Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through 1 Corinthians 13, focusing on the theme of love, specifically addressing what love is not. He emphasizes that love is not envious or boastful, highlighting how jealousy can lead to division and strife within the church. The practical application encourages the congregation to celebrate the successes of others and to promote humility by deflecting praise to God and uplifting those around them, fostering a spirit of unity and love.
Welcome and Housekeeping
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Amen. Thank you, choir. If you've got a child that wants to be dismissed to Children's Church, that is available for you at this time. We'll be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 this morning. We're continuing our study on what is love, and we'll continue looking at what it means to love Christ.
As you're turning to 1 Corinthians 13, I'll have a couple of introductory statements before we read.
1 Corinthians 13, we're going to read the first four verses, and we'll stand in just a minute, but not yet. But as I was, me and Allie had the opportunity to go on a date last night. We don't get to do our date nights often. Amen. Yeah.
The last couple ones we've been on has been with family or someone else, and so we just got away for a couple hours, and she said, What are you preaching on tomorrow?
I said, Well... I said, You know, there's some messages that are really, I say, easy to preach.
I said, This one is probably the hardest, and I say this often, but it's a tough one this morning because we've looked at the last three weeks of what love is, and how love should be generous and it should be sacrificial, and those are great things.
But then Paul gets to this point where he says, There's some things that love is not.
And he starts stepping on my toes in particular when he begins to say this, and so that's what we're going to look at this morning is what love is not. Paul, in this writing, he writes a couple of positive things, and then he gives us eight examples of things that love is not.
And that's what we're going to look at over the next couple of weeks.
And so if you've had your way to turn there, we're going to read the first four verses of chapter 13. If you'll stand out of honor of God's word, we'll give a recap of what we've spoke on here the last couple of weeks. It says, Lord, we love you.
We thank you for what you've done. I pray that as we say that, that we love you, that we truly mean that we love you.
I pray, God, that this morning as you would have your will and way in the service, that you would work on our hearts, turn our hearts from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh, and to move in a mighty way. In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
In 1848, the California gold rush began. Is anybody alive in 1848 around here? All right. I was hoping they weren't, but if so, I was going to honor you for being the oldest person to ever live here in recent days.
The Gold Rush Analogy
But it drew tens of thousand people from all walks of life. They had these dreams of striking it rich and being the prospector that was going to call themselves the best prospector out there.
They were called the 49ers. That's where we get our San Francisco 49ers from, right? They left behind their homes. They left behind their inheritance, and they endured perilous journeys for a chance to win it all, to strike fortune at its best. One fellow from Ohio,
whose name was Samuel Blake, had this dream of striking it rich. After the grueling journey, he reached the California gold fields.
He set up camp by a promising creek that he felt was going to be his creek that was going to allow him to win and strike gold. As he began his quest of sifting through and mining for gold and, what do they call it, slushing for gold through the rocks,
his heart leapt at the sight of a heavy, shiny nugget in his pan, and he exclaimed, I have found gold.
He was excited. He called all of his friends around that were around him, and as his discovery drew the attentions of others, a guy named Thomas Harding, an experienced miner, began to examine the nugget.
Thomas looked at him and frowned and said, Mr. Samuel, that is fool's gold. That is not worth anything. And as he said that, Samuel's crestfallen nature plummeted to sense of despair. He began to tell him that this was called pyrite.
It wasn't real gold, and he taught him how to distinguish between real gold, which was soft and malleable, and pyrite, which is brittle and hard.
Finding fool's gold was a common and disheartening experience for these men and women who had lost everything and gave up everything to go and find something they thought was going to be the promise of wealth, and in a
moment vanished in an instant, replaced by the bitter taste of disappointment.
And I think oftentimes, church, we get to this point where we have fool's gold in our life, or I could say it like this, fool's love, where we act or maybe have an appearance of love, but when we begin to examine Scripture,
we lack the power thereof. Paul is writing this letter, and he's beginning to notice in the city of Corinth that it was wickedness all around them. One commentator said that Corinth was one of the most wicked cities in all of Paul's days.
And I think that one commentator said it best. Paul wasn't upset that the church was in Corinth, but that Corinth was in the church.
And I think oftentimes, church, we are called to be in the world, but not of the world. We're called to be a part of the world, but not let the world be a part of us.
Love vs. Worldly Influence
We're called to love the people of the world, but not allow what they are doing in the world to affect how we are living for Christ. And over the next four weeks, we're going to look at how Paul says that love should not be. These qualities are completely incompatible with love.
