Love or Nothing

So if I were to ask you in which area of your life you would most like to make progress in the next six months, what would you say? Perhaps what you would most like to do is to get better at what you do professionally.

You'd like to improve your productivity and your results in the company, that's what you want to do. That would be your main goal for the next six months. Or perhaps you'd like to get in better shape. You'd like to lose weight, gain muscle, increase your energy and just generally feel better about yourself. Or perhaps what you would most like to do in the next six months is to finish a certain project that you started a while ago.

Perhaps a thesis you've been writing, perhaps a room you've been redecorating, perhaps an art project or something like that. So perhaps you'd really like to invest more time and energy in that more than anything else for the next few months. Now of course, if you're a Christian, you probably have goals and interests that are much more spiritual and commendable. And so if you're a Christian, perhaps what you want to focus on most of all in the next six months and maybe even in the next six years, is let's say perhaps you'd like to improve your prayer life or you'd like to witness more to your friends. Or perhaps you'd like to expand your biblical and theological knowledge. Now those would be worthy goals, wouldn't they?

What do you think? And what about collectively as a church? What would be the result of a vote that you could take at a congregational meeting on what should be your primary concern, your main goal, the thing you should primarily focus on for the next six months? The area where you, Grace Church, would most want to make progress. What would it be? Perhaps you would vote for more theological rigor or for the quality of the music in worship.

That's important. Or for more zeal and participation in outreach. Better care for the poor and the sick. Miracles and healings. We want to focus on that. Perhaps you'd like to increase support for the work of missionaries. Wouldn't those be great areas of progress for the next few months, perhaps years?

What do you think? See, there are many things we can be inclined to focus on. Many of these things are good things, even excellent things, right? But is there anyone among us who would say spontaneously that the area in which they most want to make progress in their life is the area of love? The area of love. Who would say spontaneously, oh yeah, of course, what I most want to do in the next few months is to love more. I want to love more. I want to love better. That's my goal.

That's my resolution. I don't know that many of us would say that spontaneously, right? And yet the passage we're going to read in a moment is quite clear on the fact that love is really and always the thing in which we should want to excel the most as Christians. Are you excellent in love? Am I excellent in love? Do you desire to be excellent in love? Does that seem important to you?

And would you like to grow in that area? The last couple of weeks, I've been thinking and praying about what I was going to preach to you this evening, and my wife pointed out to me, as she usually does around this time of year, that Valentine's Day was coming up. It's tomorrow. So that kind of helped me settle for the passage of the Bible we're going to look at in a moment, which is sometimes called the love chapter. It's 1 Corinthians chapter 13, but there's something else. The last few months and even the last couple of years, I've noticed, as many of you have probably, I've noticed more and more tension and strife and even division between Christians.

And I mean between people who genuinely profess faith in Jesus, between conservative Bible-believing Christians, and even between people within the same denomination. And though I do believe that sometimes contending for the truth can mean taking a stand and having some hard conversations, I also believe that the passage we're going to look at in a moment teaches us that there is something that authenticates or invalidates our witness to the truth and even to our whole religion, depending on whether that thing is there or not. And that thing is love. Now, just a little context before we read the passage together. It's in a letter that we read from this morning that the Apostle Paul wrote to Christians of his time who were living in the ancient city of Corinth. And what we learn about the Corinthian Christians through Paul's letter, and we had some of that this morning, is that there are many problems in their church, and one of those problems was conflict and division between believers in the church. And so Paul wants to fix that, amongst other things, he wants to fix that by talking about love. And as you'll see, by placing love, genuine Christian love, right at the top of these Christians' value system. He wants them to consider love as the most important thing for which they should constantly be aiming as they live out their Christian calling and as they do the other things that are characteristic of their Christian calling.

And the whole lesson of this passage, for them as well as for us this evening, is this. You can have the most sophisticated Christian religion if love isn't predominant. It's all worthless. You can have the most sophisticated Christian religion if love isn't predominant.

It's all worthless. It's love or nothing. Now I didn't say it's love and nothing, all right, or you need nothing but love. I did not say that, but rather, if you do not have love, then the rest counts for nothing. And that may seem like strong language, but let's take a look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, and I believe it's your habit to stand up for the reading of God's Word, so please do so now. 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but 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 does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

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. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your Word. Please now, by the power of your Holy Spirit, apply the truth of your Word to our lives so that we would bear fruit to your glory. In Jesus' name, Amen.

