The victory of love - 1 Corinthians
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Introduction
Introduction
Good morning RCF. My name is Daniel and I am the student ministries pastor. It’s great to be with you this morning.
Over the last couple of weeks we have been in a series exploring love. We started with Robbie walking us through how Jesus loved and he talked about how love is what reigns supreme above all. Then Janell looked at the very nature of love and explored love as an action. It is something that we do that leads to a feeling opposed to something we feel that leads to an action. Today we are wrapping up our series on love by exploring the victory of love.
Before we do that let’s Pray.
Okay so by now Robbie and Janell have given us examples of how society views love. Love is often this thing we associate with good feelings or romance. Society has this view on love as this superficially authentic thing,. They make it more about how it makes us feel then what we do with love.
Before we read the passage it’s important for us to know who it is that Paul is writing to. Corinth was a trade city. (PICTURE) Now that is not Corinth, that is Mos Espa which is a trade outpost in Star Wars lore. Truth be told, I found an opportunity to through in a star wars reference so I took it. But Corinth is a trade city. Think of a trade city in Bible times like a central hub or a port of sorts. The place is filled with all kinds of leathers, spices, Or anything that was being traded for currency. People from all over came to do business there brought along with them their own beliefs and ideologies. During his early ministry this is one of the places Paul helps plant a church. But since he has been away, the church has adopted habits and beliefs that were brought in through a cultural prism. So people become confused with what is truth and what is an adopted belief disguised as truth. Throughout the letter to the Corinthians, Paul is addressing questions concerning things such as spiritual gifts, marriage, food offered to idols, and the resurrection. As a matter of fact, chapter 13 itself is kind of an outlier or a reset in a letter that is primarily addressing questions.
Section 1: The eternality of God’s love
So we get to the bottom of this chapter and after taking the time explain Love’s supremacy and what love looks like when being lived out in a Godly way, Paul starts explaining the eternal nature of love.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
Show of hands, how many of you have read, sang, or seen love never fails written somewhere? We probably all have right? It is one of the more common passages about love in the Bible. Last week we sang a song titled Love Never Fails. The reason for this is because it is a constant reminder of what remains at the end of all time. If you are reading out of the ESV, your Bible says that Love never Ends. God’s love doesn’t have an expiration date.
The idea of failure and success is an interesting one. Growing up, success always meant achievement. (pictures of me and my mom in basketball and my grandpa in soccer) This is a picture of my mom when she was 20, a picture of my abuelo when he was in his early 20’s and me when I was in high school. If it isn’t clear, success was something that my family often associated with sports. One of my fondest memories growing up was during the 2002 world cup, my dad would wake me and my brother up at 2 am and we would watch soccer and eat cold pizza for 4 hours and sleep the entire next day. My dad was a MASSIVE Brazil fan. So big in fact that my middle name, Alberto, is after Carlos Alberto who is widely considered the greatest defender in the history of Brazilian soccer. That year, Brazil made it to the final and won. My dad went crazy. He bought a championship shirt, bought us an xbox game just because the Brazilian national team was on the cover, he celebrating harder than anything I had seen. That was even after the Lakers had won their 3rd straight NBA title. I remember in the midst of this celebration, my dad looked at me and said that can be you one say holding that trophy. Seeing how proud my dad was to say that, I wanted nothing more than for that to be the case. For the longest time I did everything I could to achieve that goal to the point that when I would make a mistake, I saw nothing more than a failure.
In the chapter before this one, Paul is talking about Spiritual gifts and addressing what the church turned to in order to determine who was “living for Christ” in the best way they could. The church in Corinth was looking at what success in a Christian life looked like and with this cultural hold that society had placed on things, they came to this conclusion that it was 1. Prophecy and 2. Speaking in tongues. Those are the first two spiritual gifts you thought of too right? Just like I practiced and scrapped and clawed for any ounce of success I could find, they did the same thing in the church. Paul actually talks about this in the next chapter and calls them out by asking “what is the point of speaking in tongues if it is not blessing someone else? Are you just doing it for show?
