This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “I Corinthians 13” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, July 7, 1996.
We have been working our way through the various versions of 1 Corinthians 13, one translation at a time, and this morning we are using the New English Bible translation. This is the New English Bible translation, and we are beginning at 1 Corinthians 12, verse 27, and reading through to the opening statement in the fourteenth chapter, the first verse. So let us give our attention to God’s holy word. Now, you are Christ’s body, and each of you a limb or organ of it.
Within our community, God has appointed in the first place apostles, in the second place teachers, then miracle workers, then those who have gifts of healing, or the ability to help others, or the power to guide them, or the gift of ecstatic utterance of various kinds. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Can all interpret them?
The higher gifts are those you should strive to attain. And now I will show you the best way of all. I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy and know every secret truth. I may have faith strong enough to move mountains. But if I do not have love, I am nothing. I may give away all I possess, or even surrender my body to be burned. But if I do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient. Love is kind and does not envy anyone. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude. It is never selfish, nor quick to take offense. Love keeps no record of wrongs. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. There is nothing love cannot endure. There is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.
Are there prophets? Their work will come to an end. Are there tongues of ecstasy? They will cease. Is there knowledge? It will disappear. For our knowledge and our prophecy are both incomplete, and the incomplete will disappear when completeness comes. When I was a child, my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish. When I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see only a reflection in a mirror, dimly. But then we will see face to face.
My knowledge now is incomplete, then it will be complete, just as God’s knowledge of me is complete. In a word, there are three things that last forever: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Put love first. What can we say about these extraordinary verses? Particularly now, as we come to the latter part of this chapter in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 8 through 12, we may well be struck by them. They shine like a fine gem, so many-sided and so brilliantly. In these verses, Paul builds to the close of his argument for the unique and transcendent love of Christ’s gospel and of Christian experience.
That love revealed in Jesus Christ as the Father in Heaven offers Him up for sinners. That love fulfilled in Jesus Christ as Jesus offers up for us that perfect obedience from which our love for others flows. Now, these verses. They begin with a masterful transition statement at the opening of verse eight: Love never fails. It never collapses. It never suffers ruin. Love, like God Himself, stands like a fortress. These words at the beginning of verse eight connect with the previous verses we have examined, particularly verses 4 through 7. At the same time, they lead us in the most satisfying way into the verses now before us, verses 8 through 12.
Love’s permanence, that is, love’s eternity, revealed in Jesus Christ, demonstrates its ability, because of Him, to place us in the exalted atmosphere of the heavenly kingdom. This love now asserts itself in our lives, shaping and guiding our attitudes and behavior. The greatness of this love, which I possess, is the greatness of God. According to Paul, Jesus Christ proves this by the way He contrasts love with the special gifts of the Holy Spirit, which He has been discussing.
These gifts, even in their remarkable expressions, belong to the realm of the partial and the incomplete. In contrast, gospel love endures into the realm of perfection, completion, and fullness. The world will come to an end, and all the special gifts will come to an end. We know in part, we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. This emphasis by the Apostle Paul thus highlights the temporary nature of the gifts. They belong to the realm of the temporary and will cease, as he says. They will be abolished. On the other hand, love belongs to the eternal order. When the perfect comes, the gifts will have ceased, but love will remain. It never fails. It never suffers ruin.
Paul, in these verses, effectively highlights the limitations of the special gifts. He does so in a church where these gifts have been sought after and boasted about, as if they were the unique expressions of the unlimited glories of the coming kingdom. As if, by possessing them, those who had them were already in glory itself. However, Paul’s argument is even more decisive than merely pointing out the partial and temporary nature of the gifts. Observe the progression from verse 8 through verse 12. First, in verse 8, Paul speaks in what we might consider the most striking manner.
It seems, according to the vocabulary of the Apostle here, that in one sense Paul is describing the temporary nature of these gifts. True, love never fails, but if there are prophecies, if there are tongues, if there is knowledge, you must recognize the force of Paul’s deliberate construction. It is as if Paul were leaving open the question of the gifts’ existence, as if they had become a mere possibility. If they are prophecies, if they are promises, if they are knowledge, then they are temporary. Of course, the Apostle Paul does not leave things at this point; he does not leave the gifts in a state of uncertainty. He does not do so because of the undeniable reality of these gifts, a reality he knows firsthand, since he has received them all. He argues, as it were, from their temporary nature in order to reestablish their purpose in his argument.
But even as he reestablishes these gifts, effectively creating them anew, he does so in the most cautious manner, using language that is limited and, to some, may seem to diminish their value. He does not simply emphasize their partial and temporary character, but he also connects them with immaturity and childishness, as if they belong to a world of infants. And as you move toward the twelfth verse, he also suggests their connection with indirect and unclear images, which fall short of face-to-face communication. He could not do more to emphasize their temporary nature. This is holy Scripture. It is also remarkable reasoning. When we come to verse 11, that well-known passage in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul continues his contrast between the partial and the perfect, the temporary and the eternal.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. Now, at this point, many commentators move directly from verse 11 to verse 8 without pause. At this point, in verse 11, they find themselves facing great difficulty, unable, as it were, to follow Paul’s reasoning. For it sounds to them as if Paul were deliberately connecting the gifts to childishness and immaturity, as I have already suggested. But these commentators object. How can this be?
