Spiritual Gifts with Love - 1 Cor. 13

What is love?

A dashing young man once said to his beautiful girl, “I would climb the highest mountain or swim the deepest ocean just to be with you and I’ll be over tomorrow tonight, so long as it’s not raining.”

How easy it is to fall in love with loving instead of actually loving!

Children of God, 111

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Your Spiritual Gifts without Love are Useless

John 13:34–35 NASB95

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

What good is your gift of the tongues of men and angels?

What good is your gift of prophecy?

What good is your gift of revelation and knowledge?

What good is your self-sacrifice?

Jonathan Swift, the satirical author of Gulliver’s Travels, who said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Spiritual gifts, no matter how exciting and wonderful, are useless and even destructive if they are not ministered in love.

Warren W. Wiersbe

Your Spiritual Gifts Through God’s Prism of Love Unify

Henry Drummond wrote in the last century a book entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World”

He compared Love with Light

as it passes through a crystal prism

it breaks into Its componant parts

Called a Spectrum of light

Paul passes love the a spiritual prism

and breaks it into its componant parts

According to Drummondthis passage

Shows us the componants of the “Spectrum of Love”

Vs 4 - 6

Patience - “love suffers long”

In a “I want it now Society” we no longer want to wait

Road rage

Kindness - “and is kind”

Where is the kindness towards our fellow man

Almost unexpected

Generosity- “love does not envy

Jealousy is replaced with trust

Humility- “love does not parade or brag itself, it is not puffed up;”

Society teaches us that He that loves the least controls the relationship,

Is that what love is all about

Courtesy- “Does not behave rudely”

Hannah “Love is not rude Dad!”

Unselfishness- “it does not seek it’s own

Eph. 5: 25

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her;

Good temper- “is not provoked”

Woman told Billy Sunday she had a bad temper, but it was over in a minute.

Billy replied, “So is a shotgun, but it blows everything to pieces,”

Guilelessness- “Thinks no evil;”

1 John 4:16–21 NASB95

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.

Sincerity- Does not rejoice in iniquity, But rejoices in Truth”

No law has ever been passed that can compel one moral being to love another, for by the very nature of it love must be voluntary. No one can be coerced or frightened into loving anyone.4

A. W. Tozer

Your Spiritual Gifts are Perfected in Love

Vs 7

Strong/Secure- “Beareth all things”

Hopeful- “Believeth all things”

Enduring- “Endureth all things”

Your Spiritual Gifts End but Love Remains

Vss. 8-13

Done Away; Cease; Done Away

Don’t you get it?

Love lasts eternally!

By process of elimination, the only possibility for the perfect is the eternal, heavenly state of believers. Paul is saying that spiritual gifts are only for time, but that love will last for all eternity.

John F. MacArthur

Some years ago after the patient in a certain room in a mental institutions had found release from his pathetic earthly sojourn. As his room was being readied for another unfortunate occupant, the attendants found scrawled on the walls of the room the following profound lines:

"Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade: To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry, Nor could the scroll contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky."