1 Corinthians 13 is
possibly the most familiar passage in 1 Corinthians. Its familiarity is almost certainly due to
its prominent and frequent reading in marriage services, where it is implicitly
understood as an ideal description of 'love' to which the bride and groom
should aspire and perseveringly display in their new life together. Now, while it would be churlish to deny the
chapter's relevance and application to keeping the embers glowing in any
romantic relationship, that's not at all why Paul wrote this particular section
of the letter. In its context 1 Corinthians 13 is not primarily focussed on
cultivating loving relationships between individuals; rather, the focus is on
repairing, restoring and deepening the loving relationships within a fractured
church family.
Without delving too
deeply into the details of the text (note: this is another passage to return to
and marinate in at a later time), it may be helpful to remember that Paul has a
number of aims in mind as he writes. In
writing to motivate his readers (including ourselves) to purposefully cultivate
this Christlike, selfless, sacrificial, warm-hearted and active commitment to
those within the church, 1 Corinthians 13 firstly exposes our sin, our lack of
love. The Corinthians were more committed to arrogantly displaying their
giftedness to each other than they were to loving their neighbour (v1-3). When
Paul describes love as "not envious… not arrogant, not rude…" he is
reminding the Corinthians of their shameful behaviour that he highlighted
earlier in the letter (3:3; 4:6, 18-19, etc…).
For believers to fail to love is to sin, for which we need God's
forgiving mercy and the Spirit's fruit-bearing grace. Loving relationships in
church must always been seen in the context of the Gospel; there is no other
way to love one another as God expects.
Secondly, this
chapter therefore describes what it means to genuinely repent for such
lovelessness. Enabled by the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), we are to love, for
that is the enduring mark of a truly Gospel-transformed life (1 Cor 13:13):
hope, will one day be fulfilled; faith, will one day be unnecessary for we
shall see Jesus; but love - the very
atmosphere of heaven - will endure into eternity, and that's why it is
"the greatest".
Thirdly, in
describing what love does in this chapter, Paul is describing Jesus and indeed
how He lovingly relates to us, with patience, kindness, selflessness,
forgiving, gracious. That's Jesus' love. That's what we need Him to be for us;
that's the love others around us need to experience from us.
Paul is no
dozer. His passage on the necessity of
loving relationships within the church fellowship is deliberately sandwiched
between two longer sections in which he addresses fractional disunity among the
believers (chapter 12) and the equally divisive understanding and use of the
'gifts of tongues and prophesying' which were also causing problems in the
church and needed to be addressed (chapter 14).
'Tongues' was the gift by which someone was enabled to speak of God and
His saving work in a language unknown to the speaker, Acts 2:1-11 (note: others
see 'tongues' as a special means of communication whereby the tongue-speaker
engages more fully and directly with God - in an unknown 'language' - than they
would otherwise); 'prophesying' was the spontaneous, Spirit-prompted
exhortation to give a word from the Lord to specific people for specific
reasons for a specific time. For some in
Corinth, it seems that having and using these gifts was a mark of superior
spirituality, which Paul refutes.
Whether these
specific gifts were time-limited, and used by God only when the early church
was still settling down and had yet no full Bible, or whether these gifts are
still present and a necessary component of today's church life - is much
debated among today's Christians.
However, whatever people's understanding and conclusions on these
things, while individual believers may not agree on specific matters, from 1
Corinthians 12-14 as a whole we learn that the most important concern is that
our fellowship together and the exercise of their gifts ought to be governed by
a loving desire to build up one another in the faith and by a desire to glorify
God (14:1,5,12,19,25,40). That - is the
important thing.
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