The Unifying Rule of Love
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:8–12
It is helpful to remember the circumstance of the church to which the apostle wrote these words. The Corinthian church was for the most part dominated by immature leaders and marked with division. Paul could not address them as he would have liked, they were not ready for the deeper truths of the faith at this time in their journey, so he kept them from the congregation. It is not true to say he hid them, for the information of how to live a victorious Christian life was available already, and he wrote to them in his second letter about living life in the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). But he did not bring it up to them in this letter. They were too marked with selfishness, petty power struggles, moral compromises, and confusion over spiritual gifts, to have properly grasped the subject at this point.
Often believers magnify this thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians — we call it “The Love Chapter of the Bible” — as though Paul reached his most profound moment when these words were penned. Profound and moving as they are, they were primarily meant to encourage a healthier spiritual appetite among the Corinthian Christians, to help them gain a glimpse of the true nature of God and the new nature of the Christian who is born of the Spirit. The separate teachers were seemingly proud of their individual “revelations” — some of which apparently did come from God — and their ability to grasp and communicate the truth of God, yet they did so in the spirit of competition with one another, with lives unchanged by the love of God, with lips that were harsh, and with minds that lacked the fuller comprehension of some of the most fundamental truths of the faith.
To such a congregation the apostle spoke about the love of God and sought to enlarge their comprehension of it, and of life and eternity.
The first thing we notice from the passage quoted above is the superiority of love over every other experience of the Christian. We receive much from God in our salvation: knowledge, peace, wisdom, spiritual giftedness, a new community, a renewed hope in life, a God-given mission to fulfill, the promise of reigning with Christ in the future, and high moments of spiritual ecstasy. All that God gives to the believer is good and to be received in humility and gratitude. But it all is secondary when compared to receiving the love of God in our hearts. Love is the superior Christian virtue, the superior blessing of the Holy Spirit, and the superior value among believers.
Like the Corinthians all of us are prone to magnify other things as more important — knowledge, power, position, influence with people, talents. But these things if left to rule without the guiding principle of love can become weapons of destruction and not tools in the Spirit’s hands to build the church. The Church of Jesus Christ is built-up only through the building up of the individual believer. The Bible is abundantly clear that the bricks and mortar of the Church are the people themselves (1 Corinthians 3:10–17). We are the “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5) that God is using to construct His Church and His churches. The only way to have a superior church is to have superior disciples, and the only way to have superior disciples is for them to be touched by the love of God so deeply in their souls that everything about them is different.
This was the main point of Paul when he discussed the uselessness of building with “wood, hay, and stubble.” He referenced the type of ministry among the people of God than turned them into inferior disciples, untaught, unchanged, and unloving. Love is superior to every other blessing that flows from the heart of God to the human heart. To be touched by God means to be touched by love, and in Christ all the contrasting values in our hearts that compete with love must be surrendered to Him: anger, jealousy, pride, lust, fear, un-forgiveness, bitterness, a complaining spirit, and untrustworthiness. Also feelings of inferiority, feelings of shame, and a sense of utter failure are also to be surrendered to Christ. The love of God specifically deals with these deep needs of our souls and assures us of our acceptance in Christ through God’s grace.
This leads to the second thing to consider from the verses above: Love is not only superior to all other Christian experiences but also is to be dominant over them as well. That is, love not only comes first in our virtues and blessings but it is to be the principle by which we interpret every other blessing. It is like the king of virtues that not only comes first among the other members of the “royal family of graces” but is to rule over them as well. Or to use an illustration of modern day politics — love is to be like a strong federal government over our hearts and minds, and every other Christian blessing is to be like a state or city government that must be submissive to the rule of love.
The apostle saw that the fellowship in Corinth had made a big deal over insightful prophecies and moving ecstatic experiences and knowledge of salvation. Some who emphasized the speaking in tongues — which appeared to be some ecstatic experience — might say to others that if only they could speak in tongues that all would be well in their souls. The sense of ecstasy of tongues, as someone prayed in his spirit but not with his mind (1 Cor. 14:14), strengthened the individual believer (1 Cor. 14:4). Such moments of deep worship also are likely to bring an emotional release, and often the individual believer can confuse the two — what is emotion and what is of the Spirit. The emotional release in worship can be likened to the sexual release, and since many in the Corinthian church had been converted to Christ out of the sex-trade business, this must have spoken to their souls. It seemed to them to be the authentic Christian answer the counterfeit sexual religious experience found among the pagan temples.
Others disagreed and thought that prophecy, being divinely enabled to speak a message from God that encouraged and strengthened others, was supreme (1 Cor. 14:3). This appealed to the “men of action” in the church, who had enjoyed those moments when someone clearly told them what to feel, what to think and what to do. The third position argued that those things were inferior to true depth of knowledge, that study and contemplation was the secret to living a life above all other lives. They might have compared the tongue-talkers to babbling brooks, and perhaps had been a bit jaded and skeptical of prophecies because of so many false statements that were uttered in the name of God. Instead they called for depth of knowledge, that this was supreme in the Christian life and in the church.
Each of these three positions was attractive to certain members of the church, and appealed to them on the basis of personality traits and individual experiences. Birds of a feather do flock together, so without the guiding principle of love reigning over every other Christian blessing, what should have led to unity and growth, led to division and decline.
