We are in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, and we're going to be reading verses 8 through 13. Our focus this morning is really going to be on verses 8 through 12, because I want to save verse 13 for its own sermon on faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love, so that'll be our text for next week. I'll just read all of 1 Corinthians 13 and we'll focus on our attention this morning on verses 8 through 12. Here now God's holy 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 remove mountains, but have not love, I am Nothing. If I give away all that I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, 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, believes all things, hopes all things, 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. 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. Let's pray. Father, what a beautiful and powerful portion of your holy word we have before us this morning. Would you feed our souls with it? Feed us on Christ through your word this morning. Let us be attentive and understanding, receptive, teachable, responsive, by the work of your spirit in our hearts, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. You may be seated. All right. If I offered you a choice and I said, You can choose between something that is partial, incomplete, and also temporary, and something that is complete, and whole, and also eternal. Which one would you choose? Seems like a rather obvious choice, right? But let's just make it a little more interesting. What if the thing that was partial and temporary was pretty exciting, pretty attractive. Popular. In demand. And the complete and the eternal thing, while it was of lasting value, not everybody appreciated it as much. It didn't shine quite as nicely. It wasn't quite as in demand. And maybe it was even hard to attain. Now what's the choice? That really is the choice that Paul is putting in front of the Corinthians in this section of 1 Corinthians 13. It is a choice between prophecy, tongues, and knowledge. Attractive, impressive, spiritual gifts that are wonderful, but are incomplete and pass away. and the enduring and abiding virtues of faith, hope, and love, and love of which is eternal and perfect because it reflects the very character of God. And Paul is basically chastising the Corinthians for being really, really, really attracted to what's over here and not so much interested in what's over here. You know, it's easy to misvalue something. You ever watch the Antiques Roadshow? Who's seen the Antiques Roadshow? Come on, you can admit it. So, that whole show is based upon people misvaluing things, right? How many times on that show have someone saved a painting from being thrown away because somebody else thought it was ugly, and admit it, when you saw it, you thought, eh, that's pretty ugly, right? And then you find out it's worth tens of thousands of dollars, right? Or you see something on there and you think, wow, that looks like a piece of junk or I don't understand what that purpose is. And then you find out that thing is worth more than your car or more than your house. It's easy to misestimate value. The truth is all of those things on Antiques Roadshow are just future dust, right? No matter how valuable they are, there will come a time when they will be turned to dust or forgotten, broken, and tossed aside. So much of life depends on valuing what is truly valuable. And a Christian, in many ways, we can understand what a true Christian is as being someone who has come to see and understand that God alone is of infinite and eternal value. He is the most lovely, the most perfect, the most holy, the most desirable, and the most needful being or thing that our souls could ever prize. And yet, even though Christians have all come to see that to some degree or another, or we wouldn't be Christians, it's amazing how, even though we know that, we still have a tendency to misvalue the things in our lives. We still have a tendency to grasp after the wrong things in terms of what matters most in our Christian lives, in our coming to know and possess and treasure God more and more. Because in many ways, we can understand the whole of our Christian lives as a pursuit, A.W. Tozer called it the pursuit of the holy. It's the pursuit of God who has made us his own. And so, I love Philippians 3, it's one of my favorite passages of scripture, right? I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own, right? So He has pursued us in love first, He's captured our hearts with His love, and now our whole calling as Christians is to pursue Him. But what do we need in order to be able to pursue him? What do we need to be able to strive after God in our lives? The Corinthian church, we've seen this again and again, they wanted things that would impress the world. They wanted things that would raise their status in the eyes of their neighbors. They wanted things that would make them seem relevant, important, significant. And among all the things they coveted, the spiritual gifts of tongues, prophecy, and knowledge were at the very top of the list. Why? Well, let's connect this back to everything else we've seen in 1 Corinthians. What are the Greeks' value? Wisdom, right? And how in the Greek mind is wisdom displayed? through eloquence, right? You think of the gifts of prophecy and knowledge. And prophecy is the ability to speak forth oracles from God. It's the display of divine wisdom and revelation in oral form. And knowledge is an insight into divine mysteries. And so for the Greek audience, which is