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PART 1
1 Corinthians Ch.13v1-3
Introduction
Love is a very strange word and can mean all kinds of things to different people. Apparently the internet trader Amazon in listing its books has 2,652 titles on the subject of “heaven”, 10,304 titles on the subject of “money”, 16,765 titles on the subject of “sex”, 18,818 titles on the subject of “God” and 30,066 titles on the subject of “love”. People are interested in love and love is one of the deepest of human needs and yet it is a very misunderstood concept.
Think about this love letter which Marie wrote to Jimmy her ex fiancée.
Dear Jimmy,
No words can ever express the great unhappiness I have felt since breaking off our engagement. Please say you’ll take me back. No one could ever take your place in my heart. So please forgive me. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Yours for ever. Marie.
PS Congratulations on winning the National Lottery.
Ideas about love are divergent and people have said and still say all kinds of things about it. “Love is a warm puppy.” “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Shakespeare said, “Love is a sickness full of woes.” “Love is like measles, everybody catches it some times.” “Love makes the world go round.” Love has been known to produce goose bumps, loss of appetite and starry eyes and while it may make the world go round it can also cause a lot of confusion in the process.
When Paul the Apostle speaks about love in this chapter he is talking about a kind of love that is not related to sensual considerations or physical attraction, and it is something that does not depend on a romantic or harmonious atmosphere or winsome coaxing or tender wooing – no Paul’s word for love in this chapter is the Greek word agape which really describes God’s love for us and the kind of love that God looks for from us. It is the kind of love that is directed towards God, our neighbour and even our enemy in the New Testament.
The model for this love which Paul talks about lies in the nature and character of God himself and his dealings with human beings. If you think about the love of God you begin to realise that God’s love for human beings was first shown in creation and it was more sharply focussed in the long and trying relationship between God and the children of Israel and then it was brought to excruciating clarity in Jesus Christ. God’s love may well have been bright in his dealings with the children of Israel over hundreds of years but his love shone with a new and surpassing brilliance in the coming of his Son Jesus Christ.
It was this agape kind of love that caused Jesus Christ to leave the glory and beauty of heaven for the sake of earth and that caused him to persist in that love on this earth even when he was treated with indifference and rejection. It was this love that caused Jesus Christ to go to the despised and rejected and to reach down to people in love and healing power. It was this love that caused Jesus Christ to finally go in humiliation to a cross in order to save a lost world. It was this agape love which filled the hearts of the early Christians through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit and enabled them in turn to be reflectors of that same love to a lost world and it is still that kind of love, which is a far cry from warm puppies and moonlight and roses, which is meant to pervade the lives of Christian believers and the life of the Christian community.
David Prior in his commentary on 1 Corinthians says that this agape love “is a love for the utterly unworthy, a love which proceeds from God who is love. It is a love lavished on others without a thought of whether they are worthy to receive it or not.” That is God’s kind of love and Prior says that Jesus said it is a love which has to characterise and control the Christian community if it is to be recognised as Christian, and if Jesus himself is to be recognised as God’s Son and the Saviour of the world.
While it is good for all of us to assess our individual lives in the mirror of this chapter from time to time, Prior says that this chapter directs us to our true calling and that it is probably good for any church to assess its life together from time to time in the mirror of this chapter.
I read about one church which had house groups and the leader of one of the house groups went to the minister one day and said that the group had decided to disband. Apparently it was the only thing which this group had agreed on for some time. When the minister asked why the leader said that they had been together for so long that they had learned how much they disliked each other. Perhaps they had been putting on church so much that the strain had begun to tell and one by one relationships became threadbare as they found out what others were really like and decided they didn’t like what they saw. The leader said, “We have no alternative but to disband.” The minister said, “There is an alternative. You could decide to do what Christians are called to do and choose to love those whom you dislike.” The minister and the leader looked together at the meaning of agape love in the scriptures saw how it was modelled in Christ and was a mandate for Christians. That group didn’t disband in the end but they engaged in some healthy confrontations and commitments and they carried on in fellowship together. That is the kind of agape love which Paul is talking about in this chapter. It is not just a beautiful passage of literature to be read at weddings and grand state occasions but it is a practical chapter describing what real Christian love is and describing the kind of love that should be seen in the life of the individual Christian and the life of the church community.