How can the gifts of the Holy Spirit, by which the revelation of the great God comes to the Church, be described as childish and immature? There is a sense in which their objection is rightly taken, and it should be acknowledged. But the contrast is not between the gifts and love in themselves, but between two successive stages: childhood and adulthood.
Paul’s point is to illustrate the transition from one state to another—the transition from this world to the next—by appealing to the transition from childhood to adulthood. His purpose is to provide an illustration that sets the transition from the present world of the partial and temporary to the future world of the complete and eternal. While Paul has this purpose, he also subtly suggests that the gifts are an immature expression of Christian activity. He follows the same approach in verse 12.
The mirror offers only a dim and even distorted reflection. The movement is from the time when we see God reflected as by a mirror, even through the Holy Spirit’s revelatory gifts, to the time when we shall see him face to face. This is a movement from our partial knowledge in the present age to the full knowledge of the age to come, when I shall know just as I also have been fully known. As with the illustration of childhood and adulthood, so here with the image in the mirror. As we are confronted with these statements in verses 11 and 12, we may find ourselves hesitating to accept such comparisons.
The gifts of the Holy Spirit are linked with childishness and dim reflections, not as a mere comparison. Paul’s method here is consistent and forceful. If you follow him in verse 8, if you pay attention to what he says in verse 8, you will have no difficulty understanding what he is striving to express in verses 11 and 12. If he places the gifts in verse 8 in the category of what is temporary, you will have no difficulty understanding his intention in verses 11 and 12, where he connects them to childishness and to dim reflections in a mirror.
Paul’s method has as its goal the complete undoing of human pride in spiritual matters. There is purpose in his approach. His method aims specifically, in this context, to remove Corinthian pride, and this for the sake of exalting genuine gospel love.
Many of the people in Corinth viewed their gifts and endowments as the most perfect and highest expressions of heavenly glory in this present life. They displayed these gifts openly before others, treating them as anything but partial or temporary. According to them, this was the language of heaven. This was the substance of eternity, if one could see it at all within the realm of this creation. How could Paul speak of these gifts as if they did not exist? These gifts, which they had come to enjoy and with which they had been endowed, were now dismissed by Paul as if they were nothing. Even when their existence was acknowledged, how could Paul bring them so harshly into association with childishness and cloudy reflections in a mirror?
But Paul speaks the truth. He presents the case for genuine gospel love. The gifts will come to an end. They belong only to this world. Yet, of equal or greater importance to Paul in this context is his confrontation with the Corinthian sense of superiority, which misinterprets God’s goodness so completely that it now obscures the very essence and existence of the gospel. The gospel, as centered in the love of God and the love of Jesus Christ, is thereby undermined.
You see, these people have subjected love to a standard of their own making, a standard that would render love nonexistent and inoperative. They reduce love to something partial and temporary. They classify it with childish things and shadowy reflections. Such is the effect of their vanity. Paul has turned their attitude back upon themselves and placed it directly upon their own heads.
If you are disturbed that Paul uses the language of non-existence with regard to the gifts in verse 8, and if you are unsettled by his connection of the gifts with things childish, immature, and dimly perceived in nearness in verses 11 and 12, then understand that behind what Paul is doing is an activity engaged in by the Corinthians themselves. In effect, they work toward the non-existence of love in their understanding and definition of the gospel.
I have never met a person proud in their spirituality who truly loves. It is as if they are incapable of it. Paul knows whereof he speaks. The kind of activity in which the Corinthians presently find themselves blots out love. It totally eclipses love, as if it were non-existent and non-operative in the definition of what religion is. Now, you may feel that you are off the hook, because recently you have not been engaged in prophecy, you have not been speaking in tongues, and as far as you know, you have no gift of knowledge. But you understand what the Apostle has done here. He has taken the highest things in order to include everything lower beneath them. Thus, every endowment is addressed by the Apostle’s instruction concerning the higher order of revelatory gifts.
Does it matter whether you are a minister, an elder, or a deacon? You are also addressed by these words. All lesser and more common endowments are in view. Does it matter that you are just a plain pew sitter? Not at all. Whatever endowment you may have, or whatever may be the measure of your presence in the body of Christ, you are also addressed. When the highest is addressed, the least is addressed as well. And this applies wherever spiritual pride or supposed superiority might be found.
And that strikes at the other point, does it not? The universal character of love and the obligation that is placed upon us all regarding it. We may not have the gift, but we are told we have the love. Therefore, remember what you have heard here today from the Apostle and from this pulpit. Remember for yourself that wherever spiritual pride arises, gospel love will disappear. You can count on that. Let us pray.
Our God, we would hear You again. We have spent much time with this passage over the course of our lives, and we may well think that it is all old and familiar. We may think, Lord, that it is tried and true material, to be sure, but we know it all already. Yet even this, Lord, reflects a kind of spiritual pride in us. Father, we plead with You that our eyes may behold the wondrous things in Your word, and that our ears may be open to what You are saying. May You help us, O God, with the depth of these matters, so that there may be depth in our souls, and because of Your mercy, grace, and work within us, we may be capable of great service to Your people and to the church. Hear us, Lord, as we labor with these matters, for surely many of us are struggling with them right now. Lord, may we put behind us all spiritual pride, and Lord, may Your love in Jesus Christ shine brightly in us and for You.
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