primarily what the Corinthians had around them were Greeks, this whole idea of prophecy and knowledge were so valuable because it made them appealing and it made them valuable among the Greeks. And then what do the Jews value? Signs, wonders, power, miracles. Remember this is back like in chapter one. And tongues is a very impressive sign. It's a very impressive spiritual gift when we rightly understand what it was in biblical times. Tongues is a very impressive display of supernatural power. And so the Corinthian church really valued these three gifts. But the problem is, as we've seen also, they were a church that was profoundly lacking in love. In many ways, we could go back to our portrait of love and action that we looked at the past couple of weeks, we could go back through that, and everything that love is not, we could go back through the first 12 chapters of Corinthians and find the Corinthians being and doing all of the things that love does not do. They were arrogant. They were rude. They were self-seeking. They were inconsiderate of others. I mean, who shows up at the Lord's Supper and just eats until they're stuffed and drinks until they're drunk and doesn't care if anybody else is even there yet, right? That's pretty much rude and self-seeking and, you know, and then who takes a brother to court and sues them, right? you know, easily provoked, that's keeping a record of wrongs, that's, you know, insisting on your own way. Who divides up and says, I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas, well, I follow Christ, right? That's arrogant. It's this puffed up pride. And so this is a church that's profoundly lacking in love. And that's why Paul is laying out this chapter in this beautiful form. I told you a couple weeks ago, he uses this ancient classical form called an encomium to try to get them to see in a way that they would receive the importance of love. So this whole chapter is really unfolding their need for love. And at this point, he's really kind of hitting them pretty hard on the things they value and how temporary and how incomplete they are compared to faith, hope, and love, and especially compared to love. Let's look for just a minute at these three gifts. First of all, we see that the first thing he says about them is that they are temporary. Verse 8, love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. When you read that whole verse, you kind of understand why love never ends is put at the beginning of verse 8 rather than at the end of verse 7. That used to bother me. I don't know if you guys even are that, like, obsessed about things like that, but it always used to bother me that, you know, the whole love description is verses 4 through 8a. Why could it be 4 through 7, right? And you start, because when you understand what Paul's doing here, the last thing he says about love is that it's enduring, it's never ending, it never falls or fails or falls apart. And then that's contrasted with these gifts. Prophecy and knowledge is said to pass away, and tongues is said to cease. Just three different ways of saying the same thing. They are temporary. And so Love Never Ends is both the culmination of this description of love, and it's also set up to contrast with the temporary nature of prophecy, tongues, and knowledge. But what are these gifts? Prophecy is a divinely, the giving of a divinely inspired message. So in apostolic times, in the times of the Corinthians, prophecy primarily, but not exclusively, primarily referred to revelation that was received from God and that was spoken forth in a powerful way with divine authority as the mouthpiece of God. To be a prophet is to be the mouthpiece of God. There's some evidence that even in the early church, prophecy was sometimes used as a synonym for preaching. Because Paul, enlisting his spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, doesn't really mention preaching, but he does mention prophecy. And there's some thought that prophecy would have also included what we would today associate as preaching. And that's what after the apostolic age, later in church history, prophecy becomes associated with the idea that you're speaking forth the word of God with divine authority, that is preaching. And so the great Puritan pastor William Perkins wrote a great classic work on preaching and it's called The Art of Prophesying. It's one of the most helpful books on preaching written in the 1600s, The Art of Prophesying. It's the art of proclaiming with divine authority the word of God. So there was revelatory prophecy, where you received a revelation from God, and you spoke it forth like the Old Testament prophets. And then there was prophecy of taking the word of God and then speaking it forth to the people. That's prophecy. Tongues is actually, the word that's translated tongues is the word for languages. It's the word glossi. And glossi is a word where we get our English word glossary. So you know there's a glossary in the back of a book? What's it do? Shows you the meaning of words, right? Helps you take something that was sort of unknown to you and make it known to you by giving you a little index of the meaning of words. We even use the word gloss, which means to give a rough, on-the-spot translation of a text. One of my favorite Old Testament preachers is someone who a couple of you grew up under his preaching for a couple of years at least, Dale Ralph Davis. He used to be the pastor at Asquith, and he's now an Old Testament professor at RTS Jackson. And the guy, when he preaches from the Old Testament, all he has in front of him is the Hebrew text. and he does an on-the-spot. I can't do that, I'm sorry, I have to admit. If you put a Hebrew text in front of me, I would need to go away for about an hour and work on it, and then I could come back and have a translation for you. But he's doing a gloss, he's reading the Hebrew text and giving an on-the-spot translation. So this word has to do with languages, it has to do with words. And the place we read about the gift of tongues is really in Acts chapter 2. We get our description of the biblical gift of tongues. And Acts chapter 2 says, when the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven, and at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each one of us in his own native language? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt, the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. and all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, what does this mean? That's obviously a miraculous sign, right? You've got people from like 20 different places, 20 different language groups, and they're all coming together, and they're hearing this group of disciples, that number's about 120, speaking fluently in each one of these different languages. None of them had studied those different languages. So it's a pretty profound miraculous gift. In fact, when we get into 1 Corinthians 14 in a couple weeks, what we'll see is that sometimes the speaker himself didn't even know what he was saying, and it relied upon someone else in the church to be gifted with the interpretation of tongues. And so the speaker would speak, and the interpreter would interpret. And then knowledge, knowledge is a gift that we know very little about because it's not really mentioned much outside the Bible, in the Bible outside this passage, but the word is gnosis. And it seems to mean a spiritual insight or a special understanding of divine things. It's not a message necessarily given that you could proclaim, but it's just a special insight into the kingdom of God, the nature of God, into eternal divine truth. Now, if you think about it, really, you can understand why the Corinthians were pretty impressed by these gifts, because they are Pretty great, right? I mean, these are not little things to scoff at and say, oh, foolish Corinthians, why were you so interested in these things? I mean, imagine being able to open your mouth and speak forth the words of God. You know, this always blows me away. The Old Testament prophets could say, thus says the Lord, and they speak, and it's like it's the word of God coming out of their mouth. That's pretty awesome. Imagine being able to speak in a language that you've never studied. like Joel just stands up and all of a sudden the Italian blood in him comes to the surface and he starts speaking fluent Italian. Where did he figure that out, right? And then Gabe gets up and starts translating it for the rest of us. I mean, if that happened, we'd be pretty impressed, right? Or someone had a true insight into the nature of God and his kingdom and could share it with us. These are pretty impressive gifts. And it's easy to see actually why the Corinthians were impressed by them. But Paul wasn't as impressed as they were. And it's not because Paul undervalued these gifts. As we'll see in chapter 14, Paul thought prophecy was a very valuable gift. But He was not impressed because the Corinthians valued these gifts more than faith, hope, and love. And so Paul takes time to emphasize in verses eight through 10 how temporary and how impartial they are. Prophecies will pass away, tongues will cease, knowledge will pass away, for we know in part and we prophesy in part But when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. You see, no matter how much divine insight someone with the gift of knowledge was given, it was only just part of what God was about and doing. No matter how much prophecy someone spoke, it was always just part of God's full revelation of himself and his plan. And so these things are temporary and they are partial. Now the big question that people have when they come to this particular verse and this section is, when will these gifts pass away and cease? Because Paul speaks of them in verse eight clearly as passing away and ceasing. Well, the hint that we get is in verse 10, which says that when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. And so different people have discussed what the perfect could be. Could the perfect be the perfect and complete, just a word that means complete, the perfect and complete canon of scripture, so that when the canon of scripture is complete, There's no more prophecy or tongues to be given because God's told us everything he's going to tell us until Jesus comes again. That's one possible option. Or could the perfect be the coming of the Lord Jesus and the new creation in the new heavens and the new earth? Well, if we look later in verse 12, Verse 12 seems very clearly to be talking about the coming of Jesus and the new creation, because it says, 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. And so that verse seems very clearly to be talking about seeing Jesus face to face in the new creation. not just the completion of the canon of scripture. So if verse 12 is referring to the same thing as verse 10, then the perfect would be the coming of Jesus and the new heavens and new earth, which seems likely, but I can't tell you with 100% certainty that that's what it's referring to. But even if it is referring to the second coming of Jesus and the the new heavens and the new