A Word about the Greatest Gift of All

Today I want to share a word about the best gift of all as I comment on 1 Corinthians 13.

This is the last of four episodes in which we have explored the gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

Previously we have looked at how Christians are empowered by the Spirit for ministry, and we have also discussed the free gift of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual gifts He gives us. The last time we were together we explored the sign gifts.

All of God’s gifts to His children are wonderful, but the best of all, according to Paul is the gift of loving people the way God does. In 1 Corinthians 12:31, Paul instructed the Church at Corinth, 

But earnestly desire the higher gifts.
And I will show you a still more excellent way. 

THE WAY OF LOVE:

Love, while probably the most common topic for movies, books, and songs, is also one of the most misunderstood topics of those literary genres.  An example of this is the infamous line from the movie Love Story:  "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Huh? What does that even mean? 

A better way of describing love was told to me by a Warrant Officer in my National Guard unit years ago. He had just lost his mother to a long and difficult illness, and he said to me with tears in his eyes, “Chaplain, no one ever loves you like your mother.”

Love is also often a precious commodity in the church.  It was for good reason that evangelist Vance Havner once said: "You can be as straight as a gun barrel theologically, and just as empty spiritually."  

Paul taught the Corinthian church and us about God's love.

LOVE ENRICHES:  

 Verses 1-3 say:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

There is only one goal for God's type of love. It isn’t to get something in return for the love given. It isn’t to make a show of bestowing love. It is solely intended to enrich to one loved.

My brother-in-law once said, “Now that we don’t farm the way we used to when we needed large families to all the work we do today with machines, there is no logical reason to have kids; you have them to give love to them."

Paul, who was quite gifted in ministry and leadership made a powerful point here: It does not matter what gift you if you don’t have love. You may be a great leader but without love you will be ineffective. You may be a great supporter but without love your support is useless. You may do miracles but without love they'll just be a sideshow. A skilled surgeon who doesn't care can cause death just like one who isn’t skilled.

 God is our Model of enriching love by: 

• Creating the world.

• Sending His Only Begotten Son.

• Sending His Holy Spirit.

• Preparing mansions for us in Heaven.

LOVE EDIFIES:

Verses 4-7 say:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

To reach its goal, love must act; love is not a feeling, it is action. We may not feel affectionate about someone you but can still love them because love is a behavior, not an attitude. In our youth group in my home church, we had a saying, "You don't have to like me, but you do have to love me."

 Love acts in the best interest of the one who is loved. Love does not lose patience and it allows for mistakes. Love gives the benefit of the doubt, and it doesn't jump to conclusions. Love is empathetic and helps us feel the way others do.

God is our Model of enriching love in action:

• When we hated Him, He loved us.

• When we slandered Him, He gave us His truth in the Bible.

• When we abandoned Him, He chose us.

 The truth is that God loves us even better than a mother does.

LOVE ENDURES: 

Verse 8 tells us:

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

 Verse 13 also affirms this idea:

 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love has a goal, a method, and a guarantee. True love will never end. Infatuation, lust, and affection fade, but love doesn't. You can't really fall out of God’s type of love because while our abilities and gifts will end; love won't 

Love will never end because it is a gift from God. This kind of love comes only from God, who is our Model of enduring love. God is eternal, and so is His love. We must turn to God for this type of love.

LOVE GROWS WITH EXPERIENCE: 

Verses 9-12 teach us:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Loving like this is not a natural act. Naturally we are selfish, and self-centered. Naturally we prefer it if other others don’t succeed (less competition for us). In our natural state, we would make this hell on earth. All we have to do to prove that is to point the ethnic cleansing that took place in Hitler’s Germany, in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda. 

Loving like this is not a natural act so it takes time to learn to love like God does. We must be taught and nurtured, and we must practice, and make mistakes. We must grow in the Lord. 

For all of this we need: to be transformed by God, by being saved in Jesus. We need the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome our own weakness. We need the willingness to be taught and corrected. 

Paul is our model of growing love. In Him we see the power of God to place the love of God in our hearts and the practice of God’s love in our lives. 

He went from being an accomplice to murder and a persecutor of the Church to becoming the first Christian missionary and to writing half of the New Testament including this treatise on love we have examined today.

Paul could not have such an amazing life change without the power of God, which He gave to Paul through the Holy Spirit. I am grateful that this same gift and same power is available to us, God’s people today.

CONCLUSION:

Seek the gift of loving the way God does. It will bless Him! It will bless you! It will bless those God puts in your life! What better gift could we want? 

Every blessing, 

Dr. Otis Corbitt