Hope For the New Year

Portion to 1 Corinthians chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

First Corinthians chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

I'm sorry, I don't have a page number.

We do have a pew Bible.

If you don't have one with you, you'll find one in front of you, and it's very near the back.

So we will read all thirteen verses.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers and understanding and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

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

Love is patient and kind.

Love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude.

It doesn't insist on its own way, it's not irritable or resentful.

It doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

As for prophecies, they will pass away.

Tongues they will cease.

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.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face, now I know in part.

Then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three.

But the greatest of these is love, the word of the Lord.

Well, today is New Year's, and it is a traditional time of year for new starts.

A time of reevaluating the importance and priority of various levels of our lives.

What we eat, how we exercise or don't.

And certainly important in that list is how we relate to God, our spiritual well-being.

I do hope that that is something that we do, not only in the first of the year, but certainly at the beginning of a new year, as we're beginning to think in big pictures, I hope we do make time to think about and sit before the Lord and ponder and reflect on where we are spiritually, where we've been in the past year and where we're headed, where the Lord is leading us, what he's teaching us.

So this morning I've selected a text.

It's actually not a text designed to teach you what to think about in the new year.

But I really have been blessed by this text in recent weeks, and feel like this is a text that actually contains some things that would help us think through our priorities and important spiritual things for the coming year.

This is, as many of you know, a very special chapter.

It represents one of the places on the mountains of Scripture.

I don't know if we would call it any kind of summit, but it is high on the mountain.

You leave the base camp and you are up on the mountain and maybe even in the death zone as you come to 1 Corinthians 13.

It's a profound, deep chapter, a very high point chapter.

And so it's a good place, it's a really good place to think about big priorities and big pictures because God has seen fit to give us that kind of offering here.

I'd also just like to say one other thing is I'm not going to give you any kind of a pattern here.

I'm offering you some reflections and thoughts that flow along with the text.

This isn't a formula for how to make your life count next year.

But I do hope that it will be very helpful for all of us.

Well, I'd like to arrange my comments this morning under four words.

Four words.

I'm fond of words, and so uh I'd like to begin with a word of priority.

A word of priority.

Uh one of the things that uh I've painfully discovered in life is that it is easy to miss central things.

I'm pretty sure I'm not done learning that lesson yet.

But it is easy to miss central things.

While we devote ourselves to all kinds of important periphery things, we can miss the central things.

Think about that for a moment in those of you who are parents, and just the way you parent.

Has your parenting changed over 20 years or 10 years?

Um I hope it has.

Think of you who are married.

How has your marriage changed?

What priorities did you bring into the marriage?

And what has God shown you now?

10, 20, 30, 40 plus years into it.

Well, it's very easy to do that with the Lord as well.

When we began the Christian race, we might have one set of priorities in mind.

And as we mature, as God brings us on in life, we begin to see things differently.

And our writer this morning is saying really, really clearly that there is something that is so central to the Christian life that if you miss it, you really have nothing.

That's the exact word he uses, nothing.

You don't gain anything, you don't have anything.

In fact, you might even go further and say you're just an irritant.

He uses some very strong language about this.

I don't know how many of you remember there's a person in the New Testament named Nicodemus.

He was a contemporary with Jesus.

And he came to Jesus one night, alone presumably, and he wanted to engage Jesus.

He was skittish.

And Jesus began to expound to him what he had come to bring.

And it began to be clear to Nicodemus that he really had missed in his religious upbringing as a leader in religious society, in Jewish society.

He was a member of the Sanhedrin.

He was a high-ranking, studious man.

And it became clear to him that he had missed something huge in God's revelation about himself.

And all of that's kind of summarized for him in words that he spoke.

And I don't, I so resonate with these words.

You could probably just picture the look on his face.

He said, How can this be?

How can this be?

Like a man who had spent years in one direction with a lot of energy and now is that far off of something so central.

Well, the thing that is so central in our text that God reveals here is love.

Love is at the center of God's own character.

God is love, and is at the very center of what God has for us.

Love for God, love for one another.

Love is at the very center.

But it's interesting how easy it is to miss this.

I don't think we miss the language.

I think as you hear those words, as we read this in the text, there's no surprises here, right?

This isn't new to us.

Of course, love's important.

But when we look at the kinds of religious things that the Corinthians were doing, or the examples that Paul gives in the text, the kinds of great sacrifices and service, the kinds of great expenditure of gifts and resources that were put out clearly in the name of God, but without love, that they really amounted to nothing, absolutely nothing.

And we too can engage in great acts of service.

We too occupy ourselves, expend great energy, great resources on all kinds of things, great planning, great disciplines, many good things in the Christian life.

And sometimes I think it would help us to ask the question: are we hitting near love?

