In the late 1990’s my primary
seminary professor, Dr. Doug Dickens, traveled to the former Soviet Union. As a professor of pastoral ministry, a
pastoral counselor and hospital chaplain supervisor, Dr. Dickens worked with
hospitals, psychiatrists and psychologists around the country. He traveled to a gritty, post-soviet
wasteland of a Russian city to meet with doctors, hospital administrators and
clergy to talk about building a pastoral ministry component into their hospital
services.
Needless to say, Dr. Dickens faced a
skeptical audience as he addressed an atheistic medical staff. The staff had been very kind and receptive to
him all week as they toured him around the hospital campus. Friendships had been formed, despite the
language, cultural, and religious divides.
At one of the final gatherings, Dr. Dickens stood before an audience of atheist
friends and spoke about the value of prayer, emotional and spiritual connections,
and kindness in the healing of patients.
One psychologist succinctly uttered what everyone was thinking, “We do
not believe in your God. How do you even
know God exists? How do you know this
kind of care works?”
Quicker on his feet than I, Dr.
Dickens asked the psychologist who he now called friend about his wife and
family.
“Do
you love Nadia, your wife, and your three girls?”
“Of course, I do,” the doctor
responded.
“How do you know you love them? What does love look like?”
“Well … my heart hurts for
them. I would give my life for
them. They make my life better.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Dickens
responded. “This is exactly what the
love of God feels like. This is how we
know God - God first loved us and gave his life for us. It is this kind of virtue that changes lives
in a hospital.”
Love points us to God and
demonstrates the presence of Jesus within us.
In Paul’s first letter to the church
in Corinth, he addresses a variety of conflicts within the church: Whose followers will control of the church –
Paul or Apollo’s? How will the church
celebrate communion that doesn’t ostracize members of the community? And … what are the roles of the spiritual
gifts in the community – are certain gifts like the gift of speaking in tongues
more important in the community than say service or teaching?
In the middle of this letter – Paul,
like Dr. Dickens, points the Corinthians back to the heart of faith and life: love. As
all of these issues are swirling around the church – people are taking sides,
individuals are being slander, including Paul – and they have forgotten the
true essence of what it means to a follower of Jesus: Love.
For Paul, Love sits at the heart of
a life with Jesus. Without love, we miss
Jesus. Without love, we miss the heart
of the church. Without love, we are just
being religious. Without love, our
hearts and our lives dry up.
1 Corinthians 13 demonstrates this more
beautifully than any other biblical or nonbiblical writing. The passage is written as a Greek rhetorical
device common in the first century called an encomia. An encomia was written to praise either an
individual or a virtue. 1 Corinthians is
an encomia in praise of love. We can simply call this Paul’s love letter to
the world. Rather than our typical kind
of love letter – expressing love for another person, Paul addresses love in the
in the life of the church.
If we are patient and attentive
enough, this love letter of Paul’s can teach us how we can love the world as
God loves us. Over the next few weeks, I will preach a
series of sermons called Love Stories. Each week, I will take a description of love
from 1 cor13 and describe how this aspect of love is lived out within
individuals in the Bible. February is a
month to celebrate love – I hope this February we will also be shaped by God’
divine love for us and the world.
In chapter 13, Paul singles out love
as the defining characteristic of our faith.
1.
Love Matters (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)
The
first thing we see in the prologue of the chapter (v.1-3) is that Love
matters! In chapter 12, Paul has been teaching
the Corinthians on spiritual gifts – speaking in tongues, prophecy, and
faith. In Chapter 13, Paul instructs that
while we may have all of these spiritual gifts – if we miss love, everything
has been in vain. Love matters. Listen for the
spiritual gifts listed in these verses.
If
I speak in the tongues of mortals
and of angels, but do not have 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 do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand
over my body so that I may boast,[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
The prologue
establishes love as the essential element of a faithful life in Jesus.
For most of his letter, Paul points
the Corinthians to view and emulate his life as a positive example of Christian
living. Here Paul does so again –this time
as a negative example. Paul shows
himself as one gifted with many spiritual gifts – tongues, prophecy, faith,
knowledge, and even sacrifices – yet, he says – when he exercises these gifts
without love – they are useless.
Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and
writer. He makes this statement in one
of his cartoon pieces: “A story without
Love is not worth telling.” He goes on
to describe this statement: “The best
stories are about things we care about, told to the people we care about. This
is true whether we’re talking fiction, fact, people, ideas or yes, the story
about the business you’re trying to get off the ground."
Think
about the stories we share: the funny stories
about when we laughed so hard mike came from our noses; the sad stories about
the last moments we had with a loved one as he or she died; the business
stories about the customer or the sale who saved the company or the job or the
day. What makes these story so power is
love – our love for someone or something in this story. A story without love is not worth telling.
Paul would say the same thing about
a life of faith. Life is not worth
living without love. We might build the
biggest church or have the most people attend or be completely out of debt –but
if we fail to love, it’s not a life worthy to be lived. We might raise our kids to stay out of
trouble or get all the way to retirement with a portfolio full of money or make
good on a test – but if we fail to allow love to shape us, we might as well
have just let everything go to waste. We
might even be a great singer in a church choir or quartet, a great preacher
seen around the world via youtube or have the bestselling book at lifeway – yet
if we fail to love, we should have simply stayed home.
