incarnation

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature[ God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” (Philippians 2:5-6)

The only proper response to the gospel of Christ is service. The trajectory of Christianity is incarnational- “God came down…” In Christ we see that God has become a humble servant as He emptied Himself of His glorious splendor in order to lay down His life for many. This is a reality that changes the direction of our passions from self to sacrifice, from selfishness to compassion. It was His glory to serve us and therefore we find His glory as we empty ourselves, as He has given His life for us.

Consider the story from the book of John in which Jesus, shortly before His execution, gathered the disciples around Him in order to teach them how to live and to serve others:

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under His power, and that He had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash His disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around Him. (John 13:3-5)

At first glance this passage looks like a non-sequitur attaching two disconnected thoughts into the same sentence. Jesus knew He was from God, so what was His response? He washed the Disciples’ feet. One of the mysteries of the spiritual life is that the more you give your life away, the more you gain.

“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matt. 16:25)

Every follower of Christ will be drawn naturally into service as his or her life reflects the nature of Christ and is drawn by His Spirit. If you are not giving your life away, you are losing it. The more we give, the more we receive, and the more health and life we have. The most unhappy people in the world are those who are living only for themselves. The dichotomous effect of the gospel is that the more I drain my life of self, the more energized I become with life. The more I grasp at life, the less of life I will receive, but the more I give my life away, the more life I attain.

In his book “The Jesus I Never Knew”, Phillip Yancey contrasts the worlds “stars” with the world’s “servants”. He reflects on his life as a journalist in which he has interviewed and met some of the world’s biggest celebrities - the idols of American popular culture:

I have also spent time with people I call “servants”. Doctors and nurses who work among the ultimate outcast, leprosy patients in rural India. A Princeton graduate who runs a hotel for the homeless in Chicago. Health workers who have left high paying jobs to work in backwater towns in rural Mississippi. Relief workers in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and other repositories of human suffering. The PHDs I met in Arizona, who are now scattered throughout the jungles in South America translating Bibles into native languages. I was prepared to honor and admire these servants. I was not prepared to envy them. Yet as I now reflect on the two groups side by side, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. Without question I would rather spend time among the servants than among the stars: they possess qualities of depth and richness and even joy that I have not found elsewhere. Servants works for low pay, long hours and no applause, “wasting” their talents and skills among the worlds poor and uneducated. Somehow, though, in the process of losing their lives, they find them.

Thus the essence of Christianity is the incarnation event- and the essence of who we are in Christ is in the same direction. To find life, we must be willing to give it away.