The Permanence of Love – 1 Corinthians 13:8-13
“As important as legal language and clear facts are, God knows we need our imagination to be captured by truth. We need to be won over by the surpassing beauty of Christ, the utterly compelling glory of God. We must see these as a greater good and a better hope than all the promises of our idols and daydreams. So God doesn’t merely present the gospel to us in a contract. He gives us a wonderfully creative book in the Bible and invites us to engage with our imagination.” (Mike Cosper)
Enduring love is the true…
“For many years I had read this chapter and applied it in the sense that these characteristics of love were something that I needed to ‘do’. I would read that ‘love is patient’ and I would try to be more patient. I would read that ‘love is not irritable’ and I would try not to be irritated. If I found myself being impatient with someone I would think to myself ‘I need to have more patience’. I interpreted this chapter to be a guide on how I needed to behave…But this way of thinking about it never helped me achieve what the chapter describes: Love NEVER fails. What I missed was that Paul is describing what actions result when love is the motivation. Paul’s core message is about motivation…understanding that we are dealing with motivation is the key to understanding how it can be that “love never fails.” (The Sower Magazine)
“Love will never be gone. Rather it will simply continue, as now, but in a world where the sin that wars against love is altogether removed. Whereas the gifts are “nothing” without love, love does not need the gifts for full revelation” (Paul Gardner)
“Love will remain the interpersonal currency of heaven.” (Anthony C. Thiselton)
Our spiritual gifts are…
“We know in fragmentary ways, and we prophesy part by part” (Anthony C. Thiselton)
Our spiritual gifts are…
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” (Charles Goodhart)
“we optimize for what we measure, and when we choose the wrong measurement then we get the wrong behaviour.” (Charles Goodhart)
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 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. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” (1 John 3:1-3)
Love abides in us…
“Love is the future eternal light shining in the present.” (Karl Barth)
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:1-5)
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God…Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” (1John 4:7, 11-12)
“Love is an activity, the essential activity, of God himself, and when [people] love either him or their fellow [person] they are doing (however imperfectly) what God does.” (Paul Gardner)