Let us now turn to the first three verses of the chapter where Paul speaks about:-
1) THE PREEMINENCE OF LOVE (v1-3)
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
These verses bring us into the context of this chapter in regard to the church at Corinth because in chapter 12 Paul has been speaking about God’s rich endowment of spiritual gifts to his people and if you go on to chapter 14 he gives instructions about the use of those spiritual gifts among God’s people. Here in this middle chapter 13 Paul speaks of God’s love which can be imparted to our lives to make sure that those gifts are used in the right way – the way of love and for the glory of God.
So where there might be controversy in the church and in the instance of the Corinthian church the controversy was in relation to the gifts of the Holy Spirit the one thing that can help in terms of any delicate discussion when feelings might be running high is to make love the pre-eminent thing. In a way it is the same with any issue in the life of any Christian community – love must always be preeminent in the midst of tension.
Paul here speaks of some of the spiritual gifts which he has spoken about in the previous chapter such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, wisdom, knowledge and faith and then he mentions giving to the poor and even martyrdom and he says that we can have all of those gifts and give our money away and even die as a martyr but unless love is the pre-eminent motivating force and incentive in all of it then it amounts to nothing. Paul isn’t knocking any gift of the Spirit nor is he knocking any sacrificial Christian action or activity but he is saying that love is to be the essential ingredient in all that we are and do.
The gifts we have and the sacrificial things we do as Christian believers are all very important things because they can be the eyes, the hands and the feet of Jesus as he acts and moves on this earth now but if those gifts and actions are no longer an expression of Christ’s love then they may well be harmful in their effects and what really matters is that in whatever gifts or sacrificial act or service you and I express other people, whether within the church or outside the church, should encounter the ascended Lord Jesus receiving some glimpse of his love for them.
Paul has said that we should desire spiritual gifts because they can be important in bringing blessing to the life of the church and the life of the world but the excellent way for those things to have most effect is when love is the motivating force in their use – in other words Jesus and his love must shine through everything. When Alan Redpath wrote on these verses he said, “The one thing that matters is Jesus Christ and his love, his passion in your heart. Do you possess that now?”
The important thing to realise is that we do need gifts and sacrificial actions and service but none of those things can ever compensate for the absence of love in the life of the Christian and the life of the church community. This chapter which we will go on to consider is one of the most humbling and challenging in the Bible and whenever we read it we really cannot emerge from it the same as we realise again that this love of Christ must be the pre-eminent motivating force in our lives.
PART 2
1 Corinthians Ch.13v4-13
On my bookshelves I have several books written by the Rev. Andrew Murray which have been and still are a great blessing to me. It was said of Andrew Murray that he used to read this particular chapter of the Bible on his knees every day of his life and because of that it is little wonder that his life seemed to be so impregnated with the Spirit of Christ and perhaps that is also why his ministry, even though he has been dead for many years now, persists through his writings and still has great influence. Something of this love which Paul wrote about shone through his life but we need to know clearly what this love is like and so we see in verses 4 to 7 that Paul writes about:-
1) THE PROPERTIES OF LOVE (V4-7)
“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
According to Paul here a loving person will behave in a certain way and will do and not do certain things because of the kind of person he or she is becoming as the love of God is shed abroad in his or her heart through the Holy Spirit.
There are those who have said that if you substitute Jesus for the word love in this section you really do have a description of Jesus himself and to become more like this is to become more like Jesus which is the aim of the working of God’s Spirit in our lives. It is for that reason that possessing these qualities is a top priority for the individual Christian and the community of the church.
We know that it isn’t easy being like this and if we substitute our own name in the passage where it says love we soon begin to realise how little we are like this and how even more dependent than ever we are on the working of God’s Spirit to shed the love of God abroad in our hearts. It is not something we achieve in our own strength.
I read a story about an actor who was playing the part of Christ in a Passion Play. While he was carrying his cross up a hill a tourist began to heckle him and make fun of him shouting insults. Finally the actor had taken all that he could take so he threw down his cross, walked over to the tourist and punched him. When the play was over the director said to the actor, “I know that man was a nuiscance but I can’t condone what you did and especially since you are playing the part of Jesus. Jesus was patient and bore all things and he didn’t retaliate. So the actor promised he would behave himself but on the following day the heckler was back and again the actor exploded and went over and punched the man.
