Love (part 3)

This transcript has been automatically generated

Now, 1 Corinthians 13. There aren’t really many trials, are there, if that’s all it is? We’re taking 3 great words during this term, and the first, of course, is obviously the greatest word. I suppose it ought to have come last. It’s rather unfair that I should have the best and the greatest of the words.

And that’s what we’ve been doing from this chapter, 1 Corinthians 13. It’s the greatest thing that we can understand, obviously, and the greatest thing we can experience. But the word love obviously does need to be redeemed. I think that’s been coming home. I got down to Cheltenham today to where I was speaking this morning, and I went to see a friend of mine and his daughter, who is my goddaughter, one of my goddaughters.

And she’s the most affectionate creature, and despite the fact that I was breathing out colds and slaughter, she came straight up to me as I came into the front door and gave me about 13 splodgy kisses in in 13 seconds. And, um, you know, it’s the most warm-hearted creature, this girl. I’m always touched because whenever she plays in a game with me, she always wins but can’t bear winning, because I can’t bear losing.

And she tries to make it so possible for me to succeed, and I never do. And as, um, she went out of the room, her father said, pressure is starting on her. I won’t say her name in case know her, she’s exceptionally naughty. Well, you see, there is a very warm-hearted creature who certainly is not good.

And love by itself may just be warm-heartedness, and that’s a lovely thing to have in a church, but it’s got more to it in the New Testament than that. And perhaps you won’t mind me therefore giving you a couple of verses outside 1 Corinthians, after which we shall barely move from it at all. So with your basic Bible open at 1 Corinthians 13, look at 1 John 4:8. 1 John 4:8. And if you’re one of those people who gets there with one slice while everybody else is trying to find it, well then you can go on looking for Ephesians 3:19.

And if you’ve got there already, well then just sit on your hands and be content.

1 John 4:10: Sorry, 4:8 I meant. 1 John 4:8: He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. One of the great statements about God in the Bible. In fact, perhaps the greatest. God is love.

Notice not love is God, which is how so much liberal Christianity interprets that and how the man in the street interprets it, in other words, this is what I think love is and therefore God must be like that, hooray, all’s well. But God is love, not love is God. Therefore first of all I’ve got to find out what God is like and then I may begin to find out what real love is meant to be like. So love is the very nature of God and that must be why it’s the greatest thing we can ever know because it means that something of the very nature of God is beginning to dwell in my life and to sprout out. Something at any rate.

So obviously that must be the greatest thing. Then Ephesians 3:19, he says much the same thing: And to know the love of Christ, he says at the end of his prayer, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. And one of the new translations says, to be filled with all the nature of God, and I like that rather. You see, to know the love of Christ is to be filled with the nature of God.

So to be filled with love in the Bible is not just like my dear goddaughter, and I’m still, you know, feeling warm after the journey all the way along the M4 after being given so much affection in such a short time. But she lacks a great deal of biblical love in terms of some of the things that we’ve had in this chapter, and so do we all. Because to be biblically full of love is also to be biblically full of the character and nature of God.

Right, well now let’s come back to 1 Corinthians 13, and we’re doing the last paragraph, which is undoubtedly the most complex tonight, 8 to 13. So you’ll be ready for your hot dog afterwards.

Yes, I really must have a scarf. I had one. Who’s going to lend me one? The draught here is appalling tonight. Thank you so much.

Oh, how lovely, it’s been on the radiator as well. It’s even better. Right. Oh, it’s marvellous. Thank you.

If you’d prepare that for me each time I’m here, I should like— the others, I’m sure, don’t need it, but— right. Paragraph 1— the time’s come on for hooting. Verses 1 to 3 was, if we may go back a fortnight, gifts without love. He lists all the wonderful gifts. Gifts that they valued— tongues.

Gifts that he specially valued— knowledge and teaching. Gifts that the world values— laying down your life for a cause. And he says, these without love are nothing. Now just to summarise that, obviously there are no churches ever existent without gifts. If you don’t have any gifts, you can’t have a church because it’s the gifts of God that bring, make it possible for the word of God to be preached and people to be won for Christ.

And if there are no gifted Christians, then there’ll be no church. So you can’t have a church without gifts. If a church exists in any century, in any place that is a true church, then some of the gifts of the Spirit have been exercised.

But imagine a church without any Christlikeness. That, I suppose, is just conceivable. You can’t have a church without gifts because it wouldn’t be there. But imagine a church that had been founded, yes, people had been converted and were full of new life and zeal, but there was very little Christlikeness. Then you might say, what’s the point of the church?

