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Introduction
As I stood in front of what is considered to be the most likely place of Paul’s brief imprisonment in Philippi, I tried to imagine his state of mind. He came to Philippi at the prompting of a vision. He had no doubt that this is where God was leading him to bring the gospel message.
It was the most clear fulfilment of Jesus’ words in Acts 9:15–16, where he said of Paul, “This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”
Among all the regions that Paul visited in his missionary journeys, his initial visits to Philippi and the broader region of Macedonia were perhaps the clearest examples of what it would mean to both proclaim the name of Jesus to the Gentiles and to suffer for his name.
After he was imprisoned in Philippi, he was chased out of town to nearby Thessalonica, where he was once again met with severe opposition and forced to flee to Berea where there was a more reasonable group of Jews, but then he was pursued by the Jews from Thessalonica and forced south to Athens.
Yet, despite initial rejection by many, the gospel took root in Macedonia. Among the first converts in Philippi were Lydia, a wealthy merchant woman; and a Roman jailer and his family. This unlikely group formed one of the most remarkable and diverse congregations in the early church. From its inception, the Philippian church was born out of suffering and sustained by joy.
As I stood in front of that prison cell, I thought about how easily we associate divine blessing with comfort and success. But Paul’s story challenges that assumption.
Here was a man who followed God’s call with absolute clarity. And that obedience led him not to applause, but to chains. Yet it was from chains he would later write to these same believers words overflowing with gratitude and joy: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice.”
It is one thing to rejoice when life is going well; it is another to find joy when obedience costs us something.
Paul’s time in Philippi reminds us that the presence of suffering does not mean the absence of God’s favour. In fact, it is often in our lowest places that God’s glory and grace shine brightest.
In the same way the Roman cross became a symbol of hope through the sacrifice of Christ, the jail cell that once symbolized defeat became the birthplace of a partnership in the gospel that Paul cherished for the rest of his life.
My goal this morning is for us to see how the gospel reorders everything. From the moment Paul stepped foot in Philippi, the city and the rest of the Roman empire was forever transformed.
To set up today’s message, we need to understand the context in which our passage was received. It is important to know so that we can appropriately receive this instruction as relevant and crucial as followers of Christ.
The site of Philippi was chosen for its fertile land, abundance of springs, and the gold that was mined there. Originally called Krenides — meaning “the little fountains” — it was renamed Philippi by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, around 356 BC.
Philip was an ambitious and shrewd ruler who transformed the small, struggling kingdom of Macedonia into the dominant power of Greece.
He recognized the strategic and economic potential of the area: it sat along the Via Egnatia, the great Roman road that later linked the eastern and western parts of the empire, and its gold mines provided the wealth that funded his military campaigns.
Under Philip’s rule, Philippi became both a fortified city and a symbol of his growing empire. His son, Alexander the Great, inherited not only his father’s kingdom but also his vision of expansion.
Fueled by the resources and stability Philip had secured, Alexander went on to conquer much of the known world, spreading Hellenism, or Greek language and culture, from Egypt to India.
By Paul’s time three centuries later, Philippi had long been absorbed into the Roman Empire, but its Macedonian and Hellenistic heritage still shaped its identity. It was a Roman colony populated by those loyal to Caesar, and proud of their citizenship.
This was the location God had chosen to begin the spread of the gospel among both the Jews and Gentiles in Europe.
One of the great obstacles to the establishment of the church in such an important Roman colony, however, was their understanding of power.
As was described by our tour guide in Greece, there was a clear class system within Roman society.
At the top of the order were the aristocrats, which were those who owned land and were involved in politics. Then were male Roman citizens, followed by male non-Roman citizens, then women, and then slaves.
To the Romans, the emperor was, in a sense, the only living image of the gods, and so he was above all others not only because of his political position but because he represented divine power.
To honour the emperor was to honour the gods; to dishonour him was an act of defiance against the gods and a demonstration of disloyalty to the empire.
To bring a message such as the one proclaimed by Paul, was to disrupt this order of power.
Paul writes from imprisonment to a people living in a city obsessed with rank and privilege. And in his letter, he calls them to a radically different way than what they have always known.
It is one that reorders everything they thought they knew about power, status, and glory.
