The Supremacy of Love, Part 2

Tom Shrader works through the final characteristics of love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, focusing on what it means to bear, believe, hope, and endure all things in relationship with others. He emphasizes that love protects rather than exposes, refuses to gossip, trusts God to work in difficult people, and never treats failure as final. Using Peter's denial and restoration as a key illustration, Shrader calls the congregation to measure their lives against Paul's definition of love and to look to Christ as the living embodiment of it.

“Love bears what otherwise is unbearable. It believes what is otherwise unbelievable. It hopes in what otherwise is hopeless. It endures when anything less than love would give up.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: The Definition of Love

Recorded: 2001 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 29 min

Themes: love, forgiveness, hope, gossip, endurance, trust, restoration, patience, struggling in relationships, dealing with difficult people, husband, parent, new believer, feeling betrayed, navigating conflict, mentor

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-7, 1 Corinthians 4:18, Isaiah 5:20, Galatians 6:1, Matthew 26:69-75, Acts 2:14-41

Theological Themes: agape love, sanctification, christlikeness, bearing all things, perseverance, biblical love, redemption, spiritual maturity

Full Transcript

Introduction: The Supremacy of Love

Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians, chapter 13. Paul is dealing with the topic of love. In verses 1 through 3, he talks about the supremacy of love. He says you can have all your gifts. In fact, see what he says there in verse 3? This ties right into what we're talking about in giving. You can give all your possessions — not some of it, but everything you have away. The word "give" there means to begin in a systematic way to divest yourself of everything you have. You can give away everything you have, and you can even present your body as a martyr, but if you don't have love, it's not worth anything.

Paul's Definition of Love

What is love? Paul defines love for us in verses 4 through 7. Let's take a look at them. Paul says: "Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous. Love does not brag, and it is not arrogant. It does not act unbecomingly. It does not seek its own. It is not provoked. It does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth." Verse 7, the verse we look at today: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

My original intention was to cover these four verses in a single Sunday, but once I got into that presentation three weeks ago, I saw for myself how Paul is saying this is supreme among all the virtues. If I don't have this, I'm deficient. Something is seriously missing in my life. When I want to figure out if I'm living like Christ, I don't necessarily look at specific things that I do — I ask whether I have these Christ-like characteristics in my life.

So here is what we've asked you to do, culminating really in today's discussion: examine your life. This is serious business. Is that you? As you hold these verses up like a mirror to your life, is that what you see? Are you that person, living that way? Let's look at each one of these traits.

Love Is Patient and Kind

First, love is patient. Some translations will say "long-suffering." This deals not with circumstances, but with people. Love understands that people will bring inconvenience and will take advantage of us. As we said a couple of weeks ago, we will be patient and wait for God to work in their life.

Love is kind. It means courteous, gracious, pleasant. The best test of that is not in a restaurant, or in the office, or with your friends. The best test is what you are like at home.

What Love Is Not: Jealousy and Boasting

Now Paul says here is what love is not. Love is not jealous — jealous in two ways. The way we typically think of it: you have something, I want it, I'll take it away. That is indeed jealousy. But there is another side to that, and it is a very dark side. You see somebody who has something, and you don't want him to have it — not because you want it yourself, but simply because you don't want him to have it. That is a sick impulse. The reason we laugh is that it is the way we are. Love is not jealous.

Love does not brag. It means to talk about yourself — perhaps communicating actual, factual things about yourself, or perhaps inflating your résumé just a little. But here is what happens. You have a relationship with somebody, and you begin to talk about yourself and inflate yourself. By that very act, you have pushed the other person down, and periodically you have to come back down and push them a little lower. This is the only time we see this word in the New Testament.

What Love Is Not: Arrogance, Rudeness, and Self-Seeking

Love is not arrogant or haughty. That was a problem in the church at Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 4:18, Paul says, "Some of you have become arrogant, proud."

Love does not act unbecomingly — poor manners, rudeness, a complete absence of common courtesy. It is a concern about my rights and my privileges rather than my responsibilities and my duties.

This next one may be the key to all of it: love does not seek its own. That is probably the foundation upon which we can build everything else. Love says, as I make decisions and look at life, there are many things to consider, and certainly my own interests are in there — but they are down somewhere near the bottom, not toward the top. The cry of "what about me?" is not what dominates my thought process.

What Love Is Not: Provocation and Keeping Score

Love does not provoke. It is not pushed to anger. It is not filled with self-defense or retaliation.

Love does not take into account a wrong suffered. This is a bookkeeping term. It means to calculate or reckon — the kind of entry you see in a business ledger, designed to go in and permanently stay there. Love doesn't do that. Love doesn't keep score. It is not that love forgives and forgets, but rather that love remembers and still forgives. Love is not living in the past.

