1 The Greatest of These Is Love, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (August 10, 2014) If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. PRAY We are working our way through 1 Corinthians and today we come to a very famous part of the book; undoubtedly the most famous part of 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, the love chapter. And whenever we read this chapter we feel and overwhelming desire to say, Sigh. That s so sweet, so sentimental. While the Bible is for the most part mocked and derided in so much of our society, still today you can go to weddings where people don t believe in Christianity at all yet they want the love chapter read during the service. It s not really thought of as being scripture anymore but instead like a sonnet. Shakespeare had his Shall I compare thee to a summer s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate, and Paul had his love chapter. Now, of course, there is strong sentiment to be found in 1 Corinthians 13, powerful emotions rightly flow from understanding Paul s teaching here, but 1 Corinthians 13 is not sentimental. It is not a sonnet. Rather, Paul is in fact addressing a huge problem in the church at Corinth and he s correcting them. 1 Corinthians 13 is not a sonnet; it s a smackdown. It s an integral part of Paul s three-chapter long instruction on spiritual gifts. If you ve been coming to Grace for the last month or so you know we ve been studying what Paul has to say about spiritual gifts (and we ve defined spiritual gifts as God-given, Holy Spirit-empowered abilities, talents, and powers that God gives to individual Christians in the church). And it s only if we read this chapter against that backdrop that we will really understand what Paul can teach us about love. We ll look at three things Paul has to say about love.
2 First, Paul teaches that nothing matters without love. Second, we ll see why nothing matters without love. Third, we ll see how we can live as if nothing matters without love. First, Paul says that nothing matters without love. Re-read verses 1-3: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. I think, and most commentators agree, that Paul in these verses is deliberately exaggerating here to make a point. Paul tries to draw the picture of someone who is spiritually gifted to the highest possible degree. What if someone was so gifted that they could speak every human language? What if this person was so intelligent, so wise, that they know and understand everything? There are no secrets from this person; there is nothing too complex for this person to figure out (that s verse 2). And what if that person was so gifted that they could also speak all the angelic languages? By way of clarification, Paul is not saying that people actually do speak in angelic languages. Some people have taken verse one and run with it and said that the modern experience of speaking in tongues is actually angelic speech, and they point to verse one to support their view. That s not what Paul s saying. But just suppose someone was that gifted. Paul says those gifts, if they aren t empowered by and infused with and motivated by love, don t matter at all. In the church in Corinth, the people were very gifted not as gifted as what Paul described in these three verses, but still full of Spirit-inspired gifts. They did speak in tongues, they did prophesy, they did heal. But Paul warns them that you can have all the gifts and talents in the world in abundance, but if you don t have love none of it matters. Translate this to the modern day. Today what we hear from the world (especially if you re younger and entering the work force) is I don t care what you are or what you do in your private life. All that matters is do you have the talent, the drive, the gift set to hack it do you have what it takes? So what you do in your private life, what you re like in your heart, what motivates you, that s your concern. But when you re trying to get a job, or get into school, or make the team or the sorority or whatever, what counts is can you perform? Because all that matters are your gifts and talents. Paul says just the opposite. He says, I don t care what gifts you have or what talents you have. If you don t have the heart, the love, it s all worthless. It doesn t count for anything. Now you might say, What about verse 3? If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. You might say, Now, I can understand someone using their talents and gifts selfishly and God saying it doesn t matter, but here you have someone acting in a completely self-less way. You can t get
3 any more selfless than giving all your money away and dying the death of a martyr going to your death proclaiming the Christian faith. How can love not be bound up in it? Well, just think about it for a minute we ve all had people in our lives who used their personal sacrifice to get what they wanted from other people. Maybe it was someone close to you who worked really hard and sacrificed to make sure you had certain things, but if you ever contradicted them they d blow up and say something like, How dare you? After all the things I do for you, I just ask you to do this one little thing and you refuse me. Or, they d put a guilt trip on you. They say, I just thought after all the things I ve done for you, you d think of me and do this one thing for me. But I guess you just don t care about me. A lot of people have gotten what amounts to power over other people by their willingness to sacrifice and go without, but that s not love. Now, Paul s teaching is totally contrary to the wisdom of the world. Why would Paul say nothing counts without love? Second, why nothing counts without love. Paul gives us two reasons. First, only love never fails. Read verses 8-10: 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. Paul says all these other gifts will end. Right now, we are in what theologians call the church age. It s the period of time between the first coming of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and the second coming of Christ (which we don t know when will happen). After the second coming of Christ, we will enter into the eternal age. We ll be in heaven, the new heavens and the new earth, and there all the spiritual gifts will cease. We won t need them there. We won t need to be able to speak in other languages in heaven because we re all going to sing a new song there, the Bible says. Understanding will be perfect, knowledge will be perfect, and all the imperfect manifestations of those things the gifts will pass away. We won t need other Christians to give us prophetic instruction when we are in the arms of the Father. You won t need people to tell you about God or try to instruct you in his ways because you ll be right there with him, in his arms. You know who will be out of a job in heaven? Me but I ll be happily unemployed. The only thing that will matter in heaven is love, because only the things motivated by love will make it there. C.S. Lewis at one point says, Everything that is not eternal is eternally out of date. Friends, don t you see? Your talents, your abilities, your good looks and athleticism, even your spiritual gifts those are good things, good gifts from God. We are to use them. But oh my goodness apart from love they are not eternal, because only when we use our gifts with love, only when our actions and words are powered and motivated by love, infused with love, will they have eternal value, because only love never fails.
