1 Corinthians 13

Today’s Passage: 1 Corinthians 13

This is the most quoted chapter in all of Paul’s letters, and it is very likely the most misused. We have heard it read over candlelight at a hundred weddings, printed on cards, embroidered on cushions, until we can almost forget that it was written to a church that was suing each other in the courts, getting drunk at the Lord’s Table, and shouting over one another in the assembly to prove whose gift was the greater. Paul has just finished telling them that the church is one body with many members and that the eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you.” He ends chapter twelve with a promise: “And now I will show you the most excellent way.” Chapter thirteen is that way. He takes three of the most impressive things a person could possibly do, speaking in tongues, prophesying and knowing all mysteries, giving away everything he owns and even his own body, and he weighs each one on the scale without love and finds it worth nothing. Then he sets down fifteen short verbs, a portrait of love drawn in ordinary daily behavior, every stroke of it aimed squarely at how the Corinthians were treating each other. Then he lifts his eyes and shows them why love is the greatest thing there is: because the gifts they were fighting over were partial and temporary from the start, and love is not. Prophecy ceases, tongues are restrained, knowledge is dismissed. Love never fails. And at the end he leaves us standing before a mirror, waiting for a face.

As you read, hold this: Every gift God gives is partial and passing, but love never fails, because love is what God Himself is and what we shall see face to face.

1 Corinthians 13:1 (BSB)

¹ If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the gift is worthless. He does not say the tongue is false or that the man never had it. He grants him everything, and more than everything, for he throws in “the tongues of men and of angels,” a gift beyond anything anyone in Corinth had ever claimed. And then he weighs the man himself. Not the gift, the man. “I am only a ringing gong.” Sit with that for a moment, because it is a strange and searching thing to say. A gong is not a person. It has no life in it, no will, no love, nothing of its own. Somebody strikes it, it makes a sound, the sound fades, and the room is exactly as it was. Paul is saying that a believer using a real gift of the Holy Spirit without love (ἀγάπη) agapē, pronounced ag-AH-pay. Strong's G26, love; deliberate, self-giving love. This is the word the New Testament had to take up and fill. The Greeks had erōs for desire and philia for the affection between friends, but the noun agapē was thin and colorless in ordinary Greek, used rarely and vaguely, and that very emptiness made it usable. Into it the apostles poured what they had seen at Calvary. So agapē in Scripture is not first a warmth in the chest. It is a settled, deliberate willing of another’s good at cost to yourself, and its definition is not a dictionary entry but an event: “But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” That is why this chapter can never be read as a moral demand and nothing more. Every line of verses four through seven is true of Jesus of Nazareth before it is ever asked of you, and it is asked of you only because He has already poured His own love into your heart by His Spirit. You cannot manufacture agapē by trying harder. You can only receive it from the One who is Himself the fountain of it, and then let it out again toward the people He has put in front of you. Love is not the price of admission. Love is the family likeness. has been reduced to an instrument in the most pitiable sense: a thing that makes an impressive noise and leaves nothing behind. Whatever else you take from this chapter, take that. The question God asks of our serving is never first “How impressive was it?” but “Was there love in it?” A man may preach magnificently, know his Greek, hold a room in the palm of his hand, and be bronze. And the terrible mercy of it is that the man himself may be the last to know, because a gong cannot hear itself.

1 Corinthians 13:2–3 (BSB)

² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

The scale keeps rising and the verdict keeps falling. First the man was a noise. Now he is nothing, and then he gains nothing. Watch how high Paul is willing to pile the weights on one side. Prophecy, which the Corinthians ranked at the top. All mysteries. All knowledge, the very thing this church prided itself on, though Paul had already warned them, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Faith enough to move a mountain, which is the language the Lord Himself used for the greatest faith imaginable. And then, in verse three, the two most extreme acts of self-giving a human being can perform: the total liquidation of everything you own for the sake of the poor, and the surrender of your own body. There is nothing left to give after that. And Paul says a man may do all of it and gain nothing, because a gift given without love is still, at bottom, a transaction about the giver.

That is the sentence that ought to stop us. We can imagine unloving eloquence easily enough. Unloving generosity is harder to imagine, and that is exactly why Paul names it. It is possible to empty your bank account into a good cause because you cannot bear how it would look if you did not, or because giving buys a certain standing, or because it silences something in you that would otherwise have to be faced. The act is right and the poor are genuinely fed, and God is not mocked by our motives so as to punish the poor for them. But the giver “gains nothing,” because he was never really reaching toward the person he was giving to. Notice, too, that Paul says “I” all the way through, not “you.” He puts himself under his own scale first. The apostle who could out-prophesy, out-know and out-suffer anyone in Corinth stands in the dock with the rest of us and says: without love, I am nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:4–5 (BSB)

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs.