Where are we missing love in all of this?

But how?

Maybe we would want to ask, how?

How do we not miss love?

How do we engage in love?

And of course, you know that, and we had it read this morning, that Paul gives us a list.

We like lists.

He gives us a list of the character traits, if you will, of love, at least some ways in which love shows itself.

And it's put in terms of human relationships, of how we deal with one another.

Well, my goal this morning isn't to expound that list to you.

In fact, one of the things I'd like to just say is I don't think this list is given to us so that we will go out and get to work on it.

I love nuance too.

That's not to say that God doesn't call us to all of these things.

It's not to say that he's going to say in the next chapter, pursue love.

But I'm saying that as you read this list, there's probably something in you, if you know yourself, and depending on how you're wired, there's probably something in you that begins to move, it begins to start vibrating and moving, that you need to get busy on this list for the coming year.

Because there's a lot of things in this list that we struggle with really deeply.

Not only that, but don't miss that this list is not about just superficial things for us to go do, to be kind or to be patient.

This list is talking about, fundamentally, heart attitudes, postures of our heart on the inside.

This is fundamentally why we just can't go out and do this.

To just be kind.

To just, I'm going to start being kind today.

I'm done with unkindness.

I'm done with impatience.

You know, let's just go down this list.

We'll soon discover that our heart runs in very many contrary directions to all that he's given us here.

And that what we often find ourselves doing in our attempt to go and do this list is to do it really with our words and with our facial expressions, and we do it more on the outside than on the inside.

And these are complex things, so I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but we find ourselves using nice voices with each other, and that masks itself for being kind.

And that's not what's being talked about here.

God is calling us to a deep, heartfelt heart posture of love that really cares for another in the deepest of ways.

And I think appropriate to say as a new year has passed, and as we see the years ticking off faster and faster, as you get older and older, don't you realize that it has taken a lifetime, as old as you are, for you to begin to see some of the things in this list and what they really entail.

It's taken a lifetime for you to begin to see how you fall short of some of the things in this list.

Your spouse saw them 20 years ago, but you're just coming into that, maybe.

It really takes a lot of suffering and pain for us to grasp this list deeply.

But nevertheless, love is a priority.

Love is a priority.

And I'll say more later about maybe how we pursue that priority, but for now I'm gonna leave it there.

Now I have three more words, and they're all gonna focus from verse 12.

So I'm gonna really narrow on a single verse.

It's a verse that's uh a very um profound verse, and one that we maybe tend to read over a little bit quickly.

But there's three words for us here.

The first is a word of clarity.

Clarity.

I think it's I find it maddening to not be able to see.

You know, whether it's I can't find my glasses and I can't read a text, or you're sitting down at a movie theater and some tall person with a hat sits right in front of you.

You know, it's just maddening.

Well, the more there is at stake, the more maddening it is.

Is that right?

And our writer is talking about in this text, fundamentally, he's talking about seeing God.

He's talking about knowing who God is, knowing what his vision for us is, knowing what God is doing in our lives.

These are the kinds of things that are on the table with words like prophecies and words of knowledge and insight and so forth?

It's really maddening not to be able to see much about what God is up to and who he is and what he's doing and what he's done for us.

So let me ask you, how was 2016 for you?

Was it a good year?

What will 2017 hold for you?

Chances are, I think, there are many things that we don't get about the Lord.

Chances are there were many things last year that we did not understand why they happened, why God in his providence moved in those kinds of ways.

There are many things last year that we didn't understand about ourselves, about what was going on in us.

It's maddening.

And it can be unsettling, it can impact how you feel about the trustworthiness of God, right?

If your dreams are being shattered, and eventually they will be, if your life is unraveling in various kinds of ways, and likely it will at some levels and some deep levels before God's done with you, and you're honest with the Lord, I'm pretty sure we're going to struggle with whether he's trustworthy or not.

I know that because God gave us psalms that express those very ideas and that are meant to teach us, to give us permission to enter into those kinds of lamenting areas where we just don't understand what the Lord is doing.

Where, on the one hand, we have to hold on to truths that a few weeks ago were preached in this pulpit.

God will let no evil befall you, the people of God.

He'll keep you from sunburn and moonburn, right?

Remember this passage?

Uh with Psalm 121, I think.

And um your help comes from the Lord, your creator.

Wonderful bedrock truths that we we have to have.

But when you compare them with how your own life is being laid out, the kinds of evil that you do encounter, it can leave you scrambling because you don't understand what God means by this and what is he up to, and why does he allow this?

And don't think that evil is passive in this.

Evil with a capital E.

Evil is out to leverage all kinds of things in your life, especially shame and guilt, and to lead you to places where you begin to feel like, wow, the things that are Happening in my life are the result of the failure that I am.

