One of my favorite things about living in Vancouver, Canada, where I was for three years studying at Regent College, was the mountains. On a clear day, which were not that frequent, given how often it rained there, you could see the mountain range in the north of the city from just about anywhere.
One time in the first few months that I was living there, I was biking home from campus in the late afternoon, and I noticed there was a small alleyway between two houses at the top of this high hill, one of the many hills in the city. And through this alleyway, I can see a sliver of the mountains. So I pulled my bike off the main road and down the alley, and as I walked closer, this beautiful vista opened out in front of me, of the city and the silhouetted mountains behind. The sight took my breath away, and its beauty and vastness, and also its surprise. I wasn’t expecting to see it there. The sight of these mountains filled me with wonder, even joy. And in pausing to look at them, I allowed myself to be drawn out towards something so much bigger, so much greater than myself. Something that’s always there, always present on the horizon, even when I can’t see it.
After that, I’d often return to this alleyway on my commute home just to pause and to wonder at these mountains.
What would it look like to see Jesus with this kind of wonder? And how might such an experience of wonder change us? Today, as we explore Philippians chapter 2, verses 5 through 18, we’ll walk through these three movements. First, we’ll take some time to behold the glorious and wonderful humility and exaltation of Christ. Then we’ll consider how we respond to Christ’s humility, with fear and trembling, like standing before a beautiful mountainscape in wonder. Wonder that moves us to worship and to humble service. And lastly, we’ll look at how we can cultivate this practice of wonder, this posture of fear and trembling. So let’s keep these movements in mind as we move through the text today.
Two weeks ago, Dave preached a sermon on humility, looking at the theme of humility in Philippians building up to our passage for today. In this letter, Paul is inviting the Philippians, he’s inviting us, to imitate the humble way of Jesus, who descended to humanity, became a human, and was obedient unto death on the cross. This is what brings Paul joy, even while he’s in prison, to see his fellow believers living together in humility and unity.
But what is it about Christ’s humble way that Paul is asking his readers to behold and to imitate? We’ll find something of an answer to this in our passage for today in Philippians 2, which I invite you to open your Bibles if you’d like to follow along. We’ll start in verse 5 here with what is sometimes called the humility poem or the Christ hymn. So it reads, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped.” So Christ shares in the form, the very nature of God—He is God—but He does not count this equality with God as something to be grasped, something He’s trying to use for His own advantage or that He’s striving for.
Instead, He chooses to empty Himself. He strips Himself of status, taking on the form of a slave in human likeness. And then verse 8, it says, “He humbles Himself.” Some translators say even that He humiliated Himself. And He becomes obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
So Jesus isn’t giving up His equality with God, but He’s choosing not to grasp it, to use it to His own advantage. Instead, He expresses His equality with God in this self-emptying act of sacrificial love unto death on the cross. And because He is God, the ladder that Christ has to come down from His place with the Father is so much taller, so much higher than any mountain that we have to come down as we imitate Christ’s humility, so much taller than the fire ladder that Dave talked about. Imagine a ladder coming down from the highest peak of one of those mountains in Vancouver, descending into the valley. That is the height, the vastness of Christ’s humility.
So this is the first movement, looking at Christ’s humility and then at what happens as a result of Christ’s humility. Continuing in verse 9, Paul says, “Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place. He gave Him the name that is above every name.” Jesus, because of His humility, is exalted. And this is something to wonder at, which brings us to our second movement, our response to Christ’s humility, which is a response of wonder.
And wonder is what we see as the passage goes on. God exalted Jesus to the highest place. He gave Him the name above every other name, so that 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.
Our response to the humility of Jesus is a response of wonder and awe, bowing before Him and confessing that He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. As we look to Christ, we are drawn outside of ourselves to something, to someone, who is so much greater, who through His self-emptying humility is worthy of our praise. We worship a humble God, the glorious Lord Jesus Christ, who descended the tallest ladder of humility and who did not count His equality with God to be an object of desire, but emptied Himself. This is how God chose to launch His mission of cosmic salvation to restore and reconcile all things to Himself. He didn’t seek out or even try to use political power, or physical strength, or wealth, or intellectual prowess, but He humbled Himself to bring about our salvation.
And our right response to this humble God is a response of worship, of awe, reverence, and adoration. To gaze on the surprising beauty of Christ, which, like the mountains rising above Vancouver, fills us with wonder. When was the last time you found yourself filled with this kind of wonder at the work of Jesus Christ, at His humility? When the clouds cleared long enough for you to see His glory, when you sat at His feet just to wonder at the awe-inspiring work that He did, have you noticed if this posture of worship changed the way you lived out your faith?
As our passage goes on, we see something more of what this posture and our response to Christ looks like. After the humility poem about the work of Christ and starting in verse 12, Paul says, “Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Which is to say, practice your salvation. Live a life of faith born out of the knowledge that God has saved you. And do this from a posture of fear and trembling.
Maybe you, like me, hear the words “fear and trembling,” and this little thought bubble comes up above your head with a bunch of question marks in it. What can these words mean, to work out your salvation in fear and trembling? I don’t want to be a fearful person, or a person who trembles all the time. And what does working out your faith have to do with fear and trembling?
