St John the Beloved
Sermon and teaching audio from St John Church in Cincinnati Ohio.
St John the Beloved
A More Excellent Way
What truly measures a spiritually mature Christian life? Many of us get it wrong, focusing on our biblical knowledge, spiritual gifts, or service record. But in this profound exploration of 1 Corinthians 13, we discover that without love as our foundation, even our most impressive spiritual accomplishments amount to nothing.
Love is the gold standard that gives everything value. Think about playing a board game with your children while checking your phone – you're physically present but emotionally absent. The children don't primarily want the game; they want connection. Similarly, our service and contributions are hollow without the genuine connection that love provides.
Biblical love isn't abstract – it has a clear shape and definition. It's patient, giving people the time they need to change. It's kind, recognizing everyone carries burdens and seeking to make life sweeter. It rejects arrogance by becoming self-forgetful. It embraces truth, even when uncomfortable, and refuses to keep records of wrongs once they've been addressed.
While spiritual gifts may come and go, faith, hope, and love remain – with love being the greatest. Our spiritual maturity isn't measured by how gifted we are but by whether we're growing in these virtues. And we find our perfect model in Jesus Christ, who demonstrated love through His sacrifice.
The question we must continually ask isn't "How gifted am I?" or "How much do I know?" but "Am I growing in love?" That's the measure that truly matters. Will you join us in examining your life by the gold standard of love? Return to 1 Corinthians 13 often for self-examination, as love always bears the shape of Jesus Christ.
I don't even have to say it, but at this time I would like to dismiss kids age 2 through 7 to be part of Kids Church. If you'd like to be part of that downstairs, you're also welcome to stay and worship with us. Happy to have you either way. And I also want to recognize that this is quite a historic Sunday for our church. We have never had a drum kit up front. Never had a drum kit up front. So praise God for Seth and the gifts that he brings, and just the Lord continuing to grow us in that way. And also we have a baptism to celebrate later this morning of a youth who is becoming a young man in our congregation, and it will be a baptism because of his profession of faith. So it's exciting to celebrate that.
Speaker 1:But without further ado, I will ask the rest of us to stand for the reading of God's Word this morning from 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 31, and then into chapter 13, the entire chapter. The Word of God reads this way, and I will show you a still more excellent way 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 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 and 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. But 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. This is God's word. Thanks be to God you may be seated, and may God bless the reading and preaching of his word. Thanks be to God, you may be seated, and may God bless the reading and preaching of his word.
Speaker 1:Julie and I feel like we're getting old. I know that we're not getting old, but we feel like we are. From pictures, it is clear that planting this church has given me a lot of gray hairs, so thank you for that. But just look at pictures of me, even from three years ago. I look 10 years younger, but we see one another every day. I see my wife every day and she looks just as young to me as she did when we were first married, and she's in kids church today. She's not here to hear me say that, so I don't get points for that. She's in kids' church today. She's not here to hear me say that, so I don't get points for that.
Speaker 1:But when you go back and look at old pictures and old videos, it's clear that some things have changed in the past 20 years, especially with me. In most things maturity can be measured and it can be seen and measured. Physical maturity can be observed and measured. Babies, for example, can they roll over. Yeah, that's a milestone. Can they sit up, can they speak? We have all these metrics of when we should expect that to happen. Whether or not you've become mature in a skill usually can be tested and measured. Our sons just got their brown belts in taekwondo and that's an attempt to measure their progress and their maturity in that skill. Just like we must all grow up and mature physically, so we must mature spiritually.
Speaker 1:The Bible teaches that to become a Christian means to be spiritually born. Jesus uses the expression born again, born again into a new understanding, into a new way of life, into a new way of looking at the world, into a new relationship with God. But we must also grow up and become spiritually mature, because we don't start that way and it doesn't happen automatically. So what does that mean? How does that happen? How can that be measured or discerned? Can spiritual maturity be measured and discerned?
Speaker 1:The Corinthians we've been going through 1 Corinthians and this is where we are today as we walk through that book the Corinthians were measuring their spiritual maturity by all of the wrong metrics. And often too, in our culture and in our church, in the church culture we live in and just in the broader culture, we often measure health and maturity by the wrong metrics. And this is what the Corinthians were doing. They were thinking about their knowledge of the Bible and their knowledge of theology, their ability to teach others, their spiritual gifts. All of those things are good and necessary, but none of them are a measure of spiritual growth and health.
