The Permanence of Love
Tom Shrader walks through the final section of 1 Corinthians 13, arguing that love surpasses spiritual gifts because it shares God's own nature and endures into eternity. Prophecy, tongues, and knowledge are all temporary—each serving a purpose in this age but destined to pass away—while love never fails and remains the defining mark of a genuine Christian. Shrader calls the congregation to pursue love as their primary goal, measuring themselves against Paul's definition rather than evaluating others.
“Love is supreme and, unlike any of these others, it's an attribute of God — love is the link God gives us to His eternal self.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: The Definition of Love
Recorded: 2001 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 34 min
Themes: love, spiritual gifts, eternity, self-examination, patience, kindness, prophecy, Christian character, struggling with pride, feeling unworthy, navigating conflict, new believer, small group member, husband, young adult, seeking spiritual growth
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, 1 Corinthians 12, 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Peter 4:8, Job 26:14, Romans 11, Acts 28:8, 1 John 3:2, Ephesians 4:15, Matthew 18
Theological Themes: agape love, pneumatology, cessationism, sanctification, becoming holy, eschatology, spiritual gifts theology, fruit of the spirit
Full Transcript
The Supremacy of Love
Turn your Bibles, if you will, to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It is the love chapter, and you are going to have to work very hard today. I am going to give you quite a bit of information in a very short period of time. Paul is talking here about the issue of love, and it is absolutely essential that you remember that Paul is addressing the issue of spiritual gifts. That is what he was talking about in chapter 12, and that is what he is talking about in chapter 14. Love is tucked in the middle of this, and I think we will see the reason why this morning.
If we were to outline chapter 13, we have done it this way: the first three verses speak of the supremacy of love, then the definition of love, then the permanence of love. In verses 1 through 3, Paul says you can have all the gifts — speaking in tongues, prophecy, knowledge — but if you do not have love, even if you give everything you have to the building fund, you are just making a bunch of noise. You are clanging and gonging, and there is nothing there. You are nothing, because love is supreme.
Love is evidence of the Spirit of God working in your heart. It is not the gifts that we look to and say, "There is a mighty man of God, there is a great woman of God." We look to the love in their heart.
The Definition of Love
So what is love? Paul defines it for us. He says he does not want us to think as the world does about love. Here is what love really is: love is patient and kind. It is not jealous, it does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, it is not provoked, and it does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with truth. It bears all, believes all, hopes all, and endures all.
I have been surprised — stunned is probably too strong a word, but surprised — at the response to this teaching. I do not think we have ever taught chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and received a stronger response to the message. I am hearing men in growth groups saying their group has taken that definition and is applying it to their own lives, holding each other accountable. Small groups are talking about it, and I want to be clear: there is no exaggeration here. I have never seen a response like this.
The response has essentially been, "Woe to me, because I do not measure up to this." Paul is very serious. He says that if you are really a Christian, you are going to prove that Christianity — not by speaking in tongues, not by prophecy, not by knowledge — but by love. Show me that love.
So let me take one last run through this definition of love. The whole purpose of this is for you to examine yourself — not the person to your left, not the person to your right. Someone in the first service this morning said they needed to get that tape and send it to somebody. I do not want you to send it to somebody. I want you to look at your own life. If love is the supreme quality in this life, more important than any of our gifts, and if it is permanent right through life and into eternity, then I had better make certain I am a lover.
Walking Through the Definition
Here is what Paul says. First, love is patient. That love is long-suffering. The word patient deals not primarily with circumstances, but with people. Paul says you are a person who is anticipating and waiting for God to work in the lives of those around you. Love is also kind — serving, gracious, and sweet to all. A great place to examine this is not how you handle a waitress in a restaurant or someone standing in front of a mall ringing a bell, but how you handle the people at home.
