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September 23, 2026 | Chris Pepper teaches from Philippians 2:3-8 on Christian humility and its role in neighboring. He illustrates how pride hinders loving others well and emphasizes the example of Jesus' humility and sacrifice as the model for Christian love and selflessness.
Bellevue Baptist Church High School Ministry
So, if you would, let's lock in together. We're gonna be in Philippians 2, three through eight. Yeah. Philippians 2, three through eight. Hey, if we haven't gotten a chance to meet, by the way, I am Chris Pepper. I'm the High School and View, we're a college ministry director. I haven't gotten the chance to meet a lot of you. There's a lot of new faces in the room. So I wanna say, hey, thank you for being here. You're probably here for Ultimate Frisbee, and you probably don't care what I have to say, but that's okay. I will forgive you this time, but I won't next time. The spot back there, there's a little sign that says the spot, that is for our guests. So if you're a guest, I would love to meet you back there at the end of the night. Please, we're gonna come get some of your information, your social security number, all of that kind of stuff, and then we'll take some money from you. It'll be a great time. All right, hey, tonight we are talking about Christian humility. Can anybody tell me what series we've been in in the last two weeks? Shout it out. Neighboring. Neighboring. I'm talking about neighboring. What did Camden talk about on week one? Neighboring. Neighboring, yeah, neighboring, but what specifically did Camden talk about on week one? Who is my neighbor? And who is my neighbor? Everybody. You guys are so intelligent. Everybody is my neighbor. And then what did he talk about last week? Nobody was paying attention last week. What did Camden talk about last week? How do I love my neighbor? And this week, I get the opportunity to answer the question, what stops me from loving my neighbor well? So like I said, we're gonna be in Philippians 2, three through eight, so if you have your Bibles, you can turn there now. We're gonna be talking about what it means to be humble. What does it mean for a Christian, even more so, to be humble? When I was in high school, which was not that long ago, I was involved in a student ministry that I grew up in. It was very similar to this one, but middle school and high school were combined. It was the only place that I felt connected to since we moved to North Carolina from South Africa. So I spent a lot of my time there. My junior year, I had an idea for the ministry. So I went to our youth pastor and I said, hey, I think we should have a white board in the room. We'll put it on the left-hand side of the room, and every time that one of the students shared the gospel with someone, they would write that person's initials on the board. And if at any point in the year that person got saved, then we would circle those initials. And by the end of the year, the board was full of circles. It was amazing to see. I was excited about it, our ministry was excited about it. And being that I was a junior in high school, and I had such an incredible ministry-defining idea, not really, that's just what I thought at the time. We're talking about humility, if you're tracking with where I'm going. I let it get to my head a little bit when our senior pastor, our version of Ben, our senior pastor tells our student team that he wants a student to share with the entire congregation about what was going on with the white board and the student ministry. And I was stoked because this was my chance for everyone to see how incredible I am and how God has ordained me. And I get to tell the entire congregation. So I was a little bit surprised when the men's ministry pastor's son, who had nothing to do with the idea, was no better a public speaker than I was at the time, and didn't even write an initial on the board, was the one who was asked to share with the congregation. I was furious by this. And that was because I was full of pride. And as a result of being full of pride, I was also full of envy. But when people would ask me why it wasn't me who got to share on the stage about the white board thing, in my pride, I would act humble. I would tell them that, you know, I would say things like, oh, I didn't want the stage, it's all for the glory of God, I didn't do anything, I wouldn't have done it that well anyway, because I thought maybe those folks would be impressed with my humility, which in and of itself was also pride. At the end of the day, the white board idea was not actually nearly as great an idea as I thought that it was. I wasn't the greatest gift God had ever given that ministry, and I certainly didn't change it as much as I thought that I had. However, it did have an impact on the schools and the area that we lived in. So what do I make of a situation like this? How do I escape pride in this situation? If I acknowledge that it was good and that God had utilized me, am I being prideful? If I say that I'm actually nothing and belittle myself, is that not also sometimes pride? If I become upset because I wasn't applauded for something good that I did, that is more than likely, in most cases, pride. So what am I supposed to do? How can I avoid pride when it feels like it's so ingrained in all that I do and all that I say, and why does pride affect how I love my neighbor? We'll figure it out together tonight. So, like I said, if you're in Philippians, it's two, three, and four, chapter two, verses three and four and it says this, it'll be on the side screens. It says, do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others. Most of us and most people know these seemingly simple principles. We know that we should put others above ourselves. We know that it is the good Christian thing to do, but I don't think we ever truly take the time to ask the question, what would it actually mean for me to do that? Or what would it mean to consider others as more important than me? To look exclusively to the interests of those around me. To do literally nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit. All of these questions beg the same questions I asked at the end of my story about my time in high school. Those questions are, what is pride and what is humility? I read a book back in January that Pastor Ben gave to all of us and I'd read it years ago as well and it was such a good reminder. It's called The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Tim Keller. It's a little itty-bitty book. I would recommend that you get it. If you can, you can write that down. It's The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Tim Keller. I don't like reading. I promise you, you can read this book. It is so, so, so short. I read it in one afternoon. And if I could summarize the book, it would be that humility isn't thinking less of myself and it certainly isn't thinking more of myself. It is very simply just thinking of myself less. It's knowing that I am not the center of the things that I do or the things that happen around me. Pride says, this will be on our center screen. I'll have all these three things. Pride says that I am more important than you. False humility, that's actually wrapped up in pride, it's insecurity wrapped in pride, says that I'm less important than you. And actual humility simply says that I am not the center of this. Whatever this is right now, I am not at the center of it. Romans 12, three, this will also be on the side screen, says, for by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think. Instead, think sensibly as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one. Humility is to think sensibly about myself. It's not that I think massively about myself or I think way too low, I'm realistic with myself here. I know what God has given me. I'm not fake humble and I'm not prideful. I think sensibly about myself and I don't think about myself all that often. I know that might seem a little contrary to how many of us think of humility because most of us naturally, including myself at times, think that humility is thinking low of ourselves because whenever someone we view as impressive or incredible says that they aren't actually impressive and incredible, we call them humble. When LeBron James get up there and he says, oh, glory to God, which we both know he probably doesn't mean, we think, oh, LeBron is so humble, he's so humble. The reality is I don't necessarily, and I don't know LeBron personally, but I don't know that I would consider LeBron James to be a particularly humble person. But when he gets on the TV and says something like that, my initial natural reaction is to think, wow, look how humble LeBron James is or Taylor Swift or whoever it might be. I wouldn't say that she's particularly humble, but whoever that celebrity is for you. But I truly believe that sometimes this also is a form of pride. You see, in my understanding of pride from the time that I've spent in the Bible and the sermons that I have heard, I believe pride to be me placing myself in God's shoes. See, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, in their pride, believed that they knew better than God, and they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In their pride, they thought they knew better. So if pride is consciously or subconsciously believing that I know better than God, then thinking too highly of myself or too low of myself is also pride. The moment that I begin to say and believe things about myself that God himself has not said and does not believe, I am saying that I know better than he does. If God equips me to do something incredible for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, and then I actually do it, I'm not gonna pretend like it was nothing if God said this was something incredible. And likewise, if I am just down in the dumps and I am doing absolutely nothing, I'm not gonna seek validation in whether or not other people think highly of me, and I'm not gonna chase being seen as impressive. What does Philippians say? I will do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility I will consider others more important than myself. Humility is considering others as more important than me. Humility has very little to do with what I think about myself, and it has far more to do with how little I think about myself. It's about frequency of thought. So that then brings us to neighboring. The primary thing that stops me from being a good neighbor to the people around me is me, every single time. It is not Satan, it is not a busy schedule, it is not the fact that I might not be a people person, it's the fact that more often than not, you and I put ourselves above everybody else. Almost everything we do is out of selfish ambition and conceit. Almost everything we do is in our own interests. When your mother asks you to do the dishes, when your younger sibling really just wants to spend some time with you, when your grandparent needs a little extra assistance today, when someone you think is weird is struggling and alone, when you know they're struggling and alone. We are so inclined.
