If you are a Christian, let me ask you this question. How long did God endure your unbelief before you were redeemed?
How long does He continue to endure your abiding sin? If it weren't for the longsuffering of God, dear friends, I would perish, and you would perish. God is a longsuffering God, and that is how He manifests His love. The world loves to talk about love. Christians love to talk about love. But love can be so easily distorted, romanticized, and the love that is evident in the life of a Christian can sometimes fall short of the biblical definition of love. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. God is love, John tells us in 1 John. Love is included in Paul's list of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. But are we pursuing a love of God and a love of neighbor that is influenced more by the world's distortion of love or by the Bible's definition of it?
Over the next few days, R.C. Sproul is going to help us think through the various traits of love to help us grow in Christian character. Here's Dr. Sproul from his series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit. We've been looking at the fruit of the Spirit as evidence of saving faith in the life of the Christian and as really the test of our growth in grace and the outward signs and manifestations of our growing sanctification. Now if we again turn our attention to Galatians in the fifth chapter where Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, we read that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, and so on.
I don't think it's by accident that the first fruit that is mentioned in this list is the fruit of love. We remember that elsewhere Paul gives an exceedingly profound exposition of the nature of Christian love. In polls that are taken yearly among believing Christians asking them what is their favorite chapter in the Bible, usually the chapter that ends up in second place is the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, let not your hearts be troubled, you know, and so on. The number one perennial favorite chapter of Christians in the New Testament is 1 Corinthians 13. And because of its being such a favorite and that we've heard it so many times again and again we'll hear it read or recited at weddings, we hear it as part of the lyrics of popular Christian songs or hymns and so on, the literary eloquence of chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians is so magnificent and so beautiful that there's a trap here, that we can get excited about the beauty of this text and in a sense become over-familiar with it and miss its message. But when we go to the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, we're not going there to see a rhapsody of romantic love. We're going there to get the instruction from God Himself about what Christian love is supposed to look like, about how Christian love is to behave. And with that in mind, let's go now, if we may, to the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians and look at it afresh. Paul says to the Corinthians in verse 1 of chapter 13, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.
Isn't that an interesting metaphor that Paul uses here? We put great stock and admiration in the ability of eloquent speech. We heap awards and cry bravo to those who have mastered this singularly difficult activity of mankind. If somebody is particularly articulate, we hold them in high esteem. And if they are outstanding speakers who can mesmerize their audience with their dynamism, we assume greatness in their lives. But Paul makes it very clear here that it is entirely possible to be able to have an eloquence that is transcendent in its majesty, speak in the tongues of men and of angels, and yet be lacking in love. And if we have this ability, and keep in mind we have a tendency to honor people who are successful in achievements in worldly matters. And we are driven, particularly as American people, to high levels of competitive achievement, thinking that God is going to honor us on the same basis and same criteria by which we honor our other fellow human beings. Where God is not all that concerned about how eloquent we are in our speech as He is about how loving we are in our lives. Because if we have this ability, if we can give these great human achievements, but have not love, if love is absence, we are told that we become as a clanging cymbal, sounding brass.
Instead of symphony, it's cacophony. Instead of beautiful music, it's noise in the ears of God if it is not accompanied by this Christian virtue of love. And he goes on, he says, and though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, let's talk about that. Again, he's talking about gifts without fruit.
He's talking about abilities, which abilities we get from God in the first place and have no intrinsic merit to them whatsoever. If we have all of these achievements, an acquisition of knowledge, for example, if we don't have love, we're nothing. And yet, how hard do we pursue knowledge?
How much money do we spend to gain knowledge, to get a higher degree, to get more intellectual status? Hey, I understand this. That's the world I live in. And I live in a world where my worth is often measured by my expertise or by my knowledge or by the information that I have. And some people who don't have as much education as I do will at times look at me in awe.
Oh, you must be a great man. You have all these degrees and all that sort of thing. That's not how God looks at it. And we need to know that because it's possible to have all kinds of knowledge, to have all kinds of education, and miss the train, miss the chief virtue of the Christian life, which is love. Paul himself is writing this, and Paul's writing this as the single most educated Jew in Palestine that was on this planet when this letter was written. Paul was a scholar scholar. He had the equivalent of two PhDs by the time he was 21 years old. He was a man of prodigious knowledge. But he understood this. He said, if I understand all mysteries, if I'm the best theologian in the world, have all knowledge, and even if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing.