Here is what love is not. It is not jealous — it does not say, "I want everything you have," or, "I do not want you to have it." Love is not braggadocious, which is the only time we see that word in the New Testament. Love does not brag. It does not build itself up, even if it is telling the truth. I know people who, though they are not exaggerating, are constantly talking about themselves, and I think they consequently view all of life through the lens of how it will affect them. By inference, as they build themselves up, they push you down. Love does not do that.
Love is not arrogant — it is not haughty or proud. Love does not act unbecomingly. It is not rude. There is common courtesy there. And this is probably the key: love does not seek its own. In fact, that may be a pretty good definition of love itself. One of the men in our group defined agape love this way: a deliberate choice to act for the best interest of another person. That is really what we are talking about. Every decision I make, as I figure out my life and gather the data to decide what to do, my own interest will naturally be part of that — but Paul says it belongs way down at the bottom. I am not driven by "what about me, what about me, what about me," but by how my choices will affect others.
Love is not provoked. It is not aroused to anger, not upset, not irritated. A lot of you are angry people, and what is very interesting to me is that a lot of the quiet ones are angry. That is always a surprise. Those who are very quiet often have the most volatile tempers. Love does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not keep score. It does not say, "Remember back in '73 when you —" It is not that love necessarily forgets; it simply forgives. It is not after that pound of flesh.
Love does not rejoice in unrighteousness. It does not call evil good or good evil. It sees the world as God sees it and takes no satisfaction in sin. And here is the flip side of that: love rejoices with truth — especially biblical truth. It loves the Word, loves the proclamation of the Word, loves the study of the Word. It loves to hear God's truth.
Recap: The Four Qualities of Love
Here is how we ended last week. Love bears all things — that is, it covers, supports, or protects people. 1 Peter 4:8: "Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins." Love protects those who are hurting, even those who have made mistakes, and to the best of its ability, when it is appropriate, it covers that up. It keeps it hidden. It keeps it secret.
It is not that we do not deal with sin — do not misunderstand. We deal with sin, but we do not bring it out publicly unnecessarily. That is gossip. We try to protect one another. If somebody has made a mistake, we try to deal with it privately. Obviously, if somebody is involved in unrepentant sin, we have a prescription for dealing with that in Matthew 18, but that is not what we are talking about here.
Love believes all things. It is not cynical and suspicious. It believes the best and gives people the benefit of the doubt. Love hopes all things — it is persistently optimistic. Love endures all things. No cause, no situation, no person is ever totally helpless and hopeless if God moves. Failure is never final. There is always the possibility that God will move. That is Paul's definition of love.
The Permanence of Love: Setting the Stage
Now in verses 8 through 13, Paul talks about the permanence of love. Each time I teach this, I see it a little more clearly, so it is really helpful. One of the things I see today is that even though Paul is going to make reference to the gifts, Paul's dominant thought here is still on love. He is talking about the permanence of love.
He is writing to a church that is all messed up. That is what chapters 12, 13, and 14 are about. This church is very confused. One author writes this: many of the Corinthians continually had their eyes on the wrong things. They were overly concerned about the temporary and little concerned about the permanent.
Instead of being God's salt in Corinth, they were being flavored by the culture around them. Instead of penetrating Corinth with the spirit of godliness, Corinth's spirit of ungodliness had penetrated the church. Instead of being obedient to God's Spirit and controlled by the fruit He gives, they were infected by materialism and pride and antagonism and selfishness and compromise, indulgence, hatred, sexual immorality, jealousy, and virtually every other sin imaginable. They were called to be light, but their deeds were of darkness. They were called to be righteous, but they lived in sin. Instead of Corinth being Christianized, the church was being paganized.
That is what Paul is dealing with — a church that is missing the big picture. Remember the context: chapters 12, 13, and 14 are all one package. In chapter 12, Paul is telling them they are over here pursuing this, when he wants them to pursue the better way. What is the better way? Love. As he begins chapter 14, he says, "Pursue love." In the middle, in chapter 13, he is saying: listen, you are out here pursuing all these gifts. There is nothing wrong with that — in fact, you ought to pursue your spiritual gift. That is good. God has given you that. It is necessary for the body. But that is not what is going to last.
