16 Days of Biblical Love #4: Love does not Boast

Before I delve into the specifics regarding love’s not boasting, I had a few thoughts about Paul’s description of love as an overall concept. As I’ve looked over these first few concepts, I’ve been struck by how familiar they seem. The reason for that is largely due to the fact that they are familiar to me!

You see, late last year I was absolutely hammered by Paul’s words in Colossians 3:12 – “Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience”. These words whacked me around the head a whole lot, quite simply because I couldn’t particularly see any of them being used to describe me. I took them on as my personal challenge for this year, to improve in those qualities.

Then, to be honest, I’d forgotten about them. Sure, every two or three weeks I would go through a situation that would require one of those virtues and I would re-pray for them, but on the whole I hadn’t been actively pursuing them as much as I could or should. Which is why this journey through 1 Corinthians 13 has been a real challenge to me to get back to that – they’re exactly the same qualities!

We started with patience, which appears in both, then kindness, which appears in both, then not being envious… and now we’re up to not boasting, which is a large part of humility. We also find many of these virtues repeated as fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5, as well as a whole stack of practical outworking of them in the other of Paul’s letters. Like it or not, the Bible definitely thinks all of this stuff is quite important!

So, not boasting. This is probably one of the easiest of the elements to accomplish, I reckon – so long as you’re aware of it. A lot of the other elements can just happen before you even realize it, but boasting you can feel coming a mile away. You know that moment when the conversation turns to something that you’re good at, or a topic you know lots about, or a chance to name-drop… You’d be hard-pressed to say that boasting just accidentally happens. More often than not, it’s a case of just waiting for the lull in conversation so that you can make your boast.

And it’s as easy as keeping something like “Do not boast” in your mind to make sure you avoid actually saying it. Again, this is one of those things that you need to actively pursue, until it becomes a habit. Tattoo it to your arm or something – “Do not boast”. It’s so simple!

Now I just need to pray that I remember to keep that at the forefront of my mind…

But I just had another thought. Surely the more we learn how to love; the more we learn what the elements of love truly are; the more we endeavor to outwork this stuff… Instead of having to remember “Do not boast” all day, perhaps its better to make sure that not boasting is such an ingrained element of love, that all we need to remember is “Love”. After all, loving God with all that we are and loving others as ourselves are what it’s all about.

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