The Necessity of True Love

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Christ’s Letters to the Churches in Revelation 2

So this afternoon, we're in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. But I'm going to pull a fast one on us and say instead of starting in 1 Corinthians 13, we're actually going to start in the book of Revelation, in Revelation chapter 2.

And so if you would, let's turn there together, Revelation chapter 2. If anyone here has read the book of Revelation, I think most of us have, you'll know that the first few chapters, at least chapters 2 and 3, are dedicated to Christ's letters to seven churches that were located in Asia, which is essentially the western half of modern-day Turkey.

And through the Apostle John, Christ had these letters written to commend and to correct these churches in the Roman province of Asia, to commend them and correct them about their behavior, yes, but also about their attitudes, to warn them, to encourage them, to spur them on to greater faithfulness.

And in his letter, in Revelation chapter 2 and verse 1, in his first letter, Christ first addresses the local church in Ephesus. He wrote to them specifically, this local church specifically, to assess their unique strengths, to identify their own besetting sins, and then to personally warn and encourage them.

And imagine with me for a moment, just picture this. We're here together in this room, and in the mail, in our mailbox in the office, comes a letter addressed to Grace Fellowship Church. And we look at the letter, and we look at the return address label on that letter.

And there on the return address label, it says, God Almighty, God the Son, the Lord of Glory, the One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the Alpha and the Omega, the One who is coming soon. With what kind of wonder and trepidation would we gather around as we opened that letter to see what God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had written specifically to our church?

Well, this was the case for the church in Ephesus. Through John, the Apostle John, there was a letter to be delivered to this church among six others. And at some point, we know they were able to read this letter, because we have it in our Bibles to read.

They too were able to read this letter directed specifically towards them. And in this letter, the Lord Jesus Christ wrote this to the church in Ephesus. He said, To the angel of the church in Ephesus write the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for My name's sake, and you have not grown weary, but I have this against you.

You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. Repent and do the works that you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place unless you repent.

What would we think if this was the contents of the letter that was written to Grace Fellowship Church when we opened that envelope? Initially, we would open it. We'd begin reading. And Christ essentially says in the letter, I see that you are discerning.

I see that you are careful to hold to good theology and sound doctrine.

And we'd go, yes, yes, that's it.

That's what we're trying to do.

That's us.

He says, I know that you hate false teaching, just as I do. I see that you patiently endure hardship for My name. We'd be over the moon. And then, but, but then Christ says, but I have this against you.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

What could Christ, the Lord of glory, possibly have against us? He says, you have abandoned the love, the love that you had at first. He tells the Ephesian believers, your love has grown cold. In all of your love for sound doctrine, in all of your love for theology, you've forgotten to love Me.

You've forgotten to love neighbor. You're a loveless church. And then Christ says, remember from where you have fallen and repent. And in the original language, He says in the present tense, I am coming.

I'm already on My way. If you do not repent, I will remove your lampstand. Essentially, I will revoke your identity in Me, and you will cease to exist as one of My churches. What alarming words. I'm going to turn my mic off.

I just can't handle it. And for, okay, it's hard for me. I'll get used to it. I have to try again next week. But what alarming words. And for a church like ours that loves good theology, that loves sound doctrine, what a sobering warning.

Note this, note this, that it is possible for a church to get their doctrine right. It's possible for us to have good theology, to persevere in the face of false teaching, to hold fast to the truth, and then to still be cast out, to have our lampstand removed, because we do not have love.

It's possible for us as a church to be right in all the right ways. And if we have not love, Christ says, I will take your lampstand from you. And as I was considering this text earlier this week, it had me thinking, if Christ were to write that letter to our church, if he were to write a letter to our church, what would he say?

And what would he say specifically about our love? Our love for God. Our love for our fellow image bearers. And if Christ were to approach the doorstep of your soul this afternoon, would he commend you?

