Building Up in Love

Reader: Mike Olson

Reading: 1 Cor 13

Introduction

Thank you Mike for reading God’s Word for us this morning.

So today we are looking at the well known “Love Chapter” of 1 Corinthians, but as you have probably heard me say before...this chapter is not something that is exclusive to weddings. In fact, the love that this chapter is talking about is not the romantic love that is shared just between husband and wife. It is about how the Church should function.

When we hear the word love we typically think only in terms of one or two kinds of love, but the ancient Greeks had many different words for love depending on the relationship that was involved. So the Apostle Paul and the other New Testament writers chose to employ something of a rather uncommon Greek word for love. They didn’t wan’t their readers to get confused between other kinds of love, like love for family (storge), brotherly love (philia) or romantic love (eros) so they set apart this other word for love to describe the selfless, sacrificial love of God that works in and through his people. The word they chose is the word “agape”

So this passage is not about bringing someone flowers or looking longingly into their eyes or sharing smooches or long walks on the beach. This is about us. It is about the Church. It is about how we are supposed to be building one another up in Christ.

This is the theme that we keep running back into over and over again throughout these Epistles or letters of the New Testament. The idea that the Church that Jesus is building is not just a building where people gather together to address their felt needs... it is a place God has provided for us to gather together in expectation of building each other up to be more like Jesus.

Tension

Somehow over the past 50 years or so the idea of Church has drifted from being a place where we gather in a dynamic way to grow one another to becoming a place where statically we come to be fed. So the expectation of most people when they walk into a church is to spend some time evaluate their experience according the quality of the presentation instead of evaluating it according to the opportunities of participation.

And I am sure that some of you are thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know we needed volunteers Pastor Dan. I am ready where is the sign up sheet.” And I love your heart in that, but even that is missing the point. The participation that I am talking about is not something that you sign up for on paper. It is not something that you do or don’t do according to when your name is on the schedule. It is a consistent way of living your live that you committed to when you said “yes” to Jesus.

When you became one of His beloved Children you signed up to act in love toward His family.

In this kind of love. In the kind of love that Mike just read about. In the 1 Corinthians 13 “agape” kind of love. And while this may be explained most thoroughly here, Paul calls the Church to this same kind of love in all his letters.

Ephesians 5:1–2 (ESV)

1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

This is not the Hallmark channel kind of love. This is not a mutually reciprocated kind of warm fuzzies between two people kind of “love”. Jesus laid down his life for us while we were still sinning against him. That would not make for a good “feel-good movie”, more like a tragedy.

Listen to how Paul describes this kind of love in his letter to the Church in Philippi. He says...

Philippians 1:9 (ESV)

9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment,...

This is not the typical way that we talk about love is it? To love with knowledge and all discernment? I thought love was a warm feeling, what is this knowledge and discernment stuff? Those sound cold and rigid like facts and thinking with your mind. Love is about living from your heart, don’t look just leap.

And I should be careful to not overstate my case here, because all forms of love involve our emotions and feelings in some way, but I am just trying to disrupt our default understanding of the “love” word to make room for a fuller one. To make room for an understanding that includes more than just that which involves our feelings.

Because anytime our feelings are not grounded in truth, in “knowledge and discernment” then it leads only to dangerous counterfeit versions of love. The world is barraging us with these counterfeit versions of love where love is not just measured by how you feel, but by how whatever you are saying or doing is making anyone else feel. So that any time you do something that makes someone upset in any way then you are being unloving.

This is such a dangerous lie. This ushers in these counterfeit versions of love that are really not love at all. Things like codependency, enabling an abuser or just watching as a loved one makes a damaging life decision because you know that saying something will make them angry and “that would not be loving”.

God’s design of love, particularly this “agape” love, flies in the face of these kind of destructive relationships and behaviors. So Paul’s prayer for the Church is...

Philippians 1:9–11 (ESV)

9 .... that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

You see the person who initiated the phrase “Love is blind” was not talking about Biblical Agape Love. Agape love is the opposite of blind. It is the love that God works in and through His people to help them to see things clearer and clearer. But the road to this clarity is not always lined with warm fuzzy feelings, there are often difficult battles on the way to becoming “blameless” and “filled with the fruit of righteousness”.

At the end of the day the love that God works in and through His people is not aimed at our temporary happiness, it is aimed at our holiness.

