Love Does Not Envy or Boast; Love is Not Proud (1 Corinthians Sermon 48)

So I’d like to ask that you turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13. So we continue to make our way through this incredible chapter, the love chapter. Now, the ancient Israelites, as they encountered the living God at Mount Sinai, he descended in fire on that mountain. And he spoke to them out of the cloud, and as he did, they saw no form of any kind, and they were forbidden to make any artistic representation of God of anything they saw in the heavens above or in the Earth beneath, or the waters below. They were forbidden to make any artistic representations; instead, God through the Holy Spirit gave the Israelites words, descriptions, character traits of Almighty God. For example, Moses, when he went up on that same mountain, heard the Lord speak his name, the Lord the Lord, and then gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love. These are virtues, these are character traits or attributes of God, and the Bible is filled with these descriptions, we have these God is statements. For example, God is Spirit, meaning you can’t make any physical representation of him. No artistic rendition of God can be made. God is light, and in him there’s no darkness at all. And then beautifully, God is love. These are the descriptions we have.

Well, similarly in the New Testament, when the Word became flesh, became an actual human being, Jesus Christ born of the Virgin Mary, had an actual physical body, but we have no physical descriptions of Jesus, we don’t know what his cheek bones look like, we don’t know the color of his hair, how long it was, we don’t know what his eyes look like, the shape of his nose, none of those things matter, we have no portrait of Jesus physically given to us in the New Testament, instead, similarly to Almighty God, we have words that are given that describe who Jesus is, and I believe 1 Corinthians 13 is a portrait of Jesus, the perfect man of love: the perfect man of love.

I. The Portrait of Christ Multiplied

Now, some preachers, I’ve listened to a lot of sermons on 1 Corinthians 13, trying to understand how best to preach this incredible chapter. And one preacher I heard said, “We ought to insert our own name in these descriptions,” so this is what it would sound for me, and I can’t do it very long because it becomes difficult such as: Andy is patient, Andy is kind, Andy does not envy, I’m gonna stop right there. Because it’s not true, I wish it were. I wish that this would perfectly describe me, and I think you can do the same thing, you can insert, not my name, but your name in there and put your own name, and then you can see how convicting this chapter can be.

But Jesus Christ lived out this perfect love every day of his life. Jesus was the perfect fulfillment of the Law of God, the two great commandments, vertically to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, horizontally to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus is the only man that has ever fulfilled both of these perfectly. Now we, in our minds should go ahead to the cross, that’s where we get the perfect picture of Jesus, the man of love. He loved his Father perfectly by going to the cross. He said in John 14:31, “The world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what the Father has commanded me to do.” In other words, going to the cross, Jesus’ death on the cross under the wrath of God was a perfect display, vertically, of his love for God.

It was also a perfect display of his love horizontally for others. As it says in 1 John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” But Christ’s perfect love for other people was put on display before he ever went to the cross, every single day of his life, so therefore, we can look at these words as a beautiful portrait of Jesus. We can say Jesus was patient. Jesus was kind, Jesus did not envy, Jesus did not boast, Jesus was not arrogant. Jesus was not rude. Jesus was not self-seeking, Jesus was not easily angered, etcetera, this is a perfect portrait of Jesus Christ.

Now, in our salvation, in our sanctification, once we have been justified, once our sins have been forgiven through faith in Christ, we begin that internal journey of sanctification, of growth in godliness, of growth in Christ-likeness. And so the indwelling Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit enters us at conversion, he begins to form the portrait of Jesus in our souls, not a physical likeness, we don’t physically look like Jesus, we don’t know what he looked like. But every day, the Holy Spirit transforms us more and more by the ministry of the Word to make us like Christ. And so it says in Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” So that’s the work of the Holy Spirit in us in sanctification, that we would be conformed to Christ, the Holy Spirit within us, the indwelling Spirit inside a Christian’s heart is a skilled artist, and he takes the same paint brush and paint of the Word, of words, and works them in our souls, he paints Christ in our souls, we become gloriously conformed to Christ, and that means we will become perfectly loving.

Now, this is an incredible work on the part of the Holy Spirit, this is an incredible work, because, look who he has to work with. John the Baptist called his generation, the people that came to listen to him, especially his enemies, a brood of vipers. The Apostle Paul picks up this image in Romans 3, talking about the natural human being apart from regeneration, is like a brood of vipers. He says, “Their throats are open graves, their tongues practice deceit, the poison of vipers is on their lips, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.” That’s who we were apart from the transforming work of the gospel, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, a brood of vipers. So picture a whole kind of nest of wriggling, writhing poisonous snakes, they’re hissing and snapping at each other with bared fangs, or maybe you could picture a bunch of junkyard dogs snarling, barking, circling each other, ready to go for the throat, that’s what we are naturally, apart from the grace of the gospel.

This is the raw material that the sovereign artist, the Spirit of God has to transform and some day he’s gonna take this pen of junkyard, rabid dogs and make us in heaven, a colony, more than that, a city, a nation, a world of perfectly conformed to Christ, people, redeemed, perfectly loving, and that’s something we can look forward to. Now, 1 Corinthians 13 really is law, it is the law of God, and we need to understand that. That’s why when we read it, we have this initial sting, this initial conviction comes on us. The law of God is perfectly summed up in love. Romans 13:10 says, “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” Now, the law is relentless. The law cannot justify us, the law cannot forgive us for the times we violate it; however, justification is a gift of God to all who believe in Jesus. Jesus’ perfect obedience of the law is ascribed to us; it’s imputed to us as a gift, so that, by faith, we are seen by God to be as obedient to the law as Christ was. We are seen to be as loving to each other as Jesus was to those around him.

“The law cannot justify us, the law cannot forgive us for the times we violate it; however, justification is a gift of God to all who believe in Jesus.”

Now, once we have been justified through faith in Christ, the Holy Spirit then brings us back to the law of love and says, “Now, obey this. Obey this.” And so, yes, it’s relentless, but at the same time, it’s powerfully transforming as we look at the law, we don’t have to prove ourselves, we could never do that, but we know now based on this law of love how we are to live, and as we gaze into 1 Corinthians 13, it’s really gazing not only at a portrait of Jesus, what we should be, but we’re also looking as in a mirror at what we are, and both of those things happen. I wanna grab an image from one of my favorite Michael Card songs, Michael Card’s a Christian artist, and he wrote a song called, “When a Window is a Mirror” and so I want you to picture this image, I’m gonna expand it a little bit. Imagine that you love to hike, and you pick out a mountain in the Rockies and you go on a vacation out there and you rent a cabin with a fantastic view of the mountain that you’re intending to hike, and you wake up just before dawn and you look through the window at the mountain, you can see a beautiful view of it, right up to the summit, maybe you can even see the path you’re gonna travel, the course you’re gonna take, the path, the trail you’re gonna hike, but as you’re looking in the low light of the early, early morning, you can also see a reflection of your own face, so you can see your face and you can see through the window, the distance you have yet to travel as well, and that’s what happens with this mirror that is also a window. We can see where we’re going, we can also see who we are.