Think about this for a moment. Examine yourself. Would he commend you for the love in your soul, for the abundance of love overflowing in acts of kindness and care to others, in acts of worship to God?

Or would he find your heart cold, indifferent, and deficient in love? Where would Christ find you? Well, today, in 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul is addressing this very same issue that the Ephesian church was dealing with.

Here with the Corinthians, we know, we've looked at it. They loved knowledge. They loved wisdom. They loved exercising extraordinary, visible, spiritual gifts like tongues. But in a way that was very similar to the Ephesian church, they were not nearly as interested in exercising Christ-like love, to love one another, to love the believers within the church, to love those outside the church, next door, in your family, down the street, at work.

They were not nearly as interested as loving God with their actions, with their attitudes. But for the benefit of the Corinthians, for our benefit as well today, this is what we're going to find in Paul's letter.

Paul is writing, most of us have heard 1 Corinthians 13 at some point. Maybe it's at a wedding, maybe it's at church, it's somewhere. But what we're going to learn from Paul is this, that Paul shows us what true love actually looks like.

It's 13 verses. 1 Corinthians 13 is 13 verses long. In this brief chapter, he shows us how love is necessary. Love, brothers and sisters, is not optional. He shows us how love acts. We could say the character traits of love.

How do I know that I'm loving another person in a biblical way? And then he shows us that long after the gifts cease, long after these gifts that the Corinthians were so consumed with, long after debates about doctrine are fully and finally settled, love will remain forever.

Love is eternal. So you could say that Paul drives home the importance of love in the Christian life, and then he shows us how we are to love. He gives us the motive, and then he gives us the tools to carry it out.

And again, I'm just going to pause for a second. There's a saying, familiarity breeds contempt. This is a familiar verse. I remember teaching Noah's Ark to a group of adults who had been Christians for 30, 40, 50 years, and it's like, will you just pay attention for a second to see what God is trying to teach us through Noah's Ark rather than this children's painting that we have in our minds?

Well, in the same way, can we together, brothers and sisters, get past the fact that this is a familiar text, it's a familiar topic, and yet Paul and God speaking through Paul has a lot to say to us today.

Love Is Necessary and Not Optional

So let's look today, 1 Corinthians chapter 13. I'm going to begin by reading verses 1 to 3. Paul says, If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

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 I have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

The first thing I want us to understand, the first thing the Word of God is conveying to us in these three verses, is that love is necessary. Love is essential. Love is one of the great non-negotiables of the Christian life.

And building what Paul's already written in chapter 12, Paul lists a bunch of the prominent gifts that we would see in the church. And he uses an intentional exaggeration to drive home the point, this is absolutely essential to a faithful and effective Christian life.

And so this is, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with this, because there's some tangential things, some tangential stuff, that we can look at, even as we consider the centrality of love. So in verse 1, Paul begins by referencing tongues.

And not just the tongues of men, but the tongues of angels. And many conservative commentators would agree that this is really exaggeration on Paul's part. That the expectation in the New Testament is almost always that the gift of tongues are to be spoken, or are spoken, in a discernible language.

And so the gift of tongues, as we see it, for instance, in Acts chapter 2, they're speaking in a language that people in the surrounding nations could understand. The gift of tongues was spoken in such a way that there could be interpreters who could interpret the language for the people.

And Paul is even going to go to another length later on in 1 Corinthians to say that if no one in the room can benefit from your gift, from this speaking in tongues, don't even speak in tongues. Oftentimes, and probably in this case as well, the gift of tongues is really in the language of men.

But here Paul exaggerates. He says, even if I were to speak in the tongues of angels, even if a person could speak in the tongue of angels, if it is not accompanied by love, it is worthless. He says, it is like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Now, if we've been in a scenario like that, where people are speaking in tongues and you're not used to that, yes, it can be uncomfortable. Depending on your theology, you might even find it annoying.

