Devastating Doctrine of Love

Again, today to gather with God's people to worship the one true and living God and what a beautiful day he's given us. So I am very pleased to be with you again today. So I invite you to take your Bibles and turn to first Corinthians. Paul's letter to the Corinthians, the first letter, first Corinthians, chapter 13. You're dealing primarily with verses one through seven this morning. So let us hear now the word of the Lord as inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. The tongues of men and of angels, but have not love. I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, 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. If I give away all I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Let's read the rest of the chapter just to kind of get our bearings here. Love never ends. As for the prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 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. 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. So now faith, hope and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Sovereign Lord. As I stand this morning behind this sacred desk. Behind this holy book and before this gathering of your people, your sheep this morning, I confess that I come as a weak and needy man myself. Father, I desperately need this word this morning that I'm about to expound. So there's a very real sense in which I am preaching to myself. Yet I earnestly long that this people might be edified with divine truth, that an honest and clear testimony of your marvelous matchless grace might be set forth to your glory. Father, grant me strength to in proclaiming this word this morning, grant both myself and this congregation illumination, for that is what we need. Illumination, open our eyes to see the things into which angels long to look. I ask for grace and the unction of your spirit this morning. I ask for clarity of thought and clarity of expression in my words and communication. And Father, grant me fervency and help me to feel the massive, massive weight of the things I preach and grant me grace to apply them to consciences of these dear loved ones in Christ, these dear brothers and sisters, my family, for whose care I've been charged this morning. Father, keep me conscious of my own sin, my own pride, my own defects. And keep me from gloating with pride over my performance to seek merely to have these people think I am brilliant. or funny or witty or clever or anything else. Father, attend with power of the preached word and awaken our sleepy and slothful hearts and convict us and nourish us and comfort us and build us up by your grace, undermine our foolish pride with the truth that all we have been, we've been given and remind us a fresh Lord through your word that you will share your glory with no man. Help me not to treat your holy word in an effective manner or bear weak testimony to so worthy a redeemer and keep me from treating Christ's redeeming death and victorious resurrection without fervency. Father, it is your work to open blind eyes and unstop deaf ears through the proclamation of your word, through the power of your spirit. And I ask that you do this today. And if anything falls in my lips, that is falls short of the truth of Scripture that does not square the Scripture. Father, forgive me and strike it from the ears and the minds and the hearts of these gathered today within the hearing. And Father, ravish us afresh with a vision of so great a redeemer. I grant us joy and shakable in Christ and bring honor and glory and praise to your name this morning. And we pray this in that great and awesome name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, a great prophet, our great priest, our great king. Amen. Love. Read about love this morning. Very simple text on the surface, but I would argue this is one of the most difficult texts in all of Scripture. Oh, it's not difficult to understand. I think even a child can understand it. I think my seven year old can understand the words, what they mean intellectually. But the difficulty comes in the doing. It is a sobering text, difficult. It is devastating to us, rightly understood first, perhaps because the Bible's simplest description of God and thus God's self-understanding, his self-description is God is love. First, John 416, very well known passage. Almost anyone can quote God is love. Not everyone can tell you where to sound. They can quote it. Love is the most blessed manifestation of God's character. And of course, John, in that in that letter, goes on to say in the second part of verse 16 of first John four continues to say, and the one who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him. So there is much at stake this morning in understanding this text, because the simplest and most profound description of Christian character is also love. So the most simple, the most simple description of God is love and of Christian character. But what does love mean? What does it mean? Because it appears that the love of God is the one thing that every person in America can agree on. And think about it. How many times have you heard the most crooked politician or the most liberal pundit or most liberal pastors say, I just believe in a God of love. Keep all that wrath stuff away. Keep all that angry God stuff away. I just believe in a God of love. But what does it mean to believe in a God of love? And this is particularly true in our culture where we are in love with the idea of love. And yet. We do not understand the kind of love that God demands or the kind of love that characterizes God, the kind of love that characterizes God's people do. We don't clearly understand this, I don't think, because we tend to boil love down to a sentimental greeting card, kind of a