Life's Oldest, Most Powerful Leavening Agent & It's Cure

At sunset today, we complete our annual commanded reminder that sin is a mortal enemy and a corruptor of all things good. So for seven days, we have, as God has commanded, observed a period of time that is to remind us that sin is a universal enemy and that it is the corruptor of all things good. All of us, and many of the faces I look at around here for decades now, have understood what leavening is and what constitutes it, have removed it from our dwellings. And we don't discriminate between leavening agents. We clean everything. So anything that happens to be a leavening, whether it's a leavening to be put into baked goods or a leavening that's in a baked good, we remove it all. But today, as we close out the Days of Unleavened Bread, I'd like to narrow our focus and take a good look at Public Enemy Number One, the oldest and most powerful leaven and its cure. So I don't intend simply to describe to you, I intend not only to describe, but to walk through the Word of God at the cure for the oldest and most powerful leaven. If you were to go to Alaska and decide to tour the sites in the state, and you wanted to go up to Denali National Park, you'd leave Anchorage, and the last community of any size at all would be the little community of Talkeetna, the last step before Denali. And in the middle of Talkeetna is the Talkeetna Roadhouse, which has served miners and trappers and loggers from the early parts of the 1900s. The Talkeetna Roadhouse changed hands about 27 years ago, and when the former owner transferred possession to the new owner, they gave to the new owner three things. A deed, a set of keys, and a sourdough starter that dated back to 1902. Sourdough has been around for millennia, and there's nothing more to it than simply flour mixed with water exposed to the air, and the oldest leavening on the face of the earth takes over from there. Yeast. Yeast spores have been around from the beginning of time. They're naturally occurring, and they exist on every continent on the face of the earth, even Antarctica. As such, it is fair to say that yeast is the most powerful leavening on the face of the earth. While yeast, physically speaking, deserves that status, what is the oldest and most powerful spiritual leaven?

The answer is pride.

Pride. Pride is the first spiritual leaven to make an appearance well in advance. Man's creation. If you would turn with me to Ezekiel 28, we will see the first instance where pride occurs. Ezekiel 28, beginning in verse 11, in this particular case, Lucifer, who became Satan, is personified as the king of Tyre.

And in verse 12, Ezekiel is told, Son of man, take up a lamentation for the king of Tyre, and say to him these things, says the Lord God, you were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God, and every precious stone was your covering, the sardius, topaz, and diamond, the barrel, the onyx, and the shasper, sapphire, turpakoise, emerald, with gold.

The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes were prepared for you on the day that you were created. You were the anointed carob who covers. I established you.

You were on the holy mountain of God, and you walked back and forth in the midst of the fiery stones, and you were perfect in your ways from the day you were created till a niquity was found in you. By the abundance of trading, you became filled with violence within, and you sinned, and therefore I cast you out as profane thing, out of the mountain of God, and I destroyed you, covering carob from the midst of the fiery stones.

Your heart was lifted up, and if you have a marginal rendering, it simply has in the margin, proud. Your heart was proud because of your beauty. 11. He is known as a corruptor. The verse continues, You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor, and I cast you to the ground.

I laid you before kings, that they may gaze upon you. Here in Ezekiel 28 is the first occurrence of pride, the very first time that anything in God's created kingdom went awry, that anything went from being perfect to being imperfect.

And at the head of the parade was Lucifer, now Satan, who was cast out because of his pride. The parallel account to this is in Isaiah 14. I'd like you to turn to Isaiah 14. 13. And while the entire account is prideful in nature, as we read it, we'll begin, actually it only takes here a much shorter space. The space necessary begins with verse 12 and only goes to verse 13.

So as we read these three verses, and they are all prideful, I want you to think as we read it and ask yourself a question. What dominates in these three verses? So let's read it. How are you fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? How are you cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations? For you have said in your heart, I will ascend unto heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, and I also will sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the most high, and yet you have been brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the pit. What dominated in those verses? I've seen some mouths mouth the answer quietly. Lucifer was all about I. I will do this.

I will do that. I will go here. I will take charge of this. I, I, I, I. Satan was completely full of self. Take a note of that element, because it will be the key to understanding pride. We looked at Lucifer, and we looked at the point in time where Scripture said his heart was lifted up, or it became proud. Let's move on from there to the next time that we see sin occur in Scripture. The next time we see sin occur, we're all aware of, happens to be the Garden of Eden. And if I were to ask you what the sin was, we would all say the same thing.

