Easter 2024

Morning, church.

Uh reading from the book of Philippians.

Have this mind amongst yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not account did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.

Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon 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 confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thank you for joining us this Easter morning.

The appropriate way to start an Easter service is he is risen.

Wow, you guys are well trained.

Thank you for uh joining us this morning.

My name is James Rasman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Oh no, it sounded like something terrible happened over there.

Cancel the second service.

We are thrilled to worship together with you this morning to celebrate the resurrection of our Savior and what exactly that means for us.

So we're going to move through this text today that's perhaps not a typical Easter text, but it it captures the wonder of the humility of Jesus Christ and encourages us to take on that same mind for ourselves.

And so we're going to look at that together this morning.

But before we do, would you pray with me?

Father in heaven, how great your love is towards us, that you would send your only Son, that he might die on our behalf, and that you might offer us his righteousness by faith in him.

Holy Father, a man might die for a good man, but who would die for the unrighteous?

And yet you demonstrate your own love towards us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Lord, we praise you for the depth of your love towards us.

And because of the depth of your love towards us, we pray that your name this morning would be highly exalted.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So there's this strange pattern in Scripture, which is that when God shows up into a situation, things turn literally upside down.

So we can hear this in these two prayers of these two mothers in the scriptures, the first of which is the prayer of Hannah.

Hannah is the mother of Samuel, who'd become one of the great prophets of the Old Testament.

And in her prayer, when she recognizes, receives the birth of her son, she prays this in 1 Samuel 2, verse 5.

1 Samuel 2:5

Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.

The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn.

We can hear in her prayer, this prayer of celebration at the birth of a son, there's this inversion that takes place.

The hungry are full, those who are full have hired themselves out for bread.

The barren mother is uh celebrating, the one who has seven is forlorn.

When God shows up, the world turns upside down.

In this very prayer is echoed by Mary when she is uh told of the birth of her son, our Savior, Jesus Christ.

In Luke chapter one, verses fifty-two through fifty-three, she sings in the Magnificat, He has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate.

He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Now these are sort of weird things to pray at the birth of a son, and it is a prayer of God's miraculous coming into the world.

And when God miraculously comes into the world, the exalted are humiliated and the humble are exalted.

And we see this pattern throughout scripture, and it's a pattern that theologians refer to as humiliation and exaltation.

And it's a strange pattern, but I know that you actually understand it because you understand it in the narratives of Scripture.

Although when it's laid out as plainly as it is in those prayers, it seems sort of strange.

But in the narratives of Scripture, you get it.

So consider the narrative of Joseph.

His is a story of humiliation, as Joseph, the one who would rescue God's people from the famine, begins his story by being sold into slavery, abandoned by his brothers, buried in a pit, placed into prison.

His story is one of humiliation, and then he is raised up into the highest seat in the greatest empire of the world at that time.

And so his story ends in exaltation.

It is this pattern of humiliation and exaltation.

Consider the story of Moses, which we're going through now as a church together in Exodus.

And we see that his story begins in humiliation.

He is just numbered among the sons who are to be destroyed by Pharaoh.

He is abandoned, in a sense, by his own parents, and experiences this depth of humiliation.

And then he is chased out of Egypt by Pharaoh, abandoned by the people who he was determined to save, and finds himself a wanderer, forgotten for forty years, a shepherd alone in a foreign land.

And this is the man who will become the rescuer of Egypt.

Consider David's story.

David is promised to be the king.

He is the forgotten one among his own brothers.

And then once he finally makes his way into the palace, he is chased out by the current sitting king Saul.

He finds himself hiding among the enemies of God's people, hiding among the Philistines, and literally pretending to be insane so that he isn't killed by them.

He is utterly humiliated.

And then he becomes the one who unites the kingdom of God.

Humiliation and then exaltation.

This is March Madness.

That's called a segue.

And in March Madness, what is it that we call, you know, the what we're all looking to see is like the Grand Canyon University who just keeps playing.

