The Way of Love | A More Excellent Way - 1 Corinthians 13 | June 2

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First Corinthians chapter 13. If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

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 move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give 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 does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful.

It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in 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.

As for tongues, they will cease. 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.

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.

Amen. You may now kiss the bride.

I'll admit, I stole that joke from someone else, but it was so good that I just did it myself.

And I guess I didn't have to admit that I stole it, but...

Yeah. But that's where our mind goes, right? Those are where we hear these words

most often in this chapter.

And that's where our minds most often go, right? That's where we've heard these

words most often in the context of a wedding ceremony, rather than in the context

of an actual church service.

I suppose it's not so strange that couples who are declaring their love for

one another would gravitate towards these words as they exchange vows between one another,

as they They declare that a covenant marriage is coming into being.

But I fear that as a result of this usage, perhaps maybe a little bit of what

is really going on is lost.

What is really important may be lost as a result of that because we've kind

of made them into nice words exchanged between a bride and a groom on their

loving day as they exchange vows with one another.

And so, maybe we've lost a little bit of the power of what is contained.

Now, don't get me wrong. These are perfectly good words to share at a wedding.

Husbands and wives should love each other like this.

They definitely should. And I do believe that if you set your heart with a purpose

to internalize these words and live by these words, then you will have a better marriage.

But that's not really what they're about. They're not really about the love

between a husband and wife.

And these really are truly words of love describing the type of love that God

has for us as a self-sacrificing others love, his love towards us who are sinners.

But maybe they're not exactly about that either.

They are to an extent, but just bear with me. The reason that most people kind

of gravitate towards this, these reality of these words as a description of God's love,

his patient love for sinners like us is because of the Greek word that Paul

uses, which many of you have probably heard.

And if you haven't, the Greek word that Paul chooses in this particular context is agape.

And while there are several words for love in the Greek language,

agape is the one that is most often chosen to describe God's self-sacrificing

love because it is a love that pours itself out without expecting anything in return.

And Jesus doesn't only reserve this right of love for he and the father,

but he challenges us to this kind of love as well.

There's a story where he's eating dinner at the house of one of the rulers of

the Pharisees. It's a Sabbath dinner.

And Jesus kind of spends the whole night sort of assaulting the guests with

truth, you might say, verbally assaulting them with truth.

And then he even turns to the host and he says, when you give a dinner banquet

or a dinner or a banquet, Do not invite your friends or your brothers or your

relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid.

But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame,

the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you,

for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.

So, just like Paul, Jesus is confronting culture. He's confronting the culture

of reciprocity, which says, if I do something nice for you, then you are obligated

to do something nice for me, right?

You must follow suit. You must return in kind. That's the whole,

I scratch your back, you-scratch-mine kind of mentality.

So, Jesus is writing against culture, and He's saying, don't do that.

He's saying, invite people over to dinner who can't possibly repay you.

Do kindness. Show your kindness to those who have no hope of returning it or

increasing your status.

Because even Sabbath dinners were an opportunity for these sort of social jockeying.

So, Jesus is saying, don't do that.

And it goes back to God in this, in the sense that God loves you because He

promised that He would, and not with the expectation that you could earn it.

God loves you because He promised that He would, and you cannot earn it. And He knows that.

And this is the love that calls people to God and salvation.

It's a love that they cannot possibly

repay. A love that we cannot hope to reciprocate in any sort of fullness.

And this story about Jesus and this dinner is directly followed by his words to die to self,

to lay down your life, to pick up the cross for yourself and to give up all

that you have, all that you desire, all that you hold dear.

And because at the end of the day, it's a call to die. That love is a call to die.

And this is the way that God has first loved us.

And Paul at no point says, this is God's love in these verses.

At no point does Paul say, this is the way that you should love.

And let me tell you how God loves so that you understand it. It's true.

He is communicating that to an extent. This is the way that God loves us.

It is his agape love, but there's maybe something more that he's focusing on.

Because what Paul does say in the chapter we just read last week,

chapter 12, he says, I will show you a still more excellent way, right?

We just read those words. He concludes his thoughts by saying,

I will show you a still more excellent way.