I'm not going to comment on that. But that's not what Paul is saying. Paul's not saying, if you speak in tongues, but you don't have love, it's just going to be noisy and annoying. No, what he's saying is this.

He's making reference to the pagan worship, the pagan cult worship of the false god Dionysius. And in the pagan worship of Dionysius, this was the false god of merrymaking, of celebration, the god of wine, even the god of insanity, as some people saw it.

And what Paul is saying is, you are insane if you think that your gifts, devoid of love, will please God. It would be better for you to engage in some type of pagan worship than to practice this God-given gift without love.

It is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And then in verse 2, Paul continues, he says, if I have other gifts, like prophecy or knowledge, this knowledge that the Corinthians coveted, they wanted knowledge, even if I have prophecy or knowledge or faith, so as to move mountains.

Notice the hyperbole again, the same hyperbole that Christ used in Matthew 17, 20. If you have faith to move mountains. He's exaggerating. And he says, even if I have the best gifts, even if I'm able to do the most unnatural things, like move mountains by those gifts, if I do not have love, he says, not only it's not worth anything, he says, I am nothing.

My ministry in the church is worthless. My contributions in the world are of no account. The most important prophet without love is worthless. The greatest faith healer in the world without love is of no account to God.

The next great prince of preachers without love might as well be teaching from another religious text. It's rubbish. If I'm up here on Sunday afternoons preaching, and I don't have love for you, brothers and sisters, I am nothing.

That's what Paul is saying. And then Paul begins in verse 3, he transitions, notice with me, from spiritual gifts to different actions or activities. So he says, if we were to give all that we have away, imagine with me for a moment that you went home, you said, I love the Lord.

I want to give him the very best of all that I have. I want to obey what Christ taught the rich young ruler in Mark 10, 21, to sell all my possessions and give all of my money to the poor. I want to do that tonight.

Imagine if you were to do that tonight. You go home, you get on Facebook Marketplace or Kijiji or however you want to sell your stuff, and you sell everything in your home. You sell your bed, you sell your dressers, you sell your kids' toys, your poor kids, you sell clothing, everything, except for maybe one outfit on your back and a blanket.

Imagine you did all of that, and you did it out of a sense of guilt rather than out of love, or you did it out of a sense of duty. What Paul essentially says is, you should have kept it if you don't have love.

Not only do you not have a couch or a bed, but there's no treasure in heaven for you. You might as well have kept all of your stuff. Paul says, if I delivered my body to be burned, meaning that if I endured persecution, if I persevered and endured in the face of opposition, if I refused to put that pinch of incense on Caesar's altar, if I refused to bow to the sexual revolutionaries of the day, if I will not compromise in the face of tyranny or persecution, even at the cost of my own life.

Paul says, even if I die a martyr's death by being burned alive, if I even offer all of that, even my own life, and I have not love, it's meaningless. Not only is your death foolish, but it's useless.

It was a wasted life, a wasted death. So to summarize what Paul's getting at, I know I'm hitting this hard, but to summarize what Paul's getting at, he's saying that you can be whoever you want to be.

How has the Lord gifted you? How has the Lord enabled you to serve him? Who are you? Rather, you draw, you do artwork. Do you do your artwork with love? Sam, you play the music on Sundays, and we praise God for that, but do you play that music in love?

Do you help set up these chairs in love? When you have fellowship in the afternoons after the service, is that defined in your heart by love? What Paul is saying is, you can pour your whole life out, even at God's altar.

You can give every waking hour of your life to service, and even the exercise of good gifts that God has given you, but if your motive, notice that important word, but if your motive is not love for God and love for a neighbor, everything that you are and everything that you have done is futile.

It means nothing. It will gain you nothing if you have a loveless heart, regardless of what you do. My brother, PJ, him and I were talking yesterday around the men's group, Fire, or Invisible Fire, and he was telling me, he's reading the book, Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper.

