Sermon Tone Analysis

These familiar words give us the blueprint for how we are to love each other, the list of ingredients for love.

Certainly this is valuable for the relationship between husband and wife, between parents and children, between extended family, neighbors, enemies, etc.

But the context of this is in the realm of church life; even more specifically, in the area of spiritual gifts and our belonging to the body of Christ—to this family intentioned and integrated by God.

In this body, as part of the family of God, we must be marked by love.

Love has to be the controlling factor, the governing dynamic.

Verses 4-7 are some of the most familiar words in all of Paul’s writings.

They are memorable, repeated, beautiful words.

But there is one characteristic of love we have not yet read, one very important description of love in verse 8.

If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to 1 Corinthians 13.

If you are able and willing, please stand with me for the reading of God’s Holy Word. 1 Corinthians 13, beginning with verse 8;

May the Lord add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!

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Love never fails...

This is a beautiful and fitting end to this list of characteristics used to describe and define love.

Love never fails...

Literally, Paul says love never falls.

And the word Paul uses for ‘never’ he only uses here; it’s incredibly strong.

Love never ever fails, never ever falls.

This love never folds under pressure, even intense and sustained pressure.

This love continues through death into eternity.

This is the love of God.

Paul wants to underline and circle and highlight the priority of love for all Christians (in Corinth, Rich Hill, and everywhere in between).

To do this, Paul mentions the three gifts at the top of the Corinthians’ priorities: tongues, prophecy, and knowledge.

Each of these will either become irrelevant or else be swallowed up in the perfection of eternity.

Love never fails, but prophecies will.

Love never fails, but tongues will.

Love never fails, but knowledge will.

No gift of the Spirit is permanent.

You saw the phrase “in part” scattered throughout these verses (Paul’s trying to make a point).

The gifts we have been gifted with are transitory in nature.

They are temporary, passing away.

They will cease.

They will be stilled.

They will, like our earthly lives, vanish as a mist.

These gifts are more akin to the morning fog than they are the centuries-old oak.

The Corinthians are putting a lot of stock in the gifts they’ve been given.

They’re holding them over one another, bragging about this gift or that gift.

They’re asserting one gift is better than another.

And it’s lunacy, because no gift is going to last.

Much is incomplete

John MacArthur writes that these “gifts are temporary, partial, and elementary.”

Paul is showing us the comparison between the gifts and love.

The point of 1 Corinthians 13:8–13 is that the church must be working in the present on the things that will last into God’s future.

Faith, hope and love will do this; prophecy, tongues, and knowledge, so highly prized in Corinth, will not.

It’s important for us to realize what will last and what is passing away.

We are living in a temporary world, with temporary stuff, and we can only experience temporary enjoyment of that stuff.

What the church in Corinth was focusing upon, giving all their energy to, fighting all their battles about was merely temporary stuff.

How much of our energy, how much of our focus, how much of the battles we fight are focused on the temporary, the fleeting, the transitory?

I dare say most of what we focus upon in the life of the church is, sadly, the temporary; wouldn’t you?

The first few verses of 1 Corinthians 13 teach us what we say is nothing without love, what we know is nothing without love, what we do is nothing without love—without love, what we say, know, and do is woefully incomplete.

What we see is the nothingness of tongues, prophecy, knowledge, action; they are nothing apart from love.

In the last few verses of 1 Corinthians 13, we are struck with the the endlessness of love, the permanence of love.

But before we get to that, though, we need to see the incomplete nature of all this.

This pretty well sums it up.

ek merous, in part.

The nature of these gifts is “for now only.”

This was probably a rude awakening for some of the Corinthians.

They, no doubt, thought their knowledge and prophecy was full, not partial.

They, like us, no doubt think themselves mature, even perfect, as opposed to being mere children.

Paul’s comment makes it clear that all human knowing is partial—including even his own and that of the most learned, gifted, knowledgeable believers in Corinth.

We don’t know perfectly.

We don’t.

It’s not difficult to understand, though it’s harder to admit.

This is clear—we know in part; the research in every laboratory in the world demonstrates the truth of the statement.

The more we know the more we realize we don’t know.

In the TV series Friends, Ross (a paleontologist) and Phoebe (a free spirit hippie) are arguing about science and evolution and gravity (Phoebe says, “Lately I feel less like I’m being pulled down and more like I’m being pushed down.”).

At the end of their argument Phoebe asks Ross:

“Now, wasn’t there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the earth was flat?

And up until, like 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the small thing until you split it open and this, like, whole mess of crap came out?

Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can’t admit that there’s a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?”

It’s a well-taken rebuke to any of us who believe we have it all figured out.

We don’t.

And we won’t, at least not this side of heaven.

Where the Church and spirituality is concerned, we don’t have a handle on everything.

We know in part, we prophesy in part.

In part.

Incomplete.

Imperfect.

These are the words that describe us as we slog our way through this life.

“I know in part.”

What we say, know, and do = in part.

What we say, know, and do is passing away.

Tongues, prophecy, knowledge—it’s all temporary, incomplete.

There is a completeness that is to come, and when it does, all that is in part, all that is incomplete will vanish.

These gifts have their part, they have their place, but they must not take primacy of place.

They must not be all important to us because they are not everlasting.

Much is incomplete, and so we

Wait for Completeness

My junior year of college, my professor in Advanced Greek gave us an assignment from 1 Corinthians 13:10.

We were to take the word our Bibles translate as completeness or perfection and write a paper explaining it.

We were to work out what this word meant and to what it was pointing.

Nothing like asking a bunch of know-it-all 20-year-olds to try to settle a debate that’s been raging on since Paul wrote these words.

It was a good exercise in understanding that we don’t, in fact, know it all (not even close).

We know in part has never been more true than at that moment.

In teams of 3-4, we struggled through the original language and then tried to work-out what this word completeness/perfect meant.

What is this word referring to?

This was before the internet was very helpful (we were still dialing-up and watching hamster dance), so we couldn’t cheat and just look up what this scholar thought or see what our favorite preachers had to say about it.

The good news for you is that I have seemed to lose the paper I wrote on this one word.

I was planning to cite my paper extensively and bore all of you to sleep (or into a deeper sleep as the case may be).

When completeness comes…when the perfect comes...

To teleion, we decided, had to have something to do with Jesus, we just weren’t sure what.