You eagerly desire, earnestly desire the higher gifts, and I will show you a

still more excellent way.

So one way of interpreting this is in an accusatory tone, which we don't typically

get from our translations because it leaves out the pronoun,

that Paul is almost saying, you desire gifts that you perceive to be higher

and better than those around you.

Don't do that. I will show you a better way to live.

I will show you a more excellent way. If you are, all of your abilities,

all of your gifts, all of these social statuses, they don't matter much if you're

putting yourself on display.

If you're pointing to yourself, if you look down at the center of your motivations

and you're there, then you've got something wrong.

It's what Paul is saying, that love is self-sacrificing. that we pursue love first.

And here is the excellent self-sacrificing way of love.

This is kind of the introduction to this chapter.

And arguably chapter 13 is the climax of the entire book to the Corinthians

or letter to the Corinthians in many ways.

This is the point that Paul has been building to. Paul has been building in

all of his corrections and all of his exhortations and all of his teachings,

Paul has been building and now it is erupting and overflowing from the depths of his heart.

And he writes these words, 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 to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have and I deliver up my body to be burned,

but have not love, I gain nothing.

This is the context that we're dealing with, right? They were boasting.

The Corinthians were boasting in men.

They were puffed up, even in wrongdoing, they were puffed up.

They were unwilling to suffer long and bear all things.

And so we're taking each other to court. This is what we've seen over the last 13 chapters.

They were insisting on their own way and eating meat that caused others to stumble.

They were acting in rude or unseemly ways.

They were insisting on their own way as they ate their own meal at the Lord's

Supper without any regard to others.

They were jealous and envious as they compared their spiritual gifts,

and they thought that some were needed and others were not.

So, Paul is holding up the Corinthians to the mirror of love,

to the standard of Jesus, and he's saying, this is not how love behaves.

This is not how love works. This is unacceptable.

Love doesn't divide. Love dies.

Love dies to self. It dies to preference.

It dies to injustice, which is a hard word for us to hear. I've never heard that at a wedding.

But I've heard it a lot from Paul over the course of this letter,

because spiritual preferences, laying down our spiritual preferences is still in view.

Worship is still in view. Love is still the answer.

And Paul is pointing to the fact that love dies. He says, love is patient and kind.

So, the actual word here, the word that he uses, he chooses,

goes back to a Hebrew idea that we see in Exodus 34, where it says that God

is long-suffering. Isn't that word?

It says, the Lord God, a merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding

in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands and

forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

So that word slow to anger, it's the same word some Bibles translate it as long-suffering.

Love Love is long suffering. That's that word for patient.

And actually the literal translation,

if we translated it literally into English, would be long of nose.

So God is, he's got a big nose. He's like Pinocchio, I suppose.

But it's of course not a physical description. It's an idiom, right?

Back in those times, if you had a red nose or a hot nose, it meant that you were angry.

And so if you had a long nose, it took a lot longer for those kind of things

to be present, for you to have a red nose or a hot nose. So you were slow to anger.

Love is patient. Love is long suffering.

Now what this doesn't mean is it doesn't mean that we don't get quickly frustrated

when our day didn't turn out as it should have, as we thought it should have.

What it doesn't mean is that we let minor inconveniences pass by without giving them much thought.

That's not what is saying love is because this word Word longsuffering is not

situational. It's not circumstantial.

It's not directing at the way, the things that you encounter in your life.

This word is solely directed at other people in the same way that God forgives

iniquity and sin over and over again,

in the same manner that God loves and forgives and bears your sin time after

time in patient hope that you will repent and return to him.

It is solely directed at the offense caused by other people.

And so, long-suffering, that love is long-suffering, means that you open yourself

up to being wronged and wronged again and wronged again.

Because what the message Paul is saying is that love doesn't have enough. It never has enough.

It doesn't, it never says that's too much.

That if, I guess I should say, it doesn't say I've had enough,

if that makes more sense.

It never says I've had enough, I'm done with you. because if there are two people

or 2,000 people that are in relationships of love with one another,

every single one of them will be hurt.

And all of them will have to suffer long. All of them will have to endure and bear.

