1 Corinthians 13; Matthew 5:43-48
Please be seated. We have three passages of scripture today. Numbers 12, Matthew five, and then first Corinthians 13 will be our main passage. So, uh, find, find your way there and stick things in the pages to hold your spot. Uh, while you’re turning to numbers chapter 12, uh, let me just say kind of by way of introduction, um, You’ll know what I mean in a moment.
We do not have a noisy church. Our ministry without love is like a loud and clanging cymbal, and I’m grateful that we have a quiet church. Let’s do keep it that way. The elders were reminiscing the other day when the church was not quiet, and it was not fun, and that’s where some of us left our hair behind during those days. So we’re glad for peace and joy. So it’s kind of a sweet privilege to go through a passage like this today and not be like, okay, who am I gonna make mad because, you know, they don’t like something that got done. So it’s nice to preach this passage in peace. First Corinthians, I’m sorry, Numbers chapter 12 is an Old Testament account of Israel in the wilderness. And some people decided that it was their turn to be in charge. And the moral of this story is don’t try to be in charge or you’ll get leprosy.
So it says in Numbers chapter 12, verse one, Miriam, that’s Moses’ sister, Miriam and Aaron, his brother, spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married. For he had married a Cushite woman and they said, has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?
And the Lord heard it. Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all the people who were on the face of the earth. And suddenly the Lord said to Moses and to Aaron and Miriam, come out you three to the tent of meeting. And the three of them came out and the Lord came down on a pillar of cloud and stood at the entrance of the tent and called Aaron and Miriam. They both came forward and he said, hear my words. If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, make myself known to him in a vision.
I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth clearly and not in riddles. And he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?
And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them and he departed. When the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous like snow and Aaron turned toward Miriam and behold, she was leprous. And Aaron said to Moses, oh my Lord, do not punish us because we have done foolishly and have sinned. Let her not be as one dead whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes out of his mother’s womb. And Moses cried to the Lord, oh God, please heal her, please. But the Lord said to Moses, if her father had but spit in her face, should she not be shamed seven days? Let her be shut outside the camp seven days. And after that, she may be brought in again. So Miriam was shut outside the camp seven days and the people did not set out on the March until Miriam was brought in again. After that, the people set out from Hazaroff and camped in the wilderness of Peron.
And then over to Matthew chapter five, this is in Jesus serving on the Mount where he speaks of loving loving our enemies. In these passages, you’ll have Jesus say, you have heard that it was said, he’s referring to the Old Covenant, the Old Testament. And then he says, now I say unto you, you have heard that it was said, Jesus says, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good. He sends rain on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.
And then 1 Corinthians chapter 13, there are 13 verses. 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 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.
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, 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. Amen. God’s great and gracious word. May he add his blessing to it. There’s a word I can’t pronounce actually there’s probably bunches of them, but it’s the word cacophony. I say cacophony Cacophony see I even messed it up there cacophony.
It’s a you know phony sound It’s a word that means harsh noises, noises that are discordant, out of chord. They often are a mixture of sounds. Think of the last time you went into an MRI machine, how unpleasant that is. It sounds like you’re laying on the street beside a pothole. with the city workers, jackhammering, and all the rest. I don’t know how that is supposed to make you happy and healthy and whole again, but the MRI machine, cacophony. I said it right. Good.
Or look up online the Gitmo playlist. Remember back in the George Bush days, they brought terrorists over from the Middle East during the War on Terror, and they would play music day and night. The Gitmo list has Britney Spears. It has Barney. It has ACDC. It has rap music. It has heavy metal. All kinds of cacophony. My brother has three little boys and every year I tell him I’m gonna get them a drum set for Christmas. That will be music to your ears.
Perhaps you have lived in a city. And you have the sounds of horns beeping and engines revving and the hustle and bustle sounds also mixed with the tweeting of birds and other sounds of nature mixed in. And people say, I need to escape the city and get out into the country, get into the fresh air and the peace and the quiet. Perhaps some of you have been to the North Carolina Symphony and You’ll hear a beautiful symphony in the first section, but because they have to, and they’re usually playing at a major university, they’ll play a modern symphony which is full of dissonance. The noises just don’t match up and sat through a couple of these and you really get agitated and aggravated with the sounds of dissonance.
And then in their third section, they’ll go back to playing something normal. At least that’s what I call it. But cacophony, they’re all around us. Perhaps some of you watched the halftime show last Sunday evening. That was probably, I’m sure, a cacophony. But what if it’s in your church? And we’re not referring to the music. We have wonderful piano and piano player, but what if it’s in the one body with many parts? And what if the one body, many parts are selfish, divided and confused?