Let’s look at these in turn, starting with the reordering of power.
Reordering Power
Philippians 2:5–7 “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
Not too different from the world today, the Roman world valued status and advancement. And the rise to power and status was connected to the gods, who were the providers of good fortune.
Just about every community in those days had a temple or places of worship dedicated to the gods. These weren’t simply religious sites, they were social and political centres that reinforced the hierarchy of the empire.
To participate in civic life meant offering incense to the gods, attending festivals in their honour, and showing allegiance to Caesar, who was himself regarded as divine.
Power flowed from the top down, and success was seen as evidence of divine favour. Those who prospered did so because the gods, or Caesar, were thought to be on their side.
In such a world, humility was weakness, and service was reserved for slaves. Honour and status were everything. To lose them was to lose one’s identity.
Yet into this world stepped Paul, proclaiming a message that turned the entire system upside down: a crucified Messiah who emptied himself of divine privilege, who took on the form of a servant, and through obedience, not conquest, was exalted to the highest place.
Paul’s gospel directly confronted Rome’s assumptions about power and glory. Where Rome exalted strength, Paul preached weakness made perfect in Christ.
Where Rome demanded allegiance to Caesar as “lord,” Paul declared that Jesus Christ is Lord, a dangerous confession in a city proud of its Roman citizenship.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians reveals that the true reordering of power begins not with domination, but with self-giving love.
The central message of Paul’s letter is that the proper orientation of power as demonstrated by Jesus is downward mobility.
Christ, being in very nature God, did not use his privilege and power to his own advantage.
Think about the ordering of Roman society. The aristocrats were at the top and slaves were at the bottom.
In the Roman world, power was geographic. Land defined everything: wealth, influence, citizenship, even identity. The men at the top ruled because they possessed.
To own land was to belong, to have a name that endured. Those without property were the expendable classes. Day labourers, women, and slaves.
The empire’s social pyramid was built on ownership: those who owned stood tall, and those who did not own were forgotten.
Into that hierarchy stepped Jesus — a man with no title, no estate, no street address. When someone wanted to follow him, he replied, (Matthew 8:20) “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
And when he was killed in the most shameful way possible, even his tomb was borrowed (John 19:41-42). In the eyes of Roman society, that made him nothing. He was a nobody, a man with no status and no legacy in the conventional sense of the idea.
He was a wanderer without rights or property. But that very emptiness revealed the true shape of divine power. It is a power that finds its greatest fulfilment in humility.
This is the mindset Paul is instructing the Christians in Philippi to have.
Philippians 2:5–7 “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
The word for servant here is doulos, which was the word most commonly used for the lowest class of people in society, the slaves. The ones who had no autonomy, no power, no status, and no ability to change their status.
God entered the world and identified himself with the lowest class in the world in order to overturn the meaning of greatness itself. The one who created and owned everything chose to own nothing. In him, the pyramid is turned upside-down.
Contrary to the empires of this world, the kingdom of God is entered into not with possession but with surrender, not with privilege but with poverty, not with control but with love. “Blessed are the poor,” he said, “for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).
The cruciform life, or the cross-shaped life that Philippians calls us to is one of a reordered power.
The Christian life reorders our understanding of strength. From asserting our rights to releasing them.
In short, power in the kingdom of God is measured not by what we hold, but by what we are willing to give away.
Reordering Status
The kingdom that begins by reordering power naturally moves to reorder status. In Rome, status was inherited, guarded, and displayed.
It was a hierarchy of worth determined by birth, wealth, and ownership. But Jesus dismantled that system. He did not demand a high place in society.
The one who had no power in the form of wealth or land also refused to claim rank. His very life asked a subversive question: What if true greatness comes not from rising above others, but from lowering oneself in love?
That’s exactly what Paul declares next in verses 7–8 “rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!”
Slaves were the lowest class. Yet Christ became one of them. He crossed every conceivable boundary in order to identify with the fulness of humanity.
From divine to human, master to servant, innocent to condemned. Jesus showed us the path to true greatness.
The world says, “Climb higher.” Christ says, “Go lower.”
To follow him is to serve, not from weakness, but from the strength of divine humility. The Son of God reorders status by stepping beneath us, not above us.
