Dennis Tuuri

this Advent season on Philippians 2:5-11. And today we’ll begin that by looking actually at verse 5 briefly, but this sermon is by way of introduction to a series here that’ll go on three or four weeks on this wonderful hymn, or so some say at least, found at the very center, the beating heart of the center of the epistle to the Philippians. To put it in context this morning I’ll read from Philippians 2:1-16.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Therefore, if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind, let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore, God also has highly exalted him, and given him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure. Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless children of God, without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this wonderful text that you bring us to this Advent morning. We pray your blessing upon us, Father, now and into this next month as we consider the words of your scriptures. May your Holy Spirit bring us life in Jesus Christ, the knowledge of his mind and understanding of the text before us in a way that will transform our lives to make us more brilliant and shining lights as we go into the world. In Jesus name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, we have this wonderful time of year again as we consider the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. One of the things that we do occasionally, Christine and I and other family members, we did last night—Charlotte and Lana, Christine and I—went to the Advent Lessons and Carols at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Northwest Portland. They have another service of that today at 5:00. If you plan on going to that, you better get there probably at least an hour early. The thing fills up quite quickly on Sunday and it’s always absolutely jammed. And it’s a blessing, it’s a mixed blessing. Of course, the Episcopal Church has become quite liberal. That particular church is, as I understand it, where St. Adams worships when he goes to church. He goes to that church as well as Marcus Borg, who denies historic Jesus Christ at all. So it’s a very mixed bag, but the Advent Lessons and Carols still have a good deal of good material in them.

One of the readings last night, and this is why I mentioned it, is part of a poem by John Donne. John Donne was the Puritan preacher and poet in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. And I’m going to try to read this verse that is part of their Lessons and Carols. And if you want to hear it read well, you can go to that this afternoon. I’ll do my best. I think this is from his poem called Corona. And this is the second stanza.

Salvation to all that will is nigh. That all which always is all everywhere, which cannot sin and yet all sin must bear, which cannot die yet cannot choose but die. Lo, faithful virgin, yields himself to lie in prison in thy womb. And though he there can take no sin nor thou give, yet he will wear taken from then flesh which death’s force may try. Heir by the sphere’s time was created. Thou wast in his mind, who is thy son and brother, whom thou conceivest. Ya, thou art now thy maker’s, thy father’s, thy maker’s maker, and thy father’s mother. Thou hast light in dark, and shutest in little room immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.

Tremendous mystery and beautiful blessing that we consider this time of year—the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Advent does not go back as far as the celebrations of Pascha and Passover. The Advent season actually came the latest in the church cycle, probably in the late sixth century. The original church calendar celebrated only Passover and Pentecost as the two great feasts. By the third century, a celebration of Christmas was added. Then in the early sixth century, preparation for Pascha, or Easter as we call it today, came about. When the catechumens would enter into the church, they were to fast and pray in preparation for that, and the church was urged to join them in that. And so the season of Lent came forth as preparation for the season of Passover, or Easter and Pentecost.

And then based upon that forty-day preparation of Lent, people thought it might be good to also have a season of preparation for the celebration of the Lord’s birth. And so Advent was born, really, as informed by Lent. And so it kind of precedes the great feast of Christmas the same way that Lent precedes our great feast of Easter. And we focus primarily in the Western church on those two holidays. So that’s kind of the place of Advent in the Christian calendar.

Now, we are calendar-light here. We never want to miss the reality that the Old Testament calendar system—the yearly Sabbaths and the feasts that were given in the Old Testament in the Mosaic structure—those are all fulfilled in our Lord’s Day celebration. So we don’t want to miss that by going back to some kind of church calendar that becomes mandatory or somehow replaces what the Lord’s Day is—emphatically the fulfillment of—and that’s the entire Old Testament calendar.

So we don’t want to get in the way of that by stressing too heavily the church calendar. And yet the Lord gives us seasonality of times and he gives us these feasts and festivals that come from our ancestors, the church, our forefathers as it were. And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating them and marking particular days in the preaching of the gospel and in our celebrations. And so that’s what we do during the Advent season as we prepare essentially for the great feast of Christmas, and we sort of remember the seasonality of our lives.

