1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13 - The Way of Love

Introduction:

Good morning, if you have your Bibles let me invite you to open with me to the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 12.

We are going to read verses 27-31 of chapter 12, and then the entirety of chapter 13.

Chapter 13 is a special chapter in God’s word.

It is a popular chapter of the bible.

It has been used on a lot of wall art in Hobby Lobby.

It has been quoted at many weddings.

It is known as the Love chapter.

In it, Paul poetically, beautifully, and clearly articulates the nature and the necessity of Christian love.

So why did I not divide up our study so that I finished chapter 12 last week, and then started fresh with chapter 13 this week?

Why did I reserve the final paragraph from chapter 12 to be included in this sermon on chapter 13.

Well sometimes we need to be reminded that chapter divisions are not inspired.

There were no chapter or verse divisions in the original writings of Scripture. These division are here to help us find things, but sometimes they cause us to lose sight of the flow of thought.

One of the problems with the Love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13, is that it is often quoted apart from Paul’s original flow of thought....

We need to remember that chapter 12 is all about God’s sovereign and active work to build his church with uniquely gifted people.

This text is not primarily about a marriage relationship, though their certainly can be applications there...

This chapter is an assessment,

it is a challenge,

it is a re-orientation for the church member to consider whether they are walking in what Paul would call the most excellent way… the way of love.

so first, We are going to read the end of chapter 12, the entirety of chapter 13 and then we will pray for understanding.

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.

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. 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.

Lets Pray

1 Corinthians 12:27 ESV

27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

The church is much like a body.

Church members are like members of a body deeply connected to one another, but unique in their function and contribution to the ministry.

We looked at that illustration in depth last week.

Here, Paul goes on to articulate different roles and giftings God had appointed and used in the church in Corinth.

The apostles were those who had seen the resurrected Jesus and were commissioned to speak authoritatively on his behalf.

Prophets were those gifted by God to proclaim true things about God and what he was doing in the world.

Teachers were those gifted in explaining the truth and making doctrinal truth understandable.

Some had special giftings for working miracles, and healing people, while others had more of a gifting for simply helping those who were hurting, and guiding or administrating the ministry of the church.

Some prayed so deeply in the presence of God that they actually spoke in a special prayer language that Paul will address in detail later.

‌Pauls point here is not to explain how each gifting worked, but rather to make this singular point… …

Not everybody is gifted to do the same things in the mission of God.

1 Corinthians 12:29–30 ESV

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?

The assumed answer is no.

This is a point we have already made the past two weeks, but lets make it one final time.

Truth #1 Not Everyone is Gifted to Do Everything in the Life of the Church

We believe every individual member of every local church has a very unique part to play.

We believe that God appoints people in his church to fill particular roles in this ministry of care for one another and this mission to get the Gospel to the nations.

Not everyone is called to do everything,

but everyone is called to something in the community life of the church.… and everyone is called to carry out their personal ministries of care for one another in a particular way.

Some of the Corinthians are obsessed with how they think they are gifted by God.

They have ranked the different giftings according to man’s wisdom… but Paul’s aim now is to redirect their thinking.

1 Corinthians 12:31 ESV

31 But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

Now, we are going to talk about what he means by desiring the higher gifts in chapter 14.

but he pauses the argument to show us what should dominate our aspirations and motivations regardless of how God has gifted us.

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 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. 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.

Truth #1 Not Everyone is Gifted to do Everything in the Life of the Church

Truth #2 Everyone is Called to Show God’s Love in the Life of the Church

God’s greatest concern for you is not how effective you are at kingdom work.

His greatest concern for you is not the depth of academic knowledge that you possess nor in your ability to articulate it.

His greatest concern for you is not whether you display the more seemingly supernatural giftings.

His greatest concern for you is whether you embody the greatest commandment.

Do you love God with all your heart, and all your strength, and all your very soul?

Do you love the people in this room?

Do you love the lost in this world?

Too many people in God’s church are more concerned with how God has or hasn’t gifted them than they are concerned with whether their deepest ambitions come from a place of genuine love for God and his people.

Christian we are first and foremost receivers of God’s abundant love.

Through faith in Jesus God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit.

And we are to become then distributors of the same love we have received.

But what does that look like?

What does it mean really to love someone?

Well thats where the beauty and the practicality of this passage really shines.

- What follows are 15 verbs that describe true Christian love.

- The first two which articulate what love is positively.

- The second 8 which articulate what love is not,

- And the last five which poetically describes the kinds of things love does.

so lets meditate through this phrase by phrase, and let the word of God stand before you like a mirror which reveals our great need for him.

1 Corinthians 13:4 (ESV)

4 Love is patient and kind

This description is deeper than our first glance.

It contains both the passive responsibility of love and the active responsibility of love.

Another word for patience here would be “longsuffering”

Patience or long suffering is to endure some wrong doing for a long period of time without acting out against it.

Love, therefore, is first described in this list as enduring, even painfully so, someone else's sin against you.

The very essence of patience is the act of enduring something you would rather not endure, but you know that your endurance is worth it.