Now read these slowly, and read them twice. Read them first as a portrait of Christ, because that is what they are. He is the one who was patient (μακροθυμέω) makrothymeō, pronounced mah-kro-thoo-MEH-oh. Strong's G3114, to be long-tempered, slow to anger, patient with people. The Greek is a wonderfully physical picture. Makrothymeō is built out of makros, long, and thymos, heat or passion, so the person described here is quite literally long-tempered. Where we say someone has a short fuse, Greek says he has a short thymos, quick to flare. Love has a long one. It takes a great while to come to the boil, and the special flavor of this word all through the New Testament is patience with people rather than with circumstances: not the endurance of a delayed journey but the endurance of a difficult brother. It is the word Peter uses of God Himself, that He “is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to come to repentance.” Think what that means. The reason any of us is still standing is that God has a very long fuse. He has borne with our repeated, unoriginal, well-worn sins for years and has not yet come to the end of Himself. Every time you are slow to anger with somebody who has tried you, you are doing toward them, in a small and creaturely way, exactly what God has been doing toward you the whole time. with disciples who could not stay awake, kind to lepers no one would touch, never envious, never boastful, never proud though He had every right in heaven to be, never rude to the woman at the well or the thief on the cross, never self-seeking, not easily angered even when they spat in His face, and keeping no account of wrongs when He said from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Every single line fits Him, and only Him, perfectly. Then read them the second time as the mirror Paul is holding up to Corinth, and to us. It is a striking thing that in a church obsessed with the spectacular, Paul defines love almost entirely by ordinary behavior, and mostly by things love does not do. Seven of these first nine strokes are negatives. Love is drawn here less as a blazing flame than as a certain steady way of being in a room with people who are difficult.

Then the list turns sharper, and every point of it lands on Corinth. “It is not rude,” and they were shoving past one another at the Lord’s Table. “It is not self-seeking,” and they were dragging each other before pagan judges to grab what they wanted. “It is not easily angered,” and the church was split into camps. And then the last stroke, the quietest and the hardest: it “ keeps no account of wrongs (λογίζομαι) logizomai, pronounced lo-GID-zo-my. Strong's G3049, to reckon, count, credit to one's account. Logizomai is a bookkeeper’s word before it is anything else. It means to reckon, to calculate, to enter a figure in a column, and Paul uses it again and again for the great accounting of the gospel. It is the word behind the promise, “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him,” and behind the heart of reconciliation itself, “that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s trespasses against them.” So when Paul says love “keeps no account of wrongs,” he is not asking for a vague good-naturedness. He is asking the forgiven to keep the same ledger God keeps. Consider what it would have cost God to keep the other kind. Every wrong entered, dated, totaled, carried forward with interest, and the column never closed. Instead He took the whole account and nailed it to a cross, and the page is blank. A believer who nurses a grievance, quietly adding to the record, is holding open a book that God has already shut about him. Love does not merely forgive the entry. Love stops keeping the book. .” That is not the same as pretending nothing happened, and it is not the same as calling evil good, for the very next verse forbids that. It is the refusal to write it down. It is declining to keep the running ledger that so many of us keep without ever admitting we keep it, the tally of who said what and when, ready to be produced the moment we need it. Love burns the book.

1 Corinthians 13:6–7 (BSB)

⁶ Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Here Paul guards against the very misreading his own chapter invites. Love is not a soft indifference to right and wrong. It “takes no pleasure in evil,” and there is a whole world in that phrase, for there is a real pleasure that the human heart can take in evil, especially in someone else’s. The small satisfaction when a rival stumbles. The appetite for the story that puts a neighbor in a bad light. Love has no taste for that dish. And the opposite of that appetite is not squeamishness but joy: love “rejoices in the truth,” gladly, out loud, even when the truth costs it something and even when the truth vindicates somebody else.

Then come the four great “all things,” and they are not the naivety of a person who believes every tale he is told. Love “bears all things,” which carries the sense of covering, of putting a roof over something rather than broadcasting it. Love “believes all things,” which is the settled disposition to think the best that can honestly be thought of a brother rather than the worst, to hand him the benefit of the doubt he has not earned. Love “hopes all things,” refusing to write anyone off as finished, because the God who saved us has a long record of saving people everyone else had given up on. And love “endures all things,” a soldier’s word, holding the position under fire and not withdrawing. Put them together and you have the reason love outlasts everything else in the chapter. Gifts are given to a season. This kind of love has no natural stopping point at all. It simply keeps standing there, covering, believing, hoping, holding on.

1 Corinthians 13:8 (BSB)

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed.

“Love never fails.” Three words, and the whole chapter turns on them. And the moment Paul says it, he sets three things beside it that do come to an end, and they are precisely the three the Corinthians had been ranking themselves by: prophecy, tongues, knowledge. Whatever else we may argue about in the verses that follow, that contrast is the argument, and it is unmistakable. These gifts were scaffolding. Love is the building.