Seasonality is an interesting thing. The seasons come and go and the seasons have reference to our world. So God sort of has us go through this routine circular pattern, so to speak, and so it’s proper, I think, to kind of note the seasons with observations of what God has done in redemptive history, which is what we do at the celebrations of Christmas and Easter.

I was listening to a lecture by Oden Rosenstock when he taught at Dartmouth this last week. And he’s different—if you’ve read him, that’s one thing; to hear him talk is quite another. But I have a quote here I wanted to read and it’s about seasonality and it has to do with our lives. We’re going to make a transition from the Ten Words—the Ten Commandments—that we’ve basically finished with now into the season of Advent by continuing kind of one of the implications of the Tenth Word. And it has to do with who we are, what we desire, and how we fulfill the mission that God has given us in the world.

So I wanted to read this quote. I hope it goes okay. Let me just try it. This is from Oden Rosenstock. “Now, the strange thing about humanity is, gentlemen—he was apparently teaching an all-male class—that one man’s life is the seed and the other is the harvest. Man is a little more complicated, as you know, than the grain. In the case of the grain, the one seed is the same as the ear that comes out of it. Right? So you see the same thing. It comes out of the same seed. You can trace it physically by analyzing the fruit of the seed. You see, the strange thing about you and me is that if I bear fruit, it would be fruit in other men’s bodies, in your bodies perhaps—as my students, or somebody—not in myself. That is, gentlemen, the sequence—the sense of semination and fruitbearing in the human race—and that’s the difference between nature and you and me, in history.

The seasons are distributed among four generations. In nature—winter, spring, summer, fall. It’s the same substance throughout the season. In you, in my case, however, it isn’t like that. It isn’t quite. Interesting, isn’t it? Quite interesting rather. That it’s a very simple thing, once you understand it: that the problem of humanity, gentlemen, is that it is that creature in that natural history of mankind in the living world of plants and animals and stories. We are that strange creature in which the seasons are distributed among different individuals, different specimens. It’s quite simple. You can put it in terms of good zoology. Christianity has always felt closer, gentlemen, to zoology than to idealism. Christianity is not idealism.

Socrates says, ‘Oh, I do not die. My mind is so immortal. I live on.’ If you read anything of Plato, it just makes me laugh. I mean, the denial of real death. There is no death. They say. Jesus says, ‘This is terrible. Death is terrible, but I come to life in other people.’ So Paul and Peter then said, ‘We have put on the Lord Jesus.’ They have put him on. Meaning that in their generation, they are Christ. Again, in every generation, there are living people who are Christ today. In many more than just two apostles or four apostles or three evangelists. But you have to learn the zoological, the evolutionary, the biological, put it as you can. The realistic, the physical problem of Christianity is the recognition that death is a hinge between generations and that therefore if a man well dies like the soldiers on the battlefield, they beget the new order of America, didn’t they, in Valley Forge? Isn’t it obvious?”

What’s he saying? Oh, he’s saying that we’re unlike wheat. A grain falls into the ground and something comes up from the same seed. Now, Jesus in his resurrection accomplishes that, and our bodies will be resurrected, of course. But what he’s saying is that in the course of human history, that’s not the way it works. That’s not the way God has established it. The way God has established it is that when we die—and hopefully we do well in our lives—and we die, our fruit won’t be us, as it were, but it will be us affecting other people. So for Hoy, he hoped perhaps it was his students, his family, his friends, those of his church. Death in our case leads to generation of other people, impact on their lives.

And so today’s lesson is about imitation. And what I want to talk about is proper imitation, or mimesis, as opposed to improper imitation. And what this means is that we avoid the silly American thought that we are merely individuals, and we see ourselves truly in relationship to other people, to mentors, to men and women who we imitate and we follow in a positive and godly sense.

Philippians 2:5 says, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” This is our mind, our view of things, our understanding of the world. And we are encouraged to put that mind on, to have that mind, to imitate, as it were, the Lord Jesus Christ and his way of evaluating our world. So the text begins this great hymn of the Christian faith found at the beating heart, the center of this wonderful epistle to the Philippians. That song is preceded by a call to a godly mimesis.

Now, mimesis—this term is a modern term that’s used considerably in circles that I read at least, and in more and more circles throughout the world, both philosophically and theologically. René Girard is the man who came up with this theory of mimetic desire. And I told you when we began the series of sermons on the Tenth Word that we would talk upon this. And today’s the day—mimetic desire.

