The Greek word Paul reaches for is perpereuetai. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The word almost sounds like what it describes — per-per-eu-e-tai — a stuttering, on-and-on quality, the sound of someone whose conversation keeps coming back to himself. The Greek noun behind it, perperos, named the kind of man classical writers had been making fun of for centuries: the vain blusterer, the boastful soldier, the man who could not stop telling you what he had done.
Paul takes that word and turns it on the church. Love does not perpereuetai. Love does not run its mouth in the direction of itself. Love does not work the conversation back around to its own gifts, its own work, its own importance. Love does not need an audience for what it has done, and it does not need a microphone for what it knows.
The placement in Paul’s list is deliberate. He has just told the Corinthians that love does not envy — does not look sideways at the brother who has more. Now he turns and tells the other half of the same room that love does not brag — does not look down at the brother who has less. The envious man is the gift-less believer who resents the gifted one. The braggart is the gifted believer who runs his gift like a trophy in front of the gift-less one. Both have forgotten the same thing. Both are about to be told what it is.
What was happening in Corinth
The Corinthians were boasters. Paul knew it before he was three chapters into the letter.
The first thing he confronted was the way they were lining up behind their favorite teachers as if those teachers were prize horses. I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. I am of Cephas. I am of Christ. The names were being collected and worn like banners. Behind each banner was a believer who thought himself a little better for following the teacher he had attached to. Paul’s verdict came fast:
…so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1:29–31 (NASB)
By His doing you are in Christ Jesus. That is the line that drops the floor out from under every Corinthian boast. They were not in Christ Jesus by their own cleverness. They had not chosen Paul or Apollos or Cephas because they had the spiritual taste to recognize who was best. They were in Christ Jesus because God had done it. The teacher they were following was a servant God had used to bring the message to them. To boast about the teacher was to boast about a tool God had handled.
Then a few chapters later Paul tightens the same screw:
For who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?
1 Corinthians 4:7 (NASB)
That is the question that ends bragging in the believer who is willing to sit with it. What do you have that you did not receive? The intelligence you boast about — you did not earn it; you were born with it. The opportunity you boast about — you did not create it; it was opened to you. The spiritual insight you boast about — you did not generate it; the Word taught it to you. The gift you boast about exercising — the Spirit handed it out, sovereignly, to whomever He chose (1 Corinthians 12:11). There is nothing in your hand that was not first placed there by Someone Else. To brag about any of it is to act as if it appeared by your own doing. It did not.
That same disease was loose in chapter 12. The believer with the showier gift was not just envied; he was also bragging. The gift had become the platform for the man. The tongue-speaker spoke louder, longer, more frequently than was useful. The prophet made sure the congregation knew who had received the word. The healer kept careful private records. By the time Paul gets to chapter 14, he is laying down rules to bring order to a worship service in which everyone wanted to be heard and no one wanted to defer. The same gift God had given to build up the body had become a microphone in the hand of the receiver. What do you have that you did not receive? hit the Corinthian braggart squarely.
Now you can hear what Paul is saying in 13:4. Love does not brag. You have been collecting your teachers like badges. You have been holding your gifts up like trophies. You have been running your spiritual life as a performance, and the performance has been to your own credit. Whatever else you have learned, you have not learned that everything you have is borrowed. The love you claim to have is not the love I am writing about.
The God who does not boast
The God of Scripture talks about Himself constantly. He names His own attributes aloud. I am the LORD. I am the LORD your God. I am holy. I am gracious and compassionate. Apart from Me there is no Savior. If the standard for bragging were “talks about Himself a lot,” God would fail it on every page.
But the standard for bragging is not how much you talk about yourself. The standard is whether what you say is true and whether the saying inflates beyond what is real. A man brags when he claims more than he is. He invents. He exaggerates. He gestures toward credit he does not own. God does none of those things, because God is what He says He is. The most God could ever say about Himself would still be an understatement. When the LORD declares His own glory, He is not bragging; He is being accurate. There is nothing larger than Himself to compare Himself to. The truth about God can only be spoken by Him, and when He speaks it, the universe is simply hearing what is.
That distinction matters because the One in whom there is nothing to inflate is also the One who modeled, in His coming, the deepest humility this world has ever seen:
Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5–8 (NASB)
Read it slowly. The One who could have boasted of everything boasted of nothing. He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant. He came into a corner of a backwater province under a Roman occupation. He grew up the son of a carpenter. He gathered fishermen rather than scholars. When He worked miracles, He often told the people He had healed to keep quiet. When demons announced who He was, He silenced them. When the crowds wanted to make Him king after the bread on the hillside, He withdrew.