You may be seated. So, you can have the most sophisticated Christian religion. If love isn't predominant, it's all worthless. That's the whole lesson of this passage. And I want you to see three things that Paul talks about here. One, the pertinence of love in verses 1 to 3. Secondly, the persistence of love in verses 4 to 7. And the permanence of love in verses 8 to 13.

First, the pertinence of love, or the relevance of love. First thing that we learn in this passage is that true love, in the Christian sense of the word, true love is more important than any other aspect of Christian piety. It's more important than any other aspect of Christian piety.

It's the most pertinent thing, the most relevant thing in our religion as Christians, in our walk and in our witness and in our service as Christians. So, if you look at our passage, you'll see that Paul uses a series of hyperboles to make sure that he gets his message across. So, a hyperbole is when you take an example and then you exaggerate it to the extreme. And so, what Paul is doing in our text is he's piling up extreme examples of things that may seem to have value for Christians.

But he wants to show that even these examples, if they could be real, would not compensate for a lack of love. It's as if you were saying, hey, suppose I'm a Christian and I have the gift of speaking in tongues, as some of you do, Corinthians. That is, you've been able at times to speak spontaneously and miraculously in languages you've never learned. Okay, but now suppose I could do something even better and in fact completely crazy that no one has ever seen. Suppose I could even speak in heavenly tongues, in the language of angels. Can you imagine how spiritual I would be if I did that? Well, listen, says Paul, if I don't have love, if I don't have love, that would be nothing.

Just worthless noise. And it would be the same, Corinthians, if I had, let's see, something completely crazy. As if I had as much knowledge as God himself. Can you imagine that? No, you can't imagine it because it's impossible.

It's hyperbole, right? Imagine I had the power to reorganize the Rocky Mountains. Or if I gave away all of my possessions, all of my time, all of my energy to charity. Or even if I went so far as to sacrifice my own body for my religion.

Imagine that, Corinthians. Well, you know what, if I don't have love, nothing of all that would count in the end. So you get what Paul is saying, right? Love is an inherent element of Christian piety, which means, according to the definition of the word inherent, an element involved in the constitution or essential character of the practice of our Christian religion. Love in the Christian religion is like eggs in an omelet, right?

You can put salt, pepper, milk, cream, butter, mushrooms, onions, bacon, whatever you want in perfect quantities and of the utmost possible quality. If you don't have eggs, you're not going to get an omelet at the end, right? Or it's like a football game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. One of these teams is clearly the better team and will certainly win the Super Bowl, but if there's no ball to play with, you gain nothing, says Paul.

You'll gain nothing if you don't have that important inherent element to the game. Or it's like me telling you this evening that the most important thing you need to learn from this sermon, now listen carefully, the most important thing that you need to learn from this sermon is that all the sophistication of our Christian religion is love. It's not appropriate, right? That may be very accurate and very interesting, but if I tell it to you in French, I'm a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, right? It's just not relevant, it's not pertinent, unless I tell you in English. And very much in the same way, I could be super devoted to my religion as a Christian believer, super zealous, super active, super righteous, super intelligent, but nothing of all that is relevant or pertinent, unless I have love. There would be an inherent element of my religion missing if I did not have love. To truly love is more important than any other aspect of godliness.

That's what Paul seems to be saying here, right? Do we agree? Do you agree that supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, revelations, miracles, healings, whether or not we're supposed to be experiencing those things today, and I'll come back to this in a moment, those supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit are in any case less important, less important than our duty to genuinely love our neighbor. Do we agree with that? Do you agree that if you give a lot of money to the church, if you go to Sunday worship morning and evening and to Sunday school and to the midweek prayer meetings, if you volunteer to be on the welcome team, if you help with serving coffee and refreshments, if you help with the music or the nursery, even if you preach a faithful sermon every Sunday, all of that may be very good and excellent, but if you don't have love, it's just a lot of fluff.

It's worthless. Do you agree that it's possible, it's possible to have a very refined theology, an impressive influence, massive material wealth, a large number of followers, a long list of services offered to the community, an incredible commitment to world missions, and yet it's possible to not have the love that God expects from his people, and that being the case, we'd just be an imposture. We'd just be fraudulent Christians. Do you agree that you can devote a lot of time and energy to correcting all the theological errors of your friends and contacts, especially on the internet, on Facebook, on Twitter, that you can demonstrate a lot of zeal for the truth through endless debates on social media, you can contend vigorously for the truth on the end times and on the proper administration of baptism, and you could even be willing to go to the stake for these things. But do you agree that if you don't have love, if you don't have Christian love, then all of that amounts to mere gesticulation, and it's at best useless and at worst harmful? Do we agree that that is what Paul is saying here?

