“31 But eagerly desire the greater gifts. And now I will show you the most excellent way. 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy.”
When I was a child, I received a voucher for long-distance phone calls as a birthday gift and I was ecstatic. This was before the days of cell phones, and long-distance calls were still quite expensive. I received these vouchers from my parents because one of my best friends had moved to Georgia. We kept in touch and after a few years his family moved back to Michigan. We hung out quite a bit during high school although we went to different schools. We even worked at the same grocery store.
Years later he got married. I didn’t go to the wedding. I was invited, but I didn’t go. I didn’t go because I was envious. We were both in our late twenties. He was getting married. I didn’t even have a date to bring to the wedding let alone a prospect for marriage. Missing that wedding was not an act of love towards my friend. It was an act of envy. Now love does not envy.
There are many acts that love does and there many acts that love does not. Love does not envy; it rejoices with those who rejoice. That is the claim of this sermon: love does not envy; it rejoices with those who rejoice.
We will study this in two points. First: what love does not. Second: what love does. We will first see that love does not envy. Secondly, we will see what love does instead.
First: what love does not. Paul has been describing love in terms of what it does. It suffers long with other’s offenses. It does acts of kindness. Love must be understood in terms of what it does.
Love must also be understood of what it does not do. This is especially important in our day because our day is rather obsessed with love. A simple search on Google yielded 1.4 billion hits for the word ‘faith’, 4.9 billion hits for the word ‘hope,’ and 16.5 billion hits for the word ‘love.’ Truly the greatest of these is love. “The world moves for love,” as one movie put it; “it kneels before it in awe.”
And yet for all this interest love is not well understood. We find ourselves in a strange situation. Billions of people, perhaps yourself included, want to receive love and want to give love and yet have precious little idea what love is and is not. Today we see one act that love does not do; love does not envy.
Envy is the compulsion to fill a hole within yourself. This compulsion is provoked by way of comparison with someone else. I envied my friend because his wedding exposed something I lacked. I took his wedding as an assault on my worth. I begrudged his happiness because I didn’t have it. That is how envy works. I resented my friend’s prospering and coming to honor as if he were guilty of doing some injury to me, to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards.
You envy that which is connected to your self-worth. Each of us is tempted to find our self-worth in any number of sources other than Christ. I was tempted to identify self-worth in terms of marriage and I acted in envy.
You are tempted to find your self-worth in sources other than Christ. You might find your self-worth in success. If so, you will envy people within this congregation whom you consider more successful than yourself. You might envy a fellow farmer his fields or his machinery. You might grumble that he inherited far more than you have. You might imagine that you could have done far better than he has if you had what he has. That is envy, and that will have an effect on how you treat that man. That envy will have an impact upon this relationship within this church and therefore that will have an impact on this church. Your envy has an impact on the health of this church just like my envy had an impact on my relationship with that friend.
What is it that you find yourself envying? Do you envy appearance? Do you envy wealth? Do you envy reputation? Do you envy another family’s stability?
You can envy another individual almost anything and whatever you envy reveals where you find your self-worth. “Your rivals’ success threatens the best part of yourself—the part you take pride in, something on which your self-affirmation depends,” as Rebecca DeYoung puts it.
Saul envied David’s success on the battlefield and his reputation as a warrior. The Pharisees envied Jesus’ authority and his following with the people. Ananias and Sapphira envied Barnabas’ reputation for generosity. You can envy anyone anything. Calvin was right, “man’s nature is a perpetual factory of idols.”
This envy is a grave threat to any church. There are doubtlessly relationships within this church that are strained by envy. Perhaps there is a woman here who keeps her distance from another woman because she envies the success of that other woman’s grown children. The woman with the successful children has done nothing to injure the envious woman but the envious woman’s sin has done something to this church. It has weakened us as a church because church is composed of the relationship between its members.
Is there anyone within this church whom you envy? Test yourself by the following manifestations of envy supplied by Rebecca DeYoung. “Envy can show itself in feeling offended at the talents, successes or good fortune of others, reading false motives into others’ behavior, belittling others, backbiting, arousing antagonism against others, scorn of another’s abilities or failures, ridicule of persons, institutions, or ideals; prejudice against those who we consider inferior, who consider us inferior, or who seem to threaten our security or position.”
I would imagine that every single person within this sanctuary has been guilty of some of those manifestations towards other people within this sanctuary-- that is unless you are a visitor. And if you are a visitor, you know that your envy has manifested itself towards the people you already know. Envy is no stranger to our hearts. This is a familiar sin. It is a sin for which Christ died because it deserves death. The fact that it is so familiar just makes it all the more grievous.
