1 Corinthians 13: What God is NOT and What God Doesn't Do

Welcome to episode 280, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, I'm continuing to talk about God. I'm sick of talking about evil. If you want to hear about evil, 2 or 3 episodes back I talk about the punk. I hate him. I hated talking about him, but we are being deceived, every one of us. If you're listening to my voice, I am confident that you do not know the truth on every issue. Jesus said, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. That is John 8:32. We have got to know the truth. This is soapbox moment early, but we have got to get in the word and let the word of God get inside of us. Jesus, in one verse up from 8:32, was 8:31, where he told his disciples that were following him that if you abide in my word, you are a disciple indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. We have got to be in the word, and that's what we're doing right now. We're still going to be on 1 Corinthians 13. It's the love chapter in the Bible, I think, is what they— they being those people in authority over you and I— have labeled this thing. And it's true, it talks about love. Paul's talking about how love is and love what— what love is not. And how you need love. If you— it's a great chapter. I want to give you a little bit of homework. Read 1 Corinthians 13 all the way through. I think there's only like 13 verses, so it's a real short chapter. But we're going to concentrate again on 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. And last episode we talked about what love is, and we, we did the whole verse, and I'm going to do that again, but I want to concentrate on what love is not. And what love does not do. If you follow this podcast at all for any length of time, you'll know that I've struggled in the past. I'm getting better, maybe still struggling a little bit with driving and having people cut me off and slowing down and hitting the brakes, all of that stuff, or pulling out in front of me. I'm the most important person in this world when I get behind the wheel, and I just forget my raising sometimes. And I don't cuss and scream and kick But I get frustrated. God had me memorize 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, and it was— I thought it was what love is, and it's not what love is. It's mostly what love is not. And to get a great understanding of what love is, we got to know what love is not. And the reason I bring up the driving is because when I start gripping that steering wheel and I start feeling myself going crazy and wanting to just blast these people, I start to play back in my head and start speaking out loud 4 through 8. Love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek his own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never and I'm gonna put that up on the screen while I was reading it, but that's by memory. And I just want you to know that if you put this word inside of you, then you've got it to bring back out, 'cause the punk's gonna get you some way. He's gonna start needling you, and he's never gonna stop. This guy's a punk, that's why we call him the punk. He never stops. But the thing is, we have overcome him by Jesus, the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. We can have victory, and we do have victory over him, but we have to take it. We have to submit ourselves to God, then we can resist the devil and he flees. So by submitting yourself to God, and that's in James 4:7, when you submit yourself to God, you're putting yourself under God's authority. And so when we do that, now we got to know what love is and what love does not do. Because when I'm driving down the road, love does not envy, love does not parade itself, it is not puffed up, does not behave rudely. That's one. Does not seek his own. Is not provoked. That's another one. Thinks no evil. Does not rejoice in iniquity. All of those things love does not do. I want us to concentrate on it does not envy because what— the reason I kind of had this idea is because I was reading in Proverbs that King Solomon said, where there is envy and strife, there is every evil work. And that it— I'm doing that again from memory. I didn't have my Bible with me when I started to record, but that's okay. I'll put it up on the screen. And if it's wrong and if it's not in Proverbs, I think it's in Proverbs, but I can't call the number. Where there is envy and strife, there is every evil work. So I just want you to let that sink in because that just hit me across the head like a 2x4. I sometimes listen to how people talk and they go, man, that person so-and-so's got this and they've got that, or they got this truck or they got that car. 'Or look at the house they're in. How can they afford that house?' And after they say that, 'I should have that,' or 'I wish I had that and they had my house,' and all of that stuff, that kind of starts opening the door, I think, to envy. It's kind of in the top 10. God says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house or thy neighbor's wife.' There's no covetousness. That means wanting something that someone else has instead of going out and getting your own and doing something to change how you're doing it so that you can have— if that's something that you really want, God wants to give you the desires of your heart. So if you truly want that, just start going and getting after that. Make that a life goal. But don't try to figure out a way that that person can lose it and you can gain it. That is envy. That's going to open the door wide open to Satan, all evil. Where envy and strife, there is every evil work. We can't afford to have envy anywhere. If you go back to 1 Corinthians 13, you see that love does not envy because love can't envy. So you can't envy if you're going to work in God's kind of love. And to parade hisself— and I know it's a bad deal, and I know I've got jacked up thoughts on this— the parading yourself and not puffed up and not seeking your own, all of those things, that self-promotion It's why I have a hard time promoting my YouTube channel and my videos. I'm going to get better at that. If I don't raise my hand and say, hey, go listen here, or please leave a review if you're enjoying this, if I don't try to promote this a little bit, no one's ever going to find this. And if you're watching this and if you're enjoying this, this is my little segue into— I don't want to sound like I'm begging, but it would be nice to have a review on iTunes or on Google or something to where you really like it and tell somebody else that may be able to find that searching. I'd never really ever do that, but I hear all these other podcast people saying it, so it must be important. And so there you go, that's my self-promotion for probably the month or two. But I just wanna encourage you to think about what love is not. And again, you're gonna have to go to 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, You're going to have to read that, and I want to encourage you, God had me memorize that, and I can't tell you how much that helped me going through my little issues with my driving or any kind of— when I start feeling I'm better than someone else, and I— that don't happen a lot, but I'm human. I'm walking through this life just like you are, and sometimes I have stupid thoughts. I think it comes from the punk, or really probably comes from me instead of giving him credit, but I'm trying to change all this, and the only way to change it is to use the word of God against it. Because if you don't use the word of God against it, then it's just you against your enemy, and your enemy is going to beat you every time. We've talked about that. You can't fight your enemy in the physical realm. You've got to battle him in the spirit realm. And the spirit realm is where God is and God's word is. And that's where the power of the word comes in. And I want to just let you meditate on that. We're going to talk a couple of more scriptures on this, what God is not But I just wanted to set the stage because God is love and God is patient and God is kind, but God is also not a lot of things. And I just want you to think about the things that he's not. If God's showing you what he is not, then the other side of that coin is he's the opposite of parading and puffed up. I'm going to leave you with that because I feel myself starting to ramble on. But I just want to encourage you to just get into the word of God. Start looking at God is love. And in 1 Corinthians 13:13, Paul says, now these abide: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. And I believe that love is the greatest two things because God is love, and love is going to remain when we get to heaven. If you've got love in your heart and if you've learned how to love people and love God. I think a Pharisee came up and asked, "Teach, what is the great commandment?" And Jesus says, "The greatest commandment is love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your spirit, and all your strength. And the second is similar to this: love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets hang on these two." So in my kind of a simplistic vernacular, I'm thinking Jesus hung the whole Bible on love God and love people as yourself. And we're going to get into that down this God is love path. But right now, I want you to think about what God is not. And God is not a lot of things. He's showing you more of what he's not than what he is, because it's pretty simple. God just loves you. I've told you this multiple times. You are God's favorite. If God had a refrigerator in heaven, your picture would be all over it. So just take that, just know that God is love and God's not mad at you. He's not angry. Let's just pray real quick because again, I feel myself rambling. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you that you are love. And God, I thank you that you're allowing us to get into your word and to let this word get inside of us. And God, I pray in the mighty name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that this listener would just get into your word and allow the Holy Spirit to just lead them into all truth. God, we thank you, we love you, we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.