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*The Mind of a Servant*
 
*Philippians 2:1-11*
 
January 8, 2006
 
*/Focus:/* Having the mind of Christ means learning the servant’s life.
*Introduction: Wonders of the Human Brain*
Let’s  start by reading our Scripture  passage.
If you’ll turn in your Bibles to Philippians 2:1-11, you can follow along as I read from the New Living translation:
 
/Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ?
Any comfort from his love?
Any fellowship together in the Spirit?
Are your hearts tender and sympathetic?
Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one heart and purpose.
Don't be selfish; don't live to make a good impression on others.
Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself.
Don't think only about your own affairs, but be interested in others, too, and what they are doing.
\\ Your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had.
/
There is a hymn call “He Lives which begins like this:
“I serve a risen Savior                                                                     He’s in the world today                                                                I know that He is living                                                        Whatever men may say.”
I mention this because today we are going to examine what it means to serve, to have the mind of a servant.
Will 2006 find us serving Christ?
Will we be able to sincerely sing, “I serve a risen Savior”?
Now, back to our Scripture reading,/ \\ Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God.
He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form.
And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal's death on a cross.
Because of this, God raised him up to the heights of heaven and gave him a name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
/
I want to call your attention to verse 5. Let me read it for you again (this time from the NIV):/   \\ ”Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.”
/If you have an old King James, you will notice that it reads much differently.
Instead of saying,/ “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus/,” it says,/ “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
/Now, I realize that attitude is probably the best translation, but I’ve always liked the idea that our minds ought to indeed be the mind of Christ.
Minds are incredible things to.
Minds and brains are clearly different things.
For instance, all of you have known people with brains who didn’t seem to have a mind.
The brain, therefore, is but the vehicle, and the mind is the driver.
The brain is that three-pound organ, that tiny softball of decision, perched on top of the spinal cord, by which we make our way through life, but the mind is behind the steering wheel..
 
It operates at various levels of activity and frenzy.
For instance, if the brain is operating at zero to three cycles per second, it is in a theta stage, a coma kind of a stage, and death is pending.
If the brain speeds up to a delta-wave condition, four to six cycles per second, it is likely in deep   
Sleep - (pause)  common to some sermon series on Leviticus.
If it speeds up to between seven and thirteen cycles per second, it’s in a beta stage, which is a creative, restful stage of man.
If it speeds up to fourteen to twenty-one cycles per second, it is in the alpha stage, the typical Baptist stage that is perfect for baking casseroles and going to annual general meetings.
And at twenty-one plus, it is in a gamma stage, which is a hassled, hurried, frenzied state of life, the stage some of you found yourselves in over the recent Christmas holiday!
Now, I believe that brains are put there for a specific reason, and I think the verses we are considering this morning encourage us to let our brain be the dwelling place of God.
Carl Sagan, the philosopher, says that the brain is “about three pounds of a messy substance, shut in a dark, warm place.
It is a pinkish-gray mass, moist and rubbery to the touch.
About the size of a softball, it perches like a flower on top of the spinal column and is connected by the finest fibers and filaments to every nook and cranny of our bodies.”
Statistics say there are an estimated thirteen billion nerve cells inside the brain itself, and most of these cells have junction with five thousand other nearby nerve cells.
Some fifty thousand of these synapses, or junctions, exist in our bodies.
As you can see the word /astronomical/ isn’t big enough to describe the complexity of our brain, for the number of known cells in the brain far exceeds the number of stars we know about in all the galaxies.
Take the skin, for instance: There are four million structures sensitive to pain.
Five hundred thousand keep track of touch or pressure.
Another two hundred thousand keep track of temperature.
Add the big ones—the eyes, ears, nose, and tongue—and you begin to get the picture.
The best way to picture a brain’s network is to imagine thousands of telephone switchboards, each one big enough for cities like New York or London, and you begin to get the picture of the marvelous complexity of the human brain.
Brains are impressive, even in nerds and dorks and television evangelists.
What amazes me about them is that they’re all about the same size.
It amazes me, for instance, that Madame Curie and Tina Turner have  the same size brain.
Or Wernher von Braun and Chevy Chase—all about the same size.
Isn’t this trivia just mind  boggling?
But when you read a passage like Philippians 2;5 (which says: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus”), you become aware that for all its beauty and complexity, it really is the dwelling place of God.
One day as he was meditating upon this great passage, Calvin Miller wrote a sonnet to his own brain, and it goes like this:
 
*Calvin Miller’s sonnet to his brain*
Gray, wrinkled, three-pound thing, I clearly see 
I cannot trap you with an EEG, 
You nervy organ, you, skull-cased and free, 
A brazen challenge to psychiatry.
Soft mass, I cannot help resenting you 
Each time they search and probe for my IQ.
Half of Einstein’s lobe was twice of you, 
You joyless megavolt computer shoe.
Be careful, Judas organ, or you’ll find 
God cauterizes every rebel mind.
You small, gray lump, you always seethe and grind, 
Spend small electric currents thinking blind.
Yet, you’re the only shabby place I see 
That His (point to heaven) Great Mind may come to dwell in me.
The mind of Christ is that which is to inhabit us.
I’ve always liked /mind/ when the word is used as an adjective, for instance as being high-minded or low-minded or filthy- or empty.
But I like it better as a verb: to mind your manners or mind your business or “Do you mind?” or “Don’t mind if I do.”
That active sense is what Miller is talking about.
*I.
The Servant’s Mind Is Always Becoming*
I want you, for the sake of understanding this passage, to begin not with verse 5, but Philippians 2:8, where it says that /“Jesus, being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”/
That verse always troubled me a little, because if there’s any doctrine I personally prize, it is the doctrine of the sinlessness of Jesus Christ.
To speak of him becoming obedient bothered me a bit, until finally it seemed God said to me, “Look, the emphasis here is on /becoming/, that this Jesus who is Lord, who would be my divine mind implant—this Christ had to learn it all in human existence, too.
He was not born as Saint Alphonsis suggests.”
Saint Alphonsis said that shortly after birth, Jesus sat up in the straw, umbilical still wet, and said, “Hi, Mary.
I’m Jesus, the Son of God.”
So much trouble with that.
The emphasis here is that Jesus, like all of us, had a mind that was in the process of becoming.
We are talking about the messianic consciousness—the idea of Jesus’ discovering who he is, the divine Son of God—and that discovery goes on and on and on.
Isn’t it amazing that in our lives we have to stop and say over something we did only a year or so ago, “Was I really that stupid in 2005?”
The process of the growing mind moves on and on, and it began so gradually.
The same Calvin Miller who wrote the sonnet we just read relates the following story; “I remember that first time in school when Mrs. Dirksen, my first grade teacher, asked me what my name was.
I knew that.
And then she asked me what my mother’s name was.
I said to her, “Momma.”
She said, “No, that is not her name.”
I said, “Yes it is.
We all call her that.”
“No,” she said, “it’s not ‘Momma,’ it’s something else.”
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