earth, the perfect new creation, even if that's what it's referring to, it doesn't rule out the possibility that prophecy and tongues and knowledge as divine revelatory gifts would cease at a time that is prior to the second coming of Jesus. And the reason I say that from this text is just a parallelism that looks so intentional that it seems almost inescapably interesting to me. And that is if you look at verse eight and verse 13, and realize those are the bookends of this passage. Verse eight begins with love, verse 13 ends with love. So this third section, Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away, right? And then verse 13, so now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. So you've got three things that pass away. prophecy, tongues, and knowledge, and you've got three things that abide, faith, hope, and love. Do they abide even after the perfect comes? Even after we're face-to-face with Jesus? Or do they abide for now, for the remainder of its age? Some Bible scholars will tell you, well, faith, if you understand it just as trusting in God, then faith would even be appropriate in the new heavens and the new earth. But that's not usually how Paul uses the word faith. Paul uses the word faith to say things like, we walk by faith and not by sight, right? And Hebrews tells us that faith is the evidence of things unseen and the substance of things hoped for, right? And how does Paul talk about hope? Paul talks about hope and he says, who hopes for what he already has? For if you already have it, it's no longer hope, right? So if you've got faith, hope, and love that are abiding, I don't think faith and hope extended in the new creation because they're fulfilled. Faith becomes sight, hope becomes fulfilled, right? So I find that inescapably interesting that Paul has those parallels. And I think based upon other passages of scripture, I would say that the revelatory gifts of prophecy, tongues, and knowledge cease with the closing of the canon and the end of the apostolic age. Now, I'll get into that argument a little more in chapter 14, because I don't think that's really the primary focus of what Paul means here. Because I don't know that Paul, in his conscious mind, would have understood Oh, there's coming a time when the canon of scripture will be complete before the Lord Jesus comes. And the reason I say that is that when is the Lord Jesus going to come? Well, for all Christians throughout all of church history, since the time when Jesus left and the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, the coming of Jesus has always been soon, imminent. Perhaps today, it's always been the hope of the believer. And so I don't think Paul had this conception that the canon's going to close. I don't think it was that clear in his mind. But I do think the Holy Spirit is giving us, through inspiration, this parallel to help us see that. So that's kind of where I'm going to leave that. I think the perfect that's coming and the face to face is certainly the coming of the Lord Jesus and the new heavens and the new earth. But I do think that there's enough there to help us get the hint at least that the time would be coming when prophecies and tongues and knowledge would pass away. Because God's given us everything he's going to reveal to us in this word. So today, I think the way prophecy is exercised is when you take this word, and you study it, and you meditate upon it, and you pray through it, and you authoritatively declare it and say, thus says the Lord. This is what his word says to us. And that's the art of prophesying, as Perkins would say. And I think knowledge is, again, it's study the Bible and seeing things. You've had that aha moment, right? You're studying a, how many of you have read a passage of scripture that you've read 10 times before, and all of a sudden, you see something you never saw there before? Oh, wait, that's saying this. Isn't that wonderful? I think that's a spiritual gift of knowledge. That's the Holy Spirit shining a light on, a little brighter, turn up the volume a little bit louder, and helping us see something we didn't see before. I think that's the modern non-revelatory, because it's coming from scripture, not directly from the Holy Spirit. So I think that prophecy and knowledge have modern parallels in preaching and in illumination, but I don't think they continue as revelatory gifts. So then what's the goal for us to think about? Because, you know, Forest Hill Church in the year 2021, I don't think too many of us are like really highly prizing prophecy and tongues and knowledge as the thing that we need. Although I would say this, We can sometimes put too much emphasis on things that impress the world, which is the same thing the Corinthians were really doing, right? Oh, if we had a really good preacher, if we had somebody who could really just fire it up, you know, if we had just an awesome you know, praise team that was like professional level musicians. Maybe we need some lights and smoke and, you know, oh man, if we just had, you know, a great coffee bar, you know, I wouldn't object to that but, you know, if we just had like, you know, Starbucks in the back, you know, if we just, if we just had, if we just had, we can do that kind of, longing for the things that would make us impressive in the eyes of the world. And I think that church has fallen into that trap all the time. But there's other things that we do too. And I think what we need to hear really as our application from this passage this morning in verses 11 and 12. And verse 11 is a call from