Hallmark card or an emotion, a bare emotion. Of course, it is it is emotional at times, but it is far more than that. We're a popular love song. We have on my XM radio that I just got a free subscription to the Love Channel, right? We hear all these popular songs I can hear about love any time I want to. So I'm going to date myself and think about some of the popular songs, songs in the culture about love. I'm going to date myself here again. You're going to see I'm a child of the 70s and 80s singing about love. What's love got to do with it? Love is a battlefield. The person's obviously married. Love stinks. Love hurts. Indeed, it does. You know, love bites. Love somebody. OK, love is in the air. I don't know how many people are breathing that, but it's in the air. All we need is love. Love is easy like a Sunday morning. And my personal favorite, if you love someone, set them free. No idea what that means. No, I don't think the author does. Well, I want to know what love is. The author of that song should have read first Corinthians 13. I want to know what love is because Paul tells us. And for all our talk about love, it is clear that our understanding of it, even in the church, barely scratches the surface because Paul makes clear in this text, tied to our definition of love and our commitment to acting upon the biblical mandate of love proves whether or not our Christian profession is true or false. So there's much at stake this morning. Everything is that heaven and hell stand in the balance as to whether or not we understand love and how to love and what kind of loving people we are. After all, Jesus told his disciples, almost shockingly, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You are also to love one another. And by this, all people will know that you are my people, my Christians, they will, my followers, they will know it by your love. His command to love as I have loved you tells us that love is infinitely Christological. And what I mean by that is simply this. It is bound up in the gospel itself. It says something about Christ. It says something about the gospel. Love. I mean, Jesus, by his indestructible life and his humiliation and his sacrificial death, has demonstrated for us how to love. Clearly, love is central to the gospel and is central to living a gospel centered life, for at the heart of the gospel is give and not get. Oh, we receive glorious blessings. My sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Is there a more glorious line in all of hymnody? We get much we get this great inheritance I preached about last Sunday night, a great inheritance, its adopted sons, but central to love, central to living out Christian love is give, I would argue, because this seems to characterize the kind of Christian love which Christ commands and which Paul defines here in first Corinthians 13. And yet we tend to romanticize these verses, we hear it at weddings, we see it in our wall hangings as some kind of ode to love. But as my dear friend Tom Askell points out, this chapter is really very devastating in two ways. Devastating to us. First, it describes love in such a way that it is patently obvious that everybody who claims to be loving ain't loving. And secondly, it is devastating because it demonstrates the fallacy, the falseness of a modern brand of Christianity that focuses on the good things at the exclusion of the best thing. So I have two main points this morning as we look at love. But first, let's quickly get our bearings. Paul is addressing this Corinthian church. It's the church fraught with trouble. There is factionalism or cliques have arisen in the church. There is sexual immorality, profound worldliness and the arrogant abuse of spiritual gifts. These things had beleaguered the church, had roiled the church. There's much controversy in the church. It's one of those churches that when you come out of seminary, you're really looking for a church that isn't a lot like the Corinthian church. And yet Paul writes this in love to them, to correct them, to correct the world, to correct their errors, because Paul had himself founded this church during his second missionary journey. But love was missing in the Corinthian church. Oh, the church had spiritual gifts galore. It had right doctrine for the most part, because Paul said in chapter 11, verse two of First Corinthians. Now, I commend you because you remember me and everything and maintain the traditions, even as I delivered them to you. So the Orthodox, for the most part, but love the attribute that is most basic to Christian character was abundantly absent. Because let's face it, it is easier to be Orthodox than it is to be loving far easier. It is easier to be active in church ministry than it is to be loving. It is easier to display a form of external godliness than it is to be loving. So Paul reminds them in the first three verses, and this is my first point, and I'll spend a very little time on this and my second point is going to be the main part of the sermon. But my first point is this that I see in the text versus one through three. Love is better than spiritual gifts and martyrdom. Let's read it again. in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and have all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all that I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. So love is better than spiritual gifts. Love is better than martyrdom. Verse 1, he says, love is to be more desired than eloquence, a use of the language, a command of the language, which was so prized in the Greek world. Love is better than that. It is better than supreme spiritual giftedness. We can't think of anything greater than that in some circles, maybe even ourselves. But love is better than that, Paul says. In verse 2, he reminds us