It's a good book. I'd commend it to you, but one of the things I love about that book is it has such a compelling title. Don't Waste Your Life. The title alone is worth the purchase cost of that book.

Don't Waste Your Life. And I mean who among us, if we're honest, who among us wants to waste our lives? Who among us wants to get to 70 or 80 years old or 90 years old, however many years God gives us, and to say on our deathbed, I have wasted my life.

And as I was thinking about that, let me tell you, if you want to get on the fast track to wasting your life, then simply live your life devoid of love. Don't concern yourself with being motivated by, being driven by love.

If you want to live a futile and meaningless existence, then don't pay attention to your motives. Don't give any thought to why you come to church, or why you serve, or how you parent, or how you do the things that you do.

Don't regularly examine yourself to ensure that God, that love for God and love for neighbor is the driving force behind every decision in your life. If you want to have a life that amounts to nothing, forget about love.

As Christians, we must walk according to the law of love. When God assesses us on Judgment Day, when we come before God, He's not just going to look at what we did, but why we did it. And love must be the rule of our lives.

Love must be the measuring stick by which we measure the success of every endeavor and pursuit. I think about when the Jewish lawyer approached Jesus and asked Him, what is the greatest commandment? Kids, I want to ask you guys, if you've been paying attention, what is the greatest commandment in the whole Bible?

Does anyone know? Love. That's right. This Jewish lawyer asked Jesus, what is the greatest commandment in the law? What is the most important thing that I must obey? And Jesus said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

This is the first, the great and first commandment. And second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. So if you want to be holy as God is holy, if you want to be like Christ, then first and foremost, love must be the rule in your life.

And if we're honest with ourselves for a second, I know that everything that I'm saying here is obvious. And if I were to ask you up until this point, what have you learned? You would say nothing at all.

I already know this. But if you're really honest with yourself, how often do you forget about these great commandments, this great commandment to love God and to love fellow man? How often do we go about our day in work, in our parenting, in our leisure, in our use of the gifts, even in church, even in our own respective ministries, and we forget about this great motive in our life, which is to be loved, to sacrificially love others, to sacrificially love God.

I remember hearing Paul Washer early in my Christian life. I'd maybe been a believer for two or three years, and he said, and I think he's right, he said, the most earnest and sincere Christian can go weeks, can go weeks without ever thinking about this great commandment to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

But how helpful would it be if we were to set this command before ourselves every single day, before we wake up, before we go to work, before we interact with our family, with our friends, before we pick up our phones, if we were to say, I'm going to live for love, and that love to God, and love to neighbor.

Perhaps that's why God instructed the Israelites, if you remember in Deuteronomy chapter 6, when Moses was just preparing to lead the nation of Israel into the promised land, he taught them, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, with all of your might, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

Hear this, parents, you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit down in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand.

They shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I'm not a big fan of Christian art.

When I go to the bookstore, I usually go for books and not for trinkets, but maybe that means getting a poster or a picture on your wall that just says in bold letters, love God, love neighbor. We need to be reminded, because we forget.

Now you might ask next, but how do I love other people? I remember being in, it was the Solicitor General Staff College, and I took this course Respect, I believe it was Respect in the Workplace, and one of the things that they said was, we don't follow the golden rule, we follow the platinum rule.

And that's not to treat others the way that you would want to be treated, but to treat others the way that they would want to be treated. I understand what they're getting at, but essentially what they're saying is this, the way that you love, the way that you treat people doesn't matter based on an objective reality, but based on their subjective preferences.

How do we know as Christians that we are loving God according to God's objective standard? How do we know that we are loving right and not wrong? Paul tells us in the next few verses, in verse 4, Paul says, love is patient and kind.

Love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

The Active Character of Agape Love

The next thing that I think the Word of God is teaching us, not only is love necessary, but love is active. Oftentimes we hear people say, love is a verb. It's kind of a kumbaya type of thing. Everything we do, it's love is a verb.

