.

One of the most obvious lessons that I have learned is that uh things are often not the way they seem.

I don't know if you've noticed that.

You assume certain things and then you find no, things are really not the way they seem.

A corollary to that principle of things are often not the way they seem is the fact that left to our own, we mostly get it wrong.

Has anybody ever found that besides me?

Things aren't the way they seem, and left to our own, we so often, maybe even mostly, get it wrong.

We wander off the path and we run the risk of ignoring or destroying that which can guide us in the way that we should go.

I want to share an experience I had a number of years ago.

It's a true story, uh, much to my chagrin.

Uh it was a late winter morning.

We were living in the Black Forest of Germany, and um of the things I enjoyed doing so much there was hiking in the High Alps.

We lived about two hours from the High Alps, and on this late winter day, I had the day off, and I had gotten in the car and I had driven up to my favorite place in all of the world.

My absolute favorite place.

It's called the Ottelboden Valley.

It's one of the valleys above Interlaken, and uh this little village up there called Ottelboden.

Uh, a ski village in the summer.

I'm not a skier, but in the fall and the winter when it was still passable, and then again in the spring I would often hike.

And there was a particular trail that I enjoy going.

And on this morning I was heading up the side of the mountain to the village to head up to the real side of the mountain on the trail.

On my way up, I realized that some of the mountains looked a little different than the way they normally looked.

And it reminded me that we had had an awful lot of snow that winter, and there had been an unusual number of avalanches.

And particularly in the area that I like to hike that was about 10,000 feet, these avalanches they would destroy the sides of mountains in the sense that they would knock all of the trees down.

And the trees were just where these avalanches came, they were just every which way, like an old-fashioned kid's game of pickup sticks.

That's the way these trees looked.

But I was heading for a place I knew, and I was going to be on a trail that I knew.

Things are not always the way they seem, and we often get it wrong.

So I uh I started up the from this ghost house where I stay.

I started up, it was a ski slope, but my trail went around the back side of the mountain and up to the top of the cable car that I could take down.

My knees don't mind going up, but they sure get have problems coming down.

So I'd love to go up the mountain.

In this case, the back side of the mountain, get to the top of the cable car, and then take the cable car down.

So I started out, I got a little bit of a later start than normal.

It was a little bit afternoon, late winter.

And um normally it would be a fairly steep but a wonderful hike.

I don't climb mountains, I hike mountains.

Um I don't seem to do much of that anymore here in the Red River Valley of the North, but uh that's a different issue.

Um normally it would take about five hours.

I knew the trail well.

Um I had hiked this trail probably a half dozen or a dozen times.

I knew the trail, I knew what it looked like, I knew the path, I knew where I was going.

Nothing could go wrong.

Um all would be well, but left to our own, we often get it wrong, and things are not always the way they seemed.

And Jane is starting to laugh.

She remembers this day, I suspect.

But I would I would be just fine, no problem, after all.

I had a map, um, I had warm clothes, I had my my walking stick, my hiking stick, I had matches, I had toilet paper, I had snacks, uh, I had a water-resistant coat.

Um, I even had my cell phone.

So what could possibly go wrong?

So about two hours into the hike, as this trail started to curve around towards the backside of the mountain, uh, it began to drizzle.

Late winter, cold, penetrating drizzle.

Um the trail got wetter and slipperier, the the twigs and the pine needles and everything became rather wet.

Um then a bit later, not only was there a drizzle, but a heavy fog set in.

And I mean a heavy fog.

Ultimately, I could only see about 10 feet in front of me, but no problem.

I knew where the trail was, I knew where I was on the side of the mountain, I can do this.

Um as I got around to the back side of the trail, I realized that that side of the mountain was one of those areas that an avalanche had come and had knocked down all of the trees.

And yet I knew where the trail was, so I figured I can just go over, under, around and through these trees.

The trees, however, were the trunks were huge.

They were four feet, three, four, five feet in diameter, and they were just all over the place.

And my trail took me right through this.

And my only way forward was to climb over and scramble and scoot under, and I found myself uh getting rather tired.

Um it was starting to get dark.

Early afternoon, or early evening that time of the year, back north side of the mountain, it was starting to get dark.

Um I thought maybe I ought to turn back.

But I don't turn back.

Always forward.

Why go back?

You've been there already.

Might as well just keep going forward, right, dear.

Um and actually I did a calculation.

I had a pretty good idea where I was, although by this time, after climbing over a bunch of the trees, the trail really was nowhere to be seen.

But I knew where I was, and I figured that the way back was significantly longer than the way forward up to the top of the uh the mountain.

And so I calculated I could press on.

Um yeah.