That is why Paul prays this for the Church and we should be praying this for our Church…but we don’t. We pray that everyone will just get along and that there won’t be any tension, conflicts or disagreements.

But the truth is, on this side of heaven, God’s people are always fighting upstream. So those conflicts and disagreements that we all hate are often the times that we grow the most. They are the training grounds to see if we are living our lives out of our flesh or out of His Spirit. Spiritual gifts, but as you heard in the reading those gifts will only work if we use them in love.

It is in these times of conflict that we know if the “love” we claim we have for one another is God’s strong “agape love”, or if we are just here to pursue the “warm and fuzzy” feeling of the world’s shaky love.

So with that in mind, lets get back to 1 Corinthians chapter 13, page 959 in the Bibles in the chairs. I will pray and then we will dive into this familiar text seeking to learn how to rightly apply what it teaches to our lives.

Truth

A few weeks ago we looked at a text on “surrending our rights for the Gospel” but I explained that it was couched in a larger contect of idolatry that we had to understand in order to know what the verses we were looking at were all about. This is true for this week as well. 1 Corinthians 13 is sandwiched right in the middle of a teaching on Spiritual gifts. I would encourage you, if you haven’t already, to read chapters 12 through 14 to have an even better context to understanding chapter 13.

We won’t go into great detail on those chapters this morning, but just to get a running start on chapter 13 lets look back at the last few verses of chapter 12 where it says starting in verse 27...

1 Corinthians 12:27–31 (ESV)

27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. 28 And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues.

29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? 30 Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? 31 But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

This is something of a capstone on chapter 12 showing us how we each have individual gifts and roles to play in the body of Christ. There are different roles and there are different gifts. We don’t all have the same role and none of us have all the gifts but we are all expected to execute our spiritual gifts within the body of Christ according to the various roles that God has given us.

And we should earnestly desire for more spiritual gifts, but no matter what role or gifts we have been given we are ALL called to execute them in the same “more excellent way”. In the way of “agape love”.

That is our first point for this week:

Agape Love is essential to Spiritual Gifts (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)

Even without reading back in chapter 12 we can see this relationship from the first verses of chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13 (ESV)

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

There is a reference to the various tongues mentioned earlier in Chapter 12. In the Bible, a “tongue” is a way of speaking or a particular language. What is being presented here is a spectrum that goes from the most respected and eloquent orators among men all the way to the awe that surrounded the untouchable language of the messengers of God.

Here we are not talking about the sign gift of speaking in tongues, that is covered in detail in the next chapter, but this gift of “tongue” at whatever level would be the kind of thing that would draw people in and capture them with the dynamics and power behind their words.

As a friend of mine likes to say, “Some people have a way with words, some people not have way”.

These people were given this incredible gift of communication that was sweet to the ear…but if they took that give and used it without agape love it would actually become painful to the ears. Not only would it become useless, it would be repulsively annoying!

Similarly, he says...

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.

So you see where Paul is going here? For people who like to compare their spiritual gifts to the gifts of someone else, this is like top shelf Christianity. It is the “Super-Christian” stuff. The kind of stuff with the potential to get you a TV show, private Jet and expense account. You can convince a lot of people that you are something special with these gifts...but without using them in agape love...you…are…nothing.

But before we all share a chorus of contempt over the celebrity Christians, Paul shows us how it can go the other way too.

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.

So maybe I don’t find my status is what I have, but in what I have given away. This asceticism thing was an ideology that Paul often had to combat in the early Church. And remembering the rich young ruler, we CAN honor God in how we give away what we have to follow him but if it isn’t done in agape love, all that service and sacrifice meaningless.

Do you see how this passage really doesn’t connect much with a romanticized idea of love? Not only is it here in the middle of passages on spiritual gifts, those gifts are directly referred to in the passage. Tongues, Prophecy, Teaching, Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Giving, Serving these are all spiritual gifts practiced among the body of Christ, and Paul’s point is don’t waste your time on them without this agape love thing.

So what is “agape Love”? Paul gives us a pretty robust picture, but if you put it all together it is clear to see that...

