Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

After our break for Easter, we come to the final words in Paul’s famous chapter on love.

Paul wanted to explain to the church at Corinth what love really was, because they were hopelessly confused, as we often are.

As usual, we’ll read the whole chapter for context, but the words we’re focusing on today are the first part of verse 8.

I’ve chosen to use the Message this time, as I did over Easter.

Bear in mind that, with this passage, Eugene Peterson has taken the Biblical text and elaborated on it.

Nonetheless, I think he captures the ideas and feelings that Paul is conveying quite well.

Let’s read.

Bible

Is this love?

Let me ask you which of these three scenarios you think best illustrates genuine love.

A man creates an elaborate proposal, involving a horse-drawn carriage, Paris, the eiffel tower, a string ensemble, and a massive diamond engagement ring, all to impress his bride.

But, once they’re married, he quickly gets bored and abandons his wife for a new woman.

A normal romance culminates in a nice meal and a traditional proposal, but the marriage settles into a grudging cohabitation.

A low-key romance is followed by constant, unstinting support for the rest of the couples’ lives, even through suffering.

Which of these three do you think is most representative of genuine love?

Why?

If you have ever read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd you might realise that the main character of the book, Bathsheba Everdene, encounters this sort of decision.

She opts for the early extravagance of a flashy soldier, and then a wealthy farmer, and she suffers as a result.

In the end, after all of this suffering, she finds the steady love of the shepherd Gabriel Oak is her final refuge.

God’s love

Now, Thomas Hardy comes from the romantic era in art, which prioritised the emotions over the “cold truth,” but Hardy was himself a “Victorian realist,” part of a movement that valued facing up to reality, not matter how difficult it was.

As a result of this and his pessimistic atheism, his work tends to be quite dark.

If you’ve read or watched Tess of the d’Urbavilles you know depressing his work can be.

But in Far from the Madding Crowd, his first successful work, Hardy recognises an important reality: genuine love is not flashy or proud, but it is powerful, and a large part of that power comes from it’s constancy—the fact that it endures, it never fails.

Paul emphasizes this in his final words on love.

In verse 7 he has told us that:

As I mentioned in my last sermon on this verse, there are many ways to interpret these four verbs.

This version is from the Contemporary English Version of the Bible.

The New Living Translation, which is what we normally use in our sermons, translates the sentence this way:

In either case you can see that the main point that Paul is trying to get across is simple:

1 Corinthians 13:8 (CEV)

8 Love never fails!

Just as the shepherd, Gabriel Oak never stopped loving Bathsheba Everdene, despite her foolish mistakes and rejection of him, God never stops loving us, no matter how brutally we reject him.

In the Greek, the word translated in the CEV as “fails” (and in the ESV as “ends”) simply means to fall, as in to fall down.

It refers to the rain, to a person falling down drunk or in worship or in death, and so on.

Love never falls over, like the imaginary Energizer bunny, it keeps on going on and on and on.

There is a significant difference of course: an endlessly drumming bunny would quickly get very annoying, whereas love, genuine love, is never annoying.

Why never failing is important

Paul spends the whole second half of the chapter we read earlier emphasizing that love never fails.

He points to all the spiritual things the Corinthians value—prophesying, speaking in tongues, possessing spiritual knowledge—all this, he says, will pass away.

Ultimately, only three things will remain: faith, hope and love.

And the most significant, the most important, the greatest of these is love.

Why does Paul make such a point of love’s enduring nature?

Why is it so important that it never fail?

I think this is related to what love is, what it does in reality, and where it comes from.

John says “God is love.”

God has always been love.

In the eternity before time, before creation, when God alone existed, he was love, because he was three in one.

The Father loved the Son, who loved the Spirit, who loved the Father, and so on.

This mutual love is what the world is built on.

The interdependence of all things in creation—the way that ecosystems work via diverse species supporting one another; the way that molecules work via diverse atomic elements bonding together; the way that human families and societies work via diverse people caring for one another—all this is merely a pale reflection of those incredible bonds of love at the heart of the triune God—one God in three persons.

Even the devestation of the fall—the corruption of Satan and selfishness—has not been able to loose the bonds that bind the universe!

When we love, we are participating in the deepest law, the deepest pattern, the deepest reality underpinning the cosmos.

Love is not merely a choice.

It is not merely an emotion.

It is not merely a posture, an attitude, or a lifestyle.

Love profoundly transforms the reality we dwell in, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

When Paul says that “the greatest of these is love,” he is, if anything, underplaying the profound importance of love.

The apostle John is not exaggerating when he says,

Without love for one another, we have no life.

We have only death.

As John says later in his letter:

God is love.

And so we see why genuine love never fails.

Genuine love, God’s love—love from God—is the source of life, it is core to who God is.

And God is eternal—he is never-ending, never changing.

And so love is the same.

What does this mean?

So what does this mean for us, then?

If genuine love never fails, what does that mean?

How does it affect the way with live?

Think for a moment about your own hangups.

Think about your fears, your worries, your insecurities.

Why did you get angry with someone the other day?

Why can’t I just get things done when I want to?

What is it that’s holding us back from making friends, from sharing Jesus with our neighbours, from caring unselfishly for our children and spouses and siblings and parents and friends?

I think when we dig deep into our behaviour, and why we don’t live like Jesus, what we find is a fear that we’ll be abandoned.

I don’t share Jesus with my neighbour when I can because I’m afraid of being embarrassed by appearing to be peddling a fantasy.

But if I could trust that Jesus love would not fail, that my neighbour would encounter that love just as surely as I do, then I need not be afraid.

I defend myself aggressively when my wife complains about something because I’m afraid that no-one will protect me if I don’t stick up for myself.

But if I was confident in God’s unfailing love, and its genuine impact in my life (not just some theoretical “makes me feel better” impact, but something that really strengthens me and protects me), then I wouldn’t feel any need to defend myself, and instead I could really listen to my wife and take her complaints seriously to help me love her better.

So much of our lives is lived so weakly because we don’t actually believe that God’s love never fails.

Instead, we believe that God’s love barely even exists, at least in any meaningful way.

But God’s love does exist.

And because God’s love exists, we can show that same love to others.

We can be patient, kind, never envious, boastful, arrogant, disrespectful, or self-seeking.

We can refuse to tally wrongs against us and so escape irritability, and we can rejoice in the truth instead of in wrongdoing.

We can always be supportive, always hope for and believe for the best, enduring patiently.

And, like God, our love can go on and on, never falling, never failing, a rock for those who need us.

This is what God calls us to, through Paul’s words in this letter to Corinth.

It is a hard calling, a challenge to the best of us.

But it is a call for all Christians, young and old, fresh and wizened, inexperienced and experienced.

A discipline of love

How can we do this?

I have a suggestion for a sort of spiritual practice that might make this easier.

My suggestion is that each day, when we wake up, we take one of these attributes of love, we reflect on how God has shown his love to us in that attribute, and then we pray that God will help us to show that to the people we interact with this day.

So, for example, if we start with patience, we’ll think about how God has been patient with us, how even though he knows how wicked our hidden thoughts us, he still patiently works with and in us.

And then we pray for God to give us patience with those we encounter today, and for him to rescue us from the temptation towards impatience.

Each day we can focus on a different aspect of God’s love, until we come to the end and start again.