that superlative spiritual and intellectual capabilities come to nothing without love. Prophetic powers without love come to nothing. In chapter 14, verse one, Paul admonishes his desire to earnestly seek the gift of prophecy because the prophet proclaims God's truth to the people. And Paul himself is a prophet. So he would have held this gift, no doubt, in high esteem. And yet even this great gift must be administered in love. And the parallel in today's church is where the prophet is the pastor. So you must find a pastor who will not only preach the truth to you, but he must preach the truth in love. You can find a lot of guys who'll preach the truth. You can find a lot of guys who'll love you. But it's hard and very difficult to find a man who'll preach the truth and love. And that is your task, to find a man who will do that. Because one without the other is not the biblical package. It's not the complete pastor. Not the complete prophet. You must preach the truth and love. In verse 2, he says, the second part of verse 2, if we know all mysteries and have all knowledge, and yet have not love, we have nothing. I mean, Paul even admits in verse 9, we know in part and we prophesy in part. That makes me feel a lot better about knowing everything as someone who likes to know everything. I mean, even a prophet or an apostle does not know all the mysteries of God's redemptive plan, nor does he possess all knowledge. Now, knowledge for many of you and many of us, knowledge for me can become a golden calf. There is no doubt about it. I like to know everything I can know about a given subject. I like to know and I like for you to know that I know. That's why I prayed this morning that God would liberate me from this desire to be seen as brilliant. Because if that is all you see, then you see nothing at all. You see just a tinkling cymbal. And that's all. Just a lot of nonsensical music and bluster here in this pulpit. If I do not come to you in love and yet knowledge. Again, it's a golden calf. I would love to know everything. I would love to know everything. I was told I'd know it all growing up, and rightly so. Because I want to know everything. A lot of us do. Ask your teenagers, because I'm kind of stuck in that perpetual teenage that I want to know everything. And yet Paul says here that we have knowledge, we can be brilliant, we can have lots of degrees by our name. And if we don't have love, it is meaningless, absolutely meaningless, because he says in verse eight that knowledge and spiritual gifts, such as those the Corinthians had, they will pass away. They will pass away. They will not endure. But love. Brothers and sisters, love will endure. And this is why love is better than gifts or better than knowledge. It goes on in verse two. What about mountain moving faith without love? And here all faith refers to this unshakable confidence in God's ability to do mighty things on behalf of his people. It is no coincidence that Paul uses the same figure of speech used on one occasion by Jesus in Matthew 17, 20, where he speaks of having faith like a grain of a mustard seed. And if you have that, you have the ability to move mountains. And the Lord's point to his disciples there was that if they trusted him completely, that nothing in their ministries would be impossible because he is God. They are clay pots, but he is God. And Paul's point here is that even if a person had that great degree of prayerful trust in the Lord, but they were unloving, there would be nothing. So all faith, we'd love to have all faith. Wouldn't we love to trust God in everything? I'd love to trust God every day. I'd love to have mighty faith. And if I have that. I do not have love. I am nothing. Verse three speaks of extreme benevolence, giving away everything we have. That will surely prove that we're loving, giving away everything we have. We like our stuff. We're going to give it all away. Lay down our lives for Christ. Martyrdom and persecution in the early church was intense and was a way in some places to quick fame. There were those who would seek martyrdom as a way to get their name on the front page of the newspaper. I'm going to go out, give my life to Christ. I'll be made famous by 15 minutes of fame. And yet, that's the wrong motives for martyrdom. I mean, even martyrdom can be motivated by self-interest and pride when this is true. It loses its spiritual value. And I said that, and Paul said that to say this. Brothers and sisters, I can lay down my life for the cause of Christ and go to hell in the end. I can lay it all down. I can give everything away. All of it. If it's not motivated by love, love to God and love to neighbor, It is nothing. I'll go to hell. Because all these things will pass away. So love is better than spiritual gifts and martyrdom. But what will this love look like? And that is the heart of the sermon today. So that's my first one. I want to spend a very short time on that and more most of our time on my second point. And my second main point will come in much of the rest of the time is this. Love displays the sweet fruit of gospel humility. Love displays the sweet fruit of gospel humility, and I see this in verses four through seven, the remainder of the passage. Because in these verses, Paul gives the all important definition of love, so kind of unpack his argument here. First, in verse four, he says love is he tells us what love is and he defines it in terms of two things. First, he says love is patient. OK, we're already in big trouble, aren't we with this? Get ready for church this morning. I may have said this last week. Get ready for church this morning. I was far less impatient this morning waiting on Matthew than I was trying to get my kids ready for church this morning. So patience is tested all the