Love Never Fails
Here is what he says in verse 8: love never fails. Love is never empty. Love never falls away. Love never fails. Now, love is not a magic key that unlocks every opportunity. It is not a special formula that, if we apply it, automatically produces our desired results. It is not that love always wins in the normal sense. It is that love never fails — it is always there, always present. Whenever you live the life that God would have you live, the characteristic of that life is love.
Remember the context. The Corinthians are out there looking at prophecy, looking at tongues, looking at knowledge. And Paul is saying: can you get this? Here is the key — love never fails. These other things are all temporary. They are all going to fall away. Then he says, let us look at them: prophecy, tongues, knowledge. They are all temporary.
What Paul Means by Prophecy, Tongues, and Knowledge
Paul says prophecy — that is, the proclamation of God's truth — will be done away with. This is not prophecy in the sense we often think of it, as looking into the future. Every Saturday and Sunday night, KTAR at 10 o'clock has a show along those lines — a spiritualist show, just a goofy program. I could normally never listen to it, but I like to catch the first five or ten minutes if I am awake, and last night I was. So I had it on set to shut off automatically. They had a numerologist on, and you would call in and they would tell you the future. The first caller said, "I was born on such and such a day," and the numerologist said, "Well, I think you had a tough year this year. Next year is going to be a great year." The caller said, "I'm pretty positive about that." The numerologist said, "I sense you're optimistic." It is just goofy.
That is not the kind of prophecy Paul is talking about. He is not talking about the psychic hotline. He is talking about proclaiming God's truth — making God's mind and heart known as we proclaim His Word. Tongues is that supernatural utterance of a known language that one has never studied or learned. Knowledge is knowing things, not just in general, but specifically — a wide range of biblical truth.
The Distinction Between Cease and Done Away With
So Paul says: prophecy will be done away with, and knowledge will be done away with. That word means literally to be reduced to inactivity — it will be abolished. Something or someone will cause it to stop. Tongues, however, will cease. That is a different word, and it seems to be a different idea. It means to stop or to come to an end from within. Tongues have a built-in stopping place.
Here is what we are saying. With prophecy and knowledge, something or someone brings them to an end from outside. If you will allow the illustration, tongues have within them —
Love Never Fails
Love cannot fail because it shares God's nature and God's eternity. In heaven, we will not only have no more need of faith or hope, we will have no need of the gifts of teaching, preaching, helps, prophecy, discernment, knowledge, wisdom, tongues, miracles, healing, faith, mercy, or leadership. None of these gifts will have a purpose or a place in heaven, yet love is and forever will be the very heir of heaven. Love is supreme, and I would suggest that is because, unlike any of these others, it is an attribute of God. Faith is not an attribute of God. Hope is not an attribute of God. Love is an attribute of God.
Have Tongues Ceased?
In Robertson's Word Pictures of the New Testament, he deals with the word "cease." He says they shall make themselves cease, or automatically close themselves. This raises the question we have around us all the time: have tongues ceased? I would take the position that indeed they have, for a variety of reasons, and we will spend much more time on this when we get to chapter 14.
Tongues were a sign gift, just like miracles and healing. When we look at miracles, for example, the last miracle we see recorded in the New Testament appears in Acts chapter 28, verse eight, around 58 AD. Paul continues to write after that, and John writes as late as 96 AD, and in those writings subsequent to this there is no mention of a single miracle of the sort we typically associate with this. Does God still heal today? Sure He does. But have miracles ceased in the way we see them in the New Testament? Yes.