So what Girard says is man is made to be an imitator, and what we do is we imitate each other’s desires. You notice how the Tenth Word says, “Don’t covet or desire improperly your neighbor’s wife, his house, his field, his servants, his cattle, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” The object becomes less important as we get to that “anything.” The desire that is forbidden in the Tenth Word can focus upon anything because ultimately, as Girard says, it’s not the thing itself that we’re desiring. We are involved instead in an imitation of the desire of our neighbor that he has for his possessions.

And the simplest way that Girard explains this is by two children. We’ve heard this story before, but again to remind us what I’m talking about—he uses mimesis. That’s the Greek word instead of imitation, because when we think we might know what imitation means, and he wants you to think about it—really think about it. And so if we put two children in a room with a toy—or they both have their own toys—but one looks at the other one and sees him playing with his toy, and then he wants that toy that he might have previously had no interest in. He’s imitating the desire of the other person for the thing that he has, and he takes the toy. And so this is mimetic desire—imitative desire. We’re imitating the desire for the thing, and as a result, wanting the thing that he has and wanting to take it.

Now, when he sees that the other child really wants the toy, he sees that increasing desire of the other child. And the first child, the other child who had the toy originally—his desire for that toy is intensified, is it not? He might have only picked up the toy as one among many things he was interested in. But you know what happens next between these two or three-year-olds? Now we’ve got a row going on. Now we’ve got him yelling and screaming and pulling back and forth.

What’s happened? They’ve fallen into the sort of sin that Adam and Eve fell into in the garden when the serpent convinced them that the God who had graciously given them life, and who had graciously given them these trees that were pleasing, desirable to the eye—there’s a proper desire that they were to have. That this God is not a loving, kind God to them. This God is a rival to them. Right? Satan twists God’s words. And he says, “Well, you know what God is really like? He’s your rival. He’s not your loving father. He’s your rival. And he wants you not to have what he has.”

Satan creates sinful desire, sinful mimetic desire, on the part of Adam and Eve, in convincing them that God is a rival to them. Now, men—at least I’m a man, I know in my life, I know in your life, I know that all too often, more than we would care to admit—admit it, men, think about what you do. You don’t trust God. You think of him as your rival. Things go wrong. You don’t get what you want, or something you have breaks, or whatever it is. And all of a sudden, you know, you really have this feeling that God is your rival, and he doesn’t want to give you good things.

Now, that’s Adam. That’s who we are in Adam. We are guilty of the sin of Adam. And that sin began with a desire twisted. Instead of seeing Father as giving us things that are desirable and good, we now imitate an improper desire that sees God as our rival. And this rivalry leads to violence on our part. And we strike out at God the best way we can by striking out at the image of God. So this is what mimetic desire is.

And it doesn’t mean that imitation is bad. It means that this kind of sinful imitation—remember, we said the Tenth Word says, “Don’t desire your neighbor’s wife,” but desire can be a good word, too. You are supposed to desire certain things. That word itself is not sin. It’s not sin to desire something. It’s sin to desire the wrong thing. Improper desiring—improper imitation—imitation of the serpent who creates rivalry and improper desire for things, grasping at things, right?

The text we just read—we’ll look at this in the next couple of weeks—but there’s lots of parallels between this song and Adam. Adam’s made in God’s image. Jesus is found in the image of God. He’s described as that in the text. And very, very importantly, Adam grasps at the fruit. And Jesus in Philippians 2 doesn’t grasp at this equality with God. Adam ends up humiliated, shamed, and disgraced. Jesus makes himself of no reputation, and the end result is his exaltation—that at his name, every knee shall bow.

So we come today to the center of this epistle, and we come to a series of verses that we’ll look at very carefully in the next couple of weeks that are absolutely essential. They’re at the core of Christian sanctification. If we want to celebrate the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnation of our Savior, then we’ll celebrate this text and we’ll obey the ethical implications and commands of it—to be positive imitators of the Lord Jesus Christ, to have his mind on who we are.