And if we do agree, then the question that arises now is the following. What is this love? What does it look like? What is this love that is inherent to the practice of our religion? What is this love that is more important than any other aspect of Christian piety? What is it?

What does it look like? It's the second point in our passage, verses 4 to 7, the persistence of love. To love truly, to love Christianly, is to love with the love with which Jesus loves his people. It's to love with the love with which Jesus loves his people. And you could define this love as a persistent, favorable disposition towards someone, right?

What do I mean by that? Let's look at the passage to see what Paul is saying, again in verses 4 to 7. Paul goes on to list plenty of characteristics of this true Christian love.

The passage is well known. We'll look at this in a little more detail in a moment, but if you were to summarize it, you could say that Christian love consists in pursuing steadfastly the interests of others. Pursuing steadfastly the interests of others. You put aside your own interests. In fact, you put aside yourself and you put the other person first. You make yourself small and you value the other. You take the burden upon yourself in order to elevate the other. And you do it persistently.

You do it without ever giving up. It's what I've called the persistence of love. And in fact, that is the love that God has for his people. When you read the Bible from the beginning, you see that God wants to join a people to himself, a group of people that he calls to himself. And what you see throughout the Bible is that these people that God wants to join to himself really don't deserve it, okay? They're constantly doing things that God hates.

They're doing things that offend God, that harm that relationship. And yet the whole Bible is the story of God being patient, of God forgiving, of God forbearing, and of God continuing to work in favor of his people. It's what the psalmist says 26 times in 26 verses in Psalm 136.

He says, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. That's the kind of love that God has for his people. Or as God himself says to his people, despite his people having accumulated innumerable offenses against him, he says in Jeremiah 31, he says, I love you with an everlasting love.

Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. See, the kind of love that God has for his people. Or do you remember the story of the prophet Hosea? You know, God told Hosea to marry a prostitute. In other words, a woman whose life was immorality and unfaithfulness. But God told Hosea to hold on to her and to keep the promise of his marriage, the promises of his marriage, and to do so persistently even though she keeps on being unfaithful. Can you imagine?

Can I imagine? Your spouse doesn't respect you. He or she is never home.

He or she spends his or her time in nightclubs and has multiple affairs. And yet you continue to pursue him or her patiently, faithfully, with your loving kindness and your favor. And so God says to Hosea, go again and love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Even as the Lord loves the children of Israel. So Hosea is setting an example, a prophetic example of how God loves his people.

It's a persistent favorable disposition towards someone. And in a way, the apostle Paul in our passage is also saying, you guys, Corinthians, love one another as God loves you, as God loves you. The ultimate example of this love that God has for his people is of course to be found in Jesus, right? Romans 5 verse 8, God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Or in another passage, 1 John 4 verse 9, in this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. This is how persistent God's love has been and still is for his people.

We were all without exception as human beings, we were all detestable to God by nature because we were all born with a sinful heart and then we went on and multiplied offenses against our creator. But God through Jesus took the burden upon himself. And in the person of Jesus who is God incarnate, God himself put aside his own interests, so to speak.

He put aside himself, if I dare say. And he demonstrated his love for us by putting our interests ahead of his own. And this love of God's culminated at the cross where Jesus died instead of us. He took our faults, our sins upon himself to deliver us from them.

He made himself small so that we would be lifted up. Such is the persistent favorable disposition of God toward his people. He literally loved us to death. And I have to ask you before going any further, have you responded to this love? Have you received the salvation that God lovingly offers you in Jesus?

Do you trust him? Do you love him in response to the love that he has demonstrated on the cross? Where he bore the sins of all those who would put their faith in him so that they would be forgiven for their sins and receive the assurance of eternal life with him in paradise forever and ever.

Have you received that through faith in Christ? And the love of God you see that finds its ultimate expression at the cross is, in its essence, the same love that is described in our passage in 1 Corinthians 13. It's covenant love. The love that is characteristic of God's relationship with his chosen people. You could almost replace the word love in our passage with the word God. And you would almost have a description of the way God relates to people who are joined to Christ through faith.

If I may paraphrase a little. God is patient with us if we're believers. God is kind to us if we're in Christ Jesus. God does not get angry at us if we're in him. God rejoices in us. God never gives up on us. And this love that God has for us is not only what saves us, but it's also the power that enables us in turn to love. As the Apostle John says in another passage, we love because he first loved us.