time. Long suffering, long tempered, a long fuse. This is commonly used in the New Testament to connote patience with people rather than patience with circumstances. Christostom, one of the early church fathers, said this about patience. He said, this is a word which is used of the man who is wronged and has it easily in his power to avenge himself, but will never do it. He's a mighty man, he has lots of power, he can seek vengeance, but he will never do it. Because patience never retaliates, it refuses to pay back evil for evil. They give biblical illustrations here. Think of the last words of Stephen in Acts 7.60, where Stephen is being stoned to death and he's dying. He says, what? I'm going to get you back? You're going to pay for this? You're all going to hell? No. He says, Lord, do not hold this sin against them. Shocking. But that's what love does. Love is patient. Of course, 2 Peter 3, 9, God is a supreme example. The Lord is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. If you are here today and you are lost and you are breathing, it is God's patience toward you. It is God's mercy toward you. He is showing you patience to not destroy you and send you into eternal judgment. Repent and be reconciled to God because he's showing you patience. And of course, we think of Christ as he was dying on the cross. He said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. God sent his son for our sake to redeem us. And we killed him. And yet he said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do, because he was long suffering, long tempered, the sinless savior. So love is patient. Secondly, love is kind. And this is the counterpart to being patient, to be kind. in this sense, is to be useful, serving and gracious. This is active goodwill. This is Matthew 5, 40 and 41. Our Lord says, if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, don't get an attorney. Give him your coat also. And whoever shall force you to go one mile, go with him too. Are we two mile Christians? Are we going the second mile with those, maybe even those who hate us? and despise us. Are we willing to give them our tunic as well? And God, of course, is a supreme model. Romans 2 for Paul reminds us, do you think a lot of the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Again, this kind of piggyback on what Peter said in first Peter three. Not knowing that His kindness, the kindness of God, leads you to repentance. He is patient with you. He is kind to you. And His leading you to repentance is His kindness to you. And His patience with you, if you are not converted, is His love toward you. His kindness and patience toward you. I think our first test of this is in the home. Kindness. Patience. Fathers, are you kind to your wife and children? When they don't do things exactly the way you wish they would, do them. Are you kind to them? Or do you lash out at them because really what you want is to establish your own kingdom and you want to be sovereign over your own realm? Because you've become God in your place, in your home, and you want them to do exactly what your will is. Your sovereign reign. Are we patient and kind toward them? Are our children kind to each other? Are they kind to us? Are we practicing mercy and self-sacrifice, hospitality for those within the church and those outside the church? Patience and kindness, of course, are also fruits of the Holy Spirit, proving that to some degree, some degree that we are God's people as he bears the fruit of his Holy Spirit of patience and kindness. Remember, I said this is very difficult. Very, very difficult. Oh, it's easy to understand. It's just not easy to do. So love is patient. Love is kind. And then Paul tells us in verses four and the first part of verse five tells us three things. Love is not OK. Love is this. It is patient. It is kind. Now, love is not. And it begins with envious or boastful. Love is neither envious nor is it boastful. That is to say, love neither breaks the 10th commandment, you shall not covet. Nor does love strut its own accomplishments. Because envy tempts us to put others down, while boasting causes us to build ourselves up. And this is the very opposite of humility. And we know that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And I think this is the very thing that Paul was getting at when he admonished us in Philippians 2, 3. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility. In humility count others. as more significant than yourselves. Count others as better than yourself. The other man is always better than you. He's first. I think we see this creep into our lives in very subtle ways. What about our talk? What about conversations? We have lots and lots of conversations in a given day. And if you talk as much as I do, the average person talks 20, gives 20,000 words in a day. Typically, I'm told someone like me, probably 40, 60,000, lots of opportunities for sin. But I keep asking myself, where is my talk centered? Is my talk centered on me? Am I just waiting, poised until the other person takes a breath so I can insert myself into the conversation? Let's talk about me. There's a country song. I want to talk about me. I want to talk about I. You've heard this song probably. If you haven't, it's about this. I want to talk about myself. Really? So do we want to talk about ourselves or are we other centered? Do we stand back and listen to the other person, take their concerns seriously, Or we just want to talk about ourselves. We just want them to know us, what we've done, where we've been, what we think, how we feel, all these things. Or is our talk focused on other people? I think this is a test of whether we are boastful. Or even envious. We're envying the other person. They've got the floor. We want the floor. We're going to