in these moments to put ourselves above others. We put off doing the dishes because we're thinking about how tired we are after a day at school. We often fail to think about how much more tired mom and dad are. Now that I work a full-time job, I have started to realize my dad was way, way, way more tired than I was in school, and I should have done the dishes way more often than I did. And I actually, to this day, feel bad about that, that I gave them so much flack for the stinking dishes. It's not that hard. Your younger sibling, I have a younger sibling, when we were younger, he always wanted to hang out with me, Matt's annoying, now he's all cool and he's taller than me and he has better hair than me, whatever. But at the time, he was a little dork, and I didn't want to hang out with him because he's annoying and irritates me, blah, blah, blah. When in reality, Matt just really looked up to me when we were a little younger, not as much now, now I look up to him physically. But at the time, Matt looked up to me, and he just wanted to spend some time with me, and I was so caught up in myself that I wouldn't do it. When your grandparent needs a little extra help one of these days, I don't want to play video games, I just want to chill, watch YouTube, whatever. We fail to remember all the times that they've given us so much. Most of us, our grandparents have given us so, so, so much, and we just don't think about that at all when they need a little extra help. We don't want to befriend the weird, lonely kid who we know is struggling because it might be awkward. If other people see me talking to them, they might think that I'm also weird, and I can't have that. We never consider the fact, we never consider how hard it might be for them to feel like they've never even been seen, they walk in every room, and they feel like they're invisible. We don't consider that, all we consider is what it might look like for me. It's incredible to me how many of our everyday decisions revolve entirely around us, and how little we actually consider other people. Until we stop thinking about ourselves so much, we will never be able to be a good neighbor to the people around us because putting ourselves, or putting others above ourselves, requires self-sacrifice. It requires putting death to me and my needs. Sometimes that can be for some really small stuff that brightens someone's day, and sometimes, when we stop thinking about ourselves so much, we could change somebody's life forever. Back when I was in high school, at the same ministry I was talking to you about earlier, it was a year later, I was a senior, and at this point I had a small group of guys that were like freshman, sophomore age, so the same age as many of you. And they were going through what they felt were very difficult breakups, and I didn't really know what I was talking about, but they asked me about it, and by the grace of God, they felt that I was helpful in those conversations. Because of that, one of the guys, one of the weeks, we'll call him Mark, that wasn't his real name, but we'll call him Mark, he comes up to me and asks if I could talk to his friend, and we'll call her Isabella. Her name was not Isabella, but we'll call her that for the sake of the story. Because she was in their same grade, and was also sad about a breakup. And I, in my selfishness, did not care. I didn't really want to deal with that. And I'm not even the youth pastor, so it's not my job. Anyway, I kept pushing it off, week after week. I kept saying that I forgot, and that I would talk to her the next week, and whatever. And it was one Wednesday night, and I was about to leave and drive home, and I just got this strong gut-punch sense, like, you got to go talk to Isabella. And so I did, I turned around, and I went back and I found her. And I half-heartedly apologized for taking so long, and I asked her what was going on, and she told me that her and her boyfriend broke up, and they're not doing things together, and their parents are mad at them, and all the things that I had heard a million times. She doesn't know what she's going to do. So I internally was rolling my eyes a little bit, because, like I said, I thought to myself, this is the same junk I hear every single time. She's going to be fine, so I gave her some really basic advice. I said, oh, it's going to be fine, time heals all wounds, blah, blah, blah. I just wanted to speed through the conversation, because I was tired, and it felt like a waste of my time. I know these are harsh words, but I'm being honest with you about how I felt in this moment. And so I just, yeah, I sped past it. I didn't follow up with her, and I didn't even think about that conversation for over a year. And then one afternoon, I was walking back to my college dorm, and my mom calls me. And my mom, if you have got the chance to meet my mom, you know that she's incredible. And my mom is a small group leader at our church back home in Charlotte. So she goes to all the camps every year and all of that. Well, not anymore. Now she's tired of it. But she did go for a long time. Camps are exhausting when you're an adult. But she went for a long time, and she calls me and tells me, hey, I had Isabella in my small group this year. And after one of the small groups, she told me that the night that you talked to her was the same night she was planning on taking her own life. And that the only reason that she didn't was because she felt like somebody saw her and cared. Yesterday, I was sitting in Starbucks