Endless Love

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Don Filcek; 1 Corinthians 8:8-13 Endless Love

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filcik preaches from his sermon series titled, 1
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Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in. Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Ben said, I'm Don Filcik. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm really glad to welcome all of you here. And I recognize that as I look out,
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I see there are some people here in this very room who were one of those 14 adults at the very first meeting of Recast Church on April 19th, 2009.
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That's coming on 15 years ago, but I also recognize that some of you are brand new here. So we go all the way from someone here in this room who was here 15 years ago, the very first service of Recast Church, all the way to maybe this is your first service here.
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And it's been an awesome journey to see how God has continued to grow us as a church in these past 15 years.
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I regularly hear, and I hear this. I'm not tooting our own horn. I'm just saying that this is what I hear from people.
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Word on the street is that we're a fairly friendly church. That's one of the first things that people say to me after they visit here is that they felt like people greeted them and that they were welcoming.
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And I want to encourage you to keep loving each other well, to keep welcoming well, to keep connecting with each other well.
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I think that you're going to see that that ties in with this message fairly closely. God brings us together with others in relationship, and that's part of the reason
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He has forged the church. The reason that He's started churches and gatherings like this is so that we can continue to grow in our faith.
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We can continue to grow in community, and we can continue to grow in service to each other. You see, we need
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His Word. That's where we grow in faith. But we need each other. That's where we grow in community, and we need to serve others with the gifts that He has given us.
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And that requires community, and that is the growing in service. One of the definitions of church that I love best comes from Eugene Peterson.
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He happens to be the guy who translated the message. I think that's okay, that's limited, but I really like the guy as a pastor.
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He's since gone to be with the Lord, but in his memoirs he's somewhat of a mentor to me in his writings.
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But he calls a church an outpost of heaven in enemy territory.
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An outpost of heaven in enemy territory. We are to be a manifestation of God's will and God's way in the midst of a fallen world that doesn't have a clue why we do the things that we do, why we stand where we stand, why we believe what we believe.
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And how many of you have related to somebody just this week who doesn't have a clue why you value what you value? I think all of us have that, have people in our lives who just don't get what the
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Christian life is all about. So we live in the midst of a fallen world.
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And we don't do this perfectly, right? If we're honest, we don't represent Christ perfectly as individuals, and no church does this perfectly either.
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But that is a part of the beauty of the beautiful mess of church. We are an image of what it looks like when
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God is restoring fallen people into an increasingly wholesome community.
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Increasingly wholesome community. I say this in part to commend what I've experienced here in these past 15 years as a significant grace from God, seeing
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His love poured out in our local gathering, but also to remind us of the fundamental assumption of our text this morning.
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We live in a time that is in between the times. We as individuals are not what we were made to be yet.
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We are not what we will one day be. Amen? And as a church, that is true as well.
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We only ever experience a dim reflection of the wholeness and completeness that is coming for those who have faith and trust in Jesus Christ.
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And that's where our hope is placed. Not that we're going to fix it here and now. Not that we as an outpost of heaven are going to create heaven on earth, but that our
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King is coming back for us. Amen? That's the hope. The love we express and experience in Christ will go on for eternity.
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The love that is commanded in the greatest of commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
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And the second Jesus said is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. This love is not a complete love yet.
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We can't accomplish it yet. But it is a character quality that will survive the transition into the new kingdom.
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When Christ returns for us, the world will be flipped and edited and reversed and scrubbed clean.
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And yet in that major reforging of the fallen order of things to a complete and wholesome order of things, love will remain.
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While I want to encourage you to read this text with hope, I also encourage you to think about what a high standing love is given in this passage and consider where God might be calling you to put love into practice for the good of others this morning, even as I'm reading it.
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So 1 Corinthians chapter 13, open your Bibles, your scripture journals, or your devices to 1
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Corinthians 13. We're going to start in verse 8 and just read just a few verses just to the end of that chapter, a little bit of a shorter text this morning.
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But again, I would like to remind you every week this is God's holy and precious word. This is what he desires for you to hear this morning.
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He brought you here to encourage your faith through this very text, 1
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Corinthians chapter 13, starting in verse 8. Love never ends.
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As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease.
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As for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
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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,
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I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.
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Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
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So now faith, hope, and love abide. These three, but the greatest of these is love.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for the opportunity that we have to gather together in your name that our faith might be strengthened by the hearing of your word together in this community, and then that we can just have an opportunity to be gathered in a room where we can look around and see that we are not alone in this battle, in this fight, where we recognize that the world is increasingly, the pressure seems to be turned up against you and against truth.
