Here are some children’s ideas about love.
-Glenn, age 7 - If falling love is anything like learning how to spell, I don’t want to do it. It takes too long. (loving people takes a long time. It should take a lifetime. We should love people all our lives.)
- Tom, age 5 - Once I’m in kindergarten, I’m going to find me a wife.
- Kenny, age 7 - It gives me a headache to think about that stuff. I’m just a kid. I don’t need that kind of trouble.
- Regina, age 10 - I’m not rushing into love. I’m finding fourth grade hard enough.
- Angie, age 10 - Most men are brainless, so you might have to try more than once to find a live one.
- Dave, age 8 - Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I’ve been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me.
- Ava, age 8 - One of you should know how to write a check. Because, even if you have tons of love, there is still going to be a lot of bills.
- Manuel, age 8 - I think you’re supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn’t supposed to be painful.
I tend to think we adults are much more childish when it comes to love than are our children. Certainly the Corinthian Christians had not mastered the idea of love from a biblical perspective, else Paul would not be addressing the issue in this letter. We are not far removed from our Corinthian brothers and sisters I think.
Paul wrote this letter to the Christians because there was division among them. These believers seemed to be divided over who was the more prominent apostle—whether it was Paul or Apollos. Some took pride in the fact they were of Apollos and some took pride they were followers of Paul. There was also this whole issue of who should marry, or who should remarry, or who should marry a believer or not marry a believer, or stay married to a believer. It was enough to make a person’s head spin. Then there was this whole issue of whether a good Christian should eat meat that had been offered to idols. And who can forget that they even argued over the meaning of the Lord’s Supper and who should partake it. And finally, they argued about the spiritual gifts, and it is as Paul addresses this division that he writes some of the most often quoted (and I might say mis-applied) words of Scripture:
Read 1 Corinthians 13:1-13—
Paul says, “Wait a minute. You’re forgetting the most important things. You’re focusing on the wrong things.” Paul reminds the Corinthians in a gentle way that they are majoring on the minors. Sure, tongues is great, but without love, you’re just making noise. And prophecy, too. Wonderful. Knowledge? Fantastic! But without love for others, I’m no good. And even if I could make a mountain move, if I didn’t have love what good would it do to move the mountain? Sure, I could be generous and give all my worldly possessions away, but I would be doing it for prideful purposes if I didn’t love those to whom it was given. All those gifts will be gone. There will come a day when those gifts will no longer be necessary because we will be perfected, and when we are perfected we will be perfected in love. Love, Paul says, is the mark of spiritual maturity—love is the more excellent way.
I remind us that the word Paul uses here is the Greek word agape. J. I. Packer tells us this word seems to have been virtually a Christian invention—a new word for a new thing (apart from about twenty occurrences in the Greek version of the Old Testament, it is almost non-existent before the New Testament). Agape draws its meaning directly from the revelation of God in Christ. It is not a form of natural affection, however, intense, but a supernatural fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). It is a matter of will rather than feeling (for Christians must love even those they dislike -- Matt. 5:44-48). It is the basic element in Christ-likeness, and it goes beyond our modern understanding of love in the emotional or romantic sense.
Toyohiko Kagawa, the Japanese Christian leader, distinguished three levels of love. The first of which is physical love, which holds people together in families. Above this level is a plane which Kagawa calls psychic love. Psychic love includes our association in friendships, in professional and social groups, and in all those relationships which rest on community of mental tastes. Kagawa then designates a still higher level of love based upon conscience. He says, “If one is walking along the road with an enemy on his right hand, and a sinner on his left, and if he can walk with them without accusing them, or if he can halt his progress to help them, then he has risen to the plane of conscientious love. Such was the love which Jesus manifested, and to which He summoned his followers, bidding them to do good to those who hated them.
This highest level of love is the love Paul writes of to these Christians. It is connected to the Old Testament word hesed which refers to God’s faithfulness and mercy. It is the love revealed in John 3:16—“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have eternal life.” It is love rooted in the will of God because John reminds us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
Maturity in Christ is shown in the way we love. Paul tells the Corinthian Christians, and I think I hear him speaking to 21st Century Christians, too, when he say love like God loves.
But how? That is always the question isn’t it? And the answer again, is to do it the way God does it. First, decide. Love is not an emotion. Love is not a feeling. Love is not even at option for the person who seeks to be Christ-like. It is first and foremost a decision of the will. Love is rooted in commitment—to a marriage, to our children, to the church, to the lost, to the poor, to the sinner, to our enemy. We must make the decision to be a person who loves with the love of God. Until we make that decision, and make our commitment based on that decision we will never know the maturity of Christian love.
We commit ourselves all the time. Often to trivial pursuits, but we fulfill those trivial pursuits as if they were the most important thing in life. Billy Graham in Call to Commitment shared a letter from a young communist who had committed to the cause. Listen to what he wrote:
There is one thing in which I am in dead earnest about, and that is the communist cause. It is my life, my business, my religion, my hobby, my sweetheart, my wife, my mistress, my bread and meat. I work at it in the daytime and dream of it at night. Its hold on me grows, not lessens, as time goes on; therefore, I cannot carry on a friendship, a love affair, or even a conversation without relating it to this force which both drives and guides my life. I evaluate people, looks, ideas, and actions according to how they affect the communist cause, and by their attitude toward it. I’ve already been in jail because of my ideals and if necessary I’m ready to go before a firing squad.
That is commitment. That is the kind of commitment that carries us to Christian maturity—that allows us to put away childish things and grow up in Christ. It is first a decision.
Secondly, love is an action. When we have decided to love, then we must act on that decision. C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity writes, “Do not waste your time bothering whether you ’love’ your neighbor act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”
In Miracle on the River Kwai, by Earnest Gordon, the story is told of the Scottish soldiers who, forced by their Japanese captors to labor on a jungle railroad, had degenerated to barbarous behavior, but one afternoon something happened.
“A shovel was missing. The officer in charge became enraged. He demanded that the missing shovel be produced, or else. When nobody in the squadron budged, the officer got his gun and threatened to kill them all on the spot. It was obvious the officer meant what he had said. Then, finally, one man stepped forward. The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death. When it was over, the survivors picked up the bloody corpse and carried it with them to the second tool check. This time, no shovel was missing. Indeed, there had been a miscount at the first check point. The word spread like wildfire through the whole camp. An innocent man had been willing to die to save the others! The incident had a profound effect. The men began to treat each other like brothers. When the victorious Allies swept in, the survivors, human skeletons, lined up in front of their captors, and instead of attacking their captors, insisted: ‘No more hatred. No more killing. Now what we need is forgiveness’.”
Love is decision and action. God decided to love us, and then he acted in His Son, Jesus Christ. He forgave our sins, and gave us new life. When everything else passes away. When this old life fades to dim and the shadows are passed. When the world is gone, and the judgment is over—when we’ve seen all we can see with these old earthly eyes, Paul says three things will endure—faith, hope, and love—and he adds, the greatest of these is love. Love is the more excellent way.
