The Rev’d Quintin Morrow
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Fort Worth, Texas
www.st-andrew.com
I Cor. 13
March 2, 2003
The Message Outline:
I. The Primacy of Love (vv. 1-3).
A. Without love we are nothing.
B. Without love we accomplish nothing.
II. The Particulars of Love (vv. 4-7).
A. What love DOES NOT do:
1. Love does not envy.
2. Love does not parade itself.
3. Love is not rude.
4. Love is not self-serving.
5. Love is not easily provoked.
6. Love keeps no account of wrongs.
7. Love does not rejoice in evil.
B. What love DOES:
1. Love suffers long.
2. Love is kind.
3. Love bears all things.
4. Love believes all things.
5. Love hopes all things.
6. Love endures all things.
III. The Permanence of Love (vv. 8-13).
A. Love never fails.
B. Love is the chief virtue of the Christian life.
Pastor George Crane tells of a wife who came into his office full of hatred toward her husband. "I do not only want to get rid of him; I want to get even. Before I divorce him, I want to hurt him as much as he has me," the woman fumed.
Crane suggested an ingenious plan. "Go home and act as if you really loved your husband. Tell him how much he means to you. Praise him for every decent trait. Go out of your way to be as kind, considerate, and generous as possible. Spare no efforts to please him, to enjoy him. Make him believe you love him. After you’ve convinced him of your undying love and that you cannot live without him, then drop the bomb. Tell him that you’re getting a divorce. That will really hurt him."
With revenge in her eyes, she smiled and exclaimed, "Beautiful, beautiful. Will he ever be surprised!"
And she did it with enthusiasm—acting ’’as if." For two months she showed love, kindness, listening, giving, reinforcing, forgiveness, patience, sharing. When she didn’t return, Crane called. "Are you ready now to go through with the divorce?"
"Divorce?!" she exclaimed. "Never! I discovered I really do love him."
The Catholic saint Francis de Sales said, “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love God and man by loving.”
The Apostle Paul penned his Corinthian letter to a church in complete disarray and on the verge of imploding upon itself. The church was rife with public immorality, doctrinal confusion, divisions, party politics, petty bickering, believers suing other believers in secular courts, syncretism, divorce, and abuses of spiritual gifts and the sacraments. And the root cause all of those ills Paul subscribes to one deficiency: The Corinthians were not manifesting and exercising sacrificial love to each other in their common life. Following this diagnosis the Apostle then proceeds to prescribe the cure for the Corinthian troubles: Manifest and exercise sacrificial love to each other in your common life.
The remedy is found in I Corinthians chapter 13, the familiar, much beloved, and popularly named “love chapter.” Yet I submit to you that our familiarity with I Corinthians 13 has not resulted in our incorporating its truths into our hearts and manifesting its principles in our lives—just the opposite. Perhaps our over-familiarity has desensitized us, and numbed us, to the scandal of the priority and power of sacrificial love in action. And it’s time for us to wake up.
Paul begins his appeal to the addled Corinthians and us in the first 3 verses of chapter 13 by a declaration of the priority and primacy of sacrificial love for the every born again believer. His point is a simple one: Love is the premier virtue of the Christian life. It towers above all others in importance, and it must be the ground, the foundation, the first principle, of everything we as believers do and are. And notice how Paul uses hyperbole—exaggeration—to make his point so that we won’t miss it.
The Apostle states rather matter-of-factly: No matter how spiritual other Christians perceive me to be, or how much I accomplish for the kingdom, if it is not motivated by and accompanied with love, I am nothing and I accomplish absolutely nothing. If I exhibit supernatural, ecstatic utterances without love—worthless. If I memorize the Bible cover to cover, and know everything there is to know about God, and have supernatural faith, without love it is all meaningless. If I give everything I have for the poor, and even my own dearest possession, my life, as a martyr, and if either is loveless, it is also in God’s reckoning useless.
Paul’s point? Sacrificial love is the premier virtue of the Christian faith; and with that point implicitly comes this imperative: Do what you have to do to begin manifesting this love in your life.
