Learning to do Church - 28
The Art of Loving
I Corinthians 13:8-13 Part 4
I DEA : God’s kind of love has permanence and prominence.
This morning we are going to wrap up our study of 1 Corinthians 13; the
great manifesto on love written by the Apostle Paul.
The chapter began with Paul subjugating everything they valued in their
church to love (miracles, achievement, sacrifice).
Then, Paul listed the characteristics of true love. As we looked at each of
these in detail we could easily see that:
 They described the unconditional way we all would like to be
loved. Just for who we are and not what we do or how we look.
 They described a quality of love that is impossible for any of us to
show, but by the love of God Himself shining through us.
 Complete and perfect love can only come from God, at least until
we get to leave our old nature and physical bodies behind.
Then Paul tells us, “Love never ends.” We might show love for a moment
in time, but not this kind of love. The word literally means, “to fall
down” like an old decrepit building. Love doesn’t fall into disrepair; real
love always has the new car smell.
To impress us with the importance of love, Paul lists things that will be
long gone while love remains. That is the point we are at now.
This chapter on love is not randomly plopped down in the middle of
Paul’s letter. The Corinthians lived their entire lives in a pagan culture
where love meant nothing more than corrupt lust. The only love they
knew did fail.
 Many a husband or wife can bear testimony to the failure of love.
 Churches are not known to be places where love thrives. The
world laughs at church politics, church fights, and church splits.
God’s kind of love was incomprehensible to them.
1
John MacArthur describes the church in Corinth as evangelism in reverse. Instead of the church impacting Corinth, Corinth was infiltrating
the church with selfishness, pride and strife displacing humility, unity
and most of all love. The result was factions in the body of Christ, disintegrating marriages, and an absence of any gospel impact to their city.
They needed to be willing to let God’s kind of love radiate through them.
I Corinthians 13:8
1 Cor. 13:8 (ESV) Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
Paul’s purpose is to impress us with the priority and permanence of
God’s kind of love. His love is a love worth pursuing. To make that impression, Paul chooses some prominent pillars of our faith and tags each
of them with a label that says temporary.
The majority of Christians miss the forest for the trees in this text; they
miss Paul’s point about the permanence and prominence of love and
get all hung up on what will pass away. Multiple people have told me
they are anxiously anticipating what I will say about this verse. I know
you want to hear about is tongues.
We are no different from the Corinthians. They were infatuated with
spiritual gifts, especially showy public gifts, and especially miracle gifts.
Paul chose three prominent gifts they valued, and contrasted their lasting value to that of love. They would pass away but love would remain.
We will look at tongues first since the other two are mentioned again in
the next verse.
Paul wrote, “as for tongues, they will cease.” You don’t need to know
the Greek to understand this. Tongues were languages people could
speak without ever having studied them and cease means just that—
stop, finish, come to an end.
What you want to know is when. I am convinced that the miracle gift of
conveying revelation from God by a person speaking a language they
had never studied ended very shortly after Paul wrote this letter. It was
written in A.D. 53 or 54, one of the first books of the New Testament.i
2
 Tongues are only mentioned in this early letter and Acts.
 The teachers who came after the Apostles are known as the Primitive Apostolic Fathers. There is no mention of tongues by
them. Clement of Rome wrote to Corinth at the end of the 1st
century about spiritual problems and never mentions tongues.
 The next group of Church Fathers wrote to nearly every corner of
the Roman Empire where there were Christians. Justin Martyr
who died in 165 and Origen who died in 253 A.D. never mentioned tongues. Another, Celsius, explicitly argues that the signs
of the apostolic age were temporary.
 During this time a Montanus about 150 A.D. with a follower Tertullian who claimed to have a gift to speak in ecstatic speech for
the Holy Spirit. The church dismissed both as heretics.
 The famous Augustine commented on the book of Acts, “In the
earliest times, the Holy Spirit fell upon them that believed and
they spoke in tongues. These were signs adapted to the time…”
 The great reformers like Martin Luther never mention tongues for
any time than that of the apostles and 1st century church.
What I want you to see is that for centuries, a time period of over a
thousand years, tongues ceased in and of themselves just like Paul said
they would. So where did the present Pentecostal movement begin?
 The first eruption of tongues came in a group of prophets in
France in 1685. They claimed young children spoke perfect
French while in a trance. The group was discredited after night
raids on enemies and all of their prophecies went unfulfilled.
 The Jansenites were Roman Catholic reformers opposed to the
Reformation. In 1731 they held nighttime graveyard meetings at
a former leader’s tomb and reportedly spoke in tongues.
 There was a group led by Mother Anne Lee (1736-1784) called the
Shakers. She regarded herself as the “female principle in Christ.”
Whatever that means. She taught that the second coming was
fulfilled in her. She also had a revelation that all sexual relationships were corrupt. Men and women spoke in tongues.
The modern Pentecostal movement only began about a century ago.
 In 1901, Agnes Osmond, a student at Bethel Bible College said she
received the baptism of the Spirit and could speak in tongues.
3
 In 1906 the Azusa Street Revival took place in Los Angeles, which
became the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism.
Has God revived this sign gift for the last days? Before we go on in the
text, what should be our take away here?
1) Paul’s primary point was the permanence of love. Love is more important than tongues, prophecy, even knowledge.
2) Just as Paul said they would, tongues ceased. The text itself does
not allow for tongues to revive in the last days. Tongues were never random sounds spoken by someone in a trance.
