A More Excellent Way

The Context and Purpose of 1 Corinthians 13

First Corinthians chapter 13. If I speak human or angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

And if I give away all my possessions and if I give over my body in order to boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs.

Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end.

As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child.

I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put aside childish things. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully as I am fully known.

Now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Let's pray.

Father, we can't even imagine the eternal, bottomless, endless love that you have for your people. Lord, that you sent your only beloved son to die on our behalf. Lord, that you knew the thoughts and intentions of our hearts, that we were perpetually wicked, and yet you made a way because of your deep love for us.

God, I pray for Pastor Josh as he comes to open up your word to us. Lord, I pray we know that where we are gathered here, that your spirit moves in our presence. Lord, I pray that your spirit would open our minds and our hearts to the beauty of your word and the love that it shares for us.

Lord, that we would take the truth of the love when it cuts, where we reflect on it and be changed by it. Lord, may the worship of your name be a beautiful and sweet incense to your nostrils today. Lord, we love you and praise you.

Amen.

Though we're with ink the ocean filled, or were the sky a parchment made, where every stock on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole, where it stretched from sky to sky. The church forgets this at her peril. And we take, I love this, we, I love to handle passages that have been so brutally taken out of context.

And there are a few passages in scripture, I think, that have been used more out of context than 1 Corinthians 13. And the reasons are understandable. It's beautiful. It might be the most beautiful thing that the Apostle Paul ever wrote.

It's poetic. It stirs your heart. It grabs your emotions. It makes you long for something better. It makes you look at your spouse and think, man, if we could remember this, everything would be perfect all the time.

And it's true. But we can't. And what Paul is doing here is he is not writing a flowery poem so that the Corinthians' marriages would be awesome. He is writing a scathing rebuke to show them how they have forgotten the faith.

And by forgetting the faith, they have forgotten what makes you of the faith, which is the love of God. If you don't have the love of God, you have absolutely nothing. Nothing that you do, nothing that you think, no person that you're in a relationship with is of any value if you do not have love.

Because as Paul would write in Romans 13, if you don't have love, you don't have the law. If you don't have the law, you're not righteous. And if you're not righteous, then God will not have you stand in his assembly.

And all is lost. And as we look through Corinthians, I'm going to attempt to do something here that is rarely done with this chapter. When we take verses out of context and twist them, what we usually do is we have our need and our need is usually a wedding or trying to impress somebody you're dating.

And we will read 1 Corinthians 13 and we will use the apostles' eloquence to make ourselves sound eloquent. And what we've done is we've forgotten what's come before and what's going to come after. So as we delve into this amazing chapter, what we have to do is find its place in the argument and find its place in the letter.

And what we do is as we look back at Corinthians, I think there's two high points in this letter. One of them is here in this chapter, which is the governing principle of the gifts. And then we have chapter 15, which is the governing principle of the entire Christian faith.

And I think 13 and 15 are very linked together. They are super important. Many of you have had questions about how I'm going to handle prophecy, tongues, miracles, healing. This is the key. If you don't understand today, then you're going to be afraid and you're not going to understand chapter 14.

Paul writes this to bring into focus how the gifts operate in the church and how you can so easily miss your way. But as we look back, we see that the church of Corinth was marked by pride. They had divided into factions and they had tried to collect very influential orators for themselves, like trading cards.

Some were of Paul, some were of Apollos, and then the most holy rollers, the biblicists among them, they were of Jesus, right? We're going to skip the apostles and we'll go to Jesus. They had false love in the church.

In fact, they were talking about how tolerant they were. They loved so much more than anyone else because they didn't throw this guy with his sexual immorality out of the church. They loved him too much to throw him out.

They were filing lawsuits against one another, appealing to the secular courts because they didn't trust each other and because they wanted to showboat in front of the secular courts. They had selfishness and communion, where really in a way unimaginably, some were cutting in line to take the wine to the point of getting drunk and taking the bread to the point of not having enough for the people at the back of the line.

There was irreverent worship. Without covering. Women stepping out of their natural role and screeching with their shrill voices in their tongues that were unintelligible and their prophecies that were not covered, and it was not good.

And they had a cavalier disrespect and disregard for their brothers and their consciences by eating the meat that was offered to idols and then trying to make convincing arguments that this was fine. And if you don't get it, if you don't eat the meat offered to the idol, then maybe you're just not as holy.

That's what's going on in the church. And then as we see in the letter turns to where we call chapter 12, we see that there is an idea of elevation in hierarchy of gifts. That some gifts are greater than others.