Being long-suffering means dying to the desire to have an untroubled life. You could say that.

It's dying to the desire to have an untroubled life.

Love dies to self, accepting hurt, and responds for the spiritual good of the offending party.

Because if we take those two adjectives in kind, love is patient,

love is kind, not only do we suffer wrong, suffer hurt over and over again,

time after time for the sake of love,

but also when we experience hurt, not if, but when we experience hurt,

we respond with kindness.

We respond with good. We don't return evil for evil, but we in turn hurt and

injury with acts of good.

And that's why they're grouped together. I've often thought this way about our

culture specifically, living in America.

We don't, if you think of the country perhaps, but if we think of our individual

lives, we don't really have enemies.

Not really. I mean, maybe some people in the.

But even then, most of the time, the people that hurt you most are the ones that you love.

So, the question is, if that's true, that most of our hurt comes from people

that we love, that love us, and that's probably why we care so much.

That's why we experience hurt is because if there wasn't love,

then we probably wouldn't care as much that we felt hurt.

So, the question for us is, who do you perceive hurt from? Who have you felt hurt from?

How can you pray for their spiritual good?

How can you work to their spiritual good? How can you pray a blessing over them today?

How can you act so that you're not returning evil for evil, harm for harm,

but you are working for their spiritual good?

And there's an interesting tidbit. This one's just for free.

It's not necessarily tied to the message altogether, but there's that whole

law about eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth that we see Jesus repeating.

The entire law was constructed to prevent blood feuds so that people wouldn't

ever do ever increasing acts of revenge against one another, right?

That there was a strict limit on to how they could repay harm shown to them.

So, it was to prevent blood feuds.

But Paul is echoing the words of Jesus, which say, we take it a step farther

and we repay harm, we repay injury with acts of good.

That we suffer suffer alongside our fellow sinners.

And we forgive them much because of the great love and forgiveness that we have been shown.

That we suffer alongside our fellow sinners. We show them much love,

grace, and forgiveness because we have been shown so much love,

grace, and forgiveness. Love dies.

Paul continues that love does not envy or boast, is not arrogant or rude. So there are.

There are a couple overarching themes that go throughout this list of what love

is and isn't. It's not just strictly a list that has no coordination with one

another. There's kind of themes involved.

We just looked at how love endures. A little later, Paul will literally write those words.

He will say, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love is like we sang, love is not fragile.

It's not fragile, but it endures the sin of people around us when wronged.

Even when wronged, we endure the sin of the people around us and we return not in kind, but with good.

So, the other main common theme that we see in these words is that love is humble.

Love is not arrogant. There's so many ways in which the opposite of love is

not hate, or maybe you've heard indifference or apathy.

There's so So many ways in which the opposite of love is not any of those things,

but the opposite of love is pride.

Because pride is selfishness that works for the good only of the self.

Whereas love is invariably others focused.

That pride is the opposite of love.

The glory loving, self-exalting, attention-seeking, whining,

pouting, self-pitying me must die.

That love doesn't say, I want what you have.

And it doesn't say, I wish you didn't have that good thing. Love doesn't say,

don't you wish you had this good thing or point to itself.

Love takes delight in the honor of other people. Love glories.

Love glories in the spiritual good of the people around you.

Love does not seek its own personal preference, its own personal gain without

any reference to the good of the people around us.

It takes into account the good of others.

Love seeks its joy and profit in the good of others, not in private gratification.

So the main category of what love does not do, what we must die to is arrogance.

Love is not arrogant. And I know that there are passages in Jeremiah and where

we must get to is we must pray, Lord, reveal and destroy all the pride in my life, right?

So, I know that there are passages in Jeremiah and other places that speak of

the heart, but I was reading in Samuel the other day, the other night,

and it says this strange thing just after Saul is anointed king.

It says, "...as Saul turned and started to leave, God gave him a new heart.",

And we know that didn't necessarily turn out great for Saul,

but it's still an interesting thought, an interesting word that as Saul was

anointed king and as he turned to leave, it says that God gave him a new heart.

And so I also pray that God would give me a new heart, that God would give us a new heart.