What if they’re suing each other? What if they are saying, I follow Paul? Well, we follow Apollos. We follow Jesus, and we follow Peter. Selfish, divided, and confused, a cacophony. And on and on, we could go through the list that we get in 1 and 2 Corinthians.
It was a loud, noisy church. We like to say church ought to be an outpost of heaven. It ought to be a place when we come in its doors, there’s a sweetness, a fragrance, a friendship, a fellowship, a love. There’s truth and beauty and goodness. And the outpost of heaven gives us a foretaste of heaven.
But sometimes a church can feel more like an outpost of hell. where there’s disorder, there’s chaos, there’s self-serving and self-seeking and hatred, and all kinds of noise. And so today, as we think of 1 Corinthians 13, we are reminded of the last verse of the last chapter, chapter 12, 31, I believe it is. Paul says, after all the this and that about spiritual gifts and the disorder from that in the church. He says, I will show you a more excellent way. And so among the gifts and among the graces that a church has, there must still be something more. And that still something more is love. You can have a church full of the best and the brightest people. the most gifted people. And if they do not have love, then there is no benefit. In fact, without love, the church and its gifts and graces are useless. And so today we want to think about love. Love is, as one preacher has put it, it’s the operating system. It is the operating system of the church, and it must be debugged. It must be kept pure and whole and it’s got to be updated from time to time. Otherwise it crashes and it burns. And so we want to think about love in four ways today.
This passage has a lot of structure in it, a lot of grammar, a lot of logic to it. And it has a little bit of now and not yet this present life and the life to come. So we’ll think of it this way. First, there are three conditional statements. Second, it will tell us what love is and what love isn’t. Third, it will tell us that love is permanent, but the gifts are temporary. And then fourth, it will tell us the difference between knowing in part and then knowing in whole. So first, the three conditional statements, you’ll see them in Versus 1, 2, and 3. These are conditional statements. Those are if-then statements. If this is true, then this will happen.
It’s like the light switch over on the wall. If you flip it up, you will, I don’t know if I have this right, close the circuit and cause current to flow through. Is that right? If you flip the switch down, you’ll open the circuit and electricity will not pass through the switch. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? Off means no light and on means light. And so these conditional statements are like that.
If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, if I have prophetic powers, if I understand all mysteries, if I understand all knowledge, if I have all faith and that faith is strong enough to move mountains, If I give away everything I have, even if I go to the martyrs fire and then burned at the stake, if I do all of these things, but have not love. then I am nothing but a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. I am nothing, I gain nothing. And so again, you can have a church full of the best and brightest people, full of gifts and graces, but if there is not love, If there is no well-oiled machine with the grace of the love of God, then it accomplishes nothing. It gains nothing.
It’s just a bunch of noise. And so the Corinthian church is a very noisy congregation and it is the noise of dissonance. It is the cacophony. It is the noise of discord. You’ve been to a church like that before. I’m sure you walked in the door and something didn’t seem right, smell right, feel right. Or perhaps you were in a church that grew in disunity and not unity. And it just got to be a dread to be there, a dread to be part of that church.
And so Paul is very clear. If these things are there, but there is no love, then It’s nothing, it’s useless, it’s no benefit, no gain. And so these are the three conditional statements. Much like an engine that has no oil, it will seize up and it will no longer work. We must have love in our life and in our ministry and in our gifts and graces. Well, the second thing our passage shows us is a list of what love is and what love isn’t.
You find that in verses four through seven. And I want to point out to you that most sort of Bible-believing New Testament scholars will tell you this passage is probably Paul personifying love as Jesus. Jesus is the personification of love. You’ll see things about the life and ministry of Jesus, and it’ll be stated something like this.
Love walked among us. Whatever Jesus did, however he served, including the cross, but his whole incarnation, his whole coming to this earth to seek and save the lost is love on display. And so you could say here in a sense, the word love and its attributes are synonymous with Jesus Christ.
And then you throw out that we are made in God’s image, that image bent and broken by the fall, but we are being renewed through Christ Jesus daily. We are being renewed more and more. and being conformed into the image of Jesus Christ, our dear savior, and the only son of our Lord, of God, our father. And so when we look at what love is and what isn’t, we also, while we can say what love is, it’s Jesus, we can also see what was wrong with the Corinthian church.
All the love isn’t stuff. You can imagine those are the problems there. So the list. It’s got 15, I think, in it. Seven, what love is, is, and eight, what love ain’ts, I guess you could say in the South. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable, resentful, and it does not rejoice at wrongdoing. Love rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things. Love endures all things. The list of what love is and what isn’t.