And we learn two things.

Grand Canyon University exists.

And they've got a pretty good basketball team.

And what do we call that?

You know what we call it.

That's in March Madness.

Cinderella.

Cinderella.

So you know the story.

It's all in the name of that princess.

Cinderella.

Her name means little ashes, for those of you that don't speak French.

And she is the hidden one, abandoned.

Her father dies.

She's just with her wicked stepmother and her wicked stepsisters who keep her.

Her only friends, I don't know if you've seen the movie recently, her only friends are mice and birds.

If you haven't seen the movie recently, because you don't have a three-year-old daughter, perhaps, I would say 60% of that movie is just mice playing tricks on cats.

It is the majority of the movie.

You think it's mostly about Cinderella and Prince Charming.

It's not.

It's mostly like animal slapstick in that movie.

But the the point is that her uh she is the hidden one, the hidden beauty, and uh her she is does not have a dress made by the loveliest of tailors.

She has uh clothes that are put together by her by mice who played tricks on cats to get the thread.

She doesn't end up actually wearing that dress because the her secret her fairy godmother shows up.

And you guys have seen the story.

The point is, she's the hidden one, and she is the one who the glass slipper fits.

And when that happens, when the one who is most humiliated becomes the one who is rightly exalted, we know that's a story worth telling.

We know something right has happened here.

So you understand this principle of humiliation and exaltation.

You understand it narratively.

When you see it, you know it.

It speaks to your heart.

So, what is happening there?

Why do we get this narratively?

Well, the exalting of the humble has this sense of God coming in and revealing the true glory that has been covered up and hidden by the corrupt structures of the world.

See, there is a true glory that's hidden by the sinful, greedy corruption of the world.

And it takes God showing up to reveal how things ought to be rightly oriented.

They ought to be rightly oriented towards the good, the true, the beautiful, the servant princess who is not greedy like her stepsisters, who is seen by the prince and recognized.

When the prince shows up, things ought to be rightly ordered.

And that is the case when the Lord shows up, that the right order makes its way back into the world, and the humble are exalted, and the exalted are humbled.

Now, the maximal version of the story of humiliation and exaltation is the story of Jesus Christ.

There is no, it is the limit case of this story.

There is no possible way to tell it in a more complete term than the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ.

Because nobody has come from higher and gone down lower.

And no one, having been so low, has been raised higher.

It is the premier example of humiliation and exaltation.

So this morning we're going to look in our text at the humiliation and exaltation of Christ and what this means for us.

Philippians 2, 5 through 6.

This is the theme that Paul is describing.

He says, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Paul commends to the Philippians, he says, Have a mind like this among yourselves, have a humility like this amongst yourselves towards one another, like Christ.

Now consider the position that he was in, who though he was in the very form of God, did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped.

Although Christ is the eternally begotten second person of the Trinity, who is very God himself, existing in joy forever within the persons of the Trinity.

He is very God.

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

Now, when we hear grasped, we might think attained, but that's not the connotation that we should have for this Greek word.

The connotation that it should carry for us is not grasped as though Christ might attain to the position of being God, but it is jealously holding for your own benefit.

Jesus did not count holding on to his position as God as something worth holding for his own benefit.

But instead, in verse 7, it says, emptied himself.

Now there's all these strange ways of talking about this, because you see, God's emptying himself in Christ is a taking on.

When we're talking about this dynamic of what happened, we have to use all these strange, almost contradictory terms.

His emptying himself was a taking on of our humanity, taking on the very form of a servant.

He was emptied in that he took on our position, our position as creatures under a creator, our position as humble before the one who created us.

This is the position that Christ took on.

But it is not just that he took on the position of a man, but even lower than that.

He took on the very form of a servant, a slave, a man beneath all other men.

He was utterly humiliated in his taking on flesh.

But he was humbled even beyond that, from his great position.

