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NOTHING WITHOUT LOVE

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

1 CORINTHIANS 13:3

And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

MARK 10:21

There is nothing I need more in my life than more of the love of Jesus. I need more of his love for my wife—the woman God has called me to serve until death. I need more of his love for my children and the rest of my extended family. I need more of his love for the church, including the spiritual brothers and sisters it is sometimes hard for me to love. I need more of his love for my neighbors who still need to hear the gospel, and for all the lost and the lonely people who are close to the heart of God even when they are far from my thoughts.

Everywhere I go, and in every relationship I have in life, I need more of the love of Jesus. The place where I need it the most is in my relationship with God himself, the Lover of my soul. What about you? Are you loving the way Jesus loves? Or do you need more of his love in your life—more love for God and for other people?

THE LOVE CHAPTER

One of the first places people look for love in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 13. It is one of the most famous passages in Scripture, mainly because it is read so often at weddings. Some people call it “the Love Chapter,” which is appropriate because it mentions love (agape) explicitly and implicitly more than a dozen times.

First Corinthians 13 is the Bible’s most complete portrait of love. A literature professor would call it an encomium, which is “a formal or high-flown expression of praise.”1 The Love Chapter is a love song for love, in which the apostle Paul establishes the necessity of love (vv. 1–3), sketches the character of love (vv. 4–7), and celebrates the permanence of love (vv. 8–13) as the greatest of all God’s gifts.

As familiar as it is, this chapter is not understood nearly as well as it ought to be. For one thing, people usually read it out of context. Admittedly, they do sometimes begin reading at the end of 1 Corin-thians 12:31, where Paul says, “I will show you a still more excellent way.” This is a good place to begin, because chapter 13 is “the more excellent way” that the apostle had in mind. But there is a wider context to consider—a context that many readers miss. As Gordon Fee writes in his commentary, “The love affair with this love chapter has also allowed it to be read regularly apart from its context, which does not make it less true but causes one to miss too much.”2

One way to make sure we do not miss what God has for us in 1 Corinthians 13 is to remember who the Corinthians were and what God said to them in this letter. If there was one thing the Corinthians needed, it was more of the love of Jesus. The church was sharply divided over theology, practice, social class, and spiritual gifts. Some said they followed Paul. Others followed Peter or Apollos—“my apostle is better than your apostle!” Then there were those—and this was the ultimate form of spiritual one-upmanship—who claimed to follow Christ. There were similar conflicts about ministry, with various Corinthians claiming that their charismatic gifts were the be-all and end-all of Christianity—“my ministry is more important than your ministry!” This was the issue in chapter 12, where the apostle reminded them that although the church is made of many parts, we all belong to one body.

So when Paul wrote about love in chapter 13, he was not trying to give people something nice to read at weddings. After all, the love he writes about here is not eros (the romantic love of desire), but agape (the selfless love of brothers and sisters in Christ). Instead of preparing people for marriage, then, the apostle was trying desperately to show a church full of self-centered Christians that there is a better way to live—not just on your wedding day but every day for the rest of your life. The Love Chapter is not for lovers, primarily, but for all the loveless people in the church who think that their way of talking about God, or worshiping God, or serving God, or giving to God is better than everyone else’s.

Here is another mistake that many people make: we tend to read 1 Corinthians 13 as an encouraging, feel-good Bible passage full of happy thoughts about love. Instead, I find the passage to be almost terrifying, because it sets a standard for love I know I could never meet.

None of us lives with this kind of love, and there is an easy way to prove it: start reading with verse 4 and insert your own name into the passage every time you see the word “love.” For example: “Phil is patient and kind; Phil does not envy or boast; he is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way; he is not irritable or resentful; he does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Phil bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Phil never fails.” Do the same thing for yourself and you will know how I feel: not very loving at all.

THE NECESSITY OF LOVE

The problem is that love ought to be the distinguishing characteristic of our Christianity. Love is the virtue, said Jonathan Edwards, that is “more insisted on” than any other virtue in the New Testament.3 Paul certainly insists on it in 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, where he makes a logical argument proving the necessity of love. Love is so essential that we are nothing without it.

According to the canons of ancient literature, an encomium usually begins with a comparison in which the author takes what he wants to praise and compares it to something else. That is very nearly what the apostle Paul does in 1 Corinthians 13: he takes love and makes a series of conditional comparisons to show how necessary love is. Each comparison has something to do with spiritual gifts or accomplishments—things that talented and virtuous Christians either have or do. The point, according to Charles Hodge, is that “love is superior to all extraordinary gifts.”4

Paul starts with speaking in tongues, which is a gift that some Corinthians had and some Corinthians didn’t. But even if they did have the gift, they were nothing without love: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (v. 1).

To “speak in the tongues of men” is to communicate spiritual truth through the miraculous gift of utterance in a human language. To “speak in the tongues of angels” is an even greater gift, for it is to speak the very language of heaven. Paul does not minimize that gift of celestial eloquence, but he does say that it is nothing without love.

Some scholars believe that when Paul spoke about a “noisy gong” he was referring to the hollow bronze jars that were used as resonating chambers in ancient theaters—a Greek and Roman system for the amplification of sound.5 The point then would be that without love, our words produce only “an empty sound coming out of a hollow, lifeless vessel.”6 Others believe that Paul was referring to the gongs that were used to worship pagan deities, like the goddess Cybele.7 If so, then he is saying that without love we are merely pagans. The image in this verse always reminds me of The Gong Show, a television program from the 1970s on which contestants were judged on their ability to sing or dance. If the judges didn’t like a particular act, they would stand up and strike a huge gong to end the performance. Gongs can produce a lot of noise, but they do not make very much music.

Cymbals do make music, when used the right way. But if someone keeps banging a cymbal, the noise is deafening. No matter how gifted we are, this is what we become if we do not use our gifts in a loving way. No one can hear the gospel from the life of a loveless Christian. People just hear “bong, bong, bong, clang, clang, clang!” To bring the metaphor up to date, “If I network for the gospel but have not love, I am only a noisy blog or a meaningless tweet.”8

In verse 2 Paul starts listing other gifts, many of which were discussed back in chapter 12. He mentions prophecy: “if I have prophetic powers.” Someone with this gift can foretell the future, or has supernatural insight to interpret what is happening in the world from God’s point of view. Paul mentions the gift of understanding “all mysteries and all knowledge.” The word “all” is emphatic. The person who possesses this spiritual gift has a comprehensive grasp of the great mysteries of God, including his plans for the future, like the mysteries that the prophet Daniel revealed for King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. By “knowledge,” the apostle means spiritual knowledge of biblical truth—something the human mind can know only by the revelation of the Holy Spirit.

The Corinthians possessed gifts of knowledge and understanding, as Paul has said several times in this letter (e.g., 1:5; 8:1). But someone who has such gifts is nothing without love. A man may have mystical insight; a woman may know the deep mysteries of God. But these prophetic and intellectual gifts are nothing without love. So Paul says, “If I have...