It is a real pleasure for me to be able to see you all again, and not in a very hot period of the year, as normally. It is very nice to see you on this very English kind of day.
I am going to read a passage that I think will be quite well known to most of you, if not all of you: Philippians 2.
If there is therefore any exhortation in Christ,
if any consolation of love,
if any fellowship of the Spirit,
if any tender mercies and compassion,
make full my joy, that ye be of the same mind,
having the same love,
being of one accord, of one mind;
doing nothing through faction, or through vainglory,
but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself;
not looking each of you to his own things,
but each of you also to the things of others.Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
who, existing in the form of God,
counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a servant,
being made in the likeness of men;
and being found in fashion as a man,
He humbled Himself,
becoming obedient even unto death,
yea, the death of the cross.Wherefore also God highly exalted Him,
and gave unto Him the name which is above every name;
that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth,
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Let us bow together in a word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, we are so thankful, as we have been together in Your presence this morning and have, by Your Spirit, been enabled to worship You and to glorify You.
O Heavenly Father, as we come to Your Word now, we ask that You will grant to us all that enabling grace and power that will mean that both the speaking and the hearing will be in the Spirit. We pray, Father, that we may hear Your voice, and that You will enable me to speak Your Word—to communicate that which is on Your heart.
We need You, Lord. We want to recognise very simply that, when it comes to the ministry of Your Word, we, left to ourselves, can achieve nothing. Whether it is in my speaking or in our hearing, we achieve nothing.
But, Lord, if You are the power and the energy, the revelation and illumination of this time, then, Lord, we shall remember this morning with praise and gratitude, because we were not only enabled to worship You, but we received from You something that will, as it were, form us into that full-grown man in the Lord Jesus.
Help us then, Lord, as we together commit ourselves to You for the rest of our time this morning, in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.
This very well-known little phrase in Philippians 2 is what I want to dwell on for a while this morning: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
There are two things which the Bible speaks about a tremendous amount. You find them everywhere—sometimes under different terms, especially in the Old Testament—but you find them throughout the Bible, from beginning to end. As far as the Word of God is concerned, these two constituents in our human personality or being are the most significant and important: the heart and the mind.
It was not for nothing that, when the Lord appeared to Solomon, He said, “Give Me your heart.” It was as if God was saying, “If I have your heart, I have everything.”
We believers, especially evangelicals, are very much given to talking about giving the heart to the Lord Jesus. But how few have really given their heart to the Lord Jesus. It has become a very trite phrase: giving our heart to the Lord. What it means is that we get salvation. That is what we really mean. We are getting heaven; we are getting eternal bliss and joy.
We have forgotten that God wants your heart. When a person has given their heart, God has the focal point of their personality. He has, as it were, the centre of their being.
Once God has your heart, He will begin to commit Himself to you. He will begin to reveal His secrets to you. He will begin to unveil something of Himself to you in an ever-increasing way. After all, in the end, it is the heart that matters.
But the other part of our being that the Bible has a tremendous amount to say about is the mind. The mind is vitally important. In fact, I think it is of strategic importance.
As a man thinks, so he is.
In the final analysis, it is the way you think that determines your character. It determines your behaviour. It determines your conduct. It determines your way of life.
Thinking is very important. I have often used a little phrase that I believe sums it all up:
Concept governs behaviour.
If you have a certain concept, whether you like it or not, your behaviour will be the consequence. Your behaviour is consequential upon the concept.
If you think certain people are inferior, you will treat them as inferior. If you think certain areas of the world are unhealthy, you will not go there. If you consider that certain food, however full of vitamins it may be, is somehow bad, you will never touch it. Your concepts govern your behaviour.
Therefore, your mind is of tremendous importance. We are living in a generation in which the battle for the mind is paramount. Through television, radio, film, newspapers, books, and magazines, the battle is on for the minds of the nations.
We are being influenced all the time by things we hardly know and hardly understand. Take one simple illustration: the Darwinian theory of evolution.