In verse 8, Paul writes, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

That is what we remember this morning.

That our Lord, in the very position of God, humiliated himself by becoming the form of a servant, and more than that, being obedient unto death, going to the cross.

So consider the maximum version of this story we could imagine.

Who has been, you know, if in our scripture reading that we're doing together as a church, we just read the story of Nebuchadnezzar.

This is one of those bizarre stories in Scripture, of which there's a few.

And in this one, Nebuchadnezzar is the king of Babylon.

He's the greatest king in the world at that time.

And he's walking on his palace, and he thinks to himself, Ah, look at what I have made.

I've united the world under Babylon.

And then God says, You will be utterly humiliated.

And then he lives like a beast.

It's like it's a werewolf story.

Like I don't know if it is completely a werewolf story.

Because he becomes hairy, and then he goes and lives like a like a wolf in the woods.

And he's utterly humiliated.

Now that is a large version of this story, the most powerful king to be alive, living like a beast in the field, but it is not as much as this story.

There is no position higher than God.

And yet he did not consider holding on to that for his own advantage.

What are the advantages of being God?

I could think of a few.

And become wrongly condemned in death, humiliated before a false counsel, lying witnesses, betrayed and abandoned by his friends, mocked as a king, raised up in death for all to see, treated as the greatest of sinners and rebels, receiving in his body the wrath of God for the sins of mankind.

Utterly humiliated.

But then there is this turn in the story in Philippians that Paul is telling us in verse 9, the next verse, Paul writes, Therefore, because of this humiliation, therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

Now, this whole sermon came out of a personal frustration that I had with the word therefore.

And I kept thinking, I don't understand the connection.

Because so you're so he's utterly humiliated.

Therefore, he is highly exalted.

What is the reason, though?

What's the reason for him being highly exalted?

And and consider he is the second person of the Trinity.

He is God.

He's already the most highly exalted.

Why are we saying that Christ is highly exalted when he already, because of his humiliation, when he already has that name?

Well, consider two reasons.

Christ is exalted because of his humiliation, because in his humiliation, we see that this man who is born in a lowly state beneath other men, rejected by the world, that this man was truly God.

Now, how do we see that in his humiliation?

We see it because, like God, in his humiliation, he shows his love for his enemies.

God is the one who loves his enemies.

And in Christ's humiliation, we see he is like God.

Because his death is not an arbitrary humiliation, it is a payment for sins, so that those who are his enemies might be counted as his sons and daughters.

And in that we see that this lowly man demonstrates the love of the Father.

The second reason that he ought to be exalted because of his humiliation is that he did what no man could do.

He honored God in perfect obedience.

Even obedience unto death.

Consider this Adam in the garden, the first man, like this show.

Adam is in the garden, they do just happen.

I was talking with Ryan beforehand, and I was like, there's gonna be no references this morning, so this is a serious Sunday, and he said, those just flow out of you, and they do.

He honored God in perfect obedience, obedience unto death.

Consider Adam in the garden.

Adam is promised, if you are obedient to me, you will receive life.

And Adam failed.

He would rather exalt himself over God than receive the promise of life for his humility before God.

Christ is promised by the Father that if you are obedient to me, you will receive death.

And Christ shows his love towards us in his perfect obedience to the Father, even at the promise of death.

Because of his perfect obedience, he ought to be the name that is highly exalted above every name.

So what does this mean for us?

I hate the feeling of being humiliated.

I bet some of the clearest.

Stories in your own mind are of times when you have felt humiliated.

Can you remember them?

Turn to your neighbor and share.

The i they come, they they you might not be able to recall it right now, but tonight, when you're trying to fall asleep, you'll remember it.

I'm pretty sure I got put together by the guy that sold me these solar panels on my house.

And I'll think about it at night, and I'll remember the line he used to close me, and I'll think I was a salesman.

I know that line.

Why did it work on me?

And I was humili I'm humiliated when I think of it.