Now, the Bible is filled with references to positive mimesis, or positive imitation. And on your outlines, we’re going to go through a series of verses here. So we’re looking at righteous, mature mimesis. Here’s the other thing: René Girard’s theory is usually illustrated by children. That’s where you can see it plainest. And the fact that you can’t see it as clearly in older people tells us something. Adam was a baby. Adam was immature. And immaturity easily falls into the wrong kind of imitation and rivalry. And of course, what happens after their fall is they begin to then combat each other, blaming each other, and marriage problems begin with the fall. So it is impatience on Adam’s part—grasping for the fruit rather than waiting for God to give it to him. It’s impatience. It’s childish. It’s immature. And it is our state in fallen Adam unless we use the grace of God’s word to teach us how we should then live in relationship to what Jesus has come to accomplish.

So this text will tell us what it is. All I want to do today is to encourage us to seek positive imitation of other people in the providence of God. My first mentor in the Christian faith is actually here today, and that’s a blessing to me. And of course it is in the providence of God. These texts that I’m going to read to you are texts that call us to see mentoring relationships, to people generally, to everyone—certainly to Christ—but then to particular individuals in our lives. And all I want to do today is to help you to think about the positive value of imitation.

It’s necessary to have this kind of sermon in America because in America, individualism is king, and in America the quest for authenticity is everywhere: me and only me. I don’t want to imitate anybody. Well, that’s unbiblical, as we’ll see as we go through these texts. We need to have preached to us the admonitions of the Lord Jesus Christ and his ministers to be positive imitators of righteous men and women.

So let’s look at these texts. Ephesians 5:1—and it reads quite simply: “Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children.” Oh, there it is. Be mimetically involved in relationship to God as dear children. And then verse 2 goes on to tell us, you know, how do we—well, how do we imitate God?

Well, we look at the Lord Jesus Christ. In verse two of Ephesians 5, it says, “And walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” So, how do we imitate God? We have the mind of Christ, and the mind of Christ leads us to love, and it leads us to love sacrificially. Well, that’s exactly what Philippians 2, as we’ll look at in the next couple of weeks, goes on to say—right, that the Lord Jesus Christ lays down his life. He doesn’t seek reputation. He doesn’t seek attainment. He seeks merely to serve his father.

Unlike Adam, Adam has come to see God as rival. Jesus—what does he tell us throughout the gospel of John? He’s come to reveal the Father. The only thing that he does is what the Father wants him to do. He looks at the Father. He listens to the Father as the obedient Son. And he is himself this picture for us of what man is to be—an imitator of God in a proper sense.

And then it tells us that we imitate God when we imitate the attitude, the actions of the Lord Jesus Christ. When we walk in love and when we give ourselves for others rather than seek them to give themselves for us.

1 Thessalonians 2:14—”For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen just as they did from the Judeans.”

Well, here we’re imitating the churches. Again, how do we imitate God? We imitate God by having the mind of Christ. Where is the mind of Christ? Paul told the Philippians, you have the mind of Christ. You, the church, are indwelt by the mind of Christ, by the Spirit. And that’s the same with Jesus and the Father, right? Jesus is empowered by the Spirit to do the Father’s will. And the Spirit of God inhabits the churches of God. And we can then imitate those very churches.

And again, the specific reference here is in terms of suffering, suffering for the sake and the cause of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

1 Thessalonians 1:6—”And you became followers of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction with joy of the Holy Spirit.”

Now, the word mimesis, the Greek word for imitators, is not used, but it’s clearly the same thing. You became followers of us and of the Lord. How do we follow the Lord? By becoming followers of those who are in the Lord and who he has brought into the context of our lives. In particular, here, the apostles, the pastors of the church. They’re to be imitated. And in imitating their life, then we’re imitating the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, played out in the context of our world. That generation happens, right? The life of Paul as he dies becomes evident then in the lives of others, and this regeneration that Oden Rosenstock talks about occurs. And it occurs really, ultimately, with the Lord Jesus Christ in our lives.

So you became followers of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction with joy of the Holy Spirit. Again, affliction. So we’ve seen so far that we’re to imitate Christ. We’re to imitate God by imitating the churches of God and by being followers of the particular men and women that the Lord Jesus Christ has brought along as faithful examples to us.

1 Corinthians 4:16-17—”Therefore, I urge you: imitate me. Well, now it gets quite personal. Paul says, ‘Now imitate me as an individual. For this reason, I have sent Timothy to you, who is my beloved and faithful son in the Lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach everywhere in every church.’”

