Love never fails
Love is—1 Corinthians 13 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 27:17
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· 133 viewsLove never fails. That is how the apostle Paul ends his description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. But why does love never fail, and how does it make a difference that it never fails? It turns out that love's infallibility is a key aspect of love that underpins the universe. To find out how, have a listen as we conclude our series on the "love chapter."
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Introduction
Introduction
After our break for Easter, we come to the final words in Paul’s famous chapter on love. Paul wanted to explain to the church at Corinth what love really was, because they were hopelessly confused, as we often are.
As usual, we’ll read the whole chapter for context, but the words we’re focusing on today are the first part of verse 8.
I’ve chosen to use the Message this time, as I did over Easter. Bear in mind that, with this passage, Eugene Peterson has taken the Biblical text and elaborated on it. Nonetheless, I think he captures the ideas and feelings that Paul is conveying quite well. Let’s read.
Bible
Bible
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
3 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
4 Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
5 Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
6 Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
7 Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. 9 We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. 10 But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
Is this love?
Is this love?
Let me ask you which of these three scenarios you think best illustrates genuine love.
A man creates an elaborate proposal, involving a horse-drawn carriage, Paris, the eiffel tower, a string ensemble, and a massive diamond engagement ring, all to impress his bride. But, once they’re married, he quickly gets bored and abandons his wife for a new woman.
A normal romance culminates in a nice meal and a traditional proposal, but the marriage settles into a grudging cohabitation.
A low-key romance is followed by constant, unstinting support for the rest of the couples’ lives, even through suffering.
Which of these three do you think is most representative of genuine love? Why?
If you have ever read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd you might realise that the main character of the book, Bathsheba Everdene, encounters this sort of decision. She opts for the early extravagance of a flashy soldier, and then a wealthy farmer, and she suffers as a result. In the end, after all of this suffering, she finds the steady love of the shepherd Gabriel Oak is her final refuge.
God’s love
God’s love
Now, Thomas Hardy comes from the romantic era in art, which prioritised the emotions over the “cold truth,” but Hardy was himself a “Victorian realist,” part of a movement that valued facing up to reality, not matter how difficult it was. As a result of this and his pessimistic atheism, his work tends to be quite dark. If you’ve read or watched Tess of the d’Urbavilles you know depressing his work can be. But in Far from the Madding Crowd, his first successful work, Hardy recognises an important reality: genuine love is not flashy or proud, but it is powerful, and a large part of that power comes from it’s constancy—the fact that it endures, it never fails.
Paul emphasizes this in his final words on love.
In verse 7 he has told us that:
7 Love is always supportive,
loyal, hopeful,
and trusting.
As I mentioned in my last sermon on this verse, there are many ways to interpret these four verbs. This version is from the Contemporary English Version of the Bible. The New Living Translation, which is what we normally use in our sermons, translates the sentence this way:
7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
In either case you can see that the main point that Paul is trying to get across is simple:
1 Corinthians 13:8 (CEV)
8 Love never fails!
Just as the shepherd, Gabriel Oak never stopped loving Bathsheba Everdene, despite her foolish mistakes and rejection of him, God never stops loving us, no matter how brutally we reject him.
In the Greek, the word translated in the CEV as “fails” (and in the ESV as “ends”) simply means to fall, as in to fall down. It refers to the rain, to a person falling down drunk or in worship or in death, and so on.
Love never falls over, like the imaginary Energizer bunny, it keeps on going on and on and on. There is a significant difference of course: an endlessly drumming bunny would quickly get very annoying, whereas love, genuine love, is never annoying.
Why never failing is important
Why never failing is important
Paul spends the whole second half of the chapter we read earlier emphasizing that love never fails. He points to all the spiritual things the Corinthians value—prophesying, speaking in tongues, possessing spiritual knowledge—all this, he says, will pass away. Ultimately, only three things will remain: faith, hope and love. And the most significant, the most important, the greatest of these is love.
Why does Paul make such a point of love’s enduring nature? Why is it so important that it never fail?
I think this is related to what love is, what it does in reality, and where it comes from.
