05 Apr The Heart of Christ is Found in Service

    Posted at 14:25h in Encouragement by
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    When Christ entered Jerusalem days before His crucifixion, He wept over their unrepentant hearts and the coming destruction onto the city. The Savior of the world, hours before His death and a day before being brutally crucified, washed His disciples’ feet as an example of humility, service, and love for one another. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when being handed over to His captors and after three hours of prayer so intense that He sweated blood, Jesus allowed His betrayer to kiss Him. On the cross and in deep agony of body and soul, He made time to offer forgiveness to a repentant thief and to ask our Father to forgive His tormentors and those who scorned Him because they didn’t understand what they were doing. In the most difficult of circumstances, Christ had every reason to think about Himself and no one else. And yet you find with every opportunity, He is putting Himself last. THIS is the heart of the gospel and service unto God.

    “Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this same attitude in yourselves which was in Christ Jesus [look to Him as your example in selfless humility], who, although He existed in the form and unchanging essence of God [as One with Him, possessing the fullness of all the divine attributes–the entire nature of deity], did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped or asserted [as if He did not already possess it, or was afraid of losing it]; but emptied Himself [without renouncing or diminishing His deity, but only temporarily giving up the outward expression of divine equality and His rightful dignity] by assuming the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men [He became completely human but was without sin, being fully God and fully man].

    After He was found in [terms of His] outward appearance as a man [for a divinely-appointed time], He humbled Himself [still further] by becoming obedient [to the Father] to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also [because He obeyed and so completely humbled Himself], God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE SHALL BOW [in submission], of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess and openly acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord (sovereign God), to the glory of God the Father.” PHILIPPIANS‬ ‭2:4-11‬ ‭AMP