Sermon for Palm Sunday, 2026
Philippians 2:5-11
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
The text for our sermon today is Philippians 2:5-11, our Second Reading read before.
Lord God, heavenly Father, sanctify us through Your truth, Your Word is truth. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ,
Jesus arrived at Bethany on a Friday. A couple days later, after the Sabbath had passed, the large crowd that had come for the feast heard that Jesus was heading to Jerusalem, so they cut and laid out branches and even placed their own cloaks on the road[1], all the while shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!”
These were words taken from Psalm 118, sung as part of the Passover feast. Jews sang it when the Passover lambs were sacrificed, and now they sang it for the Lamb of God on His way to be their sacrifice. But they weren’t thinking of sacrifice. Instead, they received Jesus as heavenly royalty, Israel’s King.
While it’s good for us to remember Jesus entering Jerusalem, we must never forget that this event signalled Jesus’ journey toward death. No matter what anyone declared that Sunday many years ago, on the following Friday, Jesus would be dead.
We can perhaps imagine what sort of attitude or thought process Jesus must have had to ride into town, knowing that He was going to face betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death. Surely no one in their right mind would willingly take a path where they know it ends in death. To do so would require a real sense of mission and an enormous will. But it would also require Jesus to be humble, and it is this humility that the Apostle Paul urges us to copy when he says, “Have this mind among yourselves.” As Christ was humble, so must we.
A few verses earlier, Paul wrote, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (v. 3-4).
Humility is a vital concept in the New Testament, a clear mark of a committed Christian, and stands in opposition to the selfishness and pride inherent in our corrupt, sinful natures, which often see humility as cowardice and equate pride and self-assertiveness with true manhood. Books and podcasts offering assertiveness training and effective ways of exercising power and “looking out for number one” are hugely popular and profitable. However, the attitude of a heart transformed by God’s grace is no longer “me first and everyone else after me, if at all.” Instead, it is a humble and loving attitude that puts others’ interests before one’s own.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself.” That is true humility. Jesus Christ was God — is God. Whatever it is to be God, with all the power and glory and so forth, Jesus had it. From all eternity, Jesus has been one with the Father, being truly God. His eternal existence as God is unshakable and unchangeable. Jesus’ divine nature is incapable of experiencing humiliation; yet, while fully retaining His divine nature, He took on a true human nature. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He who is true God from all eternity became a true man and has dwelt among us. This is what we call the incarnation, and we understand it as one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith, one that cannot be overappreciated. Think of all that Jesus gave up.
He could do anything, anywhere, anytime. Still, He did not consider that possession to be too tremendous, too precious, or too valuable to be set aside. He did not hold His own glory and power and prerogatives as more significant or desirable than our salvation. He counted redeeming us as more important than the enjoyment of His own participation in the glories of the Trinity for a time.
Jesus didn’t cease being God. He was, and always remained, true God, but for a time He set aside His divine power and took on human weakness. He relinquished His knowledge and became an infant in the womb. He set aside His glory and became not just human, but a helpless child, in an insignificant family, in a remote region of an impoverished nation under military occupation, during a period we would consider primitive. That’s what Paul means when he says Jesus “emptied Himself.” That is genuine humility — humbling Himself beyond all reason, forsaking His own comfort, glory, and prerogatives for the sake of His enemies’ well-being and salvation—us—sinful mankind. He considered nothing too great to give up in order to fulfill His purpose, which is our redemption from sin, death, and hell.
That is the attitude Paul is challenging us to imitate and make our own. If you want to think like Jesus — and believe me, if you consider yourself to be a Christian YOU DO — then this is what you should imitate, humility. Nothing should be too much to lose for the sake of Christ, or for the sake of His Gospel, or for the sake of His people. No indignity should be more than you can bear. No insult should be too much to take. No embarrassment should be enough to stop you, and no loss, even to the point of your own life, should be beyond what you are willing to give.
That was the attitude of Christ — humility which permitted Him to become one of us and to die so violently and shamefully for us. We are to partake of that humility. We are to humble ourselves in our own minds so that our interests and our comfort take second place to the welfare and spiritual health of others! This is not about allowing someone to make you do something; it is about doing it yourself because it is right, setting others and their needs first before our comforts, our preferences, our personal pride, and even our own needs, simply because it is the will of God that we do so. “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.”
On the night of His betrayal, Jesus said to His disciples, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35). The disciples could not follow Christ to the cross, but He asks them to imitate His love for them by loving one another. Christians bring dishonour to Christ and His love when they deal with one another in a loveless manner. Are there any among you today who have bitterness in their hearts toward someone else? If so, can you say you are showing the humility Christ asks of us?