Now that’s what he’s saying in paragraph 1 and we won’t recapitulate on that anymore. He’s saying you may have all the gifts that have brought a marvellously zealous church into existence but if it doesn’t in the end show the nature of God so that people coming in say, well, I think I know a bit more what it is to know, know God and to love him, then what’s the point of the church?

Paragraph 2. Now these people must have protested that there was a lot of love in their congregation in Corinth, and indeed there seems to have been a tremendous lot of emotion and a tremendous lot of feeling. You can see that in some of the things that we read last week. But what he says in paragraph 2 is that yes, there’s a lot of emotion and a lot of feeling, high feelings in Corinth, But there’s a lot of immaturity as well, and the mark of this love of God is that this, well, if you like, the steam of all this emotion, this new life, is getting into the pistons and driving the wheels along the road of patience and kindness and humility and sensitivity to others and so on.

And it seems very much therefore as though the ideas of love and maturity are very much together in Paul’s mind at the moment.

Now paragraph 3, and this is complicated but only because it needs entirely rethinking, I think. Once the key has been found, it’s not difficult and it is very stimulating. But when you are trying to rethink something, it’s always a bit difficult. Let me tell you what the normal interpretation is, and there’s a great deal of truth in this normal interpretation, but it just isn’t so satisfactory as a whole. The normal interpretation of verses 8 to 13 is that Paul is just saying one thing, And that is that the gifts of the Spirit are in use for this age but love is in use for eternity.

And the illustration of childhood and maturity in verse 11 is to say that in this world it’s like childhood and in the world to come it’s like maturity. You see, immediately we begin to smell a rat, don’t we? Because that’s not the way that Paul talks. And many commentators have wrestled with this illustration and said, well, for once in a day Paul got a very bad illustration because he certainly doesn’t want to imagine and say that living the Christian life and being the church in the world is an illustration of childhood. He wants them to get away from that.

And then why all this emphasis on partiality in verse 12, that we only see in a mirror dimly and that I shall understand fully then but not now. Why all this emphasis on the inability to do certain things now? Why is he emphasising that?

Well, all this made me realise long since that the old interpretation is a little superficial and doesn’t satisfy the questions that some of these very remarkable sentences raise. First of all, we’ve got to understand what has happened, and this is a bit difficult. You’ve got to put your Sherlock Holmes hat on. And one can get it wrong. But it looks very much as though many of the people in Corinth were making a claim for what one can only call a spiritual fullness, a spiritual wholeness, and what Professor Barrett calls— I think I mentioned this last week and I like this word best— a spiritual totality, which really belongs only to heaven and the life of the world to come.

If you want proof that the Corinthians thought like this, come and ask me afterwards. It’ll take too long. It’s all in chapter 4. And in other early chapters of this letter. But I think probably better not to look back now.

I like the word totality. If you prefer the word completeness, you use it every time I say the word totality. It seems according to Dr. Barrett that these Christians in Corinth are saying, well now look, you see, we in Corinth, we’re a bit special. We’re different from these other churches we keep hearing about from you, Paul, because we’ve suddenly entered, we’ve broken through the barrier. Through the spiritual gifts and especially through the gift of tongues, we’ve broken through a barrier to a perfection and a fullness and a totality of spiritual life that the other churches don’t seem to know.

Now that has a slightly modern ring, doesn’t it? And, but I think it was much more exaggerated in Corinth than it is today in most sane Christian circles.

Now Paul says 3 things to them because in fact this paragraph 8 to 13 is not just a purple passage as I’ve said repeatedly, it’s a careful argument. And the first thing he says in verses 8 to 10 is that the gifts of the Spirit are not signs of final perfection. I repeat for your notes if you’re taking them: The gifts of the Spirit are not signs of final perfection. Let me read: Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away.

As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect. But when the perfect, that is when the totality, the completeness comes, it lies in the future, the imperfect will pass away. Now do you see verse 10 says, the perfect, that’s what the Corinthians were talking about, being perfect, a perfect church.

A full church, a church with all God’s gifts. He says, when the perfect comes, it’s in the future.

Verse 10: And when it comes, notice what happens, the imperfect things will pass away.

When perfection comes, the gifts, in other words, will disappear. This means that the gifts are a means to an end and not the final end itself.

They had said, because we have these great gifts, the end must have come. He says, oh no, when the end comes, the gifts will disappear.

Indeed, says Paul, the gifts are marked not by completeness and totality but by incompleteness. Our knowledge, for that is a gift of God, verse 9, is imperfect. Our prophecy, that is a gift of God, is imperfect. Let me take one that he doesn’t mention which I think is so obvious that it helps as an illustration: the gift of healing. Now there are probably different opinions here in this church about the gift of healing.

