Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

This year my wife, Kim, and I celebrated 30 years of marriage.

When we said “I do” back in 1992, we had no idea of the roller coaster ride that was ahead of us.

We just knew that we were madly in love with each other.

We also made this agreement early in our marriage.

We were not going to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

In our youth we were cynical about the commercialization of Valentine’s Day and the cultural pressure to spend money on chocolates and flowers and cards and other gifts.

We refused to have the expression of our love reduced to a single day.

We held the line for several years, but after the third of our four children came along we gave in.

Here’s how it happened.

The college students at our church decided to bless the parents of young children by babysitting all the children of the church so that the parents could have a Valentine’s date night.

What parent of young children is going to turn down that opportunity?

It became an annual event!

My children are now grown.

No need for babysitting.

But here’s the deal, once you start celebrating V Day, there’s no turning back!

Once you do it one time, it’s over.

You have now established an unbreakable tradition.

Sometimes it’s just a card and a kiss.

Sometimes it’s jewelry.

Sometimes it’s chocolate.

Sometimes, it’s a date.

But it’s always something!

Our celebration of Valentines Day is an abiding one!

It has in some respects become a symbol of our abiding love for each other.

You see, there are all kinds of ways in our relationships that we can forget about and neglect the primacy and priority of love.

This is particularly true in the body of Christ.

We know that Jesus said the greatest commandment is “you shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, mind, and strength.

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

He said, on this rest all the law and the prophets.

We know Jesus said that the church’s witness to the world is our love, “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We may have even heard the apostle Paul say in Romans 13:8 “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

Let me ask you this question family.

When those who have not come to faith in Christ look at the church, do they gaze in amazement because our life together displays an abiding, self-sacrificing, attractive love?

Is Jesus attractive to those outside of the church because those who claim to know him demonstrate a supernatural love for one another?

If not, could it be that we too often neglect the primacy and priority of love?

I want to focus on three things from this familiar passage 1 Corinthians 13.

Transforming Love.

Connecting Love Relates.

Enduring Love.

Transforming Love

Love transforms.

Let’s situate ourselves in the lifeworld of the 1st century church in Corinth.

After being destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, Corinth was rebuilt under Julius Caesar in 44 BC as a modern, planned city.

It served as the capital city of the province of Achaia.

As a center of government and trade, Corinth was characterized by the power that the Roman presence represented and the wealth brought in by the commerce.

You could describe Corinth with four P’s, powerful, prosperous, pluralistic, and promiscuous.

Because it was a crossroads for trade, it was also a crossroads for ideas and religions.

Not only that, but over time the phrase, “to live like a Corinthian,” came to mean to live a life of immorality.

Paul shows up in Corinth around 49 or 50 AD, while on his second missionary journey.

We find out in Acts 18:11 that he stayed there, working in his tent-making trade and teaching the word of God for a year-and-a-half.

After leaving Corinth, Paul went to Ephesus, where he wrote this letter sometime between 52-55 AD.

What’s more, 1 Corinthians isn’t the first letter he wrote to them after he left.

He refers to a previous letter in 5:9-10 when he says,

I bring all this background up for two reasons.

To give you a sense of what life was like for people trying to live as Christians in that city.

And, to point out that what we find Paul saying in this "love chapter” is intimately connected to who they are called to be in that city as they bear witness to Jesus Christ.

They are sanctified, set apart by God through faith in Christ.

Declared holy and called to be saints/holy ones together with every believer in every place.

And in the first three verses of chapter 13 is they are exhorted by Paul to grasp the reality that the love they have been brought into is one that transforms them from self-centered idolaters to self-sacrificial lovers of God and neighbor.

Look at the three negative statements in vv.

1-3.

If don’t have love, I am a noisy gong and clanging symbol, v. 1.

If I don’t have love, I am nothing, v. 2. If I don’t have love, I gain nothing, v3.

The Corinthians’ problem is that they were so wrapped up in the gifts that the Spirit gives, they ignored the Giver of the gifts, evidenced by the fact that they lived like those gifts were their own personal possession for their own personal benefit.

He told them in chapter 12:4-6,

Then he says at the end of chapter 12,

At the beginning of chapter 14 he comes back around to desiring spiritual gifts,

So the issue is not with the gifts themselves or with their desiring spiritual gifts.

The issue is that every aspect of their lives is supposed to demonstrate the transforming power of Christ and his gospel.

They have been brought into God’s abiding love through faith in Christ.

That love is to flow through them to their brothers and sisters.

So speaking in tongues, human or angelic, absent of love, having the gift of prophecy absent of love, giving away my goods or sacrificing my body apart from love is the equivalent of idolatry.

Without love I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Without love I am nothing.

Without love I gain nothing.

This describes the impact of idolatry.

When the prophet Elijah confronted the 450 prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, and from morning to midday they cried out to Baal, louder and louder that he would bring fire.

The writer says in v. 29, “No one answered.

No one paid attention.”

All their noise amounted to nothing.

In Jeremiah 2, the Lord says to his people in v. 5

You went after nothing and became nothing.

Then, later in that same chapter, Jeremiah says in v. 17, “you’ve forsaken the LORD.”

What do you gain going to Egypt to drink the waters of the Nile?

What do you gain by going to Assyria to drink the waters of the Euphrates?

The answer is “nothing!”

Listen, the love of God in Christ works to transform us from self-centered idolaters to loving servants of the living God.

God’s immense, deep love pursued hard after us to bring us into his family, transforming us.

And it is a love that will not let us go.

Paul is giving them this corrective word because he knows that the end of the story for God’s people is an abiding love that flows from God to his people, and through his people to the world.

Connecting Love

And this transforming love is a connecting love that works itself out in diverse and difficult relationships with others.

Look at vv. 4-6 again with me.

Paul describes and defines love by how it acts.

What it does and does not do.

He brackets it with two positives fills the middle with five negatives.

Love is a reality that’s difficult to capture in words.

It is a term of deep endearment.

It carries with it a sense of affection and care.

I tell my wife everyday, “I love you.”