We are being bombarded from every corner with the idea that man has evolved. Some believers have always felt that the Bible has to be explained in terms of whatever contemporary scientific theory happens to hold the field.
There is a marvellous comment attributed to Charles Spurgeon about the Word of God: it is a lion. You do not need to defend the lion; just open its cage and let it out. But unfortunately, many believers feel they have to defend God’s Word and explain it.
So there are those who say, “Well, there may be a form of evolution. We might have come from slime in the very beginning, or something else, or slowly evolved. We can fit it somehow with Genesis 1. After all, the six days are a thousand years each.”
But they altogether forget that if those six days in Genesis 1 were each a thousand years, then everything created and living during five hundred years of light would have died during five hundred years of darkness. It is a theory people do not think through.
There are many such theories, in which we try to explain the Word because we feel that fossils have been discovered which are said to be millions and millions of years old. Personally, I believe the miracle is gone if you do not really believe that God is. If you believe that God is, then anything is possible.
He could have created the whole lot in six days, intact. I do not think it is beyond His power to have created it all in a second. He did not even need six days. He could have done it with one word, and it was all there.
I do not know whether He did do it that way, but I notice that there is now a new theory called the Big Bang Theory. The whole thing began with a big bang. At least it is a little nearer to Genesis 1.
But I am using that only as an illustration. The Darwinian theory of evolution has never actually been proved. It is speculative, a thesis which nevertheless has become such an integral part of our life that everything else follows.
After all, if we have evolved from something, then, of course, people conclude that abortion is permissible. Later, they may come to euthanasia—the killing of anyone who happens to be ill. Then they may feel that certain ethnic groups ought to be wiped out like cockroaches.
It is not for nothing that the Nazis began by legalising abortion in the middle of the 1930s. They went on to euthanasia—“mercy killing” of the mentally ill—and then to genocide. You must remember that not only Jews but over one and a half million gypsies were liquidated because they were considered an unwanted ethnic group. The Nazi plan was eventually to take the Slav peoples and wipe out two-thirds of them.
Once you have adopted a certain theory, a certain concept, everything else begins to follow. Do you understand what I am trying to say? Even if there are mysteries about the origin or development of life, the fact is that our concepts govern our behaviour.
That is why it is of tremendous importance that we should give attention to this word of the apostle by the Holy Spirit: “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
There is a mind which leads to life, health, and glory. There is a mind which leads to corruption, barrenness, and death. You and I need to understand that these two minds are at war with one another. They are diametrically opposite. There is no coexistence between the mind of the flesh and the mind of Christ.
For the mind of the flesh is at enmity with the mind of the Spirit. Most of us, having been saved, spend at least a number of years trying to reconcile the mind of the flesh with the mind of the Spirit. We wear ourselves out. No wonder Christians, of all people, are often the most miserable.
They spend their time trying somehow to live according to the principles of this world and the principles of the flesh, while at the same time trying to grow in the Lord, share with believers, and see the Body of Christ built up. It is impossible. They are two different worlds.
What is the mind of the flesh? Here I have great help, because every one of us was born with the mind of the flesh. In one sense, we all know this thing from the inside, even if we have never been able to define it.
We live spontaneously according to the mind of the flesh. No one has to instruct us how to live by the mind of the flesh, because from babyhood we all live according to it.
The mind of the flesh is simply this:
I first, I second, and I last.
It is a very simple little thing. We do not need academic intelligence to understand this principle: I first, I second, and I last. If others come into the picture, it is only so long as they do not disturb me—so long as they can be stepping stones to profit, success, popularity, or glory.
Many marriages soldier on according to this principle. Sometimes wives look upon their husbands simply as a means of having a family, building a nest, and getting an end. Husbands sometimes look upon their wives simply as a means of satisfaction—someone to cook, someone to serve, and now and again someone to show off.
There is no self-sacrifice in that at all. It does not come spontaneously from within. The mind of the flesh is simply to glorify oneself, one’s family, and one’s children.
That is why there is so much juvenile delinquency, because some parents use their children. Their children become little status symbols. Parents want their children to enter certain areas where they feel the children will achieve not just fame, but glory for the family.