Give us a new heart that is solely directed and honored towards him.

That he would give us a new heart that loves people on purpose.

Us, that he would give us a heart that dies to self and exalts others,

that we would lift others up.

And that's the heart of the phrase that we encounter in Romans 12,

other places, Philippians, that says, consider others better than yourself.

Think of others more highly than yourself, whatever your translation you're most used to.

Now, what that's not saying is to think less of yourself, although maybe that's

a pretty true application. We tend to think too much of ourselves.

Even when we think that we think very little of ourselves, we tend to think

more of ourselves than we think of other people, just in a different way.

But it's not saying that. It's not saying to devalue yourself.

It's not saying to dishonor yourself, to self-deprecate.

Because you have been created with such value and purpose.

You've been created in the image of God. And so, to self-deprecate is to dishonor the image of God.

So, that's not what it's saying. What it's saying is that we lift others up

to an even higher station.

We exalt them to an even higher place that we consider them even better than we think of ourselves.

And we think of ourselves pretty good sometimes. Most of the time we think of

ourselves in a very good way. So we should think of others even higher than that.

This is a call to lift others up.

Love prioritizes other people. Love dies to self. Love prioritizes other people.

If we keep reading this chapter, it says, love does not insist on its own way.

It's not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing,

but rejoices with the truth.

It's hard not to insist on our own way because it's very hard to trust other people.

So very hard to trust other people. None of us really know the true extent of

our own selfishness, but we know it well enough to be on our guard against others.

Can we say that again? None of us really know the full extent,

the true extent of our own selfishness, but we know it well enough to be on

our guard against other people.

And it's so very hard to trust other people as a result, especially when we're

experiencing wrong, we're enduring wrong time and time again.

But even when no wrong has been done, when no hurt has been perceived,

it's still very hard to trust other people.

But trust we must, trust our hearts with one another, no matter what happens,

time and time again, we must trust. Love trusts.

And I guess another way of saying this is that love risks.

To love is to risk rejection, change, losing pieces of ourselves, abandonment, and more.

To love is to risk. Love requires the courage to risk it all for each other.

So, another thing Paul is saying along with this is that you don't store up

wrongs against one another for an opportune time.

In your marriage, in your relationships, you're not waiting for the the other

person to fail and keeping that, holding on to that.

So the next time that they feel wrong by you, you get to bring it up,

you know, well, you know, you know what you did, Mr. Perfect, not so Mr.

Perfect after all, right? We're

not storing up wrongs to hold against one another, which is so difficult,

especially because I feel like when we're wronged or when we feel like something

is done against us and we stay silent, the next time it happens,

we just feel like you did it again, you did it again, you did it again, right?

Love doesn't keep a record of wrong.

What does that look for those of us who have kids? What does that look like

with our children when they do the exact same thing over and over again,

because they just can't help it.

And their brains aren't fully developed and they don't have no semblance of

self-control in their body to not do the exact thing that we're not,

we're telling them not to do, even while we're telling them not to do it.

Not that that's ever happened to me.

I've heard, I've heard about it as a friend of a friend kind of thing.

I don't, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe you've experienced Esperanza.

We don't keep a list of flaws and then hold it against them.

We don't keep a list of flaws against one another.

We recognize and show grace to those who are sinners, just like us.

Recognize and show grace to those who are sinners, just like us.

Not seeking our own way, not insisting

on our own way means dying to the dominance of our own preference,

dying to the desire for revenge, dying to the need for no frustration.

We recognize and show grace. We recognize and show grace to those who are sinners just like us.

Love rejoices in the truth. Ruth.

I heard an acquaintance of ours share the thoughts with regard to this particular

part of this passage, and I thought I'd just read those to you,

these words from somebody we used to know many years ago.

Real love doesn't celebrate sin and say at least they're being who they are.

In our culture, we want to believe that love means we are always accepting and

always affirming, and if you disagree, that shows that you do not love me. That's not love.

That's patronizing indifference.

Love wants better for people than sometimes we want even for ourselves.

So many times, the spiritual good that we are working toward,

that we want for other people, is not what they want for themselves.