take the floor back. Just take a breath. There we go. Got the floor. No, our conversation, our words should be edifying to the other person. Paul says in Ephesians, we should build them up. And maybe that's a listening. I need to be a better listening listener. Pray, brothers and sisters, that I'll be a better listener. So love is not envious or boastful. Secondly, love is not arrogant. Love is not puffed up. I love the word picture here. I love the old King James. It's not puffed up. Think of the state puffed marshmallow man or the Michelin man. He's really puffed up. He's kind of full of air. And that's a good word picture. Because I am arrogant when I forget the correct answer to the question Paul put to the Corinthians elsewhere that we saw in Sunday School today. What do you have that you have not been given? When I fail to realize that the answer to that question is absolutely nothing, I am arrogant. I am puffed up. And this can display itself in many different ways. In the circles I run in, we tend to be doctrinally arrogant. We have all of the doctrinal I's dotted and all of the T's crossed, you know, from the decrees before the foundation of the world to what will happen on that last day. And those who don't have their doctrinal eyes dotted and teeth crossed, we tend to kind of look down on those people. And it's a sin. It is deeply sinful. Maybe they disagree with the vagaries of our theology. Maybe they're in another denomination. And yet, we can be very, very arrogant. And I would argue that, coming from the doctrinal perspective I come from, which really emphasizes grace, if you are arrogant about your doctrines, And you think that somehow you're clever enough to understand them, and that's why you know them. Then you don't understand those doctrines at all. Because a man of grace should be a gracious man. We also can be spiritually arrogant. The Corinthians and their spiritual gifts. Oh, they had lots of gifts. They were spiritually arrogant. The Pharisees. Think of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Thank God I'm not like other men. How many times we say this in our minds? Thank God I'm not like those people. I'm not like those people who have a different view of the spirit. They do all these things and I'm glad I'm much more informed than them. And I don't do all those things. So that's just really foolish. Think about how that sounds. We can say that to ourselves. We don't say it out loud. We probably are polite enough not to say that to our friends because they won't think we're very spiritual if we say that. And they might rebuke us if they love us. But we are more spiritual where we've grown beyond these things. We talk about how mature we become in Christ. And I wonder if we really think that how mature we really are in Christ. I hope we're maturing. But as soon as we think we're humble, we're probably not humble anymore. Materially, we can be arrogant, we can we can believe because of the things we have, that those who have less than us are beneath us. Think of this is a violation of James upbraiding the wealthy and James sued not for having wealth, but for committing the sin of partiality because of their wealth. They want it all in so many places at the table. Put the poor man over there in his dirty clothes, his ugly car. I'm going to put him over here because he doesn't measure up. So we tend to be arrogant and puffed up in so many other ways. There's many, many other ways that we can be arrogant and demonstrate this, I think. So love is not envious or boastful. Love is not arrogant. And thirdly, love is not rude. And some translations say love does not act unbecomingly. This is poor manners. Rightly understood. Not giving thought to the feelings or the sensitivities of others. It is being careless, overbearing, crude, churlish, running over other people. Again, we can do this in conversation, just kind of stumble over and interrupt others if you really just want to be heard. Lots of other ways. It can be very rude, cut people off, not listen to people, give them the silent treatment. Recall 1 Corinthians 11.21, during the Lord's Supper, Paul said, To the Corinthians, each one takes his own supper first and one is hungry and another is drunk. They were doing is displaying this kind of behavior during the Lord's Supper, during the meal. And also during worship services, some tried to outdo others in speaking in tongues. We're competitive people, we can try to outdo each other in 10,000 ways. Love is not envious. Love is not arrogant. It is not boastful. It is not rude. Love does not consider the other person less than themselves. I think Paul is saying here because it's not rude. It's viewing that other person as a human being. Go through the drive through at the fast food place and that person just becomes a thing. No, that person is a human being. We need to view people the way God sees them and that will keep us, I think, from becoming rude. So now Paul transitions after he tells us what love is and what love is not. He speaks of love in action over the next two verses, the next three verses, half of verse five through verse seven. Paul turns to what love does, Paul turns to the actions which the fruit of love produces. First at the end of verse five and verse six, he tells us what love does not do. So catch the argument here. Love is this, love is not this. And now he's telling us love does not do these things. Come in negative to the positive argument here. He says, Love does not do four things. First of all, love does not insist on its own way. Love does not live for itself primarily. I want to illustrate. Two inscriptions on tombstones in a graveyard in London read this way. The first one says, Here lies a miser who lived for himself and cared for nothing. But gathering