To love truly, to love Christianly, is to love with the love with which Jesus loves his people. So here's what that may look like. For those, you're really starting to be annoyed at that one person in church because they never volunteer to help. And then there's this other person on the other hand who's always serving and that annoys you too because you feel like it's just for showing off.

Another person, well it's just their personality. It just rubs you the wrong way. And then there's this other person and you have a theological or political disagreement with him or her and it's really straining your relationship. Yet another person made a remark to you the other day in a tone of voice that seemed just a bit dubious and you're wondering if it wasn't a criticism in disguise. And then there's this other person who invited friends from church to their home, but you were not invited and that was just not very nice.

Suppose some of these things happened recently, just normal church life, you might say. Well listen what Paul says here, what God says in his word. Love is patient, meaning it's long-suffering, it's lenient, it takes the burden upon itself. Love is kind, it seeks to serve others, not serve itself. Love is not envious, he says, nor is it boastful, meaning it's not self-centered, it does not seek attention or vindication, it does not seek to be seen as better than others. Love is not rude, he says, or more precisely it's not unbecoming or indecent or disdainful. In other words, love stays respectful of others. It does not insist on its own way, again it does not seek to be right at all costs.

It does not seek its own interest but rather that of others. It's not irritable, says Paul. It does not get angry easily, that's what it means. It does not lose its temper. Love is not resentful. It does not brood over negative thoughts. It does not keep a record of wrongs.

Now listen carefully, I love this one. Love does not rejoice when the other person does wrong, even the person on the opposite side of a disagreement. I.e., love does not feel justified and victorious through the other person's wrongdoing, but instead, love joins in celebration with others to celebrate the truth even with the person who's on the opposite side of a disagreement.

And love bears all things. It believes the best about others, it hopes the best for others, it endures all things. It is patient, it persists, it perseveres. Love never gives up. That's what Paul is saying.

That's quite the plan, isn't it? That's what love should look like in normal church life. And it brings us to the third and last point. Love is the mark of true Christian maturity. Love is the mark of true Christian maturity. We talked about the pertinence of love, the persistence of love.

Now let's talk about the permanence of love. Much has been written about these last verses, verses 8 to 13. The reason is because there are certain things that Paul says here that are not very easy to understand. What Paul is doing is he's drawing a contrast between some of the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit that were going on in the Corinthian church. So he's drawing a contrast between those things and love. And he says that these supernatural things will cease one day or pass away, as he says, whereas love, and even faith, hope, and love, these things, he says, abide.

And of these things that abide, love is the greatest, it's the most important. So the general idea is that these supernatural manifestations, which were in fact much sought after by the Corinthian Christians, these things are in fact, according to what Paul is saying here, they're in fact characteristic of a certain immaturity and a certain incompleteness because these things are going to pass away and something else that is better is going to abide. Okay, so Paul is rectifying the perception that the Corinthians would have had, which was that these spiritual gifts were signs of great spirituality. But these things will disappear, says Paul.

They will disappear once you're past that stage, once you've grown up, once you've reached maturity or adulthood. So these things must be put into perspective and their importance must be kept minimal in relation to what will abide and remain and which is therefore really important, namely faith, hope, and love. Do you see Paul's logic? Look at the two analogies that Paul uses in our passage. First, the analogy of the child who is growing up, verse 11. So a child has a perception of the world that is specific to a child, right?

It's normal. It has needs that are specific to a child and then as a child grows up, there are things in its life that are expected to disappear and so it would seem strange if those things did not disappear as the child grows up. And so in a sense, supposedly mature Corinthian Christians who seek with much effort to speak in tongues, to prophesy, or to receive special knowledge through a supernatural illumination, they are, according to Paul, kind of like adults who continue to bottle-feed themselves, who continue to wear diapers because they find it more convenient, and who in their quiet time every morning continue to read a chapter a day from the children's storybook Bible.

It doesn't seem to make sense. The other analogy is the analogy of the mirror in verse 12. Paul says that he and the Corinthians see the world as in a mirror, which is pretty good but not great. Imagine watching a play with your back to the stage and looking at what's going on in the reflection of a small pocket mirror. Or imagine watching the play from outside the theater through a window that's not very clean. You can guess what's going on but if only you could sit inside, right?

In the front row, right in front of the stage, it would be so much better. And so Paul is saying that these supernatural manifestations of the Spirit are temporary ways to see what's going on. It's good but it's not the best.

