These Three Remain

Summer of Love: These Three remain

People died, children were conceived, hearts were broken lives were changed and history was made. But now the summer of love was over. By October of 1967 the movement known as the Summer of Love, when over 100,000 hippies and flower children had descended on the Haight Asbury district of San Francisco was but a memory. A mock funeral processional was announced for October 6th it was called “The Death of the Hippie” and it was to officially signify the end of the Summer of Love.

L. Frank Baum wrote in the The Marvelous Land of Oz “Everything has to come to an end, sometime.”

Since June we have been celebrating the Summer of Love here at Cornerstone as we have dove into 1 Corinthians 13, the so-called love chapter of the bible. And for the 12th time we are going to invite you to stand as we read the chapter together. And for our last reading of 1 Corinthians 13 we are going to read responsively.

Which simply means I will read a part and then you will read the next section.

1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others,

I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains,

but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;

but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind.

Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude.

It does not demand its own way.

It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.

It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture!

But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child.

But when I grew up, I put away childish things.

Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.

All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Thank you, you may be seated.

And now we arrive at the end of our Summer of love with the last verse of 1 Corinthians 13. 1 Corinthians 13:13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

For the Christian, when everything is finished, when the last page is turned, when the credits have rolled and the story is done, it won’t be finished.

There will still be three things that remain. Faith, hope and Love.

Paul reminded the early Christ followers in Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works, so that no one can boast.

It is by grace that you have been saved. How? Through faith.

So we begin with The Faith We Have in Jesus The bible defines faith this way, Hebrews 11:1 Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.

Sometimes I think it would be so much easier if when we claimed the promise of our salvation and forgiveness it came with a “Something” that was tangible. Maybe a certificate signed by God, or a plaque we could put on our living room wall. But the reality is, that if you are anything like me you’d misplace it anyway. I haven’t seen my Social Insurance card for forty years.

And if you didn’t misplace it, then it would become the assurance of your salvation, and you would come to depend on that piece of paper as the assurance that your sins were forgiven and that you were indeed saved.

Whenever you doubted, you could pull it out and read it and if anyone questioned your salvation you could show them your certificate of authenticity.

And if you ever lost the paper or if it were destroyed then you’d wonder about your salvation.