I Want to Know What Love Is!
I Want to Know What Love Is!
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13
Sermon Summary:
At the heart of every relationship we navigate—with family, friends, colleagues, and our faith community—lies one essential element: love. This exploration of 1 Corinthians 13 rescues Paul’s famous passage from being merely a wedding reading and reveals it as a powerful sermon addressing a deeply divided church. The Corinthians were fractured by spiritual pride, with members believing their gifts made them superior to others. Into this chaos, Paul introduces what he calls ‘a more excellent way.’ Love isn’t just a feeling that comes and goes; it’s a choice, a discipline, a decision we make even when emotions fail us. Paul personifies love through fifteen present-tense verbs, weaving together what love does and what it never does—patient yet never envious, kind yet never boastful, truth-celebrating yet never self-seeking. This isn’t the fleeting ‘eros’ of Greek culture but ‘agape’—that deep, abiding, transformative love that mirrors Christ himself. When we substitute Jesus’ name for ‘love’ in verses 4-7, we see the perfect embodiment of this powerful force. In our current culture characterized by envy, self-importance, and thin-skinned reactions, we need this counter-cultural love more than ever. Early Christians transformed the Roman Empire not through eloquence or miracles alone, but through radical love that cared for the marginalized, sick, and forgotten. That same love still works today, and we’re called to follow this Jesus way—because when we get our theology of love right, everything else falls into place.
Sermon Points:
Key Takeaways:
- Love is a priority—it’s foundational to everything in Christian faith and life, not just one topic among many
- First Corinthians 13 is not a standalone poem but a sermon addressing a divided church that valued spiritual gifts over love
- Love is personified through action verbs—it’s not merely a feeling but a disciplined choice and habit
- Love can be described by what it does (patient, kind, truthful, protective) and what it doesn’t do (envious, boastful, arrogant, selfish)
- The Greek language has multiple words for love; the New Testament uses “agape” (disciplined, abiding love) rather than “eros” (sensual love)
- When love is personified in 1 Corinthians 13, it describes the character of Jesus Christ
- Love is permanent—while spiritual gifts will cease, faith, hope, and love remain, with love being the greatest
- Early Christianity distinguished itself from other ancient religions through radical, sacrificial love
- Following “the way of love” means following the Jesus way
- Western culture today is characterized by “unlove”—envy, self-importance, thin-skinned reactions, and celebration of others’ failures
Scripture References:
Sermon Transcript:
We focus on a different facet of flourishing together. So for the fall, it is not good to be alone. We have been learning more about relationships and, today marks the final installment of that particular series as we will bring it to a conclusion next Sunday. We’ll turn the corner. And our theme for engagement month is call to the wild and what we’re going to talk about is how the Lord has released us out into the wild.
It’s one thing to be a Christian within the confines of the church, but it’s something else to actually live out in the wild every day, to be, engaged, if you will, using the gifts that God has given you and the opportunities he has placed in front of you to live missional and so we’re going to begin that journey next week. So, you know, we are involved in this human flourishing study. And one of the domains that is being researched in the global flourishing study is close social relationships, relationships with your family, with your friends, with your colleagues at work, with your church, with the acquaintances that you’re connected to.
And so we have spent, this entire fall looking at all those different relationships. So here’s what I want to do this morning. I want to bring it to a conclusion by stating the obvious. It’s one of my spiritual gifts. Remember, at the heart of all relationships is love. So I’m entitled this message. I want to know what love is.
Another original to me. It’s crazy how creative I’ve been during this series with all these titles. First Corinthians 13 is the text. So back in 1984, Mick Jones, he was a member of the British American group foreigner. He said he like to work at home late at night by himself. Occasionally one of the other band members would come over, and this particular song came to him at a season in his life where he was reflecting upon the power of love and the desire that he knew people in his life had.
That was to know what love is. Well, when he shared those lyrics, he really captured the sentiment of all human beings. I’ve never met anybody who didn’t want to be loved. And there’s this desire that we all have to know what love is. And so this page in our Bibles, first Corinthians 13, is the most famous passage on love in our Bibles.
Sometimes we are a little bit misled by it, however, because we remove it from its context and we read it almost like it was, just a random poem or maybe a hymn that Paul just inserted somewhat clumsily, into a larger conversation. And so what I’d like to do this morning is rescue. First Corinthians 13, if I may.
