All right, turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. 1 Corinthians 13, we've been doing a study on spiritual gifts and introduced it at the beginning of chapter 12. And then we went over to see what Peter had to say about spiritual gifts as sort of an outline, and then came back to chapter 12. Today I want to deal with 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It is a passage of scripture which I am certain you all have heard before. It would probably be impossible to count the number of times we've heard 1 Corinthians 13, especially like it's read at weddings. And for good reason, this chapter is probably the most deeply felt, beautifully written prose in all of scripture. At least, we'd be hard pressed to find anything superior to it in style. And this is, in this chapter, Paul completely changes his writing style. He goes from didactic to poetic. In other words, he goes from teaching facts to sort of feeling truth. And so he's going to teach about love, or charity, as it says here in the King James Version. Charities come to mean something a little different in our day, but it is still a helpful translation of the word. At least the word charity causes us to understand that this is about giving, it's about doing, it's about some act of selflessness. The Greek word is agape. It's actually kind of a strange word in Greek. The language has so many words for love, from friendship love, phileo, to sexual love, eros, to family love, storge. The least used of all the words for love in Greek was agape, and it's like the early Christians grabbed a hold of this seldom-used word and said, okay, that one's going to be ours. We will define that. And it becomes this selfless, God-infused love of Christ's disciples. And yet, as with all scripture, It would be a mistake to remove 1 Corinthians 13 from its context. This is absolutely still about the use and misuse and lack of use of spiritual gifts. We looked at 1 Corinthians 12 in some detail where the Apostle is correcting the misunderstanding about spiritual gifts in the church at Corinth. And so in chapter 12, he's shown how spiritual gifts are not just the domain of, you know, super saints with the showy, the highly visible gifts. He said there's a variety of gifts. They're working in a variety of ways. They accomplish a variety of purposes, but they're all given by the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God. He's argued that God has created the church by his own design and given every individual member spiritual gifts for the benefit of all, for the common good. If you remember in chapter 12, he's also rejected the idea that anyone can dismiss themselves from service in the church. He's denied that any member can look at another member as unnecessary or unneeded. What he's done is he's shown that through the use of their spiritual gifts, church members are enabled to care for one another. And now, remember how he closes out chapter 12. He asks that series of rhetorical questions. Does everybody have a showy gift? Does everybody have a highly visible gift? Because the church at Corinth had elevated this special set of gifts, which they thought truly spiritual people had. But Paul argues that all church members are spiritual people, even though they aren't all apostles, and they aren't all prophets, and they aren't all miracle workers, and they don't all speak in tongues. And even Paul at the end of chapter 12 would say he would not try to get that church at Corinth. He wouldn't try to convince them to stop seeking what they thought were the best gifts. He just wanted to show them there was something even better. So the end of chapter 12 verse 31, but covet earnestly the best gifts, and yet I show you a more excellent way." In other words, there is something even better than what you think is the best. And so no wonder then that this text we're about to read is so beautifully written, that the elegant prose is just another part of the argument as Paul is showing that love is greater than the greatest spiritual gift. 1 Corinthians 13, read the whole chapter, he says, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity or have not love, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profits me nothing. Charity suffers long and is kind. Charity envies not. Charity wants not itself. Is not puffed up. Does not behave itself unseemly. Seeks not her own. Is not easily provoked. Thinks no evil. Rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. Bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things. Endures all things. Charity never fails. Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease. Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abides faith, hope, charity, these three, but the greatest of these, is charity. Now, you know, again, I know I'm taking a massive text, but if you stick with me, stay with me to the end, I think you'll clearly see why. In this chapter, Paul is arguing that charity or love, I'm going to use both of those words interchangeably, they mean the same thing. Paul's arguing that love is this surpassing Christian reality that is greater than even the greatest gift. If you study this chapter with me this afternoon, you're going to see why love matters, and how love behaves, and why love endures. The first three verses teach us why love matters. Now, before we get too far, we should point out that love is not a spiritual gift. It would be really tempting to think of it that way. But spiritual gifts are unique to individuals, and love is uniform within God's people. That is, love is not a gift that is given to some Christians. It is within all Christians. And so love is not a gift of the Spirit. Love is a fruit of the Spirit. As Paul says in Galatians 5, 22 and 23, he lists the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, right? Love is the very first of the fruit of the Spirit. Those aren't things that are like gifts that are given separately and dispensed to a