of this beautiful gem in God's Word which deals with the matter of love. Last week we saw together the preeminence of love and its portrait. We said that if there were such a thing, we could describe this chapter as a non-narrative biography of Jesus Christ, for these words beautifully describe our Lord in His dealings with us. We can go to the Gospels and find illustrations after illustrations which would give us insight to the phrases found in verses 4 through 7 where love is described.
Let's look again at those verses. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. We'll continue reading for our text today with verse 8. Love never fails, but where there are prophecies, they will cease.
Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection. Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part. Then I shall fully know, even as I am fully known.
Now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Isaac Watts, the great poet of Britain and the writer of many of our hymns, has fashioned a poem based upon 1 Corinthians 13, which captures some of the thoughts. Had I the tongues of Greeks and Jews, and nobler speech than angels use, if love be absent, I am found like tinkling brass, an empty sound. Were I inspired to preach and tell all that is done in heaven and hell, or could my faith the world remove?
Still I am nothing without love. Should I distribute all my store to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, or give my body to the flame to gain a martyr's glorious name? If love to God and love to man be absent, all my hopes are vain. Nor tongues, nor gifts, nor fiery zeal the work of love can e'er fulfill. Love is unique. One may be greatly gifted and even well known, but without love he is nothing. We have spoken concerning love's preeminence and its portrait.
Today we look in verses 8 through 13 at the permanence of love. Love is going to be around for all of eternity. You notice, for example, in verse 8, the first part of the verse, the permanence of love's power. Love never fails. Then the last part of verse 8 through verse 12, the permanence of love's place. And then in verse 13, the permanence of love's priority. Now let's go back and look at these one by one. First the permanence of love's power. Found in those three words, love never fails.
It doesn't say that love seldom fails, but it says that love never fails. That does not mean that love cannot be rejected. Nor does it mean that love cannot be refused. But it does mean that love never quits. It never stops. Its power goes on. That word fail is an interesting word that has a lot of ramifications. For example, it can mean and be referred to a petal that falls from the flower.
Love is a beautiful blossom that gives off a fragrance that can fill a home or a church with a fragrance that honors God and pleases people. Love never loses that fragrance. You and I can, but love will not. No petal from this blossom will ever fail or wither or fall down. It's a word that can be also used of a ship that goes off course during a storm. It means to lose control, something like those oil platforms in the North Sea this last week in the fury of that tempest.
Those platforms began to shift and to lose from their moorings. What it says here is that love never does that. It never goes off course. It never strays, despite the buffeting and the opposition that it may encounter. Love never fails. It is also used in the sense of collapsing or to suffer ruin, like a building that would be constructed and which would then collapse.
I have been told that when the towers, for example, up here in Shoreview were constructed, the twin towers, that one of them, after being half built, collapsed and killed five men who were working on it. Love is never in danger of doing that because love does not collapse under weight, under stress. Love never fails. As Solomon wrote, many waters cannot quench love. Just as God never changes and God never fails, so agape love, God's kind of love, never fails either.
We see it in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, a love that drove him onto Calvary's cross, though there were many opportunities whereby he could have stepped aside. But having loved his own, he loved them to the uttermost or to the end. He refused to be deterred from the direction that his love was driving him. His love nailed him to that cross, his love for you and for me.
Despite the fact that his own disciples turned against him, despite the fact that there were enemies that shouted for his crucifixion, Jesus Christ loved them as he loves us, and he died for the sins of the world. Some of us this morning were alive in 1929 when that fateful day came in which our economy collapsed. To put it simply and perhaps too simply, the demands of our economy were so great at that point that our banks were unable to sustain it.
And consequently, when the banks began to fail, the economy failed. And there was a great collapse causing some people to commit suicide because their whole life's work suddenly collapsed before them. Love is never that way. No matter how much demand is made upon love, it will not collapse and fail. There is power in this kind of love, the kind of love that loves the object despite the reaction of the object.
This is seen in the story of a young man who was imprisoned some years ago without the knowledge of his parents. He was in a distant state. Suddenly the word came to them that their son was imprisoned. Immediately they went to that city to visit their son. He heard that they had arrived and went to the visiting room in the prison sullen and prepared for angry recriminations against him. But instead, his parents only voiced loving concern for him.
He broke into tears overwhelmed by the love that they evidenced. And he said, I thought you would never forgive me, that you would disown me. They responded, why should we do that? You're our son and we only want to help you. Love perseveres. Love never fails. This kind of love is an unqualified love. It is not a love that says you act in this way and then I will react with love toward you. It is not this kind of love.