It’s not a standalone hymn. That’s not really what it is. It’s not a it’s not a disconnected poem that Paul crafted as he reflected upon the beauty of love. It’s not a text that Paul thought to himself, one day. Christian pastors are going to be conducting weddings, and they need something to read about love on that day. That’s not what First Corinthians 13 is.
It has been removed from its context. We do read it at weddings and it is a beautiful, powerful expression of a description of love. But when you read it in context, here’s what’s happening. Paul is addressing a church that is deeply troubled. It’s a church that’s divided. It’s a church that struggling with its leadership. In fact, it’s a church that seemingly at some point in the conversation Paul has with them, every time they meet together, they get worse. It’s one of those churches that maybe needs to take a sabbatical from meeting with each other, if I may say that, to see if they can’t get better.
Paul is engaged in this conversation, and one of the challenges the church is facing is there are people within the church who believe that their giftedness is superior to everybody else’s giftedness, and they believe they are the shiny thing, if you will, in the church and because of that, they look down on the other members of the body. And so Paul is in the middle of this conversation about spiritual gifts. And if you if you’ll open your Bibles and look at it with me in first Corinthians 13, he talks about these gifts, and then he just says as a preface to what we’re about to read.
Paul says at the end of chapter 12, I’m going to show you a more excellent way. In other words, all this furor over speaking in tongues, performing miracles, having the gift of faith. All these things that you think are superior, that you think somehow have distinguished you from the rest of the congregation that is only furthering the divide that already exists.
You remember what Doctor Garland said about this church. It wasn’t that the church was in Corinth. It’s that too much. Corinth was in the church. I remember that. And so Paul says, I’m trying to help you see a completely different way to live than the way you’re living right now. So this is actually a sermon inserted into this challenge, this theologically challenging conversation Paul’s having. So keep that in mind as we look at this text. So here’s what Paul says to the Corinthians. And in so doing, he says it to me. And you, first Corinthians 13 verse one, if I speak in the tongues of men or of angels. In other words, some people thought this was just a heavenly language. If you will, but do not have love.
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I’m nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor, and give over my body to the hardship that I may boast, but I do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. It always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it’ll pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I taught like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now, we see only a 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. And now these three remain faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Look at the very next sentence. Follow the way of love. Paul says, what a what a powerful message to the church at Corinth. So let me begin my conversation with you with a question. What’s love got to do with it? Once again, another original question for me. 1984 was Just a Year About Love. That was, Tina Turner.
Y’all remember? Some of you do. And, she, won three Grammys with that song. She was 44 years old. Became the oldest female to ever topped the Billboard list in America with that song. And, so it’s a pretty profound question. What’s love got to do with it? You know what the Bible says? Everything.
What’s love got to do with it? Everything. Love is at the very heart of everything. Y’all remember some of you were in our church back during the pandemic, and somewhere along the way, in the pandemic, we were focused on this conversation about love. And we met this Irish, this wonderful Irish scholar named Patrick Mitchell. Y’all remember that?
And he wrote me and I came across his book, The Message of Love. He actually, remember, sent a video to us, from Ireland. He teaches in, an Irish seminary there. Bible seminary in Ireland. And, well, in May, he actually came to our church and, as a staff, we got to spend part of the day with Patrick Mitchell.
Wonderfully delightful man of God. Well, in his book, The Message of Love, he answers that question. What’s love got to do with it? Let me show you this quote. From Patrick Mitchell, from that book, The Message of Love. Here’s what he says. He says rare is the person who does not want to love and be loved. Love appears to be intrinsic to our humanity.
Sociologists may dissect behavior mechanics behind the claims of love. Branches of medical research may explore the biochemistry of love. But however explain it is almost universally agreed that we need love in order to live and flourish as human beings. Would you not say Amen to that? Would we need love? And we want to love. We want to be loved.
So with that said, let’s look at this text and see what we can learn. I want to offer you four words to connect us to this particular teaching in this text. The first one is the word priority. Love is foundational to everything in our lives. It just is. It’s at the very heart of everything. We are relational creatures.
It’s the way God’s wired us. Because he is relational. Let me share with you what Patrick says about love in another passage. I didn’t I didn’t have it for you on the screen. But let me just say this. He says, we live in and we are deeply shaped by Western culture. There is therefore, I believe, no greater need for the renewal of the church than to grasp afresh the breadth, depth, scope and radically countercultural nature of the Bible’s teaching on love.
If we do not get our theology of love right, we will end up with a distorted view of God. His relationship with his people, the nature of the cross, the motivation for and the source. The source of the Christian life. The work of the spirit. The dynamics of Christian worship. The purpose of the church and the nature of Christian hope.