It was taking of the fruit that was forbidden, and that that was considered the first sin. But have you ever, so to speak, backed the trolley, back a step, and asked, what was the catalyst to the commission of the first human sin? We know what the sin was. Have you ever looked at the catalyst? Turn with me to Genesis 2.

Genesis 2. And I may ask, while you're turning, if I can have one of the deacons supply some water up here, because I sense that I may very well need it before the sermon is over. Genesis 2 and verse 1. Oh, I said Genesis 2. I'm sorry. Let's go further at Genesis chapter 3. Genesis 3, Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. So it starts out by letting you know he is shrewd. He is shrewd. And he said to the woman, Has God indeed said, You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

So here's a cunning creature.

Here's a cunning creature. He looks at the woman and he then misstates what God said to the man and the woman. He misstated that for a reason.

He misstated that with the intent to play upon Eve's pride. That instinctive pride that says, I know better. I know what was really said. No, no, no, no. That's not what was said. This is what was said.

As the old saying goes, he played Eve like a fiddle. He wanted to engage her. And the way to engage her was to give her something to correct. And now he had a conversation. A conversation that led to a man and a woman eating of a tree. They were told explicitly by God not to touch, not to eat. Pride was the catalyst.

Four thousand years later, you know, there's something about Satan. God said he was full of wisdom. He said he had corrupted his wisdom. And in terms of cunning, there's probably no being more cunning than Satan. And yet, in the sense of smarts, there's a flaw. There's the flaw of predictability. Turn with me to Matthew 4.

Four thousand years after Adam and Eve, Jesus Christ, to begin his ministry, fasted 40 days and 40 nights. And at the end of that point in time, Satan then came forward for a battle royal. It was his battle with the intent to win forever. His intent was to have Jesus Christ compromised to the place where all the plan of God would have been derailed and the Son of God would have sinned. As we look at Matthew chapter 4, the very flaw that took Satan and turned him from Lucifer into Satan, the very flaw that had caused Eve to take the bait and run with it was the same bait he dangled in front of Jesus Christ. Verse 3, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. Prove it. Prove it.

Satan understood the vanity. He understood the pride. He understood the arrogance. That is inherent in nature. And so his very first salvo across Jesus Christ's vow was, if your God's Son, prove it to me, bye.

But Christ wasn't like him.

That's how he took him up on the pinnacle of the temple. Verse 5, in test number 2, again, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, he shall give his angels charge concerning you.

Show off. Strut your stuff. Show me who you are. It had been Satan's fatal flaw. It had set Adam and Eve up to take the tree. If it was good enough for them, it was a good starter with Jesus Christ. There's a lesson in Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14, Genesis 2 and Matthew 4. If you look at the landmark cases of history and consider Satan's preferred tactic and learn a lesson, the lesson will be that if Satan determines to test you, his natural first step is to check out your pride. If Satan wants to test you, his first natural step is to check out your pride. You know, yeast and pride have the same primary effect. They bloat. They bloat. When we see someone strutting with pride, and they start showing off verbally, we have our unleavened bread analogy in our slang. Well, he's full of hot air. It's the natural way we human beings say somebody is full of pride. Oh, he's full of hot air.

Leavening blokes. Leavening blokes. Whether it happens to be flour and water mix, whether it happens to be the human spirit. Paul is the only one in the New Testament who uses the term puffed up. Nobody else uses it. And actually, it comes from the meaning of taking a set of bellows and attaching the funnel to something and then pumping the bellows until it blows it up. That's where the puffed up comes from.

What can we glean from Paul's usage of the term puffed up, which he used almost exclusively in 1 Corinthians? There is a passing reference in Colossians, but it is 1 Corinthians between the beginning and the 13th chapter that the Apostle Paul, in dealing with problems internal within Corinth, uses the term puffed up. It is the perfect Days of Unleavened Bread analogy given to a congregation in the setting of the Days of Unleavened Bread. So, time-wise, everything's in sync. We've got a few hours before our Unleavened Bread is over. Corinth was in the Days of Unleavened Bread, and Paul was preaching a Days of Unleavened Bread using the mechanics of yeast. So, if you'll turn with me to 1 Corinthians, let's look at a congregation that the Apostle Paul was trying to teach.