Speaker 1:And Paul, in this text, teaches us today that the greatest measure of the Christian life is love. The greatest measure of the Christian life is love. That's what we learn in 1 Corinthians 13. But love is not a nebulous or an esoteric concept in the Bible. It has shape and it has definition. It can be recognized and identified. We can recognize this is love and this is not love. This is loving and this is not loving. The Bible gives us parameters and definition to love, and once we understand the high calling of love, we can see then where we need to grow and how we need to grow. The greatest measure of the Christian life is love. So, as we think about 1 Corinthians 13, let's consider what that means.
Speaker 1:Under these three headings we're going to look at the value of love, the shape of love and the superiority of love. The value of love, the shape of love and the superiority of love. The value of love, the shape of love and the superiority of love. So first, the value of love. Love is what makes something valuable. If anything in the world is valuable, it's valuable because of love. Love is what makes something valuable. Paul teaches here that unless we have love, it does not matter how gifted we are. Let's look again at verses one through three.
Speaker 1:Paul says if I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and 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. So just to kind of walk through that, the person who speaks in tongues without love for others but just doesn't maybe to draw attention to themselves or to demonstrate their spirituality or to stand out, they're just noise, paul says. Paul says that that kind of use of tongues contributes nothing to the body. They've done nothing. Or the person who has a deep intellectual understanding of their faith or an impressive knowledge of the Bible, someone who has spent years studying but they're unloving, they're cold or they're smug toward others in the church. They have no love for the lost. They're arrogant toward those who don't believe.
Speaker 1:Paul says if that's me quote I am nothing. That's what Paul says, and what he means is that I have accomplished nothing. All those years of study have gotten me nowhere because that knowledge has not resulted in a deeper love for God and for people. Or the person who makes great sacrifices, who is financially generous, who gives their money maybe, who's always serving, who suffers like a martyr, who follows all the rules and always does what they're supposed to do. But they don't do it out of love, they don't do it warmly, they do it out of some sense of duty or self-righteousness. Paul says if that's me, he says I gain nothing Like Cain's offering in Genesis 4, god will have no regard for a cold obedience rendered without love. No matter how gifted we are, how much we know, how well we can speak or how much we sacrifice without love underneath that it amounts to nothing. We contribute nothing, we accomplish nothing. We gain. Nothing amounts to nothing. We contribute nothing, we accomplish nothing, we gain nothing. Whether it's a gift, an active service or teaching or words spoken, what makes it valuable, what makes it helpful, what makes it worthwhile, is love.
Speaker 1:My kids ask almost every day if I will play a board game with them, usually at the end of the day when we're winding down for bed. Sometimes I'm too tired, the day is too busy, and I'll just simply say no, I say sometimes. Maybe they say that that's often what I say. Sometimes I say yes and we have a great time and we're engaged with one another, but I must confess that too often I give a begrudging yes, I don't want to play, but maybe I committed to it at some point earlier in the day and now that commitment's being called in. So I'll sit down and play the game, but maybe I'm distracted and I'm on my phone. I'm not paying too much attention. I'm just trying to get through it as quickly as possible so that I can go and do what I really want to be doing and they can get sent to bed. When I spend time with my kids like that, yes, I played a game with them, but what have I accomplished? What have I gained? What have I given them? And the answer is not much, because what they really want is to bond with their dad and to connect with their dad, and the game is just a way to do that. It can be the most fun, expensive board game in the world, it can be a thousand dollar board game, but without love, the experience will be hollow.
Speaker 1:Love is the thing that gives it value, that makes it matter. Even small things, even simple things like playing a board game with your kids, even small things done in love are valuable and memorable and meaningful and helpful. To hazard another illustration US bank notes used to be backed by gold, by the gold standard. They had value. Why? Because they represented gold like an actual precious resource that stood behind them. Love is like the gold standard. Love is the thing that's really valuable, that stands behind, that should stand behind everything that we do. That stands behind our gifts and our service and our words and our time spent with others. When our contributions and service and words are no longer backed by love, they have no value. They lose their value, they contribute nothing. We gain nothing from them.
Speaker 1:Now hearing this, you might think well, if acts of service done without love are worthless, then I shouldn't do anything until or unless I feel it. So I should just wait to feel affection and warmth and then act at that time. But that would be a huge mistake, because love is much more than feelings and affection. Love includes feelings and affection. That's certainly part of love. But sometimes the way that we grow in affection towards someone, whoever it might be, whether it be our children or our spouse or our neighbor or a coworker or whoever it might be is by choosing to love them even when we don't feel it. I might not want to play the game with my kids at that time, and I can't change my attitude in that moment, I can't change my heart. But what I can do is I can choose to turn off my phone and give my kids my full attention. And if I perform the acts of love enough, the feelings of love will eventually catch up. Jesus says wherever you invest, wherever you put your treasure is, your heart will be there too. Your feelings will catch up eventually. So I'm not saying don't do anything until you feel it, because in that case you'll never do anything, because you'll never feel it.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to do and I think what Paul is trying to do, is show us the gold standard. He's showing us what's valuable, and it's love. This is what we should be striving for, that we do all things in love, because love is what makes anything that we do valuable and helpful. So that's point one, the value of love. Point two, the shape of love. Love has a shape. The Bible gives love what? Really? Quite an objective definition, a definition that we can both agree to, that we can both see. This is what it means to love.