But love, if not properly defined, can be an ambiguous thing. That teenage boy in the backseat of his car in the throes of passion and lust is convinced he loves the object of his desire. That little pig-tailed girl, looking longingly at the puppies in the pet store, is absolutely persuaded she loves that little doggy in the window.
What is essential to loving the way we ought is a definition and description of the “Real McCoy,” the genuine article. Paul gives us that—the “gold standard,” if you will; the benchmark by which all our attempts at love must be measured and approved—in verses 4-7 of I Corinthians 13. Here the Apostle gives, following the priority of love, the particulars of love.
Notice that we are given 7 things genuine love does not do, and 6 things it does do.
Genuine love does not envy. It does not parade itself—boast about what it is doing to receive recognition and acclaim. Love is not rude—that is, it is concerned with the feelings of others and doesn’t manifest itself in fits of meanness. It is not self-serving; it motivates us to forego our needs and concentrates rather on the needs of others. Love is not easily provoked; in trying situations it causes us to stop and seek a response that better serves our brother or sister than our own need to be right. It is difficult to incite a row with love. Love keeps no accounts of wrongs done to it. Husbands and wives, do you know when we play the “trump card” of our spouse’s past wrongs in a marital spat? When our case is weak and we are losing the argument. Love has a short memory of past injuries and refuses to bring them up again to hurt someone. And love doesn’t rejoice in evil, but finds its joy and contentment in what is good, and true, and righteous.
Conversely, love suffers long; it holds off anger and is able to withstand wrongs. It is kind—tender, pleasant, and sweet-natured. Love bears all things. When we think of a “bearing” love our thoughts go immediately to Calvary; there our Lord, motivated by love, bore the cross, the shame, the abuse, the rejection of friends, and the sins of the world. Love believes all things. It hopes all things, continuing to look beyond the immediate circumstances to the future fulfillment of God’s promised blessings to the righteous. Love endures all things—like a Timex watch it “takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin.’”
We could spend a month of Sundays examining this passage and not exhaust the richness of truths contained in these 4 short verses. This kind of loving is a tall order. In fact, it is not even possible for the natural man apart from grace to love like this. Loving like this requires help from the Holy Spirit. Moreover, it takes a lifetime of failing and trying again, falling down and getting up, to see this love manifested in our lives. But today, right here, right now, if you are a believer, your desire ought to be to love like this. And if it is not, then it is imperative that you take Paul’s advice in his second letter to the Corinthians and examine yourself to see if you are really of the faith. St. John says in I John 4:7-8:
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
Paul concludes his appeal to the Corinthians and us with the revelation of the permanence of love in verses 8-13.
The sign gifts, like tongues, interpretation of tongues, special revelations, and the like, the Apostle says, will fade away in the life of the church. But love he says will never fade away. The obvious implications is that love is more important than these gifts, because that which is important endures. Paul says that there are 3 cardinal virtues in the Christian life—3 things we must possess and manifest if we are authentic heirs of everlasting life: Faith—a complete reliance upon the redemptive work of Christ; hope—the expectation of realizing the promises of God in the future which we only anticipate now; and love—the decision of our wills to put the needs and concerns of others before our own. And of these 3 essentials Paul says, the greatest is love.
This harkens us back to Jesus’ teaching, doesn’t it? “Rabbi,” the lawyer asked, “which is the greatest of all the commandments?” “Love God with all that you have and all that you are, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these 2 commandments hang God’s entire revelation and ethical imperative in the Old Covenant. There is no commandment greater than these.”
What does love look like? It looks like this. In his book Loving God, Chuck Colson writes:
It was a quiet December evening on Ward C43, the oncology unit at Georgetown University Hospital. Many of the rooms around the central nurse’s station were dark and empty, but in Room 11 a man lay critically ill.
The patient was Jack Swigert, the man who had piloted the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 and was now Congressman-elect from Colorado’s 6th Congressional district. Cancer, the great lever, now waged its deadly assault on his body.
With the dying man was a tall, quiet visitor, sitting in the spot he had occupied almost every night since Swigert had been admitted. Though Bill Armstrong, U.S. Senator from Colorado and chairman of the Senate subcommittee handling Washington’s hottest issue, social security, was one of the busiest and most powerful men in Washington, he was not visiting this room night after night as a powerful politician. He was here as a deeply committed Christian and as Jack Swigert’s friend, fulfilling a responsibility he would not delegate or shirk, much as he disliked hospitals.
