Audio version of this sermon is available here.
And now I will show you the most excellent way. 1If
I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and
understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to
remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away
all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain
nothing.
4 Love
is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5
or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues,
they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know
in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the
partial will pass away. 11 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. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to
face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully
known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the
greatest of these is love.
So let’s begin with the
first section, verses 1-3 which basically begins like this: Everything we think
is important is nothing without divine love. Paul starts this passage in
an effort to counteract the excessive emphasis the Corinthians were evidently
placing on various gifts and abilities that individuals were demonstrating. Paul
gives us 3 categories and each category has both a natural action, something
earthly, and a supernatural action, something heavenly, but regardless of
whether it’s a natural ability or a supernatural ability, all of it is nothing
without divine love. Paul’s overriding theme here is the primacy and importance
of this divine love.
The first category has to do with speech. Paul writes
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of
angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” The word tongues here is the word
for languages. Whether it is natural speaking or supernatural speaking,
whether it is the languages of men, or the heavenly language of angels, the
essential element of importance is divine love. You could be the most gifted
speaker in all the world, you could move people to tears with your words, yet
if these abilities and gifts, even if they have good consequences, don’t come
from a foundation of divine love within you then you might as well be a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. The ability to speak is an incredible power, the
book of James (chapter 3) describes the tongue as a “fire”. I’m sure you can
think of inspirational speeches and words that have changed your life, that
have changed the course of history even. There are some examples from the
movies below.
Now even if you combine all of these inspirational speeches and yet you
don’t have the divine love that Paul is teaching about here, abiding and
residing within you, then all of it might as well sound like the teacher from Charlie Brown.

The final category has to do with
actions, again whether they are natural actions or supernatural actions,
without divine love you gain nothing. You could, as Paul writes, give away
every single material possession you own. You could be so committed to a cause
that you give up yourself to be burned as a martyr. You could even have a faith
that allows you to perform miracles, instantaneously healing someone, and yet if
at the core, at the center of our being if there doesn’t abide and reside this
divine love then you gain nothing. Let me say it again, you could donate
everything you own to the church, you could go to another country and be burned for
proclaiming Jesus, you could even go town to town performing miracles in the
name of God, and still gain nothing.
It’s not about what you say, even if
you spoke with in the language of the angels. It’s not about what you know
intellectually, even if you’re a prophet who understands the very depths of the
mystery of God. It’s not about what you
do, even if you die for the gospel, it’s about this divine love, that’s been
given to us freely, by grace, that is taken in and becomes a part of you. I
keep saying the word divine love rather than just love, because this is a love
that comes from God, from the divine and when you experience it, when you open
yourself up to receive it through repentance, turning away from whatever you
think the end all be all is, and through faith, turning towards the one true
source of all goodness and all divine love, you experience a love that
transcends romantic love, that transcends the love of family, that transcend
the love of friendship, that transcends all the boxes we have to describe love.
The word used in the New Testament is agape. It was a Greek word that wasn’t in
common use before the New Testament, and the Christians took it up and made it
their characteristic word for this divine love. It is a new word for a new
idea. When this new love, this divine love, agape, is received, it begins as a
spark within you that grows into a flame and it is the bond between us and God,
and between us and each other as fellow believers
Agape is the foundation, the
essential element of the secret sauce for Great Relationships. This agape,
can’t help but be expressed, and if you look at verses 4-7, you see how this
divine love expresses itself through being patient, being kind, by not envying
or being boastful, and so on. If agape, divine love, is the tree, then verses
4-7 are the fruit. We won’t go into those verses today, you can go back
online and listen to the last 6 sermons as we fleshed out each of these
manifestations of this divine love, and how they contribute to Great
Relationships.
Today, we press on to the final
section, verses 8-13, which comes back to describing agape, the divine love
directly. Just as verses 1-3 taught us that everything we think is important is
nothing without divine love, so verses 8-13 bookend the chapter by teaching
again that everything we think is important ends, but divine love is
different, is eternal. Verse 8 says that love never fails. More literally, it
translates that divine love will never fall, or collapse, or suffer ruin and
when we look at the following verses we clearly see in contrast that the point
here is that divine love is eternal, it never ends. Paul writes that these
other things, like prophecies, tongues, and knowledge, will cease and pass
away.