And while I understand their sentiment, that's not exactly true. But what Paul does here in these 13 verses that make up 1 Corinthians 13, he uses the word love nine times. In this case, it's all nouns.

In this case, in 1 Corinthians 13, love is a noun. But he uses the Greek noun agape. And it might help us to understand what Paul's getting at if we look a little bit at the Greek language and the Greek culture in which Paul was living and writing.

So in the Greek language in Paul's day, there were four words that were often used to describe love. There was the Greek word storge. And really, if you want to write this down in English, it's familial love.

Storge, it's love between family members. It's the love that a dad has for his children or his children for the mother. We see this word in the Bible at least three times in some modified form, either in a negative or in a compound form.

But we have storge, familial love. Then there was eros. That's the Greek word that we get the English word erotic from, eros. It was a romantic or an erotic type of love used to describe unreasoning passion or burning desire because it was viewed as a debased word in the Greek culture.

We don't find it in our Bibles, but the Greeks knew it well, eros. Another word that we find in the Greek language for love is this word phileo. If anyone knows the city Philadelphia, that uses the compound phileo and adelphoi, meaning brotherly love or the city of brotherly love.

And phileo is a kind of tender affection used to describe maybe love between close friends, maybe the love of a brother. We see that in the New Testament about 20 times. And then lastly, this word that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13, this word agape, agape love.

Agape love in the Greek culture and Greek language was the most profound form of love, deep and constant love, Vines' Expository Dictionary says. It was understood by the Greeks to be God's perfect love toward unworthy recipients such as sinful man.

It was reserved in many ways for God's love for his creatures. And interesting of this type of agape love in the New Testament, if you want to talk about verbs and nouns, it occurs about 250 times in our New Testaments.

Over half of that is in the verb form. So the active agape love. And so this is the type of love that Paul is talking about. Agape love, deep and constant love, committed love, selfless love. And he describes this love in some detail.

And I want us to see here that it's likely that Paul isn't being exhaustive in his description of this love. He's not saying that this is the exhaustive list of how every person must love, but likely this is a somewhat exhaustive list and really a list that addresses some of the Corinthians issues especially.

And so he says this, love is patient and kind. Paul mingles an active and a passive form of love. True love is characteristically patient. This is what it means when we say that it's passive, that true love shows forbearance to other people.

True love is not easily rattled, but it is long-suffering. This kind of patient love, if you think about it this way, is the love that we exercise when we share the Gospel with that friend or with that family member.

And every single time we share it, it's like it falls on deaf ears. And yet, this kind of patient, forbearing, long-suffering love.

Prays.

It prays for their conversion. It shares the Gospel still, even when they mistreat you. It's the kind of love that doesn't grow frustrated or embittered when they don't turn. It's a love that never fails.

That's a patient kind of love. Love is kind. It's actively merciful. True love looks for ways to show undeserved kindness to other fallen people like us. True love, Paul says, doesn't feel selfishly jealous.

True love does not boast or brag. This kind of love, or the kind of love that God would have for us, is a wise love. Like we read in Proverbs 27, 2, Let another praise you, and not your own mouth. True love does not boast.

Agape love, Paul says, is not arrogant. I find this interesting. He uses the Greek word phusio. It means to be puffed up or to inflate. It would be used in the context of inflating bellows. When you're blowing something up, you're blowing up your inflatable raft.

True love does not become inflated. And it's interesting, Paul used that same word in 1 Corinthians 8, 1, when he said that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Brothers and sisters, if you pursue knowledge without love, it will be useless.

It will be meaningless. It will be a knowledge that puffs up and that makes arrogant. True love, Paul says, does not insist on its own way, something that the Corinthians were apt to do in their corporate life as a church.

True love is not irritable or easily provoked. It does not give in to sinful anger when the pressure is on. Dads, specifically. I don't know about you, but I felt like I had amazing patience. Soon-to-be dads, amazing patience until my children were born.

