Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I would like you to open your Bibles at 1 Corinthians 13 because we are, as usual, going to look at the layout of what it is to love. To really love, to be primarily concerned with the other's well-being, irrespective of the cost to yourself.

We talked about the different forms of love and how our human loves have to be ruled and fueled by agape. Remember, there is phileo love, human love. There is eros, the erotic, sensual, sexual, gift love that God has given us, but we have taken it and turned it into lust. In other words, we do not use our bodies to bless, but we rather look at the other person and say, "What can you give to me?" instead of, "How can I bless and give to you?"

Because when agape rules and fuels our human loves, then they are kept sweet, and they are kept within the boundaries that the Bible gives them to enable them to grow and to flourish. People are so confused. They think that eros is the most important love. And so that gets out of whack.

Even people in the Christian church are confused. I talked to a young man here at the front of the church, quite a few months ago, who came forward when Stuart had made some comments about sexuality. He had been convicted because he was living with his girlfriend.

He said to me, "I really am confused about this." I talked to him a little bit and he had been living with her for a long time, years. I said, "Well, why don't you two get married? Do you really love each other?" "Yes, we really, we really do love each other in the right sense." So I said, "Then why don't you get married instead of living together?" He said, "Well, she's not a Christian."

I remember standing looking at him saying, "Huh? Pardon?" He said, "Well, I've been a born again Christian. I was brought up in a very strict Christian home, and I know that you're not supposed to marry a non-Christian. In fact, the Bible says, doesn't it?" He quoted scripture, "Be not unequally yoked together with an unbeliever." So he said, "I knew that I shouldn't marry her," but he had been living with her.

Now that's confusion. That really is confusion. For his human loves were not ruled, the authority of agape, what agape said in the word of God about that particular situation, was just not being obeyed. And so he was obeying eros and trying to figure out how everything else fit into place.

So when we think of agape ruling our human loves, then I mean that he has things to say about our human loves in this book, and we need to find out what they are, what the boundaries are. That way we can ask him to submit our human loves to him and he will rule them for us, and he will also fuel them. Fuel them. When a marriage goes cold, he is the one, for he is love and he gave it to us.

Now, Paul is addressing some problems in the church at Corinth, if you remember. They were very gifted. God had gifted them with the charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, and they had them in large measure. And yet they were children, they hadn't grown up, they needed to get bigger, if you remember, and behave motivated by love.

Because they were playing with their spiritual gifts and they were getting jealous about other people that had gifts that they didn't have, there were divisions, and there was coveting. They wanted what other people had. Remember the definition of coveting, "I want what you've got and I don't want you to have it either." That's jealousy.

So obviously when that sort of thing was going on within the church body, there were divisions and there were parties, and people were following this teacher and thinking this teacher was the one, and putting them up against each other, and there wasn't unity in the body of Christ.

So Paul addresses this in the letters, and specifically the first letter, although the second letter as well, to the Christians in Corinth. When he begins this passage in 1 Corinthians 13, he talks about the possibility of pride coming in. "I can understand all mysteries. You can understand all mysteries," he says, "but that doesn't mean that that's a cause for boasting."

We're going to talk about pride, and we're going to talk about boasting, and we're going to talk about rudeness and arrogance, and all of those things are wrapped up in this passage of scripture. In one little phrase, love doesn't boast, it isn't proud, it isn't rude. That's taking the negative. It is humble, in other words.

Now Paul talks about this big head that it's possible to get when you are in a Christian, when you discover the gifts that God has given you. I want to talk a little bit about the difference between being proud and having a good self-image. A good self-concept is very important. That's all wrapped up with trying to see yourself as God sees you.

Trying to love yourself as God loves you, and being content with the way that you're made, knit together. Psalm 139 tells us, knit together, embroidered in your mother's womb in the way that you are, your personality, your makeup, your physical abilities, your intelligence.

God has knit you together for a reason, and he has a matching, corresponding place for you in the world, in the body of Christ and in the world, to match your abilities and your personalities, your gifting that he has given you, to be a blessing in the place that he has placed you.

He has given you spiritual abilities as well. You know, often when I finish speaking somebody will very kindly, not too often, but sometimes will come up and say, "That was wonderful, thank you so much." They're very complimentary. I always say to them, "Well, you don't get prizes for gifts." What they're trying to say is, "God helped me through you," and I accept that and I'm glad about it and say thank you for that.

I'm reminded of Corrie ten Boom, when she was a little lady, in case you don't know, who hid a lot of Jews during the war and got caught. In fact, she was the leader of the whole spy ring in Holland. When she got caught, she was sent to this concentration camp and all her family with her, and she was the only one that survived that experience.

Corrie came out of that, miraculously delivered from the gas chamber the day that the entire barracks that she was living in was told to take their soap in their hand, they were going to the showers. Of course, when they got to the showers instead of water, gas came out and so they knew that this was the end. Corrie was told to step forward in the parade line and told that she was going to be released. It was a mistake.

