SCANDALOUS
June 6th, 2022
LOVE…Refuses to be Jealous When Blessing Comes to Someone Else (v. 13:4)
1 Corinthians 13:8, 13, ‘Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which one day will fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten…Until then, there are three things that remain: faith, hope and love—yet love surpasses them all. So, above all else, let love be the beautiful prize for which you run.’ (TPT)
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Have you ever struggled with someone you know—maybe a friend or even a sibling or a co-worker, an acquaintance—receiving what you thought should have been yours? Maybe it was a promotion or a trip you had wished your family could go on or a new house in a nicer neighborhood? What happens when it is as serious as healing for their illness while you remain sick or in pain, or you bury your loved one while a miracle saves the life of someone you know? What about the marriage proposal or the baby announcement, the divorce or the miscarriage, and perhaps, even as painful as the abortion your friend schedules while you hopelessly stare at another negative pregnancy test?
How do we feel, and then how do we respond, while staring down giants—loss, weight gain, bad news, disease, addiction, death, financial crisis, broken marriages and obliterated families, anxiety, depression; the list goes endlessly—that defeat us? Do we throw our hands in the air and give up, annihilate the friendship? Worse yet when it is a family member that we cannot simply divorce or kick out of our lives? Do we eat obsessively, maybe starve ourselves, drink more, endorse a new high that keeps us from feeling the low? Perhaps we bury our head (and our heart) in just about anything that takes away the pain or at least numbs it? Do we bat our eyelashes and mumble, ‘I’m fine.’ all the while, every hope, all the dreams, are shattering into hundreds of fragments? Maybe we promise ourselves we’ll never ever let ourselves feel anything again.
Our culture has never been so socially aware while we have never been so socially inept. There aren’t too many subjects which are not splayed out for everyone to know about, every topic gutted and fileted for human dissection and daily consumption. It’s not just words killing relationships, but simple pictures are now as well, every post, every tweet, every thread, every stream drifting us further and further from the truth while we all slip into false realities of make-believe and pretense. No one sees the real ‘me’ anymore, but jealousy and competition are in the driver’s seat, the silent motivational speaker in everyone’s head.
Perfect love, God’s love, love designed by a holy God, doesn’t keep score about what someone else has that I don’t. It rises up in gladness when my friend scores instead, even if I didn’t. It says ‘Good for you! Maybe next time it will be me, but for now, I’m thrilled it happened for you.’ Even when it hurts, when it is difficult to say, ‘Congratulations. I’m so happy for you.’ We boast in the blessing that has befallen someone else, and with every ounce of sincerity, we are able to say, ‘No, this won’t change a thing between us; I could not be more overjoyed had it happened for me. You go! I support you all the way!’ It takes a big person, especially in the social climate we are forced to bask in today, to cheer on someone else when our own dreams might be disintegrating in the dust. What a foundation is built upon your loyalty! Beautiful You, never give up; a blessing is likely coming for you just around the next bend.
So many weddings happen every year during the month of June; so many ‘I do’s’ are spoken that eventually become ‘I don’t’s’, because we understand so little about love, God’s love, the goodness of it, the purity of it. What would happen if we too loved like that, stopped wanting what we don’t have, stopped putting on faces that aren’t ours to wear, stopped coveting and stealing someone else’s blessing?
