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IN PHILIPPIANS chapter 2 Paul speaks of the Lord Jesus in verses 6 to 11. Verses 6 and 7 of this section of Philippians could be said to be a commentary on the verse from Isaiah 53 which is before us in this meditation. Both speak of the experience of the incarnation of Jesus. We cannot in any way plumb the depth of the experience of Jesus when he became incarnate - that is became human by being born into this world, but the little the bible does reveal to us we ought to seek to learn and appreciate, for that little is more than a life for us, and full of meaning as it reveals the wonder of God's saving love through Christ. It is this experience of Jesus we are seeking to understand in this sermon.

The title I have chosen for this meditation is from the Authorised Version of the Bible. The New International Version, which is more used today, translates this phrase in Philippians 2:7 as he 'made himself nothing', but there is something strong and powerful, in my mind, about speaking of the incarnation of Jesus as Jesus 'emptying himself'. The great hymn 'And can it be ....", which Charles Wesley wrote over 200 years ago, has a phrase 'he emptied himself of all but love', and in this phrase Wesley seeks to express the humiliation of Jesus expressed in the incarnation, and for this reason is a helpful phrase. Yet Wesley speaks in the language of devotion rather than truly accurate language. Jesus emptied himself as our text reveals to us, and love was the one thing he brought amongst us and poured out on us in this act of humiliation; yet it is not true that he emptied himself of his deity. He was still God the Son. His deity shone through his life though hidden. Jesus declared his deity on several occasions. What is true is that Jesus laid aside the privileges and glory of his deity and accepted degradation for our sake. His deity he could not empty himself of. It was essential to his being. God could not cease to be God. Also Jesus had to die as God as well as man, so that his sacrifice for sin would be of infinite worth. The value of the one sacrificed gave full value to the atonement he made for the sins of the world.

I feel that the best way of opening the meaning of our test is to take it sentence by sentence, and this is what we will do together. May the Spirit of God lead us to Jesus who emptied himself for us.

We must consider these two words first for they express something absolutely at the centre of the revelation the Bible gives of Jesus. 'Before Him' must mean 'before God'. There was and is an absolute oneness between God the Father and God the Son essential to their eternal existence. God is and always has been, and in God there is a holy oneness in all things. When Jesus, the Servant of God, became human, he became the 2nd Adam. He came into the world to be our substitute and representative and to be all that we can not be, and be it for our sake and in our stead. Jesus came as the 2nd Adam to fulfil the whole of God's law on our behalf, and so Jesus grew up before God. He always lived his incarnate life on earth before God and in tune with God's perfect will. This is the essence of the Servant growing up before God. Jesus was always one with the Father and always perfectly obedient to the Father. This obedience caused him to accept our guilt and go to the cross and die in our place. Jesus expresses this living before God in John 15:10 and John 14:31. In this obedience Jesus dwelt in the love of God, and enabled the love of God to be shed abroad in our hearts. Jesus is our perfect and complete Saviour because he was obedient to the Father, lived before God, and lived in our place and for us, so that we may hide in him and be cleared of all our sin.

Surely this phrase expresses the beauty to God of Jesus in his incarnate life. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the virgin Mary and became man. The Servant submitted to this emptying of his glory to do the Father's will of love for us sinful humanity. How precious was Jesus to God in this obedience. As Jesus grew up he was to God a tender plant, watched over and cared for, loved and cherished.

In this idea of Jesus in his incarnation as a tender plant, there is also the revelation of the vulnerability of Jesus. How easily can a plant be injured and crushed. So Jesus came into this world with this total vulnerability to suffer and experience all the pain that we fallen sinners are prone to. In his life Jesus went through all the myriads of experience of human pain and suffering, because it behoved him to suffer all the pain which sin brings upon the human experience. Jesus shirked nothing of this living because of the great love where with he loved us, for he came to save us from our sins. Each one of us suffer pain in this life in body, mind and spirit, but our suffering is only a microcosm of the total suffering of humanity. Jesus in his life, vulnerable as a tender plant, gave himself up in his tenderness to the total suffering of all mankind in order to atone for our sin.

At the moment of writing this sermon the Kosovo war and suffering is at its height. I have felt more than ever before in my life the awful pain and suffering that occurs in our world, and the awfulness of the sin, pride and greed, that causes it all. As I at this moment contemplate Jesus growing up before God as a tender plant when he was here on earth, and accepting the total suffering of humanity and making himself vulnerable to the whole of its pain, I see in Jesus how he in his life suffered this Kosovo pain and suffering, and bore it in his body and life, in order that through him we might, through faith in him, have a glorious peace and heaven awaiting us in his eternal glory. God has met that pain, and does care, and has done something infinitely wonderful to put things right. Jesus bore it all in his suffering life, and through this loving sacrifice we have a future where this sin and suffering will always be a past forgotten evil dream.

The root is the root of the tender plant, the suffering Servant. He was planted in a dry ground. The dry ground this world of sin, and the hearts and lives of humanity, corrupted by sin and dead in sin.

