The Greek phrase Paul reaches for here is ou zētei ta heautēs — literally, does not seek the things of itself. The verb zēteō is the ordinary word for seeking, looking for, going after — what a man does when he wants something. The object is ta heautēs — the things that belong to itself. Love does not go hunting for its own.
Other translations push the phrase one direction or another. The NIV says is not self-seeking. The ESV says does not insist on its own way. The NLT says does not demand its own way. They are all reaching for the same heart: love does not orient its life around itself. It does not arrange its days to maximize its own comfort, advance its own interests, secure its own advantage. The Christian who has been deflated of arrogance and washed of unbecoming conduct still has to be addressed at this deeper level — the silent orientation of the whole life. The previous attributes addressed what the believer was doing. This one addresses what the believer was for.
What was happening in Corinth
The Corinthians had built a Christianity that was for them.
The factions of the first four chapters — I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephas — were factions of self. Each believer was attaching himself to the teacher he had decided would give him the most prestige. The lawsuits in chapter 6 were exercises in self-seeking — believers dragging each other into pagan courts to get what they wanted. The meat-for-idols dispute in chapters 8 through 10 was self-seeking on both ends: the strong wanted their freedom to eat what they pleased; the weak wanted their consciences accommodated by everyone around them. The Lord’s Supper had become, as we saw, the wealthy seeking their own fill while the poor went hungry. And the gifts had become platforms for the self-display of the gifted.
In the middle of all of this, Paul made the standard plain in a sentence the Corinthians could not have missed:
Let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor.
1 Corinthians 10:24 (NASB)
That is the verse the Corinthians had been ignoring. Paul wrote it in the meat-for-idols context, but the principle was for everything they had been doing wrong. Let no one seek his own good. It is not that the believer is forbidden any concern for himself; it is that the believer’s first reach must be for his neighbor. And the Corinthians had been reaching, every time, for themselves.
A few sentences later Paul offered his own life as the example:
…just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit but the profit of the many, so that they may be saved.
1 Corinthians 10:33 (NASB)
Not seeking my own profit but the profit of the many. Paul was the apostle. He had the most to claim, the most to defend, the most to make of his own position. And what he did with his life was hand it away in the direction of the people he was trying to bring to Christ. The Corinthians had the same Lord, and they were behaving as if the Christian life had been arranged for their own benefit.
The disorder showed itself in the worship service most sharply, because the worship service is where the inward orientation of the believer becomes most visible. Paul named the principle for the gifts in chapter 12:
But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
1 Corinthians 12:7 (NASB)
For the common good. That is what the gifts were for. Not for the self-promotion of the receiver. Not for the spiritual advancement of the gifted in the eyes of the congregation. For the common good. And the Corinthian gift-holder was treating his gift as his own property, his own credential, his own platform. He had taken a gift given for the body and pulled it sideways toward himself. He was seeking his own with the very gift God had given him to seek his brother’s.
Now you can hear what Paul is saying in 13:5. Love does not seek its own. You have been seeking your own teacher, your own court verdict, your own freedom, your own fill at the Lord’s table, your own platform in worship. The love I am writing about would seek what is mine only after, and only inside, the seeking of what is yours. The Christianity you have been practicing has been a Christianity built around yourself. That is not what I am calling you to.
The God who emptied Himself
Christ is the inverse of seeking-its-own taken all the way to its furthest point. The Son of God, who had every legitimate claim to every honor in the universe, walked through this world with a settled orientation away from Himself and toward the people He had come to save.
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)
Did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. That is the heart of not-seeking-its-own as a doctrine of the divine life. Christ had the right to insist on every privilege of His own. He laid the insistence down. He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant. He moved through this world looking, every moment, for the good of the people the Father had given Him.
The Gospels are full of small examples of this. He withdrew from a crowd that wanted to make Him king because crowning was the world’s idea of what He needed and not the Father’s (John 6:15). He let Himself be interrupted by a woman with an issue of blood on the way to a more important errand for a synagogue ruler, and gave her His full attention before continuing on (Mark 5:24–34). He let children be brought to Him when His disciples were trying to protect His schedule, and laid hands on them and blessed them (Mark 10:13–16). He bent down on the night He was betrayed and washed the feet of twelve men, one of whom was about to sell Him, and one of whom was about to deny Him three times. He went to a cross He could have refused.