Many times, even in this room, the spiritual good that we are working towards

is not what we want for ourselves sometimes.

The most we could ever hope for another person in this world is Jesus.

The thing I want for you more than anything else is Jesus.

And even though in this room, most of us, if not all of us have made some confession

of faith, we don't really realize what that truly means and what that will cost us.

And yet that's still what I want for you.

Some people, many people, perhaps most people in this world at this point in time don't want Jesus,

because people who are outside the church tend to realize the cost of what that

means more than people inside the church.

They realize what they have to give up if Jesus is real, if God is real,

and if he is God, they realize what they have to give up.

And we don't always realize that inside the church, but we show them Jesus in the way that we love.

We show Jesus's love. We show God's love in the same self-sacrificing love that

pursues them and their spiritual good that endures wrong.

And that continues to love. We show them a better way, a more excellent way,

because, and this is not Paul's words. These are my words, but love is the real deal.

I was sitting at work the other day, kind of going over what I was preparing

and And my friend, who is a believer, was sitting next to me just kind of talking

as he was heading out the door. And he's like, I don't think the Bible says that.

I mean, it was a joke. We're just joking. But those are my words. Love is the real deal.

Paul uses this metaphor, this example of a banging gong, a crashing cymbal.

Now, this is something that those in the Corinthian church would have immediately

recognized because in pagan temples, they would often have to try and awaken

their false gods by making a lot of noise.

And we see something like this in Elijah with his encounter in the prophets of Baal.

We see them cry aloud. They cut themselves.

They dance around. They're banging on drums and still yet no one answers.

And in the futility of their actions, Elijah kind of starts ribbing them.

He taunts them, cry aloud for he is a God.

Either he's musing or he's relieving himself or he's He's on a journey or perhaps

he's asleep and must be awakened.

So they were just, they were just making noise. Nobody was listening. Nobody would answer.

They were just making noise. Paul saying, Paul,

if love is the real deal, if love doesn't just make noise, he's saying,

don't mistake spiritual activity for spiritual maturity.

There's a difference. Love is humble and it is others directed.

Love is solely directed at other people that it doesn't just make noise.

It's not for show. It's the real deal.

And so the application for us is in many ways, the application for the whole Bible to some degree.

And that is that we would hold ourselves up, hold our love up against this love

and realize how far we fall short.

Not to be discouraged, but to realize our great need for God.

That we need God to love this way.

We need God to love with the same self-sacrificing love that endures wrong over

and over again, that pursues the good of others.

We need God to live like this.

Have you ever been loved like that? Have you ever experienced that kind of love?

And if not, I'm sorry. People suck. We suck. I'm sorry. Kids don't say that?

If you have felt and experienced that love, pay it forward. Pay it forward to another person.

This is the love that we have been called to. God loves us out of our sin.

God doesn't shame us out of our sin. God doesn't guilt us out of our sin.

God loves us out of our sin.

In Psalm 119, the psalmist writes lots of great words.

He says, oh, that my actions would consistently reflect your decrees,

and then I will not be ashamed when I compare myself with your commands.

And he says, I have chosen to be faithful. I've determined to live by your regulations.

I cling to your laws. Lord, don't let me be put to shame.

And again, turn my eyes from worthless things and give me life through your word.

Reassure me of your promise made to those who fear you.

Help me abandon my shameful ways for your regulations are good.

I long to obey your commandments. Renew my life with your goodness.

God loves us out of our sin, out of our shame, out of our guilt.

And the highest calling of the Christian is that we would reflect that love

into the world and that we would see lives changed by the deep, deep love of Jesus.

Let's pray. God, change our hearts. Change our hearts.

Give us new hearts that function properly.

Remove from within us these cold hearts of stone and give us new hearts that endure that hope.

Give us new hearts that love the Father.

We can't do it without you. We can't have this self-sacrificing love that you

show upon us, that you shower upon us. We can't do it without you.

And yet that is what you have called us to.

So we just recognize our need for you. And we pray, give us a new heart.

Thank you for listening to Mountainside Church's podcast. We hope you found

inspiration and encouragement in today's teaching.

To learn more about our church, stay connected or partner with us, visit mcboone.com.

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