The qualities of love, “Kindness, patience...enduring all things,” sound great when we are on the receiving end, but not so much when we apply them to loving others.
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” I Corinthians 13:13
Years as a bachelor have provided me with immense opportunities to grow in my faith and hope. Isolation and independence have allowed me to focus on my studies and they have freed up my schedule to throw myself into ministry. Although lonely, these years have been helpful in my development of spiritual growth. I can understand why the Apostle Paul would emphasize singleness in devotion to Christ in I Corinthians 7.
But all of my studies and theorizing have not afforded me the opportunity to really put the principles of love to the test. All of that has already begun to change.
Since I became engaged last summer, I’ve been reading through I Corinthians 13 regularly in preparation for my wedding this spring. The text is meant to be reassuring, and after an initial reading we are left with romantic notions, but as we closely examine the text, it reveals an overwhelming picture of where our expectations of being loved are confronted with the reality of loving others.
Nothing Ventured Nothing Gained
I Corinthians 13 was written as a reprimand to a Church that couldn’t get their act together. The qualities of love, “Kindness, patience...enduring all things,” sound great when we are on the receiving end, but not so much when we apply them to loving others.
Loving someone is hard. Of course, we are not the problem. We are easy to love. That’s what the Corinthian believers thought. They looked at their spiritual gifts as a measuring rod for God’s favor. Knowledge had puffed them up, being in the spotlight had gone to their heads, and sacrificing for the benefit of the less fortunate had made them bitter that they were giving away more than they were receiving.
In contrast to I Corinthians 13:1-3, God can speak in every language imaginable and commands His angels to do His bidding. He not only knows the future, but He holds it in the palm of His hand. He created the mountains and could remove them in an instant. Furthermore, He sacrificed His only Son on our behalf.
It’s easy to love those who are loveable. Especially when they love us back. Jesus said the greatest example of love is someone who lays down his life for his friend. But we weren’t friends of God. We were His enemies. It was while we were still sinning that Christ humbled Himself and died for us. That is the perfect expression of love.
We need to be honest about ourselves and acknowledge our selfish misconceptions about love. No one could ever offend us as much as we have offended Christ and we could never love anyone as much as Christ loves us. Looking to the example of Jesus should inspire us to love one another as He loves us.
Great Expectations
Whenever someone tries to define love, it somehow falls short of our lofty imaginations. People like to debate whether love is either an emotion or a choice. I would like to suggest that love is as much of an emotion and a choice as its counterpart. There are times that we can be overwhelmed by hate, but we also make active choices that fuel our anger.
Whether it is a choice or an emotion, it seems that it is the intention behind love that makes the difference. We give love with the expectation of it being returned, hopefully with interest. When love is not reciprocated, we withhold our affections, hoping in some way that by decreasing the supply we might manipulate the market’s demand.
Love is not a commodity. It may not always be easy and doing everything right may not always produce a return on our investment, but for the believer it is the greatest resource that we could ever possess and it only increases in quantity and value the more that we give it away.
We seem to think that we take a great risk by loving people; that we give away a piece of ourselves whenever we open up our heart. In truth, love might not always feel like a good personal investment, but when we are truly loving others, we are making an eternal investment and our treasures are stored in heaven.
What Our Hearts Long For
When we look at love in the context of the gospel, it is a beautiful picture and exactly what our hearts long for. But how do we put it into practice?
First, we need to abide in faith, hope, and love. It is not enough to simply have an intellectual understanding of how they work, we need to sit with them for a while. Faith teaches us to count the promises of God as more true than our own reality. Hope teaches us to trust in God for what we cannot see. Love teaches us to rest in the assurance of God’s grace and mercy that we do not deserve.
But abiding in these three elements of God’s disclosure must propel us to share what we have been given. This is what makes love the greatest of the three. Not just that it captures our hearts, but it compels us to love one another.
“We love because he first loved us.” (I John 4:19)
“If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (I John 4:11)