In every one of those moments, He could have sought His own. He could have been crowned. He could have kept walking past the bleeding woman. He could have brushed past the children. He could have refused the towel. He could have called twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53). He did none of it. He sought, every time, the good of the people in front of Him, even when the cost was paid out of His own life.
That is the orientation the believer is being called into. Not seeking your own profit but the profit of the many. Not because the believer is now invisible to himself. Not because his own needs no longer matter. Not because Christianity is a long campaign of self-loathing. But because the love God has poured out into his heart through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5) now flows the same direction the love of Christ flowed — outward, toward the neighbor, at whatever cost. The Christian who has tasted that kind of love cannot, for long, organize his life around himself, because the love itself is reorienting him.
From the inflation, the orientation
The last chapter named unbecoming conduct as what the inflated man does when his arrogance pushes through into behavior. This chapter takes the same picture one layer deeper. The inflation is not just an inward swelling, and not just the bad conduct it produces. It is an entire orientation — a settled facing of the life toward the self.
A man who is oriented toward himself does not have to consciously seek his own. He seeks his own by default. Every decision he makes runs through the same filter — what is in this for me? — and the filter is so automatic that he no longer notices it. He decides what church to attend by what he gets out of the sermon. He decides which friends to keep by what they cost him versus what they give him. He decides how to spend his money, his time, his energy, by some quiet calculation of return. He has been doing this all his life, and he has rarely been aware of it, because the self-orientation is the temperature of the room he has always lived in.
Paul is telling that man — and us — that the Christian life requires a reorientation. The room has to be set on a different axis. The default has to be changed. The believer is not asked to think less of himself; he is asked to think of himself less. The two are different. The first produces a hollow man. The second produces a Christian who has found, by experience, that the joy of a life poured out for others is the joy his self-oriented life had been promising and could never deliver.
What it looks like
Freedom from seeking its own looks like a high-school student who has been studying for a calculus test and whose friend, the day before the test, texts her in a panic because he is hopelessly behind. She closes her own notes and walks him through three hours of the material, even though it costs her the grade she was hoping for. The grade was for her. The walking-through was for him. She has just learned what love does not seek its own looks like in a chapter she does not yet recognize she has been living.
It looks like a teenage boy on the basketball team who, in a tied game with seconds left, has the open shot and instead passes to the teammate with the better angle, because the goal is the win, not the highlight. He does not see his name in the headline. He sees his team win.
It looks like a young man in a dating relationship who, when the question of where to go to dinner comes up week after week, defaults to the place she wants more often than the place he wants — and who, when the question of how the relationship is going comes up, listens to her answer before giving his own. The seeking-his-own would have been the default. The not-seeking-his-own is the discipline he is learning, and the relationship is being built on it.
It looks like a teenage girl who, at a youth-group service event, takes the harder job — the one nobody else wanted, the one that means working in the back instead of being seen in the front — and does it well, and does not mention to anyone afterward that she did it.
It looks like a young woman who chooses to spend her Friday evening at the home of a friend whose mother has just died, sitting with her, instead of going to the party she had been looking forward to all week. The party will happen again. The friend’s mother will only die once, and the friend will only need her in this way one time.
It looks like a teenager who notices that his younger sibling has been struggling with something — a class, a friendship, a small fear — and who, without being asked, spends time helping. The cost is his time. The return is invisible. The seeking-not-his-own is in the noticing without needing to be asked.
It looks like a high-school student in a small group who, when the discussion question comes around, holds her answer back to make room for the quieter girl across the room to be the one who speaks. The quieter girl would not have spoken if the louder one had gone first. The not-seeking-her-own was the choosing of silence so that someone else could be heard.
It looks like a believer who has been wronged by a brother in the congregation and who, instead of seeking the satisfaction of being publicly proven right, goes privately to the brother and works the matter out before any other believer knows it ever happened. The vindication would have been for him. The reconciliation is for the body of Christ.
It looks like Christ. The One who, on the night before His crucifixion, washed the feet of the men who would scatter from Him within hours. The One who, on the cross, looked at the soldiers gambling for His clothes and prayed Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). The One whose entire life was a long campaign of seeking the good of those who had given Him nothing back, who would never be able to give Him anything back, and whose only claim on Him was that He had chosen to love them before the world began.
