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. 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. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:8-13 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/1co.13.8-13.NIVUK
While I was a missionary in Romania, I sometimes had the privilege of attending weddings. One of them has always remained ingrained in my mind.
The Bridal March played. The bride and groom came in, accompanied by their emotional parents. The worship leader announced the first song. ‘We will now stand to sing Sfârșitul veacului trăim, cu lupte, ure și război...’ which translates as ‘We are living at the end of the age, with battles, hatred and war...’
Do you know what crossed my mind?
‘I hope I’m invited to the wedding meal, because this could be very interesting...’
And yet, the Bride of Christ – the Church – has often been the site of incredibly bitter battles that border on hatred and, in some truly dreadful cases, have given way to it entirely.
Paul sees the problems in the Corinthian church. He sees the battles for supremacy and the bitter arguments and the desire to be ‘right at all costs’. And he gives them the solution to it all:
Love.
In this last section on love, he moves passed explaining its importance and what it is to describe its effects. His extraordinary prose in these verses is designed to illustrate the clear and unmistakable advantage love has over any other way to relate to each other within the Body of Christ.
He started by talking about the durability of love – that love never fails.
The word for ‘fails’ means ‘to fall down’. In other words, everything around us will fall, but love will not.
Paul takes three examples from verses 1 and 2 and explains the crucial difference between them and love – we would do very well to pay attention to this.
Prophecies will cease. Paul knew this to be true. All prophesies had fallen silent in his nation for four hundred years due to their chronic disobedience of God. But even that is not what Paul is talking about here. He is saying that the day will come when there will no longer be any need for prophecy, and so it will fall silent. So the very ministry Paul is about to argue is very important for public worship is now something Paul says is secondary to love.
Tongues will also be stilled. The word in Greek means ‘to be paused’ but also ‘to cease’. In other words, a day will come when tongues will be utterly redundant and no longer used in worship.
So this means that speaking in tongues is not at all the means by which we determine if someone is or is not a believer. Of course not! The defining characteristic has, is and always be love – not according to me, but Jesus Christ Himself:
‘A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’
John 13:34-35 NIVUK
We will discuss this later, but I believe these two verses in John destroy any argument which asserts that the three occasions (and there are only three) in Acts when speaking in tongues takes place are proof that you must speak in tongues to be considered a Christian. That is nonsense. 1 Corinthians 12:30 confirms it without a shadow of a doubt.
The defining characteristic of a Christian is not tongues, it’s love.
One day we will have no further need to speak in tongues. That will never be true of love.
Thirdly, knowledge will pass away – both human and divine.
This is significant because there was a group of cultic Christians called gnostics (coming from the same word in Greek) who believed they had secret, insider knowledge from God and that because of this they could be saved.
Paul blows that idea to smithereens with just two words in Greek: their knowledge will pass away.
This is something we must bear in mind. I have sat through services where it’s obvious that a lot of effort has been put into maintaining a service that is theologically on-point, but, to ask the question once asked by those great Bible scholars the Black Eyed Peas ‘Where is the love?’
Yes, it is important to have the right theology, but there must also be love. Without love, all our fine theology is moot and cold and pointless and dead.
A Gospel without love is meaningless.
Paul then discusses the totality of love. He uses three pictures to explain why love is the whole picture, while everything else is only part of it.
He takes those two great gifts of knowledge and prophecy, and then says that they offer partial vision, but love is the complete picture.
He says that we find ourselves as children, immaturely grasping at some way to comprehend the world, but love brings us to complete maturity.
He says that anything else is but a pale reflection – the complete reality is love.
So if we put our trust in knowledge, prophecy or any other gift, or indeed anything else, we have incomplete vision, incomplete maturity and an incomplete grasp of reality.
In short, only love completes us.
How can we know this for sure?
John takes up the explanation:
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1 John 4:7-12 NIVUK
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
1 John 4:16 NIVUK
Love is both the reason for and the culmination of the Gospel. A Christian who can say they have found new life at the cross – the greatest symbol of love human beings have ever known – and then not love their brother or sister in Christ does not fully understand the implications of what they believe.
A Christian must love, because Christ first loved them.
In Ephesians 5:21-33 we see Paul using the illustration of Christ’s relationship with the church to explain how Christians should approach marriage. Its another beautifully challenging set of verses.
But what if the church could become a model for marriages?
What if obedience to these verses could act as a model for people for how they should react to others who are not at all like them?
What if the church could truly become an agent of change in a lost world by truly living the Gospel of love it preaches?
How much of a difference would that make to the world?
Questions
Had you ever thought that love could be superior to every gift practiced by anyone in the church? What does this mean for you?
What could your church do to more actively demonstrate love for each other and those around them?
How can you do your part to make sure that your church demonstrates the love of Christ to those around them?
Comments