Love and Truth

Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness. As Isaiah wrote, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil." Love does not rejoice or laugh at sin.

And here is the flip side, where we left off last week: love rejoices with truth — that is, biblical truth, God's truth. I don't know if you had a chance last night to watch Larry King Live. Probably you didn't — you all have lives. I don't have a life, so for your sake I'm watching Larry King Live. Larry King last night had on a rabbi, a priest, someone who teaches Islamic belief, and Max Lucado. I missed the first ten minutes, but when I tuned in they were responding to something Lucado had said. My suspicion is that Lucado had just made the point that he is saved by grace, not by deeds — saved by Jesus, that it is about Jesus. King, as he does —

Love Bears All Things

Love bears all things. Literally, love can cover anything. In this sense, love will never drag into the light of day the faults of others and their mistakes, if it can possibly help it. It is not that love bears all things meaning sin, and believes all things, and hopes for all things, and endures all these things. We have already said we are to reject sin and arrogance and all those things.

What it says is, the best that I can, I want to protect that person. I want to support them. I do not run around and see how many people I can tell gossip. Even if it is true, it is still gossip. One author writes this: "Love bears all things by protecting others from exposure and ridicule or harm. Genuine love does not gossip, or even listen to gossip."

I love that last part. I was talking to somebody not long ago, and they said, "I don't solicit this — people just come to me with this stuff." Really? Let me tell you why: because your ears are about eight feet long and you cannot wait to give them a great hearing. This stuff drives me crazy personally when I see it. I do not like it.

If you have a problem with somebody, go to them and try to solve the problem. If you cannot, let it go. There is no right to criticize these people. It is so destructive. Even when you go to a friend with something legitimate, you will say, "You know, so-and-so has this weakness." And I am telling you, ten years later that person is going to say, "You know, they have always had that weakness. They have always been..." — and it never leaves them.

I will admit to you, I play my cards pretty close to the vest. One of the reasons is that I do not trust many people with information. Can I trust you with something privileged? Can I trust you with information?

Illustrations from the Past Week

I had two things happen to me just last week. God is so good — just as I am struggling for illustrations, He pops sinners into my life. I had a man, and we were talking about another person, and he said to me, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but..." I stopped him right there. I said, "I don't need to hear that. What do you want me to do with this?" I did not want to hear it.

About two days later, I had somebody talking about someone else and say, "I don't know if I should tell you about this." This person really made me uneasy, because they were putting it in spiritual terms: "I don't know about you, but I know you'd want to pray about it." We would never walk up to someone and stick a knife in their back, but we will take our tongue and just destroy a person. Love does not do that.

Love bears all things, and to some extent love buries these things. It is not that we do not deal with sin — you have been around here long enough to know that. We have procedures to deal with sin: Matthew 18 and the process outlined there. If somebody is involved in sin, you go to them. That is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about weaknesses and mistakes — things that may not even be sin — and how sharing them can tarnish a person in ways they can never recover from in other people's eyes.

Love Believes All Things

Love believes all things. It is ready to believe anything that has a ground of reality. It is ready to start over. John MacArthur writes this: "Love is a harbor of trust, and when that trust is broken, love's first reaction is to heal and restore."

The Supremacy of Love in Public Debate

Now, before we get to verse 7, it is worth setting the stage with something that illustrates what is at stake when love is absent from our convictions. Larry King goes through this all the time. If you missed a particular discussion, just wait a month and he will do it again, because he always does it. He focuses on Jesus, and he asks the Catholic priest, "Do I need to believe in Jesus to go to heaven?" The priest says, "No, no, no. Yes, that may be part of my belief, but what it is about is knowing God and who He is." He said, "Here is the rabbi sitting next to me — my good friend the rabbi. If the rabbi is as good as he can be and does as much good as he can, he will go to heaven."

The rabbi King had on was a bit of a debater, and he started to respond. Then all of a sudden, Eichmann came into the conversation. Remember him? He was part of Nazi Germany, captured and put on trial. When I was a young man, he was captured. I do not remember whether they gave him life imprisonment or executed him, but they found him guilty. And the discussion turned to what was happening around Eichmann at the time — ministers going in and saying, "Believe in Jesus, believe in Jesus, and you will go to heaven." And the rabbi said, and I quote, "That's preposterous."

It was a great discussion. I watched it and said to myself, if I were a pagan watching this, which person would I have voted for at the end? I think I would have voted for the Catholic priest, because he offended no one. He basically said, do your best, get to know God, love God, and do your best. To Max Lucado's credit, when he had the opportunity to respond at the end, he said, "I am always troubled by that. How good is good enough? How much is the best?" And nobody ever says this: even if I did my best, it is not good enough, because sin has separated me from God.

