Title: U Before I
Text: I Corinthians 13:1-13
Thesis: Christ makes himself known through the way Christians live out love.
The title for this message was lifted from Homiletics Magazine, January/February 2010, Vol. 22, NO. 1
Introduction
You may recall being taught a little mnemonic device devised to help you remember how to spell certain words. One of those was, “I before E except after C.” The little code worked on words like siege or friend and on words like ceiling and receive. But it did not always work because the rule did not apply on words like science or ancient or weird or foreign. But non-the less, the title is a take-off from the spelling rule, “I before E except after C.” Love acts itself out in the life of a Christian by placing U before I.
This subject is so much more than a clever turning of a phrase. Read Philippians 2:11-5. Citing Jesus as the perfect example of love Paul instructs us, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Jesus Christ…”
That sounds a lot like placing U Before I. In order to learn to place U Before I we need to learn a few things about love. The first thing we need to know is this:
I. Love is the single-most important attribute of a Christian’s life
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” I Corinthians 13:13
Depending on how you read it, either I Corinthians 12 ends with this statement or I Corinthians 13 begins with this statement: “And now I will show you the most excellent way.”
This statement follows Paul’s teaching on spiritual gifts in chapter 12. The statement could well follow any of his teachings on spiritual gifts found in Romans 12 or Ephesians 4. The gist of Paul’s teaching is simply this… despite his urging all of Christ’s followers to seek and exercise spiritual gifts in the Body of Christ, i.e., the Church, he is very intentional about making sure that of all the things we might desire to have and exercise in the life and ministry of our Church, in our families, communities, workplaces, and neighborhoods, is love. This teaching is strategically placed in the bible to help us understand just how the Christian community is supposed to relate to itself. The Christian community exists to serve itself and others, being obedient to Christ’s purposes in the world with the gifts and tools God provides… but to do so with love for God and others.
This is not a teaching to be taken lightly. I would guess that some the times I may think I have done good with my life… there are people with whom I have not related lovingly and they have been hurt. The people in my life who have hurt me and been most hurtful in the churches I have served have been the people who thought they were the most godly and good people in the church. Love matters. Living lovingly matters. It is the single-most character quality any of us can have.
Paul does not care how lovely we sing, how dutifully we fulfill our duties, how much knowledge we acquire and teach, how many notches we get on our gun handles evangelizing the lost, how much money we tithe or give to God or other good causes, how many casseroles we bake or stitches we sew, how many prayers we utter or how many committees we chair, how much we can speak in tongues or how masterfully we exercise leadership… God says, “If whatever you do is not done as an expression of love, it is nothing.”
I heard a joke this week about a young pastor who thought he was God’s gift to the Church. He was convinced that he was all that and a bag of chips. One Sunday as he drove home from church with his young wife he said, “I wonder how many great preachers there really are?” And his wife said, “One less than you think!”
The most important thing in any Christian’s life is not how gifted and great we are or what we do. The most important thing is that we love and that all we do is an expression of our love for God and others.
• If I exercise the gift of tongues without love, I am only a resounding gong of a clanging cymbal.
• If I exercise the gifts of prophecy, knowledge and faith without love – I am nothing.
• If I exercise the gift of generosity and die as a martyr, without love – I gain nothing.
The bible says that love is the single most important attribute of a Christian’s life. When it is all said and done “these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
As Paul moves on in the text we see that this most important of attributes is not about syrupy sweetness and sugary feelings. There is nothing whimsical about this attribute. Genuine love shows.
II. Love, as an attribute, is to be apparent in the Christian’s life
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.” I Corinthians 13:4-7
In the original language of the bible there were several variations to the meaning of the word love, depending on the word you used for love. For example, if you used the word Eros, it referred to sexual love or a love for truth and beauty. If you used the word philia you were speaking of the love between friends. If you used another word it was specific to the love between members of a family. These are all quite natural loves. There is the love of passion. There is the love of friends. And there is the love of family members for each other. These kinds of love just happen.
But the love spoken of in our text is not that kind of love. It is not the love of passion or friendship or family. It is a love that is deliberate. It is an intentional love. It is a love that is the expression of an act of the will. It is a decision. It is a love that is so deep and heartfelt that it responds with Christ-like words or deeds regardless of what we may think or how we feel. This is a love that does the right thing and does it nicely. This is not the emotional love of passion for a lover, or affection for a friend or devotion to family. It may or may not be born of emotion but it is always the result of obedience to God and the desire to do what is best for the other.
Commentators point out that the noun “love” is paired with sixteen verbs that show love in action.
“Love is patient or uncomplaining under provocation. Love is kind. It does not envy or is not filled with jealousy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude or discourteous, it is not self-seeking or better understood to mean, does not insist on its own way, it is not easily irritated or angered, it keeps no record or account of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres, i.e., love never fails, falls to pieces, or collapses. “ I Corinthians 13:4-7
Marlene Neufeld told this story from her bed time routine with Micah, her autistic son.
I asked him, "How many kisses do you want?" Micah loves this game. Sometimes it's just one kiss; sometimes it's "a hundred." He asked for one.
Then suddenly he sat up in bed. "We need a record of kisses!" he declared. He jumped out of bed and went to the small chalkboard that's in his room. Taking a piece of chalk, he laboriously printed out KISSES on the top. Then he recorded one small mark.
"There," he said. "We have a record of kisses."