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Father, I pray that you would help us to know how to navigate these very, very tough and divided times with both love and truth.
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Father, we have a tendency in our hearts to major on one or the other. I have experienced in my youth plenty of truth without love, and then it seems like the culture is moving towards love without truth.
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Father, I pray that you would help us to be a balanced people who are recognizing that the most loving thing we can do is speak the truth.
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Help us to get the truth right. The truth, not that we're better than everybody else and that their sin is gross and ours is okay, but the truth that you love sinners and sent your
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Son to die for us, that anyone who would repent and turn from their sinful ways would be made whole and right and be promised eternal life with you.
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Father, I pray that that gospel would be the thing, the thing that we major on in our lives, when we think of religion, when we think of our spiritual side, when we think of the part of us that is given over and is growing and increasing in love for you, that it would be gospel -oriented through and through, that it is only because of what
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Christ did for us on the cross that we have hope and that we're able to love. Father, I pray that that freedom that we're given in the gospel and at the cross would be the very fuel of our worship, not just these songs that we're about to sing, certainly those, certainly in the gathering to sing with joy and gladness and hearts that are on fire for you because of your great love for us, but also the worship in the way that we live, the way we drive our car, the way we discharge our responsibilities for our employers and the way we respond to spouses and children and parents and all of it worship to you because we have been bought by the blood of Christ and we've been shown such great love from you.
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Let our hearts delight in that this morning as we sing together in this gathering of your people.
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In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. All right, go ahead and be seated. And big thanks to the band.
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Just I'm really grateful for them every week and glad for the work that Dave does in leading us. So yeah, yeah, thankful for them.
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Yep, that's appropriate. I encourage you to get comfortable and keep your Bibles open to 1
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Corinthians chapter 13, verses 8 through 13. And if at any time you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donut holes, you're not going to distract me.
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Whatever you need to keep our focus on God's word and the remainder of our time together. Last week, we saw the necessity of love and the biblical definition of love.
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And this week we see one final point in Paul's argument about spiritual gifts regarding love, and that is the permanence of love.
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And I broke this up because there's a lot to say about love in chapter 13, but there really is this one main point from this whole text.
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So there's really a one point sermon here. Love will never end. That's the main point. Love will never end.
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Just like last week, it might be beneficial to clarify that this is not a message about marriage.
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We did just come, Lynn and I just got back yesterday and a handful of couples here got back from the marriage retreat.
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And it is a good reminder of what love is supposed to be, and especially in marriage. And yet it is not a marriage about, rather, a message about marriage or romantic intimacy.
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It is a message about a particular brand of love that is meant to be expressed between brothers and sisters in Christ.
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This is love for us. This is love to one another. It is a love granted to us by God through the
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Savior Jesus Christ that is now meant to be shared with others. That's the love that we're talking about.
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This is a lean toward others for their benefit kind of character trait. It is expressed in humility, kind actions, patience with the foibles and failings of others.
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It is expressed in a quickness, in a speed to forgive the one who asks. It endures with hope for a better future, that kind of love.
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And that better future is the goal of this passage. I left us last week as a reminder that these broken relationships, these difficult marriages, these trying associations and friendships of this life are not the final word on relationships in human history.
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And how many of you, that's exciting to you? Like the relational crud and the brokenness and the churning and the strife and the struggle that comes naturally to us in these fallen, broken human relationships do not have the final word.
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This is not the sum total of eternal relationships here. No, we hope for a better future.
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There is something that is yet to come in all of this. If you're anything like me, then your relationships have been a mixed bag.
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I think if we're just honest, if you're just to reflect back on a history of your life regarding interpersonal relationships with others.
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I've noticed this over the course of my 50 years on this planet is that the common thread in all relationships that I've ever had is me.
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I bring enough, I bring to every relationship I've ever had enough brokenness to spoil it from the start.
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Anybody want to raise your hand and say, that's me too. Those of you that don't raise your hand are just tired. I get it.
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But I think all of us know in ourselves that we bring enough mess with us to destroy any and all relationships.
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No matter how hard they want to love me, I bet I could mess it up. You know what I'm saying? No matter how much they want to bring to the table,
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I'm sure that I can destroy any relationship with my own self -centeredness.
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What is the percentage? Ask yourself this. Think about the state of relationships now. Really, before we can understand the value of what is being presented to us here in the text of an everlasting love from God that will go on for eternity, that will be shared with us and in turn shared to others for eternity, before we can really value that, we have to first mourn over the current state of love and human relationships in the here and now.
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So, when you think about percentages, what percentage of relationships that end ugly between two people?