Left to our own, we most left to myself, I mostly get it wrong.

So um finally, after about another hour, this drizzle turned into an absolute frigid downpour that soaked everything.

And I was getting so tired I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, and I realized I just couldn't go forward any longer.

It's too stubborn to go backwards, besides, it would take me longer, and so I figured, okay, I've got a cell phone.

I'll give the Gosthouse a call, and I'll also give Jane a call, and somebody will help me, and I turn on my phone, and of course, on that side of the mountain there was no cell service.

Um but I always had my map and I knew the mountain pretty well, and I I realized, well, I'm probably just gonna have to spend the night here on the side of the mountain.

As long as I could start a fire, I figured I could survive.

I'd never had to actually stay overnight up in the mountains, and it was fairly cold, but I figured if I could get a fire started, no problem.

So I tried to start a fire, and of course, all of the twigs were sopping wet.

The pine needles, everything I could use for kindling was sopping wet.

And I found myself in a situation that the only thing dry that I could find was my trail map.

Don't burn the map.

Now, I've often reflected on that situation.

Oh, wait a minute, you want me to tell you what actually happened there?

Yeah.

Well, first, isn't this a parable of the way we bumble around through life?

We think we know where we're going, we think we know what we're doing, we think we know what the right way is, and we stubbornly and foolishly press forward.

And we finally find ourselves, although we have a sure and certain guide that will show the way, either we neglect it or we start burning it, uh, figuratively in this parable.

Uh Proverbs 14.12 says there's a way which seems right to us, but in fact only leads to destruction.

Proverbs 12.15 says that the fool thinks they are doing right, but the wise listen to their wives.

No, the wives, wise listen to advice.

Things are not the way they seem so much of the time, and we so often uh get it wrong.

Um, in fact, um I was determined, and so I thought, okay, the the trail has to be here somewhere.

I just couldn't see it anymore.

Finally, about 30 yards down uh the side of fairly steep side of the mountain, I clambered down and I came across the remains of the trail.

And by going down, uh I was actually ultimately able to get back to the top of the cable car and get back to the guest house and never tell my wife what happened.

Yeah, I did, but uh anyway.

All right.

Let's read Philippians 2, 5 to 11, because it tells us something that we don't get right and we really have trouble believing.

Um let's not neglect the map, the guide.

Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

We're we we started last week on a series of my favorite passages in Philippians.

Um in the next uh four or five messages, I'll I'll just be covering some of the highlights for me.

Philippian favorites.

Um Philippians chapter two.

Uh we're gonna be looking at verses five through eight.

We probably won't get to nine to eleven, but five through eight.

But let me start with verse one because it really is part of the context.

Um, says Paul, if there is any encouragement in Christ, and the way that's written, the answer is, of course there is encouragement, any comfort from love, and there is, any fellowship or participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, and there is all of that, then complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but to the interests of others.

That's the preparation for our passage.

And then God through Paul says to me and to you, have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not account equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by being obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

The way up is down.

Therefore, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue can threat confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.

The way up is down.

The way up is down.

It was for Christ, and it is for us.

Things are often not the way they seem.

We think the way up is up, where the way up is really down.

And we mostly get it wrong.

We clamor and climb and do all kinds of frantic things to get up, to go up.

He had already said in verse 3 do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility.

And this passage is talking about the humility of Christ that is found in the humiliation of Christ, a theological term that talks about the incarnation becoming man.

So what we're seeing in Jesus is an example of the way things really are.

The way up, the way to exaltation, the way to receive what we're really all looking for is down, down then up.

The way up is down.

It just doesn't seem that way.

We feel like the way to get our needs met is to go out and find some frantic way of getting our needs met.

I mean, that's just the way we're wired together.

The way to get what we want is just go out and get what we want.

Where what we find in the gospel is the way to get what we want is to receive a gift and to take advantage of what Christ has done.

But we get it so messed up.

We begin to think that what we really want we should reach out and get, or the good things that we have we should keep.

Isn't that just the way you know when when God blesses us materially, we subtly assume that God blesses us materially so that we could enjoy the good life.

So we grab hold.

Have you ever thought that perhaps God increases your standard of living, that he might increase your level of giving?

That's a radical thought.

The way to receive is to give.

The way up is down.

We secretly want people to think well of us, to speak well of us, and so we act in ways that chase people away.

We so often get it wrong.

We assume that our privileges we should keep a hold of and enjoy.

We find it hard to imagine that God's better way for us often leads through pain and suffering rather than receiving what we think are blessings.

We often get it wrong.

So to God to help us, God gives us the example of Jesus.

This is not given as a club to beat us over the head.

