This text is very popular among fiancées and wedding planners. As a definition or description of love, it’s a classic. And it’s classy. It is one of the best-written, most poetic and beautifully written pieces of literature on the topic. It’s craftsmanship as a written piece is so outstanding that some scholars think it was actually beyond Paul’s ability. They believe that somebody else wrote it, Paul knew of it, and very appropriately included it here, right smack dab in the middle of talking about the unity of the Body of Christ, the variety of spiritual gifts, and how that all works together.
You see, as good as it is for use in weddings, it’s important for us today to pay attention to the fact that Paul didn’t write it for a wedding. He wrote it for the church. Before chapter 13 we have chapter 12 in Corinthians in which Paul wrote about one body many parts, one Spirit, many gifts. He was helping the Corinthians understand how the community called the church ought to exist. Apparently in that community there was some misunderstanding about what could Christians do and how does the Holy Spirit operate in our lives. So Paul’s question in chapter 12, “do all speak in tongues” was probably typical of the kinds of problems the Christians at Corinth were working on and needed help with.
God, through Paul, spoke up for the great variety of Spiritual gifts possible in Christian experience. But while the Spiritual gifts make for a variety of Christian behaviors, God says he has a most excellent way of holding it all together. That’s what love is for. That’s why we have 1 Cor. 13 where it is. In the next chapter, 14, Paul shows how love has its impact on the way the members of the church worship together. There is to be no competition, no showiness, no lack of consideration for each other’s needs.
Chapter 14 indicates that apparently Christians who could speak in tongues used it as a real proof of the presence of the Holy Spirit in them. So in worship they freely expressed themselves as a testimony to the reality and power of God. This was supposed to help the unbelievers believe and encourage the new Christians to grow in the faith until they could speak in tongues too. That’s putting it in the best possible light. But there are also hints here and in chapter 12 that already in Corinth, even so long ago, tongues speakers thought that everybody should speak in tongues and you weren’t a very good Christian if you didn’t, maybe not a Christian at all. And in spite of this letter to the Corinthians, churches today can still fall into this error, even if they quote 1 Corinthians to prove that speaking in tongues is a legitimate spiritual gift!
So what is it about love that is so important to this discussion of spiritual gifts and the nature of Christian community? Paul’s chapter breaks into three sections; the absence of love, the nature of love, the greatness of love. The first section, verses 1-3 depicts love as the proper motivation for everything we do as Christians. The next section, 4-8 is Paul’s actual definition or description of love itself, what it is and what it is not. And the last section, 9-13 is actually Paul’s loving way of addressing the boastful tongues speakers who thought they were so mature in the faith. He was letting them know that in reality they were the immature Christians who caused the problems. He was telling them to grow up! And he adds a last little comment that love is the best, most important and most enduring quality of Christian living.
One of the things that Paul is really trying to do in the first section is prove that love makes all the difference. There were other religious cults around the Corinthians. These new believers themselves used to be pagans and idol worshipers so they were very familiar with the religious practices of the other religions around them. Do you know that speaking in tongues happened in other religions before Christianity? It was all around the citizens of Corinth.
As idolaters they were in contact with demons and evil spirits that they thought were legitimate Gods worthy of worship. And these demons encouraged such deception by causing their followers to speak in tongues. Yes it would be quite an experience to feel taken over by a spirit that made you speak in a language you didn’t know and made you feel that spiritual godlike beings really do exist and might help you live a better life if you treat them right. But Paul is saying the experience itself is not enough to assure one that he or she is really in touch with God. Without the distinctly Christian characteristic of Love as defined by God, all that ecstatic utterance called speaking in tongues is just noise, like a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
By the way, Corinth was also filled with such noise. The commentaries I read mentioned that the pagan religious culture of Corinth included this practice of marching to their worship services, or even announcing their own religious rites in processions that included gongs and cymbals being sounded repeatedly as they moved through the city streets. There were many such groups, so there were many such instruments, all playing at the same time. But they were not together, not in tune, not in harmony, and not making any sense at all, just a great noise, such as you might hear at the humane society when all the dogs are barking. It’s not exactly a symphony.
