There once was a sculptor who was working hard with his hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little boy who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stones falling away left and right.
He had no idea what was happening. But when the boy returned to the studio a few weeks later, he saw to his great surprise a large, powerful lion sitting in the place where the marble had stood.
With great excitement the boy ran to the Sculptor and said, “Sir, tell me, how did you know there was a lion in the marble?” (Henry Nouwen, Clowning in Rome, p.87)
God is doing something new. God is making something new of our lives. He’s working with who are, who He created us to be and who we are at this point in our lives, but He’s transforming us in to…people who are different, people who are free, people who are…like Him.
Like the sculptor in that short story by Henri Nouwen, God is at work in our lives creating something good, something that is outside the range of our expectations and imaginations, something that is wonderful.
There is a beautiful exchange going on. And you are part of it. And there is nothing more exciting to BE a part of than what God is doing.
This beautiful exchange happens in two ways. The second follows the first.
Part One of the Beautiful Exchange: His Life for Your Life
In a chapter of the book of John that has rewritten me and rewired me hundreds of times over the years, Jesus says something amazing. He invites us into his circle.
These are words spoken by Jesus in the Upper Room on the night of His passion, His suffering. It is the night of what we know now was the first Eucharist, the communion that Pastor Ronda will celebrate with us in a short while.
And in what can (only) be described as an invitation to this beautiful exchange, Jesus speaks. We need to read and hear these words accurately.
This is the voice of the Creator, the Maker of all things, who has come to this planet to win a people for Himself in order to bless the whole earth and all peoples. This is the voice of Jesus Who is both God-in-the-Flesh and completely and fully human. He says: John 15:9 "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command.
This is a lot of messages in itself, but for step one of the beautiful exchange I want to focus in on verse 13.
There is no greater love than to give one’s life for another, to offer up oneself and one’s earthly existence in order that another person may live.
Think about it. What would it take for you to give up your life so that the person sitting next to you would live? What would it take?
What would make you choose to not live so that another could live? We might imagine that we would give our life for someone we love in a pinch, jumping into the crosshairs of a dangerous situation and risking our own lives for the sake of another.
And in fact this happens sometimes. Not often, but it happens.
We have a strong survival instinct, for one thing. It’s opposite to that instinct to allow our lives to be threatened, to put ourselves in harm’s way.
But Jesus. Jesus, for the first critical step of this beautiful exchange, offered Himself. And not just in a dangerous moment. Not in a snap decision to jump into the line of fire to protect you from death.
But knowing…knowing from before time began actually, that He would die for you. Knowing as He, the Word made flesh, was conceived in the Virgin Mary.
Knowing once here on planet earth, born as a human child… and growing into a young man…knowing all along that He came to die, for you and for me. Knowing that His life’s purpose was to die in our place so that God’s purpose would be fulfilled.
Of course Jesus came to teach about the Kingdom of God. Of course Jesus came to show us how to live. But the big picture is that all of Jesus’ teaching pointed to the cross, pointed to His suffering.
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.
This is interesting. In the NIV that we’re using, the word used is attitude. The oldest manuscripts actually say: “Have this mind in you”.
So what is the exchange here? What attitudes might we bring to Jesus that need transforming by His Holy Spirit. Well the number one North American norm has been, for years, that my job is to look out for number one.
Two mistakes there for the Christian. If we are to exchange our attitude for Jesus’ attitude, I’m not number one anymore. My happiness and fulfillment and gratification are no longer why I live.
My motive isn’t to please myself. What is my motive? My motive is to please God. To honour God with my life. My energies are not first and foremost to be put toward my purposes? Whose purposes need to become mine? God’s.
What’s amazing here, if you think about it, is that Jesus is in His very nature God. All the fullness of the Godhead bodily lives in Jesus, as it says in Colossians 2:9. Jesus has every right to His identity as God.
In truth, Jesus doesn’t even need to grasp at equality with God because He already has it. He has every legitimate reason to keep every aspect of His divinity in tact, every part of His deity at 100%.
But what does Jesus do, and how does that speak to us about how we are to live? Well, Jesus choose to not assert His equality with God.
The Message paraphrase of the Bible is helpful here:
“He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion”.
