Paul exhorts us in Christian love (1 Cor. 13:4-7)

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Special Topic: Paul Exhorts Us in Christian Love (1 Cor. 13:4-7)

Prepared and preached by Pastor Steve Rhodes for and at Bethel Friends Church in Poland, OH on Sunday, September 7, 2025

In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.[1]

My theme today is:

Paul exhorts us in Christian love:

  1. Context:
    1. As we reach 1 Corinthians 13, we are in the third of three chapters in which Paul writes about spiritual gifts.
    2. 1 Corinthians 12 is written about the theology of spiritual gifts.
    3. 1 Corinthians 13 is written about the motivation behind spiritual gifts.
    4. 1 Corinthians 14 is written about the practice of spiritual gifts.
    5. The Corinthian church was a divided church.
    6. I remember sitting in a New Testament class at Indiana Wesleyan University. The professor shared how when he was a pastor he would hear people say, “We want to be like the New Testament church.” He would say, “Really, do you want to be like the church in Corinth that was divided over communion [see 1 Cor. 11:18]?”
    7. The thesis of 1 Corinthians is in 1 Corinthians 1:10:
    8. 1 Corinthians 1:10 (NASB95)
    9. Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.
    10. By the time we get to 1 Corinthians 13, Paul has already written about many subjects, among them, but not limited to: marriage (1 Cor. 7); food sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8-10); the Lord’s supper (1 Cor. 11); and now spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12-14).
    11. Now, we get into the motivation behind spiritual gifts.
    12. This is the character of Christian agapē. The word agapē is not uniquely Christian. Christians likely derived it from the Septuagint, where it is often used of God’s love, not ordinary human love. It is a unique privilege to be a bearer, by means of the Spirit, of God’s love. This love differs from both natural human affection (philia, so-called brotherly love) and erōs (desiring love, usually related to physical attraction).29,[2]
  2. Love is:
    1. One source shares: The point of Paul’s rhetorically polished description of love is its contrast to what he has earlier said about the attitudes of the Corinthians. [3] Remember, earlier Paul wrote about how the Corinthians were divided. But now, look how he describes love:
    2. 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)
    3. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
    4. Again from Dr. Witherington III:
    5. The setting of ch. 13 makes evident that Paul is not talking about “natural” human love, but of a sort of love that a human being can only express and share when he or she has been touched by God’s grace and enabled by God’s Spirit. It goes quite against natural human inclinations to love the unlovely or those who do not love in return. Agapē love, as V. P. Furnish has aptly said, is not the sort of love that is dispatched like a heat-seeking missile due to something inherently attractive in the “target.”40
    6. Now, Paul starts to define love.
    7. In Greek, these are verbs, but in English, they are adjectives.
    8. Verbs are action statements. For example, running, walking, etc. Adjectives modify something. The color is red. Or, Jane is patient.
    9. Love is patient and kind:
      1. These are a pair.
      2. Tim Keller makes this come alive:
    10. Patient means, literally, suffers a long time. In fact, as we’ll see in a minute, one of the essential characteristics of love is that you stay vulnerable. When you’re getting beaten, you don’t immediately retreat. Being patient is an amazing thing.
    11. By the way, this is just a story that has always meant so much to me. Edwin Stanton was Abraham Lincoln’s political opponent. When Abraham Lincoln was running for office … You have to remember Abraham Lincoln was a Midwesterner. He was considered a hick, and he was called a hick by Edwin Stanton. He was called a gorilla. Have you ever noticed that? Abraham Lincoln does look a bit like a gorilla. He does. He called him a gorilla. He called him a monstrosity. He called him a hick. He called him all kinds of things.
    12. When Abraham Lincoln won the election and he looked around to find the most able person possible to be his Secretary of War or Secretary of the Military, he chose Edwin Stanton. He chose him and put him in his Cabinet. He put up with an amazing amount of stuff and turned him into his friend because he said, “I know this man is great.” When Abraham Lincoln lay dead, at his funeral Stanton was there. He got up in tears and said, “Here lies the greatest ruler among men in the earth.” Just amazing. Patience was the way in which Abraham Lincoln loved him.[4]
    13. If we look at Gal. 5:22-23, we see patience is a fruit of the Spirit.
    14. How are we doing with patience? We can be patient because the Holy Spirit is within us.
    15. Do we snap at others when they ask for something? What about traffic? Are we patient when waiting in traffic? I struggle with this. Most recently, driving through Chicago on the way to Wisconsin was a test of my patience. Driving on the Indiana Turnpike on the way home was a test of my patience. How are you doing with this? I want to do better.
    16. [Love] does not envy or boast: Again, these are pairs, and they are reflective of problems in Corinth. Do we envy what others have and that leads to boasting? Are we boastful? Why do we say the things we say? Are we trying to “one-up” someone else? In other words, if someone claims to have done something, do we feel compelled to say, “Well, yes, I did that too”? Or do we always feel like we need to defend ourselves? Why? Why not let someone else have the credit?
    17. [Love] is not arrogant or rude: These pairs go along with the previous. Love is humble. We are not trying to look better than someone else. How are we doing?
    18. [Love] does not insist on its own way: Perhaps an indirect reference to their unruly and dishonorable conduct in worship (11:18–22).[5] This is a real gut check. Do we insist on our own way? Someone once told me that he did not agree with something but he would not make an issue of it. That is more of the Christian way.
    19. [Love] is not irritable or resentful: Are we irritable? Do we express bitterness?
    20. [Love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. One source shares: does not delight in evil- As they were doing in [1 Cor. 5].[6] This is one in which I have heard it could be translated “thin-skinned.” Let’s do a gut check. How are we doing?
    21. One person writes: It is reported that when the Moravian missionaries first went to the Eskimos, they couldn’t find a word in their language for forgiveness. They had to combine a series of shorter words into one compound word: Issumagijoujungnainermik. Although the word appears formidable, its meaning is beautiful, being translated: “Not-being-able-to-think-about-it-anymore.”
    22. You’ve probably noticed that unforgiving people usually have good memories. Some can hold a grudge for a lifetime. But love never keeps a record of wrongs committed against it. It forgives and is unable to think about them anymore.
    23. That’s what Paul had in mind when he said that love “does not take into account a wrong suffered” (1 Cor. 13:5). The Greek word translated “take into account” was used of the entries in a bookkeeper’s ledger. Those entries helped the bookkeeper remember the nature of each financial transaction. In contrast, love never keeps a record or holds others accountable for the wrongs they’ve committed against it.
    24. The greatest example of that kind of love is God Himself. Romans 4:8 says, “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.” Second Corinthians 5:19 adds, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
    25. Every sin we commit as believers is an offense against God, but He never charges them to our account. We are in Christ, who bore our penalty on the cross. When we sin, we are immediately forgiven.[7]
    26. [Love] bears all things, believes all things, endures all things
    27. [Love] hopes all things: MacArthur shares: Hope is illustrated in the true story of a dog who was abandoned at the airport of a large city. He stayed there for over five years, waiting for his master to return. People at the airport fed and cared for him, but he refused to leave the spot where he last saw his master. If a dog’s love for his master can produce that kind of hope, how much more should your love for God produce abiding hope?[8]