4 In heaven, we will not be sitting around talking about how well old so-and-so could throw a football, or how good that team was. We will not talk about how good people were at making money, or telling jokes, or public speaking, or how hard they worked or how smart they were. We won t even sit around talking about how much old so-and-so sacrificed and served unless they did it with love, because that s all that will last. Paul talks about this 1 Corinthians 3: According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. 11 For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw 13 each one s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 14 If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. 15 If anyone s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. 1 Corinthians 3:10-15. You can do outwardly really good things like trying to build up the church! but if it s not done with love it s worthless. It s just wood, hay, and straw, and it will burn. Only if you love will you build with eternal materials, things like gold, silver, precious stones, that will pass through the fire and make it into heaven. Only love never fails. In another books of his, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis illustrates this truth wonderfully. If you know the premise of that book, it s basically Lewis wondering what it would be like if a busload of people from hell could visit heaven for just a few hours to see what it was like. And one of the things the people from hell saw in heaven a huge parade of people all singing and dancing, with musicians playing, and in the middle a lady in whose honor the parade was being done. And in the book C.S. Lewis says the lady radiated joy it flowed from her, and she was so radiant that it was as if her joy was her garment. She was unbelievably beautiful; it hurt to look at her she was so beautiful. And one of the people from hell turned to the tour guide they had tour guides in the book and said, She must have been someone really important on earth. The guide said, You ve never heard of her her name on earth was Sarah Smith. The man from hell said, Well, then why is she being so honored in heaven? And here was the reply: Every young man or boy that met her became her son even if it was only the boy that brought [her groceries] to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but [more true], to their own wives [And even] every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them. It wasn t her giftedness that mattered in heaven, it wasn t her talents or abilities that mattered in heaven, in a very real way it wasn t even her good works that mattered it was her love. Only love matters because only love lasts. Second, only love can change the heart. Verses 4-7: 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not
5 irritable or resentful [and this is one place where the ESV translators really blew it literally, it s not resentful but love does not keep a record of wrongs ]; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. There are a couple of ways you could teach these verses we could take the time to study each one of these different adjectives for love that Paul gives us. There are fifteen. And that would be worthwhile Jonathan Edwards in 1738 preached sixteen sermons on this chapter to his little church in Northampton, Massachusetts. But I ve decided not to do that, because it s not as if these verses are hard to understand. So here s what I ll say. We often confuse loving people with trying to change people, to fix them, and that s where we mess up. You can see this all the time between parents and children, between friends, between spouses, between co-workers. Anytime there is a real relationship between two people where they really get to know one another and they really have to deal with each other there will be an attempt to change the other person. And probably most of the time, when we try to change someone else, we do mean well we think we re loving them. We really think that if this person will change they ll be better off. We think, Oh, I really like this person, they have some good qualities, they just need to work on this or that and then they d really be special, then they d be perfect. And so we get into a relationship and we get to work trying to fix them. But there are big problems with that. The first problem lies in how we try to change them. Do you know how we try to change people? By not loving them! Here s how you can be sure you are trying to change someone, fix someone, not love them (we ll just look at the opposites of what Paul lists in verses 4-7): you aren t patient with them nor are you kind to them. Whatever it is we re trying to change about the person, you ll boast about how good you are at it (if not out loud, then inwardly you ll boast). You ll be rude, insist on your own way, get irritated when the person messes up, you ll show them your disapproval, and you will keep a record of it. You won t delight in the small successes but always insist that more is to be done. You ll get tired of bearing the problems of the other person and have little real faith that they can change (and it will show). And eventually you ll run out of hope and give up trying altogether. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Has anyone done this to you? Have you tried this on someone else? The second problem is this: when we try to change people, we disobey a command of God. Romans 15:1-2: We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. 2 Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. But when we try to change our neighbor, do you know what we re doing? We are trying to change him not for his good but for our good, to please us. And instead of loving that person more and more so that he is made over into the image of God, like a reflection of God, we try to change them into our image. That s idolatry. We go around trying to make people not more like Jesus, but like us!