This kind of love is so deep and so foreign to the natural nature of men that it can be described only as God's love. It is a love that loves the object despite the reaction of the object. This constancy of love makes it a dynamic force which is unequal among men. It will never diminish in its power. Love never fails in spite of the action or the inaction of the one who is loved. Love never gives up. Do you know that kind of power in your love?
Are there those that you're ready to give up on this morning? Perhaps a husband or a wife or a child. Maybe it's a neighbor or a church member or that person at work who's been bugging you for years and you are ready to throw in the towel and say I give up. Love never gives up.
It has a permanence to its power and it reaches and reaches and reaches out to the object of its compassion even if that object spurns its compassion, its understanding, its patience, its kindness, its courtesy and all of the other things that we've talked about in verses four through seven. Love has an unlimited power to it. I believe today that more people have been brought to the faith in Jesus Christ and saved through sermons on the love of God than sermons on the wrath of God.
They are both true and they are set in a counterbalance to one another. Hell is as real as heaven is real. But it is the love of God that draws men. Now we see this displayed graphically in that story that Jesus told about the man who had two sons. And the younger of them said, give me my goods that I may go off and live the way I want to live. The father gave him the goods and he went out and squandered everything until he lost his reputation and his friends, his self-respect.
And then it says he came to himself and he said, I'm going back to my father. Why do you think that son wanted to go back home? It was because he knew that there he would find acceptance. He was willing to go home as a slave. He was willing to say to his father, make me like one of your hired servants. When he got back home, all he could get out of his mouth was, father, I have sinned. And his father with great depth of love threw his arms around his son and received him, welcomed him.
I believe that day after day that father had stood as it were out in his yard looking down the road for the return of his son. And on the day when he saw the figure of his son come down the road, there was nothing that could have stopped him from running to his son and receiving love. Love has great power and it's a permanent power. It never fails. Now notice with me secondly the permanence of love's place. Not everything is permanent like love. There are some things that are temporal.
In fact, most things are temporal, including the spiritual gifts. Now again, we have to remember where chapter 13 falls in 1 Corinthians. It is in the middle of a section that's dealing with spiritual gifts. This is a great problem to the church, according. Paul explains something about it in chapter 12 and more about it in chapter 14. And right in the middle of the two, he talks about love. And now we come to part of the reason as to why he does.
He wants to show to them that more important than spiritual gifts is their love for one another. He says, whether there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. In other words, the apostle is saying the spiritual gifts are for time only. They are temporary. They are transitory. They are unlike love, which has a permanent place. The gifts are transitory.
I don't believe that Paul is particularly speaking about tongues in these verses, but he does something very interesting here, which I'm going to ask you to file away for future reference. He does two things to indicate to us that tongues would be the most transitory of them all. He does say that both prophecies and knowledge will cease, but he also says tongues will be stilled. When he says that, he uses two different verbs.
This is not clear in the King James Version, nor is it clear in the version I have before me, the NIV. It is clear in the New American Standard. The same verbs apply to prophecies and knowledge. What he says here is that the gifts of prophecy and knowledge will be abolished, will be done away, will be set aside. We'll return to that thought in a moment. Concerning tongues, he uses a different verb, and he says it in a different way.
He says concerning the gift of tongues, they will be stilled, or they will cease. The thought is that they will stop by themselves. They will be stilled of themselves. They will cease of themselves. He sets them aside as different, in a category different, than both prophecy and knowledge. And then he does something else interesting. From that point on, when he refers to gifts in this chapter, he doesn't mention tongues, but he does mention prophecy and knowledge.
The strong implication being that before, prophecy and knowledge would be abolished. Tongues would already have ceased of themselves. I ask you simply to file that away, and we will come back to it at a later time when we talk more about the gift of tongues, which is obviously a very controversial gift today that some claim to have. But let's talk about what Paul is saying here. He is saying that more important than the spiritual gifts is love. Prophecy and knowledge, he says, will be abolished.
Look at verse 9. We know in part. We prophesy in part. In other words, the gift of knowledge, which the Holy Spirit gives now, is only partial. And the gift of proclaiming God's word, which he gives now, is only partial in its scope. It does not include all prophecy or all knowledge. But he says, when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. And so he tells us there when the spiritual gifts will be abolished, when they will be set aside and done away. And when is that? When perfection comes.
Now the word perfection here is a Greek word that means to come to fullness of maturity. It's not talking about sinlessness in this context. It's talking about something that is full grown, something that is culminated, something that is completed. That's the word for perfection. He describes the now as imperfect, as immature, as still working toward perfection. That perfection or maturity or full grownness will come. And he says when that comes, the gifts will be abolished.