The message of love is crucial to the Christian faith. I wholeheartedly agree with that. We have to have a theology of love. You and I should be well schooled on what the Bible has to say about love, because the Bible is a book about love. The Bible portrays our God as a God of love. In fact, the Bible will even go as far to say that God is love.
And so the people in this church in Corinth, let’s keep our Bibles open. Let’s look at First Corinthians 13. They seem to think that their value was rooted in their superior gifting. So the greater the gift, the greater the person, the lesser the gift, the lesser the person. They were already divided in another ways. But now they’re divided in church.
They’re already segmented in their society. The ancient world was incredibly segmented, so that was already a reality to them. What Paul is trying to teach them is that when you come into the church, all that segmentation disappears. Paul will say things like, there are no Jews or Gentiles. There are no males and females. There are no slaves. And free people.
What did he mean by that? He didn’t mean that all those distinctions disappear. What he meant was, when you come inside the church, the ground is level at the foot of the cross, and we’re all sinners, and our value is actually in the image of God that’s in every one of us. And so Paul is trying to teach these people.
No, it’s not the fact that you speak in tongues. Tongues was a was a gift that the Spirit of God chose to give at the birth of the church. I believe it’s a legitimate spiritual gift, the gift of prophecy, the gift of faith. Paul recognized the reality of all of them. He said, however, if you have all of those, even if you’re able to exercise these gifts that everybody looks at and valued, particularly in this ancient church, and Paul says, and yet you don’t have love.
He says, then actually you have missed the point because love is the game changer. Paul says, as a matter of fact, when you think that you’re prophesying, when you think that you’re speaking in tongues, even if you think you’re speaking in the tongues of angels and you don’t have love, all you’re all you are is a noise maker in the church.
You might as well be a gong or a symbol. The symbols were used by street musicians. Sometimes they use these. These voices in their plays that they would pound on and they would use them acoustically. And Paul says, you’ve got all this impressive spiritual activity, but you don’t have love. What you need to know is you’re nothing. It counts for nothing and so when we’re reading this as a poem, you know, many times if we’re going to read this at a wedding, we skipped the first part because we don’t like to read that you are nothing. That’s not a good way to start a marriage, right? Okay, so we’ll use a skip over that. But Paul doesn’t skip over because that’s the introduction to his sermon.
He says, if you don’t get this, then nothing else matters. Get this verse. Love is a priority. So with that said, y’all, what is love? How do you define love? Well, here’s what I’ve learned through the years. Love is incredibly difficult to define. It just is. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you were to ask somebody, do you know what love is?
Of course I know what love is. I know how to love. I know when I’m loved. I know what it looks like. I know how it makes me feel. We. Of course we’re familiar with all that. But what is love? Here’s what I’ve learned. Love is something. More often than not, we describe rather than define. And that’s because I think it almost escapes definition.
And so we’ve got to figure out how to describe it. That’s what First Corinthians 13 is. It’s a description of love. And here’s what Paul chooses to do. I’ll give you the word personified. That’s what happens beginning in verse four. Love according to Paul. And I believe the teachings of the whole New Testament. It is connected to feelings.
But love itself is not a feeling. And that’s where my culture runs awry. My culture believes that love is just a feeling. It’s here today, gone tomorrow. It’s a flimsy, fleeting kind of thing. And what Paul is going to do in this text is help you and I embrace a much sturdier view of love. Because love is not just a feeling.
Does love promote feelings? Well, of course it does. We’re emotional people. You know, when you think about your head in your hands and your heart, all that’s connected to your Christianity, of course it is connecting you as a human being. What you think and what you do and how you feel. But love, even though it promotes feelings, it is not a feeling.
It is so much deeper than a feeling. Love is a choice. Love is a decision. Love is a discipline. Love sometimes is something you have to choose to do. Even when the feelings are not there. That’s what the Bible teaches. That is so contrary to my world. Because my world, you can walk away from something because you just don’t feel and you don’t feel anything anymore.
Well, okay. Good. But guess what? You made a decision. When you make a decision, you live in that decision. And so it’s challenging. So what does Paul do? Well, Paul personifies love. It is fascinating how he does it. Look with me at verses four through seven. Would you believe when you’re reading this in the text, the Greek text, even in English, there are 15 verbs to try to describe love.
