Good afternoon.

We’ll be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 tonight.

Thank you, Pastor Chad, for covering music for us. Andre was going to do it, and he’s not feeling well. So are a few other families not feeling well, so we’ll keep praying for them that they would get well. But I’m glad that you were here.

Again, we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13.

Here’s the word. 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 remember the Lord Jesus Christ, 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. It believes all things, hopes all things, and 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. And 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.

It’s a family worship Sunday, so don’t be bothered by your kids making noise. And seemingly being distracting. I know it can be, but it’s not bothering me. And I hope that we can all enjoy it and worship nonetheless. I think it’s good that we’re doing it. So, a German theologian in the late 1900s, his name is Adolf Harnack. He’s a Lutheran. He called this chapter, the greatest, strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote. So when I was going through commentaries and I found that, I said, oh well, I might need to call Pastor Chad or something. That’s a grand concept, I think, to know and believe. And then I’m like, well, I have to preach this passage. And it’s the greatest and the strongest and the deepest thing that Paul ever wrote. Lord, help me. Nonetheless, I’m going to give it my best go. And I trust that the Lord will build us up and edify us in the word. And we’ll walk away with something useful. And I think it would be impossible to attain to the depths of this passage in this life. But we’ll strive and seek to attain it nonetheless. So, I think it’s obvious that the passage, the main point is love. We’re going to explore a little bit about that, what that means. And go deeper into that. But the main point is love. He’s talking about love. And I want to point this out to you. Leon Morris, I’ve grown to really enjoy his commentary. I don’t know a ton about him, but what I have read only in his commentary, I’ve not read his books, I’ve been helped and I’ve been encouraged. He says this. He says, The Greek word for love, agape, it wasn’t in common use before the New Testament. It occurs 20 times in the Septuagint. That’s the Greek rendering of the Old Testament. It occurs just 20 times in the Septuagint and a few times in writings like the Epistle to Aristias. But the Christians, they took it up. They took up this word and they made it their characteristic word for love. It occurs 116 times in the New Testament, 75 being in Paul. So, what I want to say to you today, is that love is the Christian way. Agape is the Christian way. Christians took it up and owned it and made it the seedbed for the Christian life, for Christian character, for Christian action and deed and thought. Love is the foundation for everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we are. Love must be the governing principle in my life. And I, I almost wrote down guiding principle and then I thought about it a little bit. It doesn’t need to just be a guideline. I think with a guideline, I have a little wiggle room and I can bounce back and forth and I can ping pong. It needs to govern me. It needs to have strict rule and it needs to dictate how I think and how I behave, how I treat my brothers and sisters in Christ, how I commune with God. Love is the foundation for all of it and it is a governing principle. It’s a characteristic.

Paul, Paul, up to this point, you know, the past few weeks we’ve been exploring gifts of the Spirit and how those are to be used in relation to the body. How are we to act as a body and live among one another and serve one another? How are we individual members of the greater body? What does that look like for us in each of our giftings and what the Holy Spirit gives us? And now Paul, as one commentator said, it’s not a digression from that when he changes over into chapter 13 here, but he wants to make a really strong point. Without love, we as Christians are bankrupt. Without love, I am bankrupt. One, I have nothing, nothing worthy to offer before God. Even if, even if, even if I’m the smoothest orator, I have this silky smooth speech and I’m cunning and I’m flattering and I have a vocabulary that’s as wide and as high as this country, it doesn’t matter if I don’t love you.

Paul says, I am nothing but a noise. Have you ever heard one of these things crashed on? I was doing it earlier and I almost ran Pastor Chad out of the building. It’s offensive. It’s irritating. It’s not pleasant. It’s not like a melody that you would find on a piano or a guitar. The symbol can certainly be an accompaniment. It can complement something, but it’s not a melody. It doesn’t speak. So if I speak in tongues, whether, you interpret that as a language that I do not know and that you hear in a language that you do know or in just a persuasive speech, flattering speech, grand speech, like the speech of angels. If I don’t have love, it’s just a noise. It doesn’t mean anything to you and it doesn’t please God.

If I have all knowledge, in revealed scripture, and if I understand all the mysteries that God has laid out for us and that he’s given us to know, if I have all of these things, if I have faith so strong that I can tell a mountain to jump in the sea and it’ll do it, but I don’t love you, I have nothing. Paul, he goes on, if I give up my body to be burned, if I give away all that I have, but it’s not, proceeding from love, it’s an unworthy sacrifice. It’s a stench to God. It profits me nothing. I have nothing to show for it, certainly in the presence of God.