It works but it's not ideal. There's something better to come. That's what he's saying. And the reason this passage has received so much attention in the last century is that commentators defer on what this better thing is that will come. And which will cause some of these supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit to pass away. Some think that Paul is referring to the return of Jesus in glory at the end of history. Others think that Paul is pointing to the end of the apostolic age when the New Testament will have been completed and will begin to spread among the churches and in the world along with the rest of the Bible. And so Paul may be saying that one day from his vantage point, there will be no need to speak in tongues, no need to prophesy, no need to receive special inner revelation since everything that we will need to know God, to know ourselves, to be saved and to serve the Lord will be recorded in the Holy Scriptures which will be complete and perfect. So there's some debate around this and I'll let your pastors decide what's the best interpretation. You can talk to them after the service.

Send them emails all you want. But the least we can say, the least we can say from this passage is this. Spectacular spiritual accomplishments are not the mark of Christian maturity, even if one were to perform such things today. Instead, love is the mark of true Christian maturity with faith and hope. These three things are the three permanent things, says Paul, and therefore they're the three more important things and therefore they should characterize more than anything else the life of a grown-up Christian and of a grown-up church. Faith, hope and love. Not rigidity, sarcasm and belligerence.

Not building numbers and music. Not power, influence and income. But faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

If that's true, then that's what we should be looking for and working on more than anything else. Before we strive after intellectual wisdom or spectacular miracles, maybe we could strive after more love. Of course, we pray for healings, for conversions, for God's miraculous help in times of trial. We pray for God to provide for our material needs, but maybe we could pray a little more for love that God would teach us and train us to love. If you have a family, if you're married, if you have children, if you have parents, if you have brothers and sisters, my friend, you have an ideal training ground to practice love. But your workplace, your high school, your college, your church are also places to practice love.

And of course other places like social media, like the waiting line, like when you're behind the wheel of your car in a traffic jam. We need to learn to love and we can find the power to do so in the gospel. That is by meditating day after day and week after week and church service after church service meditating on how God himself in Christ has loved us.

So what's the big idea again as we wrap up? You can have the most sophisticated Christian religion. If love isn't predominant, then it's all worthless. It's love or nothing. True Christian love is pertinent, persistent and permanent.

But be careful as I said in the beginning. Paul isn't saying that love is all that matters, right? Love alone is not an end in itself. The idea is not that we can drop theology, outreach, care for the poor and for the sick. We can drop prayer, preaching, good music and worship or having a nice and comfortable church building and then let's just put all of our eggs in the same basket, the basket of love because that's all that matters in the end. That's not what Paul is saying, not at all. What Paul is saying is that all these things can be good, even excellent, but in the end, it's really love that makes a difference. You may have bought everything on the shopping list but if no one gives you a bag, you're not going to be able to take any of it home. But conversely, if you only have a bag, you're not going to take anything home either.

So it's true. Christian love is a love full of substance. It's covenant love and covenant love is filled of substance. It's not empty.

It's not an empty bag. It's the bag that wraps around the truths of the covenant. It's filled of the promises of the covenant. Christian love is evangelical love because it's infused with the gospel, the good news of God's love in Christ. Christian love is a love that conveys truth and works toward a glorious goal, as Paul says in another passage when he says, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head into Christ.

And this love is also what's supposed to set us apart from the world, right? As Jesus himself said, by this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. And Pastor Eugene this morning summed it up well when he said, and I love the expression, when he said that in the church there ought to be an economy of mercy and deference.

Here also this testimony of a church father at the end of the second century. He says, it is especially this practice of charity which in the eyes of some puts a special mark on us. See, they say, how they love one another, for they hate one another.

See, they say, how they are ready to die for one another, for they are rather ready to kill one another. So love authenticates or invalidates our witness to the truth and even our whole religion depending on whether it's there or not. May we want to love more and love better. May love be the thing in which we want to excel as Christians.

And so may it be our project in the next days and weeks and months by the grace of God. Let's pray. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for your Word. And forgive us, Lord, for falling short of what you ask of us. Thank you for the forgiveness of our sins that we have and that we find in Christ. And thank you for your love that never changes toward us because you see us as righteous and complete in Christ your Son. And again, we turn our hope, our attention to Him and we rest on the promises of the Gospel. And we ask, Lord, that you would continue your work of sanctification in our lives to your glory. In Jesus' name, Amen.