Love Is... - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Nov 13, 2022 • Andrey Bulanov

Main idea:

The whole christian life is a practical pursuit of a life of genuine love, a love that flows down into our hearts from the heart of our Savior, a love that flows through our bodies, and hands, our feet, our words, our thoughts - out to the lives of others around us.

Outline:

1. Love is patient and kind

2. Love is not prideful

3. Love is not a nasty Scrooge

4. Love takes no satisfaction in evil

5. Love is unconquerable

Application:

• Hold your heart up to the mirror of truth

• understand love

• love love - value this as supreme!

• pursue love through the power given to you in Jesus

◦ when you study love and value love you will learn love

◦ but deep down the only true motive is Christ himself, pouring our his love in your heart

Scripture References:

• 1 Corinthians 13

• Colossians 3:14

• John 13:34-35

• Matthew 11:28-30

• John 13:1

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Love is the most sought out thing in the world, and yet the thing most lacking at the same time.

One of the most important theologians of the history of the church boiled it down to one issue: love. All human behavior is animated by various loves within us that collide with each other.

All human existence is created for the love of God. To experience his love, his presence, his fellowship - and to live out all of life out of the satisfaction of that love - to be his image bearers, to reflect his glory and goodness, to be sources of his love and glory in the world.

What moves you today?

You are either chasing the various loves of your heart, the things that will not lead to real joy.

Or you are living out of the love of God which already fills your heart.

In terms of content, this chapter is really the burning center of the whole letter.

Paul has been challenging and correcting the behaviors of the corinthians :

• prideful human wisdom

• division

• relationship to idol temples and perverted culture

• singleness and marriage

• lust and self control

• spiritual gifts and worship

Here in chapter 13, he breaks form, he breaks from the structure of his whole letter to give this beautiful poetic meditation on love and you realize that it is LOVE that he has been talking about all along.

It is love that drives Paul. It is love that he is trying to teach the corinthians.

Colossians 3:14

"Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity."

Two weeks ago, pastor Aleksey preached on the first three verses and we saw the centrality of love.

To be a person of love is the very center and focus of all of Scripture - Jesus said this is the whole law and the prophets.

Love God and love people.

In Ephesians 4, Paul puts it another way - he says the very definition of spiritual growth is growth in a life of love with the family of God.

How do I know that I am growing spiritually?

• I can see that I am growing in my ability to love people. There is evidence of greater fruit and blessing in the lives of others around me as I seek to live, understand, encourage and build relationships with my brothers and sisters in Christ.

In this sense I thnk that love is the highest wisdom.

wisdom is knowing how to live in the various situations of life.

Love is what you get when you when you have a person who is truly transformed and living out the word of God in daily life.

What happens when the Word of God becomes a person and lives.

John 13:34-35

34 “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

What then is love? How do we define it? How do we describe it?

• Grudem "God's love means that he eternally gives himself to others."

• "Love is lifestyle where we prioritize, practice and find satisfaction in doing good to others and seeking their blessing."

it is this portrait that we want to give pracitical attention to today. As Paul calls us to the priority of love, he gives us a very practical portrait of love.

He gives us a list of three positive qualities, eight negative statements, followed by a statement on love's enduring power.

1. Love is patient and kind

One writer made the observation that these two qualities are the active and passive responses of love to difficult poeple.

What makes love hard, what makes seeking the good of others hard - is that people themselves are sinners and they are not easy to love. People do thinks that are hurtful to us.

It takes patience to hang on to relationships, to not give up on them, to keep loving.

And it takes a response of kindness when we are treated unkindly.

In Romans 2:4, Paul shows us that patience and kindness are two things that define God's own relationship to sinnners.

He patiently endures our darkness, rebellion and sin - rather than wiping us out.

But not only that. God demonstrates kindness to sinners. He goes on the offensive against our sin - he gives grace and sends his own Son to give us salvation.

We can all get motivated to love people. But it is our lack of patience that cuts that commitment short.

Real love requires patience because people are difficult to love.

Do we expect people to be challenging? Or do you expect them to be always thankful and appreciate you when you do something good? We can often get frustrated when we try to be kind or do good to someone and it blows up in our face - and we say "I tried but that person is just rude.."