In today’s day in age this letter probably would’ve addressed us by pointing out the size of our church or to what capacity we serve as the two things that are driving how and why we operate the way we do.
This would probably sound something like:
I read my bible in a year, did you?
The only podcast I listen to is the Bible Project
Or I sing the loudest in church
Oh yeah? Well my arms never get tired when my hands are raised.
On a more serious note, the success might look something like status in the church. Am I a deacon? or an elder? Am I the go-to person in whatever ministry I am serving in? Maybe it is that I studied at a Bible school so I know the Greek word for fails. Or maybe it is you memorizing scripture to the point where you can almost quote the Bible from start to finish. Whatever it may be, we try to put something in the place of success without stopping just to see that success at it’s core is us understanding that God’s love will never fail. It is eternally successful.
If God’s love looks patient and kind and it does not envy or boast or keep records of wrong, then that is what success looks like.
God’s love never fails.
God’s love is eternally successful.
Section 2: Perfection through God’s love
We were created in this love to partake in a never-ending successful love.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
I know what you’re thinking. “Daniel you are called to put away your childish ways.” Again, any excuse to reference star wars.
The word that jumps out here is the one that doesn’t seem to fit at first glance. The word perfection. I want to think for a second… what comes to mind when you think about perfection? I can almost guarantee that most of you started thinking about a place, person, mindset, food. When you work with youth students, food is always one of the answers.
John Wesley taught what he called Christian perfection. The word used for perfect there is the word “telios” which means “reaching the end for which it was designed.” Wesley argued that perfection is not being about appearing flawless. Rather, perfection was learning to live by love. It makes us stop and think to ourselves, why am I doing what I am doing? What is leading you to make that choice? When we are living by love, we are allowing God to use us for the purpose that was given to us from the very beginning of time which is to be an image-bearer made complete in his love. Perfection is more completion than it is a flawless appearance.
The incomplete nature of who we are without God’s love is like the growing up process of a human. At the beginning we are like babies fully dependent with nothing more to do than just eat sleep and poop. We are dependent on being catered and served and we are vulnerable to anything without protection. As you start to get older, your kids become more independent and start talking and try to make sense of everything. My nephew, Finley, asked me the other day how a candle is able to burn… I looked at him and said, because God is that cool. He accepted the response and now it is with his parents to figure out. Then they hit a stage where they go to school and they start learning things that they will never use again in life like Algebra. But there is always this moment in every person’s life where they realize that there is no more excuse of needing dependence on someone else. We call it “arriving,” but Paul would call it completion. That doesn’t mean that you stop learning along the way. The journey is not over and it won’t be until we are with Christ reigning forever, but you have been made complete through his love. The person you were designed to be, an image-bearer, is perfection living in love.
Spiritual gifts, even the ones Paul is talking about here, are not bad. But they are also incomplete without the love of Christ. You can be in an elevated position in ministry or have enough head knowledge to teach people, but if love is not the driving force by which we are doing these things, we are living in failure because the only thing that will NEVER fail is love.
We were created in this love to partake in a never-ending successful love.
Section 3: Known by God.
At the beginning of my message, Abaigail came up and read a passage out of 1 John.
For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.
If we are not living life in that perfect love, we like cain a murderer who remains in death. We were not made to remain in death. But when what we do is not founded in love, there is no life. What is the point if there is no love.
Love allows us to be fully known by God because we are made complete through his perfect love.
Strive for perfection. Crave it. But don’t look at perfection something more than completeness in God.
CONCLUSION
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Paul concludes by stating that in the end:
When we hit the point of finality.
When the world has passed away.
When every single success we had is gone and every failure we have had is gone.
When we are no longer concerned for how we look.
When we take away the spiritual gifts and the status.
When we are not sitting on a pedestal on the highest mountain top.
When the pride we take in our work and kids and family and friends and sports is not enough.
When we see a world hurting and realize that we cannot fix things on our own.
When we have tasted the highest mountain and the lowest valley.
When everything else you have every tried has failed.
… LOVE NEVER WILL.