Love, if we possess these attributes, will, if we possess the attributes that we're going to look at over the next couple weeks, they will lead us to disunity, they'll lead us to selfishness, and ultimately, they're going to spool the witness of Christ, if we have these attributes that we're going to look at of love.
And that's why I believe, as I said at the beginning of my message, this is a tough one because the first one is this, love is not envious. Love is not envious.
He starts out this list by saying, love does not envy, or another translation is, love is not jealous.
You see, there is one being in the universe that has the right to be jealous, and you are not it. God is the one that created us. He created us to love and to serve Him.
And we took that love and that sacrifice that God gave to us, and we turned, and in a sense, we smacked the Lord in the face, and we said, I am going to serve self. And God said that He is the only being in the universe to be jealous.
Simply put, jealousy will split the church and divide the church as it did in Corinth.
If you want to turn just a couple pages back in 1 Corinthians 3.3, I've got it on the screen as well. This is what Paul said to the church as he's beginning to write his letter. Because you are still worldly, for since there is envy and strife among you,
are you not worldly and behaving like mere humans? Paul, in this opening letter, in this opening verse, says, Envy is our lives, and envy causes us to resent one another.
It causes us not to do what God has called us to do in our life. Oftentimes in my life as a pastor, as a minister, this is an area where I have to recenter my life. I have to recenter what it means to be in ministry.
I'll look at pastor friends that maybe I went to college with, that maybe we grew up together, and man, their church is thriving, their church is seeing souls saved, and maybe they've had a building project, and they begin
to, the Lord looks like it's blessing them, and sometimes I'll take a step back and say, well, why isn't the Lord doing that?
Why isn't the blessings you can say from social media, why is that not happening where we're at?
And I'm not saying it's not. The Lord's been good to us. But oftentimes it's hard because looking on the other side of the fence is hard of other people's ministry. It's easy to become jealous. It's easy to look and say, well,
Lord, if you're faithful, why won't you do what you're doing there over here?
But love is able to look at another ministry in my personal example and say amen to the revival that's happening over there.
It's to say amen to the brother and maybe even call them. As I did this week in preparation of this message, I called a couple of brothers and I said, hey, just tell me what the Lord's doing. Just tell me what God's doing in your ministry.
And they would tell me, I'd say, man, I'm so thankful. I'm just going to pray with you on the phone. I'm just going to love you and care for you because oftentimes we get to the point where we think it's all about us when it's not about us.
Envy and Love's Mutual Exclusivity
MacArthur said it like this, love and envy are mutually exclusive.
Where one is, the other cannot be. If you are envious of something or someone, love won't be there. Now, if you're loving and caring for someone, envy won't be there because the power of love will overpower any envy that's in your life. You see, ultimately, envy is destructive. Envy is destructive.
Look with me in your mind of King Saul and David. King Saul had this ministry that the Lord had given him.
Man, he was the favored king. He was the tallest above all people. He was head and shoulders over everyone. When they said that others had kings, they looked at Saul and said, we have the king of kings because he is that great. And then David came along, a little shepherd boy.
And at the first, Saul had love and affection toward David.
Saul brought him in and allowed him to minister to him and allowed him to care for him and even allowed him to be best friends with his son. But then that love and affection turned to envy and anger. It turned to this guy's younger.
This guy's a little more handsome and he's stronger than I am. This guy's smart. He's talented.
And the thing that Saul hated the most was that he was popular. You don't have to turn there, but 1 Samuel 18, 7, it says, and as they danced, the women sang. And they said, Saul had killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.
Saul's once love toward David, where David came in and rescued the people of Israel from a wicked Goliath, from the wicked Philistines.
That love that Saul once had, because it turned into envy, turned to hatred so quickly. His affection turned to envy.
His love turned to hatred. It's amazing how quickly, and even the life here we look at of Saul and David, how quickly envy can creep in and cause division.
As we begin to learn through this lesson, we see where envy is, there can be no love.
I mentioned last week a guy by the name of George Mueller. Was studying through his life a little bit. I like to read after people who have pastored and ministered and that are no longer here and see how ministry was done many, many years ago. And I came across this story in 1832,
where George Mueller and another man was co-pastoring a church because George Mueller had an orphanage where he was ministering and he was wanting to pastor, but he wasn't going to be able to do it effectively. So he called in another guy to sort of help balance the responsibilities.
Rejoicing Over Others' Success
And in this process, some began to prefer this other pastor over George Mueller.
