“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)

Jesus once told a parable about a man who went to a party and seated himself at the head of the table—the position of highest honor. When the owner of the house who actually threw the party arrived, though, he ushered in some people he considered more important. He looked at the man who had evidently overestimated his importance and politely asked him to go sit at the very end of the table where there was still room among the least important guests. The moral of the story was that if we let humbly God declare our value instead of assuming on it ourselves, He will be able to exalt us. Jesus took His own advice, and God did indeed exalt Him. Let’s talk about it.

One of the ways humility works itself out in someone’s life is through their willingness to do what God says. The reason for this is fairly simple. Like we said yesterday, humility is fundamentally about being honest; honest about who God is and who we are in light of that. Well, if we are going to be honest about who God is, we are going to acknowledge that He is God. And, if He is God, then that means we aren’t. That means we need to do what He says. Because, again, He’s God and we’re not.

This is how we can understand the nature of Jesus’ humility. Being God in the flesh, He could think of Himself as less than God because that would have been dishonest. As one who was fully human and fully divine the outworking of His humility was that He didn’t “consider equality with God as something to be exploited.” That is, He didn’t use the fact that He was God to advance His interests. Instead, as a man, He lived fully submitted to God His Father, obeying His commands all the way to the end. As God the Son, He lived in perfect submission to God the Father. That is humility.

The result of this humility is that God acknowledged fully who He was (and is!) to the whole world. He proudly declared Him to be His Son. He enabled all of the various miracles He did. He answered His prayers regarding His followers. And, ultimately, He raised Him from the dead. He acknowledged to the world that Jesus was His Son who could not be held by death and returned His life to Him after it was taken at the hands of sinful men. In other words, “God highly exalted him.”

And now, because of that, Jesus has “the name that is above every name.” There is no name higher than Jesus’. His name inspires hope in the hopeless, offends the prideful, encourages the downtrodden, terrorizes the demons, lifts up the heads of the faithful, and demands worship from all those who hear it. His is the name which causes “every knee [to] bow—in heaven and on earth and under the earth—and every tongue [to] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”

All of creation is submitted to Him as its Lord and Master. Some parts of creation simply don’t realize that yet. When He makes His grand reappearance, no one will miss it. No one will not bow in worship. All will cry out, “O my God!” Some will make that cry as an exclamation of victory, some as an agonizing wail of defeat, but all will make it. There will be no avoiding it because He is Lord. Because indeed He has the name that is above every name.

Okay, but what does any of this mean for us and our call to humility? It’s not like God is going to give us the name that is above every name. No, but when we submitted ourselves in humility to Him, fully acknowledging who He is as one of His faithful children, He will gladly and proudly reveal us to the world as one of His faithful children. Those who submit themselves to the Lord will be exalted to the full extent of who they are in Christ before Him. The glory won’t be ours, it will be Jesus’ shared with us, but it will indeed shine through us.

Humility is not an easy road to walk. It means saying no to ourselves, our interests, and our desires over and over and over again. It means finding ourselves in difficult situations time after time. It means letting others have their way in order to make connections that will help point them to Jesus. It means worshiping Him and only Him when there are so many other things we want to add to that list. Humility is hard.

But God is good. God is faithful. God is kind. God is just. He will receive our humility and return to us a measure of His glory that will make it all worthwhile. This doesn’t mean that we are going to land on top in this life. Jesus demonstrated that’s likely not the case. For all His perfecting the virtue of humility, He was killed for it. Remember: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross.” But in the end, His true glory was revealed for all to see. That will be our end when we are found in Him, when we embrace the path of humility that He has blazed for us.

So, let’s do it. Let’s submit ourselves to God in obedient faithfulness and let Him be the one who reveals to the world who we truly are in Him. That will be the end that makes it all worthwhile. In Him, that end is guaranteed.