wealth now where he is or how he fares, nobody knows and nobody cares. Wow. What a legacy. The other reads sacred to the memory of General Charles George Gordon, who at all times and everywhere gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God. This is what Paul means here. We must not insist on our own way. We must not become be self-centered. I mean, love. This is love like Christ possessed toward the father. The father sent the son and in love he came and Christ possessed this love toward the father and also toward all whom the father had given him. And this love is what compelled Jesus to the cross, because this is the kind of love that does not insist on its own well-being or its own way. This is the kind of love that lays down its life for its friends. So I think you're starting to get a picture of why I used the verbiage of devastating. It is devastating to us. Love does not insist on its own way. Secondly, love is not irritable. Some translations call, say, translate this this way, love is not easily provoked. Love guards against being irritated or upset or angered by things said or done against it. And irritable here, this sense of irritable is when we become upset with someone or some circumstance a lot of the time. For me, rush hour traffic can do this fairly quickly, can bring me to my knees and show me for who I really am fairly quickly because I tend to become irritated. This is when we're frequently upset by the unintentional actions, even of another person. And this happens in those mundane moments. We talked about this, talked about this, I think, last week. Paul David Tripp talks a lot about this. And we live in the mundane moments. Our lives aren't mostly spent preaching in a church or sitting in a church because it's very easy for me to come here and be well-dressed, be well-spoken, be nice to you, and then go home and be kind of a tyrant. toward my family or toward anyone who irritates me, who maybe even unintentionally irritates me. I mean, you think about personality types or maybe some personality type of who you work with, and this guy just really irritates me. It's not my kind of guy at all. I don't like this guy or this gal. Really irritate me. From a different place, have different background, different values. I just really don't like them. I find them very, very irritating. Or we can be irritated by someone who's maybe late once in a while. My wife and I, we got married, you bring different backgrounds into the marriage. We brought two different backgrounds that came to this, very minor seeming detail. But my father was the kind of man who basically considered a person, the worth of a human being on whether or not he could be on time. A military guy, got to be on time, 15 minutes early. And my wife, and again, Paul Tripp says kind of the same thing about, you know, three o'clock tomorrow, that's kind of a rough estimate for a family. So we brought this into, this became a source of conflict because I wanted everyone in my family to be early. Lombardi time, 15 minutes early. Eight o'clock, that means 745, not eight o'clock. You're late if it's eight o'clock. I become irritated when the other people don't fit into my mold and I can become really irritated when I'm somewhere and someone's late. I guess you could say, don't be late, but no, no, really. But that is that is an unintentional thing often. And I've got to get over, ask God to put to death my expectation and then God, the expectation of another person, this unintentional action of another person. So love is not irritable. Thirdly, love does not take into account a wrong suffered literally. The ESV, which I'm preaching from this morning, translates this as resentful. Many of your translations translate this as love does not keep a record of wrongdoing, a record of wrongs. And what the word here means is that love does not account or impute, deposit into the account of another person. The same word for the imputation of Christ's righteousness here, it does for being accounted righteous. But love does not impute sin to another person. Well, question of motives, question of heart, we immediately impute sin to that other person. Because just as God pardons our sin, so this kind of love pardons the offenses of others. In other words, we are being we are never being more like God than we are when we are forgiving. Never, never than when we are forgiving our brother. We're being like God. I mean, Jesus said, the disciples said, how many times we have to forgive our brother? Seven times. That's a lot. Seven times. That's a lot of grace here. A lot of grace. Seven times. Jesus corrected their false understanding. He said, no, you must be willing to forgive him. Seventy times seven. This number of completeness or perfection must always be willing to forgive. Think of what we've been forgiven. God has forgiven us in Christ Jesus. Such that, as Peter says, his love covers a multitude of sins, and our love must cover a multitude of sins. That's how it applies. He's covered our sins. We must cover a multitude of sins as well when we are wronged. Fourthly, he says, love does not rejoice at wrongdoing or unrighteousness, but rejoices with truth. Think about what Isaiah warns back in the Old Testament. It says, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness. That's what he's speaking of here is those who turn God's truth upside down. Love does not rejoice in unsound doctrine. This is why we insist on biblical doctrine. Well, I'm just saying here, OK, someone has rejected the Trinity, the deity of Christ, who loved that person, to be very loving and correct them. No, no, no. Paul's being very clear. Love rejoices with the truth. It rejoices with the gospel. That's why there's so much unity found in sound doctrine, I believe, in enlightened