Agape love builds up others in Christ (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

This is a major them of the Epistles, and here in 1 Corinthians. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. This is the point of the Church. To be a place where we come together to build up one another in Christ and this cannot be done without this agape love. To ground our thinking in the uniqueness of his kind of love I am going to read it replacing the english word for the Greek word agape

4 [agape] is patient and kind; [agape] 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 [agape] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This is such a full picture of what Biblical agape love is and what it is not. It clearly lays out for us what this kind of loves does and what it does not do. And remember this “love” thing is what Paul says is essential to our spiritual gifts being effective as spiritual gifts. We cannot effectively build up others in Christ outside of these principles of love.

And while these things are given us to us in a list, I don’t think they are meant to be something like a “To-do list” or not “To-do list”. It seems to me that since we are talking about the way to use the gifts that the Holy Spirit has given us…this is more like “check points” to make sure we are on the right track than a “check list” of tasks that we can just grind out and make ‘em happen.

I get the sense that Paul is saying,

“Ok, you think that you are spiritually ahead of the curve because of some spiritual status that you have gained for yourself, but those are not accurate markers. Compare your spiritual growth to this agape love thing and then tell me about how well you are doing.”

Do Do Not

Be patient Envy

Be Kind Boast

Rejoice in the Truth Be Arrogant

Bear all things Be Rude

Believes all things Insist on my way

Hopes all things Be irritable

Endures all things Be Resentful

Rejoice at Wrongdoing

And that lands us on a point of application for us. In the first place, we have to ask ourselves what are the spiritual gifts that God has given us. There are several places in Scripture where there are lists for you to consider. Paul seemed to love lists. I included them on the back of you notes page to reference and even use in the Table talk groups after the service.

But for those of us who have already recognized at least of the spiritual gifts that God has given us, we should ask ourselves how have we been practicing those gifts. Do we see evidence of these markers of agape love in them? Or have we been mostly aiming our gifts at ourselves and our own personal gains?

If you feel blessed in any way then you need to recognize that there is only one giver of the good gifts and he is watching how you use the blessings that he has gifted to you. As the saying goes, we are blessed to be a blessing…how is that going for you?

Because at the end of your life, whatever you have gained with the many gifts that you have given will amount to nothing. Only the way that you used those gifts will count for anything. The way of Agape love. Because...

Only agape love continues on into eternity (1 Corinthians 13:8-13)

Did you catch that from Mike’s reading? At the end of the long list of what agape love does and doesn’t do there is one more. Love never ends. This is in contrast to all the other gifts that we have been given.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

As crazy as it sounds, Spiritual gifts have a shelf life. They are good for a limited time only. They are not eternal, because their purpose is limited to our mission while we are still here on earth. While we are here, the Holy Spirit gives gifts to various people to use in his perfect plan to draw people to faith and hope in Jesus. But eventually we won’t need them anymore. There will come a day when Jesus returns and then we will trade in these broken down corrupted versions of a body for the new and perfected model. In short, we will be like the resurrected Jesus.

1 Corinthians 13:9 (ESV)

9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, This is our current state of being. We are only a part of what we were meant to be... 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

This word for “perfect” in the Bible means full, complete or whole. It isn’t just about being morally right, it is about being remade into the perfect design we were meant to have. So Paul gives some illustrations to help us understand on a human scale what this transition is all about, so that we can rescale it to something much bigger. He says:

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. As a child we were less than what we become as full adults, He continues... 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Again, we see some things now, but later our sight will be a perfect reflection Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. By whom are we fully known? God knows us. He knows the true us. He knows the us that He created us to be and he knows what part of the current us is the most corrupted version of his design and to what degree.

So when we transition from the “partial” and become “complete” we will know this kind of living as well. And the part of us that will carry on from this world into eternity is this agape love.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Gospel Application

And when will “the perfect” come? Jesus will bring it with him, in the mean time we are to using whatever gifts and roles that God has given us to accomplish His mission of seeing others come to know and worship God and building up one another in Christ.

So I invite you to look around this room right now. Go ahead, there are a lot of good looking people in here I have been looking at them for the past half hour. As you are looking I want you to ask yourself this question: Do I truly love these people? do I “agape love” them? and how would I know?

Landing

Ok, stop looking around now and I am going to pray for us. Just so you know I am going to read 1 John 4:7-12 as part of the prayer and then I will lead us directly into communion together so those of you who are helping serve in that can go ahead and get prepared for that after the prayer.

1 John 4:7–12 (ESV)

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Here at friendship Church we practice what is referred to as Open Communion...