Passage: 1 Corinthians 13:8-13
The Big Idea
The Corinthians were so focused on spiritual gifts that they fell into performance-based spirituality. Paul points them back to what lasts: love never fails. Gifts are temporary containers of God’s work, but love is the work itself. In this life, the whole Christian life can be summed up in three relational treasures: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.
What Do You Really Want More Of?
What is your Christian life focused on? What do you really want more of?
It should all come back to faith, hope and love.
That might sound religious, but it isn’t. It’s relationship. Always relationship, never religion.
Religion wants to make church all about what you do. The church in Corinth got distracted by overemphasizing spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts are strange that way: if you focus on them too much, you can actually lose their effectiveness. They only work when we’re walking in the Spirit, which means being focused on Jesus and surrendered to His New Covenant of grace.
“Oh boy, we’re so spiritual! Look at all the cool things we do for God! We speak in tongues. We’re gifted prophets and teachers and givers and helpers and pastors.”
That’s what it looks like to fall into religious spirituality: performance-focused Christianity. “Look at what I do for God.”
Paul shows that they should focus on love more than gifts, because the gifts are temporary containers of God’s work. Love is the work itself.
We’ve seen that love is the greatest gift we can receive from God. A heart of agape love only comes as a gift from God’s Spirit. We can’t earn it or produce it ourselves.
That’s the practical lesson of this chapter. We’re God’s children, so we love the way our Father does, because we’ve been reborn in His image by His Spirit. We’ll never be happy living any other way. Only agape love fits a believer.
But does it really work?
- Love never fails.
- Can I really love the way God does? Love never fails.
- Can I receive God’s love when I’ve never earned it? Love never fails.
- But what if I want to just be religious? Can I skip the heart stuff, show up, and follow the rules? Jesus said that apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5). That will always fail.
Love Never Fails (1 Corinthians 13:8-10)
Love never fails. But prophecies will come to an end, tongues will cease, and knowledge will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with.
What is “the perfect”?
The most obvious answer is heaven: when we see the Lord face to face and enter fully into the spiritual world, where we’ll see what’s really real. And the most real thing of all is love.
- God is love.
- We’ll be the objects of His love, and that will be all that matters.
- God’s love and truth will swallow up everything else. All the pain, sorrow and regret, all the dissatisfaction and disappointment, will be immersed in His love and truth.
So it’s obviously heaven, right?
Not so fast. We also have the opportunity to experience the completeness of His love and truth in our lives right here, right now.
The New Covenant has welcomed us into this reality today. We’ve been fully adopted into God’s family. And we’re simply called to grow in grace, learning and believing everything Jesus has done for us.
Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever (2 Peter 3:18).
Grow (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)
When Paul was a child, he spoke, understood and thought like a child. When he became a man, he put childish ways behind him. Now we see as in a dim mirror, but then face to face. Now he knows in part, but then he will know fully, just as he is fully known.
- We grow and mature in this grace.
- We grow and mature in this relationship. We are known by Him.
- We can keep growing in our relationship with Jesus now, until it’s perfected when we see Him.
- Nothing relational is held back from us until heaven. We can have all of Jesus, as much as we want. He’ll fill us, spend time with us and supply our needs as much as we’ll let Him and trust Him.
- He’s perfect in His faithfulness to you. And He calls us to grow in trusting His faithfulness, His grace.
The emphasis is on the perfect work of Christ and our identity in Him, which is already complete in a spiritual sense.
We’re both perfect in Christ and growing on earth right now. Already, but not yet.
John says we are God’s children now, and what we will be hasn’t yet been revealed. But we know that when He appears, we’ll be like Him, because we’ll see Him as He is (1 John 3:2).
Already, but not yet. One day our faith will become sight.
Spurgeon described that day beautifully: Jesus Himself will capture our gaze, fill our thoughts, hold our affections and stir every holy passion to its highest pitch. We shall see Jesus.
The Greatest of These (1 Corinthians 13:13)
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Why is love the greatest? Because love is eternal. We won’t need faith or hope after this life, when faith becomes sight and hope is fulfilled. But love lasts forever.
In this life, though, you can simplify everything to faith, hope and love:
- Faith in Jesus: choosing to put my confidence in Jesus alone.
- Hope in His finished work: living with the expectation that God will do what He said.
- Love: delighting in Jesus and living with passionate affection for God through Him.
That describes the life of grace perfectly. Not religion.
Faith, hope and love are all relational. They’re the practical way to describe a life lived with God as my Father.
Faith, Hope and Love Throughout the New Testament
Look how often these three show up together.
1. Remembering your work of faith, labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 1:3).
- This church put relationship with God first, and it affected everything they did.
- They worked, labored and waited, all through Jesus. All through relationship, not religion.
2. Let us who belong to the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and the hope of salvation as a helmet (1 Thessalonians 5:8).
- Ever known someone who needs to be more sober-minded?
- This relationship with Jesus is the path to sober, clear-headed living.
- Jesus heals the heart through faith and love. I choose to believe, and then I receive all Jesus does.
- And the mind is transformed by hope. I live expecting His grace, and my mind learns to stop drawing life from other sources, like myself.
3. Through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love (Galatians 5:5-6).
- We eagerly wait to see His righteousness show up in our lives as we trust Him.
- Law-keeping will never make anyone truly good.
- Only the love of God transforms us, through faith in Jesus alone.
4. Through Jesus you believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and glorified Him, so your faith and hope are in God. Since you’ve purified your souls by obeying the truth, resulting in sincere love for your brothers and sisters, love one another deeply from a pure heart (1 Peter 1:21-22).
- Again: faith, hope and love working together to produce God’s love from a pure heart.
- Relationship.
5. We heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and your love for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, which you heard about in the word of truth, the gospel (Colossians 1:4-5).
- All three again!
- It’s almost like we’re meant to understand how this relationship with God works.
- It’s grace. This is the word of truth, the gospel!
Grace Takeaway
Gifts are temporary, but love never fails. Don’t build your spiritual life on performance. Build it on relationship: faith in Jesus, hope in His finished work, and love that delights in Him and flows to others. And the greatest of these is love.
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