“Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death — even to death on a cross. For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow  — in heaven and on earth and under the earth  — and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I love babies. That’s just a fun season of life as a parent. Oh, it’s plenty hard as well. It’s exhausting and stressful and frustrating and the like. But every time that little one looks at you and smiles, you pretty well forget about all the rest of that and just bask in the love and trust inherent in that little face. But babies are helpless little things. They can’t do anything for themselves. At all. A baby left alone will die. A human baby is about as humble a creature as exists in the world. Well, the Advent season is about celebrating that humble creature. It is about celebrating one particular of those humble creatures who was also God. Let’s talk about it

Before Christianity – before Christ – humility wasn’t considered a virtue. The world generally operated by the principle that no one was going to toot your horn for you. You had to do that for yourself. Unless you were wealthy. Then you could hire people to do it. Come to think about it, people haven’t changed very much. Scroll through your social media feed sometime. You will find one post after another of people doing various forms of self-promotion. Wealthy people still hire personal publicists whose job is to promote their employers. The difference between now and before Christianity is that we have to cover up what we are doing a bit. We put on a mask of humility and then brag away. The humblebrag is a real thing.

But Jesus changed all of that. He changed all of that because He really was all that and became something entirely less on purpose. He served us without any ulterior motives. Even though He was greater than everyone around Him, He never leaned into that inherent greatness or used His divinity to His own advantage. He was perfectly honest about His identity, but never let that affect how He interacted with us.

When Paul says to the Philippian believers that Jesus existed in the form of God, he understates just how significant of a thing that was. He makes Jesus’ greatness clearer in his Christological hymn in the first chapter of his letter to the Colossian believers.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and by him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”

That’s who Jesus is. That’s quite a picture. All things were created by Him, through Him, and for Him, and He holds them all together. That makes Him sound like He is the greatest and most powerful being in the universe. In fact, He’s bigger than the universe itself. All of creation together cannot eclipse His glory.

And that’s all true. That is really the case. That’s who Jesus is. And He became one of us. He became one of His creatures. But He didn’t step into the pages of human history with all the pomp and circumstance He was due. He didn’t write in His part as a fabulously wealthy and powerful foreigner who had simply been away on business for…ever…and was now here to enjoy all the comforts and pleasures of creation while avoiding its ugly parts and telling us how we should live.

Instead, He came in the most humble form possible. He came as a baby born to a poor couple as part of a people who were not free in a part of the world considered well beyond the borders of polite society. He did not consider His equality with God as something to be exploited for His own benefit. He used all of those advantages for us. He was perfectly honest about Himself, but never honest for Himself.

This is what we celebrate during the season of Advent. We celebrate the coming of the God who was perfect in power and might, yes, but also perfect in humility. As we have talked about recently, no other god ever did something like this. Christianity was never the only religion with stories of gods appearing as humans. The Greek and Roman gods, for instance, did that kind of thing all the time. But it was never more than a mere costume.

Those first followers of Jesus, though, proclaimed something entirely different from that. We proclaimed that God actually became a man. A fully human man. He didn’t merely slum it up for a while to hang out with and do us a favor or two. He set aside all of the trappings and advantages of divinity and became fully and completely human. And this wasn’t just to do us a favor. This was to save us from our sin. And that salvation came at the price of His own life, surrendered willingly because of His great love for us. That’s humility.

This is, of course, something to marvel at. It is something that makes Him uniquely worthy of our worship. But there’s something more here as well. The only way to receive the gift He offers us is to take on humility ourselves. You see, what He offers us is salvation. But if we are going to receive salvation from Him, that necessarily requires us to accept the notion that we need saving. We have to give total mental assent to the notion that we are broken and enslaved and cannot escape our situation on our own. To put that in another, still more difficult of a way, we have to acknowledge and accept that we are not enough on our own. We are insufficient.

To repeat the point, Jesus isn’t merely offering us a favor. He’s not giving us a simple hand to help us up so we can do the rest ourselves. He is offering a handout of something we could have in no way ever obtained for ourselves otherwise. And the only way to receive it is to acknowledge our need for it.

That’s not so easy. It goes against every natural instinct we have. It violates the law of sin that governs our hearts. And it just doesn’t feel good. Nobody wants to own up to not being good enough. What we want is to be able to proclaim – and to have others acknowledge as well – that we are good enough. We want to claim the Stuart Smalley line every time we look in the mirror: “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.”

The problem is that’s just not true. Maybe the last part is, but when we are talking about breaking free from the enslaving power of sin and putting ourselves in a right relationship with God, the first two parts are as far from the truth as they could be.

Humility is what brought about the season of Advent in the first place. If we are going to receive all of its benefits – benefits like the comfort and hope we spent the first part of this week talking about – then we are going to have to embrace a path of humility in our own lives. When we do, though, all of heaven’s blessings become available to us in Christ.

May you take up the courage of humility as you continue to walk these last few days of the Advent season to and through the great celebration of Christmas.