1 Corinthians 13

The Lord is a great giver of gifts. His most wonderful and abiding gifts are those that are given to all who call upon His Name. To them He has granted Himself and a place in His home. For some reason we too easily consider special gifts that distinguish us from each other as more important than the common gifts that we share together as Christians. This is especially the case when individual gifts have a supernatural feel to them, as they sometimes do, (which was certainly the case in the first decades after the resurrection of Jesus Christ).

At the end of the prior chapter the Apostle’s instruction to the church is to desire the “higher gifts” and to pursue the “excellent way.” There can be no doubt from 1 Corinthians 13 that Paul is not speaking of miraculous abilities as the upper deck of Christian experience. He is directing the church to seek a greater measure of the common spiritual gift of Christian love.

A Corinthian Christian may have had the special gift of speaking another language of which he had no prior knowledge. Paul even speaks with hyperbole of the tongues of angels. But if that person does not have a generous measure of the common Christian gift of sacrificial love, then he does not have anything worth talking about. The same is true of prophesy and special gifts of knowledge. Again, probably with a touch of hyperbole, the Apostle speaks of having faith to move mountains. That’s fine, but without love, it really isn’t much of anything. Paul uses the word “nothing” here. We may think that we are something, with our great gifts, but we may still be judged to be nothing if we have no love.

What is love? It is the willingness to be lower, so that someone else would be higher. It is costly, and not merely emotive. Love casts out our fleshly impatience, our envy of others in the church and in the world around us, and all our proud boasting where we would lift up self at the cost of casting down others.

It is through the lens of love that we are able to see the flaw of our insistence that others focus on our special gifts that distinguish us from the rest of the body. When we do not receive the attention that we think we deserve for the tremendous donation we make, are we tempted to be privately or even publicly irritable or resentful? If we are pushed the wrong way by someone, do we secretly believe that we have a free pass to be privately or even publicly arrogant or rude? We think we deserve better treatment; we insist on our own way, perhaps on even petty matters of relative unimportance, and we may even have a rejoicing heart to see someone else taken down or even taken out. How does that kind of attitude fit in with the love of the cross displayed in the willing death of our Redeemer for our eternal well-being? And then we remember that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. We have only lately come to love Him, and we only love because He first loved us.

The singular hope for us is to come back to the common Christian truth of the cross, and to approach the Lord in the common exercise of faithful prayer, seeking that we would be moved by the common love of Christ, and that this gospel fellowship that all Christians can enjoy may be enjoyed by us, and may yield true resources of real love. What a blessing if God would give us such a gift! And we have no reason to think that He would deny us this. We are not asking for some miraculous manifestation of divine power, although truly love like this must come from God. We are not seeking something that is available to only a tiny percentage of Christians over the course of the history of the church. We are asking for the virtue that should be the defining mark of a church that is truly alive in Christ by the divine power of the Holy Spirit.

If we will have this gift of love, then we must have Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. It is hard to have large resources of cross-based love where there is only a meager supply of hope. Hopeless people find it hard to pay the personal cost that love demands. Therefore we need much hope if we are to love. It is hard to have much hope with only a tiny supply of faith in God. You must believe that God is, and that His future promises can be approached with a very confident expectation of their reality. Therefore we need much faith to have much hope to have much love. It is impossible to have true faith without a foundation of true truth. Therefore it is with the truth of Christ and His cross-love that everything begins. In faith we lay hold of these great truths. In hope we believe firmly in the promises of the One who died for us. In love we sacrificially express the soul-enriching and body-empowering joy of our hope of the new heavens and the new earth. Without these foundational resources of God-granted faith and hope, it is hard to see how we can have abundant love.

One day we will have all of these things in fullness. The faith will be sight. The things that were our hopes will be our possession. We will then exist in a world of perfect love. So many other things, even very good things that are just for the present age will eventually come to an end at the return of Christ. They are for the present only. In Corinth there were special prophetic words from God, some even given in a foreign tongue. Paul knew that such gifts would cease. They were partial things that would pass away. He knew that a perfect day was coming. That day would be a day of perfect love, when all of God’s children would rejoice in casting their crowns before their glorious Redeemer.

It is enough for us to know that something of a spiritual adulthood is coming for us, as we pass through something of a childhood of faith, hope, and love. We have seen the perfect in Christ. We have seen His dying love, and His glorious resurrection. We follow Him in love, however pitifully now, yet with joy. The perfect is surely coming. The partial must give way. The church will one day be a world-wide Israel of perfect love.