And he said this, I determined in my own strength of God to rejoice in this instead of envying him. He began to state that with John the Baptist, a man can receive nothing except to be given to him from heaven, John 3, 27.
And he said, the resting of this is the devil hindering separation in my heart. He said, as the death of his name is Cryek, which was the other pastor, began to come upon him,
he wrote these words, my friendship with Pastor Cryek has lasted for 36 years. He said, I can think of very few men in ministry who have lifelong friends because love does not allow envy. It does not allow friendships to last long. Love lasts long.
Envy breaks things up. And when we begin to look at the people that are around us and we begin to compare ourselves and we can compare and begin to get jealous and envy.
And I was telling out the whole morning this morning as we're in Sunday school, I'm like, Allie, Scott, he's over here preaching my message. He's preaching what I'm about to say because envy is so destructive.
Church, it has destroyed so many friends in my life. And when I understood that this is happening,
there are ways and we're going to look at it of how we can fight this. And ultimately it's this, it's instead delight in the success of others. Instead of envy,
begin to delight. Romans 12, 10 says it like this, Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters.
Take the lead in honoring one another. So delight in the success of others. Love is glad when others succeed.
Love is glad when someone wins that football game that you wish you could have won or love is glad when that co-worker gets the promotion over you.
It's glad that those things have happened because you are honoring them over yourself.
But the opposite of this is if we don't take the lead in honoring others, we'll begin to honor ourselves. Acts 11 says it like this, and Barnabas was known as the one was the encourager.
And this for me was the verses that got me this week because Acts 11 says this, The Lord's hand was with them. And a large number believed and turned to the Lord. And news about this reached the church in Jerusalem.
And they sent Barabbas to travel as far as Antioch. And look at Barabbas' response.
Barabbas was one of the disciples that loved Jesus, one of the disciples that followed after him. And it says, When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged all of them to remain true to the Lord with devoted hearts.
You see, Barnabas rejoiced over the success and the giftedness of Paul.
It would have been real easy for Barnabas to come in and say, Well, God, why am I pastoring this church? Why aren't I doing these things in Antioch?
Lord, I followed you my whole life. I was one of the disciples that was there. I was one of the ones that followed with the 12 from a distance. And you take this guy who was a murderer, who was killing the church, and you put him into power? God, this isn't fair.
And envy would have allowed Barnabas to take away his encouragement and would have destroyed the ministry that the Lord was going to give him as the one that encourages. You see, Paul's son Jonathan loved and admired David.
The man that Saul hated, Jonathan, it says he loved him. And as I was thinking through this this week, this is the thing that got me.
The king's son is always the heir to the kingdom.
The king's son knows that he is going to take the place of the king when the king dies. And David had been appointed to take over the kingdom when Saul died.
And yet, in this moment, Jonathan loved David more than the status that he was going to get.
Because he knew that he wasn't going to be the next king. And even though he knew that, he loved and honored and rejoiced in the success that David was going to have as the next king. Love in that same way, church, should drive us to rejoice in the success of others.
A good motto that we should live by is this. When feelings of envy and jealousy arise towards someone else, go to that brother and sister and confess to them your wrongdoings of jealousy. You see, the hardest battles we'll have as Christians is admitting that we're jealous.
It's admitting that we have envy one toward another. It is the fight that we will always struggle with because that is the way we're designed as humans. What is the very first sin that happens in the garden? God, did he really say that you're going to die? He's holding something from you.
Think about if you partake in this fruit, you're going to be able to see as God sees. It was this envy of God's hiding something from me.
You see, in our life, always in our life, there will be something bigger, there'll be something better, and there'll be someone more successful than us. I tell people as I'm going through marriage counseling with them, and I'll tell them, I'll say, listen, there's always someone that's dating when you're dating.
And then as that dating relationship begins to get more and more, you begin to see other people in your circle that get engaged.
And you're like, well, why am I not engaged? And then all of a sudden you get engaged, and then all of your friends, I don't know how this happens, but all of your friends start getting married. And you begin to say, well, why aren't I married?
And then you get married, and then all of your circle of friends begin to have kids. And you begin to say, well, why don't I have kids? I want kids. I want what they have. They just bought a new house. I want a new house.
They just bought a new car. I want a new car. And all of a sudden, our life begins to be absorbed with what everyone else is doing, and we begin to compare ourselves to what is going on around us. We always will see something bigger, better, and stronger than we are.
And God is telling us here, do not be envious of those things.
