No, you are not #1

Philippians 2:3 Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

I could go down a road that our society has cleared for me. I could talk about how our society has a sect called “self” that is bred into our minds. How we are always taught to look out for “#1”, because nobody else will. Nobody else will because they are too busy being selfish themselves. Our society breeds pride, how that we can do anything that we put our minds to. We can accomplish any goal, and if we struggle, their are sub-sects that have all sorts of self-help agendas and teaching materials to aide along the way. I grew up a country boy; to figure out how to accomplish the tasks yourself using ingenuity. Anyone that has grown up on a farm will understand how farmers can make anything work better, or different that it was originally designed. So much of this life in which we live breeds pride. Pride is the root of all sin. Pride is why Satan was cast from the heavens when he wanted to be like God.

Paul was dealing this in his letter to the Philippian church. So many teachers and preachers were taking advantage of Paul’s imprisonment. They were seeking to elevate themselves at Paul’s expense. They had likely suffered bruised egos when Paul began to preach. People were drawn to the power of the Gospel, and not the teachers and preachers in the church any longer. The teachers and preacher now saw the opportunity to regain their status as they preached Christ, and likely slammed Paul for his imprisonment. You can only imagine how they could have easily said God would not have allowed Paul to be imprisoned if he was truly a man of God. What they did not know what that God was using Paul in prison to get the Gospel into the Roman military, and the Roman hierarchy, places that Paul would have had great trouble reaching if not being imprisoned and going into Rome as a Trojan Horse.

My testimony is one rooted in pride. God still has out his hammer and chisel whittling away at my pride every single day. Even when it is masked to others, even when it seems hidden deep to me, He points it out to me as painful as it is sometimes. Paul is truly calling for a self-evaluation in this passage; a deep look at one’s motives can many times reveal what we did not see, nor want to see. It is of no coincidence that Paul uses the greatest example of humility in Christ in the text following; Philippians 2:5-11. Christ was and is God. Christ lowered himself to become his creation, a man. To live and experience life as a man. At any point He could have changed his mind and stopped history and life as we know it. He spent 33 years culminating his humility with the most unimaginable death on a cross to give us what we do not deserve. Don’t let the world convince you that the world owes you anything; you owe everything to Him.