Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. I wish to remind about our Facebook page. I also want to let everyone know about a sermon that I did at my church back in May. The link can be found here. It was done on 1 Corinthians 13 at the request of my pastor which led to this sermon series. Tonight, we continue our look by discussing how love does not boast.
Now to be fair, I do believe there is a place where you can celebrate with those who have already accepted you on compliments that you have heard. I will gladly share with my family comments that someone makes to me that I enjoy, but when it comes to the public square, I prefer to let my actions speak for themselves. There are compliments that I have been given that will never be spoken in the public square, not because I do not believe them or do not like the commenter, but because I do not believe I need to say them.
Boasters however pump themselves up entirely. Christ had a problem with some boasters. These were namely types like the Pharisees who wanted everyone to know about the good that they were doing when making an offering or wanted the world to know that they were fasting.
Today, many of us in fact know the reality of doing a good deed and not waiting around to receive the recognition for it. While in the time of Christ, a Good Samaritan would have been unheard of, today, we have turned that into a position of honor and can often speak of an unknown Good Samaritan who showed up.
Love does not boast because love seeks the good of the object of the love. The love itself is not the greatest good. In our society, when people say they have fallen in love, it could be more often that they have fallen in love with love. Emotional states are good things, but they are not the reality. Lewis warned about this in “The Screwtape Letters.” He spoke of the people who think an emotional experience is more important than a vow taken for the improvement of character, the mutual benefit of a man and a woman, and the continuation of the species.
Boasting is an outward act that draws attention to ourselves rather than to the one we love. The Pharisee trumpeting what he was doing in the streets was not drawing attention to God but to Himself. The person witnessing this did not walk away with a knowledge of God, but he sure walked away with a knowledge of the Pharisee.
Contrast this with the experience of Paul in wanting to be a slave of Christ. The idea was that the slave drew attention to the master. If you were a really good slave, it was not to speak about you, but to speak about the master that you served. When Paul is a good slave, it does not mean that he is a particularly hard worker, which he was, but rather it means that he had a really good master. The question that needs to be asked when you read a letter of Paul or what you could imagine as a sermon of his to early listeners is “Did they leave with more knowledge of Paul, or more knowledge of Christ?”
Now this does not mean that we will never speak of ourselves in public, but let us try to make sure that we are not building up our own kingdoms when we do so. There is only one king. He does not accept competition nor can we ever truly think of giving Him any, deluded as we may be in thinking we can.
We shall continue next time.
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