Let's ask ourselves, what can be gained by looking at his instruction to them? So, how can our knowledge, how can our understanding, and hopefully even our application, grow and develop by looking at the places where the Apostle Paul said, I see the effect of leavening, or pride, and here's how I see it. 1 Corinthians chapter 4.

He says in 1 Corinthians chapter 4 and verse 6, Now these things, brethren, I have figuratively transferred to myself and Apollos for your sakes, that you may learn in us not to think beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up on our behalf or on behalf of one against the other. So, what is the mechanic here? He said, the leavening is a pride, a strutting, in an environment where you have pitted one against another.

Most men are sports-oriented, to one degree or another. They may follow one sport, they may be a sports nut, they may be anywhere in between. But when it comes to team sports, as we go from season to season to season to season, the fellow, and you women are not excluded, I've seen some very rabid women when it comes to athletics and sports. So, it's not exclusively a male domain by any means. But those who are fans, if you notice how often it is with fans that they can't help but root for one team by putting down the other team. Why is it that you have to elevate your team at the expense of the other team? Your other team is your team. If they win, they won. But there seems to be that tendency to want to grind the other team. I watched March Madness. I watched portions of March Madness. And I noticed something that went counterculture that I told my wife. I said, this was classy. This was classy. In the final game of the women's Final Four, where Louisiana played Iowa, there was a young lady who was literally outstanding. She was the most outstanding player in the women's March Madness. She played for Iowa, and Iowa lost. The coach of Louisiana had already won national titles, playing for Baylor University, had transferred over to Louisiana, and had now won a national championship for Louisiana. And she took the time to go to this young lady from Iowa, who had just lost. And even though she had dazzled everybody all the way up to that point in time, she was on the losing team. And amongst all the noise and all the celebrating and the net cutting, she walked up to that young lady, shook her hand, and said to her, you are a generational player. You lost. We won. It will make no difference in terms of who you are. You are one of those players that only comes along once in a generation. Now, that's classic. That's the opposite of what Paul is talking about. But they were pitting Paul against Apollos and Apollos against Paul. And then those who really strutted their stuff said, well, you know, I champion Christ. That really pours cold water on a...

But it didn't matter who you were championing. It was all wrong. It was all a matter of exercising pride by putting somebody down. Not celebrating the good, not celebrating the victory, but celebrating it at the cost of injuring someone else.

Verse 18 and 19 of this same chapter, the Apostle Paul said, now some are puffed up as though I were not coming to you. But I will come to you shortly if the Lord wills, and I will know, not the word of those who are puffed up, but the power. The Apostle Paul yanked their chain and said, put your money where your mouth is. You know, you can strut, and you can poke your chest out, and you can do all of these things in my absence, but I'm coming. And we're going to stand face to face. And then let's see. If you're going to strut then. You know what it tells you about pride? Pride very commonly has an element of cowardice connected to it.

The most boastful people inside have some degree of a yellow streak. Maybe very narrow, maybe very wide, since it's hidden, you really don't know. Paul knew that. Paul said, you can be very proud, and you can swagger while I'm gone. But I am coming, and then you and I are going to talk to face to face. And you know what? An awful lot of that hot air is going to evaporate. Pride carries a degree of cowardice. In 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 2, you know, these are all lessons we can learn simply by observing the Corinthian. 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 2, He again said, And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. Now, that was prefaced by the famous or infamous sexual immorality verse that was going on in Corinth, and they knew about it. And he said, you know as a congregation what is going on, and you have done nothing about it. And you're proud of it. But we live in a time today where you can see this same kind of pride very easily if you watch media. Pride likes to pose as broad-mindedness. Just watch. Pride likes to pose as broad-mindedness. What the person who prides himself in being broad-minded, understanding, and forgiving forgets is that it is God who draws the boundary between right and wrong. And when you decide to move that boundary, you aren't broad-minded. You are pridefully stupid.