And if Paul is commanding the local church in Corinth to love through patience…, he is anticipating that such patience will be needed in these beautiful mess called church.

He is commanding them and us to love fellow sinners with whom we will have to be exceedingly patient.

Friend, it is easy to love those who are most loveable to us, but that is not the kind of God glorifying responsibility that God has called us to.

This is at least one of the reasons why those who try to do the Christian life outside of the local church remain in a constant state of stunted spiritual growth.

IT is life in the local church where we are stretched to love others as Christ has loved us.

It is here in church life that we covenant to a group of people and we commit to love them through a lot.

Christ-like love endures failures, shortcomings, inconveniences, and even attacks, and yet continues to love.

And not only does true love endure this kind of thing with patience,

true love responds with an active kindness.

Kindness is the more pro-active side of love… it is the desire and the will to do spiritual good to someone else…

We treat someone with kindness when we prioritize their well being in how we address them, speak to them, speak about them, and give of ourselves for them.

Kindness is a smile and a hug, but its more than that, its a genuine desire for whats best for someone else.

Love overflows in to kindness in how we treat someone both to their face and when they aren’t around.

Love is patient and love is kind.

In other words, Godly love is a reflection of God’s love for us.

I love the connection Gordon Fee makes here in his commentary.

He writes,

“On the one hand, God’s loving forbearance is demonstrated by his holding back his wrath toward human rebellion; on the other hand, his kindness is found in the thousandfold expressions of his mercy. Thus Paul’s description of love begins with this two fold description of God, who through Christ shows himself forbearing and kind toward those who divine judgment. The obvious implication, of course, is that this is how his people are to be toward others.” - Gordon Fee

In other words, God has endured our wrongs against him, and God has lavished his grace upon us.

To love is to do the same for others.

so thats the positive, what about the negative.

1 Corinthians 13:4 (ESV)

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy...

Now what does it mean to envy and what in the world does this have to do with love?

To envy is to desire to have for yourself someone else’s success.

And to embrace such a sin, is to embrace something that is the opposite of love.

Love desires the good of another person even at the expense of self.

Envy desires the good for self, and makes it hard for you to desire good for others.

Charles Spurgeon simply says,

“Love him, and then thou wilt not envy him.” - Spurgeon

notice how tightly connected the next word and concept is In verse 4.

1 Corinthians 13:4 (ESV)

love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant

John Stott says this,

“Envy is the reverse side of a coin called vanity. Nobody is ever envious of others who is not first proud of himself.” - John Stott

Envy and pride go well together.

But pride and love do not.

Love is not boastful.

To walk in pride is to prioritize self at the expense of the others,

and it is antithetical to how Christ showed his love for us.

Romans 5:8 ESV

8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Philippians tells us Christ humbled himself for us.

He expressed his love by embracing humility on our behalf.

You cannot love well as God intended you to love if you entertain pride.

Without humility…,

You will be rude to people.

Without humility….

You will insist on your own way all the time…

Without humility…

You will run over people, ignore people, and cut down people both when they are around and when they are not.

You will be easily angered,

easily offended,

and easily irritated with people.

Without humility you will begin to see yourself as superior, and you will develop a kind of constant critical smugness which Paul just simply calls irritable.

irritable to your own destruction…., and you won’t be able to move past it.

Paul says without a humble love…, You will be resentful.

To be resentful is not just to lack patience with someone when they wrong you…, it is to never move past the fact that you have been wronged.

The language for resentful here is financial. It is to keep a ledger. Or to keep a record.

It is to hold on to someone else’s failures until you feel that they have suffered enough, or repented enough, or apologized enough to satisfy your longing for whatever your version of justice might be.

And Paul says that all of this is the opposite of love.

1 Corinthians 13:4–5 ESV

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;

Now you can see why such a passage would be used at a wedding ceremony.

It is certainly applicable to marriage...

But remember Paul is assuming that Christians are living in these tight knit messy communities of deeply connected but sinful people.

Lovelessness is a danger within the church,

in fact these are relational realities in all interpersonal relationships,

but the difference between the church and the rest of the world is that we have this thing called the gospel…

We have the truth about what love is and isn’t.

We have this gift of the Spirit which we cling to in our fight to love one another the way Jesus loved us.

The world totally misunderstands what love is.

It totally misses the patient bit.

It totally misses the humility bit.

But it also misses the truth bit.

The world errodes away the sharp edges and the difficulty of love.

The world wants love without the cross.

They want a love that is self-serving

Love that is self-affirming in all things.

But love is always a love in truth.

Paul brings correction here.

1 Corinthians 13:6 ESV

it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

This is a very important distinction in our present cultural moment.

Our culture says that the best way for you to love is to affirm and encouraged any lifestyle, belief, or ideology that a person embraces for their own happiness.

Paul says that true love never rejoices at wrongdoing.

True love never celebrates the sin that is destroying someone elses life.

True love rejoices in sharing of life giving truth to those who do not have it, believe it, or act upon it.

True love speaks the truth with a particular kindness and gentleness, but it speaks the truth none-the-less.

Be careful of the world that would make you believe you are unloving by holding a Biblical position on any issue.

