The opening verses of chapter 13 have a regular refrain to them that goes like this: If I do not have love, then I do not have anything. I have nothing to offer, nothing to gain, and I am in fact nothing at all. Love makes me who I am in Christ. Tongues, prophecy and miracles count for nothing. Self-sacrifice has no value. Love is the most excellent way.
The clanging cymbal and noisy gong would be familiar aspects of pagan worship rituals. Is Paul saying that without love supernatural gifts are little more use than pagan worship?
But what is love?
There are three Greek words typically translated love. In classical literature, Two are used as synonyms but in the NT they are used to mean two different things. One is used to describe the general love shared by people. Family love, societal love. It’s the word which often provides us with part of a word like anglophile, or hydrophile and Philadelphia (lit. brotherly love). The other word came to be used in the NT to describe God’s love for us and our love for God. It’s used here in 1Cor.13 for the “way of love” of which Paul speaks. If you hear preachers talk about agape love, this is what they are talking about.
The Corinthian question
Perhaps the critical question that was being asked by the Christians in Corinth was the kind of question we still ask today. We might be more subtle about it, but I suspect we still want to know the answer to the same question.
This is the question: What the best indicator of my spirituality?
Perhaps the question is even more subtle: What’s the least I need to do or demonstrate in order to show that I’m sufficiently spiritual to be accepted into heaven?
Now we would never say that out loud, but our human tendency to do the minimum required gives away our deep seated values. When we walk this path we are using Jesus to get to heaven and little else. He is not the way of life, he’s simply providing safe passage. In Corinth this leads them to a wrong emphasis on spiritual gifts as the key to spirituality. Whether it was tongues or prophecy, faith or altruism or even self-sacrifice, what we do for God was the heart of their search not who we are in Christ.
Wrong emphases:
Create selfish behaviour
Mislead us
Make the less important the most important
Rob us of possibilities.
Mislead us
Make the less important the most important
Rob us of possibilities.
Because we are always measuring ourselves against the wrong criteria we end up in the wrong place with God and with each other. In Corinth, tongues, prophecy, self-sacrifice, even faith had superseded love as the ultimate prize.
Are we in danger of the same thing happening to us? Perhaps not over these issues, but what about other things?
Things like busyness: “I’m so busy doing God’s work, that must make me spiritual”
Zeal: “I’m so committed to making sure we’re always teaching unequivocal truth, that must make me spiritual”.
Evangelism: “I’m always telling people how to get right with God, that must make me spiritual”
Worship: “I know all the words to the songs in the latest Spring Harvest book, that must surely make me spiritual”
The truth is that none of these are the true sign of spirituality. Only love is that sign. That’s why it’s crucial.
The way of love and the grace of God
John Ortberg wrote: Living in grace, remembering grace, keeps love alive.
Grace is key to understanding the way of love because it is by grace that we are saved, by grace that we are made alive and by grace that we are loved. We deserve none of these things. Because of rebellion towards God we do not deserve the live (in the day that you eat of its fruit you shall surely die, Gen. 2, 3). We are under judgement for sin.
Because we’ve rejected God’s way, we do not deserve to be loved let alone rescued.
But we are all three. Loved, saved and alive.
Grace makes no sense to our rule dominated, law driven lives. But to God it makes perfect sense. It was the only way we were going to be set free. And so God did for us what we could not do for ourselves and gives to us what we cannot get for ourselves.
The way of love is the sign of true spirituality because it’s the way of grace and that’s the way of God.
Conclusion
The things the Corinthian church prized as signs of true spirituality were no signs at all. But we are not the Corinthian church. But are we better? What do we prize of a sign of spirituality that is in fact nothing of the sort? Do we prize more highly a spiritual gift or ministry.
What would church look like of we prized most highly the way of love as the sign of true, deep, life-transformed spirituality? What would that church look like?
