Now Paul is going to tell us about the mind of Christ.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus [Phil. 2:5].

The mind of Christ—what is the one thing that characterized it? Humility. You may recall that in Ephesians 4 we are told, "… walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called." Then it goes on to describe this: "With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love" (Eph. 4:1–2). That is the mind of Christ.

You and I can’t be humble. We can’t be meek. We are not made that way. We want to stand on our own two feet and have our little say. All of us are like that. Don’t say you are not, because you really are. None of us wants to be offended. None of us wants to be ignored. We develop hang–ups if we are brought up in such a way that we have been trampled on.

I heard about the son of a very fine minister who had become a vagrant. Why? It was because he had an older brother who was a brilliant fellow. This boy was always hearing about the brilliant things his older brother was doing. So he just went in the opposite direction, rebelling against it. That is the natural reaction of the natural man. It wouldn’t even help matters to go to the boy and say, "Now listen, son, you just ignore all that." He is not going to ignore it. A man who is not born again is not even in the territory of being willing to take a humble place.

We come now to one of the great theological statements in the Scripture. Some consider it the greatest doctrinal statement in the New Testament relative to the person of Christ, and it is know as the kenosis, the "emptying." This passage will make it clear that He did not empty Himself of His deity. It will give us the seven steps of humiliation which Christ took. I wish I were capable of sketching for you the magnitude of what is being said in these next few verses. I wish we could grasp how high He was and how low He came. The billions of light years across known space are nothing compared to the distance He came.

We find here seven steps downward. Then we have listed for us seven steps upward, the exaltation of Christ. First, then, in humiliation, we see the mind of Christ. Then we will see the mind of God. It is in the mind of God the Father to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ. If you want to know what you can do that will put you in the will of God—I don’t know where you are to go or what you do—but I can tell you this: Since it is the purpose of God the Father to exalt Jesus Christ, I believe that is the will of God for every one of us. We are to exalt Jesus Christ, wherever we are and in whatever we do. We are to be one with the Father in this ultimate purpose of the exalation of Jesus Christ.

The first step downward was when He left heaven’s glory. He came down and down and down to this earth, all the way to where we are. You and I cannot even conceive of what a big step it was from heaven’s glory all the way down to this earth. Absolutely, it is beyond human comprehension to understand what our Lord really did for us.

Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God [Phil. 2:6].

This is, I confess, a rather stilted translation. When Christ was at the right hand of God the Father, He wasn’t hanging on to His position. There was no danger of His losing His place in the Godhead because of any lack on His part or because of the ability and ambition of a contender. He hadn’t gone to school to learn to become God; He had not advanced from another position. He was God. It wasn’t as if the Lord Jesus had to say to God the Father, "Now You be sure to keep My position for Me while I’m gone for thirty–three years. Keep a sharp eye out for Gabriel—I think he would like to have My place." I am not being irreverent; I am trying to show you that this was not something that He had to hold on to. The position belonged to Him. He was God.

Nor did He leave heaven reluctantly. At no time did He say, "Oh, I just hate to leave heaven. I don’t want to go down on that trip." He came joyfully. "… for the joy that was set before him …" (Heb. 12:2, italics mine) He endured the cross. He said, "… Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God" (Heb. 10:7). He came to this earth with joy. He was not releasing something that He wanted to hold on to when He came to this earth.

Now we see the second step down.

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men [Phil. 2:7].

"Made himself of no reputation" means to empty—the Greek word is kenoo. The kenosis theory derives its name from the word kenoo. Christ emptied Himself. The question is: Of what did He empty Himself? There are those who say He emptied Himself of His deity. All of the Gnostics in the early church propounded the first heresy that He emptied Himself of His deity, that the deity entered into Him at the time of His baptism and left Him at the cross. Well, this theory is not substantiated anywhere in the Word of God. He emptied Himself of something, but it was not of His deity. He was 100 percent God when He was a baby reclining helplessly on the bosom of Mary. Even at that time He could have spoken this universe out of existence because He was God. There was never a moment when He was not God. The apostle John writes, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things ere made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made…. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us …" (John 1:1–3, 14).

Well, then, of what did the Lord Jesus empty Himself when He came to this earth? I believe that He emptied Himself of the prerogatives of deity. He lived on this earth with certain limitations, but they were self–limitations. There was never a moment when He wasn’t God. And He was not less God because He was man, yet He emptied Himself of His prerogatives of deity.