He was so cute I had to give him another one, to which he promptly responded by jumping out of bed to add another tally to his record. Then he started counting: "One, two, three, thirteen. We have thirteen kisses," he announced. "We can have records and records of kisses," he said as he snuggled under the covers. I refrained from smothering him with more. He did need to sleep.
These words whispered into my memory: "Love keeps no record of wrongs." True, I thought, it keeps a record of kisses. (Darlene Neufeld, as told to Lyle Schrag, Delta, British Columbia, Canada)
It all adds up to this… we do what we should and refrain from doing what we should not. Love is action and it is restraint. It is apparent and it shows.
The third thing we need to know about love is that it has no limits or expiration dates.
III. Love, as an attribute, is not limited by extent or expiration date
“Love never fails… prophecies will cease, tongues stilled, knowledge will pass. And these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Paul wrote in Ephesians, “My prayer for you is that you may have the power to understand how wide, how long, how high and how deep the love of God really is.” It is a love without measurable limits or boundaries.
I am big into checking expiration dates. I always check out the bargain meat bin and if it isn’t just on the verge of expiring I will not buy it… not because it is aged and tastier but because it is cheap. When I buy milk or cheese or lettuce I always look for the item with the longest shelf life remaining on the expiration date. Occasionally I will end up with some milk that has outlived its expiration date and being cheapskate that I am, I will sniff it and eat it or drink it until it gets that sour smell or begins to grow mold or turns slimy. The point being… most things have a shelf life and they eventually sour or spoil or go bad.
True also of things like love and patience and kindness… humanly speaking, there are limits to what we can or will endure. However, the attribute of Christ-like love does not expire. God’s love does not have an expiration date.
The movie A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose career and life were crippled by schizophrenia. Nash taught at MIT and went on to win the Nobel Prize for his theory of the dynamics of human conflict as it relates to economics.
WLRN Public Radio and Television wrote in a press release:
At the height of his career, after a decade of remarkable mathematical accomplishments, Nash suffered a breakdown. The 30-year-old MIT professor interrupted a lecture to announce he was on the cover of Life magazine—disguised as the pope. He claimed that foreign governments were communicating with him through The New York Times, and he turned down a prestigious post at the University of Chicago because, he said, he was about to become the emperor of Antarctica.
His wife, Alicia, had him committed against his will to a private mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and treated with psychoanalysis. Upon his release, Nash abruptly resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension fund, and fled to Europe. He wandered from country to country, attempting to renounce his American citizenship and be declared a refugee. He saw himself as a secret messenger of God and the focus of an international communist conspiracy. With help from the State Department, Alicia had him deported back to the United States.
Desperate and short of funds, Alicia was forced to commit her husband to the former New Jersey Lunatic Asylum, an understaffed state institution.
In one scene of A Beautiful Mind, one of John's colleagues is talking to Alicia:
"So, Alicia, how are you holding up?"
Alicia responds feebly, "Well, the delusions have passed. They're saying with medications—"
The colleague clarifies, "No, I mean you."
Alicia pauses and explains, "I think often what I feel is obligation, or guilt, over wanting to leave, rage against John, against God. But then I look at him, and I force myself to see the man that I married, and he becomes that man. He's transformed into someone that I love, and I'm transformed into someone that loves him. It's not all the time, but it's enough."
"I think John is a very lucky man," the colleague says.
In the movie, Nash's wife sticks by him through thick and thin. In real life, it wasn't that easy. Alicia eventually divorced him. Later, though, they reconciled. Both the movie and the real story affirm the difficulty—and beauty—of loving those who are hard to love. We wonder at the possibility that someone could love a person who is difficult or unlovely, and then we are jolted back to Calvary's reality: it is the epitome of the beautiful mind. It is the beautiful mind of a holy, just, and merciful God condescending to love a race of undeserving sinners. (A Beautiful Mind (Dreamworks, 2001),"A Brilliant Madness: The True Story about John Nash—inspiring the film Beautiful Mind")
Sometimes love is just enough for the moment but love never fails. I Corinthians 13:8
Conclusion
I learned a new word this week. The word is “muffin top.” However “muffin top” does not mean the top of a muffin, it now refers to the roll of fat above your belt. No one is proud of his or her muffin top.
Occasionally I see someone who looks like he or she could be in one of those Bow Flex commercials… they have no muffin top. They are “ripped,” so to speak. By “ripped” I mean they have little body fat and their muscles are very well defined. They have washboard “abs.” Their “traps” look like a triangle of muscle from the shoulder to the neck. They have great “pecs” and bulging “biceps.”
Whenever I see a person who is “ripped” I know they were not born that way. They got that way by doing a lot of exercising. Well defined muscles and strength are the result of exercising those muscles. And it takes a great deal of desire and discipline to sit down at that Bow Flex or step onto the treadmill or stepper and go through the reps.
God never tells us that we are going to get zapped with the love bug when it comes to demonstrating Christ-like love that acts out of selflessness and concern for the other. Lust love comes easy. Friendship love comes easy. Family love comes easy. But agape love, a love that is the expression of an act of the will is challenging and it is a spiritual and character muscle that we simply have to exercise if we ever hope to have a “ripped” love muscle.
The Word to us from God is not about feelings or emotions. It is about the intellect. It is about using our minds to determine how we will treat people. It is about deciding to exercise the love muscle.
It is about thinking and acting on the rule…
U before I!
Christ made himself known to us by placing U before I and we make Christ known to others by placing U before I.