Some will think that this gift is very common and some will think that it’s very rare, some will think that it doesn’t exist at all. I think I probably line up with those who think it is a very rare gift.

Now we meet someone who has unquestionably been healed. By God directly.

And such people obviously do exist. We read about them and sometimes, fairly rarely, we meet them and we rejoice together.

And yet a sober evaluation has to say that the miracles of healing that happen through the gifts of healing are incomplete and imperfect, to use Paul’s phraseology, compared with the gifts of healing that Jesus showed in the Gospels. There really is no contrast at all. When Jesus did acts of healing to a man who was paralysed from the moment he was born, that is, who never had any life in his ankles or in his bones or in his muscles of the legs, when Jesus said, get up, he got up immediately, took up his bed and leapt out of the room. No visits to Stoke Mandeville. No massage, no physiotherapy, no learning to walk, no questions, no casting away a crutch and then taking another step.

Straight away, instantaneously, absolutely perfect.

Now this mark of perfection in the miracles of our Lord, we can’t stop on tonight, but it’s one of the things that is much neglected today. They are so unlike anything that has ever been seen seen since Pentecost, though there are wonderful things that have happened in the church, comparative to them they are, and I think we have to use Paul’s language, imperfect. Not unreal, I’m not saying that, so please don’t hammer me afterwards for saying that, but imperfect and incomplete. And what is more, the person always dies again.

Whereas of course in the greatest miracle of the New Testament, the person, that is Jesus, didn’t die again.

So then the first point that he’s making is a very simple one. There’s nothing complicated in this paragraph. I hope I didn’t give that impression. The first point he’s making is that the gifts are for the interim, they are for now, they are for the period between Christ’s first and second coming. But they are in themselves imperfect and when fullness or completeness or perfection comes When the church is really a heavenly church, then, well, there won’t be any gifts of the Spirit to be seen at all because the girl will have been reached.

And you don’t bother with the means to reach the girl when you’ve got to the girl. So for thee Christians to talk about having reached the girl is previous, as the sergeant major says. And indeed, you see, it is. For those people who emphasise the gifts of healing far too greatly in the Christian church today often seem to suggest that heaven ought to be ours now, that we should never have a cold and spend 2 days in bed if we’re really believing Christians. You know, there are people who talk like that.

Well, if you really believe that nobody should ever be unfit once he believes in Jesus Christ, then you must believe that he should never die and therefore you must believe that heaven has come. That’s what Paul is saying. And he says, well, it hasn’t come.

I think most Christians, when they’ve really scratched their heads and thought about it, have to agree that sad as it is, Paul is right. Those greatest gifts of all in verse 9, of knowledge and prophecy, whatever we may say about them, are imperfect. And when the imperfect comes, we tuck them away.

Second point: what is for now, what is for here and now, that is in the church age, in the life of the church today, what is for now is maturity. Verse 11: He now comes to talk about maturity and putting away the things of childhood. Now the reason why this concept of maturity is so important, and I want you, if your mind has been wandering to your exams tomorrow, to come back to me. Is because this word maturity has puzzled many Bible students because it is the same word in Corinthians in a number of places that is used for perfection. The translators don’t know which to put.

Sometimes they put perfection and sometimes they put maturity.

The reason that they don’t put perfection in many of the modern translations is that they know it is misunderstood as meaning sinless perfection by many readers.

They know that people will misunderstand it today just as the Corinthians did then. Perfection as being without sin belongs to heaven. Not one Christian will ever be without sin until he or she is in heaven.

But perfection in Paul’s apostolic language, that’s why we’ve got this word sheet, so that we can learn biblical language. If you don’t trouble to learn biblical language, you’ll never be any good as a Christian teacher. To others. You couldn’t be a good doctor without learning the language. You can’t possibly be a good Christian teacher if you don’t bother to learn the language.

When Paul talks about maturity and perfection, he is not talking about sinlessness, he’s talking about being grown up. The perfectionist, perfection if you like, of the human form when instead of being childish it is fully mature. So we say, he or she has got a perfect body.

Whereas in fact, of course, it isn’t perfect at all, but it’s full grown.

The only fullness that Paul acknowledges that you can have in this world is to be full grown. I repeat that: the only spiritual fullness that Paul acknowledges you can have in this world is to be fully grown and to be a mature Christian.

Certainly not to be without faults, certainly not to be so full of the love of God that there’s room for nothing else. And those people who talk most of being fullest of the things of God, well, it’s often that they are blindest to themselves. Their next-door neighbour or their wives or their tutors at college could tell you very well that they were full of other things as well.