Now, those are stories like that though are not the greatest depths of humiliation.

The greatest depths of humiliation are when it's revealed that I've not lived with integrity towards my friends who I love.

And I see the break in our relationships because of my sin.

When I have not honored my wife, and I must confess my sin towards her, when I realized that the problem in this toxic dynamic was me.

And I realized that there's cost and consequence for my sin.

Now, our culture knows that there are few powers like humiliation.

And we hold humiliation in a sort of place of honor in our culture.

So consider this humiliation is in one sense the one thing that is not allowed.

No one can be humiliated for their life choices, all of which are the same and equally valid.

But if you are humiliating someone for their life choices, then you will receive the punishment of absolute humiliation and being ostracized from the polite company of the world.

When there is no true right and wrong, which is the state that our culture generally operates in, that there is no transcendent right and wrong, then there is no real basis for shame.

And if there is no real basis for shame, then none of the shame that you feel is real.

It's something that's been falsely externally imposed upon you because you've internalized some puritanical sex ethic or some Western body standards or been labeled a liar.

So it's been imposed upon you, and therefore you're falsely experiencing shame by the false imposition of the world.

Or it's pathological and it's in you.

But because there's no true right and wrong, there's no reason to experience shame.

But it's just a race.

We outshame one another, that way we might feel justified in our own eyes.

And that is the way our culture operates, and so we tear one another apart.

But those are how humiliation works in our culture.

And what I want to talk about and bring our attention to this morning is why humiliation works.

And humiliation works.

Why does humiliation work?

It works not because it is fundamentally false about us.

When we think of humiliation, we often think that we are encountering something that's fundamentally false.

You're believing a lie about the actions that you've created.

And it's the oppressive nature of our culture which makes you feel humiliated for that.

Now, our culture doesn't get everything right.

That's my insight for this morning.

But that doesn't mean all humiliation is wrong or false or untrue.

Because there was once a garden, and a man and a woman lived in that garden, and they were naked together and perfectly unashamed.

And as they were unashamed in the garden, they were unable to be exploited by humiliation.

They had nothing to be humiliated about.

But in their sin, they start hiding themselves from the Lord.

And they seek to cover their own humiliation.

So God seeks them and they hide themselves.

Now, why were they humiliated?

Because in their sin they exalted themselves above God.

We are not above God.

There is one whose name deserves to be highly exalted above all other names.

And when we treat ourselves as though we are God and God shows up, our exaltation becomes humiliation.

But God, because of the great love with which He loved us, took on this very humiliation, which is our due, took it on to the point of death on a cross, so that he might gather the ones who ought to be humiliated, take their humiliation upon himself, and in his grace towards us raise us up in an exaltation that is like his own.

Because of that, he is the one who should be most highly exalted.

In Philippians 2, verses 10 through 11, Paul says, So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:10–11

Jesus Christ will be glorified.

Now, how is it that you participate in the glory of Jesus Christ?

Well, every knee will bow, this is the promise.

But will you bow from a place of exaltation in which your bowing will be a being made lower, a broken pride, or will you bow from humility, which says, I could not save myself, but the free grace of Jesus has rescued me.

And so I bow in humility before him and receive him as Lord.

And that will be a bowing of joy and of his due exaltation.

And this morning let us bow in that way towards him.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11 23, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So Christ, on the night before he was betrayed, he took the bread and he broke it, and he said, This is my body, which is broken for you.

And then he took the cup and he said, This is my blood, the blood of the new covenant which is poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.

So we come to the table this morning in remembrance that our righteousness is found in the humiliation of Christ, and we humbly receive that at the meal which he invites us to.

So let us pray for this meal.

Holy Father, we praise you for your loving kindness.

We praise you for you taking on our humiliation.

We pray that our hearts would highly exalt you.

Lord, let us find the true rest that you have forgiven us of our sins.

They are wiped away.

They're no more.

Lord, may your name be highly exalted.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.