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Love is Humble (1 Cor. 13:4c-5 Study Notes)

Study Notes is where I share some of the fruits of my  weekly sermon studies
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  • Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful
    (1 Cor. 13:4-5).

I offer my paraphrase of vv. 4c-5:

  • Love is not self-inflated; it is not self-assertive, self-seeking, self-conscious, or self-defensive.

1. Love is not self-inflated = not puffed up, not arrogant
2. Love is not self-assertive = not overbearing, doesn’t transgress proper boundaries
3. Love is not self-seeking = it terminates on something other than itself
4. Not self-conscious = not touchy, not prone to fly off the handle
5. Not self-defensive = not keeping lists of acts of aggression

The overarching idea is that love is not prideful. Positively this means that love is humble. Together with all of verse 4 (positively), you get, (1) Love is meek (long-suffering and positively kind), (2) love is content (not envious or boasting), and (3) love is humble (not concerned with self).

The point is clear enough: if you are going to love, you have to get your attention off of yourself and put it somewhere else. You must decrease that Jesus Christ may increase. In turn, you must decrease so that ALL may increase.

You can read previous entries on 1 Corinthians 13 HERE and HERE.

Meek Love

It’s been a busy week that has included trying to come up with a Sunday School lesson on ‘he descended into hell’ from the Apostles’ Creed. I haven’t had time to write much outside of that and sermon work. But as I meditated on 1 Corinthians 13:4 tonight, thinking about the meekness of love (suffering long and being kind), I found my mind going back to two quotes that are worth sharing. The first is Thomas Watson’s description of meekness:

Meekness is a grace whereby we are enabled by the Spirit of God to moderate our angry passions…First, meekness consists in the bearing of injuries…The second branch of meekness is in forgiving injuries…The third branch of meekness is in recompensing good for evil… (Thomas Watson, An Exposition of Mat. 5:1-12).

And I thought of C.S. Lewis’s challenge to us in The Four Loves:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

And so the blessed Spirit continues 1 Corinthians 13, and men like Watson and Lewis, to rip up my heart and put it back together as they point me to the Lord Jesus Christ, the meek One, who bids us, in the words of Watson, not to learn of him how to perform miracles, but how to be meek.

Study Notes: 1 Corinthians 13:4b – Love, Capitalism, and Social Media

Study Notes is a peak into my sermon preparation for the week:

  • ‘…Does not envy or boast’ (1 Cor. 13:4b)

The second pair of verbs in 1 Corinthians 13:4 is translated by the ESV: “[Love] does not envy or boast.” Envy is a straightforward word. When the verb is used positively it speaks of zeal and passion; when it is used negatively is speaks of covetousness and envy. The verb translated ‘boast’ is more interesting as far as translation is concerned. It likely comes from a root word meaning ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ and it appears in the middle or passive voice, indicating that the subject is involved as a receiver of the action. This leads to a fairly literal translation like this: “Love isn’t putting itself over.” That is, it does not boast of itself. The middle/passive element here is essential to understanding the meaning. The simple idea of boasting won’t do. Love is such that it does not boast of itself.

Modern cultural applications abound. If love does not envy, then we must realize that our Capitalistic society is fundamentally unloving. This does not mean that other types of systems are necessarily more loving; rather, we are simply pointing out that a culture of envy and covetousness militates against love. We are taught to envy from the cradle to the grave, and this cultural teaching opposes love, as the apostle expresses it. A culture of love does not teach its members to boil with envy; instead it teaches them the value of contentment. Could this be a major cause of the cultural state of marriage? How can we love our spouses when our culture tells us to envy the beautiful people? Instead of being content, we will always feel let down, desiring something more than we have, or desiring something outside of the bounds of God’s Law.

Next, if love does not put itself over, then we must realize that social media as it exists today is fundamentally unloving. It is an industry and practice based on boasting. Putting your vacation pics up on Facebook or Instagram may feel great at the moment, but who knows who you are discouraging. And such boasting, if nothing else, feeds into the culture of envy that much more.