And here’s what Paul does. He paints a dynamic portrait of love. He takes two threads, weaves them together into a mosaic that describes love. One of those threads, it would be characterized by positive statements about love. The other thread would be negative statements. In other words, Paul takes statements about love and statements about unlove. And he weaves them together into a mosaic.
They’re all verbs. They’re all present tense verbs. And what Paul is saying is that love is this. But it’s not that. Oh yeah, it’s this. But it’s not that. It’s never that. It’s always this, but it’s never that. And he just weaves that together. And it helps us understand. It is not this flimsy, fleeting, flippant feeling. That’s not what love is.
Love is much deeper, much sturdier. It is much more disciplined. In fact, Paul personifies the driving force of love. So let’s look at how he does it real quickly. What is love? Well, Paul says, I might not answer it that way, but I’ll tell you what it does. So look at verse four. Here’s what he says. Love is patient.
Love is kind. Love celebrates the truth. And then further down in the text he says that love always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. It always perseveres. These are present tense verbs. In other words, these are habits that are woven into the fabric of a Christian’s life. This should characterize how we deal with one another. Love is long suffering.
Love is tender. Love is tethered to the truth. In fact, when you get to this phrase, sometimes I think it’s so difficult to translate things in another language, like look at verse seven. It sounds almost trite when you just say, well, it always protects, it always trusts, it always hopes, it always perseveres. Several different translations of the New Testament try to help us better understand that.
For example, the Revised English Bible puts it like this there’s nothing love cannot face. In fact, that translation says there’s no limit to its faith, to its hope, to its endurance. I like that translation. There is nothing love cannot face. And so Paul is saying, you want to know what love is? Well, let me show you what love does.
You want to know what Unlove is? Well, let me show what unloved us in this very same text. What does he say? Look at it. Here’s what love does not do. Doesn’t envy. Love is not boastful. Now, once again, you’ve got these folks in this church that are very proud of themselves. They’re arrogant. They believe there’s something special about them.
That’s why they’ve gotten the special gifting. There are obviously something wrong with you. Or you’d have this. Oh, you can’t do this better. I’m sorry. You know, maybe one day. Maybe one day. I doubt it. But, you know, maybe one day. And so there’s this deep divide in the body. And Paul says, well, let me tell you what Unlove looks like.
It envies. It’s boastful. He says, look at it’s arrogant. It’s dishonorable. It’s self-seeking. It’s thin skinned. Paul says it’s a record keeper. It always enjoys evil. See? That’s Unlove. So Paul says, love is never that. These are active habits in the present tense. If these things characterize me, are you were jealous or braggart? We’re self-important. We’re judgmental. We’re selfish.
We’re trigger happy. In other words, we’re thin skinned, always waiting on you to mess up so we can call you into account. It loves catastrophe. You love what other people are broken, are faithless, vengeful, and selfish. None of that is love. Paul says if those things are characterizing you, you’ve lost your way. You’re living in darkness. You know, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King was famous for saying, darkness cannot drive out darkness.
Neither can hate drive out hate. Only love can do that. Only light can drive out darkness. Only love can drive out hate. I would tell you right now, if you’ve got hatred in your heart, why don’t you substitute love? There?
If there’s darkness in your life. Substitute light for it and see what happens. Because darkness and hatred leads you away from who God is. This is a beautiful thing about this text. There’s power in love. You see, love is a powerful force that can overcome selfishness. It can overcome hate. It can. When you and I are gripped by the very things that are described in this church in Corinth, and we can all be gripped by them.
We can get to that place to where we’re envious. We’re proud of what we have, and we’re jealous of what you have. We get to that point to where we’re boastful about who we are. We’re overly self-important. We get to that place and we realize we’re on the wrong path. We’re not on the path of love. We’re on the path of Unlove.
And I look at the brokenness in my culture right now, and I’m just watching and listening. And what I would tell you is, when I look at the Western culture right now, the American culture is characterized by a whole lot of unlove. There’s so much envy and jealousy in my society right now. There is so much self-importance and ignorance.
There’s so many people that are thin skinned and trigger happy. There seem to be so many people that celebrate the failures and the brokenness of others. There are people that rejoice with untruth, not truth. It’s amazing to me. And so you and I, as Christians, we live in that context. And the Bible has so much to say about love.
You know, the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, which was the the language of the marketplace. It’s what the it’s what the common people spoke. But even that particular common language, it was very robust with vocabulary. In fact, in the Greek language, there’s more than one word for love. You and I are limited by our language. In English.
