Love is longsuffering, love is kind, love is not jealous, love does not brag … 1 Corinthians 13:4
Bragging is when someone uses adulations or employing rhetorical embellishments in excessively praising another. Love does not brag about itself. It is not a characteristic of a person’s attitude and actions that desires to be noticed and praised for what it is doing. Those who brag about how much their church gives to the poor, or the different social events and projects they are involved in, or how much they help out their community, are not expressing love. Why? Because, by their boasting they are showing that their actions are not about seeking the best for those who are loved, but getting accolades.
God’s quality of love seeks the best for the one loved, so by its very nature it will not push itself forward to be praised, and certainly will not embellish on its accomplishments. This type of trait comes from a mind that is framed correctly and humble while giving preference to others.
In the fondness unto one another affectionately giving preference to the honor of one another – Romans 12:20
Rejoice with rejoicing, weep with weeping, while considering the same unto one another, not while framing the mind on the high things, but while associating with the humble. Do not be caused to become wise alongside yourselves, while not paying back wrong for wrong, giving prior thought to proper before all men. – Romans 12:15-17
Love is going to withhold its anger against unreasonable people and make others feel at ease by its benevolent nature, while not bragging about itself. This is God’s quality of love. Remember, the world system thinks it can express love without God and many churches today have fallen victim to replacing the love of God among the saints with a worldly love for unbelievers. Along with this worldly quality of love comes bragging. A worldly love brags about accepting those who are doing wrong.
Wholly it is heard among you fornication and such fornication which is not named among the Gentiles, so that someone has a wife of the father. And you puffed yourselves up and have not rather mourned, in order that he should be taken out from your midst, the one working such malignantly evil – 1 Corinthians 5:1-2
The world is indifferent to Christians and the love of the Father is not in the world, so we should not be allowing it to take advantage of us.
Do not love the world nor the things of the world. If someone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him because all the things in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of biological life are not out from the Father, but are out from the world – 1 John 2:15-16
We can fully experientially know what God’s love is, and because of who we are in Christ live out that quality of love towards other saints showing that we truly love God.
My little children, do not love in word nor with the tongue, but in works and truth. – 1 John 3:18
Let us love out from seeing things as they truly are. Not a worldly type of love that brags about its accomplishments, but true love that seeks the best for the one loved by following God’s example, for the reason we know love is because He loved us first.