Consider the healings you see on television. I see a man with a backache. That is not what Jesus did. Jesus said to a man who was dead, "Get up." He said to a man who was lame and had never walked, now an old man, "Get up." He took a man and restored him completely. Now, does God come in and heal, and is there pain in God working that way? Sure He does. But primarily, these things were signs. They expressed judgment on the nation of Israel, and that was completed in 70 AD. They were inferior, as we have talked about. They confirmed the apostles and are not mentioned in the later books. There is a very clear point at which we see these tongues and these miracles stop, and we would say they passed with the apostolic age.
We can build that case biblically through the verse in front of us, where we are told tongues will cease and will simply pass away. As we read the balance of Scripture, we see that, and through church history we see that as well — they pretty much just pass away and disappear for hundreds and thousands of years. We will talk about this at length when we get to 1 Corinthians chapter 14.
Knowing in Part
Remember the context here. Paul's emphasis is not on gifts. Paul's interest is on love, and what he is trying to do is correct the Corinthians. He wants them to think correctly. We have these things now, but we have them imperfectly. Look at verse nine: "For we know in part and we prophesy in part." Even in teaching and proclamation, we can only get around the edges of this. Job says in Job 26:14, "Behold, these are the fringes of His ways." Paul says in Romans 11, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways." I can never really get my hands all the way around Him. I can only study Him and understand Him partially.
When the Perfect Comes
Paul answers a very natural and important question here. If we say that prophecy will end and that knowledge will end, when will it end? The answer is right there in verse ten: when the perfect comes. The question then is, what is the perfect? Here are the answers that have been offered through the ages, at least the most popular ones: when Scripture is completed, when the rapture comes, or when the church has matured. I would think it falls in line with the last two. When I see Jesus face-to-face — either through death, or glorification, or His second coming — and in fact you can see this in verse twelve, we find the phrase "face-to-face."
We have a lady here at the church who died yesterday, Jana Buchanan, and I was thinking about her all day. One moment she was laying there, hurting and in pain, perhaps even in her mind wondering why, wrestling with all those natural questions. And the next moment, she was face-to-face with the Lord — fully understanding and fully knowing. What a beautiful picture of what Paul is talking about. What Paul is saying is: you had better look at love, because these gifts do not make that transition.
Childish Things
"When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, and reason as a child." Some have pointed out that this captures the three gifts Paul is talking about here. "I would speak" — that is tongues. "I would think" — that is prophecy. "I would reason" — that is knowledge. "When I became a man, I put the childish things away." There is nothing wrong with acting like a child when you are a child, but there is a point at which I grow up and I mature.
A Mirror Dimly
Even when we mature in our faith, we are always, as verse twelve says, looking through a mirror dimly. In that day and age, when Paul was writing, a mirror was a piece of metal — often brass — that had been polished, and when you looked into it you got only an outline. You did not get a very clear picture. When I stand here and look even into that glass at —
The Temporary and the Eternal
Looking into the infant care room, I get a very clear image — not as clear as a mirror I would have right here, but a very clear image. Paul is saying you look into this mirror and you don't really see clearly; you see only an outline. Mirrors as we know them didn't really exist until about 1300, and even then they continued to be perfected. It is like seeing something up in the sky, out in space, but it is all obscured by clouds and atmosphere. You take the Hubble telescope and get it out of the atmosphere, and you can see better — but you still don't see it perfectly until you see it face-to-face. That is what Paul is saying: all of this is temporary.
What abides, what is ultimately lasting, is love. 1 John 3:2 says, "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet appeared as what we shall be. We know that when He appears we will be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is." That is the moment Paul is talking about. He summarizes this in verse 13: "Now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love."
Faith and hope are actually encompassed by love, which believes all things and hopes all things, because faith and hope have no purpose in heaven, where everything true will be known and everything good will be possessed. They are not equal to love. Love is the greatest of these.
One author writes that gifts, ministry, faith, hope, love, and patience will all one day cease to exist because they will cease to have a purpose or meaning. But in that perfect day when we see our Lord face-to-face, love will for us be just a beginning. Our showing love, practicing love, and living in love now are of utmost importance — more important than having any other virtue or gift — because love is the link God gives us to His eternal self.