Here’s what I want you to know. Whatever gift God has given you, whether you’re an excellent accountant and you understand financial things and administrative things, such as, maybe Miss Kathy, or you’re wonderful with kids, like Miss Sarah, and you have just a gift of interacting with them and teaching them, or you’re a missionary and you’re willing to go and give all your money to fly across the world and spend your time and your vacation and sacrifice time with your family to go and preach the gospel to a foreign people, or if you’re a wonderful preacher and you just have this wonderful insight into the knowledge of God and you can just preach with the best of preachers, or you’re a wonderful preacher or you’re the most skilled musician that there is and you can just play any lick and any tune on a whim and you’re just as smooth as can be. If you don’t have love, it means nothing. And whatever you’re doing, even in service to God, you’re not meriting anything with Him. You can’t gain favor with God by doing things for Him, however grand they might be. If you lay your hand on a leopard and heal him, but it’s not from love, it doesn’t profit you anything. You can’t get to the gates of heaven and gain access to it. You can’t know God because you’ve done something miraculous or wonderful. You have to have love. Without it, we’re bankrupt. Let’s say it like this. If you have no capacity to love, you have no capacity for God. But God is love. Everything that I do in love and out of love, it has to come from Him. And then it goes through me and I give it to others.

Whatever works we do, whatever service we do, however long we do it, however many years, we show up Sunday after Sunday and Wednesday nights and Fridays at the pregnancy center and Thursday nights at the pregnancy center. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not gaining you favor with God. It doesn’t count towards salvation. It doesn’t sway God into loving you anymore. It’s offensive to Him if it’s not done out of love.

We’re bankrupt in the sense that we have nothing to offer the church. I do think that even the heathen can utter truth, right? Someone who does great things is a great preacher in a general sense, in a common sense. Someone who does wonderful charitable works, they give away all their money and they build these ministries and they don’t know Christ. God can still use that to benefit the church, right? I can still be edified from a sermon from a preacher who has not a heart for God. God can do that. But here’s where I want to say that I don’t have anything to help the church because there’s going to be a dangerous misuse of my gift. You think about prosperity preachers. These guys are skilled in speaking. They probably give tons of money to you name it. They do a lot of good things. But because they’re not rooted and grounded in love for God, they’re going to go astray. They’re going to use their gifts in dangerous ways. If I’m a crafty speaker and I’m not speaking for the glory of God, I’m probably twisted in my motives. I’m not looking for your benefit. I’m not looking to build you up. I’m seeking my own glory. And that’s going to lead me astray and lead me to do dangerous things.

And it’s also going to end up being damaging to the witness of the church due to self-motivated uses. And you think about the same example. People who abuse. You find however many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bathroom wall at this mega church. It tarnishes the reputation of the church. Christ’s church is still going to be built. Yes, but we’re going to be held accountable for those things. It does damage to the church and to the witness of the church.

Love is the Christian way and without it, we’re bankrupt. Nothing to offer God and nothing to help the church. So, I hope that you seek to do all the things you do for God out of love. Because you have been loved by Him and you want to extend that love to others. And if you see that need, if you see the need to love others, we have to properly define it. And it has to be defined according to God’s Word. We live in a post-modern society and culture. And if you don’t know what that means, simply, it is a school of thought, it’s a worldview that denies objective reality. It denies objective reality. It denies absolute truths. Your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth. Everybody’s theory and idea on something is valid. They reject schools of thought that came from the Enlightenment. And ultimately, they reject God’s Word because God’s Word is absolute and authoritative objective truth. So, being that we live in a post-modern society, we have to be careful to define terms, right? If I say something to someone else who is in a different walk of life and they come from a different religion or whatever, we probably both use the word love in English. They mean something very different than I do. And we have to define what that is. I was at the pregnancy center a month or so ago and I was having a conversation with this gentleman and his wife. They were newly married and we were excited. We were celebrating over there. They’re ultrasound images. And then we start talking about our relationship with God and if they’re in a local church and they kind of had the general like, well, we worship God in our own way. And we kind of read and do our thing on Sundays or however they do it. But the point was is that they saw a certain particular way to worship God and they deemed that okay because it was their way, right? It’s very post-modern. This is… It’s my way. I’m cool with it. And so I pushed back on them and I tried to be loving about it. And I said, well, if I could challenge you on that, let me frame it to you this way. You have your wife and she hates when you call her silly names or when you do fill in the blank. Yet you do it anyway because you think it’s funny and then you want to turn around and say, I love you. You don’t love your wife. You say you do but your actions don’t demonstrate it because it’s not according to the standard that your wife needs. No, that guy’s wife doesn’t compare to God at all. But when God says, this is how you will love me and then we proceed to love him in our own way, we’re not loving him at all. And whenever God says, this is how the world will know my people is by your love for one another and we’re not loving one another in that way, we’re not showing God’s love. Just because we call it love doesn’t make it love. We have… We have to define our term correctly based on God’s word.