when I was writing this part of my message, and I was getting emotional sitting there by myself. The barista thought I was tripping or something. I was getting emotional writing this because of the guilt I felt over my own selfishness even today. There was not a moment that I considered that even being a possibility. For weeks, I put this off over and over and over because I just didn't feel like talking to her. I thought about me. I simply did not care what was going on in her life. And had I selfishly put it off for one more week, I don't know. I don't know. Thank God I never will, but I don't know. And I think about that often. Now, many of you, especially those of you that have graduated, there's a lot of you that have graduated. Any time that one of you come to me with another ninth grade breakup, if you've had that and you've talked to me about it, you know that I don't just brush it off anymore. And I don't do that with other things as well because I learned in that moment that my selfishness and that my needs and that my tiredness does not matter in those instances because you never know. You never know what somebody is experiencing. I did not know that night what that conversation would do. I did not know what was going on in her heart. I did not know what God had intended. But had I not had that conversation, things might have been different. Now, what I don't want you to hear, I don't want you to hear that somebody else's life is on your shoulders. That's not true at all. You don't carry that. That isn't on you. Many of you in the room tonight have experienced incredible tragedy in your own family and amongst your own friends. And I don't ever want you to feel like by me saying this that I'm saying that that's on you because you didn't do enough. That decision is in the hands of the person who made it, not on you. However, we never know what God might want to do with one conversation, one invitation, and one act of kindness, or one moment when we finally choose to see somebody else instead of ourselves. Now, I chose that story to tell you because in that story, I'm the bad guy. I didn't want to tell you a story where I did it perfectly. I did not. By the grace of God, I had that conversation with her. By the grace of God. There are many times that I didn't have the conversation at all. And there are other times that I did pretty good because that's the nature of it. We're not perfect. We're never going to be perfect. But when you're in a situation like that, when you see people like that, when you know somebody is struggling, when you know somebody needs just a little bit of help, just a little bit of aid, and we only think about ourselves, we never think about the ramifications that that could have down the line or what could have happened, what could have changed if we didn't. Like I said, that doesn't put the pressure on you. It doesn't put the weight on you. But we do need to be thinking about these things as we walk around our everyday lives. We need to be thinking about the hands and feet of Jesus. That is what He has put us here for. That is why we aren't in heaven today. Because there is so much good that you and I are capable of if we would just get out of our own way. Or rather, if we would just get out of God's way and let Him use us, and let Him utilize us, and stop being selfish. Let's read the rest of our passage. It's Philippians 2, 5 through 8. It'll be on the screen, and it says, Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead, He emptied Himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when He had come as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross. We know that as Christians, we are supposed to strive to live our lives as Christ lived His. So when we talk about humility and being a good neighbor, we naturally must look at what Christ Himself did to model that. Luckily for us, it's right there in the passage that we were just reading. There is no greater example of the lifestyle that verses 3 and 4 are talking about than that of Jesus Himself in verses 5 through 8. For anyone to die for another person takes a level of true humility that is unbelievably rare. But for the God of the universe to do that for us should be the most unfathomable and incredible thing that you and I have ever heard. It should inspire us to action in a way that nothing else ever has. It should fuel our hearts to do the impossible for the sake of the person sitting next to you and next to me. It is the greatest display of self-sacrificial love that anyone on earth has ever shown. The God of the universe who creates and destroys worlds and creates and destroys life, who mends souls into being and splits oceans into, the God that every person who has ever lived, including Satan himself, will one day bow to, is the same God who would humble himself enough to die a humiliating death on the cross, on a wooden cross. He was whipped and beaten to the point where His skin was unrecognizable. The whips that they would use would have these thorns and these lashes and they would just beat Him and beat Him and beat Him. This is the God of the universe. Are you crazy? Are you crazy? This isn't even in my notes. Do you recognize the gravity of that? The weight of that? That the God of the universe was whipped and beaten and nailed to a cross and He didn't die because He bled out. He died because He couldn't breathe anymore. The nails were at a spot where He would have to lift Himself up so that He could grasp some breath. And eventually He died.