That’s a wonderful little transmission belt of the imitation of Christ, isn’t it? Imitate me. So to help you do this, I’m sending you—I’m not going to you. I’m sending Timothy, who is my son in the faith, and he will remind you of my ways in Jesus. So Paul is modeling the mind of Christ. He does that in terms of mentoring Timothy. In the very life of Timothy, they can see the work of Christ reflected in Paul’s life through the light that comes through Timothy as Paul sends Timothy to them.

So you have this transmission belt of the life of Christ carried on by the power of the Spirit in the lives of men that we then are supposed to positively imitate. We’re to positively imitate these kinds of men. “I remind you of my ways in Christ as I teach everywhere in every church.” Not just you. Every church is to be imitators of godly men of Christ. And to accomplish the imitation of Jesus, we imitate other men in Christ.

1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1—I’m actually going to start at chapter 10:31. “Give no offense,” which could be translated, “Don’t become a scandal.” A scandal is this, you know, upsetness, this contentiousness that happens when mimetic desire—of an improper sort—when rivalry exists. And this is the sort of scandals that the world is marked with perpetually. And he says, “Give no offense. Do not become a scandal to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything, not seeking my own advantage.”

Jesus made himself of no reputation. Paul is not seeking his advantage. Who in this lecture quotes, of all men, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And he says that because Emerson was writing as a non-Christian, he probably wrote more Christianly than he ever did when he was a pastor. He resigned from being a pastor. But so he likes this quote by Emerson. And Emerson says, “As soon as I try to attract someone to myself, I enter into falsehood.”

And our Savior makes himself of no reputation. Right? And so there is this danger of wanting our own advantage. And so Paul says he didn’t seek his own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” Not seeking my own advantage. Jesus came not seeking reputation but rather seeking to serve others. And so he comes to accomplish that. And as a result, scandal, contentions, rivalries, and violence are driven out of the church of God that imitates the Lord Jesus Christ properly.

Hebrews 6:11-12—”We desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish. Do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

So, you know, the opposition to imitating is sluggishness or slothfulness. God says that at the very core of our being should be a desire to imitate others and to apply ourselves in great energy toward the imitation of others. So, don’t become sluggish but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

Paul is going to tell the Philippians, after the great central hymn we’ll be looking at the next three or four weeks, to work out their salvation then with fear and trembling. And he’s telling—whoever writes the epistle, or the sermon, to the Hebrews says the same thing. Through patience you’ll inherit the promises.

Philippians 3:17—”Brethren, join in following my example, and note those who so walk as you have us for a pattern.”

So again, he doesn’t use the word imitation, but he says, to follow us and that you have us for a pattern, for a way to look at, as terms of what you should do with your life. I mean, it’s just peppered throughout the New Testament—this positive imitation, this positive mimesis.

2 Thessalonians 3:7-9—”For you yourselves know how you ought to follow us. You know that you’re supposed to follow us. For we were not disorderly among you. Again, the key to avoiding disorderliness is a proper imitation of others rather than an improper, sinful imitation of others. Nor did we eat anyone’s bread free of charge, but we worked with labor and toil night and day that we might not be a burden to you.

“You also suffer. Okay? So don’t be a burden. We wouldn’t be a burden to you. He says, ‘Not because we do not have authority, but to make ourselves an example of how you should follow us.’ So he tells them to follow us. You know, you’re supposed to follow us, he says. Then he gives them a specific example—of not taking what was rightfully his as an apostle. He doesn’t grasp. Jesus doesn’t grasp. Adam grasped. And in this case, it’s something that he is allowed to have. It’s proper for him to have support. But he doesn’t grasp at that. He instead works with his hands—not to provide a fence, but to show an example. And he tells them, ‘Here it is. I’ve given you a specific pattern that you’re to imitate or to follow in me.’

So Paul tells them to imitate him. He reminds them of specific things that he does in his life. And he tells them to use that as a pattern for them to follow as well.

Hebrews 13:7—”Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow. Consider the outcome of their conduct. Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Interesting insertion of this beautiful phrase: Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever. But what is it tied to? It’s tied to an admonition that the church—the Hebrews, that particular church—would identify their leaders, their pastors, their elders, and follow them. What does it have to do with Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever?