There will be no need for them. Now there have been a number of thoughts as to what this refers to. There are some who argue that that which is mature here refers to the completion of the New Testament canon. It is that when the New Testament was written and completed, that there was no more need then for these spiritual gifts. Yet that seems rather hard to say in the fact that prophecy and knowledge are still with us.
So it seems difficult to me for one to argue very strongly that what is perfect here is the New Testament. I believe that what he is saying here is the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And more than that, the eternal state, when time will have ceased and eternity begins again. That state of culmination and perfection as it were. I think we see that in what is said later here in the chapter. He describes the now as being a poor reflection in verse 12.
He says, but then, obviously referring to the point of perfection he mentions earlier, then we shall see face to face. It seems to me that rather obviously he is speaking here about being face to face with the Lord Jesus Christ. Now we see a poor reflection. Corinth was well known for its mirrors. It was one of the industries there. They highly polished brass in order to get a reflection. The kind of mirrors that we have today of course were unknown at that time.
He says now we see as it were a reflection of things. But then when things are matured, when the full grown has come, when perfection comes, we will be face to face with Jesus Christ. There won't be any reflection. He also says now I know in part. Then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. God fully knows us right now, doesn't he? He knows all about us. But we only know partial things. But then in the future we shall know fully.
God's plans, God's program will be obvious for we shall look at it from the viewpoint of eternity. We shall stand in a timeless state and look upon time as a complete work and program of God. We will know it fully. We will see it as God sees it. So when he says that the gifts will be abolished, gifts like prophecy and knowledge, he's talking about that time when we will be in the Lord's presence. He illustrates it this way.
He says when I was a child I talked, I thought, and I reasoned like a child. But he says when I became a man I put those things behind me. In other words, he is saying that right now we are like in a childish state, a state of immaturity. But then we will be full grown. That's the thought in this very word perfection. He says then we will be as mature and we will put away those things that are part of childhood, referring to the gifts.
When we are with the Lord Jesus Christ, what will be the need for the gift of prophecy? There will be nothing to proclaim. All will be obvious. What will be the need for the gift of knowledge any further? For then all of us shall know fully. The gifts are intended so that we may minister to one another. At that time the body of Christ will be complete and mature and full grown and we will be with the Lord. The gifts will be set aside.
There will be no need for them in that state of eternity which is to come. But I emphasize again that what he says here is that tongues will cease of themselves and the implication is long before that state comes in the future. The permanence of love's place. The gifts are temporary. They are for time, but love is forever. Love will be around in eternity to come. We will talk about that again in a minute. As we come to verse 13, he speaks about the permanence of love's priority.
He says now these three remain. These three virtues or these three qualities or graces remain or abide. He names them faith, hope, and love. Have you ever noticed how often those three things appear together in Scripture? Sometimes take a concordance and trace it through and you will notice that five or six times in the New Testament faith, love, and hope all appear together. Not always in the same order. Not always right together as they are here, but within the same paragraph for example.
Let me show you an example of it. First Thessalonians chapter 1. Turn over there a second and I will show you what I mean. First Thessalonians chapter 1 and verse 3. He says, We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith and your labor prompted by love and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. So here is one example of those three words in one verse appearing together. Those three graces should abide in the life of every Christian.
Faith of course is that trust that rests upon God's word and which leads us to act. It causes us to labor for Jesus Christ. Faith produces action in the life. When you go to Hebrews chapter 11, the thing that stands out in that chapter besides the word faith is all the activity that faith inspired. Faith was not some kind of a feeling or an emotion that came over those people, but by faith they did something. Faith leads us to action.
It is faith that brings us into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. We are saved by faith through the channel of faith. After we are saved, faith is still a part of our walk. As we have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so we are to walk in him. We receive him by faith, we are to walk in him by faith. Faith is a part of the Christian life. Again, Hebrews chapter 11 illustrates that. All of those people were believers. By faith they did things.
May I say to you that God is pleased when you and I live by faith? May I also say that there are a few of us that do it? Did I include myself in that category? And not with much pride? We are so used to living in terms of our resources and what we can do. Faith is almost foreign to many of us. Last week I was with a friend who wanted to buy his wife some flowers for the Thanksgiving table, a centerpiece. He didn't have enough money to do it.
So he and his wife prayed about it for two or three days and nothing happened. No one showed up at the door with flowers or anything. He was in his office. This would have been Wednesday morning of this last week. And a friend of his came in the office and pulled off a book from his shelf and opened the book up. And inside this book, which my friend had bought for a dollar at some sale, were two twenty dollar bills.