We Christians can even envy each other’s spiritual gifts that are supposed to be used to build up the church. Paul most likely wrote these words about envy to warn those who couldn’t speak in tongues against envying those who could. The Corinthian Christians who could speak in tongues were admired and who doesn’t like to be admired? Perhaps you envy members with certain gifts in this church. Perhaps you want to be admired as they are admired. You might attribute the worst motives to a man who uses his gifts of music because you envy the recognition he receives. Perhaps you envy another member of this church who, in your estimation, doesn’t do the good you do and yet is considered to be just as good as a church member as you, whatever that means. That is envy too. You might find yourself filled with delight when someone else in this church fails in an area of ministry in which you have succeeded. Consider that you do so because your self-worth is wrapped up in something other than Christ and you are trying to fill your self-worth with envy.
Perhaps you envy another church in our community. You see something happening among them that you don’t believe is happening among us. You grieve what they are enjoying, and you look for any reason to belittle them or for any reason to be belittle us for not being them. Jonathan Edwards is right to say that envy is like a caterpillar which delights most in devouring the most flourishing trees and plants.
People of God, this should not be. The church is to be a people typified by love and love does not envy. Jesus did not give his life for you so that you could spend your life in envy. It might be proper for you to take some time today to confess this sin to God. As you do so, please test your heart to see whether you have blamed God for not distributing His generosity in the way you would like. Are you bitter with the life He has given you because you do not enjoy the same standard of living as your brother, whether your biological brother or your brother in Christ within this congregation? Are you angry with God because someone else has what you want? If you want to love with the love of God, you must confess your sin of doing what love does not do and love does not envy.
Now envy is incredibly powerful. Don’t consider envy to be a second-tier sin. Solomon was right, “Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before envy?” The Greek word which Paul uses here contains connotations of burning with envy. This burning envy can make a man skip out on his friend’s wedding. This burning envy has done all sorts of damage within this church and within this community over the years just as it has all over the world and Satan has laughed with glee, and he has been the only winner in this situation.
Satan is the only winner when it comes to envy because to envy is to lose. Solomon is right, “A sound heart is the life of the flesh, but envy is the rottenness of the bones.” Envy focuses your attention on what you lack not what you have. “An envious disposition is most hateful in itself [and] it is most uncomfortable and uneasy to its possessor,” as Jonathan Edwards put it. We all know that he is right.
Envy will cause you to reduce relationship to competition. In this competition you can only lose because, as Rebecca DeYoung puts it, “those who are prone to envy… are still fearful even when they win. Their hold on their position is tenuous and easily lost.” If you find your self-worth in your athletic prowess and you don’t feel good about yourself unless you are the best, on some level you know that there is always someone better. This is no way to live. This is sin. Begrudging someone for enjoying what you want is sin.
I cannot imagine that you want to spend your life in envy. I cannot imagine that you want to make the sort impact that envy makes on friendships, churches, and communities. You have the sense that you were made for something more than that. You were made to do what love does, not what envy does. That is our second point: what love does.
We’ve seen that you must be born again to love with the love of 1 Corinthians 13. This section of 1 Corinthians is a description of the power of the Holy Spirit. To do what only the Holy Spirit can do you must be born of the Holy Spirit. You must be born again. Now I hope that you are not tired of hearing about the new birth. A woman once asked George Whitefield why he so often preached on Jesus’ words, “you must be born again.” He replied, “Because, Madam, you must be born again.”
Without the new birth Christianity can only lead to legalism and lawlessness and I, for one, want no part of either of those. I want the power of the Spirit in my life, in this church, in this community, and in this world. No man lives by the power of the Spirit unless he is born again and so I tell you what Jesus tells you, “you must be born again.”
You are born again by faith in Christ crucified. As Jesus put it, “the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” To be born again is to exchange your life for his. His life is the life into which you are born again. You aren’t born again so that you can have a do-over on your life. You are born again so that you can live his life. 1 Corinthians 13 describes his life. He is the perfection of long-suffering love. He is kindest man you will ever meet. “Love is patient. Love is kind.” I do hope that this is the life that you want to live.
If you are born again by the Spirit of God, you can love with this love of God. Now God does not envy. This is obvious because He is sufficient in Himself. He doesn’t need to fill any hole within His soul. He is, in fact, a community who enjoys love all the time. The Trinity is a community of uninterrupted self-giving love.
