WHEN PAUL DESCRIBES what love doesn’t do, when he gives examples of the way a loving person shouldn’t behave, he’s probably trying to prod the Corinthians into recognizing and repenting of their own unloving behavior. In the first half of First Corinthians 13:5, for example, he teaches that love doesn’t behave rudely or in ways that even people outside the church would consider inappropriate. As we’ve seen, he may be referring to situations addressed elsewhere in the letter: the man having an incestuous affair, or the lawsuits the Corinthians were bringing against each other.

In the second half of verse 5, then, Paul adds that love is “not self-seeking” (vs. 5, NIV), which could be translated literally as “love doesn’t seek its own things.” The verb “to seek” is a common one in the New Testament, and suggests an active rather than a more passive kind of seeking. And it can have a positive or negative sense, depending on what one is seeking.

It’s the verb Matthew uses, for example, to translate Jesus’ instruction to seek God’s kingdom (Matt 6:33). That’s a good kind of seeking. But he also uses it twice in chapter 2 of his gospel to describe Herod and his minions seeking the Christ-child in order to kill him. Thus, when Paul says that love doesn’t seek its own things, he’s calling the Corinthians to recognize how their own actively self-centered attitudes and behavior are in direct opposition to their calling as believers to love others. As Eugene Peterson has put Paul’s words in colloquial English, love “isn’t always me first.”

What kind of behavior did Paul have in mind? Perhaps the best example in the letter is one we’ve briefly mentioned before: the situation in which people were eating meat sacrificed to idols.

ONE DAY, I was in my local Home Depot, renting a truck for some building project I was doing; I forget now what it was. The woman behind the counter asked to see my driver’s license, but I had somehow mistakenly left my wallet in the car. I told her I’d be right back, but she reached out a hand to stop me. “That’s okay,” she said. “Never mind. I know who you are. I trust you.” We were, apparently, members of the same church, and she had seen me in the pulpit numerous times.

Whether I like it or not, I am a public person. Many people know who I am, even if I don’t know who they are. I have had complete strangers come up to me in a parking lot just to say hi. And don’t get me wrong. It’s never felt intrusive, and indeed, as the Home Depot story illustrates, it can work to my benefit.

But it’s had an interesting side effect. These interactions have happened enough that when I’m out, I can’t assume that I have the same cloak of anonymity that most people do. As pastors understand full well, even if no one is actually watching what I do, part of me feels like they are. It may sound strange to some of you reading this, but I have to think twice before buying the occasional bottle of wine. What if someone from the church, someone struggling to overcome alcoholism, sees me buying wine? I have every right to do so, but how might that behavior affect someone else?

THIS IS SIMILAR to the situation that Paul addresses in First Corinthians 8. Corinth was the site of numerous pagan temples where animal sacrifices were held to the gods and goddesses. After the animals had served their purpose, the meat could be purchased in a local market. Some of the believers in Corinth saw no problem with buying and eating such meat, believing that idols were nothing and that there is one and only one true God. Theologically, Paul agreed that they had a right to eat such food.

He also warned, however, that not everyone had a clear conscience on the matter. Imagine, for example, that you were raised to believe that drinking alcohol was a horrible sin, and still felt that way even though you knew intellectually that you had nothing to fear. Someone invites you to dinner, and without realizing that it might be a problem, pours you a glass of Chardonnay. What do you do? Politely refuse? Or violate your conscience and drink?

More importantly: what should the host do? They have every right to enjoy a bit of Chardonnay themselves, but should they refrain for the sake of their guest? Paul seems to think so. Listen to what he says about eating food that was previously sacrificed to idols:

Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. … Be careful…that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall. (1 Cor 8:7, 9-13)

Paul would rather forgo his right to a good steak dinner and even become a vegetarian if that’s what it would take to avoid causing someone else to stumble spiritually. To him, that’s the loving thing to do.

That’s a countercultural idea in a society that prizes individual rights. It’s one thing to champion human rights and social justice, but it’s another to leverage what legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon called “rights talk” to insist that we should be allowed to do anything we want that isn’t prohibited by law. “It’s a free country,” we might say, which often means, “What I do, I do for my own reasons, and it’s none of your business.”

But as followers of Christ, we are called to consider the ways in which we may need to limit our freedom for the sake of love.

YOU DON’T HAVE to a public person for your behavior in public to matter. If people know that you’re a Christian, then how you live and what you do is a representation of Christ. There are many things that you have the right to do in good conscience. But the Christian life, especially life in community, is less about rights and more about love. Indeed, to think and to live that way is to follow the example of Christ, as we’ll see next.