So, I want to dip into the will of Leon Morris again. He says this, just to start to define it. Whereas the highest concept of love before the New Testament was that of a love for the best one knows, the Christians thought of love as that quality of love as that quality we see on the cross. It is a love for the utterly unworthy. A love that proceeds from a God who is love. It is a love lavished on others without a thought whether they are worthy or not. It proceeds from the nature of the lover. That’s important. Not from any attractiveness in the beloved. The Christian who has experienced God’s love for him while he was yet a sinner has been transformed by that experience. Now, he sees people as those for whom Christ died. The objects of God’s love. I now see people as objects of God’s love and therefore the objects of the love of God’s people. In his measure, he comes to practice the love that seeks nothing for itself but only the good of the loved one. It is this love that Paul is talking about right here. It’s a love that it looks outward. It’s not concerned with self. Yes, you have to preserve yourself. You have to stay alive and eat. So you have to love yourself. But Christian love causes you to constantly be concerned with those outside of yourself and causes you to be willing to sacrifice your own comforts, your own pleasures, your own ideas, your own wishes for the sake of others. So it’s that kind of love that Paul’s talking about. Jesus said greater love has no man than what? Than he lay down his life for that person. I give it all. That’s what love means. I give it all. It doesn’t have a ceiling on it. The cap is when I am empty, when I’m done. That’s the limit. When we as the church love, love in the Christian way, when we love in that way, with that love, we are benefactors. Not benefiters. If you love me that way, I’m then a benefiter. But if I love in that way, I’m a benefactor to the church. I am offering something up to the church. I am benefiting the church.

Now Paul’s going to go into defining a little more specific what this love does and does not look like.

Love is not easily offended. Love is not short-witted and ready to backhand somebody. Love is patient.

Love, Paul says, is kind. In Romans 2, he says, that God’s kindness is meant to lead us to repentance. There’s something about being merciful and kind to someone who doesn’t deserve it. It does something in them. So when I love you that way, it does something for you. You benefit from it.

Love does not cause me to look at Pastor Chad as he’s playing the guitar and envy him to a point where, I don’t know how, but when he got home, he was playing and then he rubbed his fingers in his eyes and they started burning because there just happened to be cayenne pepper on his fretboard. I can’t envy someone’s gifts and be so consumed by it that I’m willing to react out of it and to their detriment do something harmful to them because I want whatever they have. I want the glory that he has. I want the praise and the clapping that he’s getting. Well, I looked over here and I just saw that man raise somebody from the dead. I’ve got to get me some of that and I’m not going to stop at anything until I do. Love doesn’t envy like that. Love is willing to say, God has blessed that man. I am grateful for that.

Love doesn’t covet other people’s possessions and giftings. Especially in the body of Christ, I as a finger, I rejoice. I rejoice over the fact that I am not the foot and the foot can do things that I can’t do.

Love is not a windbag. I thought that was pretty comical. A term for boasting. I’m not over here boasting about my accomplishments and boasting about my capabilities and boasting about how much money I gave last week to the charity and boasting about how long I can preach and boasting about how many letters I got beside my name. Love doesn’t cause me to be a windbag. All those boastings are empty nothings. They don’t profit you at all. They’re only meant to build myself up. Again, we have to have this constant focus that when we’re doing things for God and for His people, it’s coming from a place of love and that means I’m not concerned about myself.

Love is not walk around here like a peacock. Arrogance. The word means to morph. It’s like this metaphysical term. Arrogance is to morph into something that you weren’t. When you think about it, if I’m so arrogant to believe something about myself that is not true, so much so that I believe that it is, in my mind I’ve morphed into something that I’m not. I think I’m so high and so great that I’m not. I think I’m so grand and so good at whatever it is that I now have this idea and this conception about myself that is not true. I’ve morphed into something that I’m not. If you rip all the tail feathers off of a male peacock, he’s pretty bland and dumb looking. They’re nothings. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t think higher than yourself than you are.

Love doesn’t take pleasure in telling crude jokes. And being offensive for giggles. Love doesn’t take pleasure in getting back at somebody and just being rude.