The church must fight for contentment. We must live as though we lack nothing while living as though we have nothing to brag about in ourselves. We have everything, except something to brag about in ourselves. Hence we boast in nothing except the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the case because ‘the Lord is our portion.’ Jesus, the pearl of great price, is ours. In light of our possession of him, through faith, we must order our affections in such a way that we find complete satisfaction in him. The ‘rare jewel’ of Christian contentment is found in the beauty and value of Jesus Christ. In him we have one who satisfies us to the point of putting off all envy, and one in whom we can make all our boasts while acknowledging our own weakness and unworthiness. As we boast in the crucified Lord, we are crucified to the world, and the world is crucified to us. Hence we are nothing in ourselves for this world, and crave nothing this world offers.

The apostle Paul’s great statement of contentment in Philippians 4:11-13 has been abused in many ways. What he is essentially saying there, when he says that he can do all things through Christ, is that he can live with contentment as a poor man or a rich man, because he has Jesus. Love can win the lottery and not be changed. Love can face a stock market crash and not be changed. Love is content whatever the circumstance, so long as it has a proper object to love.

Study Notes: 1 Corinthians 13:4a

I offer you a peak into my studies this week. While digging in the commentaries on 1 Corinthians 13:4, I found quite an array of suggested meanings to the Greek words commonly translated ‘patient’ and ‘kind.’

1 Corinthians 13:4a ‘Love is patient; love is kind…’

The word generally translated ‘patient’ is a compound word that cannot really be translated into English in any literal sense; the closest we can get is probably something like ‘long-passioned.’ But the issue of translation is compounded by the fact that the word is a verb, which doesn’t come out so well in the word ‘patient.’ The KJV uses the word ‘long-suffering,’ which is probably closer to the actual meaning (and it brings out the compound nature of the word). F.F. Bruce suggests the word ‘long-tempered’ (as opposed to short-tempered). Matthew Henry suggests something like ‘big-hearted.’ The main idea is that love patiently bears being wronged.

As for the word translated ‘kind,’ it is even harder to translate in some ways. It only appears in this particular form in this text (nowhere else in the NT). It is also a verb and it appears (surprisingly, at least to me) in the middle voice, which denotes interest in the subject, such as ‘Love is kind in, or of, itself’ or ‘Love shows itself kind.’ The actual word denotes more than ‘kindness.’ It is a mixture, as some commentators have noted, of kindness and goodness. In other words, it denotes benevolence, or a good disposition (but in an active, demonstrable form). Phillips translates it ‘love looks for a way of being constructive.’ Gill uses the words ‘liberal’ and ‘bountiful.’

Between Gill, Henry, Clarke, Calvin, Coffman, Bruce and others, I came up with this list of paraphrases:

  • Love is big-hearted and open-handed.
  • Love receives wrong and gives good.
  • Love is slow to get angry, quick to do good.
  • Love is long-suffering and liberal.
  • Love accepts rudeness and offers kindness.
  • Love suffers long and wishes well.
  • Love patiently endures and actively does good.

All of these are accurate descriptions of the disposition and actions of the Lord Jesus Christ, bearing evil and giving good. This is summarized nicely by the words of Jesus in Luke 9:41: “Jesus answerd, ‘O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.’ Jesus patiently bears the faithlessness of his people, and then positively heals in spite of it. He does not withhold good even though he has been wronged. He does not return ‘in kind.’ This is where the good news comes in. We fail, and he endures our failing and offers us good. And experiencing that gives us strength to do the same for others.

So, how am I going to preach the text? I want to demonstrate the meaning, give examples, demonstrate how Christ personifies the meaning, reminding them of the suffering and compassion of Christ, remind them that they fall short, and call upon them to respond to Christ in faith that they might become more like him. ‘As I have loved you, so must you love one another’ (John 13:34).