The director said that he would have to fire the actor but the actor begged him to give him one more chance saying that if it happened again he could handle it. The director agreed and the next day the actor was carrying his cross again and sure enough the heckler was there up to his old tricks. There was the actor desperately trying to control himself gritting his teeth and clenching his fist. Finally he looked at the heckler and shouted to him, “I’ll see you after the resurrection.”
To be like this description of love is not easy especially when other people either deliberately or unknowingly provoke us in one way or another. As we read this passage we realise often how much it is in sharp contrast to what we are actually like. So we see how sin and Satan easily rob us of all likeness to God’s character but we need to bear in mind that we are actually reading an outline of what the grace of God and the power of the indwelling Spirit have actually come into our lives to accomplish. The purpose is that we should be more and more like these fourteen descriptions of love in these four short verses.
Stuart Briscoe in his book on the fruit of the Spirit said that studying this description of love has been one of the most powerful influences in his life. He said “To take Paul’s words off the velvet shelves of literature and place them on the hard edges of unacceptable behaviour was to be humbled, chastened and challenged.” He said that some times he had little difficulty being impatient with church members who, instead of realising what a superb sermon they had just heard, seemed incapable of asking anything but the most inane and irrelevant questions. So he realised that the love in evidence in such circumstances was more love for his own oratory than for the people’s nurture.
Alan Redpath asked the questions, “Does this passage find you out? Does it show your life to be the reverse of everything that Jesus is?” Thankfully he doesn’t leave it there but encourages us by saying that grace can triumph as the Holy Spirit sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts day by day.
As we go on to verses 8 to 13 we notice that Paul speaks to us of:-
2) THE PERMANENCE OF LOVE (v8-13)
“Love never ends; as for prophecies they will pass away: as for tongues they will cease; as for knowledge it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect: but when the perfect comes the imperfect will pass away. 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. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall fully understand, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Right throughout our pilgrimage on this earth we will need the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the church to enrich the life, worship and fellowship of the church and for the church to fulfil its responsibility in service to the world and to society.
That is why I do not accept the view which some Christians hold that many of these gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased to be given at the end of the apostolic age or when the scriptures were eventually finalised. I have one commentary on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which the author seems to decide which spiritual gifts have ceased and which spiritual gifts still continue to go on. The argument is that these gifts were given during the infancy stage of the church but when the church reached a mature stage either at the end of the apostolic age or when the scriptures were finalised then these gifts became obsolete and unnecessary in the life of the church.
That is a view which I cannot accept as I read Paul’s words here because it seems obvious to me that when Paul refers to “when the perfect comes” he is simply talking about the coming of the perfect age when the kingdom finally is established at the end of the age. It becomes clearer when Paul speaks of seeing in a mirror dimly at this moment and at some future point seeing face to face and then knowing only in part at this moment and at some future time being able to understand fully.
I cannot see that the church ever has been or ever will be at a mature stage until the final coming of the kingdom. We still need all the gifts which God the Holy Spirit has to give us whether they are the more supernatural looking ones or the more seemingly ordinary ones. All the gifts which God has to bless us with will only become superfluous when the perfect comes and I understand that to be at the final establishment of God’s kingdom.
Paul says “Love never ends …. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” The implication is that not only will gifts be superfluous at the end of the age and the final coming of the kingdom, but so too will two graces of the three important graces of the Christian life become superfluous. Faith and hope will then be superfluous but love will never end and love is the greatest and most important of the three graces.
There are those who argue that all three graces will continue in the age to come but I can’t see that personally because my view is that at that point faith will have become sight and we won’t need it any more and our hope will have been fulfilled and we won’t need that any more. Love however will remain and our love for both God and others will then find perfect expression. David Prior comments that “This love continues through death into eternity” and it seems to me that we will indeed be lost in wonder love and praise as Charles Wesley suggested.
This agape love which Paul unfolds for us in this chapter is the evidence of genuine Christian experience. It is this love that sent God to people in Jesus and has ever since raised people to God. To have this love shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit is the greatest experience of the Christian life and the way in which God produces his attractiveness in our lives.
This is what John Ortberg calls the immaculate infection. That we are so filled with the love of Jesus that in touching the world, instead of it infecting us we infect it because those who are touched by the love of Jesus go out spreading germs – joy germs, faith germs, love germs. We are here to go on spreading this immaculate infection of God’s love in Christ.
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