Let’s go back to C.S. Lewis as Tim Keller quotes and shares:

“[C.S. Lewis shares] Though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings … Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.” Do you see what he is saying? He says, “It doesn’t matter whether you like your neighbor or not. Do for him. Help him. Serve him. As soon as you do this you will find one of the great secrets. When you’re behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him.”

Now there is an exception. “If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed … Christian charity … is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection.” Oh my, have I seen that, and you have, too.

I don’t know how many times I have sat with people who have been married for about 20 years. They say, “There is no love left in the marriage, and I want out.” I can tell you exactly what happened. They had children. When you have a child, what happens is you have a person who needs to be served. The essence of love is to serve somebody else’s needs regardless of what you want to do.

Your child is up in the middle of the night screaming and wailing. He is 3 weeks old. What do you do? Do you say, “Hey, this is no good. I’m tired. I’m going to bed?” You get up. You feed him. You do whatever you have to do, and you get nothing from that kid for a long time. After several weeks the kid might actually reach up, grab your finger, and smile at you. Wow. You get so little and so little. The fact is, as time goes on you’re giving and you’re giving and you’re giving, and you’re getting just very little back. As a result of you giving and giving, and in spite of your feelings, what happens is your love for that kid grows incredibly strong.

Meanwhile, what happens when your spouse acts like a baby? What happens when your spouse is acting in a way that’s immature, silly, and awful, and you’re called upon to continue to be loving to her or him in spite of how that person is acting? What do you do? You say, “Well if she is not going to be the wife she used to be, why the heck do I have to be the husband I used to be?” You immediately start to say, “Since I don’t like him, I don’t have to love him.”

Then what happens is the less you love him the less you like him. The less you like him the less you love him and so on. So after 20 years here you are doing the biblical kind of love to your kid even though the kid is giving you nothing. After 20 years your kid could be an absolute jerk, and you love him. In those same 20 years you are operating in a completely selfish way with your spouse. Instead of continuing to serve even when you don’t like, you follow your feelings.

In other words, your love for your kids is biblical because it leads to affection. It’s not affection; essentially it’s service. You think of your love for your spouse as basically as an affection, and if the affection and the erotic feeling is not there, there’s no reason to give. As a result, the opposite thing is happening. Here, the more you love, the more you like. Here, the less you love, the less you like, and the less you like, the less you love.

After 20 years of no love between the spouses and lots of love between the parents and kids, even when the kids are rebellious and a mess and so on, they look at me and they say, “There is no love left in the marriage.” No kidding, because the way they define love isn’t biblical. Love is meeting the needs and concerns of others before or instead of your own.[9]

[1] Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960), 169-170

29 On this whole subject one should see the classic studies by C. Spicq, Agape dans le nouveau testament (Paris: Gabalda, 1958–59), and A. Nygren, Agape and Eros (London, 1932 and 1939). There is some obvious overlap between agapē and philia; cf. John 21:15–19.

[2] Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 269.

[3] Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 1 Co 13:4–7.

40 On this whole subject, cf. V. P. Furnish, The Love Command in the NT (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972).

[4] Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).

[5] Kenneth L. Barker, ed., NIV Study Bible, Fully Revised Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020), 2021–2022.

[6] Kenneth L. Barker, ed., NIV Study Bible, Fully Revised Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020), 2022.

[7] John MacArthur devotional, the link is no longer accurate

[8] John MacArthur devotional, the link is no longer accurate

[9] Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).

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