The few shepherds and wise men, and even the multitude of angels, were a sorry turnout for the Son of God when He came to this earth. Not only should that crowd have been there, but the whole universe should have been there. All of God’s created intelligences should have been there. The hierarchy of Rome should have been there. There should not have been just a few wise men from the East. They should have come from the West, and the North, and the South. And the temple in Jerusalem should have been empty that day—they should all have gone down to Bethelhem. But they didn’t.

Why didn’t He force them to come? Because He had laid aside His prerogatives of deity. He was willing to be born in a dirty, filthy place—not the pretty, clean stable of Christmas pageants and Christmas cards. He was willing to grow to manhood in a miserable town named Nazareth. He was willing to be an unknown carpenter. He could have had the shekinah glory with Him all the time, but He didn’t. He didn’t have a halo around His head as we see in so many paintings of Him. Judas had to kiss Him the night He was betrayed so that the crowd would know which was the man they were to capture. He didn’t stand out from other men by some kind of inner light or glory around Him. He was a human being, but He was God manifest in the flesh. He laid aside the prerogatives of His deity.

Can we be sure of that? I think we can. After He had finished His ministry, He gathered His own about Him on His last night on earth, and He prayed a very wonderful prayer to His heavenly Father. One thing He said in that prayer was this: "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (John 17:5). Notice this carefully: He prayed to have His glory restored. He did not pray to have His deity restored, because He had never given up His deity. But now that He is returning to heaven, He is asking that His glory, the glory light, a prerogative of deity, be restored. Obviously He had laid that aside. "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation."

The third step downward in the humiliation of Christ is this: "And took upon him the form of a servant."

Jesus came to this earth as a servant. He worked as a carpenter. I suppose if you had lived in Nazareth in that day, you could have gone by the shop where Jesus worked and told Him you needed some repair work done at your house—"I have a door that is coming off the hinges; I wonder if You would come and fix it?" I think He would have said, "I’ll be right over." You see, He took upon Himself the form of a servant. He could have been born in Caesar’s palace. He was a king, but He never made that claim during those early years—in fact, He didn’t make it until He rode into Jerusalem in the so–called Triumphal Entry.

He came into this world as a working man, a humble man, a little man. Not only did He humiliate Himself to become a human being, but He came among the majority where most of us are today. He was one of the little people.

The prophet Isaiah wrote that Christ would come as a "root of Jesse" (see Isa. 11:10). As a young preacher I often wondered why Isaiah didn’t call Him a root out of David. Well, I have discovered the reason. When Jesus was born, Mary, who was in the line of David (and Joseph, who was also in the Davidic line by another route), was a peasant. They were working folk living in that little, miserable, gentile town called Nazareth. Then wasn’t Jesus in the line of David? Oh, yes. David was anointed king, but his father Jesse was a farmer in Bethlehem, and his line had dropped back to the place of a peasant. Our Lord was born into a peasant family.

"He took upon him the form of a servant."

The fourth step in His humiliation is this: "And was made in the likeness of men."

For years this did not impress me at all, because I am a man and I like being a man. I couldn’t see that being a man was a humiliation. I think there is a dignity about being a human being that is quite wonderful. How can it be humbling?

Let me give you a very homely illustration that I trust might be as helpful to you as it is to me. I confess it is rather ridiculous, but it will illustrate the humiliation of Christ in His incarnation.

When we first came to California in 1940, we had the experience of living in a place where the bugs and the ants are not killed off in the wintertime. We got here the first of November and had not been here long until I found in the kitchen one morning a freeway of ants coming into the sink. They were coming down one side and going back on the other side. Also I found they had discovered the sugar bowl, and they had a freeway in and out of it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want ants in the sink and I don’t want ants in the sugar bowl. So I began to investigate and learned that the thing we had to do was to kill them. Now I’m just not sadistic; I’m not brutal; I don’t like to kill things. But I began to kill ants. I got ant poison, and we got rid of the ants. Then when we moved over to our own home, here were ants. They had found out where we’d moved. I have a wonderful Christian friend who is in the bug–killing business. He comes to my place twice a year, sprays everything—under the house, under the eaves, the trees—everything, and you can’t find an ant on my place.