Now, this idea of the law as a mirror comes from James, we just finished going through the whole Book of James, and you remember James 1:22-25, James says, “Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in the mirror and then goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it, he’ll be blessed in what he does.”

And so we look into the law of love here in 1 Corinthians 13. We gaze into this, and then James calls it, the perfect law that gives freedom, we are set free from some invisible chains that have held us back from being truly free, truly loving, and so we’re about to embark in 1 Corinthians 13 on a series of negatives, 1 Corinthians 13 gets very negative. Those are the chains, the invisible chains that hold us back from really loving one another. There are eight negatives in all, one after the other, we’re gonna look at three of them this morning. But look at verses 4-6, “Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil.” Do you see that? Eight straight negatives. Why, all these negatives? Well, I believe you could picture the first man, Adam, before he fell into sin as a pure human being, ready to love God with all of his heart, ready to love others as himself, ready to love creation, not idolize it or make an idol of it, but see God’s glory in it. He was ready, this effusive, beautiful spring of love, ready to flow, but sin made that reservoir of love blocked up, you could think of sin as blockages would be one image, or you could also see sin as pollutants that pollute the spring and make it poisonous, and so it is with our hearts, we are filled with blockages, envy, which we are about to talk about is a blockage, it keeps love from flowing, flowing out, or it’s a pollutant, it’s a toxin, and we are full of envy, we are also full of boasting, we are defiled to the core by pride, we are consistently rude, we are habitually and fanatically selfish. We flame into anger at the drop of a hat, we keep careful and meticulous record of wrongs other people do to us, and we secretly delight in evil. That’s who we are apart from Christ, and that’s someone who we still can be from time to time, even as Christians. Now, when we’re redeemed, the heart of stone is removed and the heart of flesh is put in by the sovereign working of the Spirit. We are given a new nature. “If anyone is in Christ, he’s a new creation, the old is gone, behold, everything has become new,” 2 Corinthians 5:17. Now with this new nature, this mind of Christ, that we have in us, we are able to love as Christ did, but we still have vigorous traces of toxins, of poisons flowing through our spiritual bloodstreams or in the spiritual organs within us, there are blockages keeping them from functioning normally, and the first we’re gonna look at to seek to remove is this issue of envy. Love does not envy.

II. Love Does Not Envy

Now, Jonathan Edwards in his treatise on this, Charity And Its Fruits, defined envy this way, “Envy may be defined as a spirit of dissatisfaction with and opposition to the prosperity and happiness of others as compared to our own,” a spirit of dissatisfaction with and opposition to the prosperity, or I would say the blessedness, that we see in others as we compare it to our own. So the envious person sees the happiness of another person, his success, his possessions, his honors and achievements, his spouse, his car, his house, and he’s displeased that that other person has those good things, it makes him actually angry to see those good things in the possession of another. The spirit of envy is especially aggravated then when the person compares those items with his own, he compares his office with that of a co-worker, he compares his car with that of a neighbor, he compares his house with that of his neighbor’s house or a vacation home that he doesn’t own and his heart is embittered by those blessings that have been given to that other person. This envy is actually exceedingly common, it is much more common than we think it is. Ecclesiastes 4:4, the preacher says, “I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after wind.” Now, that’s an overstatement, but it is a strong tendency in the natural world that achievement and labor is driven by envy. Now, in the ’50s, it was called, “keeping up with the Joneses” during that suburban kind of pattern of life. People would see the Joneses got a new car. We need to get a new car. Etcetera. It’s just based on envy.

Now, there are a lot of very tragic examples of envy in the Bible. Go back to the very, very beginning of the history of sin. After the fall into sin, Cain killed his brother Abel out of envy. Because God spoke well of Abel’s offerings, but he did not speak well of Cain’s, and out of envy, he murdered his brother. Joseph’s brothers were envious of him because of the favor that Jacob, their father had given to him over against all of them, they were envious of his coat of many colors and his apparent status as the heir, and so they wanted… Some of them wanted to kill him; they threw him into a pit and eventually sold him as a slave into Egypt, all out of envy. Or think about in the story of Esther, we’ve got this evil man, Haman, who is lavished with all kinds of honors and privileges and money and power and all that. But he said, he actually said to his friends, “None of it brings me any satisfaction at all because of Mordecai the Jew,” because he will not rise in fear before me, etcetera, he’s envious of Mordecai’s servile submission to his power and he can’t enjoy any of his blessings because of that. The greatest envy that has ever been, most significant envy ever was of Jesus’ Jewish enemies to Jesus, they were envious of him. They were envious of his miraculous powers, they were envious of the crowd’s accolades when they said, “Hosanna!” and, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” and they were honoring and showering blessings on him. As a matter of fact, Pontius Pilate, it says in Matthew 27:18 said, “he knew that it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him,” he saw right through- this man had done nothing wrong, he only did good to other people, but the Jewish enemies were envious of him.

So what is so evil about envy? Well, it’s a greedy, grasping- it just seems demonic, selfish spirit, it’s at the root of envy, it’s so wicked, it corrupts the heart, the whole heart with bitterness; it always competes and drives us to achieve. We’re unable to love others and be happy about their successes, it is as we’ve seen the root of some of the most hideous and evil actions there have ever been in history, it has murder, actually, and thievery as its ultimate goal, not only does it rob the envious of happiness in the good news of others, it robs them of happiness in their own blessings, their own blessings seem so inadequate. They’re essentially thankless people. We become bitterly discontent about our salary, about our car, our home, our family, our clothes, and yet all of these are good gifts from God that we didn’t deserve, but instead of being thankful, envy pollutes that stream that should be flowing up to God in thankfulness and out to others in blessing, envy pollutes all of that. Instead of being peacefully content and thankful to God, we grumble against God for blessing the other person.

Now, the opposite of envy really is love. But we’re gonna define it specifically in this regard: it is delight, actual delight, heart delight in another person’s blessedness from God. We actually take delight that the other person is blessed. We realize as James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” And we see the hand and purpose of God in giving that specific blessing to that specific person. And we delight in it, because we delight in God. And everything God does is right. It enables us to celebrate the goodness of God in someone else’s life really as though it were happening to us.