Love is patient.

"John and Charles Wesley were blessed with a patient mother. At one time her husband said, “I marvel at your patience! You have told that child the same thing twenty times!” Susanna Wesley looked fondly at the child. She said, “Had I spoken the matter only nineteen times, I should have lost all my labor.”

• Tan, P. L. (1996). Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations: Signs of the Times (p. 985). Bible Communications, Inc.

Patience is the enduring part of love, kindness is that active part of love.

For some of us kindness comes easier than others.

Some of us find it very unusual to be kind to others. Maybe its how we were raised and molded.

When we open our mouth we need to actively seek to do what is good.

Kindness takes conscious active practice. It’s very natural for us to be rude and irritable the next verse says when we are send against or when we are responding to people around in their complicated mess.

Some of us might say I’m not a people person. Paul says we all need to learn.

When you are pursuing love, you become more of a people person.

Sometimes I thnk we say we are not ppl ppl as an excuse for being lazy and unintentional in our approach to people.

We don't want to engage in the active process of learning to be kind.

2. Love is not prideful.

"Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant.."

The negative parts of the list show us that in our journey of learning to love a large part of this journey is learning to push back down against our sinful impulses.

When we have a bad attitude at home one of the questions I try to ask is is this how Jesus teaches us to love?

The journey of love is a journey into directions. It is a journey outward learning to focus on the needs of others and elevating them above ourselves and it is simultaneously a journey down in word a process of noticing exposing and actively working to kill our selfish impulses.

If your spiritual life is not an active process of pushing against your sinful impulses at the same time as learning to walk in the opposite direction of those impulses you are not growing in love.

envy, boasting and arrogance - the common idea here is an inflated sense of self worth.

The problem of arrogance is often simply the problem of reality. Arrogance is an unrealistic perspective on self on how good we are and how important we are. Arrogant people are just out of touch with reality.

The stories of arrogant people in the Bible are the stories of people with terrible falls down. Think of Nebuchadnezzar. All of them out of touch with reality.

This is why pride leads to envy or jealousy - because we are always clashing with reality - we always feel like others have more than they should and we have less than we should. We think we deserve better.

This is also why pride leads to boasting. When you have an inflated sense of self worth - you will always carry the burden of defending and proving it to others. You will need to present yourself as truly accomplished and successful. you will need to higlight your goodness to others.

The solution is NOT that we are WORTHLESS. The reality is that we DO have value and worth. Its just that our value and worth is NOT established by our own boasting and our own success.

Here is where love is key again. It is only in the love of God that we discover our deep value and worth. God's love for us elevates us - it draws us in. but it also humbles us. God sees us in our sin and weakness, and yet he loves us just the same.

His love draws us in at the same time as teaching us to grow out of our sin.

His love fills us with true STRENGTH, BOLDNESS and POWER - and yet there is no boasting here.

Love teaches us humility because when you try to love people you realize how hard it is. When you try to love people you realize how immature you are. When you try to love people you realize how much wisdom you need and how great God is for loving us despite all of our faults.

one way this is expressed is in our relationship to technology.

Some people say, "I just can’t have Instagram because it makes me think of other people or it makes me really struggle with my life. It makes me judge people and it makes me envious at the same time..."

Maybe it’s right for you to not have Instagram but you not having a Instagram is in solving problems that Instagram is revealing in your heart

When you are rooted in God's love you drink deep from that. Your heart finds deep sense of satisfaction, love and affirmation. It evaporates pride, envy. It fills with desire to see other's succeed.

3. Love is not a nasty Scrooge.

"5 is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. "

We are coming up on the holiday season and Charles Dickens classic story "The Christmas Carol" is one of my favorites.

Everyone is having a good ole time and getting ready to celebrate Christmas and old scrooge is just a nasty grouchy mean and selfish old man.

Our tendency is to brush these kinds of people aside as just so unpleasant.

But you know there is a REASON why scrooge is the way he is.

The story reveals that he has deep wounds that go back to his childhood and life growing up. Wounds that he kept wrapped up and protected. Wounds that make him a nasty, mean and selfish person.

How do you respond when poeple tell you you've been rude, harsh, unkind?