It is the old mind of the flesh: self first, self second, self last. Others only come into it insofar as they help the progress and glory of self.
The mind of the flesh—we all know it. If there is anybody here who does not know what I am talking about, I would love to talk with you. Everyone here ought to know from the inside something about this principle.
It is the natural principle from the moment we are born. It is, “Gimme, gimme, gimme.” It is all me. Everybody is there for me: to feed me, cuddle me, comfort me, provide for me, and advance me.
Self, self, self, and self: the mind of the flesh. It all began in a mystery we may never fully understand, perhaps even in glory. It began in that created being the Bible calls Lucifer, who said:
“I will exalt my throne above the throne of God.”
That is where it all began, and the poison is in us all.
The mind of Christ is something very different. Look at it here in Philippians:
Who, existing in the form of God,
counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied Himself,
taking the form of a servant.
Not just a hired servant. In the old days there were two forms of servant: the bondslave, who had no rights, and the hired servant, who had certain rights. The word here is bondslave, not hired servant.
In other words, the Lord Jesus emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondslave without rights. Then it goes a further step: being made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death—yea, the death of the cross.
This is another mind. Why did He do it? It is a good question.
Someone says He did it for the glory set before Him. That is not correct. If you think Jesus went through all this simply for the glory that was to be, He already had glory. He did not need to go through this.
No, my dear friends. He endured for the joy that was set before Him, because the joy set before Him was bringing many sons unto glory. In other words, to get a whole new kind of man, built on a new principle—the same principle on which He operated.
The principle is this:
God first, God second, and God last.
Put it another way:
Others, others, others.
Every single one who can help me to achieve this, I will bless in the name of the Lord. Would that not transform our whole outlook? If everyone who treads on our corns, rides roughshod over us, or causes us pain were seen as a means of helping us put others first, others second, and others last, what a difference it would make.
Our whole problem in this matter is rights. We have all got rights. We live in an age of rights: human rights, men’s rights, women’s rights, the rights of this ethnic group and that ethnic group. Everything is rights, rights, rights.
From early childhood, we have thought about how to stand up for our rights, fight for our rights, and achieve our rights—rights and more rights. The trouble is that these rights never bring righteousness.
I find it very interesting in Mark’s Gospel and Matthew’s Gospel, where it says:
“If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.”
The words “deny himself” could also be translated: “If any man would come after Me, let him give up all right to himself.”
The heart of this whole question is whether you and I are prepared to sacrifice our rights for God and for others.
In Romans 8 we have a very interesting commentary on this matter.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh,
God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:
that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us,
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
For they that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
For the mind of the flesh is death;
but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace.
Because the mind of the flesh is enmity against God;
for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be.
And they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
But ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you.
This is why Christians are so miserable. I travel all over the place, and it is always an unmitigated joy when I find Christians who are joyful. It is so rare.
Christians, of all people, should be the most joyful people in the world. After all, the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. In times of trouble, when everything is against you, there can be joy unspeakable and full of glory.
But Christians very rarely get there, because they are in the Spirit but living according to the flesh. They have a kind of civil war.
There is nothing more tragic than a nation in civil war, when brothers fight brothers and the whole economy and security of the nation are torn apart. How can you be joyful with a civil war? Yet most believers have a civil war going on inside them. They are really in the Spirit and not in the flesh, but in actual fact they are walking according to the flesh.
“The mind of the Spirit is life and peace.” How important it is for our whole well-being to have peace as well as life. We believers are subjected to tremendous conflicts and great battles—not only inside, but from outside. What a tremendously important thing it is for us to have life and peace.
But God has provided for us. I think I have said to some of you before: only dead fish float with the current.
A living fish has a capacity, by the very life within it, to use the current to swim against it. It uses the current to go upstream. The whole thing is against it, but it has a life that enables it to go up and up and up, and achieve the end despite the force of the current.