Now, I’m not gonna go into any great details about this. Probably out of pride, I don’t know. But when I was a teenager and on, you know, toward the end of my teenage years, I was ugly competitive in sports. Some of you guys who love sports, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I was like John McEnroe in the tennis court. I remember just hitting a tennis ball over the fence into the woods when I was playing it with a friend of mine. I had this rage inside me. This competitiveness. And it went out to any time I would compete on the court; I had this ugly rage inside me before I was converted. Once I was converted, the Lord began to show me how evil that was, how wrong that anger was, and that envy of others. And I began to enjoy sports just on their own, and I’ll never forget, there’s this one time, it just shines in my memory, it was at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, we were involved in a church plant and some friends of mine, some brothers, we used to get together regularly to play basketball. And we were playing basketball together, and I looked around at the faces and the people, the brothers that were there and I realized two of them were about to go overseas as career missionaries and we were not likely ever to play together again, we’d played together many times. And there just came a sweet happiness in that one occasion that we had, one last time to play together. And every basket that was made, I felt like it was a celebration of God’s goodness. It didn’t matter that it was the guy I was guarding that made the basket. I would try to guard as best as I could, but I was happy that they made it, and then happy about my own baskets. My heart expanded out to include all of those people because I saw that basketball wasn’t important. What mattered was our friendship in that one time. That one last time we had together. And that was God having transformed my heart from bitter envy and jealousy and rage to an actual celebration of the good thing that person just did or that… All of it is a display of God’s goodness to us all. God wanted to scatter his athletic gifts to other people and not consolidate them all in me. And that was an expansive love. That’s the essence of love. You look at another person and you say in your heart, or even verbally, you say, “I find delight in that blessedness you have from God. I’m glad you have it. Truly glad.” That’s what love is. Now, this extends out to evangelism. We want to give blessedness to other people. And we are willing as evangelists and as missionaries to put up with a lot of difficulty, even a lot of abuse and a lot of pain, so that we may have personally, the delight of seeing that person cross over from death to life. And then in our mind, go ahead to the delight we’ll have for all eternity in fellowship with that person. That’s that horizontal expansion out to love. That’s the essence of it.

How does the Holy Spirit work love, this aspect of love in us? Well, it enables us, as I’ve said, to see the sovereignty of God in every blessing, to understand every good thing comes from God. We don’t deserve any of them. To see how Christ lived that way. How he delighted in what God had done in other people’s lives. He… God causes us to be content in the good gifts that we have, the overwhelming gift of salvation through Christ, but also all the lesser gifts, realize, and we don’t deserve any of them. They’re contrary to what we deserve. And he causes our hearts to expand to include our neighbors, to truly yearn for what’s best in them, positively, but then turn around to see how ugly envy really is, and to hate it. To love righteousness and hate wickedness, that’s salvation. He causes us to examine our hearts to see if there’s any bitterness of envy, any root of bitterness within us, and that we would take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. Perhaps it’s a childless couple that has to learn by grace to delight in other people’s good news when they find out that they’re expecting. Perhaps it’s a single Christian who yearns some day to be married and has to learn by grace to celebrate another person’s engagement or wedding. And even be involved in it. Be a groomsman or a bridesmaid in that wedding, and really genuinely celebrate. Perhaps it’s a pastor like myself, really delighting in someone else’s success, evangelistically or the size, or the prosperity or the health of their church. And not compare it with my own, but really delight in what God’s doing through other people. Perhaps it’s a set of parents whose teen is a chronic under-achiever and that individual struggles, but then some other parents have this really achievement-oriented, excellent, intelligent, skillful child that’s going off to an incredibly prestigious school and be able to celebrate someone else’s blessedness and skills and gifts and not be jealous. So examine yourself. Examine your heart to see if there’s any bitterness, to see if there’s any envy or jealousy in you. And realize it’s part of your birthright as a Christian, to be conformed to Christ in this area and have the darkness of envy driven out by the light of God’s love. When you get to heaven… I can’t say this enough, you are going to so delight in other people’s rewards as though they were your own. We’re part of one body, and when one part of that body is honored, the whole body shares in that honor. And we are going to delight in other people’s honor and glory as though it were our own.

“How does the Holy Spirit work love, this aspect of love in us? Well, it enables us, as I’ve said, to see the sovereignty of God in every blessing, to understand every good thing comes from God. “

III. Love Does Not Boast, Love is Not Proud

Now, the next negative, I’m gonna combine them: Love does not boast, love is not proud. I wanna put those two together. This boastfulness that Paul mentions here really is a parallel evil to envy. Whereas envy is angry and jealous over a blessing given to another person, boastfulness is pride over blessings given to us and not to other people. That’s the specific aspect, “I have it; you don’t.” Ironically, a boastful person is trying to stimulate envy in other people. He would delight in other people being envious of him. It’s an evil thing. It makes us feel superior to others. It’s interesting the Greek word here is related to a windbag. Imagine a big bloated balloon of hot air. It kind of reminds me of the earlier statement, “knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.” So you become this big hot windbag of self-praise and self-worship. That’s what boasting is. It forgets again, that all honors, privileges, skills, talents, abilities, positions, all of that comes from God, and is given… All of those things are given to be an outflow of blessedness to other people. Remember 1 Corinthians 4:7, it says, “For who makes you different from anyone else? And what do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, then why do you boast as though you did not?” That’s a perfect verse for killing boasting. The root evil of this boasting is pride as pride really is the root of every kind of evil. Pride was at the root of Satan’s fall originally. Pride was the doorway by which evil entered the universe through Satan’s fall. God created all creatures at varying levels of ability and scope and power and stations.

And that began with the angels. He created different angels with different levels of power and different levels of glory. It seems, based on Isaiah 14, Satan thought so much of his own power and his own ability that he thought, “Not, only am I superior to all the other angels, I think I can topple God from his throne.” So with the five “I wills” he says, “I will ascend, I will make myself like the most high.” Ezekiel 28 gives an opposite kind… Or another angle… Not opposite, but another angle of the pride where it had to do with beauty. He was infused with a superlative beauty, a radiant beauty, maybe greater than any other angel or archangel. And he became enamored with his own beauty, fell in love with his own beauty, and decided to topple God. He decided to worship himself and become his own God. This is pride.

Now, humanity through Eve’s temptation, and then Adam, we sinned in Adam. We in pride joined Satan’s rebellion. We sought to make much of ourselves, really to worship ourselves, to become like God knowing good from evil. Envy springs from that pride, and so does boasting. It makes… Envy makes us hate blessings given to others. Arrogant boasting is clearly rooted in pride. It makes us worship ourselves and despise others. Think about Nebuchadnezzar walking on the palace of his roof there in Babylon in Daniel Chapter 4. And he’s walking there and he’s so filled with pride and says, “Is this not the great Babylon I have built as a display of my own power and glory and for the…” Or whatever. I mean, all of this boastfulness coming, filling his heart. And while he’s speaking, an angel of the Lord struck him down and turned his mind into the mind of an animal.