Paul wants us to know as we live our
lives – LOVE Matters and we should never forget it.
2.
Love described (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)
In the middle verses of the chapter
(v. 4-7), Paul describes love. This is
love described and it’s beautiful. We learn
the characteristics and functions of love.
Each word and phrase brings out a particular angle of love lived. The first two descriptions are positive and
show what Love is: 4 Love is patient; love is kind;
The
next 4 phrases describe love by what it is not:
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it
does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
Paul
concludes this description with sweeping claims about what love does when lived
out in the world: 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, endures all things.
Love
is this two way street. It provides a
context for mutuality, understanding and relatedness between believers, God,
and the world. When we love God, others,
and the world – we experience love ourselves.
This
is the ambiguity of love that makes no rational sense. There is nothing in this description about
what love provides for me, while one of the greatest needs in all of humanity
is to be loved. How many stupid things are
done in the name of being loved by another person: standing outside a window serenading the girls
of our dreams, going too far to prove you really love someone, risking our jobs
or careers for what we think is true love?
Paul
demonstrates the ambiguity of God’s love – to
be loved we must love – for the sake of another person. To understand the love of God, we are called
to love God and love others. We find
love when we love another person.
C.S.
Lewis puts it this way:
“When
I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my
earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly
dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the
state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest all. When first things are
put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”
God
loves us and makes us whole. This love
gains expression as we love others. It
cannot be held – it can only be given.
3.
Love Forever (1 Corinthians 13:8-13
The conclusion to this chapter (v.
8-13) makes this bold statement: love forever! Love given extends into eternity.
Love
never ends … v. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly,[b] but then we will see
face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have
been fully known. And now faith, hope,
and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
The
eternal nature of love allows it to be present fully now and yet guaranteed to
be present in the end times for which we believe and hope. Life as we know is
only a partial glimpse of what life is with god is about. We know only in part. We prophecy only in part. We see only in part. The analogy Paul uses has entered into a
popular lexicon – Life now is like looking into a mirror – dimly. Yet,
there is hope. One day we will reach
full maturity. One day, we will see face
to face.
The
Greek word here is Telos – which mean
complete, full, end. Paul reminds us
there will come a time when God pulls back the curtains to this world and we
will see with brand new eyes the full world of God all around us.
And
here’s Paul’s point – the love we experience and practice today is
eternal. This love which we share in
this world will also be felt and shared in that world to come. Love transcends this world. Fully present now – is guaranteed to be
present in the future.
The novel
Bridge of San Luis Rey by American
author Thornton Wilder tells the story of several interrelated people who die
in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru.
The plot centers on a Catholic friar who witnesses the tragic accident who
begins inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic
answer to the question of why each had to die. At the very end of the book,
Wilder writes this statement on the eternal nature of Love which Paul
describes: "There is a land of the
living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the
only meaning." In all that we do in
life – from this life to the next – what matters most, what gives the most
meaning, what survives us – is the love we pour into the world.
Paul concludes
this way: And now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; and the greatest of these is love.
Conclusion:
Usually, this is where we stop
reading in 13:13. Yet – Paul doesn’t
stop there. If we read one more verse
into chapter 14, we see Pauls’ challenge for the Corinthians and for us: “Pursue love and
strive for the spiritual gifts.” 1
Corinthians 14:1) Pursue love! Paul not only writes an encomia on the virtue of love – Paul challenges the Corinthians and
us to love! This is our purpose as
Christians and as a church.
Because
eternal, other centered love matters –pursue love in our lives. Because love is described, pursue love. Because
love is eternal, pursue love. Practice
love so much that it defines our lives and our church.
In the middle part of the 20th
Century, Frederick Franck traveled to the middle of the deepest part of Africa
to visit a man who sought simply to pursue the love found in 1Cor13. His name was Dr. Schweitzer. Frank wrote these words about him.
“Here
was the extraordinarily gifted son of a small-town Lutheran pastor who has
developed his immense potentialities to their utmost limit—as a revolutionary
theologian, as a profound, yet practical philosopher, and as a great organist
and musicologist who by the age of thirty had written a definitive study of
Johann Sebastian Bach.”
“Then,
suddenly, he gave up these careers, resigned from his professorship at the
University of Strasbourg and decided to study medicine. This decision came
after reading a plea from the Paris Mission Society for help in Equatorial Africa,
where the people were in desperate need of a medical service that was totally
lacking.”
“Becoming
a doctor, he reflected, would enable him to ‘work without having to talk. For
years now”, Schweitzer said, “I have been giving of myself in words, but in
this new commitment, I’ll not be a talker about the ‘Religion of Love’, but one
who puts it into practice.’”
With
much practice, Schweitzer became a loving witness to the ‘Religion of Love’; he
rendered a limitless service of love and compassion in the spirit of its
founder; and he became the presence of
Jesus in the heart of darkness and human suffering.”
Will you join me in becoming a practitioner
in the religion of love? As we love with
this eternal love – we will know more about the love we have already received
from God. We love because he first loved
us! Amen
Thank you for sharing this important message on love.
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