PHILIPPIANS ii. 5-8:—Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
“CHRIST our Example.” After “Christ our Redeemer,” no words can more deeply stir the Christian heart than these. Every Christian joyfully recognizes the example of Christ, as, in the admirable words of a great Scotch commentator, a body “of living legislation,” as law, embodied and pictured in a perfect humanity.” In Him, in a word, we find the moral ideal historically realized, and we bow before it as sublime and yearn after it with all the assembled desires of our renewed souls.
How lovingly we follow in thought every footstep of the Son of Man, on the rim of hills that shut in the emerald cup of Nazareth, on the blue marge of Gennesaret, over the mountains of Judea, and long to walk in spirit by His side. He came to save every age, says Irenaeus, and therefore He came as an infant, a child, a boy, a youth, and a man. And there is no age that cannot find its example in Him. We see Him, the properest child that ever was given to a mother’s arms, through all the years of childhood at Nazareth subjecting Himself to His parents.” We see Him a youth, labouring day by day contentedly at His father’s bench, in this lower sphere, too, with no other thought than to be “about His father’s business.” We see Him in
His holy manhood, going, ‘““as His custom was,” Sabbath by Sabbath, to the synagogue,—God as He was, not too good to worship with His weaker brethren. And then the horizon broadens. We see Him at the banks of Jordan, because it became Him to fulfil every righteousness, meekly receiving the baptism of repentance for us. We see Him in the wilderness, calmly rejecting the subtlest trials of the evil one: refusing to supply His needs by a misuse of His divine power, repelling the confusion of tempting God with trusting God, declining to seek His Father’s ends by any other than His Father’s means. We see Him among the thousands of Galilee, anointed of God with the Holy Ghost and power, going about doing good: with no pride of birth, though He was a king; with no pride of intellect, though omniscience dwelt within Him; with no pride of power, though all power in heaven and earth was in His hands; or of station, though the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily; or of superior goodness or holiness: but in lowliness of mind esteeming every one better than Himself, healing the sick, casting out devils, feeding the hungry, and everywhere breaking to men the bread of life. We see Him everywhere offering to men His life for the salvation of their souls: and when, at last, the forces of evil gathered thick around Him, walking, alike without display and without dismay, the path of suffering appointed for Him, and giving His life at Calvary that through His death the world might live.
“Which of you convinceth Me of sin? “is too low a question. Who can find in all His life a single lack, a single failure to set us a perfect example? In what difficulty of life, in what trial, in what danger or uncertainty, when we turn our eyes to Him, do we fail to find just the example that we need? And if perchance we are, by the grace of God, enabled to walk with Him but a step in the way, how our hearts burn within us with longing to be always with Him,—to be strengthened by the almighty power of God in the inner man, to make every footprint which He has left in the world a stepping-stone to climb upward over His divine path. Do we not rightly say that next to our longing to be in Christ is our corresponding longing to be like Christ; that only second in our hearts to His great act of obedience unto death by which He became our Saviour, stands His holy life in our world of sin, by which He becomes our example?
Of course our text is not singular in calling upon us to make Christ our example. “ Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ Jesus,” is rather the whole burden of the ethical side of Paul’s teaching. And in this, too, he was but the imitator of his Lord, who pleads with us to “learn of Him because He is meek and lowly in heart.” The peculiarity of our present passage is only that it takes us back of Christ’s earthly life and bids us imitate Him inthe great act of His incarnation itself. Not, of course, as if the implication were that we were equal with Christ and needed to stoop to such service as He performed. ‘” Why art thou proud, O man?”’ Augustine asks pointedly. “God for thee became low. Thou wouldst perhaps be ashamed to initate a lowly man; then at least imitate the lowly God. The Son of God came in the character of man and was made low… He, since He was God, became man: do thou, O man, recognize that thou art man. Thy entire humility is to know thyself.” The very force of the appeal lies, in a word, in the infinite exaltation of Christ above us: and the mention of the incarnation is the apostle’s reminder to us of the ineffable majesty which was by nature His to whom he would raise our admiring eyes. Paul prises at our hearts here with the great lever of the deity of our exemplar. He calls upon us to do nothing less than to be imitators of God. “” What encouragement is greater than this?” cries Chrysostom, with his instinctive perception of the motive-springs of the human heart. “Nothing arouses a great soul to the performance of good works so much as learning that in this it is likened to God.” And here, too, Paul is but the follower of his Lord: ‘“” Be ye merciful, as your Father which is in heaven is merciful,” are words which fell from His divine lips, altogether similar in their implication to Paul’s words in the text: “Let it be this mind that is in you, which also was in Christ Jesus.” It is the spirit which animated our Lord in the act of His incarnation which His apostle would see us imitate. He would have us in all our acts to be like Christ, as He showed Himself to be in the innermost core of His being, when He became poor, He that was rich, that we by His poverty might be made rich.