Now, our daily boasting is a little less grandiose than Nebuchadnezzar’s on the palace of his roof in Babylon, but it’s similar. Someone tells a story, and as you’re listening to that story, you can’t wait to tell your own. You’ve got the trump card. You think that’s something, wait till you hear my story. And we play that trump card. And it happens every time. We’re listening and we can’t wait to tell our story and trump the other person’s story. We use our words to elevate ourselves and lower others. And we tell stories in which we are the hero and others are the villains. If we do some act of service we wanna be noticed and praised. Noticed and praised. Noticed and thanked. It’s so selfish. And we talk about it, we find ways within the Christian community to talk about the things we’ve done, so that people notice the things we’ve done, so that they will praise us and thank us. And that’s… It’s ugly and we don’t wanna admit it, but that’s actually what’s going on. And we talk a lot about our virtues and we hide our vices. And again, we’ve forgotten that every single blessing we have, not only does it come from God, and not only is it contrary to what we deserve, it was given to us horizontally to flow out toward others, and bless them.

IV. Salvation is a Work of Humbling by the Holy Spirit

Salvation is the only answer to this problem. Unaided, the human heart cannot cure its own pride. If we did cure aspects of our pride, we will become proud about that. There’s no way out for us. We need a savior. And Jesus Christ, the salvation that has come through Christ comes in and at the core it’s meant to humble us. I mean to our core, he means to humble us. He wants to work in such a way that when we get to heaven, we will not boast in ourselves. We will not boast. As it says in 1 Corinthians 1:29, “so that no one may boast before him.” And then two verses later, “rather, as it is written, let him who boast, boast in the Lord.” Boasting in the Lord is called worship. We’re gonna get up to heaven and we will be so free of self-worship and so filled with worship to God. In order to love then, we need to be humbled. We need to be genuinely humbled. 1 Corinthians 13 is about horizontal love. We need to be humbled toward each other so we can love them. And salvation is that work of humbling.

Truly humbled people know how lowly we are before God. We are doubly lowly. We are first lowly because we are creatures and God is the Creator. And there’s an infinite gap between all creatures and God the Creator. The holy angels in heaven know this. It’s why the seraphim cover their faces, though they’ve never sinned. They understand the infinite gap, the holiness of God. He is infinitely above all archangels and holy angels though they’ve never done anything wrong. A beautiful verse for this… I didn’t even know this verse was in there teaching this, but you ought to look it up. Psalm 113:5-6, listen to what it says about almighty God, “Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high [listen to this], who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?” He has to lower himself to look at the highest archangel. That’s the infinite gap there is between God and all creatures. So the holy angels are humbled in heaven, but we are even more humbled as creatures for we were created from the dust of the earth. We were created from the… We are lower. We are created from the dust of the earth. Isaiah 40:15 uses that, it says, “Surely the nations are a drop from the bucket,” listen to this; they’re regarded as what? “Dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were [what?] fine dust.” We’re dust, and we’re created from the dust of the earth.

“Truly humbled people know how lowly we are before God.”

But not only so as… Not only is this so, we’re doubly humbled because we have sinned. We have violated God’s holy laws. We have rebelled against the most high God. We have joined Satan in rebellion against this Holy God, so we are humbled as creatures and we’re doubly humbled as sinners. And every aspect of our salvation is meant to humble us so that we see things rightly. It’s not a false picture; it’s actually a true picture of ourselves, we are humbled by every step. We are humbled by eternal election and predestination. It’s humbling. Before we were born or had done anything good or bad, in order that God’s purpose and election might stand, not by works, but by God, the one who calls. That’s humbling. We didn’t do anything, we’re chosen just because God chose us. And then we’re humbled in justification by faith alone. We’re humbled in needing a savior to save us. We’re humbled by the fact that long before we were born, he completely worked redemption. We’re humbled by the fact that the redemption involved his intense suffering under the wrath of God. And when you look at the crucifixion, we realize, we as sinners deserved that before God. That’s humbling. And we’re humbled by the imputation of his righteousness. His perfect righteousness is given to us wholesale as a gift, because we… Our righteousness is like filthy rags. That’s humbling. There’s enough humbling at the cross to last all eternity.

Justification is humbling. But so also is sanctification. Do you feel it brothers and sisters? Are you not humbled by 1 Corinthians 13? You look at it and it says… And you say, “Boy, I would love to be that person. Just the ones we’re looking at today. I would love to never envy or boast or be prideful again the rest of my life. What kind of man, what kind of woman would I be?” But it’s humbling. Every single day, we make holy resolutions and don’t keep them. We fall into habitual sin patterns and the Holy Spirit restores us, forgives us when we confess our sins. And we make more resolutions. We keep some of them, but others, we don’t keep. The very thing that we hate, we do. The thing we wanna do, we do not do. We do make some progress, the thing that we love, we do. The thing we hate, we don’t do. And we make progress, but it is a long journey of humbling. Do you feel it? I feel it.

And then glorification, that’s humbling too. You’ll be perfected in humility at glorification. Because in an instant God will do, in your life, what you tried your whole lifetime to do in partnership with the Holy Spirit, and you could never perfectly achieve. He will in an instant conform your soul, and you will be instantly perfectly righteous. And then when the resurrection happens, He’ll instantly raise your body from the dead and make it like His glorious resurrection body in an instant, effortless. And then when you see God in all his glory, and you’ll realize you’re a creature and a redeemed sinner, you will be humbled.

Well, the more that we can be humble now the better. I spent many hours as I was working on this sermon thinking about one thing. I don’t think it’s my goal to confuse you in sermons, but sometimes that happens. “Thanks, pastor, I never realized what a hard verse that was, but now you’ve shown me how difficult it is to understand that verse.” So here’s the thing, how does humbling before God produce love for other people? It’s actually not intuitively obvious. The demons know that God’s superior and they hate it. They seethe with rage over it. Jesus’ enemies knew that he was superior, and they seethed with rage against him. The damned in hell know that God is infinitely above them and more powerful than them and they seethe with hatred. It’s not intrinsically obvious that a vision of the greatness of God makes us loving. But what happens is, at redemption, the Holy Spirit transforms our heart so that we don’t just see the infinite greatness of God, but we are actually attracted to him in all of his character, in his virtues, in his love. We are drawn toward him. We love him. And as we are drawn toward him, we start to swim in the sea of what he is. God is light, and in him there’s no darkness at all. We want to be pure from sin. He draws us in to the fact that he is love. God is love straight through, and we delight in it. We see the beauty of it, and we yearn for it. So that humbling brings us into an ocean of love, and we are healed of these blockages, we’re healed of envy. Envy becomes gone because of our humility. We’re brought into this ocean of God and we see his wise, infinitely above us purposes. And who are we to question how much he gives to this person, how much he gives to that… Etcetera. Whatever God does is right. We see his greatness and we see his love, and we then are conformed to that and celebrate it.