Speaker 1:The Bible is very clear all throughout scripture that love is the main thing. We just read the words of Jesus in our reading of the law earlier. Jesus taught that all of the commands of God, all of the many commands we find throughout Scripture, can be summarized in just two in the command to love God and then in the command to love our neighbor. Paul taught elsewhere that if we have love like that, that no more commands are needed because we will naturally just obey them out of love. And even unbelieving people understand that somehow love is the most important thing. I couldn't put it any better than John Lennon, who said love is all you need, and there's something very true about that Even unbelieving people understand. The problem is that we have no shared definition of love. We can all agree to that, that love is the most important thing, but we don't agree on what that means, on what it means to love someone. And this is where the Word of God helps us so much, because it commands us to love. But it also gives us a very clear definition of love in many places, and here in 1 Corinthians 13 and verses 4 through 7 is one of the most famous places in all of Scripture where love is given a very tangible definition.
Speaker 1:And I can think of no better way to preach these verses than just to walk through them together. And I can't comment on everything in here, so I'm going to skip over a few things. I'm just going to highlight maybe some of my favorite ones, but we could do a whole sermon series just on verses four through seven. Love is patient, love is kind. Each one of those easily could be its own sermon. I can only offer some brief comments here on a few items, but here's how we should hear this.
Speaker 1:This is a great section of scripture for self-examination. It's not meant to be a checklist where we look at it and we check the boxes and pat ourselves on the back and feel like, okay, yeah, there's nothing wrong with me, I'm always loving everyone well. It's more like a diagnostic that is meant to show us where we are sick and we should always be going back to and as we walk through it together this morning, I want you to think about you. Don't think about your spouse, don't think about your kids or your friends or the people that you got in a fight with this week. Think about you and you need to recognize that you are really not very patient, you are not very kind, you are irritable and so on. Not for the purpose of feeling ashamed that's not why God wants to expose these things but in order to measure ourselves by the gold standard of love and see where, how it is that we fall short of the glory of God, so that we might better repent and seek healing and more intelligently repent and seek healing. So we're just going to walk through a few things.
Speaker 1:The first thing I want to point out is that love is active. The first thing that we should notice is that love is active and visible, and it's not as easy to see in English translations, but in the Greek, every one of these attributes that Paul mentions is a verb. They're all a verb. It's something that we do, it's something that can be seen, it's an action. Love is not just invisible feelings that we feel inside, nor is it ever just mere words, but it always expresses itself in action. Love is demonstrated in actions. So if the people around you are confused as to whether or not you love them, if your spouse or your children or your co-workers the people who you are around the most if they are confused as to whether or not you really love them, it may be because your love is just not active enough, your love is not loud enough. So let's look, then, at these verbs that Paul mentions.
Speaker 1:The first one, love, is patient. Patience is giving something or someone the time that it needs, and people often need more time to change than we want to give them. If there's one thing that I've learned working in construction, that's another thing that I do when I'm not pastoring. But if it's one thing that I've learned, it's that everything takes more time than you think that it will. Everything takes more time than you think that it will. We have such an unrealistic view of how much time things take, and that's just in construction. How much time do people take? How much time does it take for someone to understand truth, to see their own dysfunction, to see their own sin and to learn to repent? Change takes time. People need time. So who in your life needs more time? A friend, a spouse, your church, one of your kids? We cannot rush transformation. You have to be patient. It is unloving to be impatient. Love is kind. Again, we're not going to do them all. I'm just doing a few, but love is kind.
Speaker 1:Kindness recognizes that everyone carries a heavy load. Everyone that you interact with, especially these past few weeks, everyone you interact with, is already fighting some kind of battle. Don't make them fight too by having to deal with you on top of it. Kindness is what you add to everyday words and actions that makes burdens lighter and makes life sweeter. And it's simple. It can be as simple as your tone of voice. Dishes done together with your spouse, say, dishes done together in kindness, is lighter work than dishes done together in bitterness. Amen, amen. Kindness, it's what we add to the everyday things that we do that makes life sweeter. Where is kindness, the missing ingredient in your dealings. Kindness is so absent in public discourse and in our life, online and even in our personal dealings, but in-person dealings. But the Christian must always be kind. Love is not arrogant. That's another one we find here.