And this is not the list that Paul says are greater than others. The biggest gifts in the Corinthian church would have been the gifts of tongues and the gifts of miracles and healings and prophecies. And so with these gifts, what was happening is that some were denying the church, their gifts, as we saw last week, parts of the body that took their ball and went home because the church didn't value those gifts.

So some were avoiding gifts that the church needed because they felt pitiful and they were right in feeling that way because those who had the so-called greater gifts were despising those who had the lesser gifts, showing them no honor at all.

The Scathing Rebuke and the Primacy of Love

And now we come to chapter 13. You have to hear this. You have to understand that as this letter is read to the church at Corinth, every congregant sitting there listening to the reading of this letter would have felt like a scraggly little palm tree against the hurricane winds of this chapter as they started to look around and realize that what Paul is saying, they have shown none of it.

Every barb that he throws, love is patient. They're not patient enough to wait for everyone to get the elements. Love is kind. Love does not envy. And every one of these words is picked as a barb to show not only their lawlessness, but to show how they don't have love.

And then he says, if you don't have love, you have absolutely nothing. There is nothing of Christ in you. And the question that we are going to try to answer this morning as we bring this into the modern context.

Is this,.

Are the godly churches, what we would call godly, picture it in your mind, the good churches, are the good churches characterized by their love for one another? Or are they characterized by something else?

Because the apostle in a scathing rebuke that goes through time and history would tell us today, if we are marked by something other than love for one another, we have nothing. Our books, our doctrines, our powerful manifestations of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, our evangelism, all of those things that are good things, if we divide and don't love our brothers, we have nothing.

When's the last time you thought of a church and when you heard its name, when you heard the name of that church, you thought, those people love each other. They love each other. Friends, that's the challenge.

If that's not how we are thought of,.

We have nothing. Nothing.

There's one gift that is so much greater. One thing that is so much greater than all the rest that if you don't have it, if you have all of the rest, it means nothing. And that gift is love. So yes, we want the gifts, but we want love first and we want love primarily.

And if we have no other gifts and we have love, we're going to be okay. And if we have all of the other gifts and we don't have love, then we will be despised. Because it all goes to the resurrection, does it not?

We serve a risen Savior. And if that risen Savior who showed us the epitome of love under the law, if we look at that and go, well, I can carry my divisions on, then we have nothing because we despise the very foundation of our faith.

Love Greater Than Spiritual Gifts

Verses one through three say, if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. So think of it this way. This is hyperbolic language.

We get caught up on things, but what Paul is doing is he is not trying to write doctrine about tongues in this verse. What he is doing is saying, even if I speak with the highest tongue, the highest language that can possibly be imagined, if I speak like the cherubim around the throne of God who are worshiping him all day long with the sounds of rushing water that make everyone who ever saw that fear for their lives, if I speak with that language and I don't love, then it's the same thing as listening to somebody grab a piece of sheet metal and start hitting it with a ball peen hammer.

It's nothing.

It doesn't matter. See, Paul had seen the tongue of angels. 2 Corinthians 12, four says, he was caught up into paradise and he heard inexpressible words which a man is not permitted to speak. There are angelic languages, but this is not the point of this verse.

The point of this verse is to say, no matter what tongues you speak, no matter how impressive it is, no matter how much people want to look at you and your holiness and your giftedness, and you would say, man, that guy speaks with the tongues of angels.

The spirit of God is surely so strong with him. If he doesn't love, then it doesn't matter at all. It is like an annoying sound that you would try to close your ears against. That's what's going on in the Corinthian church.

They are speaking in miraculous tongues and they don't love,.

So it means nothing.

If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries, think about that. If you know the mysteries of God, and when Paul talks about mysteries, he is talking about the things of God that can only be known by divine revelation, not the things that can be naturally reasoned.

So if God gives you a pipeline into the mysteries of his mind and he tells you of all of those things, of all those mysteries that the prophets of old dived in and they long to see and the angels look at us and they long to understand the gospel, all of these mysteries, if you have all of those and you don't love your brother, it's meaningless.

Doesn't that assault us reformed people?

Doesn't it?

We love knowledge. We love it. And there's nothing wrong with knowledge if it doesn't puff up. But when we think that the end goal of the Christian faith is to know a bunch of theology, we totally miss the boat.

We have to love one another. In fact, I would go so far as to say, that all of your knowledge of the law and you don't love shows that you have no wisdom of the law. You don't understand it at all. You might be able to recite it.

You may be able to mention and memorize every single code of the law. But if you don't love your brother, you have no understanding of the law. It always leads to that. If you have all knowledge and no love, nothing.

And then he moves on and he talks about faith. This is the kind of faith that moves mountains. This is miraculous power. If you can have faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love,.

