“You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.”
We are coming up on some of my favorite verses in the Bible. I cannot tell you how many times a day I quote Philippians 2:5 to myself when I need an attitude adjustment. If nothing else, take that with you today and replace your negative thinking about yourself or your circumstances with, “Have the same attitude as Jesus Christ.”
Our formatting will miss something that I want to point out before we move on. My amazing husband, Joshua, taught on this a while ago and it really made a neat connection for me. These verses (5-11) are written like a poem or song lyrics. If you look them up in your print Bible or on BibleGateway.com, you will see how it is laid out. Paul seems to be quoting a song here, and some have suggested it could have been a song that Paul and Silas sang together when in prison just before Paul was sent to house arrest in Rome (from which he wrote this letter to the Philippians). Imagine that these verses are the very song that kept Paul and Silas praising Jesus and imitating him while in chains for the Gospel!
Verse 5, in addition to being a great sentence to repeat to yourself throughout your day, really sets us up for the question, “What does it mean to be like Jesus?” Verse 6 is the first answer to that question: he didn’t try to make himself important.
Jesus was by his very nature God — the full nature of God participating in and through a fully human man. He knew who he was, and yet he did not try to cling to this. Notice that he would have been well within his rights to play the God-card a whole lot more often, but he didn’t. Why? He didn’t think his status as equal with God as something he needed to hang on to. And yet here we are, clinging to our salary, job title, ministry position or community status like we will evaporate if we go unnoticed.
When you are secure in who God made you to be, status and title and power just aren’t that important. You don’t cling to them — not because you are working so hard to give them up but because you genuinely see those things as unimportant. What Jesus did cling to was his connection with the Father and his mission. Don’t focus on all that you need to let go of to be more like Jesus. Instead, cling to the things he did — the Father and the mission. Everything else will fade to the background over time.