I can see these same divisions in churches today. Some emphasize meaningful worship, as though that were supreme, especially today as we have an entire musical movement that emphasizes passion for Christ, seemingly “speaking in the tongues of angels” (1 Cor. 13:1). Some emphasize the prophetic word that strengthens the weak, encouraging them and helping them apply the truth of God (1 Cor. 13:2). Others emphasize learning the deep truths of the faith that lead to knowledge and devotion, even selfless giving (1 Cor. 13:3). These three — or sometimes they become four — tend to divide the church if love does not rule over them all. One says, “The Christian life is Worship!” Another says, “No, it is Learning!” Another says, “No it is Counseling!” And still another says, “No, it is Missions!” Each of them is right and none of them is right, for without the guiding principle of love every thing is out of perspective for not a single one of these was meant to be the ruling and reigning principle of the Christian life. These are capable of instilling faith and giving hope, but only love is capable of ruling over these, as Paul wrote, “Now these three abide, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.”
Love, therefore, is superior to all other Christian virtues, and is to reign over all other Christian virtues. But love is to do something else as well — love is the unifying factor among believers. When love is allowed to reign in our hearts and over all other Christian virtues Christians are brought to a new unity in fellowship and to a new effectiveness in witness.
The apostle admitted that they knew and prophesied in part. He did not mean by that that they prophesied in error, or that the deep truths of the faith were not truths at all but mixtures of fact and fiction, right and wrong, good and bad. Rather he admitted that God had not revealed to them all the truths of the universe, not even all the truths of heaven or even life on earth. One of the great questions of believers is about heaven, “What will heaven be like?” And other than a few statement of God’s glory, our reigning with Christ, the end of human suffering, the completion of our lack of knowledge, there is still very much about heaven we do not know.
Many mysteries of life here as well remain for us as long as we are on this earth. In Romans 7:14–15 Paul wrote: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” The mysteries of our fallen nature, that still retains some evidence of the original creation of humanity that was made in the image of God, are perplexing and troubling to our souls. There is something good in the worst of us, and something terrifyingly evil in the best of us. In Christ we are given a new nature, but the Old Man, or the old fallen nature still remains. Regardless of how much we progress in our faith, in knowledge, in experience, in service, in maturity, we each retain this dangerous, destructive “Old Man” that can rise up at any moment, when we least expect it.
As we mature in Christ our sinning may not be as frequent or as graphic as previously, but we can each still identify with the words of Paul, “I do not understand what I do.” Careless words, thoughtlessness, unkindness can still mark our paths, and pride and lust still lurk just beneath the surface in each of our lives. Now we see ourselves as though we are looking through a mirror, and the mirrors of the First Century were made of some polished metal and were unclear and distorted. So we see ourselves and can make out some characteristics with some clarity, but others are less clear and blurry, giving the wrong perspective. Some large character flaws we are practically blind to, and some insignificant positive traits we take too much pride in. If in such a fallen condition we would start to try and fix our brother or sister, or even our own selves, our efforts would quickly end in failure and deepen the division between us.
But Christ has provided another way — the way of love. On the night of His betrayal, He prayed to the Father that His followers would be united.
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
John 17:20–26
I have put in bold letters some words I consider key to understanding the prayer of Christ. He desires that we might have a vision of the glory of God, and this prayer is for every believer in Him. The vision of the glory of God is in-separately connected to the love of God in Christ. If we would deepen in our understanding of the glory of God we must deepen in our experience with the love of God in Christ.
The love of God touches us through many different types of communication. We learn of the love of God through the study of the Scriptures, especially those doctrines about salvation and grace. We see the love of God through the examples of other believers who are maturing in the faith. In that sense, examples of the love of God touch us through the kindness, patience, and encouragement of others. But none of these alone can transmit into our hearts the true love of God or open our eyes so that we might see the glory of God. The secret to receiving the love of God is to receive Christ as Savior and Lord.
This is the transforming truth that Paul hinted at in his first epistle to the Corinthian Christians, but that he was less than completely plain about, due to the weakness of their faith. The closest he came in the epistle of 1 Corinthians was 15:10, when he said, “By the grace of God I am what I am,” encouraging them by example that there was a deeper experience of the Christian life. If the grace of God defines us, then all our prospects are different and we are brought into a new type of life with the governing presence and power of Christ to change and mold us. If, however, we try to create our own love, we will fail and probably end up arguing among ourselves over which one’s love is better!
But we live in a different time than the early believers in Corinth. We have the full teaching of the Scriptures of life in the Spirit of God, the life indwelt by the living Christ.
If there is any appeal I can make on the basis of this passage it is an appeal to you and to me alike, that we would open up our hearts fully to Christ, to receive Him in the fullness and in the power of His Spirit. His Spirit’s power will first be demonstrated as He wins our hearts to Himself, as He convinced us of grace and forgiveness, and as He regenerates our spirits. He places into our lives an intimate knowledge of Himself. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:6, God has made “his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”
Paul, so far as we know, had never seen the face of Jesus of Nazareth, and certainly most if not all of the Corinthians had not. The human face depicts individuality and this passage means that through the gospel and through the Spirit of God we receive an intimate knowledge of Christ. He becomes more than just a person of history, more than just the main subject of the Bible. He becomes our Savior and our Lord and our Friend. And now we have the superior blessing of the love of God within us because we have Christ within us, and we are now able to take all other blessings and gifts that God has given us, and place them under His Lordship and under the rule of love.
And as the love of God through Christ grows within us, we find ourselves being drawn to other believers. The church has a new joy, a new effectiveness because it has Christ Himself as the Head and as the Heart of the fellowship.
Prayer:
Lord, like Paul we often do not understand our own ways, even less so the ways of others. But You know us. Indwell us. Fill us. Touch us deeply. Give us the wisdom to bring everything in life under Your Lordship and under the rule of love. Amen.
