When you think back on past relationships, you tend to think first about people who treated you kindly or about people who wronged you. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains that forgetting past grievances is a challenging characteristic of Christian love. We begin today's message in 1 Corinthians 13, picking up with verses 4 through 7. Our initial inclination is to view 1 Corinthians 13 as a kind of cozy chapter. In actual fact, to study it is like walking through a minefield.
It's a little like sitting on pin cushions. And certainly last time, as we looked together at these initial characteristics, we saw that without these facets of genuine Christian love being discovered and displayed in the family of God, any local church without them will begin to drift and will eventually disintegrate. We said last time that what Paul provides for us here between verse 4 and the beginning of verse 8 is essentially fifteen facets of the diamond of agape love. And again, so that we would return, as it were, to first base on each occasion, let me remind you of what we've said concerning this love that we defined in our opening study.
I'm quoting Leon Morris now. He says that the love that we are dealing with here is a love for the utterly unworthy, a love which proceeds from a God who is love. It is a love lavished on others without a thought of whether they are worthy to receive it or not.
It proceeds rather from the nature of the lover than from any merit in the beloved. Last time, in order to set the challenge before us as clearly as we might, we suggested to each other that we would remove the word love from verse 4 and following and try and read out loud the ensuing verses by replacing our individual names there. When we begin to do that, we see just how challenging these verses really are.
We dealt last time with the first seven of these facets, and we pick it up again partway through verse 5, simply working through the list, and we'll go as far as we can as the time allows. We dealt with it is not rude, it is not self-seeking, and we come now to the phrase it is not easily angered. Paraxutani is the word in Greek from which we get our English word paroxysm, which, if you look it up in a dictionary, it will have a definition somewhere along the lines of a violent, temporary crisis of emotion. And we usually think of it in terms of a fiery outburst having to do with temper. And the fact is that there are some people for all of us who simply provoke us.
Sometimes they do it wittingly, most of the time probably not deliberately and not knowingly. But nevertheless, consistently. If we might put it down at the most mundane terms, there are certain people who just get on our nerves. And we represent that for others too. We can be in their company, but they are largely annoy us. And the tendency is to blame such people because of the impact they're having on us. We say to ourselves, if they weren't around, I wouldn't feel the way I do.
If they didn't show up, then I wouldn't be provoked as I am. So it's all their fault—for existing, for living, for being in the same house as me, for coming into my bedroom, says the brother of his sister, whatever it might be—when in point of fact, such reactions fail to face realistically and honestly the fact of our own irritability and our touchiness. John MacArthur recounts the story of the daughter of Jonathan Edwards. One of Edwards' daughters had a violent temper. And when a young man who had fallen in love with her requested her hand in marriage, he was denied by the father, by Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards said, No, you can't marry her. And when the young man sought an explanation, the father said, She is not worthy of you. And the young man said, But isn't she a Christian? And the father replied, Yes, she is. And now I quote Edwards, But the grace of God can live with some people with whom no one else could ever live.
There's a tremendous realism about that, a brutal honesty, especially in relationship to your daughter. And the real challenge is, do we fit the bill there? Is that in any way descriptive of ours? Instead of loving people, despite all their faults and their foibles, many of us tend sort of focus upon what annoys us in the people that we are continually provoked to anger. We say of people, I just can't be in their company.
They just get me. If you think of how many of our offices in daily routine of business, our freeways as we drive in our cars, our school classrooms and our hospital wards, display this kind of irritability and touchiness, this provocation, and it has to do with our turf, and it has to do so often with our rights. And when we feel that our turf has been tramped on or our rights have been invaded, then we feel that we have every right, as it were, to respond in this way. And we are easily angered, justifying it all the time on the basis of what another has done or just because of their presence. Now, this is in direct contrast to everything that we see of the embodiment of love in the Lord Jesus himself.
We've referred to 1 Peter 2, and I turn you to it again, and verses 23 and 24. When they hurled their insults at Jesus, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He who had every provocation against him, every reason from a human's perspective to result in fiery outbursts, chose not to do that. He embodied this kind of love. Well, says somebody, but what about in Matthew chapter 21, and in verses 11 and 12, where it speaks of Jesus casting the people out of the temple?
What was happening then? Well, I'm glad you asked that question, because it's a good question, because it is often posed. And people say, Well, then, if he is such a great lover, and if that is the embodiment of love, how could somebody ever react in that way?