few. Love is given to all. It's manifested to all those who are saved by faith and indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God. So still, Paul is not, though, contrasting love with spiritual gifts. If I'm reading this right, He's arguing that the indwelling spirit uses love as the fuel which makes spiritual gifts effective and useful. And the church at Corinth, there were those who considered themselves as, you know, super saints because they had these exalted gifts. They had the showy visible gifts and they were filled with pride and envy and self-promotion. The very things that Paul is about to try to explain in this chapter that love never does. Meanwhile, others, without those kind of gifts, weren't serving in the church at all because they thought, oh, that's what spiritual people are. They have those gifts, and mine aren't like that, and they're not necessary, and they're not needed. And so they weren't doing anything in the church. Paul's going to argue that the lack of service doesn't happen because of a lack of spiritual gifts. Lack of service happens because there is a lack of love. Love is what would be missing. So why is it that love matters? Well, it matters because no spiritual gift, no personal sacrifice, has meaning unless it is fueled by love. The gift of tongues, which was so highly exalted in Corinth, it was worthless without love. Paul says in verse 1, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. I'm just a noisy gong. I'm just a clanging cymbal. Tongues without love, even if you were speaking the tongues of some divine language in heaven, it would be meaningless without love. Other surpassing gifts like prophecy and supernatural knowledge and working miracles, all those are empty unless they're fueled by love. Verse two, he says, though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and I have all faith so that I can remove mountains. I don't have love, I'm nothing. That isn't describing somebody who is just gifted with knowledge and mysteries and faith. They have the totality of it. He says, all knowledge, all mysteries, all faith, but no love reduces them to insignificance. Even the most self-sacrificing behavior must be fueled by love. He says in verse three, though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing." There's such this sharp and sudden end to these verses. Verse 2, it's nothing. Verse 3 says it's nothing. If I could just for a moment say this as directly as I think Paul intends it. If you could speak every language, even some celestial dialect of holy angels, without love, you are just making noise. You're saying nothing. If you were the most intelligent, most insightful, most faith-filled disciple of Jesus, so that you could miraculously move mountains without love, you're nothing. If you could make the most magnificent sacrifices, starting with giving away all your possessions and ending with giving up your own life, if you do it without love, Paul says it's good for nothing. How startling are these verses? If you can just imagine some man who could speak every language and preach wonderful sermons and explain every mystery of Scripture, he could predict the future, perform miracles, give away all his money, and in the end of his life, he willingly died as a martyr for the faith. Paul says, without love, that man has said nothing and done nothing and is nothing. Love is the fuel which makes every spiritual gift meaningful. Now look at how love behaves in verses four through seven. Love suffers long in its kind. Love envies not. Love vaunts not itself. It's not puffed up. Does not behave itself unseemly. Seeks not her own. Is not easily provoked. Thinks no evil. Rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Now, if I counted correctly, there are 15 characteristics of love, as Paul explains from both sides. Here's what love does, and here's what love doesn't do. And we could do an in-depth study of all 15 if you want, but I don't think you want that. And frankly, I don't think you need that right now to understand the chapter. But let me point out a couple of basic characteristics of Paul's list here in verses four through seven. First off, as I said, he's making a list both positively and negatively. He's showing here's what love does and here's what love does not do. Love does or love is, it's patient and kind and rejoices in truth and bears and believes and hopes and endures all things. Love does not, or it is not, envious, arrogant, boastful, rude, selfish, short-tempered. It thinks no evil, literally is saying it doesn't keep an accounting ledger of bad behavior. Or we would say it doesn't keep a record of wrongs. It doesn't rejoice in iniquity. That is, it doesn't find joy in seeing someone do wrong. So Paul's giving this simple list of here's how love behaves and here's how love doesn't behave. The other thing we can see about these 15 characteristics is that love requires both feeling and doing. That is, love is found in a combination of emotion and action. Look, the world is exceedingly guilty of defining love as if it is just a feeling. It's some mushy, incorporeal gushiness of sentimentality. And when they stop feeling love, they stop behaving lovingly. I, on the other hand, this is my confession, I have been guilty of defining love as if it is only an action, saying it is not what you feel, it's just what you do. Paul's very clear here, it's both. Real love is not a hole that you fall into. Real love is a determination of your will in regard to your emotions and your actions. When he says there in verse 4, you know, love envies not. Envy is an emotion. It's not puffed up. Puffed up is a way of describing pride. Pride is an emotion. In verse six, you get emotions both positively and negatively, right? It doesn't find joy in catching others doing wrong. You find joy in truth. Because as much as some would say, well, you can't be loving to someone and tell them about their sin, the person who is really loving finds