John says “God is love.” God has always been love. In the eternity before time, before creation, when God alone existed, he was love, because he was three in one. The Father loved the Son, who loved the Spirit, who loved the Father, and so on. This mutual love is what the world is built on. The interdependence of all things in creation—the way that ecosystems work via diverse species supporting one another; the way that molecules work via diverse atomic elements bonding together; the way that human families and societies work via diverse people caring for one another—all this is merely a pale reflection of those incredible bonds of love at the heart of the triune God—one God in three persons. Even the devestation of the fall—the corruption of Satan and selfishness—has not been able to loose the bonds that bind the universe!
When we love, we are participating in the deepest law, the deepest pattern, the deepest reality underpinning the cosmos. Love is not merely a choice. It is not merely an emotion. It is not merely a posture, an attitude, or a lifestyle. Love profoundly transforms the reality we dwell in, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. When Paul says that “the greatest of these is love,” he is, if anything, underplaying the profound importance of love.
The apostle John is not exaggerating when he says,
14 If we love our brothers and sisters who are believers, it proves that we have passed from death to life. But a person who has no love is still dead.
Without love for one another, we have no life. We have only death. As John says later in his letter:
7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God is love.
And so we see why genuine love never fails. Genuine love, God’s love—love from God—is the source of life, it is core to who God is. And God is eternal—he is never-ending, never changing. And so love is the same.
What does this mean?
What does this mean?
So what does this mean for us, then? If genuine love never fails, what does that mean? How does it affect the way with live?
Think for a moment about your own hangups. Think about your fears, your worries, your insecurities. Why did you get angry with someone the other day? Why can’t I just get things done when I want to? What is it that’s holding us back from making friends, from sharing Jesus with our neighbours, from caring unselfishly for our children and spouses and siblings and parents and friends?
I think when we dig deep into our behaviour, and why we don’t live like Jesus, what we find is a fear that we’ll be abandoned.
I don’t share Jesus with my neighbour when I can because I’m afraid of being embarrassed by appearing to be peddling a fantasy. But if I could trust that Jesus love would not fail, that my neighbour would encounter that love just as surely as I do, then I need not be afraid.
I defend myself aggressively when my wife complains about something because I’m afraid that no-one will protect me if I don’t stick up for myself. But if I was confident in God’s unfailing love, and its genuine impact in my life (not just some theoretical “makes me feel better” impact, but something that really strengthens me and protects me), then I wouldn’t feel any need to defend myself, and instead I could really listen to my wife and take her complaints seriously to help me love her better.
So much of our lives is lived so weakly because we don’t actually believe that God’s love never fails. Instead, we believe that God’s love barely even exists, at least in any meaningful way.
But God’s love does exist.
And because God’s love exists, we can show that same love to others. We can be patient, kind, never envious, boastful, arrogant, disrespectful, or self-seeking. We can refuse to tally wrongs against us and so escape irritability, and we can rejoice in the truth instead of in wrongdoing. We can always be supportive, always hope for and believe for the best, enduring patiently. And, like God, our love can go on and on, never falling, never failing, a rock for those who need us.
This is what God calls us to, through Paul’s words in this letter to Corinth. It is a hard calling, a challenge to the best of us. But it is a call for all Christians, young and old, fresh and wizened, inexperienced and experienced.
A discipline of love
A discipline of love
How can we do this?
I have a suggestion for a sort of spiritual practice that might make this easier. My suggestion is that each day, when we wake up, we take one of these attributes of love, we reflect on how God has shown his love to us in that attribute, and then we pray that God will help us to show that to the people we interact with this day.
So, for example, if we start with patience, we’ll think about how God has been patient with us, how even though he knows how wicked our hidden thoughts us, he still patiently works with and in us. And then we pray for God to give us patience with those we encounter today, and for him to rescue us from the temptation towards impatience.
Each day we can focus on a different aspect of God’s love, until we come to the end and start again.
Perhaps, by doing this at the start of each day, we can sensitise ourselves to God’s amazing love, and ease ourselves into this beautiful river of life, so that we become Jesus’ hands and feet and mouth in this world.
I can print out a set of these cards that you can place beside your bed for anyone who wants them, so please come and ask me afterwards, or email me, and I’ll print out a set.