And the answer is obvious when we think about it. Jesus was reacting on that occasion not to any sense of self-provocation. He was reacting not to any maligning of himself or impinging upon himself in any sense of wrongdoing, but he was reacting to the profaning of his father's house. And his anger was provoked not by personal abuse but by a concern for God's glory. Every so often in reading the great apostle Paul, it becomes apparent that there is that which produces in him this righteous indignation. But when you check, it's not about the fact that he was imprisoned.
You never get anything from Paul bellyaching about the fact that he was in jail, nor bemoaning the dreadful way in which he was treated in those dreadful floggings. But his anger comes through when he responds to the distortion of the truth or when he responds to the presence of immorality. In the same way I put it to you, that anyone with a concern for God's truth and for righteousness must surely have been provoked by the women's section in our local newspaper, and there on the front we were treated to the picture of a lesbian couple cuddling a baby. Now, if that did not infuriate you, you better take a Bible test. You better take a moral test.
You better take a Jesus test. Because the inference behind the picture was straightforward. Isn't this a lovely scene? Who could possibly say anything bad about this? After all, nobody's treating the child in an unhelpful way. Isn't it a lovely picture of nurture and care and so on? And for the vast majority of people, it washes over them, erodes any sense of conviction. But for the Christian, it cannot be. And there is a sense in which that kind of provocation, which is not directed against ourselves in any way, produces within us righteous indignation. But such righteous indignation is a far cry from touchiness in my life with my wife or with my kids, touchiness with my colleagues, irritability with my friends, an unwillingness to see the selfishness in my own life, and blaming all my reactions on the impact of the third party. Every time that I burst into flames in response to the actions of my brother and my sister, I declare that I know little to nothing of a gappy love.
It's challenging, isn't it? Love is not easily angered. Then, love keeps no record of wrongs. If you have the King James Version, it reads, Thinketh no evil.
Love does not store up the memory of the wrongs it has received. The verb which is used here is a word which emerges from the world of bookkeeping and accounting. It is the verb which means to credit to someone's account.
It is the word that is used by Scrooge when we see him or read of him in Dickens' work as he's constantly entering into the ledger all the things that people owe him, and keeping a record of it all, meticulously, in his copper plate handwriting. Well, says Paul, where love has invaded a life, where love has invaded a church—for remember, he is writing to a church—it will not be filled with people who love to store in their memory bank the record of wrongs received. When you read anthropology, you discover that at times in the history of man there have been communities that spent most of their time—at least the men did—either feasting or fighting. They were either eating or they were fighting people.
And many of these communities—you can read of them, for example, in Polynesia—were so consumed with both of these things that they always had a big pot boiling so that they could eat, and they also attached to themselves the reminders of their feuds. And when they were home, they would hang them from their roofs. And when they made journeys, they would hang them from their belts.
They went out—and in the words of the boxer, spoiled—and they carried the reminders of every blow that laid them low or cut them till they cried out. And when you met them, there was every evidence on their person that they had been wronged. You could never meet them, but you knew they had been wronged.
You ever met somebody like that? You're not in their company for five minutes, and they start to give you the chronicles of all the wrongs done against them. Some of them can go back a long way. Some of them have an amazing capacity for recollection. Things that ought to have been long dealt with, long buried, long released, are hanging from their belts, are worn on their lapels. You can see them hanging from the roofline of their homes. They are brooding people.
They are neutralized people in terms of Christian effectiveness. When you and I find ourselves in this position, no matter how well we may go through the routines, we are held captive to the fact that we have determined that although love keeps no such records, we keep them, and we like them. If you like, we have them all on video, and every so often when no one's around, we put the video in and we replay it, and we know at exactly which point to freeze the frame. And when we freeze the frame, we remember all over again, She did that to me. He did that to me. He said that to me.
He thought that of me. Do you have such a video in your library? Then I say to you, erase it. Record over it.
Choose not to play it. For love keeps no such record of wrongs. Think of how the Lord Jesus has treated us. Paul writes to the church at Rome, and he says, Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him. Never count against him. Not even the remotest possibility that it will count against us. No possibility of entering his presence and having him run the video and show it to us all over again. And when we go back with our own warped theology to say, Oh God, I remember all those years ago, and I did this, and we go back through all the garbage cans of forgiven sin, the Lord looks at us and says, I don't even know what you're talking about.
