Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 25 · January 25
Let This Mind
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:”
In May 1873, a thirty-three-year-old Belgian priest named Joseph de Veuster, known as Father Damien, stepped ashore at Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai. It was a strip of land walled off from the rest of the island by sea cliffs, and for about seven years the Hawaiian kingdom had been sending people with leprosy there. Damien had volunteered to go. He built coffins, he dressed sores, and he stayed. In 1884 he found that he had the disease himself. The story that has followed him ever since is that he began a sermon with words he had never used before: "we lepers." He died there in 1889.
Paul is writing to a church with a quarrel in it. Just before today's verse he says, "Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." Then he says, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." What follows is the best-known passage in Scripture about coming down: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."
Count the steps down and you find one after another, from equality with God all the way to the cross. Paul makes it clear that Christ chose them: He "made himself of no reputation," and He "humbled himself." Nobody forced Him down a single step.
So be exact about what this mind is. It does not begin with a low opinion of yourself. It begins with Christ knowing exactly who He was, equal with God, and then being willing to spend all of that on people who could never climb up to where He stood.
Damien went to Molokai by choice, but in time he could not have left, because the disease bound him to the island. Christ was never trapped at any step. He went down every one of them of His own free will, and that is the mind God is forming in you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 25 is Refuge from the Storm (Isaiah 25:4).