That’s how Paul brings his readers attention away from the surface behaviors and gets us down to the foundational heart of the matter. We must be moved by love, and nothing that we do matters at all if we do not have love. It is the same principle in the next verse. All around the Corinthians were all kinds of soothsayers and fortunetellers. Paul lumped them all under the Christian terms saying, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge.” It was really just like today. We still have astrologers and fortunetellers and Palm readers. Have you noticed the new shop down by Kev-lan? Would you say that such operations are motivated by Christian love? Or are they more likely in it for the money? That’s Paul’s point. Without love, even if you do it in church and call it the gift of prophesy, you are no better than all the rest of the charlatans in the world around you, drawing attention to your self for your own reasons.
And yes even the last verse of the section in which Paul brings up the greatest sacrifice of one’s own life, he reminds his readers that even that can be done for the wrong reasons. In summary, God is love, and of we are not motivated by the love that comes from God we are actually no use to God at all. So rather than looking at any particular behavior as evidence of being filled with the Spirit, Paul says look for the love.
I could paraphrase these verses for our community to use in this way. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of us attend worship. It doesn’t matter how much of our money goes into fancy video and other productions and equipment to make a great worship service. It doesn’t matter how much we give to charity and how many ministries we have to feed the hungry and serve the poor. What it all boils down to is, when we get together for worship, do we really enjoy each others company, do we really respect and care for each other in the most otherish way we can? Because if we don’t really love each other, anything else that we do that looks like success to us, will appear to all the world around us as vain hypocrisy.
One more thing. It is interesting to me that Paul speaks of doing things, but of having love. This highlights for me that the Love that Paul is talking about is not something that comes naturally to humans. To illustrate this I want to highlight that portion of your bulletin insert in which Jon Walker paraphrased Galatians 2:20. The original verse spoke of Christ who lives in me. We need to keep that in mind as we listen to this excellent interpretation. “It is no longer just I who loves, but Christ who loves in me. And this unlovable person that I now love, I love by the faith of the son of God, who loved this unlovable one first and gave himself up for this person I incorrectly see as undeserving of my love.” So the kind of love that needs to be at work in our lives to create genuine Christians community is the supernatural love that comes from God and can only be active in the life of a Spirit filled believer.
In the next section, Paul tells us exactly what love is and what it is not. It is interesting and perhaps it should also sadden us to have to admit that the best way Paul has of defining proper Christian love is to put it all in contrast with the way we humans normally behave. I am not going to expound on this very much. I am just going to get the point across through a simple exercise. But before we do that I want to point out what we usually mean when we humans say we love something. This is actually a misuse of the word love but it is so common in our language that we simply must talk about it a bit.
For example, what do I really mean when I say that I love chocolate? Doesn’t that mean that when I think about chocolate and when I go and get some all I am really interested in is the pleasure that I receive from chocolate? Isn’t love like that really very self-centered? Properly speaking I should not say I love chocolate. Not if we want to speak of love the way the Bible does. I could say I am drawn to chocolate. I am attracted to chocolate. It gives me great pleasure to eat chocolate. But every time I eat chocolate, I am not doing anything for the chocolate. My desire for chocolate is very self-serving and self-seeking. My relationship with chocolate is entirely one-sided, it is all about what I get out of it.
Similarly then, what do I really mean when I say I love my wife? According to the world’s use of the word, and according to my own human nature tendencies, to be honest, without the Holy Spirit giving me God’s kind of love, I would have to admit that a lot of the time I mean the self-serving, self-centered, “what am I getting out of it” kind of love. In re-learning about the kind of Christian love that Paul is talking about here I have begun to place a greater emphasis on what I have always really felt as part of my love for Kathy but needs to be more and more the focus of how I love her. Now I have started expressing my love for her by saying things like, “I want to help you have a really great day.”
Think of putting that kind of emphasis on your motivation for everything you do. Those of you who are married, what would happen in your house if you turned to your spouse and genuinely meant it when you say, “I want to help you have a really great day.” And how would you spend your time to make that happen? For those of you not married, you could still employ the same principle, in your workplace for example. Are you on the job just because it happens to be where you ended up in the process of looking for a paycheck? Or can you genuinely say, “I want to be a blessing here. I am giving myself away to this task and to the people with whom I work because it is where God can use me to do the most good in the world.”