You can get the sense that in the Corinthian church, there was not much Christ-likeness. For love was impatient. Love was unkind. A church full of envy. Oh, you follow Paul. Well, we’re a Paulist people, which one’s better? Lacking love. There was boasting. I have this gift. You don’t. There was arrogance from position or station in life or possession of gifts. There was rudeness. There was insistence on getting one’s way. Uh, there was irritability, there was resentfulness and there was rejoicing at wrongdoing. Remember the man who, how did it go way back in chapter three or four? He was taken up with his father’s wife. And what did Paul say? And y’all aren’t even upset about this.
So love can, or lack of love rejoices at wrongdoing. So what about Christ likeness in the church? Love is patient. Begins to sound like the fruit of the spirit, doesn’t it? Love is patient or long suffering. Our fuse is really long. We don’t blow our tops too quickly.
If at all, love is kind. Interestingly, the word kindness in the new Testament language is very close to the word for Christ. And so people mix those words up, but in a, in a good way, I would suppose to be kind is to be Christ like. Love rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things. Boy, it’s hard to bear a load, isn’t it? Especially when people keep heaping on that load and we still have to love them. Love believes all things. Love hopes in all things. Love endures all things. There’s a lot of long suffering in love, isn’t there? Think about where we would be if God was not patient. God was not kind. God was not taking the long look at what his son would accomplish for you on the cross and what his spirit would do in your lifelong growth in grace.
God is able to bear. God is able to see the long look. He is able to endure much because he is a loving and heavenly father. What does Psalm 103 tell us? God sees us. He knows our frame and he remembers that we are dust. He does not treat us as we deserve, but he pities us as a father pities children.
And so what love is and what love isn’t is important. He moves to a third section in this passage, verse eight, very simply stated, says love never ends. Love is forever. the gifts, the prophecies, the tongues and the knowledge, they are temporary. So you have in verse eight a contrast of temporary and forever. What is temporary? It’s the gifts. That’s the stuff they’re bragging about, boasting about, fighting about. That’s what has caused so much noise in the church. Not good noise, but bad noise.
And so the prophecies will pass away, the tongues will cease, the knowledge will pass away, but love, love, never ends. Now y’all know we live in this love is love world and the world has love just all mixed up. Um, now in English, what’s our word for love? Love. Okay, good. Y’all are smart. How many words in the Greek language are there for love? There’s a bunch. Yeah, there’s a bunch.
There’s, there’s kind of a love for, I love ice cream, right? Do we love ice cream the same way we love our wife? Hope not. Then there’s brotherly love. Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Um, I love my brother cause we play golf together. Right. Okay.
That’s a different kind of love. Um, then there’s the, you know, you got the affection, you know, the ice cream thing. Uh, and then you got Eros, the, the sexual love, marriage love. Uh, but then you’ve got agape and that’s the love that’s spoken of here in this passage. It’s the specific Christian love. That’s a word that’s not in, Much other Greek literature, they got all the other loves in Greek language literature, but the New Testament writers found agape to be the sufficient Greek word for love that explains God-like love. And God-like love is this.
I love you. I set my affection on you, not because you are worthy. Not because you are lovable, not because you will repay love in return. No, God simply loves because he wants to and because you need his love. He expects nothing in return. He sees nothing lovely about you.
And that’s the hard Christian love. It’s sacrificial. It takes a lot of willpower. In fact, when Jesus says, love your enemies, Oh, how hard for the Jews in Jesus day. That was, well, we can’t love the Samaritans because they, you know, they stole our Northern tribes land. Um, we, we can’t love, you know, the Gentiles because well, they’re Gentiles. We can’t love the Egyptians. We, you know, they could go on back through Esau’s offspring and the offspring of Noah who weren’t, you know, in the covenant and very quickly they could tell you who they loved and who they hated and why they could love those they loved and why they could hate those. And what does Jesus say?
Love your enemy. That takes a lot of strength. That takes a lot of willpower. You know, in today’s, you know, love is love world. We love people because we get something out of it. We love something or someone because we get a feeling. Right. Oh, they just give me goosebumps.
Uh, that’s worldly love that will not last. What will last is the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ with changed hearts, changed minds, redeemed people, loving others who are unloved, loving, unlovable and hard to love. That’s what Jesus points out here. And so that love will never end.
You know, somewhere in our town, there’s a mural that says love wins or something. Um, You know, I don’t recommend, you know, us going out and changing it and, you know, probably vandalism or something. Hate crime these days. But it should really say love never ends. Now, the word love used has probably got to be the right one, right?
But it never ends. it is a truism, it is a word of God from the scripture. Love never ends. So all these people in the Corinthian church, they got their gifts, they got their graces, they got their notoriety. Without love, they’re nothing. Without love, it doesn’t benefit. Without love, bunch of noise. But what does he really say to them here? That stuff won’t last into heaven. In heaven, we’re not gonna need prophecies. In heaven, we’re not gonna need tongues. In heaven, we’re not gonna need knowledge and interpretations and all the rest. It will cease.