Christ did not need a platform. He had the universe. He chose, instead, to walk through this world without doing what bragging does — without inflating, without claiming credit He had not earned, without using the conversation to push glory back toward Himself. He spoke of the Father constantly:
He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who is seeking the glory of the One who sent Him, He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.
John 7:18 (NASB)
That sentence is, among other things, one of the most concentrated diagnoses of bragging Scripture contains. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory. The braggart is not just running his mouth. He is hunting glory. He is taking what should go to God and pulling it sideways toward himself.
Paul learned the same lesson from the same source. By the time he wrote to the Galatians, he had emptied himself of every Pharisee credential he had once kept like a trophy, and he summed up where the believer’s only legitimate boast lives:
But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
Galatians 6:14 (NASB)
That is the only boast Christianity has ever sanctioned. The boast that says, I am nothing; Christ is everything; He went to a cross to make me His; that is the entire story. The believer who has boasted of the cross has nothing left to boast of in himself. The believer who is still boasting of himself has not yet been crucified to the world.
Patience, kindness, freedom from envy — and now, silence about self
The first four attributes in Paul’s list form a sequence that is not accidental.
Patience absorbs the wrong I have suffered. Kindness gives the good my brother did not earn from me. Freedom from envy rejoices when my brother is given what I was not. And freedom from bragging keeps quiet about what I myself have been given.
The first three deal with what is in my heart toward my brother. The fourth deals with what comes out of my mouth about myself. They belong together because they fail together. The braggart is almost never patient with the brother who interrupts his story. He is almost never kind to the brother whose accomplishments threaten to shrink his own. He is almost always envious of the man whose story he cannot match. The braggart’s vices travel as a pack. Take down one, and you start to take down the rest.
That is why Paul puts does not brag here, right after does not envy and right before is not arrogant. He is walking the believer through the cluster. The envious heart is one symptom. The bragging mouth is another. The arrogant self-estimation underneath both is what we will turn to next. But for now, the believer is being asked to look at his own talk and answer one question. Where in my conversation is the work being done to make me look bigger than I am? If the answer is nowhere, the believer is closer to the love of 1 Corinthians 13 than he knew. If the answer is almost everywhere, he has more company than he knew, and he has work to do.
What it looks like
Freedom from bragging looks like a high-school student who got into the college she had been working toward for two years, and who does not bring it up unless someone asks, and who, when they ask, answers in one sentence and turns the conversation back to them.
It looks like a high-school athlete who scored the winning point in a game and, when his classmates congratulate him in the hallway on Monday, names two teammates by name and shifts the credit before the conversation can rest on him.
It looks like a student who has read more of his Bible than anyone in the small group, and who, in discussion, holds back the verse he could quote so that another member can be the one to find it, because the goal of the small group is the growing of the others, not the showing off of him.
It looks like a teenage boy on a first date who, instead of running through the highlight reel he has prepared about himself, asks the girl across the table what her week was like and listens to the answer.
It looks like a teenage girl who, instead of carefully curating the version of her life she posts online, posts less, and lets the friends who actually know her see the ordinary days too.
It looks like a student working on a group project whose ideas actually saved the assignment, and who lets the teacher’s praise land on the whole group on Monday without jumping in to say, actually, that was my idea.
It looks like a teenager who spent his entire Saturday mowing the lawn, cleaning his room, and doing extra chores, and who, when his parents get home, does not instantly run through the inventory of everything he did to get a pat on the back. He did the work for the Lord, who already saw it, and that is enough.
It looks like a believer who, when his prayer for a friend is answered, does not tell the friend I have been praying. He thanks God and keeps walking.
It looks like a Sunday school teacher who has poured weeks of preparation into a lesson and who, when the lesson lands and a student is moved, does not collect credit for the moving. He moves on to next week.
It looks like Christ. The One who, when the crowd on the hillside was ready to crown Him King after the bread had been multiplied, withdrew to the mountain alone (John 6:15). The One who, after raising a girl from the dead, told her parents to tell no one (Mark 5:43). The One who, after healing a leper, said see that you say nothing to anyone (Mark 1:44). The One who did the works the world has called greatest and lived as if those works were not for the glory of His own name but for the glory of His Father’s. His pattern was clear: conversation after conversation worked around to the One who sent Him, and the credit for what was done in His ministry kept on returning to the Father who had sent it.
The world’s bragging, and ours
The world has always rewarded the braggart. It promotes him at work. It elects him to office. It hands him the camera. The man who can present himself with the most polish, the most confidence, the most carefully edited resume of his own accomplishments, has always done well in this world, and he is doing well at this moment on corporate stages and social media platforms.
