Sunday message · Defiant Joy series
Listen to the message
Message Summary
Continuing through Philippians, Pastor Phillip Santillan preaches Philippians 2:1–11 and asks how followers of Jesus can consider others more important than themselves. In 2014 he began coaching high school sports because he could not keep urging the church to live as missionaries in everyday places unless he went first. It took eight years before a door opened for a campus Bible study, but he kept showing up. Paul, Phil says, lived this way better than almost anyone, because he went first.
In 1:27 Paul turns to what the Philippians were facing. Phil points out that Paul chose a rare word meaning to live as a citizen and, drawing on Gordon Fee, explains that Philippi was a Roman colony whose believers now held a second citizenship in heaven. Living that way means standing firm together, unafraid of opponents. Believing in Jesus and suffering for him have both been “granted,” a word related to grace, so their suffering had not slipped past God’s plan.
Chapter 2 opens with what the believers already have: encouragement in Christ, consolation of love, fellowship in the Spirit, affection and mercy. Paul is not guilting them into unity, Phil says; what follows should come from gratitude, not pressure. He is not confronting dramatic sins here but the everyday pull to protect how we look and win the argument. Instead, in humility, “consider others as more important than yourselves,” a line Phil admits shakes the American in us.
Paul answers not with a technique but with a person: adopt the same attitude as Christ Jesus. Jesus was God, yet he did not use that for his own advantage. While we grab for status we do not have, Jesus emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. That was not a subtraction, Phil explains; Jesus showed what being God looks like, obeying all the way to a cross, a death reserved for slaves and criminals. A crucified God made no sense to Greeks and Romans or to Jews hoping for a Messiah who would beat Rome, so no one would invent that story unless it were true. “That’s not a God who got overpowered. That’s a God who chose.” So God exalted him, and every knee will bow.
Phil warns against reducing the passage to “just be humble,” which turns the gospel into one more thing to fail at. Jesus is the reason we have anything to give, so we pour out of what has been poured into us. He names where this gets real: a co-worker who takes credit for your work, a relationship where you forgave but still keep score, someone you avoid while calling it keeping the peace.
He closes by reminding listeners that grace is a gift, received by surrendering to Jesus, not by trying harder. Those who belong to Jesus are already fully loved and, as new creations, able to live this way. His challenge is to name one specific relationship and take one real step toward it, the way Christ stepped all the way down so that someone could be lifted up.
Questions about Philippians 2
Philippians 2:3–4 calls believers to “in humility consider others more important than yourselves” and to look to the interests of others, not only their own. Pastor Phil says Paul is not confronting dramatic sins but the everyday pull to protect how we look and win the argument. It should come from gratitude for what we already have in Christ, not pressure, and it gets real with a co-worker who takes credit for your work.
Philippians 2:5 calls us to share Christ’s own attitude: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Pastor Phil notes that Paul answers not with a technique but with a person. Reducing the passage to “just be humble” turns the gospel into one more thing to fail at. Jesus is the reason we have anything to give, so we pour out of what has been poured into us.
It means that one day everyone will acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Because Jesus humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, Paul says God exalted him, so that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:9–11). Pastor Phil notes that a crucified God made no sense to Greeks, Romans or Jews, so no one would invent that story unless it were true.
