NIL | Pastor Chip Parker | Week 1

Man, I am glad that summer is winding down.

And that's not just because I have kids going back to school.

I'm excited about one of the best times of year, college football season.

Fall is right around the corner.

Uh, Saturdays are coming where you wake up, you got your cup of coffee, college game day, watching the one o'clock game, the three o'clock game.

I I love college football.

And here's the thing: every Saturday, starting this month, and it's gonna last for a while, we're gonna hear these three letters M-I-L.

Now, you've probably already heard them before, and you maybe even know what they mean.

But in today's sports world, and it's really not just college, NIL represents name, image, and likeness.

And it is the means by which schools are now legally able to help funnel money to players for the use of their name, image, and likeness.

Like I said, that's not just a college sports thing right now.

I started coaching high school sports, and there's a class available to walk us through NILs for high school athletes.

It's absolutely crazy.

And what brought this to rise is the idea that this name, image, and likeness of a lot of high school and college athletes have value to it.

And the argument of the athletes in college is if these schools are gonna be making millions of dollars off of my name, image, and likeness, I should too.

And so success, especially in college sports, has shifted away from you know winning championships on the field to seeing athletes build a personal brand, gaining recognition, creating a name that draws value and that other people admire.

And that's become problematic.

And here's the thing it's always been problematic.

You see, as followers of Jesus, scripture tells us that our identity was never meant to be something that we create and that we form ourselves.

Our identity was something that God has given to us if we know him as our Father.

And so for the believer, name image-likeness should mean something totally different than it does for college athletics.

You see, as followers of Jesus, we are designed to live under his name, the name of Jesus.

We are designed to live in a way that reflects his image, not pushes our own.

We are designed to be transformed into his likeness.

And we need to understand that that's what life should look like as followers of Jesus, but the world is telling us completely different.

The sin nature of our flesh is pulling us in other directions.

Sin and the world has shifted our focus to ourselves.

Where just like college athletes on the field now, every man, woman, student, child is consumed with self.

We're consumed with self-promotion, with self-expression, with self-exaltation, and much more.

You see people through social media learning to build their own brand, protect their own image, push their name and their face in front of as many people as they can.

And what I'm telling you is, as followers of Jesus, we are called to so much more than that.

And that's what we want to talk about in this series, NIL, is it is not what does it mean for your favorite football team, but we want to invite you to start building, or maybe even to restart building your identity on the identity that you've been given in Jesus.

We want to help you rediscover your identity in Christ because what I know is when we stop focusing on our name, our image, and our likeness, we discover the joy that comes with living in His.

I think this is so important, right?

Because as we've already said, our culture measures success and uh measures apparent happiness and joy by influence, by reputation, by personal significance.

We're told that if you want to be happy and fulfilled and successful, then you need to go make a name for yourself.

And I think the pressure to be seen, to be noticed, to make a name for ourselves is greater now than it ever has been.

But scripture confronts this idea full on, right?

It confronts us, it confronts us and says, hey, that's what the world is telling you.

That's not what I want from you.

As a matter of fact, Philippians chapter 2 confronts this self-focused identity uh with one of the greatest paradoxes in all of Scripture.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

It's the paradox of Jesus, the unique one and only Son of God who never pursued his own glory, who humbled himself, surrendered his rights, became obedient to the point of death, and then because of that humility, God exalts him to give him a name above every name.

As a matter of fact, if you got your Bible, let's look at that text.

Philippians chapter 2.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

Philippians chapter 2, we're going to start reading in verse 5 and read all the way through verse 11.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

This is what Paul writes.

He 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 is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Those verses are powerful.

To a world that is obsessed with selfies and likes and follows and subscribers, views.

The message here to the Philippian church is a slap in the face.

It's saying, look, it's not about that.

We as a church, we as followers of Jesus, Paul says, have to adopt the same attitude in ourselves that Jesus modeled for us.

And when we look at that attitude of Jesus that he modeled for us when he came to earth, it's an attitude of humility, obedience, and sacrifice.

It's not about promoting ourselves, growing our brand, becoming famous, successful, and popular.

Jesus showed us what humility looks like.

That's why Paul begins in Philippians.

He says, adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in form of God, did not consider equality with God as a thing to be exploited.

Now, this is a complicated passage, and it really makes us lean into the study of scripture that we know as Christology, who Jesus is.

Now, we know that Jesus is God.

Jesus is the second person in the Trinity, the divine Son of God, who is equal with both the Father and the Spirit.

The Trinity is a complex subject, right?

We could talk about it for hours, but the idea here is that we believe God is three in one.

He is three different persons inside of one being.

This does not make us tri-theist that we believe that there's three gods, but we believe that in a way that can even defy the limits of our understanding, that God is three in one.

But when Jesus came to this earth, he was the physical manifestation of God to us.

And yet, though he existed in the substance of God, the form of God, he did not consider it says, equality with God as a thing to be grasped, as a thing to be exploited, as a thing to be leveraged.

And so what did he do?

He humbled himself.

Maybe we'd say it like this: he humiliated himself.

That's what it means to be humble, to live in humility.

And that is such a countercultural idea today because it's all about us.

It's all about getting as much as we can, putting ourselves out there, getting ourselves in front of the camera, letting the world see what we want them to see about our life so that we can pretend to be like others.

And yet Jesus flies in the face of that and he humbles himself.

It says that he did that by emptying himself and assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.

And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself.

And so the idea here is that when Jesus became man, he didn't empty himself of his godhood.

The word there, when it says he emptied himself, is the Greek word kenosis.

And really there's been a lot of debate about what that means.

But what it does not mean is that Jesus became less God when he took on human flesh.