Here Manna Praxis will say plainly what it holds, and say it once. We believe the miraculous sign gifts, tongues and prophecy as new revelation and the apostolic sign-miracles, were given for the founding of the church and have ceased with the completion of the New Testament Scriptures. The church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone,” and a foundation is laid once. The faith has been “entrusted once for all to the saints.” God who “spoke to our fathers through the prophets” has “in these last days” spoken to us by His Son, and we do not look for fresh revelation binding on the conscience beyond the Word He has given. That is our conviction, and we hold it without heat. Brothers and sisters who read these chapters differently are still brothers and sisters, and we will not caricature them or make sport of them. What we will not do is treat any modern utterance as though it stood level with the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 13:9–10 (BSB)

⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.

Now we must be honest with you, because this is a place where sincere Christians who agree about a great deal still disagree. What exactly is “ the perfect (τέλειος) teleios, pronounced TEL-ay-oss. Strong's G5046, complete, mature, fully grown. Teleios comes from telos, an end or a goal, and it does not mean flawless in the way we usually mean perfect. It means finished, complete, having arrived at what it was always aiming at. A teleios fruit is ripe. A teleios person is grown up, which is exactly why verse eleven turns immediately to the child who becomes a man. The word does not scold the partial thing for being defective; it simply says the partial thing was on its way somewhere. That is a kind and steadying thing to know about your own life. Much of what you presently have of God is genuine and is also a fragment: your knowledge of Him, your grasp of your own heart, your sight of why He has led you as He has. None of it is false. All of it is unfinished. And the Lord who says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” is not taunting us with an impossible standard but naming the end He fully intends to bring us to. The partial is not the enemy of the complete. It is the childhood of it. ” that Paul says is coming? Some hold that it is the completed Scriptures. On that reading, the revelatory gifts were partial deliveries of a message that God was still in the process of giving, and once the whole was in hand the partial deliveries naturally stopped, as the letters stop when the friend arrives. Others hold that “the perfect” is the return of Christ and the sight of Him “face to face” in the very next verse, and they point out, fairly, that verse twelve seems to describe something far beyond what any of us experiences while reading a Bible. Both readings are held by careful, believing men. The text does not hand us the certainty that would settle it in a sentence, and we will not manufacture one.

But look at what the passage does say without any ambiguity at all, because that is where its power lies. Whatever “the perfect” turns out to be, and however long the gifts lasted, they were partial from the first day. Paul says so twice in one breath: “we know in part and we prophesy in part.” Even at their height, in the hands of an apostle, these gifts gave fragments. They were never the whole. And a thing that is partial by nature is, by that very nature, temporary, because God does not intend fragments forever. Love is in another category entirely. Love is not a fragment of anything. It does not pass away when something better arrives, because nothing better ever arrives. That is Paul’s whole point to a church that was climbing over one another for the scaffolding while ignoring the building.

1 Corinthians 13:11–12 (BSB)

¹¹ 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 set aside childish ways. ¹² Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Paul gives us two pictures, and both of them are gentle. The first is a child. Notice he does not say the child’s talk was wrong or that his thinking was wicked. A child’s speech is exactly right for a child. It is only when the man keeps it that something has gone amiss. So the gifts, and our present knowledge with them, are not being scolded here. They are being placed in their season. Growing up does not require a child to be ashamed of having been a child. It only requires him, at the proper time, to set the small things down.

The second picture would have made every Corinthian smile in recognition, for their city made the finest mirrors in the world, and even the finest were polished bronze. You could see yourself in one, but dimly, a shape and a suggestion, never the thing itself. That, Paul says, is what all our present seeing of God is like. Not false, not useless, but indirect. And then he opens the door: “then we shall see face to face.” No metal in between. No dimness. Himself, seen. Let that land on you, for it is the hope that the whole chapter has been climbing toward and it is worth more than every gift Corinth ever quarreled over. And then the last clause, which may be the sweetest line Paul ever wrote: “then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” He does not say we shall then know as much as God knows, for we shall always be creatures. He says our knowing of Him will at last be of the same kind as His knowing of us: direct, personal, unhindered, face turned to face. And underneath it lies the quieter wonder, that we are already fully known. Every fragment in us, every wrong we ever entered in somebody’s ledger, every self-seeking motive under our best giving, all of it is already open before Him, and He has loved us anyway and will not let us go.

1 Corinthians 13:13 (BSB)

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Faith and hope are magnificent, and they are also, in their way, temporary. Faith is the assurance of what we do not see, and one day we shall see. Hope reaches toward what has not yet come, and one day it will have come. But when faith has turned to sight and hope has turned to possession, love will still be there, undiminished, only now without a single thing to hinder it. That is why it is “the greatest.” Not because faith and hope are small, but because love is the only one of the three that belongs to heaven as much as to earth, and belongs to God as much as to us. God does not have faith and God does not hope. God is love. And so the practice this chapter asks of us is not the strain of working up an emotion, but the daily, ordinary business of letting the love He has already poured out come back through us toward the person nearest to hand.