Now, whenever
we try to grasp the divine, the infinite, it’s difficult to say the least, so
Paul gives us two metaphors to help us grasp what he’s talking about. The first
metaphor is that of maturity and childhood. He points out there is clearly
a difference between the way in which children speak, think and behave and the
way in which adults speak, think and behave. This may not make sense to some of
you who haven’t had kids yet, but I can clearly attest that children reason
differently than adults. In fact when I was a high school teacher, I was quiet
fond of telling the teenage students that scientifically their brains hadn’t
even finished completely developing so whatever conclusions they came to too
actually couldn’t be trusted because how can you trust a brain that’s not
finished yet? Anyway, I learned this
lesson about little children, before I we had Sophia, when I was riding in the
car with a 3 year old named Reid. We had just gone to a church service with
this family and they had two cars. Reid’s dad took the first car and went ahead
of us to go home. Reid’s mom took the second car with my wife Benita and I and
Reid. About halfway to the house, which this was like a 5 min drive by the way,
Reid starts screaming his head off that he wants to ride with his dad. I tried
reasoning with him. I thought, I’ll fix this. “Reid, what can we do? Do you
want us to pull over and wait for your dad? He left before us so he’ll get home
before us. The fastest way to get to your dad is to keep going home!” How do
you think he responded? He wanted us to pull over and wait for his dad, even
though his dad had left before us! His unreasonableness stumped me and I let
Benita and Reid’s mom take over. When we as humans think about this divine
love, and really whenever we try to grasp God, we have to recognize that we are
currently in a time of childishness. We haven’t reached perfection yet, and so
all our abilities, speech, knowledge and actions, which may seem great at this
time, are nothing compared to this divine love, this love of a completely
different order. You might be the best block stacker in pre-school, but you
can’t ride that train your whole life. The expression and receiving of divine love, however, lasts through every
age and into eternity.
The second metaphor that Paul uses
is that of a mirror. The city of Corinth was actually famous for its
mirrors, but two things to note. One, during this time the mirrors were
polished metal mirrors, with not the same quality of reflection that you and I
enjoy today. Second, few Christians would be able to afford even a good quality
metal mirror. So when you look into a poor quality, polished copper mirror, how
good is the image quality? You can see somewhat dimly what you look like, but
it’s nothing compared to seeing someone face to face. For fun, we’ve put in the
lobby a camera and television that distorts your face a little to help
emphasize this metaphor. We live right now in a time that our vision is not
perfect. Again, many of the things we value, like speeches, knowledge, and
actions, are only temporary when compared to the High Definition reality of
divine love.
These are the metaphors that Paul
uses, but one that’s become more popular recently is that of multiple dimensions. In our study of quantum
physics and the states of particles like electrons, scientists have begun to
dabble with the idea of the existence of different dimensions, different
realities, outside our own reality. I ran across an article this week about a neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben
Alexander , who believes that he had a near death experience in which he
got a glimpse of this other dimension. Previously to this experience he
thought, like many materialist, that all there was is this world, this reality,
this time so to speak. This is what he said:
“There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay
in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons
of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had
attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger
dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the
old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple
impossibility”
“It was very clear that love was a huge part of the constituent of that
whole multiverse.” And that a being “looked
at me … It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a
look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments
of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those
other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than
all of them.”
Paul ends this chapter
by writing “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest
of these is love.” This divine love is everything, is eternal, is a taste of
another reality that awaits us. Everything in this time that we think is
important is nothing without divine love. Everything we think is important will
come to an end but divine love is eternal. This divine love is the greatest even of hope
and faith because love unites us personally in relationship to God and through
God’s love we are enabled to love one another in great relationships, other
worldly relationships. This divine love is divine, it’s not easily grasped, so
we conclude reading another section of scripture that helps spell it out for us. 1 John 4:7-16 says:
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone
who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not
love does not know God, because God is love. 9 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. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but
that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his
love is made complete in us. 13 We know that we live in him and he
in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen
and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15
If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in
God. 16 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 him.