And so this humbling draws us into an ocean of love that then flows out toward others. Boasting is gone. We realize if God has opened his hand and given you a gift… First of all, it’s just ’cause he loves you and wants you to enjoy that good thing. So enjoy it. But he also wants you to bless others with it, not to be boastful toward it. Certainly not to create envy in another person, but rather that you would be a blessing to them as God has been a blessing to you. And again, when we get to heaven, this is gonna be perfectly consummated. We are gonna be so humble in heaven, we’re gonna be liberated from this narrow, bitter, inward self-worship. You’re gonna be set free from you. And I’m gonna be set free from me. And we’re gonna just soar, enjoy. Delighting in the infinite greatness of God. Heaven is going to consist in a constant direct view of the glory of God. The entire universe will be illuminated in the glory of God, and of Christ. The new Jerusalem won’t need the light of the sun or the moon, or the light of the lamp, but it’s gonna shine with the glory of God. And all creatures in the heavenly world will be perfectly glorious, and we will see their glory. And we ourselves will be glorious. But unlike Satan, we won’t be taken in with our own beauty. We won’t be enamored with it. Nor will we try to worship other angels or other glorious beings. We will see other beings more glorious than us and we’ll delight in their glory and celebrate it, because God worked it in them. And we will be set free. And other people who have more glory than us, we’ll delight in that. And the people who have less glory than us, we will not be arrogant or boast over them. We will see all these things in light of God’s wisdom and God’s purpose. That’s where we’re heading.

V. Applications

So applications. 1 Corinthians 13 is meant to be a mirror for you into your own circumstances. Look at yourself now. Do you love? Are you characterized by envy? Are you characterized by boasting? Do you see temporal blessings properly? Do you see them in another person’s life properly? Do you see the temporal blessings in your own life properly? Are you characterized by envy toward another person’s blessings? Are you characterized by arrogant boasting and pride toward your own blessings? Let me just start with your own salvation. Are you a Christian? Have you come to genuine faith in Christ?

You’ve probably heard the gospel many, many times. You’ve heard it again today, that God sent His son. He became incarnate by the Virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life. Worked a perfect righteousness that he wants to give you as a gift, because your righteousness is like filthy rags. And he died on the cross for your rebellions, which are more than the hairs of your head. Have you humbled yourself and come in faith to Christ, trusting in him for the full forgiveness of your sins? That’s what you must do in order to begin a journey of truly loving others like God has loved you. Come to faith in Christ. Don’t wait. You’ve heard this before. There’s nothing new here for you. But maybe out of pride, you’re holding back. Let today be for you the day of salvation.

Now, if you’ve been a Christian for many years, you know there’s still so much work to do. Go over your heart. Go over your life. Go over your circumstances. Ask if you have any envy in your heart. Anything inside you that curdles your delight in your own blessings, because you’re jealous of what somebody else has. Ask the Lord to drive that darkness out of your heart. Repent from that. Repent from that envy and ask him to work genuine love in your heart. Conversely, concerning pride, ask the Lord to give you a vision of the infinite greatness and the holiness of God, and the beauty of his love. God is love, it’s not just God is loving, God is love. He’s the source of all love. Draw close to him in humility, and allow his love to saturate your life and your being. Close with me if you would in prayer.

Father, we thank you for this incredible chapter. We thank you for how detailed it is, how powerful it is. We thank you for the way that it exposes us, but it needs to. We’re under the scalpel of a skillful surgeon. The word of God is living and active like a sharp double-edged really… Scalpel; cutting out the tumor of envy and boasting and pride. Please do that work in us. Thank you for the gospel. I pray that any that began this live stream unconverted would not be unconverted now, but that they would trust in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and the transformation of their hearts. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

1 Corinthians 13:4 [Love] does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

I. The Portrait of Christ Multiplied

Probably the most famous painting in the history of art is Leonardo DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa”… which hangs behind a large piece of bullet-proof glass in the Louvre Art Museum in Paris. You have all see pictures of it, I’m sure… perhaps some of you have been privileged to be able to see it with your own eyes, although I have read recently that that is extremely difficult to do… The Louvre attracts over 10 million tourists every year… approximately 50,000 every single day; 80% of those come primarily to see the Mona Lisa… 40,000 human beings look on one portrait every single day—tiny at that (30” x 21” in size)… if you do the math, you would get approximately 1 second to see the painting if everyone got equal time in a twelve hour day… after standing in line for one hour, you get one second to stand, before you’re shooed away by the people behind you

Anyway, the Mona Lisa is a portrait, and probably the most copied piece of art in history… there are galleries that will paint you an original copy of the Mona Lisa by hand for just under $300.

Every brush stroke copied by an expert painter, just to have an actual COPY of the famous portrait

I want you to fix that concept in your mind, because as we resume our study of “the love chapter” (1 Corinthians 13), we are in some ways gazing into a portrait of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. The words the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to write on love are perfect, describing a perfect level of human love that has only been achieved once in all of history. God is LOVE (1 John 4) tells us, and Jesus is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3) Therefore, to look at Jesus is to see perfect love

A.   Inserting Our Name… Inserting Christ’s Name

1.   As we read word by word the description of love, some preachers have said we should put our own names in here

a.   “Andy is patient, Andy is kind… I do not envy, I do not boast, I am not arrogant, I am not rude, etc.”

b.   BUT THAT IS SO UNCOMFORTABLE! Because it is not true

c.   It is a goal… but I have yet to live out one perfectly loving day in my life

2.   But Jesus Christ lived not just one perfectly loving day, but every single day of his life was a perfect fulfillment of BOTH of the two greatest commandments: Jesus loved God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength; and Jesus loved his neighbor as himself”

3.   This was perfectly and ultimately displayed at the cross

John 14:31 the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me.

1 John 3:16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.

4.   But it was also displayed moment by moment perfectly every single day of his life

Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind, Jesus does not envy, Jesus does not boast, Jesus is not arrogant, Jesus is not rude, Jesus is not self-seeking, Jesus is not easily angered… etc.

B.   The Goal of Sanctification: Conformity to Christ

1.   Once we have been justified, forgiven for our sins, through faith in Christ, we begin the internal journey of daily sanctification

2.   Every single day, we are being transformed little by little into the image of Christ… made to conform to HIM

Romans 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

3.   The Holy Spirit is the skillful artist, reproducing the portrait of Jesus Christ in his children all over the world

a.   Better than the Mona Lisa, we are having the character of Christ painted in our very souls by the skillful work of the Holy Spirit

b.   Every single day, he works this kind of Christ-like love in our hearts

4.   When his work is done, we will spend eternity in heaven GLORIOUSLY CONFORMED to Christ… that means we will be PERFECTLY LOVING!

C.   The Holy Spirit’s Work: Transforming Us from a “Brood of Vipers” to a Heavenly Colony

1.   In our sin nature, we are all naturally wicked… we are far from loving as this chapter describes

2.   We are much more like a BROOD OF VIPERS

Matthew 3:7-8 “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.

Romans 3:13-17 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” 14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know.”