Yet we say, “It is all so hard. It is so hard being a Christian. Everything is against us. You should see my college, my workplace, my family. Everything is against us. It is absolute hard work.”
Everything will bring you down if you are trying to live according to the mind of the flesh. But if you live according to the mind of the Spirit, you will find that you are constituted for the very current flowing against you.
The very thing against you at college, at work, in business, or at home is the means God is using for you to overcome, and overcome, and overcome, until finally you arrive at the throne of God.
You have a kind of life constituted by the Spirit of God to go against the current. Do not make excuses any more about the current being against you. Poor little you. As if God did not know, when He saved you, that He was putting you into a situation where everything was against you.
Believers have been like this from the beginning. There has not been a single believer who was not constituted to go against the current and finally overcome by the grace of God. That is the nature of the world in which we live.
We are not of the world, though we are in the world. Thank God, we are of heaven. We have been constituted in such a way that we can overcome the very things against us. Indeed, those things are used to bring us forward for the purpose of God to be fulfilled in our lives.
What a tragedy it is when you become a child of God and do not live according to the mind of the Spirit. Something whispers in your ear, “Do not be extreme. You do not want to become one of those little old, wizened saints—lifeless, joyless, and dressed in sombre colours, do you?”
Something within says, “No, Lord, I do not want to become one of those little wizened old saints.” Now, just in case I am misunderstood, there are some old saints here this morning, and I want to say that I am not referring to anyone in this building.
You can grow old, and the life of God can still be in you. When the life of God is in you, you become an attraction to others. I know old saints who are among the most attractive people in the world. I know others from whom I would rather run and fly over three continents to get away, if it were possible.
But when someone really has this life in them, what a joy it is to see that as the body grows old, the mind of the Spirit is renewed day by day. These people know what they are talking about. They have gone through it, and they can help us. They know what has come against them and how, by the grace of God, at wit’s end corner, they overcame.
It is a wonderful thing to know the mind of the Spirit. The tragedy is that if you succumb to the voice that tells you that following the Lord all the way will make you artificial, unnatural, abnormal, strange, and alienated, you will try to obtain a balance.
The balance is that we play with the mind of the flesh while at the same time recognising the mind of the Spirit. It does not work. There is no coexistence between these two worlds. One leads to corruption and death; the other leads to righteousness and life.
You might as well settle it at the beginning: be wholly one way. What do you think will happen? You will discover that you have life, peace, and joy. Sometimes you will be surprised that you have life, peace, and joy. You will say, “Why do I feel so good? Everything is against me.” But it is the most marvellous thing to know the Lord.
Someone may say, “This is all very wonderful, but how does it work?” We had it in Romans 8:
“The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.”
You never get free by fighting the law of sin and death. Some believers think that fighting the good fight means wrestling with the law of sin and death in their members and circumstances. Of course, it defeats them every time. He never told you to fight that kind of fight. You fight a good fight of faith.
Let me give you an illustration. Sometimes when I travel, I sit in a Boeing 747—a jumbo jet—with five hundred and eighty people on board. Some of them very large.
I cannot bear jumbo jets when they are full. I love them when they are half empty, when you have two or three vacant seats on one side and room to move around and breathe. But nowadays, because of price competition, the planes are full.
I look at people coming in—some of them enormous—and I wonder how this jumbo jet will get off the ground. I remember the little old-fashioned propeller planes when I was younger. They were tiny planes with about thirty people on board.
But there we sit at the end of the runway in a Boeing 747 with five hundred and eighty people on board, quite a few overweight, with all the luggage underneath. You think, “This thing will never get off the ground. It is impossible.”
When I was at school, I remember there was a law called the law of gravity. The law of gravity, when you are sitting on a loaded plane like that, would terrify anybody. You think, “The law of gravity will not allow this plane to get off the ground.”
If you take a bucket of sand to a cliff edge and drop it over, you know exactly what will happen. It is not going to float. It is going straight down.
How, then, does a 747 with five hundred and eighty people on board and a full load get off the ground? Very simply: it has something to do with the thrust of the engines. I am not technical, but I know this from having witnessed it again and again.
