Philippians 2 — The Mind of Christ

One mind, lowly mind (2:1–4)

Paul has a concrete worry: a church he loves is fraying at the edges into rivalry. His remedy is not a management technique but a disposition of heart. "Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love… doing nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." Humility (tapeinophrosyne) was not a virtue in the ancient world — it named the servile mindset of a slave. Paul makes it the mark of the Christian, and then, so we cannot mistake it for mere self-deprecation, he shows us what it looks like in God.

He emptied himself (2:5–8)

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus." What follows is likely a hymn the early church already sang, and it descends like a staircase. Christ, "existing in the form of God" — morphe theou, sharing the very nature and glory of God — "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped." The word is harpagmos: he did not treat his divine equality as loot to be clutched, a prize to exploit for himself.^* Instead he "emptied himself" — ekenosen — the great word of the kenosis. He did not empty himself of his deity; he emptied himself by addition, by taking "the form of a servant," the same doulos Paul called himself, "being born in the likeness of men." And the staircase keeps going down: found in human form, "he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Step by step — God, servant, man, corpse, and not just any death but the slave's death, the cursed death, the cross. There is no lower stair. This is the humility Paul is asking of a quarreling church: the humility of God.

Therefore God exalted him (2:9–11)

At the bottom of the staircase the direction reverses. "Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name." The verb is a rare double-compound — God super-exalted him — and the Name given is the covenant Name itself, Lord, before which, Isaiah said, "every knee shall bow." Paul takes the words God spoke about himself alone and applies them to Jesus without blinking: at the name of Jesus every knee in heaven and earth and under the earth will bow, "and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." The way up is down. The One who refused to grasp is the One God lifts highest. Exaltation is not the reward that cancels the humility; it is the humility vindicated.^*

Work out what God works in (2:12–18)

So, Paul says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" — and lest we hear self-effort, he finishes the sentence: "for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Not "work for your salvation" but "work out" what God is working in. The trembling is real, but it rests on grace: our striving is the surface of God's own working beneath it. Do it all "without grumbling," he adds — the very sin Israel died of in the wilderness — so that we "shine as lights in the world," holding fast the word of life.

Two who lived it (2:19–30)

Paul ends not with more theology but with two portraits of the hymn in ordinary flesh: Timothy, who unlike others does not "seek his own interests but those of Jesus Christ," and Epaphroditus, who "nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life." The mind of Christ is not an idea to admire but a life to be lived, and here are two men living it.

We should feel the sheer strangeness of what this chapter asks and answers. To a church tempted to grab for significance, Paul holds up a God who refused to grab — who counted equality with God not as a prize to exploit but as a position from which to serve, and went down all the way to a cross to rescue the very people who would not serve. Our pride is the reflex to clutch and climb; the gospel is the God who let go and descended. And the wonder is that he does not merely command us this mind — he gives it: "which is yours in Christ Jesus." The One at whose name we will bow is the One who bowed first, all the way down, for us.

:::pastor An illustration. Read the hymn as a staircase and count the stairs down: God, servant, man, obedient, death, the cross. Each word is lower than the last, and none of it was owed. We spend our lives trying to climb; the Lord of glory spent his coming down. Humility, then, is not thinking less of ourselves — it is being so secure in God that, like him, we no longer need to grasp.

From history. Most scholars read 2:6–11 as an early Christian hymn, quite possibly older than the letter itself — which means that within a couple of decades of the crucifixion, believers were already singing of Jesus in the language the Old Testament reserved for God alone, bending every knee to him as Lord. It is one of the earliest windows we have into how quickly, and how highly, the church worshiped Christ. source

Worth quoting. "He left His Father's throne above, so free, so infinite His grace; emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam's helpless race." — Charles Wesley, "And Can It Be" :::