This is not given for some reason that it might by making you feel guilty get you finally to do what you're supposed to do.

Feeling guilty doesn't change our hearts.

In fact, it hardens our hearts.

Now, this passage is given to draw us to the ways of God.

And the ways of God to go up, we go down.

That's the way it was for Jesus.

That's the way it is for us.

Um let me read five through eight.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is also in Christ Jesus.

So he's saying, here's the pattern to imitate, to follow, to emulate.

The mind of Christ, the attitude, the way of thinking, the way of seeing the world that is Christ's, we are to have.

Who, out of his understanding of the way things really work, though in the form of God, didn't count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by obedience to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

That was the mindset of Jesus.

And this is set forth for us as something we should imitate.

Have this mind in you, have this way of thinking be in you, that was also in Christ Jesus.

2 Corinthians 8 9 tells us that though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we might through his poverty become rich.

See, that's not the way we think.

And yet that's the way Jesus understood and acted.

It shows us the mind, the disposition of Christ, the attitude, the mindset, the way of thinking, the way of acting.

When it talks, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, it's talking about the way he saw reality, because he saw reality the way it actually is.

He who knew all things knew and acted on the basis of the fact that by going down you go up.

So let this mind be in you, and then he talks about Jesus in verse 9.

Therefore, God highly exalted him.

You see, the way up is down.

It just doesn't feel that way to us.

As a deer pants for water, so my soul pants after God.

At least that's the way it's supposed to be.

And when our hearts pant after God, we begin to want the things that God wants and to do the things that God instructs us to do.

And this mindset of Jesus, this way of thinking, is a model or a paradigm that we are to imitate.

Imitate.

By doing out of the right heart and attitude, it gets easier and easier to do that which you begin viewing as important.

The imitation of Christ.

Now, there's a lot of things about Christ that we cannot imitate.

I mean, I don't know if you realize it or not, but you are not God.

Um He knew all things, you can't know all things.

He could do all things, you can't do all things.

Uh you can't do His miracles, you are not without sin.

You can't die for the sins of the world.

There's many things about Christ that we cannot imitate.

But my friends, this we can, and this we must.

In the uh the upper room, John 13, he gave us the example.

What did he do?

He took a towel and he went around and washed the dusty, dirty feet of his disciples, and he said, I give you this as an example, a paradigm, a pattern.

This is what you're to be doing.

Um John 2, 6, uh, those who, the one who says he abides in him must walk in the same manner as he walked.

And many, many verses.

The one who is made new by Christ is designed to be like Christ.

Let this way of living be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.

6 and 7.

This gets to the heart of what the humiliation of Christ involved.

Though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man.

Now, this is a passage which is incredibly rich.

In fact, these two verses may have been an early Christian hymn or a part of the liturgy of the early church.

And in some versions of the New Testament, the way the editors, they put it into free-flowing verse.

Not free full form, okay.

Verse.

This might have been part of an early hymn.

Who, though in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grassed, made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man, and being formed in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death.

This is a passage that has perplexed the theologians and Bible scholars for years.

I was talking with somebody, it might have been Webb the other day.

Anyway, there was something that he wanted to know, and so he started looking it up, started looking at different commentaries.

And you know, the problem with the commentaries is they never ask the questions that you don't already know.

They just answer them in the ones you already know in a scholarly way.

And this is the what is said here is very, at one level complex and at another level very simple.

There are some words here that are extremely difficult to translate into English because what we hear, when we hear these words rightly translated, we hear something else besides what they meant.

For example, being or existing in points not just to existence, but to the inner essence, the being.

This is talking about who he was on the inside, his abiding nature, a nature that does not change.

It says, taking on the form of man, that makes us think that it was just somehow or another this outward changeable kind of way he appeared.

But the word, and it's translated correctly, form, it just doesn't make the sense to us that it does to those people then in their world, their philosophy, their understanding of reality.

Form suggests not so much the physical appearance, but the essential reality that doesn't change.

Let's put it this way.

For example, a human being is always a human being.

Now, initially, a human being is a fetus in the womb of its mother, but is a human being.

And then it's born, and you have a newborn.

It's it's it's it's different, it's not quite the same, but it's still a human being.

And then it becomes a toddler, and then it becomes, of all things, ultimately a teenager.

But then eventually it outgrows being a teenager, and there's life and hope.

Um, but no matter what the phase and stage of our development is, we're always human beings.

And it's that inner essence, um, that essential internal nature that is spoken about here.

Um the point that the author is actually making is different from what we initially think.

What it's really saying is that Jesus was God, he is God, and he ever shall be God.

There was never a time that Jesus was not God.