the Apostle Paul to pursue maturity, spiritual maturity. And then verse 12 is a call to long for the perfection that is to come. So first, we are to long for spiritual maturity, because at its heart, what is worldliness? What is this desire to impress other people? It's immaturity, right? I am the youngest of four children, and I'm the youngest of three boys in our family. And there was a period of time when We would try to show off, try to outdo one another. We would wrestle. We would do push-ups. We would do this kind of stuff. And we're just sort of trying to prove that we're the biggest and the baddest. By the way, I am the biggest, even though I'm the youngest. Not a shocker there, right? So, but, what is that? That's immaturity, right? At some point, at some point, you realize, and I forget when it was, but I have this memory of a, like a Christmas gathering at my parents' house, and my brothers and I doing like a push-up contest. and realizing, oh, man, that kind of hurts. I'm really sore. Like, what are we doing? Like, we're not kids anymore. Why are we doing this stupid, immature, show-off stuff? And that's kind of what this show-off worldliness is. It's immaturity, right? And so Paul says, when I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. We don't fault children. for being childish because they're children, right? But if an adult is childish, you know, it might be cute for about five minutes, and then after that, we're like, man, this person's really immature. And that can be us spiritually. I think about my own upbringing. When I was in elementary school, my nana paid for us to go to Camp Halawasa. which was a Christian summer camp in South Jersey. Haluwasa stands for hallelujah, what a savior. And it was a great summer camp experience. I remember it very clearly, very well. I loved it. It's just like the highlight of my summer. And in high school, I was really into Christian music, and so I loved going to Christian concerts, Stephen Curtis Chapman, and youth rallies and youth conferences. But part of the reality of my spiritual upbringing, as I look back on it, is that I became sort of hooked on these experiences of these spiritual highs. And we didn't have much of a spiritual life in our home, and our family's church attendance was kind of spotty. So even though I grew up as a believer, and I knew the Lord, and I loved the Lord from an early age, I was sort of like, phew, you know, really unstable. And college, I met Beth, we were involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and you start maturing, and you start leveling out. And we loved the warm community and the in-depth Bible studies and the retreats. And it did seem like it was more steady spiritual growth, but it was also not real in a sense. It was like very insulated and very nurturing. And so when we got married and we had real jobs and it was ordinary life, it was hard, right? Well, part of growing up, Part of growing up is to realize that real spiritual growth is marked in very ordinary ways, right? Today is Valentine's Day. If you didn't know that, it's Valentine's Day. It's the Lord's Day first and foremost. But anyway, today is Valentine's Day and you know, I'm probably not going to do some over-the-top, big, spectacular, impressive show, you know, to display to Beth how much I love her like I would have done in my 20s. And it's not because I don't love her, because I do, and she knows that I do, right? But part of it's because we've been together for 26 years. We've been married for 22 and a half years. Our love has matured. And it's not that I don't do romantic things or express romantic things. I do. But there's not this pressure to make Valentine's Day into some big show, some big show-stopping event. And if you do that, fine, you can do that. But I'm just saying there's a difference between, like, the way you were when you're 20 and the way you are when you're 46. And it's not that you don't love each other. Hopefully, you love each other more. But it's a deep and steady and faithful love. And so you come to value things like faithfulness and consistency and, you know, Love, real love, right? But another thing happens as we grow in maturity, doesn't it? And that's where we get into verse 12. As we grow in spiritual maturity, and as we grow in physical maturity, another thing happens. And that is that we start to long for heaven. We start to long for the coming of Jesus and the restoration of all things and the face to face. 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. You know, I really, I really value, we as leadership really value the gathering together of the saints for worship. Because we get to be face to face, and we get to be together, and we get to lift our voices together. Yes, it's nice to have online church, which is a convenient thing to have when we can't get together. But when the ice was in the forecast, honestly, earlier this week, it's like, Lord, really? Another week? Yesterday, we made the switch, said, you know what? It probably would be icy out at Deer Creek, going over that bridge, going up that gravel road, probably would be slick. But let's see if this is available. And so we made that switch because we value being together for worship. And those who are at home who didn't feel comfortable coming out because it was icy in your driveway, I'm not trying to say anything to judge you. I'm just saying, it's the value of being together in worship. It's wonderful to see each other. It's wonderful to be together, right? And the more you love Jesus, and the more you grow in your