Love does not do this. This morning I’m sitting and I’m reading over my notes to preach on love and Isabella comes over there and she’s telling me something that Emma’s doing outside. And I was like, what? I was irritated. Immediately. Do we as Christians not have a right to be irritated? I don’t know that I can control whether someone does or does not irritate me. It’s just if somebody does something that’s irritating, it’s going to irritate me. I can’t help that. I’m irritated by it. When she came in there and did it, I was doing something. I had a goal in mind and I was irritated by that fact. Here’s what love does do. It controls what my response is. To it. I didn’t have to say, what?

If I would have been studying harder, I would have known at that moment that irritation is not a response of love.

We can’t be easily irritated, especially with one another, because guess what? We’re going to irritate one another. We have to let love govern our responses to those irritations. If I’m always irritated with you outwardly, I’m going to diminish how much impact I have on you. I’m going to diminish the level of influence I have over you. I’m going to diminish the amount of time you want to spend with me because everything you say, I’m barking back. What? That’s not love. Love keeps no record of wrongs. I must confess that I’ve done this in my marriage, and if you’ve been married for a day, I’m sure you’ve done it as well. As soon as you start getting into a quarrel with your spouse, while you go into that treasure chest and you start bringing out all the things that happened over the past couple months. Well, you remember you did that, and you said that thing? I know I didn’t say nothing back then, but I’ve been holding on to it just for the right time. That’s not love.

Especially, especially if someone comes to you and seeks forgiveness about something, you better never bring that up again. If somebody wrongs you and has the humility to come and seek for forgiveness, you better never bring that up again.

Even if they don’t ask for forgiveness, I better be ready to forgive in my heart long before they ever come walking through my door. And I better never bring it up again. If I’ve gone to the Lord and prayed for that person, and said, Lord, this really bothered me, I’m offended, I’m hurt.

But you’ve forgiven me for everything. And thankfully, you’ve not written my sins across the sky because they would stretch that far. You’ve removed them from your memory. As far as the east is from the west, let me do the same thing. Let me not jot down all the wrongs that my wife commits against me. And all the frustrations that I have toward all of you.

Love does not rejoice in evil.

And I think we would do injustice to ourselves if we didn’t try to go a little bit deeper into that word rejoicing.

If I stand by and watch an evil take place, even though I’m not taking part in it directly, I’m still guilty of it. If I stand by and watch an old lady get beat by a thug on the street, and I don’t pick up my phone to call 911, or jump in to get beat myself, or do whatever I can, start screaming and hollering, I’m just as guilty as that guy.

We don’t necessarily have to jump up and down and do jumping jacks and clap and post on social media how happy we are for all of the moral atrocities that take place in our country every day, across the world. Name it. Come up with a bazillion scenarios.

If you’re not actively against it, you’re for it. Love, love causes me to disapprove of evil. Love causes me to speak out against evil. I can’t have someone in my family who is homosexual, and then I just well, you know what? Love is love. It’s not. I don’t want to offend them. I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to push them away. So I’m just going to sit back and pray for them. No. No speaking out against evil does not allow me to discard all the attributes, the other attributes of love. I can’t all of a sudden be rude because I’m speaking out against evil. I’ve got to have the whole thing in one package. I can’t all of a sudden lose my patience because this wrong is going on. No. You have to have it all together. But you still can’t stand by and watch it happen. Now, if you see an old lady getting mugged on the street, you better jump in there and start swinging some elbows or something. I think that’s a loving thing to do. I mean, in a conversation, let’s say you’re having a friendly debate with someone and they happen to think that it’s okay to have an abortion up to eight weeks. You better open up your mouth. But be kind about it. And be gentle about it.

Also, be kind. Be truthful about it. Love

cannot be separated from truth. Going back to the previous one, you can’t love someone while approving of their evil. You can’t love someone by approving by just watching them go by. You have to meet it with truth. It has to be based on the standard of God. Objective truth. Concrete truth in God’s Word. Love, it bears all. Paul says, love covers a multitude of sins. Love, love is not going to be extinguished by one or two or three or four sins against me by my brother. Love can cover that. Love can bear that. Bear one another’s burdens. What picture do you get there? I get there just me carrying something heavy on my shoulders, on my back. Love causes me to bear all things. I’m not going to run and hide the minute I’m offended.

Love believes all things as I bear with you and you bear with me. We also believe in one another. We give each other the benefit of the doubt. Calvin says this in his commentary to sum up believes all. He says the consequence of believes all will be that a Christian man or woman will reckon it better to be imposed upon by his own kindness and easy temper than to wrong his brother by an unfriendly suspicion.