Speaker 1:Arrogance is a focus on yourself, whereas humility is self-forgetful. Arrogance is a focus on yourself, whereas humility is self-forgetful. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher. He's a super weird guy. I don't think he's a Christian, he's probably an atheist, but he gets a lot of things right. And he said this.
Speaker 1:Hopefully this is not too heady for you, but listen to this quote. He said the obsessive desire to know yourself, or this focus on the self, the obsessive desire to know yourself, is in itself a pathology. Instead of probing into yourself, dedicate yourself to an external cause. You are not cured when you know yourself, but when you fight for something else. The goal of psychoanalysis is to get you to the point where you can stop thinking about yourself and finally work for a cause. Isn't that amazing? It's an amazing word and it's a timely word, because our culture and us included in the church is obsessed with the self, with healing and with self-care, and we seek it through looking at ourselves, to try to get to the bottom of childhood trauma or whatever else might have happened to us in our past or who we are, and I'm not saying that those are illegitimate things. Healing is good. We do want to heal, but Zizek says that you're only truly healed when you can forget about yourself because you are fighting for something greater than yourself. That's what Paul says here when he says love is not arrogant, love is not focused on the self, but on something bigger, on something much greater. And actually we find healing in that Love is not self-focused but forgets itself in the fight to advance God's kingdom. I think this is the last one that I'll look at. No, sorry, I've got two more. Love rejoices with the truth. This is an important one. They're all important, but this is important too.
Speaker 1:Without truth, there can be no love, even if that truth is inconvenient, difficult to hear, unpopular or even costly. One commentator put it like this quote love does not suppress the truth, exchange it for a lie, do anything against the truth or become upset when faced with the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it is, truth is always, always must be embraced, and the reality is that truth always wins. Suppressing the truth is like holding a basketball underwater. I know we're out of swimming pool season, but you can jump back in the pool in your imagination with me for a moment. It's like holding a basketball underwater. You can press it down all day, you can suppress it all day, but eventually you're going to get tired or you're going to lose your grip and it will always come to the surface. That's what truth is like. It always comes out, it always surfaces itself. So suppressing the truth is never loving.
Speaker 1:The loving thing to do is always to face the truth. So where are you avoiding the truth or suppressing the truth, or withholding the truth in your life? This is unloving, because love rejoices with the truth, even when it is a truth that we would rather not be true. And then the last one that we'll look at before we move to our third point love is not resentful. Another translation would be and I like this translation that love keeps no record of wrongs. Maybe you've heard that Love seeks reconciliation with an offended party and in order to be reconciled, we must recognize the truth of the harm that was done. When harm is done, we have to recognize the truth of that to be reconciled. But once wrongs are acknowledged and dealt with through reconciliation, we don't bring them up anymore. We don't allow them any longer to shape our thoughts or our emotions, or our reactions or our feelings, and that's a hard thing to do. It's an ongoing fight that we engage in.
Speaker 1:I recently heard a story of a man who went to court for domestic violence and throughout the proceedings he and his wife actually reconciled and had a sweet reconciliation, even in the midst of the court proceedings proceedings, and she forgave him and she even came to testify on his behalf in court. He pled guilty but because of the circumstances, the judge allowed him to plead down to what's called an expungible felony, and he was confused as to what that meant and he said can I still vote? Like? Can I, you know? Can I still own a firearm? Like what does it mean that I'll have an expungable felony? And the judge said what this means is that if you fulfill your rehabilitation program, if you do everything that we, you know, you plead guilty, you do what we say you need to do. If you do that, this incident never happened. On your final day of rehab, they will hand you your record and it is the only copy. And if someone asks you in the future, have you ever been arrested? The answer is no, because it never happened. That's what an expungible offense means in the eyes of the law.
Speaker 1:For love, every offense is expungible. Love keeps no record of wrongs. You have to fight to take your record book that's filled with grievances and to destroy it. Some of you may need to deal with it through the process of reconciliation, where we do confront the truth and seek to be reconciled, and for some of you, you just need to surrender it to the Lord, because we've been through that and yet we're still struggling to let go of these things. But for love, every expense is expungible. It's as if it never happened. I mean, that's what God does with our sin. He takes it off of us, he puts it on Christ and he deals with it and it's gone. It's as if it never happened. It never happened. I wish I could say more. There's so much more in these verses. I encourage you to return to this section of scripture often and prayerfully, use it for self-examination, because love has a shape and it is the shape of Jesus Christ. And then, finally, as we conclude, the superiority of love, christ. And then, finally, as we conclude, the superiority of love in all things. Love is needed.