Jesus gave us this self-giving love. He delighted to see us enjoy better than him. For the joy set before him, which is your joy, he endured the cross. He didn’t envy your relative peace and prosperity as he was maligned and penniless for your sake. He delighted to see you blessed. He did the opposite of envy. Envy suffers when it sees another blessed. Jesus suffered so that you could be blessed. Jesus wanted his disciples to enjoy more than he did. Jonathan Edwards was right to say that Jesus didn’t begrudge his disciples any honor or privilege. In fact, he promised them, “that after his death and ascension they should do greater works than he had done, and they should have greater success than he had in preaching the gospel; for how few followers had Christ?” There were only a few handfuls of people present when Jesus ascended and that was after three years of active ministry. Within days of Jesus’ ascension, Peter’s ministry would lead to three-thousand conversions. Jesus couldn’t wait to send the Holy Spirit so that Peter could have greater success than he himself had in preaching, and we tend to envy anyone who excels us in what we want to excel in. God help us. Help us love with the love of God.
The love of God really does rejoice with those who rejoice. Rather than envying a man because of his success or achievements or honors or joys, it rejoices with that man. It is possible for you to want what a man has and still rejoice with him as if you had it. That is love. The power of the Spirit makes that possible. Wayne Mack is right, “love… rejoices and gets really excited when others are prospering, honored, blessed, or respected even though we are not.”
Think of the impact upon this church if we rejoiced with everyone who rejoiced. Imagine that the farmer with the worst yield this year rejoiced with the farmer with the best yield as if he himself had that yield. Imagine if a father whose children were wandering from the truth were able to rejoice with a father whose children were walking in the truth. This is only possible by the power of the Spirit.
George Mueller is an excellent example of how this can be done. Mueller founded and ran a number of orphanages in the nineteenth century. He also preached in area churches. He noticed that the churches preferred the preaching of his friend Henry Craik to his own. He noticed that the Holy Spirit blessed the preaching of his friend more than his own preaching. He wrote in his diary, “[when] I saw how preferred my beloved friend’s [Henry Craik] ministry was to my own, I determined in the strength of God to rejoice in this instead of envying him.”
Mueller had that attitude because he loved the church more than he loved himself. He had the attitude of which Paul wrote mere verses before our verse for today, “if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” You need to consider if that is your attitude. It can be by the Spirit of God.
Now, love does not envy because love is not obsessed with the self the way envy is. Love looks out for the good of others the way envy doesn’t. Now to love this way, you must, as the old song puts it, be happy in Jesus. Wayne Mack is right, “When we find our sufficiency in Jesus, we don’t have to depend on people or circumstances to be happy or content.”
In order to love rather than envy, you must find your sufficiency in Christ and in Christ alone. Christ’s choice to die for you was in no way related to the success of your farm or your physical beauty or your ability on the football field. Do you know why he chose to die for you? He chose to die for you because you are a sinner. Find your worth in his grace.
To stop envying people and start rejoicing with them when they rejoice even if you crave what they have, you must find your worth in Christ and Christ alone. You must be able to say and to say honestly, “you can have all this world but give me Jesus.”
Paul could say that, which is why he could say, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.”
Paul found his self-worth in Christ and the man who finds his self-worth in Christ has no need to envy any man. The man who has Christ has everything. “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will He not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” The man, woman, or child who has Christ has everything that God can and will give. I hope that is you. The man who has Christ need not envy any man who walks the face of this earth.
It is very possible there is someone here who is not happy in Jesus. You are envious of the trinkets of others like success or beauty or reputation or influence when you could have God Himself and be more satisfied than you can currently imagine. Don’t spend your life in envy. The bitterness will continue in hell.
If you do have the love of God, you don’t need to envy anyone in this church or outside of the church. You can love them. Rebecca DeYoung writes about the impact of this sort of love. She writes, “I personally learned to recognize and receive this kind of love from my children when they were very small. They simply take you as you are, not having yet learned the calculating acceptance that comes from having experienced rejection or felt a need to perform or outperform another in order to earn affirmation.”
You are given the Spirit of God to love people rather than to compare yourself to them. You are given the Spirit of God to make the impact that only love can make. The people of this world live their days in envy and being envied. The church is to be an alternative. The church is to spend its days in love. Christ died to make it so. He died to put envy to death. He lives to rejoice with those who rejoice. He invites you to follow him. Amen.