3.   Picture a whole nest full of writhing, wriggling poisonous snakes… hissing, snapping at each other with bared fangs

4.   Or maybe the image of a pen of junkyard dogs is more familiar to you… barking, snarling, circling each other, ready to go for the jugular

Galatians 5:15 If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

5.   This is the raw material the sovereign artist, the Spirit of God has to transform into millions of little Christs… from a dog pound of rabid junkyard Dobermans to a sweet, peaceful, loving colony of heaven that puts Christlikeness on display every day

D.   The Corinthians: A Paradigm of All Redeemed Sinners

1.   The Corinthians were just like us!

2.   They were arrogant, envying each other, boasting about their own knowledge and gifts and abilities

3.   They were ridden with factions and divisions; they were suing each other in courts of law; they were angry, vengeful, carnal, selfish

4.   They were JUST LIKE US! And the Holy Spirit used their weaknesses and sinfulness to teach twenty centuries of like-minded sinners what Christianity was meant to be like… he ordained that Paul would write these words and hang them in front of us

5.   These perfect words describe perfect Christ-like love from person to person

E.   1 Corinthians 13 as Law

1.   The LAW of God is summed up as we’ve said

Matthew 22:37-40 “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Romans 13:9-10 The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

2.   The Law is relentless… it cannot justify us

3.   However, justification is a gift of God to all who believe in Jesus; Jesus’ perfect obedience of the law of love is IMPUTED TO US AS A GIFT!! In Christ, by faith, God sees us POSITIONALLY as if we are just as loving as Jesus was

4.   And once we have been justified, the Holy Spirit brings us back to the moral law and WORKS IT IN US!!

5.   Gazing into 1 Corinthians 13 is not only like gazing at a portrait of Jesus, the only perfectly loving man in history; it is also like gazing into a MIRROR… to see our own imperfections

Imagine renting a cabin in the Rocky Mountains with a fantastic view of the mountain you went out to Colorado to climb; you wake up just before sunrise to look out the window of your room and you see THROUGH the glass to the summit of the mountain… you watch the sunrise make the mountain glow with glory; but you can also see your face in the pane of glass… the window is a mirror… and you can see both ways at the same time—the journey to glory you are about to make, and the imperfections of your own face

James 1:22-25 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it– he will be blessed in what he does.

This morning, we get to GAZE INTO the “perfect law that gives freedom” in order that we may be transformed into perfect, Christ-like love for other people

F.   Purified from a Series of Negatives

1.   As we do this morning, we begin a series of NEGATIVES

1 Corinthians 13:4-6 Love … does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil

2.   Eight straight assertions about what love IS NOT and what love DOES NOT do

3.   Why all these negatives? Perhaps it is because Adam, the first human being, was originally created pure and holy, perfectly loving, in the image of God… his heart expanded beyond himself to encompass the glory of God and the beauty of all his creation…

4.   But sin made man turn in on himself, become wicked and inward focused and polluted… these specific sin patterns entered his pure heart and POLLUTED him, defiled him

5.   Imagine a gallon of raw sewage taken from a septic system… all it takes to make it pure water is a FILTERING of all the impurities from the water… all the pollutants that are defiling the water and making it deadly to drink would be removed

6.   So it must me with our hearts… they are naturally characterized by all these negative traits

a.   We are FULL of envy… we are FULL of boasting; we are defiled to the core by PRIDE; we are consistently rude, we are habitually and fanatically SELF-SEEKING; we flame into anger at the drop of a hat; we keep careful and meticulous records of wrongs done to us; we delight secretly in evil

b.   This is our natural state apart from Christ

7.   When we are redeemed, our heart of stone is removed and a heart of flesh is put in and we are made NEW

a.   This NEW NATURE is created to be LIKE GOD in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4)

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

b.   In that new nature, we are ABLE to become loving, to have all this impurity removed from our hearts

c.   Let’s begin working on these nasty pollutants one at a time!

II.   Love Does Not Envy

A.   Definition of Envy

Jonathan Edwards: “Envy may be defined as a spirit of dissatisfaction with and opposition to the prosperity and happiness of others as compared with our own .”

1.   The envious man sees the happiness of another person, his success, his possessions, his honors and achievements, his wife, his car, his house… and he is DISPLEASED with the good things the other man has… it makes the envious man angry

2.   The spirit of envy is especially aggravated when the person compares it with his own lot… he compares his office to that of a co-worker, his car with that of a neighbor, his house with that of a person who owns a vacation home on the ocean—waterfront property… and his heart is embittered about it

3.   This is exceedingly common… actually it drives a lot of the activity of the world

Ecclesiastes 4:4   I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
In the 50s, it was called “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Comparing your possessions and lifestyle with theirs

Envy drives a lot of effort by man in this world

B.   Examples from the Bible

1.   Cain was jealous of his brother Abel when God spoke well of Abel’s offerings but rejected Cain’s… this caused Cain to HATE his brother and murder him

2.   Joseph’s brothers were envious of the preference their father Jacob showed to him… they hated his multi-colored coat and his status as the heir of the family

Genesis 37:4 When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
This led some of his brothers to want to MURDER Joseph… but in the end, they settled for beating him up, throwing him in a pit, and then selling him as a slave

3.   Haman was jealous of Mordecai the Jew… so much so that Haman could not enjoy any of his own privileges

Esther 5:13 all this gives me no satisfaction as long as I see that Jew Mordecai sitting at the king’s gate
This led to Haman plotting to kill not only Mordecai but the entire Jewish nation

4.   The Jewish leaders were extremely jealous of Jesus… his miraculous power and his popularity among the crowds… and this moved them every single day to oppose him and plot against him and eventually kill him… even Pontius Pilate perceived this

Matthew 27:18 For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him.
C.   What Is So Evil About Envy

1.   The greedy, grasping, selfish spirit at the root of envy is so wicked

2.   It corrupts the whole heart with bitterness… it always competes and drives us to achieve, unable to love others and their successes

3.   It is (as we’ve seen) at the root of some of the most hideous actions in history, having murder as its ultimate goal… not only does it rob the envious of happiness in the good news of others, it robs us of happiness in our OWN successes and gifts from God

4.   We become BITTERLY DISCONTENT about our salary, our car, our home, our family, our clothes… all of these are good gifts from

God, but envy pollutes them all; instead of being peacefully content and thankful to God, we grumble against God for blessing the other person

5.   It is completely opposed to the love that God wants us to have for others

D.   The Opposite of Envy: Delight in a Brother’s Blessedness

1.   To love means to DELIGHT in another persons blessedness from God

James 1:17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights
2.   We see the hand and purpose of God is to bless the other person, and we delight in that person’s blessings as much as our own because the SAME HEAVENLY FATHER has willed to work both of them… and whatever God does is GOOD!

I used to be UGLY competitive in sports… I used to behave like John McEnroe on the tennis court, angry, hitting balls over the fence; I had a very ugly competitiveness to me; after I was converted, God worked a change in me… as I began to realize that whatever skill I had in sports was given to me by God for me to enjoy, but THE SAME WAS TRUE OF OTHERS… the same God who gave me the ability to play well gave it to others as well…

One afternoon, I was playing basketball with a group of Christian friends; two of them were about to go overseas as missionaries; we’d played together many times, but I knew this was the last time we’d all be together; and God gave me such a peace in the performance of the sport that day… every basket made by any of us was the same as by all of us… A GIFT OF GOD! I relaxed,

thanked God quietly for every good play, whether it was by me or by even someone on the other team

The same God wanted to scatter his athletic gifts to us all… how could I be envious of another person’s gift from God??