A mistake, a heavenly mistake in the journal that had run down that list of all the women that were to be exterminated that day, and she was released. She came back to her hometown. One of the things I always think about Corrie, in that particular incident, she had a terrible time getting back. She had to walk and her feet were so swollen, and it was very cold, and she ended up in hospital and cared for, and eventually, two or three days later, got back to her hometown.

Do you know the first thing she did after she'd been in Ravensbruck and she'd been in these other concentration camps and suffered all this? The very first thing she did when she got back to the clock house, the clock shop where she lived, was to make contact with the underground once more and start all over again.

Now, if you want a picture of courage, that would be it. She had actually lost her nerve, she discovered, and so she backed out of the underground movement for a little while. But I don't know if I had been through all she had been through, if I would have picked up the phone to my contact to start smuggling Jews all over again.

But God gives some people big hearts and big courage. He certainly never gave Corrie a big head. As she began to travel the world after it was all over and tell of her experiences, the Billy Graham organization picked it up and made a film called "The Hiding Place" of it, and books were written about her. Everywhere she went, auditoriums were overflowing with people that wanted to hear her.

We had the privilege of having her stay in our home at that time. I remember my little girl who was nine, saying to me, "It's like having Jesus eating his cornflakes at the breakfast table." It was. It was like having the Lord in the house. It was an incredible experience my children have never ever forgotten.

She was so in touch with the Lord that you didn't know who she was talking to half the time, whether it was you or him. She would start talking to somebody and then she'd just break off and talk to the Lord, and you, as if he was there at the table, because for her he was.

One day I said to her after she'd spoken at Almbrook, and I'd watched everybody just flock up to her and, you know, "Oh, Corrie, that was wonderful! Oh, that was terrific!" and on and on and on. I said to her, "How do you cope with this?"

She said, "Well, I'm European like you. It's very hard for me to say thank you when I'm given a compliment." I still struggle with that. If I'm ever given one, somebody will come up and say, "Oh, this is nice." "Oh, this old thing, I got it in the garage sale, you know." I slough it off and, "Oh, your hair looks nice." "Oh, well, it's this," and you make excuses and you back off. I've learned to say thank you.

She said, "I had learned to say thank you, but what I do is I gather the compliments all through the day, just like flowers. Then at night I kneel down with this big bunch of flowers and I say, 'Here you are, Jesus. They're all yours. They're all yours.'" She never got a big head.

Paul said, "God might have given you great courage. God might have given you courage to give your body to be burned, to be a martyr for Jesus and do it well. God might have given you to understand all mysteries and all knowledge." A word of knowledge incidentally is the ability to know what you didn't know you knew. The ability to know what you didn't know you knew.

Have you ever been talking to somebody and you've needed an illustration or you've needed a word or you've needed an answer and it's come and you've thought, "I didn't know I knew that." Well, you might not have known it, but the Holy Spirit in you is giving you knowledge that you didn't know. That's a spiritual gift. And we can get proud about that. There is a danger in it.

Now, in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, Paul says, "God has his ways." God has his ways of keeping us humble. 2 Corinthians, what was it I said here? 12:7-10. "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations." Paul is saying he'd been caught up. He didn't know whether he was in the body or out of the body, but he'd been caught up to heaven and saw things that were so incredible he couldn't tell them and he couldn't write them down. Mysteries had been revealed to him in a trance or a vision.

He said, "To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me, but he said, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why for Christ's sake I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties, for when I am weak, then am I strong."

We should remember that while knowledge may make a man look big, 1 Corinthians 8:1, it's only love that can make him grow to his full stature. For whatever a man may know, he still has a lot to learn. That's Philip's rendering of 1 Corinthians 8:1, which says, "Knowledge puffs up. Love edifies."

We don't want to be that big zero, do we? Have a big head and big ideas about ourselves. Yet we want to be confident in what God has given us to do and what God thinks of us. So there's a difference between having a healthy self-image, that's seeing yourself as God sees you, and being worldly minded and proud, which is seeing yourself as perhaps you see yourself or the world sees you. There is a difference.

Smeade says, "Boasting is a way of trying to look good when we suspect we are not good. Arrogance is an anxious grasp of power when we fear that we are weak. Rudeness is putting people down in order to hold ourselves up. All three come from a lack of balance when we are empty at the center."

Think about that. If we are empty at the center, if we are not sure of how much God loves us and how lovingly he knit us together, just exactly right for the person we are to do the thing he wants us to do, then we'll be empty at the center.

Boasting is our private advertising business, our little campaign to publicize an image of ourselves. Your self-image is how you see yourself, or how others have told you they see you. Self-concept, a healthy self-concept, is to realize that God loved you, he died for you, he made you just right, and he has something for you to do. And you can be comfortable in that.

We have three children. We have David, Judy, and Peter. When they were growing up, they all had different self-images of themselves, self-concepts. David was always a little unsure of himself. If I go to school, the teacher would look at me and say, "David who? David Briscoe. David Briscoe, Briscoe." "Oh yes, he's the little boy that sits on the back row until it's safe to come out."