Why? Because he loves us with an everlasting love! And when people come to confess to us and remind us of things, we need to remember that we've been treated with such grace in response to the enormity of our offenses that surely we ought to forgive and forget the offenses done against us. Seems to me that one of the great arts in life is learning what to forget.
Why is it that it is so easy to forget what you need to remember and to remember what you need to forget? It's part of our fallenness, and the perversity is none clearer than in a life or in a home or in a church that harbors the record of wrongs. So we proceed through the minefield of 1 Corinthians 13. You will never again believe this to be a cozy chapter up to which you cuddle.
Never again. It is one of the most challenging sections in the whole Bible. Next, love does not delight in evil or rejoiceth not in iniquity, as the King James Version says. Oh, well, says somebody, we can just gloss over this one.
It's not a problem, is it? Well, think it out. There's a perverse streak in human nature which actually is intrigued by and even enjoys evil, especially in others. Isn't it true? You're halfway through Jeopardy, if you watch Jeopardy! And they have one of those twenty-second promos from one of our famous little news channels to which we all look forward at eleven o'clock at night, I'm sure. I want to ask you a question. When that little twenty-second thing comes on—you can run your own check on this—how often do they come on to tell you something good?
Not often. It came to me vividly, because I was in preparation for this during last week, and I was thinking along these lines. I'm watching Jeopardy! It cuts away. The man's face comes up and goes, and it shows a picture of some gentleman, and it says, Grandfather involved in the molestation of his grandchildren. More about this at eleven o'clock. Oh, yes, sure.
I want to stay up for more of the filthy trash out of the gutters of life. And yet, there is a perversity in human nature that says, Oh, I wonder what that's about. Oh, we're not gonna do that!
We don't do that! But that evil intrigues us, vicariously involved in other people's badness. Think about it in relationship to movies. Everybody loved the music.
I have the compact disc of Out of Africa, the great, wonderful, soaring lines there from the great pictures of the Ngong Hills. But it really was a bad story. It was an evil story. It was a story about adultery. And love cannot rejoice in adultery.
Love cannot rejoice in evil. Stand in the grocery line and look at the folks try to sell his magazines. Even The Little Old Reader's Digest is in it now. They don't leave it permanently on there, I've noticed. They have one of these sticky sheets that they put on the front of it—have you seen that?—so that you can tear it off, and it goes away, and then you can keep The Reader's Digest in your bathroom, and no one will know what it said on the front. But they're into it now as well, because that boring little missive, as it appears, is gonna need to get jazzed up next to People and Cosmo and all the others.
And what's on the cover? Adultery? Indecency? Cheating? Lies? Corruption?
Filth? Why? Because it sells.
Why? Because men and women have an appetite for it. You see, the transforming power of Jesus Christ is what Paul is addressing here, and he's saying when the love of Christ invades a fellowship, it's gonna transform all this stuff about coming to the temples of demons. It's gonna transform the way we relate to one another.
It's going to make us the kind of people who learn to live in love, and therefore rejoice not when evil is exalted. It's Philippians 4, essentially, and verse 8, Whatsoever things are true, and whatsoever things are holy, whatsoever things are of good report, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if there's anything excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. And yet, we can too easily, as Christians, fall into the trap of delighting not in those things but actually in what is murky and sordid. We can avoid some of the dangerous traps Alistair has talked about here by setting our minds on things above. A helpful takeaway from Alistair's message titled, Characteristics of Christian Love.
You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. As we just heard, it's helpful for us to think about things that are excellent and praiseworthy. Sometimes we could use some encouragement to aim our thoughts in the right direction. That's the reason we're recommending a book this week called, An Ocean of Grace. In this devotional, pastor and author Tim Chester guides us through the six weeks that lead up to Easter. And for each day, Tim has chosen a reflection or a prayer written by a figure from Christian history, people like Charles Spurgeon or Martin Luther, just to name a few. Their time-tested words continue to paint a compelling portrait of Christ's death and resurrection that will uplift you as much today as they did when they were first written. Tim has also carefully updated the language in each daily reading so that you'll clearly understand the treasured thoughts of these inspiring men and women.
You can request your copy of An Ocean of Grace today when you donate at Truth for Life or when you become one of our monthly truth partners. Truth partners are listeners just like you who give an amount they choose consistently every month. And in appreciation for their enabling partnership, they are invited to request both of our monthly book recommendations.
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I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks so much for joining us today. We hope you can listen again tomorrow as we'll learn about two more aspects of Christian love. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
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