Sometimes people just say, "Thats just how I am..."

You are rude, cold, irritable and brooding for a reason. These are all blinking lights of pain and sin in your heart that needs to be healed by the Savior.

It can be the most difficult thing of all to go into these sections of our heart - into the dark rooms filled with spiders and webs. To uncover that below our anger and bitterness is often deep pain.

Jesus is not afraid of our wounds. Hes not afraid of the blackest and bitterest parts of your heart.

Matthew 11:28-30

28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Hurt people hurt people. Healed people heal people.

I know its cheezy but its true.

5 is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. - WHY? because love is a heart healed by the Savior.

You can never be a healing and forgiving presence to others unless you are experiecing healing and forgiveness in JEsus every day.

4. Love takes no satisfaction in evil.

6 Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.

2500 years ago the greek philosopher Plato reflected on one of the most puzzling and disturbing characteristics of humans - our attraction and our desire to be entertained by evil things.

He makes an example by telling the story of a man named Leontius who was traveling by the place where executions of criminals took place (a very different world from ours!). As he passed by he was torn by two opposite desires - to look away from the death and the blood, and to look at it. After blocking his eyes for a time he finally spun around and said to his own eyes, "Fine then you disgusting things look and enjoy!"

The story highlights the dark impulse in the sinful heart to enjoy watching destruction in the world around us - especially others.

We are further conditioned by our digital world of entertainment to enjoy suffering and bloodshed as entertainment.

This is dangerous because it feeds the same evil impulse.

And then it translates into our lives when we start to enjoy seeing or talking about the brokenness that takes place in the lives of people around us.

This is why we love to gossip. We love to hear how messed up and bad the lives of others are. Even if deep down we know some of the things we say are not even true or accurate, we say them anyways because it gives us some sick sense of satisfaction.

Because love is patient and kind. Because love is humbled and satisfied in God. Because love is healed by Jesus - love is sensitive to the struggles of others.

When God's love is working in my heart, we grow in our sense of the sinfulness of sin, we naturally hate it more and more, we don't look at the sins of others from a detached "observational" perspective. We are grieved when they are in the wrong. We desire to see them grow, to succeed, to have victory over sin.

At the same time, this highlights the fact that love is not naive. it rejoices in the truth. it is not afriad to look at the difficult things. it is not afriad to ask hard questions.

Its very much part of our traditional christian culture to sometimes just sweep things under the rug. Pretend we don't notice. Assume someone else will take care of it.

It takes courage to ask people about their struggles. It takes courage to enter people's pain. Love is the only thing that gives us that courage.

5. Love is unconquerable.

7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

The last thing that Paul highlights is the ability of love to endure - to last - to push through through difficult things.

This has been one of my favorite verses over the last few years.

There is ` more disturbing and discouraging to see people fighting, disagreeing and splitting over silly and foolish things.

There is nothing more beautiful than seeing people work through difficulties in relationships - seeing friends work through deep pain or offense, seeing a married couple work through seasons of frustration and misunderstanding.

The real beauty of love is seen in the picture of the person who is trying to love and everything is pushing AGAINST him, and he keeps loving, keeps hoping, keeps trying.

This is WHY the love of God is so amazing. He keeps loving us and pursuing the plan of salvation throughout the story of the Bible even though the darkness of our sin and rebellion is making it more and more impossible for him to love us!

Example from the book of Hosea

You look at the life of Christ. What was it that drove him in the final moments?

John 13:1

"Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end."

And he got up and washed their feet.

In love he suffered the darkness and evil in the garden. In love he suffered through the last moments of life, as he hung on the cross.

"forgive them, they know not what they are doing..."

It is love that drove Jesus to enter our world to bring us forgiveness, reconcilation and restoration. It is love that made possible the impossible.

Love is unconquerable.

Why?

Because love looks, not just at the situation right now - but forward to what could and what will be.

The true power of love is seen in its power to see past the immediate situation - to look ahead, to be confident of better things to come.

Jesus did what he did because he knew where he was taking us.

And he teaches us to do the same. He teaches us to see people through the lens of the possible - to see what grace can do to them, to see the potential of healing and restoration.