This night Bill leaned over the bed and spoke quietly to his friend. “Jack, you’re going to be all right. God loves you. I love you. You’re surrounded by friends who are praying for you. You’re going to be all right.” The only response was Jack’s tortured and uneven breathing.
Bill pulled his chair closer to the bed and opened his Bible. “Psalm 23,” he began to read in a steady voice. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want….”
Time passed. “Psalm 150,” Bill began, then his skin prickled. Jack’s ragged breathing had stopped. He leaned down over the bed, then called for help. As he watched the nurse examining Jack, Bill knew there was nothing more he could do. His friend was dead.
Politicians are busy people, Colson concludes, especially Senate committee chairmen. Yet it never occurred to Bill Armstrong that he was too busy to be at the hospital. Nothing dramatic or heroic about his decision—just a friend doing what he could.
What more can be said except, “Go, and do thou likewise?”
I do not doubt for one moment that were I to ask for a show of hands this morning, asking how many of you consider yourselves a loving person, or consider St. Andrew’s a loving church, every hand would confidently fly upward. Yet there is a radical disconnect here. Because if we were actually as loving as we think are and our church is, we would have marriages, families, businesses, and lives markedly different than they are, and there wouldn’t be parking spaces enough in our lots or seats enough in this sanctuary to accommodate the people flooding in here seeking to be transformed. You see, finally, it doesn’t matter whether or not we think we are loving, or consider our church a loving, welcoming church. It matters only what others in our lives have to say, and what God has to say. Their reckoning is the truest evaluation of our love.
St. Augustine rightly opined that as a consequence of the Fall we are all born with natures, as he called them, incurvatis in se: “twisted in on themselves.” We are by nature selfish, self-absorbed, and blind to accurate self-analysis about just those realities.
What then are we to do?
I have been a preacher long enough to know that sermons like this are received 1 of 2 ways. Those who sleep through most messages, or continually check their watch, either will not have heard the call to sacrificial love this morning, or will shrug it off as applying to everybody else but them. And those who are spiritually alive, awake, and attentive to the Word and Spirit of God will feel a desperate need to make a sea change and feel overwhelmed at their own inadequacy. I can tell you that what we need is a DNA change—a heart change; a cosmetic change, or a papering over isn’t going to cut.
Next Sunday, as I close this 4-week series of messages on love, I will bring the spotlight to bear on the specifics of living a life of love that can transform your marriage, your family, your friendships, your business, and your church. Don’t miss it.
In the mean time, it is my hope that you will take home the sermon notes this morning and post them in a prominent place at home or in the office. Keep the description of genuine love before your eyes this week. This description of love is not a weapon in a marital spat. It isn’t meant to be hauled out and flaunted against your spouse as a litany of things he or she is or is not doing. It is for you. Best of all would be to commit I Corinthians 13:4-7 to memory. How’s that for a homework assignment!
Would you muster the courage to begin the prayerful self-analysis this week about your Christian life? Have you compartmentalized your faith, so that it is only one identity among many others? Or is your faith the living, dynamic, all-encompassing, joyful expression of you having received the love of God? Hold your life up to the benchmark of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7. How are you doing? One more thing: How is our church doing?
And of course you must go from here and just start loving. As Francis de Sales rightly said: We learn to love by loving. Period.
I leave you with this from One Inch from the Fence by Wes Seeliger:
I have spent long hours in the intensive care waiting room…watching with anguished people…listening to urgent questions: Will my husband make it? Will my child walk again? How do you live without your companion of thirty years?
The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. No one is rude. The distinctions of race and class melt away. A person is a father first, a black man second. The garbage man loves his wife as much as the university professor loves his, and everyone understands this. Each person pulls for everyone else.
In the intensive care waiting room, the world changes. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about.
Can imagine how very different our homes and our church would be if we realized that our everyday life is in fact the crucible of the intensive care waiting room?
AMEN.