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Think about how many of those relationships end, and they end ugly, between two people who loved each other so much that they walked an aisle to declare their until -we -die kind of love in front of a bunch of people in God.
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How many friendships are one -sided where only one is working at it? How many times do we say hurtful things in a relationship that we wish we could take back?
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How many parents and children are estranged from one another? Love is not just on hard times post -COVID.
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Love has always been on hard times because of the fallenness of the human heart. Since the fall, love has been on hard times.
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But we keep coming back to it, don't we? We keep valuing it. We keep striving for it.
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We keep talking about it. We keep elevating it. All of our songs, most of our songs sing about it.
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And we would even acknowledge that the one who doesn't even believe that God exists, the one from whom all love originates, the most atheistic human would still like to be loved, right?
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All of us want to be loved, but we all know that our love is imperfect, and I believe that cuts as a human standard as well.
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All of us know we don't love as much as we ought. In our longing for love, we are longing for something just outside of our grasp.
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In our longing to be loved, it's out of our grasp. In our longing to actually love others, it's out of our grasp.
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We are striving for a ledge just a little bit out of reach. And our passage this morning promises that for those who are in Christ, our longing to be loved and to love others perfectly will be satisfied.
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It will be satisfied. Those longings of our hearts will be satisfied. Paul starts out his final point about love by stealing his own thunder.
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Rather than building to his conclusion, he states the revealed truth from the beginning. He starts with the point, love never ends.
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You see it right there in plain sight in verse 8. Love never ends, his main point.
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Set into the context of serving one another in the church through spiritual gifts, which is really the theme of chapter 12, 13, and 14,
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Paul has been lifting up love as the more excellent way of community. Rather than clamoring for your own way, rather than building and boosting up yourself, the
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Corinthians had been arrogantly flaunting their own spiritual gifts saying, ain't I something? Look at me.
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Look at what I can do. They're tooting their own horns and making much of themselves and elevating their own personal value to the community.
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And I'm sure it's hard to imagine a church responding in this way, this arrogance toward one another, but I've heard that it can happen from time to time.
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I'm going to say honestly, I've been very blessed and grateful that I haven't seen a lot of that here. I haven't seen a ton of arrogance at this church.
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Certainly it's here, and I don't commend you blindly because I don't see into your heart, but I'm just saying that the movement of God in Recast Church in the past 15 years has not had a lot of arrogance and pride infused into it, and I'm grateful for that.
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But I know that it can happen. How many of you know it can happen? You've seen it. You've experienced it. You've lived it.
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So Paul has been seeking to bring the service of one another within the church through these passages, chapter 12 and 13, and then we're going to look at 14 starting next week.
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But to bring the service of one another in the church back to the central MO of love, what motivates us, what is the core kind of operating system of the church, and it is love.
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Applying our gifts to the church without love makes us dissonant with God's purposes, like a gong being played in an orchestra off time or a clashing cymbal that is just overpowering everything around and not played skillfully, a dissonant with God's purposes when we're tooting our own horns and making much of ourselves.
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Without love, it makes us nothing and gains us nothing, even great feats of self -sacrifice gain us nothing if they are not done out of love.
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Instead, we are being called very clearly throughout all this passage to serve one another with a love that is defined by Christ's patience and Christ's generosity toward us, the love that he has expressed toward us as the way that we're to reflect out to each other and the world around us.
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So Paul, once again, is contrasting the spiritual gifts that the Corinthians took pride in with love that God calls his church to exhibit, the very love that he desires.
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And he's saying, you've got spiritual gifts on one side and you've got love on the other. The spiritual gifts are not nothing, but they need to be applied with love.
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And he says something in verse 8 that would likely have been shocking to the Corinthians' ears. Prophecies, tongues, words of knowledge will all go bye -bye.
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They're all going to go bye -bye. They're all going to go away. Prophecy, this really central thing to the church that you're going to see in chapter 14, this very, very important revelation of God's will and desire, gone.
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Tongues, gone. Knowledge, gone. That's a word of knowledge where you need somebody else to speak into your heart and life at a specific time and specific place.
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All three of these sampling of gifts pertain to some level of communication with God. And it's interesting to note that the
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Christian faith that Jesus left us with, this is important and fundamental to this text, is that we have a communicating faith.
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Our faith is not one of esoterical experience or mystical kind of like entering into the flow and emptying your mind and just meditating and just kind of like doing your omens and, you know, no thoughts so that you could just be filled with godness or something like eastern mysticism.
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No, ours is a communicating faith. It's a studying faith. It's an engage your brain kind of faith. It is
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God communicating with us and us communicating with God and therefore communicating with others as well.