3.   This is the essence of LOVE… “I find delight in your happiness! I am pleased that you are blessed!”

4.   Ultimately this is what we hope for in evangelism and missions… I am willing to suffer great deprivations, persecutions, the loss of many earthly blessings so that LOST PEOPLE may have the joy and pleasure of salvation in Christ… I am DELIGHTED that you are blessed! I am delighted that you can spend eternity in heaven!

5.   So also any Christian giving we do… we find joy and delight in another person’s blessedness

6.   The spiritual gifts draw us together as well… the gifts were given to individual Christians for the good of the WHOLE BODY

7.   So this is the essence of Christian love

E.   How the Holy Spirit Works this Aspect of Love in Us

1.   He causes us to see the perfect humility of Jesus… far from a spirit of envy, Jesus was humble; pride is the ugly root of all envy

2.   He causes us to be truly CONTENT in the good gifts God has given us… the overwhelming gift of salvation in Christ, but also all the other gifts as well… Christ is enough!!

3.   He causes us to expand in our hearts to our neighbor… to truly yearn for what’s best for them

4.   He causes us to see how truly ugly and repulsive envy really is

5.   He causes us to EXAMINE our hearts to see if there is any bitterness of envy within us, and to TAKE EVERY THOUGHT CAPTIVE to make it obedient to Christ

a.   Perhaps it is a childless couple who sees the joy of others in a new baby

b.   Perhaps it is a single Christian who yearns to find a godly spouse and keeps getting invited to the weddings of friends instead

c.   Perhaps it is a pastor jealous of the success of another man’s ministry

d.   Perhaps it is a set of parents whose teen is a chronic underachiever, and whose Christian friends have a teen who has been accepted at many prestigious colleges

e.   Examine your heart to see if there be any offensive way of envy in you

f.   Ask the Holy Spirit to work perfect love inside your heart

F.   Heavenly Consummation

1.   No envy of the rewards and glory of others

a.   We will delight in the honors of others AS MUCH AS our own

1 Corinthians 12:26 if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

2.   Perfect unity of the Body of Christ

III.   Love Does Not Boast; Love is Not Proud

A.   The Parallel Evil to Envy: Boastfulness

1.   Whereas envy is angry and jealous over a blessing given to someone else, boastfulness is pride over the blessings given to us and NOT to someone else

2.   It makes us feel superior to others… filled with ourselves

3.   In BOTH cases, it forgets that all blessings come from God… as we already saw in James 1:17 “Every gift comes down from above”

4.   And more powerfully

1 Corinthians 4:7 For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

5.   The Greek word related to WINDBAG… a bloated billowing

B.   The Root Evil: Pride

1.   Pride was at the root of Satan’s fall

a.   God created all creatures, including angels and human beings, with varying levels of glory… he invested some with more glory and ability and position and power than others

b.   In Isaiah 14, Satan thought so much of his power and abilities that he decided to ascend to the heights to topple God… overwhelming PRIDE

c.   In Ezekiel 28, Satan is depicted as the most luminous and beautiful of all God’s angels, and became enamored with his own beauty and worshiped himself… again, PRIDE

2.   Humanity joined Satan’s revolt in the Garden of Eden… Eve was attracted to the forbidden fruit because it was powerful to make us like God, knowing good from evil… Adam joined in this same temptation

3.   The accounts in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 about Satan’s fall from heaven are couched in the language of oracles against human kings—the King of Babylon and the King of Tyre… so we human beings are steeped in pride… we are enamored of our gifts and abilities and talents and beauty; we compare ourselves to others and effectively worship ourselves

4.   Envy springs from that pride… making us hate that anyone has any blessing from God greater than ours; we become pridefully jealous, even to the point of murder—then seize from our neighbor what it his; arrogant boasting is also clearly rooted in pride… worshiping ourselves in front of others

Daniel 4:30 “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”

The fundamental sin: failing to be humble toward God

Daniel 4:25 until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes.

5.   Our daily boasting is less grandiose… but it’s very real

a.   Someone tells a story, and we can’t wait to tell ours… “You think that’s something… wait till you hear this!”

b.   We use our words to elevate ourselves and lower others

c.   We tell stories in which we are the hero and others are the villain

d.   If we do some act of service, we want to be noticed for it and praised

e.   We talk about our virtues and hide our vices

6.   We have forgotten that every single blessing we have comes from God and is given to bless others… so that we as a conduit of all our gifts should be a blessing to everyone around us

IV.   Salvation is a Work of Humbling by the Holy Spirit

A.   The Gift of Humbling is Essential to Our Salvation… and to our Love

1.   In order to love, we need to be humbled… humbled to the core

2.   Salvation is a very humbling work… every aspect of our salvation is designed to humble us, to slaughter our pride

1 Corinthians 1:29 so that no one may boast before him

1 Corinthians 1:31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.”

3.   Truly humbled people know how LOWLY we are before God

a.   We are lowly simply because we are CREATURES and there is an infinite gap between God the Creator and every creature in the universe

Psalm 113:5-6 Who is like the LORD our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, 6 who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?

b.   God has to descend from on high to even look at the holy angels, even the radiant archangels

c.   And the burning holy seraphim in Isaiah’s vision of the throne room of God HIDE THEIR FACES and COVER THEIR FEET in the presence of such a HOLY GOD… though they have committed no sins, they are completely aware of how vast is the gap between them and God

d.   How much more we human beings… we are lower than angels in glory and power…

Isaiah 40:15-17 Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust. 16 Lebanon is not sufficient for altar fires, nor its animals enough for burnt offerings. 17 Before him all the nations are as nothing; they are regarded by him as worthless and less than nothing.

e.   Not only is this so, but the truly humbled person is doubly humbled because we have sinned… we have joined Satan in rebellion against this holy God; our greatest attributes—that we are created in the IMAGE OF GOD, with a mind and an imagination, with a will and power to shape the earth—all of our best attributes are deeply marred and defaced by sin

f.   The truly humbled person is thus DOUBLY humbled… humbled in NATURE, because we are creatures and God the Creator; humbled MORALLY because we are deeply stained with sin