3) We have brothers and sisters in Christ who preach the gospel and
believe they can speak in tongues. For us to treat them with anything but love violates exactly what Paul was teaching here. (Adam)
4) One doctrine that seems to pair with Pentecostalism is a teaching
that a Christian can lose their salvation. There is no way you can
believe this without adding works to salvation, which is heresy.
John 10:28–30 (ESV) — I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29My Father, who has
given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them
out of the Father’s hand. 30I and the Father are one.”
Ephesians 2:9 (ESV) — not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
5) As a church we take a stand in our statement of faith on speaking
in tongues because of its implication for adding to the verbal revelation of God. Scripture is clear that God has completed what He
has chosen to tell us about Himself, His plan, and our future.
Revelation 22:18 (ESV) — I warn everyone who hears the words of the
prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the
plagues described in this book,
6) What about experience? First, the Word of God always trumps experience. Second, consider if what you saw really was biblical.
There is no way I could answer all of your questions in these few
minutes. If you have a question, stop by or give me a call.
1 Corinthians 13:9 (ESV) — For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
As Paul goes on with this discussion he does not mention tongues again
but focuses on gifts of knowledge and prophecy. That gift simply was
going to come to a close in and of itself.
4
God could use gifts of knowledge and prophecy to reveal and proclaim
what we otherwise would not know. The words can also describe the
instruction and exhortation of the Word of God, which we have already
been given. We have teachers who communicate knowledge and
preachers who exhort others.
Paul’s point is that these things, which are so important to us, are just a
part, just a fraction of what there is to know about God.
 You could memorize the entire Bible in Greek and Hebrew and
still not know everything about God.
 You could listen to every sermon, and certainly any one sermon
and not know everything about God.
Deuteronomy 29:29 (ESV) — “The secret things belong to the LORD our
God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children
forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Our knowledge is not wrong or unreliable, it is just partial. If you ask,
“Please explain mathematics to me?” I could reply, “1+1=2 and 2+2=4.”
That is true but it is not everything about mathematics.
This happened during WWII. When 8-year-old Adelaide Delong struggled over her addition and times tables, she turned to the one neighbor
she figured could help. Clutching a plate of homemade fudge and a
book of arithmetic problems, young Addie knocked on 112 Mercer St.
one day in the 1930s and told the white-haired man who opened the
door: "Will you show me how to do my homework?"
Albert Einstein could have shooed the little girl off, telling her he was at
work on a theory to explain the nature of all physical forces in the universe. But Einstein didn't do that. Instead, he smiled and accepted Addie's chocolate gift. As gently as he could, he said he would love teach
her to add and subtract, but that wouldn't be fair to the other girls at
school. And he gave her a cookie in return for her fudge.
1 Corinthians 13:10 (ESV) — but when the perfect comes, the partial will
pass away.
The gifts of knowledge and prophecy will be rendered inoperative. The
difficulty is identifying what the perfect that supersedes them is. ii
 It could be the completion of the canon of scripture. If you have
heard this view taught, it does have a lot to commend it.
5
 I tend to believe the coming of Christ fits the context better.
The reason will develop as we continue through the text.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV) — 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.
We have limited revelation because we have limited minds. Whatever
Adam’s brain could do, ours is severely diminished from that. That is
what the Fall did; it corrupted our minds. Until we receive our glorified
bodies our thinking can only go so far. What we have to look forward to
is that partial gifts, like infancy, will be superseded by adulthood. The
next verse tells us when.
1 Corinthians 13:12 (ESV) — 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.
Someday you will have full knowledge! Guess what? I will be out of a
job! You won’t need a teacher—who only knew in part anyway. You
won’t need a preacher—who only knew in part anyway. No more books.
No more school. All of the partial will be done away with.
We often speak of looking forward to leaving aches and pains behind for
glorified bodies. We will also leave behind our limited brains for ones
we will have for all of eternity. We will grasp the secret things of God.
1 John 3:2 (ESV) — Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will
be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall
be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
But, don’t miss Paul’s point here. You are already fully known by God
and He loves you.
The chapter grew like a crescendo to the last verse.
1 Corinthians 13:13 (ESV) — So now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.
The one and only thing of what we know now that will continue
throughout eternity is love.
 There will be no need for faith because we will have complete
knowledge. Faith is for that which you cannot see.
6
 There will be no possibility of hope because all of our hopes in
Christ will have been realized.
Everything will be known about us and we will know everything about
our Savior. He will choose to keep on loving us just because of who we
are and we will love Him
Paul’s point is how God loves you right now. He knows everything about
you and He chooses to love you. He will not know anything more about
you in eternity than He knows right now. That will not change. You will
know about him but he will know no more about you.
Paul is not saying spiritual gifts are not important. He certainly is not
saying faith and hope are not important. That is how we receive God’s
love and it is all about our hope of His coming as He promised. But when
all of that is passed there will still be God’s incredible irrational love.
That is the love Paul urges us to pursue in the body of Christ. It is a love
that loves in spite of who we are. If God can know everything about us
and love us should we not be able to love one another.
 This love does not deny that we have differences. “I am of Paul
and I am of Apollos.”
 This love does not ignore sin that is so displeasing to God that one
man would have His father’s wife.
 This love understands that we all have different roles in the body,
one being as a hand and another as a foot.
 This is a love that can love lost people because God loves them.
But, most of all this love does not quit loving because God knows all
about us and he loves us. That is what will last for all of eternity.
i
The historical background was largely taken from a sermon by John MacArthur
preached on September 19, 2010. http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/90-405/thepersistence-of-love-part-1
ii
Gromacki, R. (2002). Called to Be Saints: An Exposition of I Corinthians. The Woodlands, TX: Kress Christian Publications.
7