Certainly, our failures can bring consequences in our lives.

But not in the way that shame wants to move us, not in the way that evil wants to leverage that.

Clarity.

Clarity.

What's your view of clarity that you have right now in this life of the Lord?

What kind of clarity are you going to have in 2017?

I feel like our clarity in this world is analogous to driving in North Dakota in the winter under blizzard conditions.

White out.

That'll make your knuckles move if you live out in the country or if you have to travel a lot.

I recently had another experience of this.

I don't like driving in this kind of weather.

I knew it was going to be windy from Grand Forks to Devil's Lake.

The blizzard was on.

And at first it was fine.

I could see okay.

It was good.

And then it was less good.

And then it was okay again.

Then it was really not good.

Like I couldn't even see the taillights of the car, just two car lanes in front of me.

And there were a few periods that were absolutely, I just have to say, terrifying.

I didn't know what to do.

I just clung my wheel and looked straight ahead, and it seemed like everything was kind of moving around.

It was 100% whiteout.

I just coasted.

And it only lasted a short while.

And then boop, okay, we've got a little more clarity.

Ten feet's good.

Can you come to peace with not much clarity?

With seeing through a glass dimly.

With living with some fog as to who God is and what he's doing.

Now I know the revealed things he has given us are for us and our children.

And this isn't an encouragement to be passive in pursuing knowledge of God and pursuing wisdom and pursuing leading and shepherding.

But it is an encouragement to relax a little and to lighten up a little.

That God hasn't designed for you or me to know all we want to know.

And the road will be checkered all the way to glory for us.

A third word vulnerability.

I think that's two syllables.

Vulnerability.

When you look up vulnerability, it actually comes from a Latin word that means to wound.

And the idea is of making yourself capable of being wounded or hurt.

Or it may even mean to open yourself up to an attack, to a moral attack.

We come to use this term in modern English of a kind of openness that's deep, that trusts somebody, with someone you trust, you become vulnerable with them.

You share with them more of who you are.

You let them know who you are at a deeper way than you would just let anyone know who you are.

In fact, the deeper you do that, the more the ability that person has to destroy you if they wanted and were evil.

I think I would speak for all of us when I would say that there's something more terrifying than driving in white out, and that is being known deeply.

Like really deeply.

Between us and God.

I don't want anyone else to know that or to see that.

And were it to become known, wow, it would be really terrifying to us.

In verse 12, something is said that is really amazing.

It comes at the very end of the verse.

Paul is saying in this verse that is in contrast to our present seeing dimly, we are going to eventually see God in a way that's kind of analogous to the way he sees us.

And the way he sees us is put.

You have to look at it.

I hope if your Bibles are open, do look at it, otherwise I'll read it to you here.

Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Fully known.

This is telling us that God knows us.

He knows you.

To the absolute bottom of the bottom.

He knows every thought you've had today in all your lives.

He knows every desire, twisted or otherwise, that you'll feel that will come to your mind.

He knows it.

He sees it.

This isn't said to terrify us.

It's actually said to encourage us.

Because we are Christians.

We are in Christ.

We sang about it this morning that all we need is Christ.

That's all we need.

And we stand before our Father, our Creator, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We stand before his penetrating eyes that see all the way to dividing marrow and bone and joints and sinews.

And yet God loves his people in Christ.

He's committed to his people.

So I want to make a couple practical suggestions here from this word of vulnerability.

Maybe you could risk this year bringing God into your thought life more often.

Maybe you could risk when you are aware, whoa, I just thought that, I just felt that, I just that idea just was in my mind.

I just found myself giving harbor to this.

Wow, I'm just realizing how how much I was this or that.

Can you risk bringing God into that?

That's not a risk for God.

It's not a risk in terms of the meaning of the word.

If you're in Christ, God isn't going to harm you and attack you.

He's not going to destroy you.

In fact, quite the contrary.

He invites us to open up ourselves to him.

That's a part of what it means to repent.

How deep will our repentance ever be if it's only at those surface level things?

One of the ways you can gauge how well you invite God into your thought life would be to think about what are the kinds of things I repent to God about on a regular basis?

Kind of what are the things that I say to him?

Oh, Lord.

Did it again?

What words do you put on that?

Do we use words like idolatry?

An idol.

Father, that is an idol.

Do we use words like adultery, spiritual and otherwise?

Do we use words like liar?

Murderer.

Not on the outside.

I smiled, but I murdered him.

That's inviting God into your thought life.

You're fully known.

A second practical thing would be maybe you could pursue a deeper knowledge of yourself this year.

Just pursue a deeper knowledge of yourself this year.

And one way you might do that would be just to ask the Lord.

I think he loves it.

He delights when we ask him these kinds of things.

