Give Up Your Right To Be Right
Think about the last real argument you had. Not the one about dishes or who left the porch light on—the one underneath that. The one that left you replaying the conversation for two days, rehearsing what you should have said, building your case in the shower.
If we're honest, most of what we fight about in our marriages, our friendships, our families, and in the church is petty stuff. We just don't experience it as petty, because it's tied to something deeper—a feeling that we're missing something in that moment. We need the other person to react a certain way to validate us. To show us we matter. To prove they're grateful for us.
And we get good at it—really good—at using every tool we have to win those moments. To be right. Because admitting we're wrong feels like it would diminish us somehow. Like we'd be handing the other person a victory we can't afford to give.
We become experts at blaming everyone else for what's wrong in our relationships, and somewhere in our heads we build this whole vision of how much better our lives would be if they would just start doing the things we want them to do or the way we want them to do them.
Paul saw this type of dynamic in the church at Philippi. And in one of the richest passages in all of Scripture, he shows us a completely different way.
STOP CHASING GLORY
Paul had just told the Philippians to "do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit" (Philippians 2:3). Some in that church were chasing their own ambitions, trying to prove they were right, grumbling against anyone who saw things differently. Sound familiar?
So Paul says: stop. Stop chasing the validation. Stop trying to prove your worth by being right. And instead—
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:5)
That's the whole point of what follows. What comes next is one of the most theologically rich, Christ-exalting passages in the entire Bible—but don't miss why Paul is saying it. He's not just teaching Christology for its own sake. He's telling a divided church how to fight less and love more.
So what was the mindset of Jesus?
HE WAS GOD, BUT HE DIDN'T CLING TO HIS PRIVILEGES
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. (Philippians 2:6)
Some translations render this "who, being in the form of God." The Greek word is morphe, and it doesn't just mean outward appearance—it points to the essential nature of something. Paul isn't saying Jesus was like God. He's saying Jesus was God.
And as God, He deserved every privilege that comes with being God.
But look at the phrase Paul uses next: He did not consider equality with God "something to be used to his own advantage." Other translations say "something to be grasped" or "something to cling to." The Greek word here, harpagmos, carries the idea of clutching something in a closed fist.
Jesus had every right to hold on to His privileges, but He let them go.
HE MADE HIMSELF NOTHING
Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. (Philippians 2:7)
The word behind "made himself nothing" is kenosis—to empty. What did Jesus empty Himself of? Not His deity. When He was born into this world, He didn't stop being God. He was fully God and fully man, the God-man, every day of His earthly life.
What He emptied Himself of was the privilege of it.
Picture the wealthiest person you can think of—someone worth well over a hundred billion dollars—choosing to live as if none of it existed. Still who they are, still in possession of it all, but refusing to draw on a single advantage of it. That's a shadow of what Paul is describing here. Jesus didn't stop being God. He just stopped clinging to what being God entitled Him to.
He did this two ways. First, He took the nature of a servant—someone with no rights, no privileges, no advantages—even though as God, He had every right to them. The One who deserved to be served chose instead to serve.
Second, He was "made in human likeness." That meant hunger. Thirst. Rejection. Pain. All the things you and I experience simply by being human—but none of which He had to experience as God. That was a divine privilege He had every right to keep. He gave it up anyway.
This is the mindset of Christ, Paul says. He didn't fight for His right to glory. He gave it up. And He wasn't finished.
THE LOWEST POINT
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:8)
As if it weren't humbling enough for the God of the universe to be confined to a human body and take the form of a servant, He humbled Himself all the way to death. And not just any death—death on a cross, the method Rome reserved for the most rebellious slaves and the worst of criminals.
Sit with that picture for a second. Paul started this passage with Jesus enthroned in glory, equal with God, surrounded by worship, entitled to every honor the universe has to offer. And he ends it with that same God hanging bloodied, naked, and lifeless on a cross built for criminals.
This is the exact opposite of selfish ambition and vain conceit. And Paul says: this should be your mindset when it comes to your relationships with others—loosening your grip on the preferences and opinions you'd otherwise fight to win, for the sake of the unity Christ died to give His church.
THIS ISN'T LOSING
Here's what's easy to miss when we're in the middle of an argument we desperately want to win: giving it up doesn't actually cost us anything real.
I mean—look at how Paul finishes this passage.
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)
Jesus already held this exalted status as God for all eternity. What's described here is Him being restored to the glory He voluntarily set aside—after living a fully human life in total dependence on the Father, after defeating sin and death, after doing it all without ever grasping for what was rightfully His.
To the world watching, servanthood looked weak. Dying the most humiliating death available looked like losing, plain and simple. But in the end, that mindset was the very thing God used to accomplish real victory—the kind that actually lasts forever.
Paul's point to the Philippians, and to us, is this: it may feel like you're losing when you let go of the argument. It may feel like you're not getting validated, like they're winning and you're not. But if you have the mindset of Christ, you're not losing anything that matters.
THE APPLICATION
In most situations when we fight and argue and maneuver to prove we're right and someone else is the problem, we're chasing our own glory. We're trying to earn an identity, trying to get a need met from someone who was never designed to meet it in the first place.
But when we take on the mindset of Christ—letting go of our selfish need for glory and clinging instead to the Father, trusting Him to meet our needs and to work in us and through us—something shifts. We find our needs were already met in Christ all along.
And that means we can actually lose the argument. With our spouse. Our friends. Our family. Our brothers and sisters in the church. And still be okay.
Better than okay, actually. Because there's freedom in it. There's fruit in it. There's eternal value in living dependent on Christ instead of trying to use the people around us to fill a hole He already filled.
Now, to be clear—this isn't a call to go silent on truth or to treat every conviction as negotiable. Paul himself fought hard for the gospel his whole life. But look again at what he was addressing here: not core doctrine, but the preferences and secondary issues that were dividing the Philippian church from the inside—the "one mind, one purpose" he called them to just a few verses earlier (Philippians 2:1-4).
Those are the things worth holding loosely. And that unity isn't just a Sunday-morning project. You are the church in your marriage, in your friendships, at your family's dinner table—not just in the pew. A watching world isn't drawn to Jesus by Christians who are unified on paper but fractured in every room that matters. It's drawn to Jesus by people who look like Him—willing to let go of their preferences for the sake of the mission they actually share, with the people closest to them.
Give up your grip on being right about the things that were never worth the fight. It's not the loss it feels like.