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We are not given a mere experience of God, but we are given a communicated content from the
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Almighty, amen? We're given something that we can keep going back to time and time again to say, did He really say?
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Yes, let's look at it. Let's read it. Let's study it. Let's dig into it together. He is there.
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Our God is there and He is not silent. He is not silent.
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He communicates and so therefore we communicate as well. We communicate.
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We talk. We interact. We relate to one another because God is a communicating God and He created us in His image and therefore we communicate too.
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And salvation comes to a soul through a communicated content, not through a feeling, through a communicated content.
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Jesus Christ died on the cross so that anyone who puts their faith and trust in Him will be saved from the consequences of their sin.
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That message must be spoken for the gospel. None of this business that I've heard multiple times in 20 years of pastoral ministry where people will say, and I've heard it on the radio,
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I've heard it in sermons, I've read it in books, preach the gospel, use words if necessary. How many of you are familiar with that phrase?
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That's a mess. That's a tangle. I don't know how to mime the gospel.
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I get it. How do you get the gospel content over without words?
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You have to say He died on the cross for your sins. You're broken, you're busted, and you need a
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Savior. The whole idea that I'm going to be a good worker at my factory and everybody's going to come to faith in Christ because I'm really doing a good job.
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Now, you should do a good job, right? Not saying do a terrible job. Do a good job, but your words are going to be necessary to lead anybody to faith in Christ.
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Anyways, I just got way off my notes there, but this is a content that is communicated. The gospel is written and a spoken message.
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So prophecies are God bringing truth to a human mind to share with others. And we're going to really dive in deeper into the definition of prophecies.
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I may actually, and I'm going to just confess to you that over the course of my study in the past few weeks, my definition of tongues and prophecy has been kind of and it's starting to form, and it will form very strongly next week.
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And it may not land in places. I may have to recant some things that I've said in previous messages.
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So I just want you to just know that as I study, I always, I know a lot about the scriptures and I've studied them my entire life.
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And I mean that like I remember back in high school underlining the book of Mark and just going through it. And I was studying it back then.
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I've read the Bible probably cover to cover, not to boast, but probably 20 times at least. And I've studied it and I have a feeling about every passage.
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But then sometimes like a chapter like 14 that's coming up, I've at times and seasons in my life,
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I felt this way about it and other times I felt this way about it. And I'm going to dig in and I'm going to nail that down for you.
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But anyways, again, I'm off my notes again. Don't worry though, it timed out shorter than normal, so we should be okay.
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But see, where was I? Tongues, prophecy, going to get a better definition of that next week.
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But they are certainly have something to do with bringing knowledge and revealing mysteries. And I'm comfortable with saying that.
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Tongues are a spiritual mode of communication either to others who speak a foreign language or as the
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Corinthians thought, speaking to God in an unknown heavenly language. That's the best
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I can say right now. Knowledge is a given word that meets an immediate need of the moment. God basically giving you something to say to somebody that is impactful in their lives and you weren't thinking about it and then he just gives you a verse to share with them or something.
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But instead of majoring on these miraculous gifts here in this text, we don't want these extras to take the spotlight away from the main actress of the passage.
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Unfortunately, I have to confess that I have studied this very passage, Chapter 13, in the past without much thought about love at all.
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Now, you can study that first part and, oh, that's for marriages. That's for wedding ceremonies, right?
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The love is patient, love is kind, it doesn't envy, it doesn't boast. Oh, that's for the weddings. But now this passage is about the ending of the spiritual gifts.
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I've focused in and mined that deeper in my past without much thought about love throughout this passage, but I wanted to see what it says about prophecy and tongues in past studies.
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But love is the lead actress in this passage. While these gifts will be put in their place as mere extras on the cosmic scope of God's play, you see, what this text is saying is that during this, in this big scope of the play that God is writing of human history, prophecy is going to exit the stage.
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Lines, tongues will be written out of the script. Gifts of knowledge will exit the stage as well.
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But love remains always, will always be on the stage, always at center stage, lines in every set, the central movement of every act, love.
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Our experience of God and His communication in the here and now, what Paul is getting at is that it is partial at best.
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Like an internet friendship, whether you've never met them in IRL, we know that we don't know everything, and we know that we might very well know very little.
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But more than an internet friendship, we know that God is faithful in what He says about Himself, but we are still at a distance from Him.
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Beyond what He has revealed, we only know in part, and no prophecy has revealed all mysteries and the complete all knowledge of God.
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This tells us what He desires for us to know about Him that is sufficient to trust Him, that is sufficient to be saved and rescued by Him, that is sufficient to live for Him, amen?