What Paul is saying here ties back, though, to the end of the humility poem in verses 10 through 11. It ties back to worship. To say that we live in fear and trembling is to say that we live in this posture of wonder and awe at the humble God who has been exalted, who has power over death, who is a consuming fire. To fear the Lord is not the same thing as being afraid of the dark, or fearing for one’s future, or being afraid for one’s safety. It’s a fear that’s born out of the knowledge of how great God is, how majestic and powerful and humble. And it’s a fear that acknowledges our own lowliness, our own smallness in the face of our glorious humble Savior as we gaze on the beauty of Christ, who is exalted to the highest place but who also chose to come close by becoming human.
So fear and trembling, this is our posture here towards God. And it’s a posture that Paul ties to living out our faith. He ties it to practice. We seek to live in imitation of Christ and His humble way in fear and trembling. And this humble way is a way of service, of a humility that’s enacted in deed.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who lived in the 16th century in Spain, was the founder of the Jesuit order. He was also a man who knew what it was to wonder at the living humble God. And he also lived a life of service. Ignatius is known to have said that humans were created for this end: to praise, reverence, and serve the Lord their God. To praise, reverence, and serve the Lord. Notice that he doesn’t say our end is just to praise or just to serve, but to praise, reverence, and serve. To live lives of awe and wonder out of which our service flows.
Evelyn Underhill, who’s responding to these words of Ignatius, writes that unless those first two are right, unless we’re practicing praise and reverence, the last of this triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of our lives, she says, is a practice or a movement of praise and adoration, the work which that life produces won’t be much good. Our service must be an outpouring, an overflow of our worship, of our posture of wonder and awe before the Lord.
So now we come to our third movement. What does this actually look like? How do we cultivate a practice of wonder, a spirit of fear and trembling before our humble God, such that our service flows out from a place of worship? One significant and perhaps rather obvious way that we do this is in coming together each week on Sunday for worship, like we’re doing right now. To sing songs of praise that reorient us, that turn our gaze towards Christ as we pause to wonder at His work. We can cultivate this spirit of fear and trembling when we read Scripture, when we slow down to meditate on a particular word or phrase about God’s character or His teaching, when we delight in the law of the Lord, when we meditate on His precepts, as the Psalms say.
We can do this when we go out in nature, when we behold the beauty of the mountains, as I did in that alleyway in Vancouver, or when we behold the Charles River from the Esplanade and the line of trees all golden and glowing along the edge, or the dappled light that comes through the trees in the Middlesex fells. We’re practicing wonder when we pause to thank God for the beauty of His creation and to delight in what He’s made. Maybe these kinds of spiritual practices feel a bit rote for you right now, a bit dry. Maybe you show up on Sunday for worship, but you’re feeling a bit distracted or weighed down by your own worries or fears. Or maybe the beauty of Christ feels like a distant reality, unrelatable, something that doesn’t speak to your actual day-to-day life.
In some seasons, it’s true: God does feel distant, and it can be hard to see Him, like the many days those clouds covered over the mountains around Vancouver. But there’s also the reality that the practice of intentionally turning aside, of biking down that alleyway to look for that horizon of God’s sweet humility—this is a practice that shapes us and transforms us. We can choose to cultivate a practice of wonder, and God desires to meet us in that. And when we do this, when we’re looking outwards in fear and trembling on the beauty of Christ, on that light-filled horizon, we begin to shine like stars in the universe, as it says in verse 15, as children of God without blemish in a crooked and perverse generation. When our gaze is so focused on Christ, when we are so steeped in the reality that Christ dwells in us, that it is His light that’s in us, we shine like stars in the world. Because a posture of worship draws our gaze outwards towards that horizon, towards the beauty of Christ’s self-emptying love. And our service, our counter-cultural way of humility in the world, shines the light of God through us.
At the end of our passage for today, Paul names what the result, what the fruit of this way of wonder is. And that fruit is joy. Paul himself knew well what this joyful, humble way of service looked like. He dedicated his life to Christ for the building up of the church, even when that meant ending up in prison. And as his many letters show us, as we even see in Acts 9 at his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul worked out his salvation in fear and trembling. He sat in awe before the humble exalted Lord Jesus Christ. And he encouraged others to do so as well.
That’s the place from which he wrote the humility poem, which is in itself an invitation to wonder at Christ’s humility. From his prison cell, Paul wrote here at the end of our passage, verses 17 through 18, “Even if I am being poured out as a drink offering over the sacrifice and the service of your faith, I rejoice. And I rejoice together with all of you. In the same way also, you should rejoice and be glad with me.”
Even as Paul, like Christ, is emptying himself—he’s being poured out for the sake of others—he rejoices. He looks at Christ’s humility, Christ’s descent into humanity and unto death. He looks at the way that God exalted Him and gave Him the name above every other name, and he praises Him. He wonders at His work. He knows that our right response, our duty, and our joy is to worship the humble God in fear and trembling. And I bet that Paul was also cultivating this posture, this practice of wonder in his day-to-day life.
I want to end here with the words from a hymn by William Faber. It’s called “The Fear of God.” And this hymn shows us a little bit of what this joyful worshipful posture looks like. It goes:
There is no joy the soul can meet
Upon life’s various road
Like the sweet fear that sits and shrinks
Under the eye of God.
A special joy is in all love
For objects we revere;
Thus joy in God will always be
Proportioned to our fear.
Amen.