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True Love (1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13)
John Low, 9 July 2017
Part of the Freedom to Live By series, Sunday Morning service
This is a favourite reading at weddings of all types, seen as offering sound, poetic advice to those truly in love. Yet helpful though that may be, it doesn’t seem to be what Paul had in mind. He is arguing that love is an action, not an emotion. The kind of love he is writing about is seen, experienced and demonstrated, with almost a complete absence of any emphasis on personal feelings. What kind of love can this be?
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1 Corinthians 12:31–13:13 (Listen)
31 But earnestly desire the higher gifts.
And I will show you a still more excellent way.
13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
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.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 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. 12 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.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(ESV)