Now I do not know this to be a fact, but I have a notion that the ants had a protest meeting around my lot. Maybe they carried banners that read, "Down with McGee. He hates ants!" But, frankly, I don’t hate ants. That’s not my hang–up at all. If I had some way of communicating with those ants and getting a message to them, I’d say, "Look here. I don’t hate you. Just stay out of the sugar bowl, and stay out of the sink. I’ll put sugar and water outside for you—I’d be glad to do that if you’d just stay outside." But I do not know how to get that message over to the ants—except by becoming an ant. Now suppose that I had the power to become an ant. (If I could do it, I would not do it because I know some folk who would step on me if I were an ant!) But listen, if I could become an ant—from where I am now down to the position of an ant—that would be humiliation, wouldn’t it? I’d hate to become an ant. But, my friend, that is nothing compared to what my Lord did when He left heaven’s glory and became a man, when He took upon Himself our humanity, when He was made in the likeness of men.

And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross [Phil. 2:8].

The fifth step in our Lord’s humiliation is that He humbled Himself. "And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself." You and I have been humbled by someone doing or saying something which has been humiliating to us. But notice that Christ "humbled himself." This is a most difficult thing to do.

One of the finest things I ever heard about John Wesley was concerning an incident when he was about to cross a brook over which was a very narrow bridge, just wide enough for one person. As he was starting over, he met a liberal preacher of that day. This preacher swelled up and said, "I never give way to a fool." John Wesley looked at him for a moment, smiled, and began to back off, saying, "I always do." My friend, it is difficult to take that humble place, but it has made me think a great deal more of John Wesley. We find it difficult to humble ourselves, but our Lord humbled Himself.

Many of us have had humbling experiences. I am reminded of a summer conference at which I was speaking years ago. One of the speakers at this conference was a most dignified Englishman. He was a gifted speaker and very dignified. He was shocked when I wore a sport shirt even on the platform. To him that was the unpardonable sin. He wore a white shirt, collar, and tie; in fact, he wore a frock coat for the evening services! Well, one afternoon it rained, and in the auditorium a window glass had been broken out so that it had rained in on the platform. In those early days all the speakers in any week would march onto the platform every night, regardless of who was bringing the message. On that particular night I walked behind this dignified, formally dressed Englishman, and when he hit that wet spot on the platform, his feet went out from under him. Oh, how he sprawled! And, you know, everybody laughed. I laughed so hard I had to leave the platform. After I went back and sat down on the platform, I thought I never could quit laughing. The next night we started in as usual, and he was right ahead of me again. I reached over and said, "Say, it’d be nice to have a repeat performance tonight." "Oh," he said, "wasn’t that humbling!" Yes, he was humbled, but he did not humble himself. Many times we are humbled, are we not? But we do not humble ourselves.

The Lord Jesus humbled Himself, and that is altogether different.

We come now to the sixth step in His humiliation: "and [He] became obedient unto death." Death is a very humiliating sort of thing. It is not natural. Sometimes at funerals I hear people say, "Doesn’t he look natural?" It is generally said by some well–meaning friend who wants to comfort the loved ones. I don’t know why it would be a source of comfort to think that Grandpa looks natural in death. I bite my lip to keep from saying, "No, he doesn’t look natural." Death is not natural. God didn’t create man to die. Man dies because of sin, because of his transgression. Death came by the transgression of one man, and that man was Adam, and death has passed down to all men. Death is not natural. God did not create man to die.

Now when the Lord Jesus came to this earth, He was a little different from the rest of us. You and I came to live. I honestly don’t want to die; I want to live. I have come to the most fruitful part of my ministry, and I want to live as long as the Lord will let me. But the Lord Jesus was born to die. He came to this earth to die. He didn’t have to die, but He "became obedient unto death" and gave Himself up willingly. I have to die, but I don’t want to. He didn’t have to die, but He wanted to. Why? In order that He might save you and me if we will put our trust in Him. This is what He said: "As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep…. Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again …" (John 10:15, 17–18).

The seventh and last step in the humiliation of Christ is "even the death of the cross." Not only did He become obedient unto death, but to the death of the cross. This would make a greater impact on our consciousness if we said that Christ died in the electric chair or the gas chamber or by the hangman’s noose. It was that kind of disgraceful death. He came from the highest glory to the lowest place of humiliation. Why did He do it? Let’s go back to the word others. "Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others." He left all the glory of heaven and came down to this earth, became a man, and suffered the death of a criminal for others—for you and me. Thank God for that! This is the mind of Christ.