And so the fellow that was holding the book said, hey have you ever looked at this commentary recently? And my friend said, well, no, not really, I just bought the book. He said, I think you ought to open that book up and look at it. There are lots of treasures in that book. So he took the commentary and opened it up, forty bucks. You know what he did? Went to the telephone and called the forest and ordered some flowers. He felt that that was an answer to their prayer.
When was the last time you prayed for flowers? Or for a parking place? Which is even more nitty gritty, isn't it? And now abide faith and hope. What is hope? Hope is biblical optimism. I don't belong to an optimist club, but I believe I am an optimist, but a realist at the same time. Our optimism is based not upon what we see around us or upon our trust in man's goodness, because that's kind of non-existent, but our optimism is based upon God's promises, you see.
Our future is as bright as the promises of God, as someone has said. We ought to be biblical optimists. That's what hope is. It is an optimism about the future. We look around us today in this country and we see the morals going downhill and our economy is in trouble and all kinds of problems with Russia and terrorism. Why, it seems like a hopeless situation. It's not. It's not because God is still on the throne. And because He's on the throne, there is hope. Man can't live without hope.
Does hope possess you? Or do circumstances come crashing down on your life and raining on your parade? Don't allow them to do that. Maintain hope. Don't get your eyes off the fact that we have a blessed hope to look forward to. Allow that hope to keep bubbling within you, an optimism about the future, about God's promises, because God has got some great things in store for us. The best is yet to come. The best. Faith, hope, and love.
Now we've talked a lot about love last week and this week, so I don't want to say a lot more about it, but love is that which prompts me to sacrifice for others, including my wife, my children, my fellow workers, my friends, my neighbors. Love causes me to reach out to them, to do good for them, to be kind and to be patient with them. Love helps me not pass along bad reports about them, but to maintain a controlled tongue to be silent.
Love causes me to rejoice when truth prevails, not to rejoice over iniquity. Faith, hope, and love. These three abide, and folks, they ought to be in our lives every day of the week. They're evidence of a spirit-filled life. There's one sense, I suppose, in which these graces will forever abide together. As someone has said, faith will go on possessing God more fully.
Hope never ceases to catch new glimpses of his glory in the wonder of eternity, and love will forever seal the child of God to his heavenly Father. But it is interesting to me that in this verse it does say that the greatest of these is love. And what I see there is love's priority and the permanence of it. Now why does it say that love is the greatest? Let me suggest several reasons why that might be so.
In the first place, because both faith and hope will find culmination in the Lord's presence. Here's what I mean by that. When we are face to face with the Lord Jesus Christ, there will be any more need, in one sense, for faith. For faith will then be sight. And hope will be culminated in his presence. But love, it will persist. It will continue. In Ephesians chapter 3, Paul prays that those believers may know the depth and the width and the length and the height of the love of Christ.
And then he says that you might know the unknown. That's the unpossessable, the love of Christ. There is no way that we can ever say love is culminated or love is ended. Love is eternal. In that sense it's the greatest. But there's a second reason I think it says it's the greatest. And that is that love is the essence of God. It does not say in the New Testament that God is faith or that God is hope. But it does say that God is love.
That word is so significant that it can be said that God is love. God is agape. So much does it describe his nature. Perhaps that's the reason that it says it is the greatest. A third reason that it may say it's the greatest is that love is the root of the other two. For if you go back to verse 7 you find that love trusts and love hopes. There's faith and hope. And love is that which produces it. It is an outworking of love.
And so in that sense, because love is the root of the other two, perhaps it says here it is the greatest. I want to suggest another reason why love is the greatest. Hope and faith are for ourselves, but love is for others. And finally may I suggest another reason why love is the greatest. It is because love is that which will be illustrated and incarnated for redeemed mankind forever. What do I mean by that? Have you ever wondered if Jesus Christ will return to his spirit form?
After all of redemption has now been taken care of and after it's all applied, and all the redeemed are with the Lord, and time has ended, and new heaven and new earth, and eternity has begun again. Have you ever wondered if Jesus Christ, God the Son, will return to spirit and lay aside the body in which he incarnated himself in Bethlehem? I believe that there's ample reason to think that Jesus Christ will never do that.
That we will always be able to look upon God the Son in glorified human form. Why do I say that? If you go to the book of Revelation, chapters 21 and 22 sometime, you'll remember that those chapters deal with eternity to come. Time has ended, eternity has begun again. It's far in the future. It describes there the new heaven and the new earth. It describes the new Jerusalem, which it would seem will be the center of that recreated heaven and earth.