I am nothing.

Imagine that.

We know from Scripture, without faith, it's impossible to please God. We know from Scripture that faith is the power of the Christian life. If you want to live for Christ, you must have faith. If you want to believe what God says and not fear man and fear God alone, you have to have faith.

But if you have faith and no love,.

You have nothing.

To the aesthetic, to the one of this age who would look around and say love is about charity. Love is about the Christian faith is about feeding widows and orphans. In fact, James would say that's pure and undefiled religion, right?

So if I give all of my possessions to feed the poor, if I surrender my body to be burned, if I become a martyr for Christ and I don't have love, no profit. It doesn't benefit anyone. And we have to ask, do we not?

How can that be? How in the world can that be? How can you be a martyr for Christ? And if you don't love,.

Then you have nothing.

And I think the answer is this, is because this is a rebuke. This is a rebuke. And the people of God at Corinth are going to take the rebuke and they're going to repent. And it's a dangerous place. It's a dangerous place to be a church that forgets love.

See, this church at Corinth, they remind me of the letter in Revelation to the church at Ephesus that said, or Jesus said, I have this thing against you. You have forgotten your first love, which means they had forgotten the love of the resurrection.

They remembered the doctrine. They remembered the core tenets of the faith and they were good in Ephesus about keeping the wolves out. You're not bringing your false doctrine in here. We're going to keep you out.

But what they had forgotten was that Christ showed a new way and that new way was to love your brother. And if you forget the love of Christ, it will not be long before you forget the love of your brother because it's impossible to have the one without the other.

Love and the Modern Definition

And so as we look, we have to ask the question, right? And in many ways, it's the question of our day. We will hear slogans like love is love, which is basically an incomprehensible. Like, what is that?

There's no way to understand what that means. And in fact, that's the feature. It's not a bug. That statement is bandied about love is love because it is incomprehensible because it is tabula rosa, right?

You can take a statement like that and import any meaning that you want to. Right? We don't want to do that this morning because the Bible is very clear about what love is. We get a huge exposition of it in this chapter, right?

Let me read through it because I know you want to hear it again, right? Everybody wants to hear this as many times as you can today. It is beautiful. It is beautiful. Love is patient. Love is kind. It is not jealous.

It does not boast. It is not puffed up. It does not act unbecomingly. It does not seek its own. It is not provoked. Does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but it rejoices with the truth.

It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If they are our tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away.

And we take that and we look at characteristics of love. And we're going to go through the list and we're going to look at them. But what I want to do is I want to give you some hermeneutics here and compare this definition of love with a more succinct definition of love that Paul gives, the same author that he gives in Romans 13.

Two verses that I would draw your attention to. Romans 13, it's a big one. It will loom large in our doctrinal training. It is about the civil magistrate. But in context, Romans 13 is talking about how in chapter 12, you should grieve with those who grieve, mourn with those who mourn, rejoice with those who rejoice.

Do not take vengeance for vengeance is mine says the Lord. And then Paul prescribes how vengeance takes place. You don't take vengeance against somebody who wrongs you because the government does. The government is a terror to evil and they promote good.

And then he goes on from that. And after he has talked about what the civil magistrate does to promote good, he starts to talk about love. Isn't that strange? Isn't it strange that in a discussion of law that Paul would define love in that context?

And here's what he says in Romans 13, eight, owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.

Have you ever thought that way?

You owe love to one another. You have a debt of love to one another that you have to repay. You owe it. When you look at your brother and they've wronged you, you owe it to them to love them. And you have two choices when they wrong you.

You can go confront them to bring reconciliation and win your brother back, or you can bear it,.

Eat it and move on.

He goes on, for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. We know from the Psalms that the Christian faith is all about loving God's law.

Is it not?

God's people meditate on his law day and night. And what will happen? They will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water whose leaf does not wither, the wicked are not so. We know from Psalm 119 over and over again that we love God's law.

We love his statutes. We love his precepts because his precepts show us the straight path. They show us how to live. It is Calvin's third use of the law, right? That we are, that the law is instruction for the Christian life.

And the Christian does not rebel against the law. The Christian does not have friction against the law. We don't read the law and go, ooh, I don't really like that. We read the law and we say, thank you, Lord.

That is a sweet direction for my path. How am I going to walk? According to your law. And so love and law are not against each other as much as our culture would love to set them against each other. Because love in our culture means nothing more than unbounded tolerance and niceness, right?

In our culture to love people means to be nice to them. Is it nice to not call to attention what is going to send someone to hell? No, that's not nice. That is not love. Because love is not at odds with the law.