I might get walked on a couple more times than I would having this kind of love for people but it prevents me from being unnecessarily apprehensive and suspicious about people. Hey man, I’m sorry. I won’t do that again. Yeah, I heard that before. Again, you have to use discernment and you have to seek the Lord on that kind of stuff but he says that love believes all things. We’ve got to give people the benefit of the doubt. If I say that I’ve repented and I’m doing the things that the scripture lays out for me to do, you’ve got to give me the benefit of the doubt.

Love hopes all things. When you see your brother steeped in addiction and he can’t get out of it, I’m just going to keep loving him and I’m going to keep praying for him and I’m going to keep speaking truth to him and I’m going to be patient with him and I’m going to be kind to him no matter how many times he spits in my face and I’m just going to keep hoping that God is going to save his soul and by me showing mercy to him, he might get led there. Hopefully he’ll see Christ’s kind of love in me. It endures all. It presses on. When I got married, when you got married, we all made this commitment for better or worse. Sickness or health. Rich or poor. Love causes me to endure all things. And so as we interact together as the body of Christ and love is our governing authority and principle, we’re going to bear everything. We’re going to believe everything. We’re going to hope everything. And we’re going to endure everything. If you skate out at the first time somebody bothers you, you might not understand love. Because I promise you, you’ve bothered God at some point today in the last few minutes.

Love is the Christian way. And in it, we are bound. I don’t mean bound as in I’m beach bound. I’m headed that way. It includes that. Because of the love that I am bound up by, I am bound somewhere. But I am tied, hands and feet shackled with chains by God’s love. And those things will never be broken. Because it says right here that love never ends. And he also says in the letter to the Ephesians that in love you were predestined. predestined. predestined.

It never ends. It never fails. And so if I have received that type of love, if I know that kind of love, I can have this wonderful hope that no matter what, God’s love for me will never stop. And it’s going to carry me on, bound up into heaven. And I need to, as best I can, model that kind of love. That because God’s love for me never ends, my love for my brothers and sisters in Christ cannot end.

God’s love will never fall to ruin. And we’re safe in it. We’re kept by it. So it needs to be the ever-enduring disposition

toward God and toward one another.

Love is the Christian way. And love will outlast and outshine all other gifts and all other graces. These gifts that Paul has been talking about and he will continue to talk about, they’re useful. They’re gifts from God. They have a purpose. And we ought to cherish them. And we ought to use them how he prescribes them to be used. For the sake of one another. As Pastor Chad has said, as an evangelistic tool. But one day, all of those things are going to go away.

We know a little bit about God right now. Whatever he has revealed to us. And we preach it. And we proclaim it. And people can do some wonderful things. They have the gift of prophecy or the gift of tongues or the gift of healing or the gift of administration. Whatever gift you have, it’s wonderful and give thanks to God for it. But one day, it’s going to be done away with. And faith, faith is going to be turned to sight. I’m going to see God in his fullness in the kingdom of heaven. And my hope will be fulfilled. But love is going to endure forever. And the same love that God has loved me with in eternity past, he will continue loving me with in eternity future. And that will be the disposition of his people in the kingdom. That we will love one another with God’s kind of love. And we will love him fully and completely. So love is a Christian way. It’s a Christian word. Don’t let anybody steal it from you. And love is going to outlast and outshine all other gifts and graces. So I encourage you, if you don’t have this kind of love, if you don’t love in this way, seek God on it until you have it. Don’t rest until you attain this kind of love. Because it’s everything.

I’ll leave you with that. Lord,

as we prepare to take communion,

as we prepare to look at one another, as we share your body, the same body and the same blood, I hope that we would do some searching in this moment, tonight, and moving forward, Lord, just in our day-to-day lives, and examine ourselves and test ourselves as to whether we love one another with your kind of love or with our own.

Lord, I thank you for loving us and demonstrating to us that your kind of love, you gave all. I love that verse, Lord, you show your kind of love in that while we were still sinning, you died for us. You love us not because we deserve it, not because we’re worthy of it, not because we’ve earned it or merited it by our works, our giftings, our talents, but it’s just because of who you are, Lord. It’s your nature. And Lord, I pray that we have been a change to people by that love. I pray that our hearts are changed and that we love out of a new nature. We love because we have been loved, Lord. We love you because you’ve loved us first. And we love one another because we just can’t help it. Because we’re so overwhelmed and so changed, Lord, by the way that you’ve loved us. Please, Lord, give us that kind of love.

Make us a sacrificial people of love. Lord, not for our sake, but for your sake. For your kingdom, for one another.