The Mind of Christ Among You

When I wrote that Christ "emptied himself" (Philippians 2:7), I did not mean he poured out his divinity and ceased to be God — the word carries the sense of making himself nothing, laying aside not his nature but his rights, his glory, his claim to be served. And when I said he took the "form of a servant," it is the same word I used for the "form of God" (Philippians 2:6): the true and outward reality of the thing. He who was truly God became truly a slave. That is the weight of it.

I take up this same descent elsewhere: "though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9). And I press the mind of Christ upon the strong for the sake of the weak — "let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up" (Romans 15:2). And the counting of others' interests before your own I urge again: "in humility count others more significant than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3).

The saints at Philippi were dear to me, partners in the gospel from the first day — yet there was friction among them, even two women who could not agree (Philippians 4:2). And I wrote from chains here in Rome, a prisoner. So I did not hand them a lofty theory; I set before them the Lord himself, who had every right to grasp and instead stooped all the way down to a cross, that a quarreling people might learn to stoop toward one another.

You may ask: if Christ emptied himself, did he stop being God? No — read the words closely. He "emptied himself, by taking" (Philippians 2:7); the emptying is not a subtraction but an addition, a taking on of our lowliness. He did not cease to be in the form of God; he refused to clutch it for his own comfort. That is the very point. The one who had the most gave up the most — and if you would grasp your small dignities, look at him and be ashamed, and then be free.