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But how many of you know that God cannot be summarized in a book? In 1 ,189 chapters, it does not exhaust the knowledge of God, amen?
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And so, no one knows all about God. In verse 9, Paul is emphatically encouraging us to be realistic about our expectations in this life.
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Faith is required simply because of the state of knowledge and prophecy in this life.
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I have not seen God, but absolutely believe and trust that He's there. Can I prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists?
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Well, I can give you evidences that give me confidence, but you still will need to ultimately decide for yourself what to do with the evidence that I give you.
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You get what I'm saying there? The humility here of Paul to whom was given the revelation through the
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Holy Spirit of nearly 25 % of the New Testament written by the pen of the
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Apostle Paul, it's a fabulous example that he demonstrates so much humility to us here.
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And I think it's in verse 9, for we, he's included in that, for we know in part and we prophesy in part.
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He admits to knowing God in part. But now in verse 10, he draws our attention to a future date, verse 10, but when the perfect comes, when, that's a date, that's a time designator, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
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He's drawing our attention to a future date, a real date on a calendar. We don't know what that date will be, and we will not know what that date will be, but the perfect is coming.
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And when the perfect comes, he says, the partial things of communicating with God, the partial things of knowledge of God will be done away.
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They will pass away. Well, I can illustrate this. Lynn and I had a Keurig coffee maker about seven years ago.
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It was on its last leg. We had descaled it many times. We had run vinegar through it, followed all kinds of online things.
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We cleaned the needle out many times, but there came a point where it would make a partial cup of coffee.
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The pump would labor, and I think the pump was giving out, and so it would get, you would get about five ounces was the max you would get out of that thing.
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Well, after some research, we gave up, jumped on Amazon, ordered a new one. It was delivered. We unboxed it.
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We set it up and began making complete cups of coffee. Do you think we kept the partial functioning one just in case?
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No, we pitched it. When the one that was complete, when the one that would make a complete cup of coffee arrived, we got rid of the one that made a partial cup of coffee.
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It was no longer needed. Paul is not writing in this text about the arrival of the complete to displace the partial.
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He's not doing that to insult prophecy or tongues or words of knowledge, but he is trying to put them in their place.
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He is absolutely writing to curb our expectations in this in -between time that we live in. What do we expect from a relationship with God and communication with Him and love with His people?
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What is our expectation in this in -between time? There is something so radical coming. According to verse 10, there's something so radical coming.
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There's something so earth -changing on its way that the very way we relate to God will be absolutely overhauled.
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The difference that will be brought on that day when the perfect arrives will be so different that Paul illustrates it not with a partially functioning
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Keurig, but with childhood to adulthood, the distinction between a child and an adult.
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In verse 11, Paul interjects this illustration that highlights the vast superiority of the perfect to the partial.
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The difference between me as a man and me as a child is vast in every way. In my speaking, in my thinking, in my reasoning, says
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Paul, and certainly I would echo the same thing, I've advanced a bit beyond my childhood. And despite any jokes about the immaturity of our society or whatever it might be, man children and all of that stuff, we are all advanced beyond, far beyond our speaking, thinking, reasoning capacities of childhood.
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Paul is illustrating the gulf between the partial gifts of the Spirit that he gives to the church now and the arrival of the perfect to do away with this current system of communication to and from the
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Almighty. Right now, we understand God like children, but when the perfect arrives, we will understand like adults.
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Are you seeing what he's saying there? There's coming a day where we will understand much better than we do today.
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I'm glad for that day. I look forward to that day. Paul is so clearly pointing to the limited nature of any and all gifts we are given in the church that I just cannot understand how in the world a person could read this passage, particularly, and I think part of the problem is that you just pick a part of it and you just read that.
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But if you were to sit down and read chapter 12 through the end of chapter 14, I don't know how anybody could do that and come out with an elevation of certain gifts within the church, but it happens.
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There are plenty of churches that elevate specific gifts and say, if you don't do this, you're not saved. If you don't do that, you're not saved.
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Particularly, if you don't speak in tongues, you're not saved. But chapter 13 serves to suppress any and all elevation of spiritual gifting within a church.
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A church that boasts of its application of spiritual gifts, look at all the miracles he's doing over here, is not a church that has studied 1
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Corinthians 13 in any context. Not only is Paul highlighting, rather in context, but not only is
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Paul highlighting the temporary nature of these gifts, but he's elevating love and kindness toward one another within the church.
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And often, leaning into specific giftings is the way to make sure that a church is divided, not loving toward one another.
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Oh, you got that gift. You're really, really special. You're really special. And if we're not careful, we as evangelicals can do this too.
