Kenosis

OUTLINE

1. INTRODUCTION:

2. THE HIGHER CALLING – TO BE NOTHING

3. BACKGROUND ON PHILIPPIANS

4. PAUL ADDRESSES POSSIBLE CONFLICT WITHIN THE COMMUNITY

5. PAUL’S APPROACH – HAVE THE ATTITUDE OF CHRIST

6. BECOME NOTHING – KENOSIS EXPLAINED

7. COMMUNITY APPLICATION – HUMILITY, SUBMISSION, AND SELF-DENIAL

You know when you eat a lot of turkey you get kind of sleepy? I got sleepy, and the bad news about that is it means I have nothing prepared today. That doesn’t mean you get to get up and leave. It only means that you get to hear about nothing. You get to hear specifically how Christ became nothing for our sake and our salvation and taught us how to be nothing. There is actually a word that describes this nothingness and that word is a fancy Greek word called kenosis. We are going to learn about that today. If you have your Bibles, please open up to the Book of Philippians 2:1. If you are visiting with us today or you haven’t been here for a while, you may not know that we have been going through what we call the four core values of a church, which are worship, discipleship, outreach, and community.

Today, we are going to revisit this idea of community. Keep in mind when I say community, I am not talking about the larger community of Bellevue or Pittsburgh. I am talking about the church community. The body of Christ on earth. The people that have been called out from the world to live in community together. Not called out to live in isolation but called out to be different. As we read through this passage in Philippians today, we see that that is what Paul is trying to say. In a world where everybody is trying to jockey for position, where everybody is trying to be something, what Paul is saying is no. The higher calling is to be nothing. That is what we are going to see in today’s passage. I am going to read through Philippians chapter 2 all the way down to verse 11. (Scripture read here.)

A little bit of background on this particular letter. This is one of what they call Paul’s prison letters. He is writing from prison to this church in Philippi. This is a different type of letter than some of the other letters in that this letter is really not addressing any particularly church crisis. This letter is actually meant to be a word of encouragement to the people. Basically telling people to maintain their joy, their hope, their sense of holiness, their unity all within the midst of intense persecution. Even though it is meant to be just an encouragement letter, we also get hints that there is something else going on in that church in Philippi. We see that Paul is beginning to address that. There is some sort of conflict going on, so in order to keep it from spreading, he begins to address it. He starts out the letter by saying if you’ve got any encouragement from being united with Christ, if you’ve got any comfort of his love, if you have that fellowship with the spirit, then make my joy complete, being likeminded and being of single purpose. In other words, what he is saying is since you have all these things, since you are solid in your faith, make my joy complete. Basically, he is saying get along. He goes on to say “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interest but also to the interest of others.” Now if Paul is saying this, what it means is that there are probably people that are not doing this. There are people that are actually complaining. There are people that are actually exalting themselves, maybe jockeying for some sort of position within the church. People that are acting out of pride.

Now we don’t know the exact situation, but we get a hint of it when we look all the way back in Chapter 4 of this passage because we see the story of two women who seem to not be able to get along. Two women with funny names. I always mispronounce them, Euodias and Syntyche. In Chapter 4, we read out of The Message Translation he says “I urge Euodias and Syntyche to iron out their differences and make up. God doesn’t want his children holding grudges.” That is a loose translation but that gives you a pretty good idea that there is something going on. There is a little bit of bickering going on in the house. Paul wants to deal with that. As a side note, it is kind of sad that this is the only place that these two women are mentioned in the entire Bible. It’s sad to think the only mention has to do with the fact that they could not get along. That is a said thing. So Paul is saying do nothing out of conceit. Think of other people and that sort of thing. He is kind of ordering them to act in a certain way. But we know Paul, and Paul doesn’t just make these blanket commands. Paul tends to ground his request, ground his commands in the work of Jesus Christ. That is what he is doing here. Basically, he is going to ground it in the humility of Jesus Christ.