Pursue Love Above All Else
It makes all the sense in the world, then, that when Paul ends this chapter and we move into chapter 14, the first words are: "Pursue love." It is worth noting that the chapter breaks are human additions; they were not in the original text. Paul ends chapter 12 by saying he wants to show a more excellent way. Chapter 13 reveals that more excellent way: it is love. Chapter 14 begins: pursue love.
Think about love. Set your heart on love. As you set your goals, love ought to be one of them. Think about love, pray about love, work toward love, aim for love, and pray that God would make you a loving person. More than anything else, pursue this — be patient and kind, humble, not boasting, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. That is what God wants in you.
Love becomes the defining characteristic of the Christian life. We prove the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives not by our gifts, but by our fruit. The people in Corinth did exactly what we have a tendency to do: focus on the gift, find the gift, look at what is happening over here — and in all that discussion and focus on the gift, we miss the greater quality. Love. That is what Paul comes back to again and again.
Truth Spoken in Love
How do we know we are loving people? We are patient, kind, and all that goes with it. What may be the ultimate evidence, though, is found in Ephesians 4:15: "speak the truth in love."
On Friday, I had a brief but wonderful conversation with a man who was radically converted years ago. His heart was changed, and whenever he talks about that moment and that Savior, it is impossible for him to do so without tears. Every time I have spoken with him about it, I see his lip quiver and I see him moved to deep emotion. But he has had some difficulty, because he is so focused on truth — and we are focused on truth — that truth, truth, truth can become everything to the exclusion of truth with love.
He said to me, "I think I've had a breakthrough." I asked what it was. He said, "Every year I've struggled with Santa Claus. Here's what I've realized: it's not that I need to get Santa Claus out of Christmas — it's that I need to get Jesus into Christmas." To me, that is truth with love. When we get sidetracked on peripheral issues, the right question to ask is: what is the loving thing to do? If we are asking ourselves that question, we are beginning to think with the supreme, permanent virtue.
Love Is the Attribute We Are Called to Emulate
Even faith and hope find the manifestation of themselves in love. Love is the attribute of God that we are called to emulate. Consider the attributes of God — we cannot model His immutability, for example. But we can model His love. In fact, we are commanded to.
The more I study this passage, the clearer it becomes that Paul is talking about the gifts but is not in any way diminishing them. He holds the gifts up, and yet he acknowledges our human reaction, which is typically to get swept away with the gift and forget the Giver of the gift — to get swept away with a gift and forget how it is to be used. It is to be used in love. Paul is saying to the Corinthians: wake up. You have all the gifts you need, you are pursuing these gifts, but you are missing the greater way. The greater way is love.
To prove this, Paul takes the three great gifts the Corinthians pursued — prophecy, tongues, and knowledge — and shows them that standing next to love, those gifts fade away. Love is not one virtue among many. It is the greatest. It is permanent. And it is the one thing we are told, above all else, to pursue.
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Father, help us be men and women who love. Let us pursue love. We understand how important gifts are, and we recognize the place of faith and hope. God, we acknowledge how weak we are and how imperfectly we see things. We look forward to the day when we will be with You and see You face-to-face. God, we pray that we would be a people marked by love, in Jesus' name. Amen.
We would model Your love, that our love for one another would never fail. God, we pray that all of those attributes that demonstrate love would be evidenced in our life, that we would be patient and kind and honest and forgiving, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping in all things, enduring all things. God, make us lovers, real lovers.
Father, I pray that we would take an honest inventory of our life to see if we are men and women, students, children, who fit this description of love. God, let us be individuals who are known by our love, and God, I pray that East Valley Bible Church would be known as a church that preeminently is a church of love, that we speak the truth in love. God, we know on our own we can't do that, but with Your grace and mercy, we can. Strengthen us through Your Spirit. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.