love for Jesus, the more you long for that. And you realize, yes, I love the Bible. I love reading the Bible. It's great. I love hearing the Bible preached. I love preaching the Bible. I love worshiping with God's people. I love singing praises to God. But boy, it would be so wonderful to be face to face, right? because now in this world we see, the translation is always we see in a mirror dimly, or we see in a mirror darkly. It's actually the word, the word in Greek is the word we get enigma from, and probably most people wouldn't get it if they translated it as we see as in a mirror enigmatically, but that's probably the best translation. It's obscurely, it's, you know, you look at yourself in a mirror and you think you know what you look like, And then you see a picture of yourself. You ever get that, like, oh, is that what I look like? Because it's backwards, right? You realize the mirror's backwards. And so it messes with your mind somewhat. Well, mirrors in the ancient world were highly polished brass. And they weren't really dark. They actually would gleam. But it was backwards, and it was even more obscure. And so seeing in a mirror is not the same as when you see someone face to face. And so our hearts long for that face-to-face because we know that as long as we're in this life, as long as we're in this flesh on this side of glory, God remains a bit of a puzzle. God remains a bit enigmatic. And our knowledge of him remains obscure. It's obscured by a lot of things. One, he hasn't told us everything about himself, right? If God told us everything about himself, we couldn't, you know, at the end of the Gospel of John, John says, if everything that Jesus said and did were written down in a book, the whole world would not be able to contain the books that could be written. And that would just be about Jesus and his earthly life. I mean, we wouldn't be able to read it in a hundred lifetimes, right? But also our sin nature and the effects of the fall on our mind, and all sorts of things keep us from being able to understand this, what we have been given, as well as we should. So God's told us that he is holy, holy, holy, and that he dwells in unapproachable light. God has told us that he is from of everlasting to everlasting, that he is glorious in his beauty. God has told us that he is majestic, that he's enthroned on high. God tells us that he has steadfast love, covenant faithfulness, that he is gracious and merciful, Right? That he's unchanging. And all these things are true and wonderful and we can worship God in all of these ways. But the longer we do, the more our heart begins to ache because we know it's not the same as what it will be when we are face to face. 1 John 3, 2 tells us that when we see him, We will be like him, for we will see him as he is. So we see Jesus face to face, and the first thing that happens in what theologians call the beatific vision, the beauty of his blessedness, we'll behold it. The first thing that happens is we're completely transformed and perfected. Our human nature is made just like his human nature, complete and without sin and undying and holy. Imagine that. Wouldn't it be nice? Just be completely liberated from all sin and all thought of sin and all inclination towards sin forever. And then you get to see Jesus as He really is and not talk about Him or even pray to Him and wonder if your prayers are even being heard, but you can talk to Him and you can sing to Him and you can love Him face to face. When that day comes, One of the things I'm looking forward to when that day comes is that I will be wonderfully and eternally out of a job. Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be? We get to heaven, you know, and you're all beholding Jesus in his glory, and I sort of wheel out a pulpit, and I'd say, let me tell you all about the Lord. Let me tell you what he's like. You're like, can you get out of the way? Because he's right there. Like, it's one of the things that will not endure into eternity is preaching. It's wonderful, right? I'll have to take up another trade. I do think there will be work in the new heavens and the new earth. That's a whole different sermon. But face to face. is what we're longing for. Face to face is what we're looking for. And our faith in His promises and our hope of His glory and our love for Him and our love for one another is what really carries us forward toward that day. That's your preview of next week's sermon. Like, that's why those things are so important because that's what's carrying us forward. Not showy things, not impressive things. but those deep and abiding virtues that he gives us, faith in his word, hope in his promises, love for him and love for one another. And in that day, the only thing there will be is love and love forevermore. And so when we see that as we mature in Christ, it should be the case that our hearts cry out more and more, come Lord Jesus, bring that day. And that's the sign of maturity is when your heart is ever more and more there and less and less here. Let's pray. Father, we thank you and love you because you have loved us and saved us. Give us hearts that value the things that make for spiritual maturity, the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. To long to grow in faith, hope, and love. To grow in our knowledge of you, yes, but our love for you even more. To grow in our ability to speak of you, yes, but our ability to trust you even more. Stir up within our hearts that which you alone can do by your Holy Spirit in us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.