It is not self seeking
1 Corinthians 13 :5
It would be difficult to find a phrase that so concisely captures the practical working of love. It is an interesting choice then that the writer makes to frame it in the negative rather than the positive. To tell us what it is not, rather than what it is. Perhaps the writer, being acutely aware of his own humanity understood that our default position, our standard method of operating, is to assume that everything is about us.
Everything.
Our Conscious and our sub-conscious working in concert to see us consistently prioritized over others. It is profound how easily we see this in others and how difficult it is to acknowledge in ourselves.
And there is no doubt that living inside a culture built on the image of the success of the individual makes a tendency towards favoring oneself even easier to self-validate. The confronting issue is that while our culture may allow for it, the gospel does not. In this thing (among many) the gospel of love continues to be counter-cultural.
We press for a love that would serve us, that would make us feel, that prioritizes our significance. But the word of God makes it clear that love is not self seeking. In the Kingdom of God, love is not the me. Love is the other. It wants for the other, it works for the other, it serves the other. Love lays down its life for the other. Just as Christ did.
And in one of the seemingly ultimate contradiction’s of Christ we find that as we choose the other over ourselves, all the things that we might have tried to grasp at and draw near. All those things that we would maneuver and manipulate and wrestle to the ground to make ours, actually come to us peacefully and willingly of their volition. Just as the way of the Kingdom is to give in order to receive, it is the Kingdom way that we must choose to be love in order to receive it in it’s full an abundant measure.
This then, church, is the challenge and call of love. That it should be about us and not about us at all. The answer to our loneliness, to our wants and desires of love, is to be love. It is a daily challenge, but one that calls us on. One that can define us more starkly from the world than any rhetoric, moralizing or chest thumping. A love that is always looking to love the other. That is a love that can change the world. Let’s do it church!
All my love church
Stephen Hickson