Now what Paul says is, if you’re talking about perfection and totality, let me tell you what matters to me. The last day, yes, that will come one day, but what matters to me, dear Corinthians, is that you should grow up. And as you know, the great problem was that they didn’t. And he says, when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. That was reasonable.

But when I became a man, when I grew to man’s estate, I gave up childish things. I packed away my bricks and my bubble gum.

Now you see, there is absolutely no doubt that though it is very unkind of Paul, that he is undoubtedly referring to the way they were using the gift of tongues when he says that they were speaking like children. Just as when he says that he used to think like a child, he’s referring to the Corinthians, as you know, from chapter 14 and verse 20 where he says, brothers, do not be children in your thinking, be babes in evil but in thinking be grown up.

Now he is not saying that the gift of speaking in tongues in the Corinthian church was wrong. He is not saying that. He could not possibly mean that because he says in verse 18 of chapter 14, although the whole chapter is a dissuasive as to the way they used the gift, he says, I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all. So he cannot possibly be meaning that it was wrong for the Corinthians to speak in tongues.

What he is saying is that their use of them, the way they use it as a mark of superiority, the way they speak incessantly at their meetings so that no one can understand what’s going on, the way they behave like little puffed-up children who’ve got a toy that makes them feel grander than anybody else, this excessive valuation of a junior gift of the Spirit is a mark not of mature Christian teachers but of children.

Very interesting if you look at chapter 14 verse 20. He goes on, you see, after saying, in thinking we mature, he says a very strange thing, verse 21: In the law it is written, by men of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord. It’s one of those Old Testament quotations that really makes you feel, Paul, why must you be so difficult? What on earth has that got to do with it? It would take me far too long today to go into it all, but if you’ve got your Bible, Old Testament part of the Bible there, and especially if you’ve got a Good News Bible, you may care to turn to Isaiah chapter 28 from the— to look at the context in which this astonishing verse comes.

Now if you haven’t, don’t worry, because I’m going to read the context and the verse from the Good News Bible And I think you’ll agree with me that it’s breathtakingly apt. It’s a beautifully chosen allusion.

Here in fact is what Isaiah said. I read from verse 9 onwards.

Isaiah 28:9. Isaiah says: They complain about me. They say, who does that man think he’s teaching? Who needs his message? It’s only good for babies that have not just, that have just been weaned.

He’s trying to teach us letter by letter, line by line, lesson by lesson. They’re complaining that Isaiah treats them like babies.

If you won’t listen to me, says Isaiah, then God will use foreigners speaking some strange-sounding language to teach you a lesson. He offered rest and comfort to all of you but you refused to listen to him. That is why the Lord is going to teach you letter by letter, line by line, lesson by lesson. Then you will stumble with every step you take. Says Isaiah, because you won’t listen to the word of God through me which is so simple, too simple for you, he’ll send this message of punishment and judgement through another nation and you’ll learn it line by line cause that’s as fast as you’ll be able to work it out, you know, Portuguese into English or whatever it is.

One word at a time. You see, that’s the illusion. He’s right on the same subject. What he’s saying to the Corinthians is, look, you haven’t learned that lesson from the Old Testament yet, that baby talk is for babies.

I mean, you can listen to some of the mothers and their friends talking to the babies after Sunday morning here.

It’s delightful really, as long as you’re good at that kind of thing, you know. I won’t give you my imitation of it because I should get clocked on the jaw by one of the masters. And there are one or two rather powerful mothers around at the moment, and I’m feeling a little so tender. Well, I do it too sometimes. I have a conversation with Miss Smart quite often on my own when I’m, when I’m putting my robes on, and it isn’t exactly the most brilliant philosophy.

Now, where have we got to?

Right, first part of the argument, 8 to 10. He says the gifts are not a mark of completeness and fullness, they’re a mark of incompleteness. Secondly, verse 11, the only completeness that is really worth having and that you can have now is growing up as a Christian. So start growing up and don’t behave like children.

And then the third thing he says: When I do reach maturity, here is the third point, when I do reach maturity, I do not reach totality.

He says the same thing over again. Verse 12: Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Notice the we. Now you see, he says, when we have grown up, you and I, Corinthians, because there’s no need why the Corinthians should stay as babies for very long. He says, when we grow up, you and I, and he includes himself now, the apostle, the apostle with the most remarkable gifts of teaching surely for the church that God ever gave a man.

And he says, I identify myself with you. I’ve come to totality and fullness as far as it’s possible in this world, says the apostle, and yet when I see things and teach them to you, I yet see in a mirror dimly. Compared with what I shall see in the life of the world to come.

What I know, and I’m an apostle, I know in part. Then and only then shall I understand fully.