The world’s self-seeking, and ours
The world has built much of its philosophy on self-seeking and given it admirable names. Self-fulfillment. Self-actualization. Self-care. Living your truth. Following your dreams. The cultural vocabulary of the last fifty years has been a long campaign to convince the human heart that its first and highest calling is itself. The therapist sometimes says so. The motivational speaker says so. The advertising says so. The friends say so. The platform celebrates the man who has built a life entirely around what he wants and tells him he is brave.
The Christian is called into a different vocabulary. The believer’s first calling is the love of God and the love of his neighbor — the two great commandments on which all the Law and the Prophets hang (Matthew 22:37–40). His life is oriented around those two loves, and any third commandment that interferes with them is not a commandment from God. The young Christian who has been catechized by the surrounding culture into self-seeking has been catechized into a faith his Bible does not teach. The reorientation is going to take time, and the surrounding voices are going to keep telling him to stop. He will need to keep going.
The way out of self-seeking is not to deny that you have needs, and not to pretend that your own interests do not matter. The way out is to put them in their proper place. In Christ, your needs are met. Your future is secured. Your worth is established. Your name is written in the Lamb’s book of life. The God of the universe is on your side, knows you by name, and has gone before you in every direction. Once that is true of you — and the gospel makes it true of you the moment you obey it — the obsession with self that has been driving your decisions can finally relax its grip. The fight to advance yourself can give way to the freer thing of advancing others, because there is no longer anything in your standing with God that depends on the advancing of you.
A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ
If you have not yet obeyed the gospel, you are being asked to do something this chapter has been describing the whole way through. You are being asked to stop seeking your own.
The Christian life begins with the laying down of the self that has been running your life so far. Whoever wishes to come after Me must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me, Jesus said (Luke 9:23, NASB). Deny himself. The self-seeking life is the one you have been living. The Christian life begins when you say, in plain words to the Lord who has been waiting for you, I am no longer going to live for myself. I am going to live for the One who loved me and gave Himself for me.
The good news is that the laying down of the self-seeking life is not the loss most people fear it will be. The self-seeking life had been promising you a happiness it cannot deliver. The trade is your shrinking life for the larger life Christ has waiting. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it, He said (Luke 9:24, NASB). The math is upside down by the world’s reckoning and right side up by the kingdom’s. The man who has spent his life chasing himself ends with nothing. The man who has laid his life down for Christ ends with everything Christ has.
Hear the gospel — that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Believe it. Repent of the long campaign of seeking your own. Confess Him as Lord. Be baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). Then begin to live the reoriented life He has put in you, and you will discover that what you had been seeking your whole life was waiting for you on the other side of the very door you had been afraid to walk through.
Where this leaves us
Patience, kindness, freedom from envy, freedom from bragging, freedom from arrogance, freedom from unbecoming conduct, and now freedom from seeking its own — that list of the love Paul is describing now stands together, and the believer who has walked through them honestly has had the inside of his life inverted. He is no longer reacting at the surface, no longer cold, no longer envying, no longer inflating, no longer puffed up, no longer crude, and no longer organized around himself. The orientation of the life has been turned outward, toward God and toward the neighbor, and the orientation is the thing every other attribute has been pressing into.
The next attribute is what happens at the moment the reoriented life is crossed. The believer who has stopped seeking his own is still a man with desires, still a man with preferences, still a man whose plans can be interrupted. What happens when someone — a brother, a parent, a friend, a stranger in traffic — gets in the way? The natural reaction is to flare. The provocation comes, the temper rises, the sharp word forms. Paul names what love does in that moment, and the answer is: nothing. Love is not provoked. That is the next chapter.
That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Watch your decisions this week — the small ones and the large ones. Notice the filter that has been running automatically — what is in this for me? Notice it, name it, refuse it once, and reach instead for the question Paul put to the Corinthians at the head of his correction of their self-seeking — what is the good of my neighbor here? The asking, repeated until it becomes the air you breathe, is the reorientation God is patient enough to do in the people who let Him do it.
THINK
Pick one decision this week that you would normally make automatically, based on what serves you best. The restaurant you would pick for dinner. The seat you would take in the car. The friend whose call you would answer first. The errand you would do for yourself before doing the one your spouse or parent asked you for. Now decide it the other way — for the good of someone else, deliberately, without telling them you did. And notice what happens in you. The first time you do it, the self that has been running your decisions will object. The second time, it will object less. By the tenth time, you will be living a small distance further out of the room you have been living in your whole life, and into the room the Lord who emptied Himself has been calling you to all along.