When we exchange our attitudes for Jesus’ attitude, we don’t have to put our energies into thinking about or maintaining whatever status we may think we have.
8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!
If our attitude is to be exchanged for Jesus’ own attitude then, our pride, our arrogance, our self-importance needs to be replaced with a profound sense of humility.
What does it mean to be humble? [not proud or arrogant; modest; synonyms include unpretending, un assuming; meek, which is strength under control].
The beautiful exchange then is that instead of an inflated sense of our selves, instead of having a sense of our being better than any other person, instead of comparing ourselves to others, we gain and accurate understanding of who we are – what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are.
Now Jesus’ own humility was ultimately expressed in two things: obedience and self-sacrifice.
Two stories:
Roger Staubach who led the Dallas Cowboys to the World Championship a number of years back admitted that his position as a quarterback, who didn’t call his own signals, was a source of trial for him.
The team’s coach, Coach Landry, sent in and directed every play.
He told Roger when to pass, when to run and only in emergency situations could Roger change the play (and he had better be right!).
Even though Roger considered coach Landry to have a "genius mind" when it came to football strategy, his pride said that he should be able to run his own team. He struggled with not being the one who called the shots.
Roger later said, "I faced up to the issue of obedience. Once I learned to obey there was harmony, fulfillment, and victory."
Jesus said in John 14:15: “If you love me, you will obey what I command”.
The mark of a follower of Jesus is that our love and devotion to Jesus is expressed, is displayed in our willing obedience to Him.
No Kingdom ever had two kings. Either we will be on the throne of our lives, or Jesus will be on the throne.
The beautiful exchange here is that when we obey Jesus, when we conform our lives to His Way, we live in harmony. We have a deep and ever-growing sense of fulfillment.
We know victory in our lives instead of defeat…all because the God of the universe is in control.
Another story. It is said that Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire in around 550 BC, once had captured a prince and his family. When they came before him, the monarch asked the prisoner, "What will you give me if I release you?" "The half of my wealth," was his reply.
"And if I release your children?" "Everything I possess." "And if I release your wife?" "Your Majesty, I will give myself." Cyrus was so moved by his devotion that he freed them all.
As they returned home, the prince said to his wife, "Wasn’t Cyrus a handsome man!" With a look of deep love for her husband, she said to him, "I didn’t notice. I could only keep my eyes on you- -the one who was willing to give himself for me."
One of the reasons the early church was so incredibly effective was the willingness of those Christians to enter into situations of great pain and suffering in order to bring the knowledge of Jesus Christ to people.
When plagues would ravage whole communities and cities, it would be the Christians who would care for the sick.
This is where the whole concept of nursing – of caring for the hurting, the sick and the dying first came to light.
Those Christians would serve the sick, and they would get sick themselves often, and their deaths impacted whole communities.
The willingness of one person to risk their well-being for another – this was so counter-intuitive, so strange, and yet so loving and so hopeful, that people came to Christ in droves.
Jesus lived for the well-being of others. He focussed his care and concern and love so intensely on people.
Very rarely will the beautiful exchange lead us to this extreme level of self-sacrifice, but at the very least cultivating through prayer and action this kind of deep caring and empathy for and love for others cannot help but yield fruit, both on our lives and in the lives of those we impact.
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
God is doing something new in your life. He is at work revealing Jesus Christ in you. Christ in you, the hope of glory. He has offered His life in exchange for your life.
He did that when He willingly went to the cross and took upon Himself my sin and your sin. Actually, the sin of the whole world. So much so that the Scripture says that Jesus, Who knew no sin, BECAME sin for us.
His life for your life. What a beautiful exchange. If you don’t already know that this is true, will you, today, embrace this reality, and let the love of God in to our life in a way you’ve never known? Will you say yes to this Jesus, who gave Himself for you?
And if you have embraced Jesus, will you continue to allow God to work this beautiful exchange in your heart, in your life, in your attitude?
Will you consciously open your heart and mind and will to let Jesus do His amazing work in your life of making you to be the best you can possibly be…which is more like Him?
I pray that our answer will be yes. I pray that our hearts will be responsive to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and with one great “YES!!!”, each one here will enter into this beautiful exchange.
It is God’s gift to us. May we only keep our eyes on Him Who loves us with an everlasting love. Amen.
