Sunday message · What Love Does series
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Message Summary
Opening an eight-week series, What Love Does, Pastor Phillip Santillan notes that 1 Corinthians 13 has probably been read over more unity candles than any other chapter, yet Paul wrote it to a church coming apart. After calling love patient and kind, Paul lists eight things love refuses to do, and one Bible scholar observes that the opposite of each describes the Corinthians. The first is in 13:4: love does not envy. Phil asks why someone else’s good news can feel like bad news.
Phil admits that when a fellow church planter at a monthly pastors’ lunch described a bigger-than-expected launch, he would nod along, but “even though my outward appearance was celebrating, something inside my chest was like doing math.” At home he scrolled that church’s social media to count the crowd. In a 2009 study in Japan, imagining a similar classmate doing better lit up the brain area that responds to physical pain, so envy literally hurts.
Phil turns to 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul calls the Corinthians, who lacked no spiritual gift, babies in Christ because of envy and strife. The Greek word, zelos, is the same as in 13:4, and like the English word jealous it can be good or bad. Paul even uses it to urge believers to desire the greater gifts, so what matters is direction, not strength. Healthy desire celebrates another’s blessing and asks God for the same; envy asks, “God, why did you do that for them and not me?”
In Numbers 11, when two leaders who missed the gathering began to prophesy, Joshua wanted them stopped, but Moses, instead of feeling robbed, wished all the Lord’s people were prophets. In Corinth, believers lined up behind Paul or Apollos, but the two were never rivals: one planted, one watered, and only God gives the growth. “Envy only works if two people are competing against each other.” Envy, Phil explains, assumes there is not enough good to go around, but Paul says everything is theirs, and those who belong to Christ lose nothing when God blesses someone else.
Envy hides in ordinary places, like who gets thanked from up front, or a smile to a co-worker’s face and an eye roll as they walk away. The most important place is the cross: Matthew says even Pilate could see the religious leaders handed Jesus over out of envy. Yet Jesus, who was God, gave his life for envious people, and since God did not spare his own Son, he is not holding out when he blesses someone else.
What changed Phil was not trying harder but realizing the other planters were never his competition: God was the one making things grow. Now, when tempted to count chairs, he prays for that church by name. “I want Clarity to be the kind of church where someone’s good news makes the whole room glad.” His homework: think of one person whose good news is hard to celebrate, thank God for a specific gift in their life, then tell them. Belonging to Christ, he reminds listeners, means another person’s blessing never makes their own smaller.
More in this series
More messages in this series are coming soon. Until then, browse all the sermons.