Lord, would you open that up to me?

Would your Holy Spirit that lives in me, would you open that up to me and show me more about myself?

I think we know a little how this works.

Don't you love it?

When someone very close to you begins to see something that you saw a long time ago.

You know what that feels like, right?

There's an excitement.

There's an excitement.

Like, wow, they're getting it.

Lord, you are doing it.

You're un you're starting to unpack this corridor here.

The doors are opening up, light is coming in.

Wow.

And sometimes these can be earth-shattering, just earth-shattering, and it's just wonderful.

So take that, take that knowledge and that experience and bring it into your own life of what would it be like for you to come to that about yourself?

And I would say it's just as earth-shattering, even though it might be very painful, it will be something that will be wonderful at the same time.

Finally, a last word.

I didn't have a word for this.

I didn't feel like there was one word that would capture this.

So I'm just going to call this a word of amazing truth.

A word to blow your socks off.

That's all I can say about it.

So Paul says here something about when the perfect comes.

When the perfect comes.

Whatever your view of eschatology might be, ultimately the perfect is talking about the return of the Lord, his kingdom established, and his people being with him in a way that is mind-blowing.

We've just come through the Advent season.

And so I hope there's been some measure in your lives of anticipation.

And some of that is kind of a discipline, right?

You kind of help yourselves and your family, and you kind of try to put yourself in the place of an Israelite, a faithful, God-fearing Israelite prior to the coming of Christ, and you're thinking through the Old Testament predictions of the coming Messiah and what he would do, and you're looking forward to that day, and we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

He's here.

And the big thing that no one understood at the time was well, that's just his first appearing.

And there's going to be a long period, and no one saw how long that was going to be.

No one knows now how long it will yet be.

But it's been 2,000 years.

And we're waiting.

We don't have to put ourselves in anyone's shoes.

We're waiting for the Son of God to come back in the clouds with a trumpet.

We're waiting for him to come back and to find us and to bring his people home.

He promised he would do it.

And we're waiting.

We've been embarked on a new exodus.

We've been delivered from the tyrant of Egypt.

And we're wandering in the desert.

We're in that already, not yet, is the words we always use to describe that.

We're wandering in the desert with the Lord at our lead, the new Moses, who's leading us to the promised land.

But the promised land is yet to come.

So we know what all this is.

But there's a dramatic change coming.

The partial is going to pass away.

And what's going to take its place?

Face to face.

Face to face.

We probably recognize this language from the Old Testament describing Moses, who had this peculiar position, this peculiar, unique benefit of being able to go up on the mountain and sit with God face to face in some kind of way.

Or maybe Jacob in the Old Testament is said to have, he said it himself.

He said that with a mediated presence of God that he wrestled with, that he saw God face to face.

He was really excited about that and amazed that he wasn't killed because he knew the rebel that he was.

But I'd like you to just think about this language just for a moment.

Your face says something.

This is why you don't.

You want her to see your face.

Because your countenance says something.

Your face says something.

It displays something of your soul.

And we are going to be face to face.

The whiteout will be ended.

Living by faith will be ended.

We're going to be living in the presence of God.

And we're going to see his face shining upon us.

Some of us might struggle with this because we might see his face as looking like our angry parent the whole time we grew up.

Disappointed in their daughter or son.

Never got it right.

So the prospect of being face to face with God might bring those kinds of, might trigger those kinds of emotions in, and there might not be a real grasping of what's being said here.

The idea here is that God is going to look at us with the deepest of loving hearts in this loving chapter on love, that God is going to look at us face to face, and we're going to see him as he actually is, and we're going to know how much he loves us and cares for us.

Some of you heard it in the language having been fully known.

If you have ears tuned to the Bible, those ears picked up the idea of love and intimacy that's bound up in the no words of Scripture.

So I want to bring this to a conclusion by saying this.

This is probably the most important word this morning that I've given.

Because this word holds the key to the others.

I don't think you can really learn how to put that list into practice of loving your neighbor until you know what it is to be loved at the very bottom by a God who knows you fully.

When you know what that's like, and most of you do, then you will begin to know how to love others.

We are called.

We are called to be a people who know the face of the Lord, to anticipate his coming.

The preparation that we sang about this morning is not a preparation that you go out and get this list put in good order in your own heart.

Yes, pursue the list, but you pursue the list by pursuing the Lord Himself.

You pursue it by bringing him into your thought life.

You pursue it by making peace that he's the Lord, and I'm gonna be driving in a fog all the days of my life, and that his face is the most beautiful thing in all the world.

It's the best kind of quiet time I could ever have would be to just sit and think and sing about his face that shines over me in Christ.

I'd like to invite the worship team to come forward, to lead us in a one more song, and then we'll have a closing benediction.