The mind of Christ is the attitude of humility marked by love. He has loved us so much that He endured the loss of all things. He was willing to even set aside the glory of being God to take on our human flesh and blood and human nature. He loved us so much that He was willing to endure the assault of human sinfulness while He lived a perfect and sinless life. His love was so deep that He was willing to take our sin on Himself and endure the wrath of God against us so that we would never need to. The passion and the cross were truly terrible, and the wrath of God which caused Him to abandon His only Son to bleed and die on the cross alone is beyond our comprehension, and the humility of Jesus Christ has led Him to do all of that so that we may be forgiven, justified, and brought into the love of God by grace, and adopted into His family as not merely slaves, but as brothers! His resurrection and eternal life are also ours. It is won for all men and poured out on all and possessed by those who trust God and believe His Word and love. After His glorious resurrection, speaking to His disciples, Jesus said, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved” (Mark 16:15-16).
Jesus did not just give up glory and power, but gave up His life. Paul writes that Jesus “emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Jesus became one of us. He took on the form and nature of those He had created to be His servants — His slaves. He became everything you are, except for sin. He carried the aches and pains. He carried the troubles of life. He carried emotions, joys, and griefs. He endured not being able to have it His way at every moment, of having others decide for Him. He was a normal man, except that He was also God, enduring this normality and humbling Himself to submerge His power and glory in this human nature, and then,
“He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” He did not deserve to die. He had not sinned and earned death. He deserved life. Nevertheless, He allowed men to take Him captive when He could have disabled them with a thought or wiped their existence away with a single word. He allowed them to mock Him where He deserved praise and glory, and to beat and torture Him where He deserved worship and adoration. He even prayed for those who tortured and abused Him, that God would not hold this sin against them.[2]
Then He died. His executioners did not kill Him. No, He set His life aside by His own power and died at just the right moment by an act of His will. Still, He humbled Himself to permit them to drive nails through His hands and feet and hang Him on a cross — an instrument of monstrous torture and death — and thereby took upon Himself a curse He Himself had spoken in Deuteronomy 21:23, namely that anyone who is hung on a tree “is under God’s curse” or, as the curse is paraphrased by Paul in Galatians 3:13, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”
Jesus “humbled Himself” for us to the point of becoming the curse for us, and, taking the curse of God against the one who would die on a tree on Himself, has died deliberately in our place. Isaiah writes, “Surely, He has taken on Himself our sufferings and carried our sorrows. Yet we considered Him to be wounded, struck down by God and afflicted. However, He was pierced for our rebellious acts. He was bruised for our wrongdoings. The chastisement that brought us peace was on Him, and through His wounds we have been healed,” (53:4-5). That is how far Jesus has humbled Himself, and because of it all our sins have been forgiven, we have been given eternal life, and shall one day rise from our graves to sing in His true triumphal parade on that grand and glorious Palm Sunday of eternity!
Seeing that, Paul encourages us to have the same attitude — to have the mind of Christ. Paul is inspired to add an inducement to the picture by reminding us of the reward for Jesus, for His humility and obedience to the will and plan of the Father when he writes, “Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Just as it was for Jesus, so will it be for us. We shall not lose by imitating His humility. Having the same mind Christ Jesus had, we receive the same good pleasure of God. The earthly blessings are not the same, of course, just as the tasks we shall perform are not the same, but God the Father will reward our true humility with a true glory of our own and bless each of us with life eternal beyond our comprehension. Any loss we may suffer now is but for a time, but the reward and the joys will be forever. God has promised to return and repay all of our losses. And it is all so that God may work through us just as He did through Jesus, that His will may be fully accomplished for us and those to whom God would have us bring the good news.
But this attitude is not something we can simply do on our own. We are not told to grit our teeth and work it up in ourselves and do the unpleasant. No, we are encouraged to live in the light of the truth of the Gospel. God loves us, and He will provide. He knows everything we need and everything we do, and so strengthens us and encourages us to possess the mind of Christ. He not only cares for our bodies but also for our souls. We cannot outrun God’s goodness, out-give His generosity, or overestimate the care and concern which God has for each one of us. Speaking through Paul, the Lord asks us to walk in His light, to have the love of God, and to live in true humility.
Therefore, we trust God to be our supply. We live knowing that God has given us everything we need and that He has placed us here to love and to take care of one another, and to share His love with those who have not yet believed. In doing so, we find true glory, for the glory of God is that He has done all that He accomplished in Jesus Christ — for sinners — for you and for me. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
[1] Matthew 21:8
[2] Luke 23:34