Love is perfectly in line with the law. And the reason for that is for the Christian, we love the law because we are righteous under the law. Do you understand that? You've not broken the law. You have, but not through Christ.

Because when Christ died his substitutionary death, what he did is he substituted himself, the punishment of the law from a wrathful father whose wrath burned against your sin. We don't often think of God that way in our time, but his wrath burned against your sin.

From the time that you were a youth and you sinned, God was angry.

He was very angry.

And yet his son, as we know, he bore the full wrath of his father. For the sins of many. And that wrath was poured out on him at the cross to the extent that God for the one time in all eternity turned his back on his son.

And that was the worst torment of all for the son of glory is that his father could not even look on him for the iniquity that was laid on him.

That was you and I's acts.

He didn't do any of that. And we laid our sin on him and he was crushed for our iniquities. So why do we love Christian? We love because he first loved us. He saw our sin and he died for us in perfect accordance with the law because the law demands blood.

The wages of sin is death. To break the law is to invoke the entire covenant curse of the law on yourself. Remember the people that they said, we will obey this law when it was handed down on Sinai and Moses took blood and he sprinkled it on them.

That was to say, if you break your covenant, death is coming for you. And God forebode his anger. He was not quick to anger. He was not quick to wrath. He looked on the sin of David and all the patriarchs and he waited.

He did not excuse. He waited until the perfect sacrifice came which was his son and he wiped away and made righteous all that came before who had faith in him and all who will come after and we are one table together.

Before and after. One covenant, the new covenant, sealed by the blood of the lamb, the perfect sacrifice, the great high priest. And what we have to have with each other when we have been forgiven so much, when we have been loved so much, that creates a debt of love for us to one another who have been redeemed.

Because when you are in a family, you have to deal with each other. We don't get to divide and separate. We don't get to hate. It tears families apart when you hate, when you divide. And that should not be in the house of God because we are bonded by something in some ways that's even greater than with your own brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers.

We are bonded by the Holy Spirit, not by genetics, but by the power of God himself. He has brought together something that marriage is only a shadow of. The one flesh union of the marriage is only a picture of the joining together through the Holy Spirit of Christ in his church.

We are one body, we learned last week. Many members sewed together in one to uplift and to help each other through the Holy Spirit. It is a dangerous thing to hate your brothers. It should not be tolerated.

He goes on, Romans 13, 10, love does not work evil against a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. If you want to be right with God, love your neighbor. See, the church at Corinth, they would have heard this whole list and they would have realized, we don't have any of this.

This is bad. This is really bad. We've forgotten something and Paul is holding back because this one has the knife. But chapter 15, he unleashes the whole force of his argument through the whole letter.

Imagine telling Christians that they forgot the power of the resurrection.

Brutal.

But it's imagine telling Christians that they've forgotten to love their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Brutal.

And we look at the church today and we have divided into our camps and we don't love. And we schismatically break apart churches based on minor personal squabbles within the body. And when we do that, friends, we have nothing.

Nothing.

We're not afraid enough of God. We don't fear God when we treat our brother that way because he has expressly forbid it. And he has said the fulfillment of the law is in love. We love one another. So the church at Corinth, they realize we don't have this.

And see, they forgot the first table of the 10 commandments. Remember those? No other God before me, no graven images, no taking my name in vain, and honor the Sabbath, keep it holy. That is called the first table.

Those are the commandments that direct directly between the relationship between God and man. So let's examine. The church at Corinth had forgotten the first table of the law because they had forgotten the resurrection.

You can't love God without living in the power of the resurrection. Imagine thinking that you're going to be okay with God when you scorn the sacrifice of his only son. It's not possible. And so what happens is when you forget the power of the resurrection in the Christian life, you forget that you're not to have other gods before him.

And so it should not make us surprised that the church at Corinth is awash with confusion about idolatry. That's why they want to eat the meats, because they are playing around with the fringes of getting back into temple idol worship.

What they had been saved out of. Because if you forget the resurrection, you will start breaking the first commandment. What about graven images? They hunger for the meat that was sacrificed at the feet of these stone gods.

They hunger to be in the temple with the powerful of their society so that they can acquiesce and tolerate a little idol worship while they say that they are the church of God. That's what's going on.

How about taking God's name in vain? This looms incredibly large for us this week and in chapter 14 church.

This is key. This is key.

Look at what they're doing. They are drinking of the wine and eating the bread in God's name at the church in Corinth while cutting their brothers and sisters off. They are speaking in tongues and giving prophecies out of order and saying that they are doing this by the authority of God.