David was cautious. David was always a little unsure of himself. When it was safe, then he would come out. He struggled a little bit with who he was and how God had made him. Judy, on the other hand, struggled a lot with her self-concept and got into some eating disorders in her college days because of that.

She never felt good about herself. She never believed she was pretty, which she was. I remember saying to her, "Judy, you are so pretty." "Oh, you're my mother. You have to say that." I remember it wasn't until her wedding day. On her wedding day, she looked in the mirror and said, "Today I feel good about myself." On her wedding day. First time I ever heard her say that. She struggled a lot with self-concept.

Then we have Pete. Pete took a test at school, which was a self-image test. The first question, he told us, around the family tea table, was, "What do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about yourself?" Then he said, "The next question was, 'What do you like about yourself?'" This was in the days when these tests were just beginning. Everyone was very interested to know what he had answered.

So I said, "Okay Pete, what did you say when it said, 'What do you like about yourself?'" He said, "I just put everything." That's Pete, those of you that know him. Yet he isn't big-headed. Pete has a very healthy self-concept. It releases him to forget himself and to think about other people.

You know, that's how God wants us to be, however he has made us. He wants us to be happy with ourselves. Not proud. I mean, why be proud? God made us like this. Why be proud of the gifts he's given us? You don't get prizes for gifts. Spiritual pride, this arrogant refusal to let God be God and acknowledge. Pride is saying, "I'm something apart from God."

Humility says, "I am something because of God." You're able to accept those things, those good things about yourself in a humble manner. Pride is puffing yourself up in God's face. You'll never find pride praying for grace, asking for strength or pleading for mercy.

I think the best illustration in the scriptures is the Pharisee and the Publican. Do you remember Jesus told the story of the Pharisee, the proud man, the spiritually proud man, and the Publican, the spiritually humble man, going to pray in the temple? The Pharisee beat his breast and made a big fuss about it, and made sure everybody could see his prayer and hear his prayer and see him and said, "God, I thank you that I am not as other men. I thank you that I'm not like this man, this Publican, that I am not as he is." The Publican beat his breast and said, "God, be merciful to me a sinner." He wouldn't even look up to heaven.

Jesus said, "Now which man has gone away justified? The Publican." I suppose the Pharisee in the scriptures is the most obvious person to look at when we think of pride and how we must not be. If you ever want to do a study of the Pharisees, it's very interesting. Just to see the awful people that they were, the spiritually proud people, intensely religious but spiritually proud.

Not too long ago when I did a series in the gospels, I remember talking about the Pharisees, none of us could really relate until I suddenly realized that we have a Pharisee inside. There is a Pharisee in me. That Pharisee is what we call the flesh, or self, or us without Jesus, our old nature, the old man. Many words are used in the scriptures.

"One day I found within my heart someone who'd been there from the start. A prudish person, self-appointed, self-sufficient, self-anointed. Though I a true disciple be, I've met the Pharisee in me. Oh Lord, I pray hard on my way. I try to do it every day. A Publican to be I try and beat my breast and sigh and cry. I'm hoping others 'round will see.' Oops, there's the Pharisee in me."

"He sees not why his heart should bow. Instead, he's holier than thou. He cast the mote out of your eye. While beam in his obscures the why. A tear be shed because of sin, or why he should begin again. Forgive me, Lord, the sin you see. I've met the Pharisee in me. He's there as I start out my week, advising me that meek is weak. He's up before me every day to figure out a better way than following God submissively. I've met the Pharisee in me."

"He tells me, 'Oh, you know enough. Just keep on with the same old stuff. You've books galore and tapes to lend, you've Christian magazines to send. No need to learn theology.' I've met the Pharisee in me. I know the Lord rebukes my guest in scathing words at God's behest. He tells me, 'Heed his words of strife and realize he's trapped your life. He hates to share my heart, you see, with him the Pharisee in me.'"

"And why should he, the God of grace, be forced to live here face to face, with him who hung him up to die against an angry, anguish sky. Who pierced his feet and crowned his head, who laughed and left him very dead. Forgive me, Lord, I beg of thee, deal with the Pharisee in me."

Because whether we have a bad self-concept or not, all of us at some point will struggle with pride, with the Pharisee in me. Instead of course, we need to look at Jesus, who was never proud, who never boasted, who was always humble.

Bragging is a verbalizing of an inner arrogance. Baseless chatter designed to make another look inferior. Empty trucks make the most noise. If you're empty at the center, if you're unbalanced at the center, you'll be making a lot of noise. Paul says, "Like a clanging gong." Just a lot of noise coming out of your mouth.

Always remember that people do not create your attitude, they reveal it. As people bump up against you, what is inside you will spill out. May it be a sweet, humble, gentle spirit like his. Love doesn't boast, it isn't proud. The word is windbag, vaunting itself, puffing itself up in God's face, full of its own importance.

Now think of children, that's our picture, right? Think of the little ones' language: I, me, my, and mine. In fact, even when they're very tiny and they begin to realize their being