When God is given a very direct boundary and you decide that I want to be kind, I want to be gentle, I want to be generous, I want to be understanding, you know what? Every one of those qualities is a good quality until you decide that you're going to take God's boundary marker and move it sideways. And at that point in time, all of the goodness of those qualities goes away because you and I don't draw the boundary lines. I have found it very fascinating as an observer of human nature to watch the world of public media and to see a certain element of broad-mindedness. It isn't broad-mindedness. It is a matter of moving boundary markers in the name of sympathy, compassion, and understanding. The last one is 1 Corinthians chapter 8. 1 Corinthians chapter 8, he says, Now concerning things offered to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up. Love edifies. So he said, we've all got knowledge, but you need to understand the difference between the effect of knowledge and the effect of love. Knowledge puffs up. Love builds up. Very, very different effect. Paul was dealing with a church that thought it was smart. At the very beginning, he sarcastically chided them. He said, Oh, I wish I was as wise as you are. I mean, you go through the first couple of chapters. He doesn't mind the sarcasm. You walk around very pride of how knowledgeable, how intelligent you are, all that I could be as wise and smart as you are. Paul was dealing with a church that thought it was smart. And here he wanted them to see in this simple verse, the relative value of smart. He told them that being smart is nothing more than your tool to feel superior to others. It's nothing but pride, because the real value of knowledge is in using it to help build up somebody else. That's why he said, all knowledge does, if that's all it's about, is just knowledge. All it does is bloat. Love builds up. It doesn't puff up. So, you know, not a lot of verses. They were all exhortive verses to the Corinthian church, but there was a lesson in it. And the lesson was continual. Pride is full of hot air. It never presents a fair estimate of a person's accomplishments, their talents, their worth, or their contributions in life. It's all bloated. What's the antidote to pride? As I said, the sermon was not simply about describing pride. It was about the oldest and most powerful sin and its cure. What is the antidote to pride? If pride is all pervasive, everywhere at all times, what's the antidote? You know, all of us have our prideful moments. All of us have those times where if we sit in silence and meditate, we know that we'd like to rewind the real and erase that part because it didn't help anything. It didn't build anything. So we've all walked the path. As I said, it's universal. It's not, this person has it and this person doesn't. Like yeast, it's on every continent, on every island, in every place, in the entire world.

What can you take to reduce or remove the effect of pride in your life? As in medicine, you have to identify the pathogen in order to find the cure. What is pride at its core?

You know, if you go back, as we did in Isaiah 14, and I asked you, and I could see the connectedness in eyes and the occasional mouth when I said, what's the dominant characteristic in Isaiah 14? I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. As I said, if you're going to look for the antidote, you need to identify the disease. Pride is the exaltation of self. That's all it is. Pride is the exaltation of self. It's not the recognition of achievements. There's nothing wrong. You know, nobody scolded David when he said, let me go down against that uncircumcised Philistine. He said, I have killed a bear, I have killed a lion, and I've taken care of my sheep. And nobody said to him, well, you're full of hot air, because he had killed a lion, and he'd killed a bear. He'd taken care of his sheep. He just simply was stating the facts. Pride's not the recognition of achievements or the confidence that you can do something. There's nothing wrong with simply looking somebody in the face who says, can you do this, and saying, yes, I can. It was on a days of Unleavened Bread in Bricket Wood, my senior year. No, I guess it was my junior year. We had all the congregations together, and one of the evangelists walked up to me as we were just walking around talking. He looked at me in the face. He says, can you lead songs? And I said, yes. He said, then go up and do it. And that was the first time I ever led songs in front of a congregation. We had had song leading practice in speech class. We had done song leading at Spokesman's Club. So when he asked an honest question, I gave him an honest answer. I and all the other young men who had been in those classes had learned three, four times and four, four times. It was just simply a statement of a fact. It is always, when we go to pride, though, comparative. It's not an assessment of whether you can do something or you can't do something. Pride is comparative. I can do what he can't. I can do better than he can. And if you can read between the lines, it means that I am better than he is.

Pride is not satisfaction in achieving something worthwhile. And then acknowledging that fact, pride is the pathological need to be better than anyone else. And it's usually accompanied with a need to be sure that everyone knows it and feels it. That's pride.

So if this is the pathogen, what is the antidote? It's funny, the antidote stares us all in the face and it is so close that it's invisible. Turn with me to Matthew 22.

There are places in the Scripture that we can very easily take as platitudes. They're not platitudes. They're profound pieces of wisdom. But because we know them so well, they become platitudes. Matthew 22, verse 35, Then one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him and saying, Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law? And Jesus said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

You can't do that and exercise pride at the same time.

It's not possible. You cannot see yourself as superior and your neighbor is equal at the same time. You have to make a choice.

One has to prevail. One of those two has to prevail. You either view your neighbor as your equal or you view yourself as superior.