What's the apostle saying here? All these other things which he doesn't despise, he doesn't despise eloquence, he doesn't despise knowledge, he doesn't despise wisdom, he doesn't despise faith. I mean, these are all important things and good things. But what he's saying is if any of these other things are present without love, they are useless.
There's no profit in them. They are, and we are, nothing without love. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned but have not love, it profits me nothing.
You know, an easy way to gain the admiration of people is to buy it. If we are known as magnanimous in our charity and in our giving, and if we're wealthy and we endow a hospital wing, or build a church, or tithe our money, what does Paul say? I can do all that without love. And the doing of that kind of charitable giving without love profits nothing. And he goes beyond that.
I mean, he's speaking in Extreme Kettering. He says, if I give my body to be burned, if I become a martyr for the faith, it's even possible to do that without love. I can do that for self-aggrandizement. I can do that because I want to be a hero. If I do it without love, what's the profit?
Zero. Now, all of these statements that Paul makes up to this point are really prefatory to his exposition. He's telling us in the outset how vastly important it is to have love in the Christian life.
This is at the beginning of the fruit of the Spirit. And in a sense, all of the other fruit of the Spirit is simply an outward manifestation of the reality and the presence of authentic love. If you have real love, you're going to have joy, and you will have peace, and you will be gentle, and you will be patient, and you will be kind, and you will be longsuffering, and you will have goodness and all of the other virtues, because these are manifest consequences of true Christian love.
That's why the accent is placed on love. That's why Jesus says that love fulfills the law, because love is the driving impulse or power behind all righteousness, all virtue, flows out of love. And we're talking about, first of all, the love of God, which if it is true and it is real, will also manifest itself in one other kind of love, in the love of people. That's why the great commandment that sums up everything is, thou shalt love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your mind and all your strength and your neighbor as yourself, because it's impossible to love God with all your heart and hate your neighbor.
Those two are incompatible, so that our horizontal relationships with people flow out of our vertical relationship with God. And at the heart of Christian ethics, at the heart of sanctification, is the cultivation and development of the fruit of love. And so Paul is telling us of its importance, of its role, of where it fits in the Christian life. Then in the rest of 1 Corinthians 13, he gives us a picture, an exposition, of what that love is, what it looks like. First of all, he's telling us how important it is, how singularly important it is. And we say, okay, we get your message, Paul, that even if we have all these other talents and all these other gifts and all these other wonderful deeds, if we don't have love, we're nothing.
We get the idea here that love is pretty important, but what is it? What does it look like? What is its nature?
How does it manifest itself? Well, Paul doesn't leave us to guess about these things. He tells us. This is the first thing he says about it in verse 4, love suffers long and is kind. Do you see the link there with the fruit of the Spirit? That the fruit of the Spirit begins with love, and it talks about joy and peace, kindness, gentleness, longsuffering, that sort of thing.
He doesn't put them in the same order here, but now Paul is clearly linking the presence of love with the presence of the other fruit of the Spirit. And the very first thing he says about love is that it's longsuffering. What does that mean, to be longsuffering? Well, I'll tell you what it doesn't mean.
It doesn't mean shortsuffering. It doesn't mean that the first time somebody offends you or injures you or harms you, you write them off. Do you notice how in our human relationships that we are much more patient with some people than we are with others? If we have a friend of long standing and that person does something to irritate us or annoy us, how do we usually handle it? Ah, that's Frank, or that's Billy, or that's Mary.
That's her personality. We're buddies. You know, we stick together. Every time we talk about it, we're buddies. You know, we stick together.
Everybody sins. We're all human. We start making all kinds of allowances for them. But let another person, the first time we meet him, manifest exactly the same behavioral principle, and we'll say, well, I don't want to be a friend with that person. We don't like them because we don't like to be annoyed by that kind of character trait. We tolerate in our children things that we will not tolerate in other people's children.
I hope that in marriage we tolerate things between husband and wife that we don't tolerate outside the marriage thing because we have a certain commitment. We have a certain bond, and the bond of that commitment is a commitment of love. And real love is, in the first instance, a long-suffering love.
It doesn't keep a scorecard. The first time you offend me, I say that's one, and then the next time I say that's two, and it's three, and three strikes, you're out. Long-suffering, when you get to the seventy-seventh strike, you're still loving, and you're still hanging in there. Now, why would Christian love manifest itself in this kind of long-suffering?