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Well, the missionaries or the pastors or the preachers or the upfront teachers or whatever it might be, we can have a tendency to elevate certain gifts, right?
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We platform people, we think of them more highly, we put them on a pedestal, and we ought to be very, very careful because it's running against this very instruction that these gifts are just temporary at best.
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Boasting in our accomplishments or boasting about certain gifts during this current era would be like boasting that I can stack building blocks higher than you.
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Or I can make better truck sounds than you. Vroom, vroom, vroom, right? Paul's statement here, hear me carefully, church, maybe this sentence is in this sermon to rebuke some of you,
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I don't know. Paul's statement here should push down any temptation within us to be top dog in the toddler room.
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That's what we do when we compare the giftings that God has given to me to the gifting that he's given to you.
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Top dog in the toddler room, there we go. Since Corinth was a center for the production of mirrors, at least that's what they tell me,
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I don't know these things, I didn't go like dust off like archeology digging in the dirt with a trowel and stuff,
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I don't know. They tell me that the center of mirror production within the Roman Empire was in Corinth, that's where they shined the glass to make mirrors.
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Paul's illustration in verse 12 then would have been very contemporary to them where he mentions a mirror. I don't know if that's true or not, and I pass it along to you as, you know, second hand,
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I mean, I've got sources for it, I didn't make it up, but he says that our relationship and communication with God is currently like looking at someone in an obscured or warped mirror.
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They would not like that idea, they were trying to perfect mirrors, they were trying to make them, they were trying to get them nice and flat and smooth.
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But looking at someone in an obscured or warped mirror is the best that we have in the here and now.
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I absolutely believe that if there had been photography around during this time, we would skip the mirror illustration and be talking about photographs instead because it's a very apt illustration of what
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Paul is getting at here. Paul would have used it here in this illustration if it was there, but would you rather have a picture of one you love or would you rather have a face -to -face conversation with them?
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Duh, and that's, I think, absolutely what he's getting at here. Would you rather have a picture or would you rather have a face -to -face conversation?
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When the perfect comes, he says, we will see face -to -face, we will communicate face -to -face.
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And this phrase ought to help us snap into focus what exactly is meant by when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with.
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What event will happen on some future date that will so radically shake the foundations of our relationship with God that it will render the present forms of communication with God and the present forms of God's communication with us to be mere child's play?
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When will we see face -to -face? Or maybe a better question, a more profound question, who is the other face in face -to -face in verse 12?
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To see face -to -face requires two faces. Face -to -face is always the beholding of another.
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It is the most intimate of communications, right? And in our current age, we are still looking forward to the day when we will communicate with our
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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ face -to -face.
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Currently, we are limited, right? Not a single person in this room has talked to Jesus face -to -face.
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I've interacted with Him face -to -book. Have you interacted with Him face -to -book?
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I've interacted with Him face -to -carpet, you know what I'm saying? Or face -to -hands, right?
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Or face -to -nature, out walking a trail, just impressed with God's creation, right?
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And I've interacted with Him that way. But I have yet to interact with my
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Lord and Savior face -to -face. That is a day, I get chills thinking about it. Oh, that's the day
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I want. That's the day I'm longing for. When we sing, come Lord Jesus, come, like the reflection of the end, the resolution or whatever the word was that Rob used, that it will resolve in the end.
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That's the thing that my heart is intentioned toward, right? That's the thing
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I'm longing for. That's the thing that I want most, to see
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Him face -to -face. Kind of tired of face -to -carpet.
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Not tired of face -to -book, because I find richness and depth here. I mean, this is His love to us expressed in the way that He's showing
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Himself to us. But this is just like salt on the tongue, right? This just makes me more thirsty.
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This makes me desire more and more to know Him better. When the perfect comes, our relationship with our
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Lord will take on a radical new shift, and our relationship with our returned Savior will be face -to -face.
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Paul speaking in first person, which to me heightens these realities. Him speaking,
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Paul says, I know in part. If Paul, the recipient of the inspiration of the
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Holy Spirit, only knew in part, then I only know part of the part. But he points all of our eyes to a glorious day that's coming, a glorious day when faith shall be sight, when what we thought we know turns into full knowledge.
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I don't believe, by the way, that this means that we will become omniscient at the return of Jesus. I don't think so at all.
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But rather that our relationship and communication with the Almighty will be completely what it was meant to be from the beginning.
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Remember, He came down in the garden and talked with Adam. He came down and talked, and it will be restored to what it was meant to be.
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When we see Jesus, we will have our deepest, the deepest, most important question.