What is new in this generation is that everyone now has a platform. The phone in the hand of every teenager is, among other things, a stage. The photograph posted is a small performance. The caption is a small advertisement. The day-by-day record of the better self is a long, slow brag with a beautifying filter on top. Most of the people doing it do not think of it as bragging. The water is the temperature of the room. But Paul’s question still cuts. Where, in what you have been showing the world, is the work being done to make you look bigger than you are? If the answer is honest, it is convicting.
The Christian is not called to delete every account, though for some Christians that may be the right call. The Christian is called to read his own posts with the same question Paul put to the Corinthians. What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? The smile in the photograph — God gave you the face you wear. The trip — God gave you the legs that walked it and the money that paid for it. The friend in the picture — God gave you that friendship. The achievement you are subtly announcing — God gave you the gifts you exercised and the door that opened in front of you. None of it is yours, in the sense the bragger wants it to be his. All of it is given. Bragging about any of it is, in the strictest sense, a lie about who handed it to you.
The way out is not silence; God did not give us mouths to keep them shut. The way out is to redirect. To speak about the Father instead of the self. To name the kindness that has been shown to you rather than the cleverness with which you received it. To put the camera on someone else more often than on yourself. To be, in the conversations you have, the person who leaves the room having said more about other people than about himself, and who walks home wondering whether anyone there will even remember he was present. That kind of Christian is being formed into the image of the One who walked through this world without needing a stage.
A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ
The bragging that has cost you the most is probably not the kind you can see in others. It is the kind you can hear in yourself, in the small inflations and small embellishments you make to keep your account of yourself looking better than it is.
You may have been hearing this chapter and thinking of someone you know who needs it. Most of us, when we read about bragging, picture someone else. That is part of what bragging does — it convinces the braggart that he is the realistic one in the room and the others are the showoffs. The Word is asking you to put the question on yourself instead. Where in your own conversation is the work being done to make you look bigger than you are? The honest answer is humbling, and the humbling is meant to lead you somewhere.
It is meant to lead you to the only place where the account of who you are has finally been told truthfully. At the cross of Christ, the inflated self meets the One who knew it without flattery. There is no version of you better than the version He died for, and the version He died for was the version that included every brag you ever made about yourself in the hope of being more than you were. He went to that cross knowing all of it. The exchange the gospel offers is the exchange of your dishonest record for His honest one — the trade of the resume you have been polishing for the righteousness He has already lived.
The gospel is that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Hear it. Believe it. Repent of the life you have been building for your own glory. Confess Him as Lord. Be baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). Then look at the credit you have been hoarding and let it go. There is no credit left to keep, because everything you are will be by His doing, and the only boast you will have left will be the boast Paul kept: the cross.
Where this leaves us
Patience, kindness, freedom from envy, and freedom from bragging now stand together at the front of Paul’s list. Patience absorbs. Kindness gives. Freedom from envy rejoices in the good of another. Freedom from bragging keeps quiet about what is mine. The believer who has these four has stopped using his relationships, his gifts, his accomplishments, and his mouth as instruments of self-promotion. He has begun to use them for what God gave them to be — instruments of love.
But Paul is not done. The bragging of the mouth is fed by something inward, something that does not need a microphone to do its work. The next attribute names it directly. Love is not arrogant. If bragging is the outward inflation that runs out the mouth, arrogance is the inward swelling that produces it. Some braggarts have learned to keep the inflation off the tongue and have convinced themselves they have grown — when, in fact, they have only become quieter about the same inward sin. The next chapter asks the believer to look further in, past the mouth, into the heart that pushes against the back of his ribs and says I am more than this brother beside me. That is the next thing love will not do.
That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Walk through this week. Listen to yourself. Notice where the conversation drifts toward your own credit, and let it drift somewhere else. Notice where the photograph you are about to post is going to do bragging work, and post something less, or nothing at all. Notice where you are tempted to say I have been praying for you, and just keep praying. The believer who can do that is being made into the image of the One whose greatest works were done with His Father’s name on them and His own kept quietly out of view.
THINK
Take an honest inventory of the last conversation you had with someone who knows you well. Where in that conversation was the work being done to make you look bigger than you are? Maybe it was a story you steered yourself into. Maybe it was an accomplishment you mentioned that did not need mentioning. Maybe it was the comparison you made that was meant, just a little, to put you ahead of someone else. Now sit with this question: What would you have lost if you had said it differently? The answer is almost always nothing. The credit you were collecting was credit that did not really exist. The brother you were quietly outranking would not have noticed you had not. And the next conversation you have will be there in front of you in a day or two, with all the same temptations and a fresh chance to talk like a Christian instead of a Corinthian.