Do you think that you don't blaspheme the name of God? When you invoke his name in an uncaring way, that's what it means to take the Lord's name in vain. It's not about using profanity. It's about invoking God to justify your actions.

Treating his name as though it's a common thing. Are they honoring the Sabbath at Corinth or are they having a big old party every week and uplifting themselves and showing their own aggrandizement while in name only worshiping Jesus?

They're actually worshiping themselves, aren't they? I'm the greatest because I spoke the most tongues. Look at me.

I'm of Paul.

And see, when you miss the first table, you're going to abandon the second table. So let's go through them. What's going on in the second table? Are they honoring their father and mother at Corinth? No, they got a guy who's sleeping with his stepmother.

Okay, they're not honoring their father and mother. They don't care about their father and mother. Are they murdering? Well, they are dragging people in the church to courts to be thrown at the mercy of the pagans with no regard for how this outcome affects the church.

They despise the church of God in Corinth right now. They would love to murder their brother. You shall not commit adultery. We've seen it in chapter 6 and in chapter 5. Sexual immorality, including incest, and the things that the pagans wouldn't even speak about is running through them.

Why do they get the warning about sodomy in chapter 6? Have you ever thought about that? He said, such were some of you, right? That's because it's a temptation in the church because it's running through the church of Corinth.

All of the sexual immorality is going on there. He wouldn't mention it if it wasn't. Paul doesn't like to waste words. He was writing for the church there. You shall not steal.

They're stealing communion.

I mean, what can you steal that's worse than that? We identify with the blood and body of Christ. Not you, though, because I'm going to eat it all before you get here.

Wow.

You shall not bear false witness. We've seen bad faith arguments for eating the meat offered to idols and the factions that abound. And then finally, where he really turns and we see in chapters 12 and 14, thou shall not covet thy neighbor's oxen.

But what's going on in the church is that they are coveting something worse than the oxen. They are coveting the gifts that are given by the Holy Spirit to one another. And they're looking at what Christ has given them and said, I don't like this very much.

I would actually like the gift that he's got. And I'm going to grumble against you. And it's all because they have abandoned God's law. They do not love one another. And so what we see is that Paul is going to remind them of what love is.

And we need to remember this because this passage is not primarily about your marriage. Understand this, Christian. This passage, 1 Corinthians 13 is not about your marriage. It's about the church. Do you need to hear?

I want to say it again. It's not about your marriage. It's not about you. It's about the church. This definition of love should characterize the church. And friends, can you imagine if it does? We like to imagine in our marriage, right?

I look at this list, and it's not wrong to do so. It's not wrong to look at this list and measure up and say, am I treating Kelsey this way? Am I treating my kids this way? That's a good and proper thing.

But that's not the main focus of this text. What we should do is we should look at this text and we should go, am I treating the brothers this way? Am I treating God's church wherever she is found this way?

I think the answer speaks for itself in America, does it not?

I think it does.

And so we wonder, I have people asking me, the calls come in and going, what are we even doing here? Is the church going to have power when she doesn't love? No, Paul would tell us, you have nothing. You don't have anything.

You're going to have any power? No, what we need to do is get on our knees and repent to God for how we have fostered divisions and hatred of our brothers. Get on our knees, repent, and pray that God would use us powerfully in his hands and that the most common way that we would be marked in this repentance would be our love and patience with one another.

The Characteristics of Love

We should be very, very, very hesitant to raise up wrongdoing against our brother. We call sin, sin, and then we bear things. So love is purely wholesome. Love is also tough. It endures. You will love for all, all of eternity.

Did you know that?

You will never stop loving. And in fact, when we leave this mortal coil and we go into the new heavens and new earth, we will look at our love here and we'll see it as kind of a shadow of the love that's going to happen when we behold him.

You can't imagine the way you're going to love in glory because you're going to see him face to face. But I get ahead of myself. Love is patient. Patient means slow to anger. It's a slow boil. Are you slow in making rash judgment?

Are you slow about judgments? Are you slow about getting angry when it comes to your brothers and sisters in the church? Love is kind. That means it's looking for the good of others. Do you want to make them, you want to make their way good.

You want to show kindness to them, which is benevolence and mercy. Love is not jealous. That's a big problem with the Corinthians, right? It's a big problem here too. Love is not jealous of other relationships.

Love is not about FOMO, okay? FOMO is a purely modern, ridiculous thing, right? If you're not, if you're a little older, look, I'm too old to say FOMO, but fear of missing out, right? I'm really mad because they didn't invite me to go.

Listen, bro, it's not about you. In fact, they weren't thinking of you at all and they didn't have to. It's not a big deal, okay? If they didn't want you to be there because they hated you, they should probably tell you that.