He didn't become God when he was born in a stable.

He didn't become God when he died on the cross.

He didn't become God when he rose from the dead.

He always was, he was at that moment, and he ever shall be.

Different stages of how he existed, but as his essential nature never once changed.

He didn't cease being God when he became man.

He didn't put off his deity, he took on humanity.

There was never a time that Jesus wasn't God.

There was a time that Jesus wasn't a human being.

Important difference.

That's the incarnation, that's the miracle of it.

In addition to his deity, he took on real, true humanity.

There was a time that Jesus was not human.

There never was a time that Jesus was not God.

And this taking on humanity goes to the core of his humbling or the humiliation of the incarnation.

And it goes actually even further in second part of verse 6.

He did not e did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped.

That's a very, very interesting phrase.

He didn't regard equality with God as a thing to be grasped.

No frantic, stubborn, selfish grasping.

I think of Gollum.

My precious.

I found the ring of power.

It's mine.

I'm going to keep it.

You can't do anything with my precious.

You may not be familiar with Lord of the Rings.

Okay.

Maybe you know a fox terrier.

We had a fox terrier.

Beautiful, beautiful fox terrier.

Bred to be stubborn.

Bred to scrounge actually into wood piles and rout out rats and vermin and so forth.

We had this lovely fox terrier.

That was the stubbornest dog.

More stubborn than I am.

I will never forget, we were living in Belgium at the time.

There was this an area behind our house that was a wooded area.

And in our backyard, a hedgehog dared to appear.

And so this dog went out, doing what it was bred to do, got this hedgehog in its mouth and would not let go.

I saw this dog out there through the picture window with this bloody hedgehog sticking out of its mouth, and you know it was doing what dogs do and everything.

And I opened the back door to tell it to put it down, and this dog did what dogs did.

He came in, uh she came into our kitchen uh with this bloody hedgehog there.

So I said I tried to pry the dog's mouth open, no, no success.

I picked the dog up by the neck, I like smaller dogs, not bigger dogs, and shook it.

And and I I got a got a glove, uh, a work glove, and tried to rip it out of its mouth, and there was no way that dog was going to let that hedgehog go.

I don't even remember uh how we finally got rid of it.

Another time, um, oh I think it was that time, we finally got it out of the dog's mouth, and I had this glove, and so I took this hedgehog and I threw it across the backyard, hit a tree, and plopped down to the ground.

I was more stubborn than that dog, by golly.

Now, that's not the way Jesus dealt with his humanity.

It says he made himself nothing.

He did not demand to be seen for who he was.

This doesn't mean he gave up something.

It means the picture is like uh pouring out of a glass of water so that uh the water is no longer there.

Um or taking something off and laying it down, like taking a coat off.

Just because you take a coat off uh doesn't mean that uh that you've gotten rid of it.

When Jesus became man, he voluntarily followed the will of his father, and he chose most of the time to not let himself be seen as he was.

There were times in which the father willed that, though the the Mount of Transfiguration, suddenly the reality of who Jesus was shone forth.

But the independent exercise of his prerogatives and rights, uh Jesus set those aside.

Instead of being seen for who he is, he allowed people to abuse him.

He allowed people to misunderstand him.

He was accused, he was not guilty, he did not open his mouth, he didn't feel it necessary to defend himself.

We feel it necessary all the time to defend ourselves.

He didn't grasp a hold of the things that he might have.

Though he was rich, uh, yet he became poor that we through his poverty might become rich.

One writer said he made himself nothing, voluntarily laid aside his privileges, and then this comment the only human being in the world who had the right to assert his rights waived them.

Think about that.

The only human being in the world who had the absolute right to assert his rights, he chose to wave them.

Just a little tiny vignette, Garden of Gethsemane.

Um the the the soldiers are coming to get him.

And he says, I could call down 10,000 angels.

Just I could take care of you.

And it wasn't said, that may have just been part of what was going on in his mind.

I don't know.

But he he chose not to use the authority and the power he had.

So why do we demand our rights?

Why do we demand that people respect us?

Why do we demand that people assume the best of us?

Why do we demand that people think well of us?

Because we think the way up is up.

And the way up is down.

The humbling of the cross, verse 8.

Being found in human form, he humbled himself by coming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

Um we sang uh something about, oh, that wonderful cross, that wonderful cross.

Um I came across something that one writer made a comment about that I thought was actually very significant for us to hear.

The cross may be wonderful to us, but we're likely to forget what a cross and a crucifixion meant in that day.

It was utterly loathsome and humiliating.

Not only painful, it was despicable.