There is a freedom in this, despite the very real fear of being overlooked. When we lack status, we may experience a sense of missing out or being rejected.
But, we also experience the freedom of already being given the only status worth having.
We may be overlooked by those who value status in the way the empire values it, but we are not overlooked by the one who can give us everything we truly need.
The status of being children and heirs of God is enough. When we learn to accept this, we will no longer experience the anxiety of climbing to the next rung on the ladder of success.
This is because the promise of glory is founded upon the example of Jesus. As we see in the final verses of our passage today, it was because of the humility of Jesus that he is exalted.
Reordering Glory
Philippians 2:9–11 “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
If Rome taught that glory was earned through conquest, Christ revealed that glory is received through surrender.
The Caesars built monuments to themselves, their triumphs carved into marble and memory. It was amazing to stand at the foot of these magnificent structures.
But the glory of Christ is of another kind. It is glory unbothered by the coming and going of fanfare and applause or the ridicule of apparent failure and defeat.
The cross was once Rome’s symbol of complete domination and strength over any who oppose or subvert the empire.
But through the sacrifice of Christ the Roman cross became the throne of true glory.
What the empire achieved only temporarily through domination, God accomplished eternally through self-giving love.
Christ’s descent to the lowest place became the doorway to resurrection and exaltation. The Father raised him up, not because he seized glory, but because he surrendered it.
This is the great reversal at the heart of the Gospel: every knee will bow, not to a ruler who takes and oppresses, but to a Saviour who gives.
These words echo Isaiah 45:22–25 ““Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear. They will say of me, ‘In the Lord alone are deliverance and strength.’ ”
And in Isaiah 53:12, which is understood as speaking of the promised Messiah, we read, “Therefore I will give him a portion among the great … because he poured out his life unto death,” and in 52:13, “He will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted” (NIV).
Thus, the exaltation of Isaiah’s servant comes as a result of his suffering, a thought also reflected in our passage in Philippians.
This passage, in line with broader New Testament teaching, presents Christ as exalted to lordship over all things, and the signifying act is when God “gave to him the name above every name”
The word translated as “name”, used three times in this passage, has a broad range of meanings, including “name,” “status,” “title,” “office,” “rank,” “reputation,” “fame,” or even “person.”1
The one who emptied himself is now the fullness of all things. His status and rank was not determined by the Caesar’s empire, but by God’s kingdom. The way down is the way up. The path of humility is the path of exaltation.
In this reordering of glory, the kingdoms of this world are exposed for what they are, fleeting shadows before the eternal light of the crucified and risen Lord.
In a time when politics are becoming increasingly divisive and volatile, we can rest assured that true power, status, and glory will never be fully known by political or empirical leaders.
Theirs is a fleeting power, given and taken away by the shifting sands of a fallen world.
These temporary powers may be able to make our lives a little less or more comfortable, but when our lives imitate Christ, we will not be enticed or bothered by what is offered by the world.
Conclusion
One of the most impactful places we visited in Greece was Corinth. Acts 18 tells the story of his visit there.
After facing opposition from the Jews in that city, the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: Acts 18:9–10 “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.”
After many months in Corinth, the synagogue leaders were getting fed up with Paul and brought him to the bema, which was the judgement seat for the local government.
Just as God promised, the governor who heard the case dismissed it and the crowd turned against the leader of the synagogue.
About 500 years later, a church was built in the location of the judgment seat, and in that location was large block of marble, probably placed there about 100 years ago, with the words of 2 Corinthians 4:17 carved into it: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”
In a moment, we will sing a closing song about true power, status, and glory.
Let the king descend, living word made flesh.
When from grace I fell, Christ was lower still.
The beauty of the gospel is that there is no prison cell, no broken relationship, no level of poverty or wealth, no status that is beyond the grace of God.
His power, his status, and his glory are found only when all other options are surrendered.
As we sing, allow Christ to meet you where you’re at. Perhaps you are in a low place. He is there. Perhaps life hasn’t ever been better. He is there.
You don’t need to change your position in order to be met by Christ. Be where you are. Christ is there.
- George H. Guthrie, Philippians (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2023), 170. ↩︎