What we believe is that Jesus willingly set aside his divine attributes in their practice so that he could walk among us as an example of obedience to what it looks like to live a life under God's perfect law.

And so his humility, him emptying himself, is followed by his example of obedience, that he lived a life fully obedient to the righteous law of his father.

He was obedient to what God's plan of salvation was.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, we know Jesus, distressed and sweating great drops of blood, cried out in prayer to his father and said, If it be your will, let this cup, let this wrath pass from me, nevertheless, not what I will, but your will be done.

He was obedient to his father.

And let me tell you, that's good news that Jesus was obedient because the sacrifice that he then makes, that's that third mindset: humility, obedience, sacrifice, the sacrifice that he makes on the cross is now a perfect sacrifice because of his perfect obedience.

And that's why Paul says that he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.

Because Jesus was obedient in our place, because Jesus fulfilled the righteous requirement of God's law in our place.

Now you and I who repent of our sin and put our faith and trust in Him, we can be seen as obedient even when we have fallen short.

So it is Jesus showing us humility, showing us obedience, showing us sacrifice, where he was obedient to the point of death, even a death on the cross, for our good and for the glory of his Father.

And then Paul says, he says, now because of this, the CSB says, for this reason, God has highly exalted him and has given him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow.

What he's saying here is because of Jesus, because of his humility, because of his obedience, because of his sacrifice, God has exalted Jesus and placed the name of Jesus above every name on earth so that now Jesus is the one who gets all the praise.

He gets all the glory, he gets all the honor.

And what I see in our world today is we don't want to give it to Jesus.

We want to compete with him for it.

We want the attention, we want the glory, we want the honor, but it's Jesus who has the name that's above every name.

And that's so important because not every road leads to the same place.

All religious paths don't go to heaven.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father but through him.

He is the only way that we can be made right with God.

And because of that, he deserves all the praise, all the glory, all the honor that we could ever give him.

But here's what I want you to hear very clearly.

What I'm not saying is that you need to live like Jesus.

And if you humble yourself under Jesus, you will be exalted.

You will get famous.

You will be rich.

You will be popular.

Your TikTok will blow up.

That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is we humble ourselves under the name of Jesus, not so that we would be exalted.

We humble ourselves under the name of Jesus so that he would be exalted.

The point isn't that we do this in order to get that from God, but that we want Jesus to be exalted in our life above every name.

Don't turn Jesus into a means to accomplish your end.

Man, can I tell you that's what I see so many believers do on social media now, is they just try to use Jesus to get their own clout, to get their own attention.

They use Jesus as a stepping stool to get from others what they really want.

Don't do that.

Don't be that person.

Don't be like that college athlete who uses a school just to push himself further.

Don't be a person who uses Jesus just to push yourself further.

The way that we used to tell football players back when I coached is you don't play for the name of the back on the jersey.

You play for the name on the front of the jersey.

And I think that's true.

We don't live our life for our glory, our honor, our fame, that name on the back of our jersey.

We live our life for the name, the fame, and the glory of Jesus.

Because here's what I know, and here's what I've experienced, and here's what I believe you will find true as well.

You will find freedom when you humble yourself under the name of Jesus.

So if you're watching this and there's never been a point in time that you have trusted Jesus as your savior, where you've set aside your self-righteousness and you've humbled yourself before him, crying out for salvation that you knew only he could bring.

Maybe you need to do that right now.

Or if you have been following Jesus for a while, but maybe you feel like you've been getting off track, what I want you to know is this.

When we live for the name of Jesus, we find freedom from the weight of our own.

Man, this world has such a heavy burden placed on us, I think, through social media and the access to our lives.

We think that people should get to and are allowed to see into every part of our lives.

And, you know, because of that, it's made us kind of fake those parts of our lives where we try to pretend that these are natural scenarios and they're not because everybody watching your TikTok knows that you had to set up a camera to record yourself having this spontaneous moment.

But it comes with such a burden, right?

Like, what are people gonna think about me?

How are people gonna see me?

How will people look at me?

But I'm telling you, there's freedom from the burden of self-centeredness.

When you stop living for the fame of your name and you start living simply for the name of Jesus, there is so much freedom from all of that.

And so I just want to remind you today that Jesus is the name above every name.

It's not about our name, it's about his.

We're not called to make a name for ourselves, we are called to lift his high.

And the goal of following Jesus is not that people would remember our name.

The goal of following Jesus is that when people see our life, they see his life in us.

They see his name over us, and they come to know him just as we have.

So maybe today, as we launch into this series, and as the school year is getting restarted and it seems like everybody's trying to get back into a routine, maybe before you do, you would just pause and ask yourself, whose name have I been living for?

Have I been living for my own name?

Have I been living for my kids' name, trying to make much of them?

Have I been living for the name of a company that owns way more of me than I should?

Have I been living for any other name but the name of Jesus?

Because if you're living for any other name, that burden will ultimately crush you.

But when we live for the name of Jesus, it will bring freedom.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pray for you.

And if we can help you, if we can pray for you specifically, if we can talk to you, reach out, let us know.

We are here to help you follow Jesus and live for his name.

But let me pray for you.

God, thank you for the time that you've given us today to look to your word and start this series.

God, I pray that you would help us learn to live with the humility, obedience, and sacrifice that Jesus displayed for us through his life.

God, that you would bring us the freedom that comes with not living for ourselves, but living for him.

Making much of who he is and what he has done, and not have to struggle with self-promotion, self-exaltation, building our own brand.

God, that you would help us just to lift up the name of Jesus through how we live, what we say, how we treat others around us.

God, I pray that as we continue on in this series, that you would help us discover or even rediscover the identity that we've been given in Christ and the freedom that comes with it.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.