From it the glory of the Lamb, it says, shines throughout the universe. It lights that whole city and beyond. In chapters 21 and 22, the name that is used again and again and again for Jesus Christ is that name, the Lamb. It's the name that is seen for the first time, I think, in Revelation. Back in chapter 5, where John is caught up into the presence of God and is overwhelmed by all he sees. But then in chapter 5, he notices that there is a scroll.
Some of you have been studying Revelation on Tuesday nights, and this is review for you. But there is a scroll that is there, and the question is asked, who is worthy to open the seals of that scroll? And no one is worthy. And John begins to weep because there is no one there who is qualified to open the seals of that scroll. And then an angel says, don't weep, for the lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed. A lion. And then it says John turned around and he saw, not a lion, but a what?
A lamb. A lamb as though it had been sacrificed. In other words, that lamb, which represents Jesus Christ, had upon it the marks, the wounds of sacrifice. Now that's in heaven. There's no indication that those wounds ever disappear, or that the lamb is ever found in a different form than John sees him there in chapter 5.
The point is this, throughout eternity to come, you and I will be reminded of the significance of love, because you and I will look upon the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, and we will see the wounds in his hands and his feet, and we will remember that he was sacrificed for our sins. That's the greatest illustration that love could ever have. Love has a permanent priority, because it will be illustrated forever in the person of Jesus Christ.
My friend, God has loved you so much that that's what he's done for you. He has given his Son for your sins. Isn't that marvelous? He has made it possible for us someday to be face to face, as it says here, with himself. Now frankly, I don't know all that that phrase, face to face, implies. But it at least means this, there is no closer communion than two people can have than to be face to face.
There's the phrase that is used to describe the fellowship, the relationship between God and the Word in John chapter 1. They were face to face, it says, in union. And that very same phrase is used of you and me, for saved, face to face, in the closest kind of union with God. How can that be? Well, because Christ has died for our sins. He's made us worthy through giving us his righteousness so that we can stand before God and know that kind of communion and union with God.
But we can't wait till then to make that decision to trust Christ. We have to do that now. Now in the childhood state, now in the temporal state, now during lifetime. This is the time of decision. If you have never trusted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, I hope that you will do it today. Because you see, we do not know how long we have in this life.
This last week, the students at Faith Baptist Bible College down in Ankeny, Iowa were released for Thanksgiving, just like most other college students. They all drove toward home, but there was one student in the state of Iowa who on his way home had a head-on collision and was instantly in the presence of his Lord. You see, because we're college students, doesn't mean that we have forever. Doesn't mean we have 70 years. We don't know how long we have in this world.
That's why it is so critically important that when we understand our need for Jesus Christ to come into our lives and to save us, that we make the decision then to do it. If you've never done it, I hope you will today. For those of us who have made that decision, let us remember the permanence of love. We are never going to be beyond the boundary of love. We will always be within its arms. And so let us live a life that is controlled by love.
Let us surrender our lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ so that the fruit of the Spirit in our lives may be love. Let's bow together. That's easy for us to talk about love and to think of it in general terms, but could I ask you to think just a moment, allow the Holy Spirit to probe your mind a little bit, to stimulate you to think. Who is it among your family or friends or fellow employees, who is it that today or tomorrow needs to sense the love of God through you?
Who needs to sense that patience, that kindness, that goodness, that forgiveness? Will you allow God to bring to your mind one individual, at least, to whom you may manifest the love of God? Now with that person in mind, will you silently pray and say, Lord, you know how difficult it is for me to love that person, but love that person through me. Show me what to do that I may express love, love undeserved for that individual.
Father, I pray that you will take love from the level of just emotion and make it the controlling factor of our lives so that it will control the words that we say, even the way that we say our words. Because love to control our thoughts, our motives, and of course our deeds, cause us to live, to think, to speak like Jesus, love incarnate.
I pray that that individual or those individuals that you have brought to our mind in the quietness of these moments will be warmed and will respond positively to the love that you will exhibit through us to him or them. But even if there isn't that warm response, I pray that you will love them through us anyway, and then again and again. And I pray, Father, for some friend who may be here who has never responded to your love and received your Son as Savior.
As we close this service, may there be the opening of the heart and the reaching out by faith to receive Christ. Now let's stand together. I'd like for us to open our hymnals and to say in number 306, which speaks of the Lamb of God, let's stand together. Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
If today there is a need in your life for a public response of some kind, there is an issue about which God has been dealing with you, and we encourage you to come as we sing this closing hymn of our service. God may meet that need today. Perhaps you need to come to trust Christ or to settle some matter between you and your Savior. If you need to come, respond to Him now. He loves you. Let's sing. Just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.