Let’s even ask what we mean when we say we love God. In John 4:18 we read, “We love [God] because he first loved us.” God reached down from Heaven to save us from sin. We receive tremendous benefit and blessing from God because he loved us first. That’s where it starts. That same self-seeking, self-serving nature realizes that it is a good thing to believe in God so that we don’t have to suffer in hell, we can be forgiven of sin, we can be guided and blessed by the Holy Spirit. We can be filled with Holy Spirit joy and experience a sense of belonging and purpose. But if that is what we mean when we say we love God, then we are still talking about the worldly kind of love. That’s loving God the way we love chocolate, for what we get out of it.
Now the exercise. One commentary suggested that we should read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 like this: Jesus is always patient. Jesus is always kind. Jesus does not envy. Jesus does not boast. Jesus is not proud. Jesus is not rude. Jesus is not self-seeking. Jesus is not easily angered. Jesus keeps no record of wrongs. Jesus does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Jesus always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Jesus never fails.
In this we to see the perfect character of Jesus and how he loves us. Isn’t that all true? Now think, if Christ lives in us because we are Christians, then we should also be able to read these verses like this: I am always patient. I am always kind. I do not envy. I do not boast. I am not proud. I am not rude. I am not self-seeking. I am not easily angered. I keep no record of wrongs. I do not delight in evil but rejoice with the truth. I always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere. I never fail.
Is that all true of each of you? When I look at it that way, I find that I have to admit I haven’t perfected the kind of love that God wants to see in me. And now, when I say I love God, I want to grow up into meaning that I want to be as completely otherish as God himself is. Real Christian love is all about what others get out of us. And I realize that in this life I will never quite manage it. My sinful nature will always get in the way.
That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t even bother to try. Oh, no. As Paul said, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.” That keeps me humble before the Lord. I can’t get conceited and think I am a pretty mature Christian. I must always go back to God again, every day in fact, and acknowledge a continuing dependence upon Him to put his Spirit into me so that I act more like Him the next time. That’s what prayer, Bible Study and Christian fellowship are all about, the discipline of depending upon God so that I grow in grace and show more Christian love.
That’s why Paul was led in the final section to talk about the difference between childish ways and grown up ways. We all start out in life needing to be completely cared for by others. And to use the easy to understand worldly way with this word, we all do love to be held, to be fed, to be played with to be washed and warmed and comforted. But what we have to learn as we grow is how to give it back. We have to learn to love comforting others. We have to learn to love serving others. It has to be shown to us first. And we see it in the cross of Christ. That’s where we first get a glimpse of the amazing grace of God and how completely otherish is his love for us.
God certainly didn’t love any of us for what he could get out of us. We were all dead, completely worthless and unresponsive to His Spirit. But he loved us because love is his nature. He loved us for what we could get out of Him, life itself, eternal life as his best gift to give us the very best possible life we could possibly live.
But we barely understand that. We see it as if we are looking in a mirror, and in Paul’s day the mirrors were only of polished bronze that gave a poor reflection. The King James says it this way, “we see through a glass darkly.” But that’s because in King James’ day mirrors were by then being made of glass and a mirror was called a glass. In the Bible Paul really was referring to one of these bronze mirrors that didn’t have a perfect reflection like our modern mirrors.
The Truth is, this God, the God of the universe, the God who breathed stars into existence became sin for you. He looked down at tiny little you and loved you enough to say, “I want you to have a great day. Yes and I want you to have a wonderful eternal life.” Let’s believe that God really does want to be our Heavenly Father. Let’s trust Jesus to come and dwell in our hearts so that we begin to have the same kind of love he has for others. And let’s try to put that into practice, not in our own strength, but continually looking to Jesus and depending upon the Holy Spirit to fill us and refill us with His Holy Spirit so that the world sees us fulfilling Jesus command to love one another. Then we will be very useful to God in his work of saving other souls. Amen.
