There is a museum in Texas with no artifacts and no art. You pay a flat fee, walk in with your phone, and spend two hours photographing yourself in rooms built for exactly that. One room is a ball pit. One is a neon sign that says you are magic. One is designed to look like the cabin of a private jet.
It is easy to laugh at that. It is harder to admit it is just a physical version of the world most of us already live in.
Philippi was the same kind of place. A Roman colony full of retired military veterans where honor, status, and public reputation were the real currency. Everyone in that city was climbing. And into that environment Paul writes a letter telling the church to climb down.
In this message, Pastor Aaron Flug walks through Philippians 2 and traces the descent of Jesus, the King who possessed everything and grasped at none of it.
In this message:
- The two roadblocks Paul names as the enemies of joy in community, and why one of them is a political word in the original Greek
- Why humility was considered a character flaw in the Greco-Roman world, and what Paul did with it
- What Jesus actually emptied himself of, and what he did not
- The collision between Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Philippians 2:4
- Four diagnostics for the mind, the spirit, your relationships, and your behavior
- The difference between serving because you have to and serving because you get to
Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less. And the way up in the kingdom of God turns out to be down.