Well, it has everything to do with it. If we think of Philippians, we have the mind of Christ. Christ is mediated to us through other people, and we’re to follow those people. And as we follow those people, we’re following Christ. And Hoy’s wording seemed a little strange. There are Christs. We’re Christ walking around. But on the other hand, that’s what we call ourselves as Christians, right? Christ means anointed one. And when you’re baptized, you’re a small anointed one under the great anointing of the Lord Jesus Christ as Messiah, King, and Priest. And we’re little Christs walking around. Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.

We can be those faithful displayers of the Lord Jesus Christ and have fruit in other men’s lives as we follow those men and women whose lives are filled with fruit of following the Lord Jesus Christ.

So Hebrews 13:7.

Philippians 4:9—”Again, later in the same epistle, the things which you learned and received and heard and saw in me—not in the gospel accounts, not even in the Word of God, which certainly reflects his mind in the gospels, which reflect his life. Now, those things are important; there’s bedrock. But he doesn’t leave it there. He says, ‘The things which you learned, received, heard, and saw in me, these do. And the God of peace will be with you.’”

The God of peace—the key to having peace and unity. The Philippians hymn is buttressed by calls to be likeminded, to have one mind, to not have grumbling and disputing, to be at peace in the context of the church. And the way we accomplish peace in the context of the church is proper imitation, proper mimesis.

And the reason conflicts happen in the context of the church or any community of people is the improper rivalry and violence cycles that come from an improper mimetic desire—from an improper imitation of other people’s desires—rather than the godly desires that Jesus Christ has come to mediate to us.

The God of peace happens—he’s with us, only we can say by way of inference from the text—only as the things that we learn, receive, hear, and saw in other men and women, transmitters of the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, in his life. Only as we do that, only as we imitate him, are we going to have peace in our lives.

Now, believers, brethren, sisters—is there lack of peace in portions of your life? Is there lack of peace in some of your lives? Everywhere? I would exhort you to attach yourselves today. Look—look for people that you know are faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ. Want to learn from them. Want to follow their example. See in them what they do. Want to do those things. And this text says that as we attach ourselves in proper imitation of godly mentors in the faith, then peace will be the result in the context of our lives, both corporately and individually.

Finally, 3 John, verse 11—”Beloved, it says it all. Do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has not seen God.”

So improper mimesis, mimetic desires that lead to rivalry and violence—imitate the good. Proper imitation, having the mind of Christ, seeking it out, seeking out mentors in the faith to follow and to imitate. And then this is a little keratic, you know: don’t do evil; rather, do good. So don’t imitate what’s evil; imitate what is good. “He who does good is of God.” Imitation is action. It’s not a mindset only. It’s a mind that leads to action.

These things do. Imitate godly people by doing the things that you see them do.

Proper imitation of others is at the core, I think, of the process of sanctification. It is what it means to be moved from our old Adamic nature to the new nature and person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, mimesis and Jesus. So we have the text that we have: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” That’s where our section of sermons begins this particular verse. What does it say? “Let this mind be in you.” Now, the “you” there is corporate, and certainly it addresses individuals, but what it’s saying is that amongst yourselves, as a church, have this mind that actually already is in you. Right? We have the mind of Christ by the Holy Spirit. And what he’s saying is, “Let this mind in you, let it be in you. Do these things that you’re supposed to do. Imitate this mind that was also in Christ Jesus.”

Now, we’re in Christ Jesus. We’re in Oregon City right now, too. We’re here. But our essential identity, our self, is not centered in ourselves. Our essential identity is centered in Jesus Christ, outside of ourselves. Postmodernism talks the decentralized self—that you can’t really get into anything; there’s nothing there. And we would say there’s a truth to that. Christians say that you can’t know yourselves. The Greeks said, “Know yourself.” We can’t really know ourselves. And ultimately we are like the Philippians—those whose centrality of ourselves is found outside of ourselves, in Jesus Christ.

Now, we’re living in this world in this body in this place, but ultimately our identification is in Jesus. And so we, because our identity is in Jesus, we can have his mind, his attitude. We can imitate the mind and actions of the Lord Jesus Christ in this place that God has called us to dwell.

So we’re in him. We have his mind. Now, it says we have the mind, or to have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. And we’ll talk more about this in the next couple of weeks. But think about this. This is a text that I chose deliberately several months ago as the text that would be our theme verses for Advent and Christmas. And I chose it because it seems to have this incarnation perspective to it, as we’ll look at in the next couple of weeks.

