Exalting Christ

In my previous bogs, I shared to you that the apostle Paul used the extended metaphor of Jesus as the Head of His body, that is the church (Ephesians 1:22ff; 4:15; 5:23; Colossians 1:18-19; 2:19). And expanding further our thinking on the said metaphor and making a sort of taking that body apart a little bit by dissecting it into parts that I called in this series of blogs as the "Spiritual Physiology of the Church," that made up of the (a) skeleton; (b) internal system; (c) muscles; and (d) flesh or the skin.

Then I shared to you about the skeleton, or the "Framework of the Church," which is made up of five things that the people in the church must experience. This things includes (a) worship of God; (b) exalting Christ; (c) presence of purity; (d) the Divine Truth; and (e) spiritual authority. And we learned that the primary occupation of Christians is to worship God and that the Father seeks true worshipers, those who do it with their hearts and not merely in form.

The only way that we can come to worship God is through Jesus Christ. We could never begin to worship God unless we came to Him through Jesus Christ as 1 Peter 2:5 says, “you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (NASB) and in a very familiar statement found in John 14:6 where Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

We will find in Revelation 5:6 that John is looking at the throne of God and says, “And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth.” Obviously the Lamb standing is Jesus Christ and verses 7 to 12 clearly told us that heaven is engaged in the worship and exaltation of Jesus Christ.

If we are going to heaven down on earth, we not only praise, worship, and exalt God, but we must do the same for the One who is God incarnate, the second member of the Trinity, who is our Lord Jesus Christ for He is equally worthy of our praise.

The Need to Exalt Christ

In Colossians, Paul reminds us to give thanks to God the Father for what He has done for the believers through Jesus Christ (1:12-14), the very Creator Himself and the pre-existent Deity (1:15-17), the head of the church that is His body (1:18a), the firstborn in resurrection (1:18b) that is a sign that all believers will be resurrected, and He was made the supreme and preeminent in all things (1:18c). In other words, Jesus is the supreme one, worthy of all our praise, and worthy of all our worship.

If we want to bring heaven down, then we must be concerned in exalting Jesus Christ. When the church meets together, Christ should be exalted and echoing what the Father said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Exalting Christ in our Lives

Look what Paul says in Philippians 3:8, “More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.”

The phrase “I count” is a business term for “forfeit,” meaning all Paul had previously trusted in for righteousness (could refer to his family, his inheritance, his religious merit and/or his rabbinical training) or what he had previously considered valuable suddenly “loss” all its value for the sake of the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus. The word “know” in Hebrew means intimate personal relationship. This implies that we must have intimate personal relationship with Jesus until we become like Him.

Galatians 4:19 says, “My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you –“ The word “formed” in Greek was used in a medical sense for fetal development and interpreted as the believers’ development into the likeness of Christ. As Christians, this must be the focus of our lives so that we could also confidently say what Paul had said in Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” because “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Paul met Christ on the Damascus road but it was already 30 to 35 years after when he wrote his epistles to the Philippians but still Christ is his passion.