You get similar exchanges with other public figures. Bill O'Reilly went through this with Jerry Falwell. Falwell was talking about Jesus, and O'Reilly — who also happens to be Catholic — said, "No, no, just do the best you can." Falwell said, "I respect you. I disagree with you." These men do not always handle it exactly the way I would, but I thank God for those who are out there presenting the gospel. John MacArthur was on a couple of weeks ago. You have got to rejoice in that truth.

Trusting God Above Our Own Reasoning

Galatians 6:1 says, "Brethren, even if a man is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, each one looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted." This is the idea of trusting God first and foremost — trusting that God is who He said He was.

When considering the debate the night before, the instinct might be to side with the candidate who said, in effect, "Do your best. Hang in there. It's a hard world. Sometimes you're just a little boy who can't say no — we understand that." But that entire approach is built on the wrong foundation. Your job is not to figure out what you would do if you were God. That job is taken. Your job is to figure out what God says. That's what the Book is for. You don't have to anticipate what you would think or what you would do — it doesn't matter. What does God say? So the first priority is to trust Him.

Hope That Refuses to Quit

From that foundation of trust, we turn to trusting and believing others. The third quality of love is hope — hoping all things. This is a persistent optimism in which no cause, no situation, and no person is ever regarded as hopeless.

John MacArthur writes: "Even when belief in a loved one's goodness or repentance is shattered, love still hopes. When it runs out of faith to hold on, it holds on in hope. As long as God's grace is operative, human failure is never final. Jesus would not take Peter's failure as final. Paul would not take the Corinthians' failure as final. That's the whole point of this letter. There are more than enough promises in the Bible to make love hopeful."

MacArthur continues with words that may bring comfort to many: "The parents of backslidden children, the spouse of an unbelieving marriage partner, the church that has disciplined members who do not repent, all hope and love that the child, the spouse, or the erring brother or sister will be saved or restored. Love refuses to take failure as final. The rope of love's hope has no end. As long as there's life, love does not lose hope. When our hope becomes weak, we know that our love has become weak."

That phrase — failure is never final — is one we have returned to many times. And there is no better illustration of it in all of Scripture than the apostle Peter.

Peter's Failure

Turn left from 1 Corinthians to Matthew chapter 26. Peter has something of an unfair reputation, because most people only encounter him through the Gospels and never follow his story into the book of Acts. Matthew 26, beginning at verse 69, tells the story that comes to mind for most people the moment Peter's name is mentioned.

"Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. 'You also were with Jesus of Galilee,' she said. But he denied it before them all. 'I don't know what you're talking about,' he said. Then he went out to the gateway, where another servant girl saw him and said to the people there, 'This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.' He denied it again, with an oath: 'I don't know the man!' After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, 'Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away.' Then he began to call down curses, and he swore to them: 'I don't know the man!' Immediately a rooster crowed. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: 'Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.' And he went outside and wept bitterly."

That is what most people picture when they hear Peter's name — not a hero of the faith, but a man who denied Christ not once, not twice, but three times. He had been warned it would happen. He had declared with full conviction that he would die before he let it happen. Then a servant girl approached him, and he crumbled. Three times he said he did not know the man. And then he came face to face with the full weight of what he had done.

The Difference Between Peter and Judas

At the same time, there is Judas, whose experience runs in a parallel direction. Different circumstances, but essentially the same moment: he too had betrayed Christ, and he too came face to face with it and wept bitterly. The difference is decisive. Judas, never having been a true believer, went out and hanged himself in despair. There was no hope there. Peter, by contrast, understood that even in the midst of great sin, there is always hope in the Savior — and hope nowhere else.

Failure Is Never Final

When we meet Peter again after the Gospels, we find him in Acts chapter 2. Some time has passed. Peter has seen the risen Christ. Christ has ascended into heaven. The day of Pentecost has come.

Acts 2:14 reads: "Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd." From verse 14 through verse 36, Peter preaches a remarkable message. He speaks to the Jews about their guilt. He declares that Christ was killed according to a predetermined plan — that this was not something that had gone wrong, but the very purpose of God. And he proclaims that in Christ, and in Christ alone, salvation is found.

