Submission

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, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death--even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:5-11).

It is said that Peter the Great of Russia once set aside his royal clothes and went to Holland to learn the art of ship building for his people. Dressed in work clothes like any other laborer in the shipyards, he kept his identity secret as he learned his new skills; he worked as a commoner for the eventual benefit of his people. Peter the Great willingly did the most menial of tasks to preserve his anonymity, so that he could fully learn the ship-builder’s craft from the Dutch.

This illustration helps us to understand what Jesus did when He willingly left His throne in heaven to do His work among us here on earth. Paul tells us that Jesus was God by His very nature, yet He made Himself nothing by humbly taking on the appearance of an ordinary man. Isaiah tells us, He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Isaiah 53:2). Like Peter the Great, Jesus set aside the appearance of royalty and presented Himself to those who walked with Him as an ordinary man. The fact that Peter the Great wore common working clothes did not change the fact that he was a king; the fact that Jesus took the form of a common human being did not change the fact that He was the Son of God.

Why would anyone who has experienced royal privilege willingly give it up, even for a brief time? Peter the Great left his palace so that he could learn new skills that would benefit his people and increase the future wealth of his kingdom; the Son of God left heaven so that He could repair the relationship between God and men that had been broken by sin, and extend an invitation to everyone to follow Him back to heaven. Both Peter the Great and the Son of God willingly stepped down from their thrones to make the future a better place for their subjects.

What makes Jesus’ humility so important, however, is that our Savior held nothing back. From eternity, our Lord has been every bit as much God as His Father is; yet when the Father instructed His Son to take on human flesh and limit the use of His divine power while living on earth, our Lord didn’t hesitate for a moment. This is because He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped; when Jesus faced the choice between insisting on His rights as God’s Son, or humbly obeying His Father because He loved and trusted Him, there was no moment of hesitation—Jesus immediately submitted to His Father’s plan to save men from their sin.

That plan would call for an even greater act of loving trust, of humble submission, from our Lord. It was not enough for Jesus to come and teach us about God and how He expects us to live our lives—any prophet of God could do that. It was not even enough that our Lord came to live a perfect life on our behalf, so that God would be satisfied that His expectations for mankind had been met through Jesus’ efforts. No, the Father’s plan of salvation demanded that for us to be spared divine punishment for our wrongdoings, someone else would have to pay the price. Only a person who had no sin of his own could be punished on behalf of others. Only a being as great as God could endure the punishment of heaven for every earthly transgression. Only the Son of God, who through birth was also the Son of Man, could die for us as our substitute, and thus rescue us from the hell that our sin-filled lives have deserved.

But Jesus loved and trusted His Father perfectly, and so He was obedient—obedient even to death, even death on a cross. Jesus had been told to take on a human body, a body that could feel pain and suffer and die. Jesus had been told to limit the use of His divine power—He was not permitted to use that power to ease His suffering or speed His death. Everything that Jesus did was done in accord with His Father’s will—Jesus said in the Gospel of John, "The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life--only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father" (John 10:17-18).

And so our Lord laid down His life—when Peter pulled a sword in the Garden of Gethsemane to try and protect Jesus, the Lord told him to put the weapon away and Jesus went willingly to trial, bound and humiliated. Jesus allowed Himself to be found guilty of being the worst sinner of all—because by this verdict our sins became His, and our death sentence became His. Jesus allowed Himself to be nailed onto a cross, the method of execution reserved for the worst of criminals, and He refused to use His power to come down when the religious leaders taunted Him, Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe (Mark 15:32). Jesus was obedient until all of God’s anger at human sin had been ended, at which time He said, "It is finished." And with that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19:30).

"It is finished". No more important words have been spoken in human history. With these words, Jesus tells the world that sin can no longer drag us helplessly to hell. With these words, our Savior tells the devil that God has provided freedom from living under satanic control. With these words, Christ assures us that when we repent of angering God and turn to Jesus for mercy, all the mistakes of our past are forgotten and our future is brightened by the promise of heaven.

Christ was obedient to death, even death on a cross, and because Jesus loved and trusted His Father perfectly, holding nothing back, our Lord has been raised in even greater glory than He had before He came down to live among us. Paul writes, Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. The Son of God only took the name "Jesus" when He was born among us. "Jesus" was a name that others had been known by earlier in Israel’s history. "Jesus" was not a name for God, not a name that would be prayed to or worshipped. But when Jesus bought us back from sin and death with His own lifeblood, the Father honored Him by elevating the name "Jesus" as a name worthy of worship and praise all over the world. And Jesus has been given authority to rule earth until Judgment Day, at which time He also has been given the authority to judge mankind. Jesus was perfectly humble, perfectly obedient, and see how His Father blessed Him!

Paul tells us, Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. We too ought to be humble and obedient. We ought to be humble because we know that we have continually angered God with our lives, and that we are His children only by His undeserved mercy. We ought to be obedient because if we love and trust God completely, we are assured that He will never ask us to do something that will turn out badly for us. The problem is that, while we continue to live in sin-cancered bodies, we cannot be the perfect children of God that we were intended to be. Every day of our lives we wrestle with sin. Every day we are tempted to ignore God’s Word and do whatever feels good at the time; every day we disobey God because we don’t love Him enough or trust Him enough to be willing to submit to His leadership without reservation.

We are tempted to either take Jesus for granted, or to tuck Him away in the back of our minds and forget that He’s a part of our lives. As a result, we end up going about our lives sinning in comfort, either assuming that any wrongs we do don’t matter because Jesus will forgive us anyway, or else forgetting that we have done anything that even needs to be forgiven. Either way, when we lose our focus on Jesus we soon forget the impossibly high standards God expects of us, and we become proud of all that we think we’ve achieved. When Jesus ceases to be the center of our attention, we soon forget His example of loving trust and obedience and we live our lives more and more to please ourselves, not the Son of God who sacrificed so much to win our freedom from evil’s domination.

The way to keep Jesus squarely in focus is to devote time and energy to Him. Paul tells us in Romans 10:17, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. Jesus enters us and strengthens us through His words preserved in the Bible. Through God’s word, the Holy Spirit implants and nourishes faith in our hearts. When we are involved in regular worship and Bible study, God works within us to keep our focus on Jesus and what He has done for us, not on us and what gives us only temporary pleasure. The writer to the Hebrews says, Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:25). That approaching Day is the Day that Jesus will return in glory to judge the living and the dead—and that Day is closer now than it has ever been before. All the more reason, then, for each of us to cultivate a habit of regular worship and time spent in devotion.

It is a common mistake to think that Confirmation ends religious instruction, that once you have been accepted as a communicant member of Christ’s church, you’ve had all the religious training that you need to finish out your life. Satan would like you to believe that. Satan would like you to stop going to church, to stop reading your Bible, because he knows that the longer you go without being strengthened by God through His word, the easier it will be to distract you from Jesus and His teachings and His forgiveness. The longer that you starve your soul by not feeding it with God’s words, the weaker that your dedication to Him will become, and you will be more and more tempted to pride and disobedience.

Jesus shows us that humility and obedience are worth the sacrifices that they can demand of us. Jesus was humble and obedient to death, and He is now exalted as king of the universe. If we allow God to take charge of our lives, and ask His forgiveness when we are stubborn, we are promised that we too will be exalted after death; we too will be raised to live with our God in perfect peace and happiness and honor.

May our Lord keep you securely in the faith that He has worked in your heart through Word and Sacrament. May you grow in your love and trust of Christ, and be humbly obedient to our Lord all the days of your life.