An antidote to evangelical leadership cults

Philippians 2 may not strike you as a ‘go to’ passage as we approach Advent and Christmas, but its picture of the incarnation is beautiful.

The one who was ‘in the form of God’ (2:6), enjoying the freedom of eternity at the Father’s side, did not feel it necessary to hang onto that elevated status. So He ‘emptied himself’ (2:7), a phrase that has led to PhD dissertations and strong scholarly disagreements.

Clearly, we don’t want to say that He became less than God, and several have questioned Charles Wesley’s emotive line ‘emptied himself of all but love’. But over-analysing the Greek verb risks losing the beauty of the act. Jesus was willing to forgo the outward display of divine glory that is His by nature, in order to become like you and me – flesh and bone, tears and shame, hunger and nakedness, Isaiah’s ‘man of sorrows’.