He lost all of his strength and he couldn't hold himself up to breathe in his lungs anymore. And so then he died from asphyxiation. After he bled out, after he carried a 300 pound cross up a mountain. God, the God of the universe did that for you. And for me, are you crazy? Like that's insane, that is the most insane thing I've ever heard in my entire life. That should be wind in our sails, should be a lamp unto our feet, that should be a flamethrower in our fireplace. If my heart is a fireplace, that should be an atomic bomb. I mean, it's crazy what Jesus did for us on the cross. It's wild. And in doing that, it was the greatest act of humility, the greatest act of setting aside pride that anyone has ever shown. And so for you and I, particularly for you and I that are believers in Jesus, that have a relationship with Jesus, how can we go another day? How can we go another day sitting in our pride, sitting in our selfishness, how can we do that? We don't even deserve to be here, we don't even deserve to live. And yet we do because of what Christ has done for us. This should fuel us in a way that nothing else ever has. Are you, as a follower of Jesus Christ, willing to love people in a way that Jesus did? Are you willing to lay your lives on the line for someone else? Greater love has none than this than he who would lay down his life for his friends. See, I think a lot of us, oftentimes, we think that if that moment came, that we would. Particularly in men, I find this common. A lot of us men think we can fight better than we can, too. There's a stat that I read the other day, it was like 95% of men think that they can fight way better than they can. And that is not true. I used to think that, and my future father-in-law could absolutely demolish me if he chose to. He's in the back of the room, you can see him afterward. If he wanted to, he would absolutely fry me. And I was humbled in that when I realized that when I met him, I was like, maybe I can't fight as good as I thought that I could. You see, most of us think that we are in these kinds of situations that we are in, that we would do incredible and amazing things. If there was a shooter, what would I do? A lot of guys, how many of you guys think that? If there was a shooter, what would I do? Not nearly as many as I thought there would be. There you go, there's some more. A lot of guys would think, if there was a shooter, what would I do? I'd make up these hypothetical scenarios in my head. And I'm gonna go this angle, and I'm gonna go, hey, shh, bring it in, bring it in, bring it in. I'm gonna go this angle, and I'm gonna go that angle, and I'll stop him here, and I'll stop him there. Here's the reality, no, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. You would run and scream like a little girl. And the reason being, the reason being, is not because you're not capable of it. It's not because you're not brave. It's because if you won't sit with the kid who's by himself every day, or by herself every day, who you know is struggling, who you know is alone, if you won't even see that person, there's no way you will lay your life on the line for anybody else when that time comes. There is no way you would love anybody the way that Jesus does. If you won't do the little thing, you certainly won't do the big thing later. I think a lot of us also think that we are too small to be used by God, that we are not big enough for God to use us, that I'm too quiet, I'm too kept to myself, I'm too awkward, maybe I don't look good enough. Often we think, oh, all the people that I see that do this kind of thing, oh, they look good and they're cool, and I'm not, and I don't think that that's gonna work for me. Something my future mother-in-law said to me and my fiance the other night, she said that you can never be too small for God to use you, but you can be too big. I think that's from Agent Rogers, but I'm gonna attribute it to her. And I think that that range true here as well. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the number one thing stopping me from being a good neighbor is me, every single time, every single time. It is my pride that stops me from being a good neighbor. It's not about thinking less of yourself, and it is certainly not about thinking more highly of yourself, it is simply thinking about yourself less, that's all it is. There are two kinds of people in every room. I like this, Camden says this every week, there are two kinds of people in every room. Those of you who have a relationship with Jesus and those who do not, and that means that every single week there are two kinds of responses to the message that can be had. For those of you in the room that have never surrendered your life to Jesus, and have never repented of your sin, and stepped into the eternal forgiveness that he offers through the cross, I beg you, I implore you not to waste another second. Let today, let tonight be the day of salvation. Encounter Jesus for the first time tonight, let him change your life, let him change the trajectory of your future generations, of your kids, and your kids' kids, and your kids' kids' kids. I can't say any more because it'll twist my tongue. Let Jesus do that for you tonight, because the same God who commands the winds and the waves and they obey, the same God who can physically move mountains with a word, the same God who breathed the sun and stars into existence, is the same God who took the form of a mere man to die on that brutal cross, on that brutal cross that we just talked about. For you, even for you who don't yet believe, even for you who spit in his face, even for you who have blatantly told your friends that you could not care less about Jesus, maybe there's one in the room tonight and you've never come before, and it's because you just didn't care, and you told your friends you didn't care, and they all knew you didn't care, and maybe you're here for Ultimate Frisbee, or maybe you just showed up because you just felt like you should just once, or maybe you've been coming for a long time, you've been coming to Bellevue or church for a long time, and you've been, oh, I'm a Christian, yeah, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, but you know in your heart, you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus, and you never have. You've never asked him to forgive you of your sin, you've never stepped into that relationship with him, you've never turned and repented of your sins, stepping into the freedom that Jesus offers. Maybe you're somewhere in between. Maybe you don't hate God, maybe you couldn't care less, or maybe you're sitting there and you just got this pit in your stomach all day, and you don't know what it's from, and you're looking at him and you're like, oh, don't talk about me, don't talk about me, I've had that pit all day and I don't know why. Maybe it's because tonight is the night for you to finally tell Jesus that you are a sinner in need of a savior, and that you want desperately to be saved by him, desperately to encounter the God of humility, that he might grant that humility to you as well.