You know, Satan has scrambled everything. Mr. Sexton touched on a significant portion of that scrambling of society on the first day of Unleavened Bread. I talked to him on Passover evening and he told me what he was going to speak on, and I said, I will listen to your message after I get back from Salem. He covered one of the major components of that. Satan has convinced many that the cure to pride is self-loathing.

Do you for a minute think that cuttings or mutilations or thoughts of suicide or attempts at suicide are a cure for pride? This is one ditch and that's the other ditch. And Satan is very happy if he can convince you to pick one of the ditches. And if you're discontent with a ditch, I've got another ditch you can go to.

Satan simply wants to see man go from ditch to ditch and avoid the road to eternal life. If you love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself, there's no room to put him down. Where's the space to take a jab at him when he's accomplished something? It isn't there.

It's why I was impacted by the coach of LSU telling this young lady from Iowa what she told her. What she told her. The coach had won the national championship. She could add another national championship to those that she already had. She didn't need to say a thing to anybody.

But she was classy enough in that regard to do so.

As Paul was wrapping up 1 Corinthians after pointing out their pride, he then took time to focus on remedies. I'd like to take the remainder of the sermon to walk you through the remedies that Paul gave. You see, Paul had a mess of a congregation to deal with. I thought before the days of Unleavened Bread, I thank God that I have never pastored a church like Corinth. Every pastor's pastored congregation has had problems, but because we're human. I think Paul, Paul, you had a tiger by the tail. I am thankful God has never given me a congregation of that type. Paul, after he had to do all the correcting between the first chapter and the eighth chapter, then took time to teach them. And I want you to look at some of the teaching because it's subtle. The teaching wasn't finger tapping on the chest. It wasn't, you know, look me in the eyes. These were intelligent people, and he allowed their intelligence to take the message from what he was teaching. His teaching was concentrated in chapters 12 and 13 and in a block. If you begin 1 Corinthians chapter 12, he says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I do not want you to be ignorant. And then he, after that introduction between verses 4 and 10, he talks about the diversities of gifts. There are differences of ministries. Verse 5, there are differences of activities. In verse 6, there are, and he goes down the line. So he talks about the variety of gifts that exist. But where is he going? Because this is a congregation that says, I line up behind Paul. What I can do is better than what you can do.

You know, he told them, you speak in tongues. Doesn't cut any mustard with me. I don't care. It doesn't add anything to me. But they were up to here in comparing. And so he said, look, there is a range of gifts that God gives. And in that environment, in that environment, when there's a range of gifts, human nature runs rampant. It says, what's the best one? I want that one. I don't want that one. Leave that for somebody else. After saying there were all of these gifts, Paul then said, after you've looked them all over, and I know you've examined them all, and I know you prioritized them and created a hierarchy, and I know that you want the top of the stack, now let's come back from La La Land to reality. Verse 11, But one and the same Spirit works all things, distributing to each one individually as He wills. Don't line up and start saying, I've got a priority. I want this one. He says, it's not up to you. You're not driving the bus. God distributes them as He wills. You're not being asked. It's a very deflating statement. And when you look at the Corinthian church and the amount of hot air that was there, that didn't feed any of the air. In fact, that sort of put the pencil end in the valve stem, and you could hear, psssssh, as some of the air was let out.

Beginning in verse 14, pride is given an opportunity to raise its head again. Verse 14 through 17, He said, For in fact, the body is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, because I'm not a hand, I'm not of the body, is it therefore not of the body? I'm glad when I sit down in my recliner that my toes are not saying, I hate being a stinking toe. I would like to be a thong.

And if the ear should say, because I'm not an eye, I'm not of the body, is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were hearing, where would be the smelling? You know, Paul was talking too. They were intelligent people. It was just the fact that they were full of themselves. So he spoke to them in a way that they could put two and two together. He didn't have to. He didn't have to dumb it down. They all understood, you know, you can't have everybody be an eyeball, everybody be an ear, everybody be a nose. We've got to come to grips with reality. We have to all do something, and it can't all be the same thing. And you know what? He brings it back to the same place he did the last time. But now God has set the members, each one of them in the body, just as He pleased.