Be envious of what God has done for you. Other examples that I want to mention this morning, Eve was jealous of God. She wanted what God had, even though she had God. I want us to really think about that for just a moment. Eve and Adam walked with God every day.
We don't know how long this was. Scripture doesn't tell us, but what we know is that every day, God left heaven and came to earth and walked in the midst of the garden with Adam and Eve. They saw Him. They experienced Him.
They heard Him. I almost want to say they could physically interact with Him. And since then,
no one has seen God, because seeing God, you cannot live. And yet Eve was jealous that God was holding something back from her. Oh, for us to be able to have that experience that Eve had, and Eve was jealous that God was holding something back.
Cain was jealous of Abel. We mentioned this last week. We talked about it last week in our Sunday school lesson. Cain was jealous that Abel was the favored son in this moment.
Joseph's brothers were jealous of him. They sold him into slavery. They wanted to get rid of him because they were jealous of the favoritism in their mind that their dad had toward him. The other rulers that were around the kingdom were jealous of Daniel.
And when they saw Daniel was a favored man, when they saw Daniel was getting favored from King Darius, what did they do? They plotted to get him killed and to be thrown into the lion's den. The older brothers in the story of Joseph began to resent and get attention from their father.
They wanted that instead of the younger son. But one story that stood out to me in particular as I was looking through the Old Testament, as I was reading this past week in Genesis 15, stood out to me because I had never seen it before.
Not that it wasn't there, not that God wrote a new passage of Scripture, but in Genesis 15, chapter 2, we hear a man called Eleazar. Eleazar, he was of Damascus, and he was the servant of Abraham. And Abraham had promised Eleazar that if he did not have a child,
everything that he had was going to go to Eleazar. He had the inheritance of the greatest person in this day, the greatest wealth in this day that was going to come to him. And then one day, Abraham had a son named Isaac.
Now you can imagine, Eleazar, there could be some resentment, some envy that would begin to rise up. He would not be able to get this inheritance. But through all of this, in losing his inheritance of wealth,
the Bible says that in Genesis 15, chapter 2, that he loved Abraham and Isaac to the end.
And he served them to the end, even when his inheritance was taken away. Because he cared more about love for this family than he did anything else.
And I'm telling you, church, this morning, when the love for someone else is this strong, it doesn't matter what else comes in the way. Proverbs 27, 4 says it like this, Fury is cruel,
and anger a flood, but who can withstand jealousy? It's the extremeness that envy and jealousy has. It's vicious, and it is shared by no other sin. Jealousy is that's in its own category. Being mad at someone is cruel, the Bible says,
and having anger towards someone is a flood, but no one can withstand the power of jealousy because it's so extreme. When we begin to indulge our minds into the jealousy of someone else, it overcomes us to a point where we cannot even function in life anymore.
And James says it like this in James chapter 3, But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambitions in your heart, don't boast and deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come from above, but it is earthly, unspiritual.
And James even goes on to say that this type of boasting and envy is demonic. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder in every evil practice. Church this morning, selfish ambition is fueled by jealousy. It's clever, and it's successful.
It's able to work in the smallest little bit of ways.
As a young parent, when we were in Idaho, we had a guy who helped me, and he helped lead music for the youth, and taught in the school, and we had gotten pregnant at the exact same time. They were, I think, three or four weeks ahead of us in their pregnancy.
And so, as they're pregnant,
Allison, and her name was Amy, was comparing, okay, how far along are you? What's the weight? All the ultrasounds. Well then, I'm oblivious on some things. I don't know if you've noticed this. I don't catch a lot of things. And Brody was born, and what was the oldest? Carson.
Carson was born, and as they're growing up in nursery, and growing up, and doing things together, we spent a lot of time with them. Casey would begin to say, which was the husband of the dad, he would begin to say, well, you know, Carson, he's really close to walking.
And I'd say, oh, you know, Brody, he's beginning to walk. Well, Carson, he's starting to say words.
I didn't pick up on it. I'd be like, all right, cool, that's great, man. Yeah, I can, you know, Brody, he's saying some things. And after like three or four weeks of us hanging out, like on a Sunday or Wednesday,
Allie, we got in the car, and she said, James, you realize it's beginning to be a one-up battle.
Every time he says something about Carson, you'll say something about Brody. And she said, I know you're not doing it to one-up him. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah, Brody's younger.
He's doing some of these things. I said, but she said, but he is taking it as, I've got to one-up everything that's been said. And it was this constant comparison, this constant boasting, this constant back and forth, fueled by what she said was jealousy.