And then I discovered that I am irritable. True love is not irritable. True love is not easily provoked by a child that keeps getting out of bed or is asking for water for the third time. True love is not easily frustrated.

True love, Paul says, refuses to delight in evil, but rejoices in what is holy and righteous and true. And what Paul is doing here, the picture that he paints of this love, this love is not subject to how a person feels.

It's not subject to whatever circumstances are at play. The kind of Christian love that God calls you to is the kind of love that is not a feeling, not something that you can fall into. I fell into love, and then I fell out of love, and that's why I got divorced.

No.

True love is not the kind of superficial or fickle love that we see portrayed in the movies and romance novels. True love is a kind that is active. It is effectual. It actually, rather than your circumstances dictating how you love, true love dictates how you respond to your circumstances.

True love isn't blown and tossed by every wind. True Christian agape love, the kind that Paul is talking about, is the very same kind of love that God has showed us, brothers and sisters, in Christ. True love is a gospel kind of love.

It's a Romans 5 kind of love. I was looking at different texts. There were, like I said, over 250 references to agape love alone. So I know I'm not going to say one that you have in your mind for sure, but true love is a Romans 5 kind of love.

For while we are still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die, but God shows his love for us.

And while we were still sinners, while we were still dead in our trespasses and sins, Christ died for us. True love is an Ephesians 1 kind of love. Sister, you're going to like this love. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself, as sons, through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.

It's the kind of love that can only exist in a heart, that has been the recipient of this active, effectual, unrivaled love of a perfect God, who is himself love. 1 John 4 .19. We love because he first loved us.

True love is impossible, apart from the regenerating work of God in your life. Paul said to the Romans in Romans 5 that this kind of love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. So love is necessary.

Love is absolutely necessary. And in another sense, apart from Christ, love is impossible. But in Christ, this is the type of love that God calls us to. And coming back to 1 Corinthians 13, Paul brings this description of true love to a climax.

A climax of alls, as I would call it. He says in verse 7, Love bears all things. As I was saying, there's forbearance, there's patience. I feel like I have to quote a Charles Spurgeon story every time I preach, because he's just everywhere.

And I always, I'm sorry, I got to read some new books. But Charles Spurgeon once sent a short letter of encouragement to a fellow pastor who was having a problem with one of the deacons in his church.

I guess he had an obstinate deacon that just would not listen, would not follow through, had his own way, his own desires. And on a sheet of paper, he got a blank sheet of paper, Spurgeon simply wrote these words on the page to this pastor friend of his.

Bear, bear, bear. Forbear, forbear, forbear. And then he wrote, In yielding, in yielding to this deacon is victory. Fight the devil and love the deacon. Love him until he is lovable. And that's what Christian love that bears all things looks like.

There might be someone in this assembly that you find their personality, their communication style.

Maybe it's me.

You just, you have to bear with them. Nicole nods her head. You have to bear with them. And what God's words, maybe what Spurgeon's counsel would be to you is love them.

Bear, bear, bear.

Forbear, forbear, forbear. Love them until they are lovable. This means that, or I should say, even as Christian's love is bound up in our identity. In John 13, 35,. By this, people will know that you are my disciples.

Not by your doctrine, even. Not by your zeal. Not by the church that you attend. Not by whether you listen to expository preaching or topical preaching. Whether you go even to a seeker-sensitive church.

By this, all people will know that you are my disciples. If you have love for one another. And so we need to bear with one another in love. I find it amazing, God's good design. He has to tell us to bear with one another in love because he knows just how difficult we are.

And even difficult, how difficult we are towards one another. Paul says this too, he says, Love believes all things. Kids, I want to ask you again. If someone tells you something, must you always believe it?

No, absolutely not. We can't believe everything that everyone says because there are so many lies in the world. What Paul's not talking about is being gullible to believe all things. But what Paul's talking about is when we love someone, we give them the benefit of the doubt.