Just as He pleased. If you ever look around and you see something that you wish you had, and you don't have, and you simply don't have the skill and the talent to do it, stop and take a look at 1 Corinthians 12. I listen to special music. I wish I could play a musical instrument like some of our instrumentalists. I wish I could sing like some of our singers. I can't play an instrument at all, and I can't sing like our singers. Now, I can live with that, or I can be fussed about it, and grump and huff, but God didn't give me those gifts. I haven't had the need to study it that far, but it seems to me that people who are good at math are good at instrumental music. They seem to be a comparable area. I'm not good at math, and I don't play a musical instrument. But I love, love, love to listen to somebody who can and does and does it well. It is such an absolute delight. So here the antidote was being given again. The antidote was God gives it where He pleases. He repeated it in verse 18, where He says, Now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. Well, that one we read, but we read it also in verse 13. Now go down to verse 24. Because beginning in verse 24, Paul then gives them the environment that God wants to see. He said, But our presentable parts have no need, but God composed the body, having given greater honor to that part which lacks it, that there should be no schism to the body. He says, God built this body and gave people the ability to contribute and to serve and to give in a whole wide range of areas so that there be no divisions, that there be no headbanging, that there be no knocking, but that the members should have the same care, one for another. I think one of the most beautiful things about the Church of God, when I look at its exercise of Christianity, is the show of concern for the sick. Every time I see a prayer request from the home office and the tail end comes up where the person is now well, there's never one that doesn't say thank you for cards and letters and calls from around the world. That is one of the most beautiful attributes in the Church of God. It flies under the radar, I think. I hope it doesn't really, because it doesn't fly under the radar with me. I take absolute delight when I read those. I didn't realize how many people cared. It said, verse 26, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it. Or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. This is the environment God wants to see in the Church. When that environment is there, you know what? If that environment is wall to wall, what I just read in those verses, where's the room for pride? Where are you going to park pride in that room when that room is described by those verses? It doesn't have any place to stay. You have to let it go stay in the toolshed, because there's no room in this house.

It goes full circle back to what we read very simply when Christ said, The great commandment is you love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul, and you love your neighbor as you love yourself. You see elsewhere, he said, no normal human being hated his own self. Now, sadly, we're in a very abnormal time in society, and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see how many people hate themselves. But it's not natural. It is a part of the end-time insanity that we have to bear and live through. He says, I'm not asking you to hate yourself. I'm asking you simply to treat your brother with the same respect you treat yourself.

We end it in 1 Corinthians 13. We know that as the love chapter.

Here in this particular chapter, Paul takes on pride head to head. There were subtleties in chapter 12. They were encouraging, gentle, uplifting. Here he takes on pride head to head.

He does it by saying in chapter 13 in the first three verses, and then in verse 8 as the tag, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I'm nothing but somebody banging on a can, a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I'm nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

He said in verse 8, love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail. Whether there be tongues, they will cease. Whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

He took all the areas that people love to be proud about.

I'm frankly thankful we live in a day and a time where tongues are not necessary. You know, the technologies are such that that gift which was needed at a particular time is just simply not needed. And the distortion of it by... the distortion of it by one end of Christianity, of just babbling, and then labeling that babbling as tongues, is not tongues. Never was tongues, and never will be tongues. But Corinth was very proud. I have absolutely no training in a foreign language, but I can talk to this person, I can ask them what language they speak, they tell me, and I can speak to them in their language. Look at me. Look at me.

I've got the answers to all the prophecies. Well, that's a top of the stack in our day and time. As people around look at society and they can see the train coming down the track, there is nothing that people want more than that one. He says, you know, they do fail. There was a great catastrophe when the Jews went into captivity. To Babylon, they trusted in prophecies about the throne of David and some other prophecies that they understood them to the point where it was impossible for them to go into captivity. And, whoops, those prophecies failed.

It's a perverse thing when a person can give their life in sacrifice, which seems to be to the human mind the penultimate form of love, when ironically it's for nothing but show.

It's a bizarre part of the human nature to be able to pride yourself to death. And Paul was looking at that.