Again, I didn't see it, but she saw those things, and she helped me understand it. And oftentimes, this is what happens in our life. It's a small little area. It's a small little sliver in our life that comes in and begins to cause envy and strife. It's not this overwhelming,
massive thing that happens at first.
Destructive Nature of Envy
It's small and little that begins to work its way bigger and bigger in our life. Envy is destructive.
But then he goes on by saying, love is not envious, and I forgot the word not here. Love is not boastful in your notes. Love is not boastful.
As I said last week, there was a word that was used in this passage that is talking for the very first time and the only time that was used. The word that we have here for boastful is also the only time in the entire New Testament that this word is used.
And that's important for us to understand because this word would have been used in common language, but it's the only time in this passage that is used about love. And it says this, love is not boastful, which means to brag or talk conceitedly.
This is to focus on your own self rather than the needs of others.
This is love, the death, love begins to deflect praise to others in order to glorify God.
We must get to the point where we are focused on the needs of others as Cole talked about in his opening, where we're gracious and we're looking at those other things than it is to think about our own selves. It's bringing attention to yourself.
It's saying, you know, look at my knowledge, look at my success, look at what I've done in my life rather than turning the affection and praise to other people.
Oftentimes, and I'm not saying there's not a time where you can talk about yourself, there are times where you have to get up and talk about your accomplishments or maybe you're getting an award and there's appropriate times, but
it's when all we do is talk about ourself, when all we do is seek out the recognition.
It's constantly trying to find ways where we can be boastful. Corinth was full of boasters.
They had gifts and they have talents the way the church has never seen from that day.
They had people that were healing people, they had people that were speaking in tongues. You can go through the gifts that the Lord had given this church where they had apostles and they had miracles and they had gifts. They had all these things at the end of chapter 12.
They had everything that you can imagine when it came to being boastful,
but they lived the life the way the Pharisees did in Jesus's day. The Pharisees said, when I come into the church, I've got to sit in the right seat every single Sunday. And if I'm not in this specific seat or in this specific posture, then I'm not being a religious person.
They had to wear the proper attires where everything was right and they had all these decorations on their clothing because they wanted to look set apart from everyone else.
The Bible even goes as clear as to say that when the Pharisees began to give in an offering, they gave so that everyone would notice that they were giving. They would make the most amount of noise and they would, instead of giving $100,
they would go and they would get all $100 in pennies and they would one by one drop their pennies in the bucket so that everyone would notice how spiritual they were. This was this thing of boasting.
It's not necessarily talking about yourself, but it's being full of yourself. As I put it in your notes, they were full of themselves, not full of love. Boasting in and of itself will help no one.
Boasting leads to what we call emptiness in the spiritual life. It leads to not having anything of spiritual necessity.
Scroggins, one of the commentators I read after, said like this, there is no other kind of boasting. The very nature and essence of boasting is emptiness. Boasting is always an advertisement of poverty.
It's lifting up yourself so that Christ will never be lifted up. Boasting never builds up the church and it will never serve the community. It only honors self instead of rather honoring Christ.
In our life, I want us to take a deep dive look in our life and say, what are we ultimately boasting of? Are we leading others to be envious of you? Are you boasting of Christ and his goodness?
I will often say, as someone will call and say, hey, how are things you going? One of the first things that come out of my mouth is,
The Root of Boasting
God's been good. Man, God's been faithful. God is so faithful to me even when I'm not faithful to him. Even when I have done things I shouldn't do, God is faithful to us.
In Proverbs, one of the wisest men that ever lived, Solomon said it like this in Proverbs 27 too. I think I may have put it in your notes. I didn't. Proverbs 27 too.
It says this, let another praise you and not of your own mouth, a stranger and not of your own lips.
When we begin to go through life and all we hear is ourselves boasting of ourselves and talking about ourselves, we are so self-centered
that no one's going to get the glory. Not even God can get the glory. A great writer, you may have heard of him, his name is C.S. Lewis, not Caleb Lewis down here, but C.S. Lewis, the main writer, he said this about bragging.
He said, it is the utmost evil. The root of bragging is pride, which is the root of all sin.
It is the root of everything we do when we brag on who we are and what we have done. It is impossible, think this about this church, it is impossible to brag and build up others at the same time.
You cannot be consumed with someone else's life and help build them up and brag about yourself at the same time. It is impossible.
