Missio Dei: WK3 - TUE
THE DIRECTION OF THE MISSION
Philippians 2:5-8 (NLT) “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.”
Most of us spend our lives trying to move upward in relation to other people. Upward into influence, upward into recognition, upward into positions where we are less vulnerable and more difficult to ignore. Even when our motives are sincere, there is usually some part of us still reaching for altitude, because altitude feels safer. If I can just get high enough, respected enough, successful enough, perhaps I can finally stop feeling exposed.
Then Jesus arrives and moves in the opposite direction.
From the highest conceivable place, equality with God, down into the fragility of ordinary human life. Paul’s point in Philippians 2 is not simply that Jesus was humble in a general moral sense. He is describing a movement downward, a voluntary descent into limitation, dependence, obscurity, suffering, even humiliation. “Have this mind among yourselves,” Paul says. In other words, let this become your orientation too.
That is the part we tend to resist.
Because nearly every culture, including ours, trains people to associate upwardness with success. We optimize for visibility. We want access to rooms where our names matter. We instinctively build identities around distinction and importance. Even ministry can quietly become another strategy for staying above others, another way of becoming the competent one, the needed one, the admired one who always has something to offer but rarely needs anything in return.
What makes Jesus’s movement so arresting is that it was chosen. Nothing was taken from him. He relinquished position willingly. The one through whom Christians claim the world itself was made entered history through the exhaustion and vulnerability of childbirth, depended on parents to feed him, learned carpentry with human hands that could splinter and bleed, wept openly at the grave of a friend.
The movement of Jesus was always toward. Toward the sick, the ashamed, the socially unwanted, the grieving, the guilty, the frightened. Toward suffering rather than away from it. Toward death itself.
And when Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you,” he is not removing that downward direction from the equation. He is inviting his followers into the same movement.
Philippians 2:5-8 (NLT) “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.”
Most of us spend our lives trying to move upward in relation to other people. Upward into influence, upward into recognition, upward into positions where we are less vulnerable and more difficult to ignore. Even when our motives are sincere, there is usually some part of us still reaching for altitude, because altitude feels safer. If I can just get high enough, respected enough, successful enough, perhaps I can finally stop feeling exposed.
Then Jesus arrives and moves in the opposite direction.
From the highest conceivable place, equality with God, down into the fragility of ordinary human life. Paul’s point in Philippians 2 is not simply that Jesus was humble in a general moral sense. He is describing a movement downward, a voluntary descent into limitation, dependence, obscurity, suffering, even humiliation. “Have this mind among yourselves,” Paul says. In other words, let this become your orientation too.
That is the part we tend to resist.
Because nearly every culture, including ours, trains people to associate upwardness with success. We optimize for visibility. We want access to rooms where our names matter. We instinctively build identities around distinction and importance. Even ministry can quietly become another strategy for staying above others, another way of becoming the competent one, the needed one, the admired one who always has something to offer but rarely needs anything in return.
What makes Jesus’s movement so arresting is that it was chosen. Nothing was taken from him. He relinquished position willingly. The one through whom Christians claim the world itself was made entered history through the exhaustion and vulnerability of childbirth, depended on parents to feed him, learned carpentry with human hands that could splinter and bleed, wept openly at the grave of a friend.
The movement of Jesus was always toward. Toward the sick, the ashamed, the socially unwanted, the grieving, the guilty, the frightened. Toward suffering rather than away from it. Toward death itself.
And when Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you,” he is not removing that downward direction from the equation. He is inviting his followers into the same movement.
- In what ways are you tempted to pursue status, recognition, or control?
- What would it look like to follow Jesus in downward movement and service?
- Who around you needs someone willing to move toward them rather than away from them?
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