And some people think this is all about incarnation. This is about having the mind of Jesus that led him to become incarnate. I don’t think that’s accurate. We’ll see that as we go along. Now, the incarnation is central to the text, and it’s more central than the mind of Christ prior to the incarnation because the mind that we’re encouraged to imitate properly is the mind not of the second person of the Son of God—yes, it’s that—but it’s Christ Jesus. Paul, whenever he uses this term Jesus, the name of God, seems to be focusing, and I think this is fairly consistent throughout the epistles. You know, he can address Jesus as Christ, as Jesus, as Christ Jesus. And when Jesus is attached to Christ, the emphasis seems to be the incarnate Son of God. So the incarnate Son of God, I think, is the focus: have the mind of the incarnate Son of God taking upon himself human flesh. That’s the mind we can have now. That mind exists at the right hand of the Father—Jesus Christ, Jesus, is at the right hand of the Father. Humanity is there in Christ. So it’s still Christ Jesus, and it’s still that mind. I don’t think he’s calling us here to have the mind of the second person of the Trinity prior to incarnation.

To look at the text carefully: Let this mind be in you. This mind which was also in Christ Jesus. And we’ll look at this in more detail in the next couple of weeks. But this is the essential call. Now, it does no good to go on to the next few verses and talk about the mind of Jesus and what he was doing in his incarnation, and to sing or recite that beautiful hymn—we’ll read it one more time at the end of the service, these verses 6 to 11. It does no good to look at all of that if we don’t recognize that it’s placed there to fulfill the requirements of verse 5—that we might see that, with a view to obeying that, to doing that, to mentoring that attitude, that perspective, that view that the Lord Jesus Christ had in his incarnation.

It does no good. In fact, it would bring God’s judgment upon us to simply intellectualize these things, to understand them, if we are not committed at the beginning of the process to let the command that introduces the material on Christ sink down into our hearts and into our souls. “Let this mind be in you, which was in Christ Jesus.”

We’ll find out what it is in the next few weeks. We’ve seen little hints and glimpses and little—but we’ll focus a lot the next couple of weeks on what that mind is. But today, the focus is: May the Lord God cause us each and everyone to commit ourselves to proper godly mimesis and imitation of the mind of Christ. And as we’ve seen by these other texts, that means by having godly mentors, people with flesh and blood who are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, who the spirit of Jesus lives in the context of, to attach ourselves to those people.

If a congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we use this Advent season to take this great truth at the heart of Philippians down into our bones, and if we decide to start imitating godly people in our lives, to attach ourselves to their knowledge, their understanding, their actions, to see their lives as patterns for us, and then to see ourselves as patterns to the lives of other believers or to our children, to friends in the Lord Jesus Christ—if we get that kind of modeling going in the context of the church here at Reformation Covenant Church, oh, what a beautiful, bright, shining light into this dark, perverse generation of unbelief that we live in, the context of.

Well, you couldn’t anticipate the implications of how that light would change the world around us as it shines forth. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to do because we’re Americans. We’re individualists. We don’t want to follow anybody. We want authenticity. We want to be our own person. And Jesus says, “Forget it. You’re not to be your own person. You’re a Christian. At the center of your identity is the fact that you’re united to me. In me is life.” He says, “Why would you want anything but life? Your life is hid in the Lord Jesus Christ. His mind is to be our mind. His people who follow him in the power of the Holy Spirit, they’re the ones that we’re to follow in the context of our life.”

May the Lord God grant us today commitment as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ to be truly disciples by being imitators of him, by imitating men and women, and being a proper imitation and pattern to those downstream from us in age or maturity. May he cause all of us this holiday season to want and desire that among all things. If we want that, if we come to that ethical decision today, then the next few weeks, God will grant to us not just an intellectual knowledge, but he’ll grant us the power to live out that kind of mind in the context of our life.

Now, that would be a Christmas to remember.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the wonderful reality of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for the great challenge of the text before us, and help us to put away our radical individualism, to put on a sense and a desire to imitate God’s people in the context of our world, knowing that in imitating them, we’re imitating the pattern of the Lord Jesus Christ. Bless us, Father, as we attempt to put off sinful imitation and to put on godly imitation this season. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.