It goes against the essence of who Jesus is. As Allie said this morning in Sunday school, Jesus humbled himself to the point where he gave himself and emptied himself
so that he could take on the form of a servant because he lowered himself so that we could be lifted high. Look with me in Philippians 2, verse 6 and 8. You can turn there.
It's going to be on the screen as well. Philippians 2, verse 6 and 8. God who existed in the form of God that is talking about Jesus here did not consider himself equality with God as something to be exploited. Verse 7, Instead,
he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeliness of humanity.
And when he had come as man, he humbled himself and became obedient even to the point of death. Yes, even death on the cross. Jesus who had everything and every reason to boast never boasted.
Jesus who was coming to die for the sins of the world could have said, follow me because I'm here to redeem you.
And yet the Bible says that he humbled himself to the death of the cross. He never once in his moment of death, in his moment where they were crucifying him, in the moment where they were mocking him, he never opened his voice and corrected them
because he came and he humbled himself to be obedient to the death for you and for me. That amazing grace we just sang about is the amazing grace of Jesus where he did not even open his mouth to boast about anything. In contrast, church,
we have nothing to boast about but yet oftentimes we're the one boasting about everything. Myself included, I'm number one in this statement.
I have nothing to boast about other than what Christ has done for me and yet how often am I the one that is prone to boasting about who I am and what I have done. Paul says here that love is not envy and love is not boastful.
So what is the opposite? Number three in your notes here, love promotes and I'm finishing up here, love promotes and praises others. As Terry comes and plays, love promotes and praises others.
Serving Others in Love
Church, this morning if you're filled with Christ and you're filled with his love this morning, focus our attention on others. pushing others to the center stage and sharing the spotlight with everyone.
There's a song by one of the Christian rappers out there and the name of the song is I Can Play the Backstage. I'll play the back of everything. Christ, you take center stage, you take the first and foremost of everything, just let me play back up.
Let me be the person behind the scenes as you do everything.
You see, when we begin to be filled with Christ and we begin to be filled with who he is and what he's done in our life, we will push everyone else before us. We will serve everyone else before us because that is what Christ did.
He got on those hands and knees and he washed his disciples' feet.
He served them in love. He served them in compassion because he cared more about their souls than he cared about what they were going to eventually see. Romans 12, verse 3 says this, for by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you should think.
Instead, think sensibly as God has distributed a measure of faith to each and every one of us. Church, this morning, are we thinking too serious about ourself?
Are we thinking that we are something when in reality Christ is everything and we are nothing and it's only through the grace of God that we are able to stand up and we're able to have another breath in
our lungs that we're able to walk out of our door and go to our job on Monday morning. It is only through the grace of God that this even happens.
And oftentimes, I've said it before, we think we're that God when we are not.
As I said earlier, this doesn't mean we never talk about ourselves, but it begins to look, as I've said over the last three weeks, at the motives behind our heart.
What is the motive behind why I'm saying this? You know, for us to be humble people, we can't be self-absorbed in any way, shape, or form. We must instead promote and praise others according to the most excellent way of love.
I'm going to give three statements that I wrote down that God gave me this week. Bragging builds up self. Jealousy, I'm sorry, jealous people tear down other people, but loving people build up other people. Bragging builds up self. Jealousy tears down others. But loving people build up others.
As we think about those three statements, ask the Lord to say, Lord, where am I at in those statements?
Am I building up others? Am I just talking about myself? Or am I loving others and building up other people? It's tough. Trust me, church, it is tough. It is the hardest thing you'll ever do is to put someone else before you.
But it's in those moments when we're allowing the Holy Spirit to work through us. As even we ended our Sunday school this morning by saying, maybe it's giving that other person the parking spot at Walmart that's closer to the door than you. Maybe it's holding that door open for someone.
It's putting other people before us. It's in those moments where Christ is lifted high, not ourself. And I'm telling you, you will have so much more of an appreciation for life and a reward from the Lord when He is lifted high and not us. When we're lifted high, the reward is us being lifted high.
Closing Thoughts and Prayer
But when Christ is lifted high, that's when we're able to see Christ work in our lives and through our lives so that souls can be changed for the glory of God. Whatever it may be this morning in your life,
ask the Lord to reveal it. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. God, you are a holy God and Lord, as you've worked on this thought all week long in my life, it's been tough. God, it's been hard to examine my life this week.
How often am I building myself up rather than others? How often am I envious of other people rather than being envious of you and being envious toward you, God? Help me to love people more. Help me to love you more in everything we do and it's in your name we pray. Amen.
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