mindedness, in doctrine, when you have things right. So you think about how the culture has turned God's truth upside down. Think about the Hollywood values, the television values, the things you see portrayed on there. Same sex marriage, even the gender debate in the church. I think they turned God's truth upside down in many ways. Just rejected something that's very, very clear in the word of God. They turned it upside down and said, this person may do this, which God has clearly said they may not do. It's OK if they do it because they feel called to do it. No. Absolutely not. We must demand sound doctrine because love rejoices with truth. And in view here is not merely a contrast to not rejoicing with sin. We certainly do not rejoice with unrighteousness and living out, living with in accord with unsound doctrine will lead to unrighteousness. But here this is rejoicing in God's truth over against falsehood. Love cannot tolerate false doctrine. If a person holds the false doctrine you love, you love them, you will correct their doctrine lovingly, kindly, patiently teaching them, remembering that you were taught patiently and lovingly. Love, truth and righteousness are inseparable. After all, Jesus said, if you love me, you will what? You will keep my commandments. So love does not rejoice at wrongdoing or unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. Finally, Paul, in verse seven, tells us what love does. Love does not do these four things, and now he tells us four things that love does. This is love in action. And this is a lot harder than it looks. First of all, love bears all things. Fallen human nature has precisely the opposite inclination to this. Because we find perverse pleasure in exposing someone else's failures and faults. Think about the politician who falls. How we chortle and how we laugh and how we fail to be grieved over such a display, a public display of unrighteousness. Oftentimes, if it's someone who disagrees with us particularly, we love it. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. And this is what makes gossip, for example, so appealing in such a struggle for many of us. And not just the ladies, but the guys. We're fall in all of us. We like to gossip. However, Paul says here, we can measure our love for one another by how quick we are to cover his faults. Now, love certainly does not justify sin or compromise a false teaching. Be clear about that from verse six. Love warns, corrects, exhorts, rebukes and disciplines. But love does not expose or broadcast failures or wrongdoings. Love covers and protects in the same way the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant was a place of covering and protection. Of course, we know the mercy seat prefigured Christ's atoning death, which expiated and what I mean by this term expiated means covered. Love covers the sins of God's people, God and love covered the sins of his people through Christ. That's what love does. It expiates. It covers. So it will be seen. I mean, love compelled Christ to this atoning death. And thus love, by its very nature, is redemptive. Love wants to buy back. It does not condemn. Love feels the pain of those it loves. And it carries the burden, the hurt. And many of you here in this church are there right now. Right now. This has deep significance for you, what you've been through in the past six months or so. Don't broadcast this. Love them. Love this party. Because love buys back, love bears all things. It does not shout from the rooftop, look what this person did. Acknowledges we're all sinners. We all need mercy. Love is redemptive. So love bears all things. Secondly, love believes all things. Love is not suspicious or cynical. When love throws its mantle over wrong, it also believes in the best outcome for the one who has done the wrong. It's tied to, bears all things. Love believes that the wrong will be confessed and forgiven and the loved one will be restored to righteousness. And this is the purpose of church discipline. Once a brother or sister has repented of the sin for which they are under discipline, we must believe that their repentance is genuine, that the motives are genuine, that God has granted repentance. After all, it's his mercy, his sovereign grace that does that until we have clear evidence to believe otherwise. And love believes in another way. If there is doubt about a person's guilt or doubt about their motivation, love will always opt for the most favorable possibility. Love will consider him innocent until proven guilty. That's what love does. Again, we love to run to guilty before proven innocent. It's part of our fallen nature. Love does not do that, Paul is saying here. Thirdly, love hopes all things. It not only bears all things and believes all things, love hopes all things. Even when belief in a loved one's goodness or repentance has been shattered, Love still hopes. You brought them under discipline, and they've told you where to get off at. Love still hopes. Because when love runs out of faith, it holds on to hope. As long as God's grace is operative in this world, human failure never has the final word. Never. Never. As long as His grace is operative in this world. God would not take Israel in the Old Testament's failures as final. It was his covenant people. He was faithful to the covenant. Jesus would not take Peter's failure as final. He denied the Lord three times. He was restored. And Paul here would not take the Corinthians failure as final. He did not write them off because there are more than enough promises in Scripture to make love hopeful. It makes us hopeful for that backslidden loved one, that unbelieving spouse, that disciplined church member who did not repent, that all will be restored by sovereign mercy. Because the rope of love's