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Not all questions, but the deepest ones answered. And merely beholding Him, our faith will be rewarded with true knowledge, where faith once stood.
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God need not tell me why He made platypuses, in order for me to be fully known or to fully know
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Him. Seeing Him and interacting with Him face to face will be the beginning of an eternity of relational communication with our
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Savior. And it is so utterly different than anything I've experienced here in these waiting days.
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The knowledge we will enter into is a relational knowledge, known like I know my friends.
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I am known by God in a highly relational way. He knows me in a way, like when it says fully known, fully known relationally.
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He knows me in a way that has been kind and loving to me and patient and gracious. He knows my sins and has forgiven me.
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He knows me truly, and He has loved me anyway. Those who are His are fully known in that way.
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So, has Paul's goal been to denigrate these gifts so far that we push them out? Has his desire, has he desired to cause us all to doubt our knowledge of God or to add fractures into our trust of revelations and prophecies and tongues and words of knowledge?
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I don't think so. Instead, his goal is revealed in verse 13. He has had one goal, to elevate love within the church.
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And in order to do this, for the very proud and arrogant Corinthians, he needed to put their giftedness into perspective.
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Boasting about their spiritual gifts is like a 51 -year -old man boasting that he got a couple of victory royales in Fortnite last week by hiding in a bush.
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That may or may not have actually happened. I have a very precise year in there, but faith, hope, and love.
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That was for a younger generation, by the way. If you don't know what Fortnite is, that's totally okay. Faith, hope, and love are the substance of our fellowship.
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Right? These three abide in the here and now, he says in verse 13. Faith, hope, and love.
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And he introduces faith and hope in a passage that's very significantly about love.
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But I believe he's even implying that these three abide now, but even those three are not all going to remain.
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Not even all those three. Faith, hope, and love. They abide now, but the greatest of these is love.
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Why? Faith, hope, and love describe, define, and forge our very community today.
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I love the way that Paul elsewhere in his letters describes these three in very foundational, fundamental ways to the way the church works.
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For example, in 1 Thessalonians 1, verse 3, I'm going to read the
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Christian Standard Bible. I really like this translation, and it's growing on me. But it says this here.
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Um, we recall in the presence of our God and Father, your work produced by faith, your labor motivated by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our
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Lord Jesus Christ. Do you see him there? All three foundation to the church.
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Work produced by faith, labor motivated by love, endurance inspired by hope.
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Not faith, hope, and love, but faith, love, and hope. Just different order, same words. All three are the descriptions of a faith community in the here and now.
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And yet the greatest of these is love. In what way is love the greatest? Love is the one that will punch through the veil into the new eternal kingdom of our
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Lord and Savior. Faith will become sight, hope will be granted her object, and therefore completely fulfilled on the day when we stand face to face with our
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Savior and King. But love, love's not going to be done away with. Love will be the eternal operating system of that new heaven and new earth.
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And there we will delight in his love for us, and we will finally be able to truly love him, and we will finally be able to truly love each other.
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Oh, I look forward to that. When the perfect comes, he will transform all things so radically that we who scarcely know what love is now will truly love on that day.
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There are a few things I think God was trying to accomplish in Corinth by revealing this, and I think it's good to point our minds down those roads of thought this morning before we come to communion.
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The first is to accept his revelation. This is foundational, it's fundamental. God is a
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God of communication, and this passage presupposes that. He has told us about himself, his work in human history, his great love for us, his sending forth of his
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Son, his sacrifice for our sins, our need for faith in him, and his hope of eternity for all who accept forgiveness of their sins based on his sacrifice for them.
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To make sense of this text requires that we believe that he is a God who communicates to his people.
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Trust what has been revealed to us through the prophets and apostles. The prerequisite to all other advances in the
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Christian life is faith in Jesus Christ. If you've not yet accepted Jesus as your
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Lord and Savior, your Savior and King, let's talk. Communication is, after all, the way that God brings to us the content of salvation, and I would love to talk with you further about steps that you could be taking to draw near to Christ.
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Second, many of us have received Christ and may have slid into a pattern like the
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Corinthians, and we need to be reminded to stop thinking too highly of ourselves. Now, that can go two different directions.
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That can go towards loving others and then also towards humility in ourselves. The Christian life, in terms of love, the
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Christian life is not one of competition for God's attention. I'm glad for that. It is one of loving
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God and loving each other well. Maybe take some time to consider any acts of love for others that God may be calling you to this week.
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Maybe you've allowed something to get in the way of a familial relationship you should be investing in. Maybe some of us just need to close our mouths and listen for a change to a friend or to a spouse or to a child or to a parent.