Dry ground is not welcoming to the plant. A plant needs moisture in order to live and grow. The heart of mankind is dry without any water of spiritual life. Dry ground is hard so that the tender plant can't reach down and take root. The heart of mankind is like hard dry ground. In Ezekial 36:26 God speaks through the prophets and says he will remove from us the heart of stone within us. Jesus was planted as a tender plant in a world of people with hearts of stone. Yet the tender plant grew. Like a root out of a dry ground Jesus grew and worked his perfect work of redemption and completed it, but in the doing of it suffered all the rejection and hate of a stony world.

When we read of the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels we are struck with the reception he received. No man lived and loved as Jesus did. Yet first of all we find his family not believing in him and despising him. We find people flocking after him, but we read that Jesus grieved because they desired him and sought him for the meat which perishes - that is the earthly blessings like food and bodily healing which he gave with such liberality; but the bread of heaven, himself given in sacrifice, they did not want to know. As we read on in the gospel narrative we are amazed at the attitude of the Jewish leadership, who were the leaders of the nation to which he had been promised as their Messiah. They perceived a threat in him to their authority and influence. They resented his loving correction of the errors that had crept into their religion and the exposing of their inner hearts which contradicted their outward religious living. So hard were their hearts that they sought to kill him and gave him over to the Gentile authority to be crucified.

Today there is no story so wonderful, moving and full of hope, as the message of Jesus, the tender plant, who gave his life a ransom for many. Yet this Gospel is looked on as something that is not right as a topic of conversation in society. People will talk about anything else, but the gospel is an embarrassment. Even within the church, though there is much talk of religion and good works, yet there is comparatively little speaking of Christ, and when he is spoken of it is more of him as an example than as our sacrifice, giving himself in total love to redeem us from sin, death and hell.

How hard is the soil of the human heart, but praise God the promise in Ezekial 36:26 is that God will take away the stony heart and give a new heart, a heart of flesh. It is this gracious work I praise God for. He has softened my heart and so I am able to see Jesus tenderly looking upon me in love, and am able to hear his voice telling me how much he loves me and that he has died for me, bearing all my guilt and shame in his body on the cross. With this softened heart given me I weep for my sins which caused his death, and cling to him only to be washed in his precious blood, and I hear him say 'though your sins be like crimson they shall be white as snow' and I know myself forgiven, washed, accepted and embraced in the arms of his love. The words of Charles Wesley are echoed in my heart -

Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee
Leave, Ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on Thee is stayed.
All my help from thee I bring:
Cover my defenceless head
In the shadow of thy wings.

and echoing these words I find Jesus tenderly lifting me up and making me his own.

NO BEAUTY

Jesus, as the Servant of God, in his incarnation emptied himself of all his heavenly glory and privileges. He became man, but he shunned all earthly glory. He is the King of kings, and now sits on the throne of God ordering all things according to the council of his will. Yet when he became man he was born in a stable. His mother, though of the line of David, the great king of Israel in the past, was an ordinary humble girl.

Jesus had no beauty as the world counts beauty or desirability. The world is attracted to riches and social standing. The world is attracted to power and position. The world is attracted to success in worldly projects. So the world venerates great generals, great scientists, rulers and princes. Jesus had none of these. Although he is our creator, he claimed no earthly glory.

It was sufficient for Jesus to be a man to represent humanity before God. He desired nothing else. His beauty lay in something the world has little regard for, and in some cases despises. The beauty of Jesus lay in perfect goodness and purity, expressed in utter self-giving love. The world was attracted to the benefits his love poured out and so they sought him to be fed and healed, but as a general rule they did not seek him for his own sake. There was 'nothing in his appearance that we should desire him' because the world looks on the outward appearance and has very little interest in purity of heart.

One would imagine, from a human point of view, that if Jesus came into this world to help us, he would want to make himself attractive to us so that we would warm to him and he would win our allegiance. The fact is that Jesus in his incarnation did nothing whatsoever to attract us to him. He lived a life of perfect love and poured out that love upon us, yet he did nothing in worldly sense to attract and win people to him. He never sought to win over the rulers. Rather he was outspoken often in rebuke of them. He never went out of his way to antagonise the Pharisees, nor did he go out of his way to accommodate himself to them. He had no desire to usurp their position, but did nothing to specially explain this to them. The inner beauty of his character should have been sufficient to commend him to them, for the Pharisees were supposed to be the 'good' people. However the Pharisees were just as much of the world in their religiousness as any Roman. The world should have been attracted to Jesus, but he had no beauty to the world because the world's values had become distorted and corrupted, and so the world cannot appreciate true beauty and majesty.

This emptying of Jesus of all his glory tells us something very important. Jesus came to help and save us, but that saving was independent of any need for us to appreciate him. The coming of Jesus into this world was to be despised. His coming was to take our place and accept responsibility for all our wrong and evil, and then to accept all the punishment and debt of this evil, in order to bear it a way, and so save us, who committed the wrong, from this just pain and retribution.

It is essential that we come to trust and love Jesus in order to benefit by this great salvation and so be saved from our sins, but it did not require our support or consent or help for Jesus to work this salvation. Salvation required that Jesus suffer in our place. This Jesus did in grace and love of infinite depth. Nothing but love prompted Jesus to redeem us from sin and death, and having redeemed us he offers redemption freely to all who will believe and receive it.

How greatly Jesus must have loved me and you, to bear our sins in his body on the cross.