Well, keep in mind that I said there's a difference between human love, which may be long-suffering just out of political motivation, or long-suffering just out of indifference or a lack of caring and so on. But in the Christian realm, the virtue of long-suffering, as I said, is to be a virtue that imitates Christ, who in turn imitates God. And long-suffering is a characteristic, indeed a chief characteristic, of God. How many times does the Bible speak of God's being slow to anger and being long-suffering with a hard and stiff-necked people?
If you are a Christian, let me ask you this question. How long did God endure your unbelief before you were redeemed? How long does He continue to endure your abiding sin? If it weren't for the long-suffering of God, dear friends, I would perish, and you would perish. If God treated me with as much impatience as I treat other people, I would perish in hell, and so would you.
And so what God is saying is, look, I have been loving toward you, and let me tell you how I have been loving toward you. The first thing is I have endured your disobedience. I have endured your blasphemy. I have endured your indifference. I have endured your irreligiosity. I have endured your sin your whole life, and I still love you, and I am still kind to you, and I am still good to you, and I still care about you, and I am still going to redeem you. But, boy, it's been a trial of my patience to deal with you, R.C.
Sproul, or to deal with you out there. That's who God is. God is a long-suffering God, and that is how He manifests His love. God shows His love by His patience, and it's not a short patience. It's a long patience, although there's one sense in which God can't lose His felicity, His joy, and His happiness by what we do and so on, and we can't make Him suffer in the ultimate sense. Nevertheless, this term is used in a meaningful way about Him, and we are called not just to be long-patient, but the word is long-suffering. It's not like we're supposed to be patient with people's sins and foibles and shortcomings as long as they don't cause us any pain. Long-suffering means loving when we are experiencing hurt and pain, when we are suffering. And you understand that we're all called to suffer, and we always hope that when we have to suffer that it's short. You know, I go to the dentist's office, and I take my watch with me, and I say, I'm happy that this isn't going to last too long of a time.
I can't wait till it's over. I'd hate to have to manifest the spirit of long-suffering in the dentist's office for six months in a chair without any relief. But that's how we're to live in this fallen world, reflecting and mirroring this virtue of love the way God does it, which in the first instance is long-suffering. Several years ago, I visited the wife of a football player who's famous, and I won't mention his name, who is in the Hall of Fame. I went to their home because this woman was dying of cancer, and I had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with her. And she had been suffering from terminal cancer for ten years. And in that conversation I had with her, she was bedfast. She looked at me in a single tear formed on the edge of her eye, and she sort of gasped out and said to me, R.C., I just don't know how much longer I can endure this.
I just wish that God would take me home. And I didn't know what to say to her. I mean, what can you say? You just want to hold her hand and cry with her? I mean, I couldn't say to her, hey, keep a stiff upper lip, because I don't know whether I could take what she had taken.
She just said, I just can't take anymore. Two days later, she died. And I can't think of an occasion where I heard of somebody's death where I was more relieved or more happy to hear of it than to hear of her death. And I can't think of a time when I could think of her death. And I know that she died in faith. And I know that God answered her prayer. And I knew that God would not ever give her more than she could bear. But when I think of her, I'll tell you her name. Her name is Judy Griese, Bob Griese's wife. I think of Judy Griese as a woman of God who understood what it meant in a physical sense to endure pain over the long haul. She was long suffering in an extraordinary way. And that's the way we're to be, with all kinds of pain, as we reflect the character of God.
That was R.C. Sproul, the founder of Ligonier Ministries, from his series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit. It's good to have you with us today on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. And this week, you have the opportunity to request two resources from Ligonier for your donation of any amount.
You can give your gift at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800-435-4343. First, we'll give you lifetime digital access to this 20-message series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit. Plus, we'll send you a new 90-day devotional filled with biblical reflections on the Christian life. The devotional is called Our Great Salvation, and it can be yours when you give a gift of any amount in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org, or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. We trust these resources will help you in your Christian growth, and your support fuels getting trusted teaching to more people in more places. So thank you for your support. Here's a preview of tomorrow's episode. If you look at the Scripture and the virtues and vices that are figuring prominently in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, you will see that envy is a cardinal sin, and that God regards envy and jealousy and covetousness as extraordinarily destructive to human society and to human relationships. Be sure to join us Wednesday here on Renewing Your Mind.