I stole all my goods to feed the poor. There are robber barons of the end of the 19th century who gave hundreds of millions of dollars after they died. And I looked at as great philanthropists. But it didn't necessarily sink with how they did things during their life. And their tame compared to people in the Middle Ages, in France, in Italy, in the lowlands, and in England, where they plundered and pillaged and then gave to the church vast fortunes as they tried to buy from the church the ability to bypass purgatory. After telling them all the worst things, he then said, Look, here's what counts. Verse 4, love suffers long. Long suffering is not a term we use. We lump under the term patience, both patience and long suffering. Patience is simply a time word. Long suffering is putting up with somebody for time. You don't long suffer waiting for the feast. You patiently wait for the feast. But when somebody drives you up a tree and you treat them kindly, this is long suffering. So he said, love suffers long. Somebody get your goat. What do you do about it? He says, love just simply says, time out. I don't need to get fussed about it. I don't need to get, as the old saying goes, my knickers in a knot. I just need to let it go. I need to chill. Love does not envy. Mr. Laugs covered that in a sermon a while back. Love doesn't envy. The real obvious one when we come to pride is that love doesn't parade itself. You know, Paul, Paul, just let it all hang out right there. Love doesn't parade itself. I love watching human nature. And when I see that verse, I see a two-year-old that has just learned to put his shoes on for the first time. You know, a two-year-old that has just put his shoes on for the first time. You know, a two-year-old that has just put his shoes on for the first time can strut like nobody I know. Our little fat legs and those shoulders bounce and they grin from ear to ear. I mean, they are full of themselves. They parade. Love is not puffed up. This was the last time in 1 Corinthians he used the days of Unleavened Bread terminology. It's not full of itself. It's not bloated. Love does not behave rudely.

You know, there's no need to be rude. Rude is something you do simply because you show your own personal weaknesses. You can deal with anything decently. Now, some of us have a threshold that we probably don't belong in the complaint department at Walmart. But those people who can handle those jobs, I watch some of those people and I think, my hat's off to them. That's class because they get all sorts of stinky people and all sorts of stinky attitudes and some of them are not justified at all. Some of them, the customer's in the wrong and the store's in the right, but to watch somebody deal with that with class, you know, that person's going the right direction. Doesn't seek its own. We've covered that back and forth in chapter 12. Is not provoked.

Health ends your skin. Pride has a very thin skin. Things no evil. That's a tough one in our day and time. There is so much evil. You can't help when you open a newspaper of wondering what's the evil behind what I'm reading. It's a tough one. Doesn't rejoice in iniquity. Rejoices in the truth. You know, in a day and time where lies are so prevalent, when you hear the truth, it's like a cool breeze in the summer, like a cool glass of water when you're parched, because there's so much that isn't true. And so he says it rejoices in the truth. Bears all things. Bears all things.

Like Philippians, this next statement, when it says, believes all things, whatsoever is good, whatsoever is this, whatsoever is this, think on these. It's the same caliber. Hopes all things. You know, brethren, you're equipped, you and I, we're equipped to hope all things better than any people on the face of the earth. You ever stop and think about that? I don't see anything bad. I don't see any person who's acting bad, that I can't look beyond today and say, your time is later. I see what you do today. I see who you are today. I see what you destroy today. Your day isn't today. You and I have a hope that is beyond the capacity of everyone else in this world. It sounds like bragging, but it isn't bragging. It's built into the calling. It isn't over when everyone else thinks it's over. It's actually just beginning. And that's our hope. And because that hope is sure, it's not just pie in the sky, it leads to the next thing. Indoors all things. You can put up with an awful lot of things when you know where it's all going to go.

So he concluded it by simply saying, love never fails. He'd already told the Corinthians, pride is a flop every way you want to turn. I'll talk to you about every bit of it. Headbanging, supporting your champion against somebody else, strutting your stuff and boasting, because there's nobody around who can yank your chain. And on and on it goes.

As you look through verses 4 through 7, and you ponder those virtually, every one of these conducts relates to how you treat people. In fact, it's hard, if you can look at that, to see any of them that don't relate to how you treat people. And if pride rules, then you can cancel out everything here. Because pride is always saying, my benefit before yours. If you put pride at the front of the line, and this is why I said, this is the antidote to pride. He only mentioned puffed up one place here, 1 Corinthians 13. But he didn't have to say it over and over and over again. The formula was very simple. If you treat everyone in the way that he's saying here, there's no room for pride. If pride is what drives the bus, then you're not going to do any of these things. Because it's me first. Me first.

So, brethren, we're walking away this afternoon from our formal celebrations. Tonight at sundown, life will go back in terms of the ritual to normal. Tomorrow, if it's a shopping day, some of you will be back to buying a loaf of bread or whatever things were part of your regular normal diet. And life will go on until our next holy day and our next holy day season. But it's important to remember, as you stand back, there's one giant in the world of leavening. And it's been there from day one, and it never rests. The beauty of it is that God has a pure, true, and solid cure. So, we've looked at the oldest, most powerful spiritual leaven of all times, and thanks to God, his guidance through Scripture offers us the true and only cure.