joy in truth, not in compromising and promoting disobedient, unrighteous, immoral behavior. Then we also see here, not just feelings, but actions that go beyond emotions. To be loving, here's how you have to behave. You have to be patient and kind and selfless. Real love acts. And by that, I don't mean that it pretends, although sometimes it might feel that way. Real love puts feelings into sacrificial action. We know that in Scripture, God so loved the world. that he gave, right? The display of love is found in action. So listen to what this means. If real love is found in this combination of emotion and action, if it resides at the intersection of how you feel and what you do, then both your actions and your emotions are required if you're really going to claim to love. Specifically, in this context of spiritual gifts and service to the church, it would seem Paul's argument would tell us that if you're gonna say that you love the church, you have to back that up with how you feel about the church and how you behave for the church. There is no point in passionately proclaiming your love for the church without backing it up by faithful service. Or if you serve the church diligently, but you do it out of a sense of cold and passionless duty, you do it that it's not in love, there's no profit to it. Unless you both deeply feel and faithfully serve the Lord's church, all your claims of loving it are just meaningless noise. This is what Paul's saying. This theme of service and action in the church, it's not changed. Give me a minute, I'm gonna show you how it's not changed. All of it's fitting together. But let me just add here that often, preachers or teachers or especially overprotective parents will encourage someone to insert the name of their intended significant other into this passage, right? You've heard it before. Take the word charity and replace whoever's name it is. Read that and tell me if it's true. I don't know if anybody told Joy to do that, but I'm glad she either didn't listen or had a overly optimistic sense of my character. Because Jason is not always long-suffering and he's not kind. Jason is jealous and prideful and behaves badly. There is only one name in the history of humanity that can truthfully be substituted into these verses. And we need to say that here because if you're at all frustrated with this call to both deeply feel and enthusiastically serve in the church, you need to understand what you're doing it for. Jesus loved the church. He gave himself for it. He calls this church his body. And you should feel love and serve in love because he deserves it. Praise God, Jesus is patient and kind and he's not envious and boastful and not arrogant. He's not rude or selfish or irritable. He has not kept a record of wrongs. He has taken all of those wrongs unto himself and removed them from us. When you're saved, you're called to be conformed to his image. And so you have every reason you need to have these 15 emotions and actions of love that Paul lists here. In fact, at our final point, Paul's going to argue, you need to embrace love because anything else you embrace is just going to be temporary. He explains verses 8 through 13 why love endures. It says in verse 8, love never fails. Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail. Whether there be tongues, they shall cease. Whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly, or through a mirror, through a hazy mirror. But then face to face, now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. Now abides faith, hope, and love. These three, but the greatest of these is love. Verses 8 through 13 contain some of the most highly debated verses in scripture. I am tempted to say that Paul has planted a theological landmine and there's really not much chance I can tiptoe through it. But I would be remiss if I didn't at least point out the difficulty. And the difficulty revolves around verse 10 and that phrase, when that which is perfect is come. Exactly what or who is Paul talking about when he talks about that which is perfect? I need you to just cinch your thinking cap down tight around your ears for about three minutes here, okay? some will argue that that which is perfect is the completed Scripture. And if that's the case, then you look at verse 8 and Paul saying that the spiritual gifts of prophecy and tongues and knowledge will cease when Scripture is completed. And according to verse 9, we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect and completed Scripture has come, those partial things, those gifts will be done away with. The word perfect there often does mean complete. In this case, that argument would be the complete Bible. And if that's what it means, then it is teaching that miraculous spiritual gifts continued through a time when the New Testament was written, and then they faded away because the complete revelation of God is now with us, and it has replaced those incomplete or partial gifts. Others will say, when that which is perfect is come, is speaking about the return of Jesus. And in fairness, they point forward at verse 12 and ask, well, what about that seeing face to face? What does that mean? Don't we expect to see Jesus face to face and know him even also as he knows us? Well, yeah, of course we do. But that interpretation would also mean that the gift of prophecy and tongues and knowledge could continue until the return of Jesus. That view also fails to explain why Paul would refer to Jesus as that which is perfect instead of he who is perfect. So I lean toward the first view. I would not be shocked to find out that I'm wrong. I know you would be shocked to find out I was ever wrong, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out I was wrong. I will say if the second view is right then at the very least the gift of tongues is still going to leave and has been gone because in verse 9 when Paul talks about prophecies will fail and tongues will cease and knowledge will vanish