Speaker 1:In verses 8 through 13,. Paul makes the point that love is more excellent than all of the gifts. He says love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away, and so on and so forth. And then he comes to his conclusion and says so now? Faith, hope and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. Our gifts are not the most important or impressive thing about us, because gifts can come and go. Some gifts may be given for a particular season. We might not have them forever. They might not have them forever. They might come at one time and be gone another time. And what we learn here is that all of the gifts eventually will come to an end. We won't need them in glory.
Speaker 1:The measure of the Christian life is never in how gifted we are, but whether or not we are growing in faith, hope and love. Faith, a profound personal trust in Jesus Christ. We do all things from faith, trusting in God, trusting in Jesus, and not from fear or doubt. Hope, no matter how dark things may seem. We know that beyond that, jesus already has the victory and the kingdom of God will prevail on the earth and in our own land. And so we do all things in hope, even when we grieve, even when we are broken over the things that happen in the world. We do not grieve as the world does, but we grieve in hope and love, a deep affection and commitment to God and to our neighbor. We don't act out of self-interest, but for the sake of God and for others. Faith, hope and love are far more important and powerful than any gift, and it is in these things that we should strive to grow, and these things must shine through in the use of any gift.
Speaker 1:I was not a big follower of Charlie Kirk, but for much of our nation I've gone back to watch his public debates since his assassination and my impression of him is this he was clearly a uniquely gifted man. He was highly intelligent, driven, accomplished a lot for a 31-year-old, a highly effective communicator, very gifted and accomplished. But what shines through to me more than his gifts is the character and manner in which he used his gifts. He was certainly an aggressive debater you need to be if you're going to publicly defend ideas but he was never rude to people. He was never abusive in his language. He attacked ideas but never attacked people personally. He was never irritated by people who hurled insults at him. He displayed remarkable patience with people who disagreed with him, and he always sought to keep discourse civil. I think that's what made him so effective for so many young people. It's not just that he was a gifted communicator, but that he communicated with faith and with hope and with love. And these three things are not gifts or skills that can be learned. They are character traits that must be forged in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite Bible verses is 1 Thessalonians 5.14, and it goes like this Paul says we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. It's a great verse. In that verse we see that different people need different things. Sometimes we're faint-hearted and we need encouragement. Sometimes we're idle and we need to be rebuked and need to be admonished. Sometimes we're weak and we just need somebody to help us. Different gifts are appropriate for different occasions, but Paul wraps it up by saying be patient with them all. They might need different things, but they all need patience. No matter who you are, everyone needs our patience and remember patience is part of love. In all things, love is necessary. We teach in love, we serve in love, we discipline in love, we discipline our children in love, we rebuke in love, we mourn in love, we debate in love. It's necessary, no matter what we're doing.
Speaker 1:The greatest measure of the Christian life is love, and love is most clearly revealed to us in Jesus Christ. God does not just love us with feelings that we never see, or just with words that are distant, but he demonstrates his love for us. Romans 5.8 says but God demonstrates his love for us in that, while we were sinners, christ died for us. At one time we were all enemies of God, going our own way, refusing to acknowledge him, seeking to build a life on our own terms, apart from him. But Jesus changed our minds. He persuaded us, not through force, not through violence, but through suffering. Violence for our sake, for dying for our sins.
Speaker 1:Are you growing in love? That's the most important question, because love is what makes anything valuable. It's the gold standard. Love has a shape. It's defined by Jesus' love for us. Love is more excellent than gifts. It's always needed In any gift it's always needed. So may God fill us, as individuals and as a church, with faith, hope and love to infuse heavenly kindness into the most cruel places.
Speaker 1:To that end, let us pray Our Father. We thank you for the opportunity today. We have to hear from your word on the shape of love and the value of love, what it looks like, what we should be like. We pray, god, that you would form this in us. Help us to be people of great faith and great hope and great love.
Speaker 1:We thank you for our gifts, lord, but these things are far more important and we pray, god, that you would help us to grow in these and to exercise these things in all that we do, in our work, in the use of our gifts, in our dealings with our friends and our neighbors and our fellow church members. Help us to do all things with patience and kindness, without arrogance, without boasting, without insisting on our own way, without being resentful and more, lord, all of the things that love is. We thank you, god, that you have been patient with us. You have been kind to us. You have not kept a record of wrongs with us. You have taken our sin off of us and put it onto Jesus and taken it away from us. Our sins have been expunged and we are declared righteous and innocent in your sight, not because of us, but because of Jesus. God, we thank you for that. Fill us with the spirit of Jesus that we might imitate him as we go out into the world. We ask all of this in Jesus' name, amen.