The plane turns onto the runway, the force of the engines comes, and the thing soars into the heavens. A superior law has taken over.
Dear friends, coming back to this law of sin and death: there is no way out of it by wrestling with it. It is like the law of gravity. You can fight it, do a thousand and one things with it, but you will never overcome it.
The only way you overcome the law of gravity is by a superior law. Thank God, if you are a child of God, you should be living according to a superior law:
“The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.”
It is as if the great thrust of that mighty resurrection life of the Lord Jesus lifts us above what our old nature would command and determine. There is no other way, dear friends.
Otherwise, you become an artificial believer, and the fellowship is made up of artificial people—all trying to look like good believers, all trying to believe the right thing, when in actual fact the inside story is very different.
The only way you and I will ever live this glorious life, which is ours in the Spirit of God, is when we obey its principles. In other words, we have to live by faith and not by sight or feeling.
There are times when everything will scream that the law of gravity is going to overcome you; the law of sin and death is going to get you in this situation. But you can stand there and say, “I belong to the Lord Jesus, and the life of the Spirit within me is able to overcome this law of sin and death in this situation. I am going to trust the Lord and praise Him.”
Then your worship becomes an act of faith. It becomes a confession of trust. It becomes the word of your testimony.
I will say a few more things about the mind of Christ. What about the mind of Christ and the will of God?
What is wrong with us believers? We have the strangest idea about the will of God, do we not? If we were really honest, and someone asked us, “What do you think is the will of God for you?” we would probably choose the thing we most do not want to do and say, “I believe that is the will of God for me.”
It is strange. Some people have gone to serve the Lord in parts of the earth where they had no business being, because they believed that if they chose the hardest and most dreadful thing, that must be the will of God for them.
It is an idea that God is some kind of miser—an old schoolmaster without compassion or feeling, who loves to give His people bad times. But what did He save them for? Did He save them simply to have bad times?
No real caring father or mother rejoices when their child is disciplined or has to learn the hard way, though they may know it is necessary. The marvellous thing about the will of God is that, forgetting the little transient details—and mark that word, transient—the will of God for you is life, peace, and joy. Nothing less.
Do you think the Lord went to all that trouble to send His Son into this world to save you so that you might be a miserable little spectator, always afflicted and always down? What a witness.
God did not go to all that trouble so that you might be an unhappy, broken, dismembered being. God went to all that trouble that you might be made whole. That is the word: made whole.
The way we come there is often through affliction and tribulation; that is another matter. But the fact is that the will of God for you is not misery.
Yet there is something in us that distrusts the Lord. We feel that if we are in charge of our own way and destiny, we know what is good for us.
If we were honest, would not many of us say, “Lord, I know You have the universe and the kingdom to look after, but if You do not mind, I would rather be in charge of the details of my life. I feel that in my hands, my own preservation and development will be safe”?
We would not say it out loud, because it would not sound pious. But the interesting thing is that we make a mess of our lives. If that is trusting the Lord, there is something wrong somewhere.
Very few of us—none of us, unless we have been dealt with by God—come to the place where we can really surrender to the Lord.
The will of God is seen in the mind of Christ. First, He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He did not hold onto it.
Second, He emptied Himself. None of us can empty ourselves, but there is a mind in us which can enable us, by the grace of God, to will to be nothing.
Having emptied Himself, He took the form of a bondslave. Who in the whole world would become a bondslave—one with no rights?
Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the cross. There was nothing more abominable to a Jew brought up in the Pharisaic tradition than to be crucified.
That is the mind of Christ. You cannot do it, nor can I.
I believe our Lord taught us to pray something very simple in the pattern prayer:
“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
The word is not merely about being tempted. It is, “Lead us not into trial or testing, but deliver us from the evil one.”
This mind of Christ means that only when I really know the Lord and live according to the principle of the mind of the Spirit will I ever be able to do the will of God.
I must tell you, I have not found the will of God to be so dreadful. I have discovered that the Lord is the most glorious Person to serve. There are times when the will of God looks dreadful, but when you do it, you have joy, peace, and life. There is victory for you in doing the will of God.