So he says, when we do reach what I call perfection, maturity in this world, it is not what you Corinthians call perfection. That belongs to the life of the world to come. And he makes one of those great contrasts here which he makes so often in his writing between now and then. Look at verse 12: Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully even as I have understood. Now we see in a mirror, verse 12, then face to face.

Now, then. I can’t tell you how important that is. Um, I’m longing to go away and sit on an island for 3 weeks and write a book called Now and Then. Because it’s so desperately needed in keen Christian circles. So many people are trying to get what is promised for then now.

You can’t do that. You’ve got to live the Christian life now with the strength that God gives now. One day we shall be in heaven when we shall make no mistakes and all the rest of it and we shall never fail exams and we shall never let the Lord down and there’ll be no temptations. But now there will be temptations and we shall sometimes fail exams. And we shall sometimes let the Lord down and we shall sometimes fall out amongst ourselves because we’re now, not then.

Now one last thing on this, in this wonderful paragraph. Do you see the lovely phrase in verse 12? He says, now I know in part, then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully known.

They love to talk like that. They prefer to talk about a Christian not as somebody who knows God but is known by God. We are fully known by God. To be known by God means that God has started to work in us. When God says in heaven to an angel, I know Jane Smart, or whatever the name is, God means, I’ve taken her in hand.

Not just, I know her name and number and her address. It means, I know her and she’s mine.

Now one last cross-reference back to chapter 8 again. You see, all these phrases, 1 Corinthians 13, can’t be understood without the rest of the book.

And this is the most lovely little thing to look at again. Beginning of chapter 8: Now concerning food offered to idols, we know that all of us possess knowledge. Yes, I know that you know everything, he says, but all this knowledge of yours puffs you up and makes you conceited. Love would build you up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.

But if anyone loves God, one is known by him. Isn’t that an astonishing comment?

If I see a young Christian in Corinth, says Paul, who knows all the answers and get up and talk quite well about the answers, I don’t necessarily know that I’m looking at somebody who is very mature as a Christian.

Just knowing the wolf pack or whatever it may be. But he said, if I see somebody who’s actually loving his neighbour in this rather complex matter which we won’t go into of idols and so on and really bearing the burden of this young convert and helping him through the difficulty, if somebody loves God in that kind of way and shows it to his Christian neighbour, then I know that I’m looking at a man or a girl who is known by God. The only real solid evidence to me, says Paul, that God knows somebody is love. That is, of course, evidence that God is working.

Back then to the end of the chapter.

So faith, hope, love, that is the 3 great things that God works in us when we’re first converted. These are the first hallmarks of being a real Christian. These are the things that matter. The gifts of the Holy Spirit, that is the gift of the evangelist, a very, very great and important gift, one of the most senior gifts in the New Testament. The gift of the evangelist, though a very great gift, is only a means to an end that Joe and Mary may come into the kingdom of God and that then God may be working in them faith, hope, love.

Obviously the result of the evangelist and God working in them this is the whole point of the, the whole point of the exercise. But since God doesn’t exercise faith, although he exercises, although he plants it in us by his Holy Spirit, and although he plants hope in our hearts by his Holy Spirit, God doesn’t exercise hope because he’s got nothing to hope in. He is himself, of course, all the answer.

Yet though God plants love in our hearts, in this regard love is different from faith or hope. Because God himself loves, because he is love and can really do nothing else. It is his nature to do so and to be so.

So faith and hope are not essential to God but love is. Therefore in the last analysis, if you have to choose between faith, hope and love, this work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart, you must in the end say that the only one that finally matters is the end, the goal, the purpose of the others. That is to make us like the God who gave them to us, gave these things to us.

So it’s greatest, you see, simply because it brings us to God and God to us.

In the Bible, the scale of values is, if it brings you to God, if it’s got anything to do with God, it’s great. And if it’s got nothing to do with God, then it’s awful. If you applied that scale for the rest of your life, for the rest of your time, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. If it’s God’s, he cares about it, if it’s concerned with him, well then it’s great. But if it’s got nothing to do with God and he is not concerned with it, then you better leave it alone.

Right, well, let’s have a short prayer and then a hymn.

Through all the confusions of our immaturity, Heavenly Father, we ask that you will teach the one essential thing of this chapter to us all. And as we seek to learn it, we pray that we may grow up and that some of the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit in giving us faith, hope, and love may be seen in each of us. So thank you for this chapter. Thank you for the marvellous teaching of the Apostle Paul. We thank thee for the way that he grasped the these nettles and urged these Christians to become what your purpose was.

So we pray that that may be the fruit of his teaching in our lives, in this church, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.