LOVE is? NOT BOASTFUL AND PROUD

Hello again friends, tick-throat here, stories from the road. And when I was on the road the other day I had a chance to be with my friend Steve Moore who spent almost about 50 years in Washington DC and we were talking about this love chapter that we've been talking about for the last number of podcasts and what Paul says to this party town in southern Greece called Corinth about love and he starts out love as patient, love as kind, you know, and I really like, by the way, if you hear any sort of sounds in the background that's kindness and action because that's a grandmother Ruth fixing a little cake for a grandson who's flying into this part of Colorado with his dad from Boise, Idaho today and he's celebrating his 17th birthday and part of his 17th birthday present is to see the Denver Nuggets play the Golden State Warriors. He's a Warriors fan and I think we're coming up into playoff time here and so that's a fun thing but I don't know if I have to choose between a basketball game and one of my wife's cakes, that's a that's a tough one for me. Anyway, love as patient, love as kind, that's what the cake in the basketball game we're about. Last time we were together said love is not jealous, but jealous, he's not a standalone in this sequence as Paul talks. He goes on to say that love does not boast and is not proud. It's interesting and I was talking to my friend Steve, this is what he said, he said, boast and he's a scripture scholar. He loves reading scripture and comments on it and on a daily basis, a matter of fact. But boast is a word that you find a fair amount in the New Testament but there are different words for it and this is the only time this word is used for boast in the New Testament. It's a standalone word and it literally means don't brag and I say, well, why? Well, when I brag, according to Steve and I believe Steve, it repels you, it pushes you away. Real love invites you to reciprocate, right? It invites you in. You went on to say that New York City is a city that never sleeps. San Francisco is named the city by the bay and DC is the city where 90% of the credit and 90% of the blame is misallocated. Somebody does something on the other side and we come along and the propensity is to grab the credit and brag. Did you ever ask God to help you do something and he does? Clearly he does and then you take the credit. Now, I'm not really asking if you do that because I've done that. On occasion, I confess that here on the podcast, but that's bragging. There are other words for it. There's pride, egocentrism, all kinds of things like that. When love of self, which is what bragging is about and pride is about, goes off the rails, that's it. That's bragging. When we were kids growing up, if we ended up going to Sunday school or in church at all, we heard the story of David and Goliath, this huge guy, nine feet tall. I think the tallest man ever measured was like 8.11, but here's the guy who has 125 pounds of armor on him and the Philistines, he's one of those are going to battle with the Israelites and David's a kid. He's a shepherd boy and he comes along and many of you know this story. This guy comes out every day and every morning and every evening for six weeks and shouts across the battle space to the Israelite army. Send your guys out here, send your best fighter and I'll just chew them up and spit them out. That's a fourth paraphrase. Well, David happens to be there bringing lunch to his brothers one day and he's a shepherd and he's a good guy with a slingshot. That's not the kind of slingshot with rubber on it that we use today, but it's a thing with thongs and little pouch and Malcolm Gladwell when he talks about David and Goliath says that a fired missile rock from a slingshot is, goes so fast, it's like a shot from a 45. In that day, in armies, they had people who were powerful slingshots. They had archers and all of that, but the slingshot guys were the accurate guys. Anyway, this nine foot guy comes out and shouts, he brags. He says, you send your guy out to me and I'll and he sees David and he says, I'm going to cut you up and feed you to the birds. That may have been his last sentence. I don't know, but David took him out with one shot. So bragging and being prideful or twins, this love chapter that I mentioned is written to a party town in southern Greece called Corinth. And in contrast to the humility of love, the believer sometimes were known for their prideful behavior. They were people who said that they followed God, but they fought over which a puzzle they followed. They boasted of their tolerance of bad behavior. They took fellow believers to court and lawsuits. They argued about who had the best spiritual gifts and all that kind of stuff. And so Paul just says to him straight out, love is not proud. Love doesn't brag. Love is not proud. And it provides a corrective at this point in time for them. You know, there's an old three letter word that we don't use very much called sin. It means missing the mark years ago, a psychiatrist wrote a book that I found very interesting in title, whatever it became of sin. But when we when we miss the mark or fall short or cross a line, that's usually based in pride. And Proverbs says it this way. Proverbs 8, pride and arrogance in the way of evil and perverted speech. I hate this is God speaking. And then it says this pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Someone wrote this online. William Penn, the founder of the colony Pennsylvania, wrote a proud man, then as a kind of glutton upon himself. He's never satisfied with loving and admiring himself. Whilst nothing else with him is worthy either of love or care. Boy, that's strong. A proud man is a kind of glutton who's never satisfied with loving and admiring himself. That's exactly why love and pride are opposites. And pride we we become objects of our own love. In humility, we learn to love others. Person with Godly love is not concerned with benefiting yourself or herself. The only thing love sees is the need. So let me wrap this up. A bunch of years ago, I was a grad student at Wheaton College in Illinois and had the privilege of being teaching assistant for a year for the dean of the grad school, fellow named Dr. Tenney. And he was a Bostonian. He was he's very formal in a lot of ways, but his hobby was collecting epitaphs. And this was one of his favorites. Of course, back in those New England graveyards, I'm sure you have some interesting epitaphs. Things found on tombstones. And this is one I used to quote, reader pauses you pass by as you are now. So once was I. As I am now, so you shall be. Prepare yourself to follow me. And somebody had come along and scrawled beneath that epitaph to follow you. I'm not content until I know which way you went. So anyway, no one really wants on his or her tombstone. I don't think to say he or she was a proud braggart. Nobody wants that on one's tombstone. We're coming up in just a bit here to Easter week. What we call Easter week. Palm Sunday, which is Jesus coming into Jerusalem for Passover. And he's acclaimed as Messiah and King and all of this. And within five days, they're calling for his death. So on one end of the week, you have what we call Palm Sunday. On the other end, you have Easter Sunday or Resurrection Day. I'll be back with reflections on that week and the pieces that go into it. But for this moment, let me just say it this way in the context of the love chapter. This is a lens in the Jesus story. His humility and truth telling come head to head with the braggarts, the proud and the powerful in Easter week. And at the end of the week, when that Friday, Jesus gets impaled on a Roman cross. And that's when humility wins. That's it for now. Thanks for listening. God bless. We'll catch you later. Bye-bye.