When, because of self-preservation, you refuse to do the will of God, you lose everything. You become like Lot’s wife—a pillar of salt on a pilgrimage from a judged condition to a heavenly condition. You become preserved, almost pickled.
That is what salt does. You find something years later, perfectly preserved, but only a monument. I know many believers like that. They went so far, came out of the cities of the plain, and journeyed a certain way. But something happened, and they became monuments to something God had done.
May God preserve you and me from being monuments. We want to be witnesses. A witness is a living thing. You see something, witness something, and communicate something. You are not merely a statue.
If there is something you know is the will of God for you, but you are standing on the brink of a decision and feel that if you go that way everything will go wrong, my dear friend, if God has shown you something and you know in your heart that He is directing you to do it, then by the grace of God, do it.
The mind of Christ will help you. If you are fighting for yourself, your rights, your preservation, and your development, you will not be able to do the will of God. But if you surrender all that, you will discover that in doing the will of God, God will protect your rights, watch over your development, and bring you to fullness and glory.
I do not know a single believer in my experience who has really done the will of God and is not a happy person. I have met many who come for counsel and help because they did not do the will of God, went another way, and made their lives a mess. Even then, God can do something once it is confessed and we turn to the Lord.
There is another thing: the mind of Christ and service. There is no way we can serve one another, serve God, or serve the world unless we have the mind of Christ.
A lot of Christian service is self-fulfilment. There are many in Christian service who are building empires.
This is not abnormal when viewed from one point of view. The masculine ego is built on a success principle, especially in the United States. I do not know of any society in the world built more on the success principle. If you are not a success, you are not. Whatever it is, you have got to be a success.
There is tremendous pressure, especially on men, to be a success. But there is no way to serve the Lord if it is merely a question of self-fulfilment.
Some people go into Christian work because they cannot build an empire any other way. They cannot build a business empire, scientific empire, or political empire, so they go into the Lord’s work. There they build an empire.
It is not a modern phenomenon. Paul said some preach the gospel from envy. In his day, there were people going around building empires. It is only natural to us if we do not have the mind of Christ. We believe somehow that we have got to succeed.
If we are out for self-fulfilment, it is natural to feel that if God has given us gifts, talents, and a calling, then that calling should be fulfilled. But the question is how those talents and gifts are used, and how that calling is realised.
The way of the world is to tread down others while going up. The way of Christ is to sacrifice Himself for others, so that God will lift Him up.
It is interesting when you look at the Book. It says:
“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.”
What a strange way of going up: you go up by going down. The world does not say that. The world says that if you go down, you will stay down. Once you are down, they will tread on you and see that you never get up again. So you must strive to get on top. That is the world’s way.
The world’s way of service is much the same. Think how most people view kings. They imagine kings sitting on a golden throne with a great crown, issuing commands while everyone runs around serving them.
But the Bible says we are made kings. Does that mean we will sit in magnificent glory while lower-ranked saints bring us tea and angels run off at our command? Dear people, real kingship is the hardest job in the world.
I have always felt sorry for the Queen of Britain. No person in the whole of Great Britain worked harder than Queen Elizabeth II. If you read her diary or know what she did, it is incredible. Why? Because kingship is service.
The real idea behind kingship is service. We have the idea that nobility means you are served, while peasantry means you serve. But according to God, the meaning of kingship is that you serve everybody, and you are prepared to lay down your life for everybody.
It is a marvellous thing in the work of God when you meet servants of God who have given up all right to themselves. Then it is not their glory, their success, the expansion of their ministry, or the rights attending their ministry.
Some people become very spiritual. They will not talk about personal rights, but they talk about the rights of their status, ministry, or calling. In the end, it comes to the same thing.
The mind of Christ is that you are a slave. The thing about a bondslave is that you are at someone’s call twenty-four hours a day. You have no rights. You are owned.
That was the position our Lord Jesus took, that He might lead many sons to glory.