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And for some of us, the second prong, we need to be reminded that we are replaceable. Just a friendly reminder.
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Walking through cemeteries is one of my, well, it sounds strange, but it's one of my favorite practices over the years that's kept me from thinking too highly of myself.
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Cemeteries are full of important people who did cool stuff and are gone. Right? Very, very important to someone.
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Gone. Remember the brevity of your life and love others more than you love yourself.
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Remember the brevity of life. What's going to last? Love. Many of us, many of us likely are going to die in a hospital.
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That's just true. Morbid. Don't want to talk about it. Some of us, I would guess that the majority of us,
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I would guess, are going to get some time to have last thoughts. Most people in America don't die by accident all of a sudden.
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Most die slowly. They're going to have some time to think. And do you think you're going to think about things that you wish you had gained?
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Do you think you're going to be laying there in the hospital bed thinking about the way that you could have worked harder and got a little more gold, a little more treasure?
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Are you going to think about people that you wish you could relove? Relove. That's going to be the thoughts on our minds.
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Love will keep going after we are in the grave. The third thing is to adopt a reasonable expectation.
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What do we expect of ourselves? What do we expect of others in this life? I add this as an application because I've seen it factor into relationships in very dangerous ways.
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I've seen this repeated, repeated, repeated. And fortunately, in 20 years of pastoral ministry, a wife or a husband is done with their marriage because they just have no hope that their husband or wife can ever be what they think the standard is for marriage.
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They just think it's over because they can never be this standard.
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And they look around at other marriages and they have this romanticized, mystical opinion that everybody else's marriage is better than theirs.
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And they just don't know what's going on in the household. Or a couple leaves the church for the third time in three years because the church just hasn't quite prioritized them according to their obvious giftings.
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They're not recognizing them as much as they deserve. Or one that's quite common is just an internal longing for a past time when friends would call and get together and want to hang out most weekends, and now nobody ever calls.
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The friend group is disbanded, basically, and we might feel like we're the only ones who ever call to get people together.
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And there's disappointment in the trajectory of life. Where have my friends gone? Feel lonely.
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What can we expect in a world of fallen, broken relationships?
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What does it mean to live in a world of practice love? It means an uphill battle in us.
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I'm just trying to set the expectations reasonably. It means an uphill battle. We are called to keep loving.
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We are called to keep getting up off the pavement to get back up on the bike.
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Our hope is that one day when the perfect comes, the training wheels will come off, and then we will ride like the wind.
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But for now, the practice is a worthwhile endeavor because our Lord and Savior who loved us is the very one who has called us to practice love.
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So, we just keep doing it. And let's come to the tables as an expression of that, keep doing it.
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Let's come to the tables again this morning with this community of love forged by Jesus in our hearts and minds.
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We are a broken people loving imperfectly, and God has chosen to use us to love others and convey good news to them.
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Not good news that we love perfectly, but rather good news that there is actually a perfect love.
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He came once to show us that perfect sacrificial love, and He will arrive one day to draw us into an eternal kingdom established on that perfect love.
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Until that day, we come weekly to the tables. I say weekly, that could be both ways, right?
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Every week, and we come in our weakness. Weekly to the tables to remember
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His love poured out on us. If you belong to Jesus Christ by faith in His death for you on the cross, as much as it's up to you, you're at peace with others in this church fellowship.
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I encourage you to get up during the next song and take the cracker and juice to remember His blood shed for us and His body broken for us.
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He died for busted up people just like you and me. And talk about expectations. What did Jesus think
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He was buying there on the cross? He knew fully what He was buying, and yet He still paid the price for you and me in His blood.
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While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were still sinners,
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Christ loved us. So let's allow the permanence of love expressed in this passage to drive us to a renewed commitment to keep practicing love for all of our days.
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Love for God in obedience to Him, and love for all of these others that He loves as well.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank You for hope.
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And I ask that this would be a message of hope. I know that there are many who are relationally crushed, many who are relationally downtrodden, who just are broken on the, right now, are broken over the rocks of stony relationships.
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It might be a father or mother who is just fit to be tied with kids. It might be a marital relationship that just is just not meeting, quote -unquote, expectations.
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It might be a relationship with a boss. It might be a relationship with a neighbor, the extended family. But I think everybody in this room has some kind of a relational brokenness.
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It might just even be identifying in our own hearts how we don't love like we ought to, and feeling broken over that.
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Father, I pray that You would meet us in this hope that it is Jesus who will carry us to that place where we will one day both experience love correctly and give love correctly.
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We look forward to that day. But in this practicing time, I pray that You would help us to commit to the task ahead of us of loving others well.