6 Third, if you re really disciplined, you can change someone s behavior. Parents can do this all the time with good child-rearing. Parents can make young children mind, and that s good; they should. You can get people to change what they do, but you can t change what they are. In other words, you can t change their heart. You can t make someone into a better person. And so if that s all you do, with your children or anyone else, then all your work in that person s life will wind up worthless because it won t make it into eternity. You re just working with wood, hay, and straw the behavior and not gold, silver, and precious stones the heart. Here s one example of how this works: Mark Richard wrote a memoir several years ago called House of Prayer No. 2. He s an award winning author and he s a Christian. And in his memoir he recalls how he was born both poor and with a degenerative hip condition. So, when we was eight or nine, he had to go live at the Crippled Children s Hospital, a charity hospital in Richmond, Virginia, for several months so that he could have the operations he needed on his hips and he could heal. And as you might imagine the conditions at this hospital were awful awful smells, sights, sounds, a lot of deformed and mentally ill children. But they would always get visits from two groups of people students from the local Baptist seminary (Richard calls them practice preachers ) and student from the local barber college. And this is what he says: [T]he practice preachers [would come], murmuring down the hallway, doing God s work, visiting the sick in their Hush Puppies shoes. All smiles [ ] until they smell you. They can t control [the kids] around the piano wheeled out of a classroom, can t make [the kids] love Jesus, fail to threaten [the kids] with the prophet Elisha, who called down she-bears to rip the forty-two little mocking children to shreds, [the kids] all laughing at the violent story [and soon] the practice preachers [are] looking, as all visitors ultimately do, for a nurse and a quick exit. But the men from the barber college who come to cut your hair! Clicking down the hall in polished loafers, laughing and goofing, their smiles steadfast as they round the corner and smell you, see you, mangy mongrels with overgrown bowl cuts from the hills, crew cuts gone to seed post-surgery, matted twists of bed-headed hair pressed against pillows twenty-four hours a day. The barbers come whistling with jokes and songs and gum, and they touch you, cradle your heads in their hands as they trim, hold you in their arms so you can safely lean over the edge of the bed in your body casts as they [cut hair], telling each crippled child who he looks like from movies and men s magazines, the barbers clipping and snipping at the dirty ropes of hair falling off the beds onto the floor for Ben the porter to sweep up. The men from the barber college sweep the beds with little brooms from the deep pockets of their white jackets, which [the kids] keep peering into for more gum, and there is always more gum! And from the deep pockets they pull the pint flasks of cologne and cooling colored water they clap on their hands and rub around your necks and on your faces through your hair like a blessed baptism that opens your lungs for the first time in forever with its fragrance, remembering you to a world beyond that doesn t smell like
7 bedpans, dirty sheets, [or] the deathly perfume stench of yourselves rotting in rancid plaster. Everyone wishes the barbers came every week like the practice preachers but [they don t]. Now can t you just see it? The seminary students (and few things are more dangerous than seminary students turned loose on people) were trying to change the kids, make them be good, make them believe the gospel, doing what too many church people have done for too long, but they didn t really love them. And they so failed. But the barber students loved the kids, enjoyed them, delighted in them, and the kids knew it. And forty years later this man remembered how they loved him. It changed his heart. Friends, I promise you this: every time you love someone you work on their heart. You may never know how your act of love effected someone, you may never see how, they may never see how, but no act of love done in the name of Jesus no matter how small is ever wasted. And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward. Matthew 10:42. But it s hard to love like that because when we do love and we quit trying to change people we lose all control. We have no idea what God will do with it. We have no idea how they ll change, we have no idea if they ll make good decisions, we have no idea that they ll believe the gospel because of us, and we certainly have no idea whether they will love us back, they may take advantage of our love. So how can we do it? How can stop trying to change people and instead love people unconditionally like that? Third, how we can live as if nothing counts without love. Verse 13: So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. If you study the commentaries on this verse you ll see they all ask the same question: why after a chapter devoted to love does Paul all of the sudden bring up faith and hope? What do they have to do with love? Here s what Paul is saying: you can t love without faith and hope. No one has the ability within themselves to let go of all attempts to have control over your life and just love the people around you. No one can do that by themselves, it s too hard. But if you have faith, if you believe, that someone out there loves you like that, and especially if it s Jesus, then you have the power to love others. Friends, what did Jesus do for you? Did he come down to earth from heaven and try to change you, try to fix you, before he started loving you? No he just loved you. He gave himself on the cross for you before you could do a thing for him. He doesn t expect you to change before he starts loving you; he loves you and then by loving you he changes you. One of the ways the Bible describes our relationship as Christians to Jesus is that of marriage Jesus is the bridegroom, and the church is the bride. When I do a wedding, I often use that analogy to during the wedding sermon. So I ll turn to the groom at one point and say, Everyone can see today why you want to marry this woman she s
8 lovely. She s dressed in her bridal gown, her hair is done just right, her makeup is perfect she s the loveliest woman in the room. But remember, when Jesus came for his bride, he did not come because she was lovely Jesus bride was filthy in her sins. Instead, Jesus came to make her lovely with his love. That s Ephesians 5: Jesus came to make his wife holy by cleansing her by the washing of water through the word, to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. And friends, to the degree you believe, you have faith, that Jesus did that for you, and to the degree you have hope that because Jesus is in control and everything s going to be okay, that all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing be well, to that degree you can love. I love how Paul puts it in Galatians 5:6b: The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love (NIV 1984). Faith that God is good, that he loves you, that he loves the people around you, that he has a plan and it s good, and then acting out that faith through loving others. That s all that matters, because that s what Jesus has done for us. Now, to remind us of this great love God has for us, we re about to take the Lord s Supper. All Christians, whether members of this church or not, whether baptized in a particular way or not we, the elders of Grace Bible Church, welcome all believers in Jesus Christ welcome to come to the Lord s Table. PRAY