The fourth thing this passage tells us is that we now know in part, but one day we’ll know in whole. Verse nine, Paul says, we know in part, and we prophesy in part. Okay, part is not the whole, you understand that. But when the perfect comes, that’s heaven, the partial will pass away. So we live in partial, imperfect, part world. What’s coming is perfect, what’s coming is complete.
And it gives a little illustration from being a child and then being an adult. When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I thought like a child, I reasoned. like a child. Now, very sad. We live in a world where sometimes the reasoning of children far outpaces that of adults because they have not been tarnished by modern thinking. But generally speaking and thinking and reasoning like a child is a very childish thing. But Paul says, but when I became a man, I gave up those childish ways. He spoke like an adult. He thought like an adult. And he reasoned like an adult. And he’s reminding them that there is a gradual growing up process to the Christian life.
There will be a day when we see wholly, we see perfectly, we understand completely. And he references that in verse 12, for we see in a mirror dimly. We see in a mirror darkly, but then that’s in heaven. It’ll be face to face. Now we know in part. But then we shall know fully just as we have been fully known. And so what are we to understand from this discussion of the part and discussion of the whole?
Well, right now, the Corinthians see in a metal mirror. They did not have glass mirrors like we do. They had some polished, shiny metal and you can imagine that wasn’t a very good image of themselves. Now I know we have perfect mirrors. We have perfect lighting. You know, we can pluck an eyebrow with precision. You know, we can make sure we didn’t leave any whiskers after we did our morning shave. We can see how white our teeth are or how British they are. We’ve got really good mirrors and really good lighting, but they had shiny, polished metal. That was their mirror. And so you could see for them, you know, don’t really know what I look like, but one day, one day I will see clearly.
And that’s the world that we live in. We live in an imperfect world. We live where redemption is not yet fully realized. And so to glory in the things of this life as if they are the forever things is a big mistake. Somebody asked in the last months, when we go over to the sanctuary, are we going to, you know, have a big dedication? And my comment was, no, we’ll probably just have church and not say anything about the room.
Right? Because you can glory in what man has done. You can glory in what we think we have accomplished. We can say, look at what we have done. And isn’t God sure smart to have picked us? That’s how we often think. And God has a sense of humor. He comes down and he sees our little tower and he confuses our language and scatters us across the face of the earth. And so, uh, Whatever we accomplish in this life for the Lord is but a glimmer of the perfect and the perfection that is to come.
So it’s sweet and nice and wonderful to be in a congregation where the noises are good noises. When we refer to noisy church, for us, that’s the sound of people singing and perhaps out of tune. That’s the sound of little ones reciting the creeds and singing the songs. And maybe there are a word or two behind us on pace. Some of you adults are too. But that’s a good sound, right? That’s a really good sound. There’s not a cacophony. Because there is love, there is truth. There is not division and confusion and hatred and selfishness. But we all still need Jesus. We all still need his love and we all still need our hearts to continue to be softened and transformed and changed. That is our need to grow into this still more excellent way. I would imagine every one of us in the room would say, you know, I’m really not super gifted by God.
You know, I’m the bubble gum scraper, right? I’m the coffee maker. you know, on and on through the life of the church. There may not be any big flashy gifts and graces, but you put it all together with the oil of love and it creates a sweet, happy fellowship. Remember the three gifts we’ve looked at in the last weeks in Corinthians, the three broad gifts that God gives Christians are speaking gifts that would be teaching, preaching, you know, letting others know truth. There would be government gifts like elders ruling the church. There would be helping gifts, the gum scraping, the coffee making, opening car doors and lights and locks and, you know, seeing needs and meeting needs. All of those need to be done and honed and worked at. But also the love must be there. It’s the oil. It’s the operating system.
When I was a kid, we had family meals every night, uh, that was possible for supper. And, uh, dad would always say the blessing and my mother would always chime in after the amen. Uh, and she would chime in with these words and for the loving hands that prepared the meal, like that was the missing thing. But her loving hands did prepare the meal and it wasn’t that she was a good cook. That was wonderful and great. But it was that she loved us and that love went into all those meals.
Here’s a challenge for us. Do we want to be God-like, loving and kind in our service? Or do we want to be uselessly noisy? Let’s ask for God’s help and blessing. Pray with me. Father, we thank you for the gift of your love, your everlasting and eternal love that has so sought us and bought us with the blood of your son, our savior, Jesus. Greater love has no man than one who would lay his life down for others. You so love the world that you sent your son, the only begotten son, to seek and save the lost. Let us learn and live that love, we ask and pray. And we do so in the name of Jesus, our great loving Savior. Amen.