Finally, what about fellowship? What about the building of the house of God? What does the mind of Christ say in that matter?
You will never get two people working together in teamwork unless, ideally, both have sacrificed themselves for the other. But if that cannot be, you will never get teamwork unless one has sacrificed himself or herself for the other.
It takes two people to make a division. It takes two people to create a friction. When you have a person who has laid down their life, given up all right to themselves, taken up their cross, and followed the Lord, you cannot fight with them. They are not there to fight.
Paul said, “We have the sentence of death within ourselves.” I have often thought about that. What does it mean? It means that if you have a sentence of death, all your little quibbles and queries about rights, and this and that which worried you, fall away. You have only an hour or two, and then you are under sentence of death.
What an extraordinary thing Paul said when writing to the church at Corinth:
“We have the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead.”
There is no way that real building can take place, stone with stone, unless one after another we lay down our lives. It is the mind of Christ.
Now, in this mind of Christ, may I say this: it does not mean that you lose your originality, personality, or individuality. That is very important.
In many cults growing up in Christendom, these are precisely the things that disappear. People are not original; only one man at the top is original. People do not have individuality; only the man at the top has it. It becomes a kind of hierarchy.
But in the Body of Christ, every one of us has something to give that no one else has. Every one of us is so constituted that we have something unique to contribute.
The mind of Christ is that we are fitted together, built together, and related one to another. We find our place in relationship to one another.
It is one thing to have a heap of stones; it is another thing for the stones to be related. When the stones are related, you have a house. But then you have not necessarily got a home.
Here we are, so many living stones. Every one of us born of God is a living stone. What measure is there of relatedness, so that there can be a building together and a house of God begins to be built?
Even when we have found our relationship to one another, it is still not a home. A home requires not mere relatedness; it requires love.
It is only when the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts and increases more and more that a house becomes a home. Then the place becomes a centre of compassion, a focal point of love, a focal point of help, and a focal point of care.
We are all far away from that, but thank God, He knows our hearts.
This little passage ends with these wonderful words:
Wherefore also God highly exalted Him,
and gave unto Him the name which is above every name;
that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
The way the Lord Jesus came to that position of supreme exaltation was by going down to death. That is the principle: He went up by going down.
If He is going to lead any of us as sons to glory, we have to follow in His steps. In other words, the way up is by going down. The way to wholeness is by being broken. The way to fruit is by falling into the ground and dying. The way to glory is by knowing what it is to die with Christ.
May God help every one of us in this. The Lord wants to lead us to His throne. He wants you and me to overcome, as He says, “Even as I also overcame, and sat down with My Father in His throne.”
He wants to bring us to His throne, and there is no way that you and I can come there except through the mind of Christ.
May God open your eyes to see these two worlds. If there is a civil war in your life, may He help you this day to settle the issue. You will not live according to the law of sin and death, the principle of the mind of the flesh, any more. You will be for the Lord, and you will trust Him.
As you let go, He will preserve you. As you go down, He will in His time lift you up. As you know what it is to decrease, He may bring you to fullness. As you are broken, you may know what it is to become a whole person in Christ.
As you know His death, you may, in the end, in His time, come to glory.
Shall we pray?
Heavenly Father, would You watch over Your Word to perform it? There is not one of us, Lord, who naturally would ever live according to the mind of Christ.
But, Father, we thank You that You say in Your Word that we are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of Christ dwells in us.
Lord, we ask that You will help every one of us in whom there is any kind of civil war, that we may cease fighting and may live according to that superior law: the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
Open our eyes, Lord. You are the only One who can give us illumination. Help us, Lord, that every one of us in this place may become a witness to You and overcome by Your grace.
May every one of us be involved in the fulfilment of Your purpose in our day and generation. May this particular fellowship of Your people be built up and become a centre of light, a centre of love, and a centre of life in this whole area.
May it become, as it were, that house in which You are found, through which You are revealed, and in which others see and taste Your salvation.
O Lord, hear us, for we ask it again in that name which is above every other name: the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.