Verse 37 tells us: "When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'Brothers, what shall we do?'" Notice what Peter did not say. He did not say, "Do your best. I know you're trying. Hang in there — you'll be okay." He did not say, "Join the church." He did not say, "Give to—"

Love Hopes All Things

Failure is never final. If you have people in your life you are tempted to give up on, don't. Peter is the proof. This is the same Peter who said, "I never knew Him." And yet in Acts 2, after Pentecost, he stands up and preaches with such power that the authorities come to him and say, "We have to shut you up." And Peter answers, "I can't stop talking about Him. Do whatever you need to do, but I have to preach this truth." What made the difference? It is a Peter filled with the Holy Spirit who now understands this truth.

I know this from personal experience, because I was one of those people everyone had written off. People said, "There's no way. Don't even waste the tract. Don't even call him. Don't even spend the time over coffee." Here is the reality: you do not know. You do not know who is close to the kingdom. You do not know who is far away. You have no idea. Let me help you with this — you are not the Holy Spirit.

What continues to surprise me is how often God takes the very last person I would ever select and saves them. At the ASU game the other day I ran into three guys who used to hang out at the ball games together, wild, maniac football players. To this day, when you say one of their names is a Christian, my instinct is, "There is no way." And yet those are the three. God plucked them all — boom, boom, boom. Love hopes.

Love Endures All Things

The last quality Paul names is this: love endures all things. It is a military term, used to describe an army that holds a vital position at all costs. Love endures suffering and hardship, ridicule, embarrassment — whatever comes.

We could summarize the whole passage this way. Love bears what is otherwise unbearable. It believes what is otherwise unbelievable. It hopes in what is otherwise hopeless. It endures when anything less than love would give up. After love bears, it believes. After it believes, it hopes. After it hopes, it endures.

That is the pattern laid out in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4, 5, and 6. That is inspired Scripture, and we do not want to tamper with it. But we can ask: what does it look like in practice?

Calvary Love: The Standard of Christ

One helpful tool is this: if I take the word "love" out and insert the name of Jesus, everything comes into focus. Now it reads, "Jesus is patient." You want to see this fleshed out? Look to the person of Christ. Ultimately, it is Christ we look to when we try to understand what this love actually looks like. William Barclay puts it this way: "One thing remains to be said. When we think of the qualities of this love as Paul portrays them, we can see them realized, actualized, incarnated in the love of Christ."

This is what Amy Carmichael calls Calvary love. Amy Carmichael was a young woman sent by God to India, where she lived and served. She wrote a fascinating book — the title is representative of its brevity. It is called *If*, and it is less than a hundred pages, with sparse text on each page. But it is a book that makes you think.

Speaking of this Calvary love, the love of Christ, she wrote: "If I belittle those whom I am called to serve, talk of their weak points in contrast perhaps with what I think of as my strong points, then I know nothing of Calvary love. If I take offense easily, if I am content to continue in a cruel unfriendliness though friendship is possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love."

Then she writes something I especially want you to catch. She says: "If I feel bitterly toward those who condemn me, as it seems to me unjustly" — and then here is the turn — "forgetting that if they knew me as I know myself, they would condemn me for much more, then I know nothing of Calvary love." That is a great picture. That is love.

What This Love Demands of Us

This is not the George Harrison "all you need is love." It is not "she loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah." It runs a great deal deeper than that. It is a selfless, self-sacrificing love that says, "It is not about me — it is about Him."

You may be here today and I do not know you at all. But I can tell you this: I know what God's will for your life is. It is to obey Him. That is it. That is all He is looking for. And that means loving Him. Once you say, "Okay, I am going to do that," here is what He is going to do — He is going to bring someone unlovable into your life to find out whether you really are a lover. He is going to place you with people who will absolutely inconvenience you, and that is where the test begins.

Examining Love in Your Own Life

They will call and take advantage of you, and the question is whether you will really wait until God works in their life. This is so important. I plead with you to take this definition — God's definition of love — and see if it is characteristic of your life. Is this what people see in you?

Maybe it is not helpful for you to examine yourself. Maybe your view is so skewed you cannot even see it clearly. If I were simply to start talking to people around you, would they say you are patient and kind? Some of you are in relationships where someone has said, "I want you to bounce things off me, and me off you — I want you to tell me what you see in my life." If you are trying to figure out what barometer to use, consider this.

I was with a man not long ago who was something of a Christian-type leader. He said to me, "Tell me what you think." I said I was not good at that, and that I had friends who would be better suited to meet with him and speak into his life. But after he persisted, I said, "Look at this. Is this your life? Because if it is not, then God says your life amounts to nothing — no matter what your achievements are." He is not saying you have no achievements. He is simply saying they do not amount to anything apart from love.

Next week we will finish this chapter. Father, help us see this truth. May we live lives that bring honor and glory to You. Let us be real lovers — patient, kind, and honest. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. Have a great week, and we will see you next week.