The most loving thing to do is to point people to God’s way in God’s world for the eternal flourishing of all who believe.

Love rejoices in the truth…, and in doing so, love will be hard.

Verse 7 wraps up the description with a laundry list of the kinds of attitudes that must be present if love will prevail in a person’s life.

1 Corinthians 13:7 ESV

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Verse 7 comments both on the present difficulty of love, but it also comments on the kind of optimism that every Christian should have in their fight to love God and others.

We bear all things in love, because of a ridiculous kind of optimism that courses through our new heart.

For Christians loving one another in the life of the church,

we can love someone and be patient with them and be kind to them even when they are acting in sin…,

because we are always believing and hoping in what God is doing in their lives.

We are believing and hoping in the Spirit’s work in their lives to grow them in godliness.

Love for God and others bears all things because this kind of love believes all the things we have been promised as Christians.

Love hopes in all things that God has spoken and promised, and therefore Love endures to the end.

In fact, love is one of the few things that will transcend all time and never find an end throughout all eternity.

Thats the point Paul transitions to now.

1 Corinthians 13:8–13 ESV

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.

Love never ends.

We know this to be true.

God is Love.

God is Eternal.

Therefore Love is Eternal.

There are many things we do or experience in the life of the church as we serve our Lord that are temporary.

But one day the perfect is coming.

In other words, one day Jesus himself is coming.

He will perfectly renew our world So that there remains no trace of sin or its curse.

He will perfectly renew us so that there is no lack in us…. No sin in us… know lack of understanding in us.

We will be fully mature in Christ, no longer thinking or acting like children, but walking with God as we were always intended to do.

We will see God more clearly than we have ever seen.

Paul likens our present view of God to that of looking at a reflection in a distorted mirror,

but one day we will look at Jesus Christ face to face.

We will know Jesus fully as he has known us fully.

and on that beautiful and wonderful day the spiritual giftings that the Corinthians are arguing about will no longer be necessary.

Prophecies are a temporary phenomenon.

There will be no need for Prophecies, or knowledge, or teaching, or tongues when Christ returns and renews our minds more perfectly than we thought possible.

The mission will be over.

There will be no more need for Bible study,

no more need for disciple-making,

no more sending missionaries,

no more counseling,

no more pastoring,

no more evangelism.

So much of what we do now will become obsolete When Christ returns in all of his glory And he glorifies us into his perfect image.

We will not have to exercise faith, because our faith will be sight.

We will not have to cling to hope , because our hope will be fully realized And fulfilled.

But one thing, we will continue to do… we will love… and be loved.

1 Corinthians 13:13 ESV

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

The point here is not that faith and hope are not important to the Christian life.

The point is that love uniquely foreshadows the future we have been promised.

A future where faith and hope will no longer be needed…,

A future where love will reign.

Allow me to try to encapsulate Pauls argument here in a final truth.

Truth #3 Love in the Life of the Church is a Foretaste of the Eternal Love Promised to Us

The Corinthians are fighting, back-biting, and arguing over whose spiritual gifts are the most important.…

and in doing so they are missing the very essence of what they are to enjoy in the life of the church.…

They are missing the primacy and the necessity of loving God and one another as foretaste of what they have been promised forever and ever.

heaven will be an eternal experience of God’s unending love for us and through us to one another.

if you have ever felt the joy of someone’s Christian love, you have through a dim mirror, only tasted what God will unfold for countless ages in the life of his children.

Eternal love is what we have been promised.

And love is what we are called to pursue in our life together until that faithful day When the perfect comes.

So what do we do with all this?

Takeaway #1 Assess Your Own Love for God and Others

How do we assess our own love?

Try replacing the word “love” in chapter 13 with your own name.

Would you and others agree with this paragraph read in that way?

This is a challenging thing.

Can I agree with this paragraph?

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)

4  Brandon is patient and kind; He does not envy or boast; He is not arrogant 5 or rude. He does not insist on its own way; He is not irritable or He is not resentful; 6 He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but He rejoices with the truth. 7 He bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Do this exercise. Put your name in the paragraph and see where the sentence doesn’t work in your life.

Unfortunately, there are many days where this paragraph cannot be said of me.

And on those days, I must turn away from myself and to the source of love.

Takeaway #2 Turn to God the Source of Love

The beauty of the Christian gospel is that God loves you.

Despite your sin,

despite your past,

despite your present,

despite your unloveableness,

God has determined in his eternal heart to be patient with you, and kind to you.

He proved it by sending Jesus to take the penalty of sin reserved for you.

The question is whether you will receive that love in faith.

The question is whether you will trust the Jesus to lead you as your loving Lord and Savior.

The question is whether you will depend on him in prayer for the Love that he offers to pour into your heart.

The most difficult command in the Bible to keep is the greatest commandment.

When God commands us to love him and to love others… he commands us to do something we don’t have the strength to do in and of ourselves.

He commands us to love, when he alone can give us the love he demands of us.

Turn to him the source of love,

receive his love,

pray for his love,

and then enjoy his love now and forever.

A church that does this, is a church where the members enjoy a foretaste of the perfect love that is to come.

Lets Pray