So this writer, I think, rightly says, by the standards of the first century, no experience could be more loathsome, more degrading than crucifixion.

The difficulty for us is after so many Christian centuries, during which the cross has been venerated as a sacred symbol, to realize the unspeakable horror and disgust that the mention of anyone who was crucified on a cross would evoke.

Jewish law said anyone who was crucified died under a curse, was damned.

In polite Roman society, the word cross was an obscenity.

It was a four-letter word, literally a four-letter word, transliterated into our C-R-U-X, crux, cross.

It was a word that was a swear word, utterly vile, and nothing desirable about it.

And yet that was the way for Jesus.

The way up was down.

Oh, the depth of the riches and the knowledge of God, how unspeakable, unsearchable are his judgments, how inscrutable his ways.

To him be the glory and the power forever and ever.

We just ought to marvel at the humiliation.

We don't even like to think of that word, do we?

Humiliation.

And to think of Jesus being humiliated and us being called to walk in the way that Jesus walked.

We're not going to look at verse 9 to 11.

I want to just close and ask ourselves a question.

What in the world do we do realistically with this passage?

It'd be great to take the next 20 minutes and just have a discussion about it.

What in the world do we do with it?

We like the idea, we don't like the doing of it.

The difficulty with a passage like this is that we reduce it to a beautiful plaque and we put it on our wall.

Because at least we've done something with it then.

And we look at it and say, yeah, isn't that wonderful?

The doing of it is much different.

Doing what this passage talks about, emulating Christ, imitating Christ in the ways that we can is very far from our thinking.

We live in a world that blinds us with self-assertion, self-interest, self-fulfillment, self-service, making a name for ourselves, claiming our rights, and then running as fast as our chubby little legs will take us away from anything that is actually like that.

Let me suggest something that may not be meaningful for you, it's meaningful for me.

A litany of humility.

A litany is kind of a poetic or sometimes a liturgical form where something is repeated by the person, maybe the leader of the congregation, something is said, and then the congregation repeats the same phrase over and over again.

We find a biblical litany in Psalm 136, 26 couplets, each of which, the second phrase is his steadfast love endures forever.

So a statement is made, and then his steadfast love endures forever.

Steadfast love endures forever.

Steadfast love.

26 times.

Well, a litany of humility.

What I would, we won't, I won't make you repeat.

Deliver me, Jesus, deliver me.

But deliver me from the desire to be loved.

Oh Jesus, deliver me.

Dear Jesus, deliver me from the desire to be loved.

Deliver me from the deep desire to be extolled.

Deliver me, oh Jesus, deliver me from the desire to be extolled, to be thought well of, praised, to be honored, to be praised.

From the deep desire to be chosen above other people.

Oh, deliver me, dear Jesus, from the deep desire to be chosen above other people, to be consulted.

Oh, dear Jesus, deliver me from the deep desire to be consulted, to be approved by other people.

Oh, Jesus, dear Jesus, deliver me from the desire to be approved.

Oh, dear Jesus, deliver me from the deep fear of being humiliated.

Jesus, dear Jesus, deliver me from the fear of being humiliated.

From the fear of being despised.

Deliver me, Jesus, deliver me.

The fear of being rebuked, the fear of being slandered, fear of being forgotten, fear of being ridiculed, fear of being wronged, and the list could go on and on.

But deliver me, dear Jesus.

Deliver me from all of those desires that Jesus willingly gave up.

But I hold on to the desire to be loved, extolled, honored, praised, chosen, consulted, approved.

Deliver me, Jesus, from running away from those things that Jesus willingly took upon himself.

Humiliation, being despised, being rebuked, being slandered, being forgotten, being ridiculed, being wrong.

And the list goes on and on.

Therefore, verse 9, God highly exalted and the way up is down.

It really is.

I've got this mastered, by the way.

I just want you to know that.

Just don't ever talk to my wife.

Don't ever talk to my kids.

Don't ever talk to my dog.

Oh, we have so far to go, my friends.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we know about this, but we know so little of it.

And yet this is what we are called to.

Father, I pray that you would in some way, oh Jesus, dear Jesus, help us.

Help us to run towards the things that by nature we resist and to run away from the things that we by nature hold on to.

May we indeed be imitators of Christ.

If you don't help us with this, Jesus, dear Jesus, we'll only keep getting it wrong.

So help us, I pray.

In Christ's name.

Amen.

Would you stand for the benediction, please?

Now go into the world in peace.

And this is the way of peace.

Go into the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to that which is good.

And that's what we've been talking about, that which is good.

Honor all men.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the suffering.

Restore the wandering.

Comfort the grieving and share the gospel.

Love and serve the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be ours.

God bless.