away. There's some in Greek verb tenses and the way it's used and the way we would really say it about prophecies and knowledge is that they will be put to an end, but tongues, he says, tongues will stop themselves, essentially. Anyway, we'll address tongues and prophecy and things more in chapter 14, but for now, let me just put your minds at ease. Both of those views are side notes to Paul's main point in verses 8 through 13. The main point is obvious when you see how he starts in verse 8 and how he ends in verse 13. Verse 8 he starts, love never fails, that is it never ends. In verse 13, what remains is faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of those is love. Paul's main point in this last section of chapter 13 is the eternally enduring nature of love. It never ends. We can debate spiritual gifts and talk about, well, when will different spiritual gifts end? But what you really can't debate is that they will end. Spiritual gifts are not eternal. But charity, love, it never fails. Paul says prophecies will fail, tongues will cease, knowledge will vanish away. All of those things are temporary, but love is permanent. All of those things are partial, but love is the full expression. In fact, within the church at Corinth, they were thinking that the highly visible gifts We're the only way to truly prove that you were a spiritual person. But Paul kindly says in verse 11, I don't know what the problem with y'all is. I grew up, don't you wanna grow up? Right, I was a child and I spoke like a child and understood like a child and I thought like a child, but I didn't wanna be a child forever. I became a man and I put those things away. Grow up, don't get enamored with this handful of showy spiritual gifts and in the process, you're not using them in love. And for those of you who don't have those showy visible gifts, you're not doing anything at all and certainly that's not loving. Don't you want to be a grown up church? And so there's the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. And what I want you to remember is all of it is in the same context of spiritual gifts. In fact, let's just drive that home for a minute and try to make a practical application of this. Because here we are now, we are five messages into our series on spiritual gifts, and we have not hardly tried to list them all, much less have I tried to, you know, attempted to identify what your particular gift is. That's not usually how a study on spiritual gifts starts. Nowadays, we have these wonderful tools called spiritual gift assessments. You answer like 100 questions, and then you score it, and they categorize your answers into the most likely area of spiritual giftedness. Y'all, that's just a personality test. I wish I could say that I wasn't guilty of taking one of those, or I've never given them to others. I have, haven't I? Yeah. They aren't heresy or anything. Actually, if you take one and it tells you that you have the miraculous gift of healing, that one might be heresy. Come talk to me. Really, it's just not the most spirit-led way of finding your area of giftedness. You know what the most spiritual-led method of finding your area of giftedness is? After reading this chapter, I would hope you would be able to identify it in one word. Love? Listen, here's how it fits all into the same context. Look back at chapter 12, the very end of chapter 12. Verse 31, Paul says, the best gifts and yet I show you a more excellent way. So after all he said in chapter 12 about the uniqueness of gifts and the diversity of gifts and the unifying nature of all kinds of spiritual gifts, how all of them are vital, I think he's essentially telling the church at Corinth, look, I know that you think there are some gifts that are the best and fine, go ahead and want those. I won't stop you, but let me show you what's even better. And then through all of chapter 13, he proves that any gift without love is nothing, and that love is this extraordinarily beautiful thing in the way it behaves. And love is gonna outlive and outlast whatever you think the best spiritual gift is, because all of those are temporary, and love is eternal. And so, go fill out your spiritual gift assessment. No. Look at what he says next. Chapter 14, verse 1. Follow after charity and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that you may prophesy. And obviously I'm going to have to deal with that prophesy thing in context later, but just listen. Before chapter 13, Paul said, desire the best gifts, but I want you to know there's something even better. And then immediately after chapter 13, he says, again, you know, desire spiritual gifts, but follow after love. That word follow after is the Greek word dioko, and it means to follow, to pursue, to chase, to hunt, Chase love, hunt down love, get after it. Chase love like it has stolen the last cupcake. Love is a better way, go toward that. If you want to know and to use your spiritual gifts, and look, I hope you understand, it is what I desperately want for each of you. If you want to identify and utilize your spiritual gift, chase love, pursue love. Listen, this is so simple and yet so obviously true. You will not find what area you are gifted in until you actually try to do something. And Paul just said the whole purpose of love is about doing what you feel. So read 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 over and over until it is ingrained and you pray over it like you really mean it. Tell the Lord that you feel deeply and you want to put that into action for behalf of the church. And ask for ways that it can be done and then chase after it, pursue it. There will likely never be a time where I will be able to look at any one of you and say, I know with certainty that blank is your spiritual gift. But I'll always be able to open up 1 Corinthians 13 and 14 and say, follow after love. Chase down ways that you can feel deeply and serve faithfully. Pursue love. and you will find your gift.