hope knows no end. As long as there's life, love does not lose hope. Because, brothers and sisters, when our hope becomes weak, we know that our love has become weak. They're tied together. Think about our evangelism. I've got a friend. I've been praying for him for 20 years. He's living in gross, high-handed sin. And I love him. We grew up together. We played ball together. And I love him. And I grieve for him. But I pray for him. Because as long as there's time, I have hope that God will grant him repentance. Because I know He granted an unbelievably depraved sinner like me repentance. And I know He can grant him repentance. So I continue to pray. A very dear friend of mine who recently had been praying for his father for 35 years. His father rejected Christ. He's a minister. Rejected Christ. Rejected Christ. Rejected all the arguments, all the apologetics, everything else. My friend is a dean of a school of theology. Has all these letters out by his name. He got a call about a month ago. His brother, his younger brother, who's a businessman, has no scholarly acumen, but is a Christian, led his father to Christ. And for all these years, He'd been praying for him. He said, I prayed for my father. I prayed for him three and four times a day sometimes because I grieved for him. If you have a lost loved one, you have lost people around you, pray for them and do not give up. Continue to pray. Continue because love hopes all things. Finally, love endures all things forcefully. And the term for endurance here, this is a military term signifying an army's holding a vital position at all costs. I followed the 101st Airborne at V-Day. They were surrounded. My father, who was a member of the 101st Airborne, said, that's what we were. The Airborne were always supposed to be surrounded. That's what we were, surrounded. But they were, the Germans demanded they surrender. And if you'll remember, a very famous letter written back, the response was from one of the generals, Anthony McAuliffe, was one word, nuts. That means no, we will not surrender. That's what love does. That's what he has in mind here. Love endures all things at all costs. It does not surrender. It does not give up. It stands against overwhelming opposition and refuses to stop bearing or stop believing or stop hoping. Love will not stop loving because at the end of the chapter, verse 13, Paul says, because faith, hope and love abide. But the greatest of these is love. Love. It is astounding, isn't it? It is difficult, very difficult, exceedingly difficult. And I believe these attributes and in closing are precisely consistent with the love of Christ that he displayed at Calvary. And I said earlier, these are part and parcel to living what we might call a gospel centered life, because they are the opposite of self-love. Jonathan Edwards wrote volumes and volumes about self-love. How we can demonstrate love to self in thousands of different ways. I can read that and feel like I'm not a Christian, just filled with self-love. This is the opposite of self-love and fulfills the commands both to love God and love our neighbor. Remember, our Lord said the first and greatest commandment is to love our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The second one is like it. To love our neighbor as ourselves. Because, beloved, we prove our love to God by the content of our love to neighbor. And that is often costly. And it costs us everything. And this is why we need the gospel operating every day in our lives versus trying to do this in our own power. We can't do this. We know. I think we know we cannot do this. You get the patience. I'm out of effort. Right there. Just failure. Boom. We can't do this. You see it. That's why we need grace. We need the gospel operating in our lives every day, preaching the gospel to ourselves. We need God's grace because without God's mercy, This is impossible for this kind of love is at the heart of Christ's humiliation, his sacrificial love and the model for us, which is which our Lord expressed so well in Mark 10, 43 through 45. I close with this. Right after John and James demonstrated such gross ignorance as to the nature of the kingdom, which Christ had come to inaugurate, they asked our Lord to be given seats at the right and the left hand in glory. We want the seats of privilege. But what did Jesus say? He said, whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. This is what love does. It does not demand its own way. It lays down its life for its friends. It is devastating, devastating, devastating to our foolish pride, devastating to our own worldly kingdoms that are built upon a foundation of self-love. It exhibits the sweet fruit of gospel humility in our relationship to others in patience and kindness and gentleness and hopefulness and self and loving perseverance. By this sort of love is our Christian profession proven to be authentic. Which John reminds us, again, I end where we began, 1 John 4, 7. We love and let us love one another. For love is from God. And whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God. Because God is love. Let's pray together. Father, you have given us an impossible task this morning. But Father, we're thankful that we know the rest of the story, that with man, these things are not possible. But with God, all things are possible. Father, fill our hearts with self-sacrificial love that exhibits itself in these ways, that is consistent with the fruit of the Spirit. that gives the world a picture of what Christ's church is really like, so that they might take our evangelism seriously, so that they might see that we have been transformed by this amazing, glorious, incomprehensible gospel. Father, do this for our overflowing joy and for Your own glory, through Jesus Christ, Your Lord. Amen.