Ever have a song get stuck in your head? Well, then you know how I feel.

I’ve got this passage from Philippians 2 rattling around in my noggin. It’s the famous passage about how Jesus emptied himself. It says, “Jesus: who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.”

Think about it for a minute. Jesus possessed the very thing worth possessing in all the universe — equality with God. He was God by nature. And yet, he was so content and confident in his Father’s kingdom that he plunged himself downward in humility. He took the very nature of a servant.

Eugene Peterson, in The Message, translates the next couple of verses, saying, “Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death.”

And yet, that’s what the nature of God is — the nature of a servant. The two are not opposites. They are synonymous! The fullness of God embodied in human flesh is always the nature of a servant, whether in Jesus or you or me.

Father, as I journey from the divine image to the divine likeness, may I live a life of love as Christ, loving and giving and sacrificing as a servant, for that is your nature.