A Beautiful Exchange

That’s something else. To embrace the fact that you are on this planet in order to exchange your life for the life of another, that you will die in order to save millions upon millions of other people.

That begins to scratch the surface of the greatest love of all – God’s love, the love that laid down its life in order to give you life, give me life, give all of humanity the chance to embrace and be embraced by the living God.

So the first part of the beautiful exchange is this: Your life for His.

Because He died for you, IF you believe that He died for you and you receive Him as what He is – the Lord and Saviour – you have abundant life right now and eternal life with God that’s already actually started.

When you die, in a blink you are before God. When you die, only because of what Jesus did for you on the cross, you are welcomed in to heaven. That’s absolutely awesome.

If you write poems, I hope you write poems about God’s passion for you and for the human race. If you write songs, I hope you sing about God’s greatest act of love.

If you are creative in relationships – and we all are – I hope you share, in a way that’s true to you, about the greatest love of all, embodied in one Man, who gave up His life for us.

Part Two of the Beautiful Exchange: His Attitude for Your Attitude

This brings us back to our key Scripture today. I love this passage and am especially happy that Maryellen introduced the song we sing, “May Our Attitude Be As That of Christ” years ago, because it’s the exact words of today’s version in the New International Version of the Bible, and it’s burned in to my memory because of that. Something about singing really helps you remember stuff.

Part two of the beautiful exchange is simply this: Our attitude for Jesus’ attitude. The Apostle Paul wrote this passage to help Christians understand how to live as Christians.

That suggests that even for the earliest Christians, there was a clear need to understand just how it is that Christians live life differently from others.

Sometimes we operate with the misunderstanding that all there is to being a Christian is the New Birth: believing in Jesus and Receiving Him as Lord and Saviour.

But as you know, birth is a beginning. A newborn child does not know anything, actually. [Maryellen, Ashley…how many books has Jacob [Madison] read so far?]

Without being born in the natural, there is no physical life possible. Without being born spiritually (or born again as Jesus says in John 3), there is no true and complete spiritual life possible in the way God intends.

Anyway, Paul writes Philippians 2 with a description of how, if we are to change, what should be the direction or trajectory of our lives.

[PPT] Philippians 2: 5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.