Thoughts in Worship

Message Magazine's Online Devotional for Friday, January 22, 2016

This Week’s Devotional Focus is, “Love.”

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,” (1 Corinthians 13:4).

Boastfulness forces the listener to hear inflated views of one's self. It causes others to witness the boaster strutting its stuff and believing the hype about self. It compels people to listen to all of the great things it has done; incredible places it has been; important people it has seen. All eyes must be upon the boaster. That is not love.

Our society is so self-indulgent. There is nothing most refuse that our pretty little eyes see. We are programmed that if we work hard, we should be able to do whatever we want. And an outgrowth of that kind of permissiveness is to flaunt that which we have attained. "If you got it, flaunt it." Boastfulness redirects our focus from the calling of our lives. It redirects our focus away from the One who has called us and has much for us to accomplish in His strength. Boastfulness jumps up and down and says, "Ooo! Look at me!" Boastfulness is the chief of distraction.

Pride, the first cousin of boastfulness, has an eerily similar self-focus, but it has more than one facet. Pride not only boasts about how great it is, but also how great it isn't. Pride says, "I am too horrible to love." It says, "Don't help me..." and then manipulates you with sob stories of how needy it is. Pride loudly sobs, "Look at me! I am not good enough!" Pride says, "Not even God is powerful enough to save me. Do you know how bad I've been?" Self-pity, and boastfulness are both distractions that tend away from God. They both claw for people's attention at great emotional and intellectual expense. That is not love.

The antidote for all manner or pride and boastfulness is focus upon Christ. A great exercise for the proud person (and everyone else for that matter) is to invest much of their devotional time reading the first four books in the New Testament of the Bible. In them, we can behold the actual life of Christ and how He moved with love and compassion. It demonstrates the Sovereign of the universe's self-forgetfulness. As we more fully behold Him, then we get a right perspective of ourselves. If we do so reverently and prayerfully, we get a bonus: We become Christ like in our daily living.

Let's be kind to one another and spare one another the self-focus parade.—L. David Harris (www.DavidWritesaLot.com)