4.   Every aspect of our salvation, then, is designed to humble us deeply

a.   Eternal election from before the foundation of the earth HUMBLES US… because we were chosen in Christ before we had done anything good or bad

b.   Justification by faith alone HUMBLES US, because we could not save ourselves, but had to have Jesus Christ enter the world for us; justification by faith apart from works HUMBLES US, because we cannot boast about our achievements, our works, our generosity to the poor, our pure morality… nothing could wash away our sins but the blood of Jesus Christ; his atonement for us on the cross deeply HUMBLES US, because as we look on his infinite torments under the wrath of God, we realize that that is what God thinks I deserve for my sin… the imputation of Christ’s righteousness HUMBLES US because our best righteousness is as a filthy rag in his sight; Christ’s mighty resurrection from the dead HUMBLES US because we were powerless before the grave…

c.   Sanctification daily HUMBLES US, because day after day, we fail to do the very thing we want to do… and we do commit the very sins we hate; we are humbled day after day by our weakness and failures and wandering minds and hearts; again and again, the Holy Spirit convicts us of the same sins; again and again, we beg forgiveness and resolve to do better, only to fall once more… as we grow more and more in Christ, we become more and more aware of how infinitely far above us he is… the work of sanctification is not some triumphal journey of victory after victory; but rather a deeply humbling revelation of how much we needed Christ to die for us, how much we needed Christ’s righteousness imputed to us as a gift

d.   Glorification in the future will HUMBLE US, because in an instant God will do to our souls and then to our bodies what we could never have done in a thousand lifetimes—become completely conformed to Christ; heaven will HUMBLE US, because we will see God face to face and realize as the holy angels do our infinite smallness before him

B.   The Link Between Humbling and Love

1.   How then does this deep work of humbling produce love?

2.   It does not automatically do so… for simply the display of superior power and majesty by God to Satan, the demons, and the damned produce only rage and gnashing of teeth amongst them… they are motivated all the more to FIGHT against the Holy One… to hate him and oppose him

a.   Look at how Satan, the demons, and the wicked leaders of Israel treated Christ… though his clearly displayed his moral purity and his surpassing power, all it did in them was cause deeper hatred and opposition

3.   But when God wills to save a sinner, he works in him not only a lively sense of God’s transcendent majesty and moral perfection, but also an ATTRACTION to those… an allure… a MAGNETIC PULL toward the beauty of God’s holiness… it causes us to LOVE God for his holiness and majesty, and to be drawn TOWARD him, to be with him, to stand and bask in his presence and to be delighted with him

4.   This is the beginning of the LOVE FOR OTHERS that 1 Corinthians 13 is about… this “love chapter” is not directly about love for God… “love is patient, love keeps no record of wrongs…” these things could never be said of our love for God; Paul is clearly writing about our love for other people; but it FLOWS from our love for God… and our love for God flows from his love for us; and the great work of salvation the Spirit is doing in us is a HUMBLING WORK in reference to God

5.   From that saving work flows first and foremost LOVE FOR GOD

1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.

6.   And inevitably, when we are HEALED from our wicked, selfish PRIDE, when our hearts are moving UPWARD, VERTICALLY toward God in a genuine affection for him, a heart attracting to his moral purity, it also spreads out HORIZONTALLY toward people whom God has created…

a.   Envy is GONE… because we are DELIGHTED in the blessings God has bestowed on another person… we want as many blessings as possible for that person

b.   Boasting is GONE… because we realize that every blessing we ourselves have received is from God, and is really meant to bless others

C.   Heavenly Consummation

1.   In heaven, we will be perfectly liberated from this narrow, bitter, inward self-worship

2.   Heaven will consist of a constant, direct view of the glory of God… the entire universe will be illuminated with the glory of God and of Christ; the New Jerusalem will not need the light of the sun or

moon or the light of the lamp, for the glory of God will radiate it at every moment

3.   All creatures in the heavenly world will be perfectly righteous, for the New Heavens and New Earth are called “the home of righteousness”… they will shine like the sun in that world… angels and the redeemed from every nation on earth

4.   All of the glory that they will display will be God’s glory, and we will KNOW IT… our own glory will be perfect, and we ourselves will shine like the sun; but unlike Satan at creation, we will not be enamored of ourselves; we will not be amazed at our own glory; for we will know perfectly that our own glory is really God’s glory worked in us

5.   And other people will have more glory than us… but we will not covet their glory, for their dimensions of glory will have been allotted to them by God and worked in them by God, and we will delight in what God has done for them and celebrate it wit a perfect love

6.   Neither will we be arrogant over those who have less glory than us in heaven, for we will delight in whatever glory those people display… and we will know that whatever differences there are between us are ultimately worked by God… PERFECT HUMILIY will result in PERFECT LOVE

V.   Applications

A.   1 Corinthians 13 is meant to be a mirror into our own circumstances… look at yourself now… DO YOU LOVE? Or do you see clearly these sin patterns… ENVY, BOASTING, ARROGANT PRIDE?

B.   Begin with your own salvation

1.   Are you a Christian? Have you ever trusted in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins?

2.   If not, you must see the PRIDE that is at the root of your refusal to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ

3.   Almost certainly you have heard the gospel many times before… that God made you, but that you have violated his laws… you have sinned; you have lusted, and coveted, and been greedy and lived for yourself; your conscience testifies against you that you have sinned in the sight of God… You know that God sent Jesus Christ into the world—his only begotten Son—that whoever believes in him might have eternal life; you know that Jesus Christ died on the cross under the wrath of God for sinners; you know the gospel commands you not to try to save yourself by doing good works, but by simply believing in Christ and receiving a gift… you know that God raised Jesus from the dead; you know all this… but until right now, you have resisted the command from God to repent and believe the GOOD NEWS

4.   Please don’t wait anymore… I am begging you to come to Christ RIGHT NOW! Allow him to work salvation in your heart

C.   If you are already a Christian, 1 Corinthians 13 is meant to search you and know your heart and expose sin

1.   It is like a trip to a skillful caring dentist… I have the best dentist in the world for me… Dr. Jim Eaker… he and his technicians have cared for my teeth for years… but I always have a secret dread of going to sit in his chair, not because of pain—he is extremely skilled at reducing pain; but because of having my deficiencies and corruptions exposed and revealed… the decay in my teeth is a symbol of the deeper decay of my soul

2.   Ask yourself: do you have ENVY in your heart toward others? Do the blessings that God pours out on others make you jealous? Does it curdle in your heart to see the material or intellectual or spiritual blessedness of another person? Do you secretly wish it were you… or at least that it would NOT BE THEM? This is a chance to

REPENT from envy… to ask God to work a heavenly perspective of LOVE in your heart where you truly delight in the blessings poured out on another person

3.   On the other hand: Ask your conscience whether you are given to BOASTING or to a heart arrogance in reference to your own blessings? Do you think that your own skills and industry and intelligence have made you successful? Do you secretly vaunt

yourself above others for these blessings that God has bestowed on you? Do you hoard the blessings to yourself? When you do move out to bless others, do you expect to be noticed and praised and thanked? And if you have not been noticed and thanked, do you talk about what you have done to others so that you will be noticed and praised and thanked?

D.   Repent!

E.   Ask the Holy Spirit to do a work of genuine LOVE in your heart toward others