Fourth Sunday in Lent Rev Mark Duer
Philippians 2:5–11 / Lamb of God, Pure and Holy—Hymn #434
March 30, 2025
“Ever patient and lowly” is how the hymn “Lamb of God, Pure and Holy” describes Jesus. This morning, we focus on Jesus, the lowly Lamb of God. Once again, we find out that His lowliness is more than an example; it is a gift in which we find humility ourselves.
And that’s a good thing, because we don’t have much humility to spare. Humility is in pretty short supply. Several generations have grown up believing that the cardinal sin is not pride, but low self-esteem.
Our world is populated by many people who pay no attention to the needs of others, much less to the will of God, but only care about themselves.
The Bible lists humility, along with kindness and meekness, among the Christian virtues. Yet in many circles today any one of the three would be considered a sign of weakness. Lowliness doesn’t go over so well either.
Today in our world, if you want to get promoted, or climb the corporate ladder, you have to dress better, work harder, and get better results than those in your company. There is no place for humility.
Not so in the kingdom of God. To put yourself ahead of God and other people is not a mark of independence and initiative; instead, it is the sure sign of an idolatrous heart.
Christ tells us in Luke 10:27, And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
That’s the sum total of the 10 commandments. St. Paul writes in verse 3 immediately preceding our sermon text: “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”
Unfortunately, all too often that's not the way it is among us. When it comes to humility, we are sadly lacking. Instead of counting others more significant than ourselves, it's just the other way around: we consider ourselves most important of all.
This puts our text in an entirely different light. When St. Paul writes in verse 5 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.”
We are struck immediately by two things. First, the sad fact is that our natural attitude is not very Christlike when it comes to humility.
We do not live each and every day humbling ourselves as we should.
What we don’t have in ourselves we are given by faith in Jesus; the humble attitude of Jesus is one of the gifts He gives to those who love and trust in Him. When you have true faith, you also have the gift of humility.
Matthew 11:28-29 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
As we ponder Jesus throughout this Lenten season suffering the consequences of our sin, we are struck again by His deep and profound humility. He never once complained of injustice or returned violence for violence.
Isaiah 53:3-7 “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. 6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
Jesus is not a helpless victim in His suffering and death. He remained perfectly in charge throughout the passion account. It looked for all the world as though He was defeated that day, they flogged Him and nailed Him on the cross to die, a beaten and bloody pulp of a man.
Jesus was, and remained God thru His torment; for the only way captive humanity could be rescued and released would be if God Himself became the ransom price.
That, of course, is exactly what happened. St. Paul paints the scene in vivid detail in verse 6 of our text: “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.”
When the time came for Him to ransom mankind, He surrendered His equality with the Father and emptied Himself of His divine glory, exchanging the form of God for the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.
“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Thus, the lowest point in the humiliation of Jesus was exactly this: that He willingly placed Himself under the judgment of God in His death. Yet again note how Jesus was in complete control even in this degradation: “He humbled Himself.”
The Son of God deliberately and freely chose to take on human flesh, to empty Himself and come among us as a man, then to lower Himself still further all the way to death in obedience to the Father’s will. And He suffered no ordinary death, but the agonizing death of the cross.
Talk about lowly. Not one of us has ever run into such humility as we see in the Lord Jesus, who came down from His exalted glory in heaven to rescue fallen humanity.
Humility may be fine for other people, lowliness may be well and good, but the sinful heart just doesn’t want to submit to those virtues. Who would want to take a back seat to somebody else?
When selfish pride takes over, lowliness goes out the door, and humility doesn’t even show up on our radar screen. That's when people get hurt. And make no mistake about it, we injure ourselves as well. When pride runs amok, it not only affects other people, it also cuts us off from God.
To our sinfulness of too much focus on ourselves, the message of the lowly Lamb of God comes as healing medicine for the soul.
For our Lord Jesus walked the lowly, lonely road that led to the cross precisely to remove the injury and hurt that you and I have done in our sinful pride. The death He died on His cross in lowliness and humility was our death. The curse He bore in that shameful death was our curse.
Now the power of that curse is broken. The warfare between God and mankind is over and done. We have received from the Lord’s own hand double for our sin. The miserable record of our sin, and all the hurt and shame is blotted out in Jesus’ blood.
In exchange for the misery of our sin, we receive the very life of Christ, the lowly Lamb of God. Baptized into Him, we receive His lowliness and humility as a gift, to live by faith no longer in ourselves but in Him who died for us in wretched lowliness and was raised in joyful glory.
Through faith, we have this attitude that was first in Christ when He left His Father’s throne, emptying Himself to become a slave that we might be made sons of God to reign with Him in glory.
For what you see now is only partial. Because our Lord Jesus, the lowly Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, humbled Himself and obeyed His Father’s will all the way to the death of the cross.
Verses 9,11 9Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.