I might say to you, man, I love my job. I love those Auburn Tigers. We won yesterday, by the way. I love Cindy and I love Jesus. Now you know. Right. You know that I mean something different every time, right? Don’t you know that? But if I were speaking Greek, I just use a different word. That’s the beauty of the richness of the vocabulary in Greek.
The most common word for love in the Greek language is the word eros. It means to love. It’s a sensual kind of love. We get our English word erotic from that word. It’s the most common word for love in the Greek language. You know, the Greeks wrote a lot of poetry. They were literate society. And, they recorded so much of their history, and they use that word often.
It’s the most common word for love in the Greek language is never found. One time in the New Testament in that fascinating entire New Testament written in Greek. And the most common when and New Testament, a book about love and the most common word for love in the language is not found one time. It’s fascinating to me. In some ways, I believe it’s because God understood that that particular kind of love is a given.
It is what it is. But the Greeks had other words for love. And y’all know that word agape. A that deep, disciplined, abiding kind of love. Not flimsy, not fleeting, not just a feeling, but a choice that does produce feelings. That’s the word this used throughout First Corinthians 13. It’s agape, a kind of love. It’s a deep kind of love.
And you know what, y’all? There is power in it. In fact, some theologians have have suggested what if you took first Corinthians 13 beginning in verse four and take out the word love as the subject, because the word love is personified in those few verses? What if you take that word out and substitute Jesus Christ instead, and let Jesus Christ be the subject of each one of those sentences?
What would it sound like? Well, you want to do it. Let’s look at it. First Corinthians 13, verse four. Jesus Christ is patient. Jesus Christ is kind. Jesus Christ does not envy. Jesus Christ does not boast. Jesus Christ is not proud. He does not dishonor others. He is not self-seeking. Are y’all with me? I’m not saying I’m a fan of that kind of practice, but what I am saying is, when I read that text about love, I can’t help myself but think about Jesus because I believe Jesus loves deeply.
He loves with that agape kind of love. It’s a disciplined kind of love. And what I know is his love is powerful and it transforms people’s lives. And so it stands to reason if that kind of love is on display in me and is at work through me, it’s transformative as well. Both in me and through me and in the lives of others.
So here is a calling for you and I to love. And then finally, Paul makes one other point that is theologically profound. It has to do with the word permanence. Paul teaches us that love is forever, beginning in verse eight through verse 13, there’s an eschatological thread that Paul just throws in. All of a sudden. And Paul says, I want you to think about where we’re headed.
Here’s what I want you to understand. There’s a there’s God who is at work in history, and he’s moving us toward an end. And here’s what I want you to know. All those gifts that you think are so important right now, one day they won’t even exist anymore. They were created by God for imperfect people in an imperfect world.
And these gifts one day will disappear. They’re prophecies, speaking in tongues. All these things that you think are so important in the day is going to come when they will no longer exist. Paul says, it’s kind of like when I was a kid, there were certain things that I enjoyed. There were things that I did. There were toys that I played with.
There was a perspective I had on life. Guess what? Once I matured, I no longer needed that. You no longer need these gifts, Paul said. And you’re having a hard time understanding that because you’re looking in the mirror and it’s kind of dim right now. One day you’re going to see everything as it is, and then you will know this love is permanent and love will last forever to outlast all these gifts.
Paul says, A matter of fact, all these will go away and all that’s going to be left is faith, hope and hope and love. And guess what? The greatest of those is? Love. So I want to ask you this morning, how well do you love? Paul says in chapter 14, verse one, follow the way of love. You know what the way of love is?
The Jesus way. That’s what it is. And so you and I have been called to love. You know, Christianity was birthed in real time, in a real place, in real history and in the ancient world, it was dominated by religions. There were all kinds of religions expressed in the ancient world, and Christianity was birthed in the midst of that religious milieu.
Somehow or another, Christianity stood out and it gained footing, and it actually grew across the ancient world in an amazing way. There are all kinds of theories behind it. We historians I see Stephen over here. We’ve studied it. We’ve tried to figure it out. What? What happened? Why? Why? Why the church? Why did this happen? There were so many other options.
And the Greeks were captivated by those other options. So were the Romans. But somehow or another, Christianity took took root in the Roman culture. And as you studied the history of Christianity, what you’ll watch is if you study history, you’ll see the romanization of the world. There’s no doubt about that. The Romans take over the world, but an amazing turn of history.
You can also watch the Christianization of the Roman Empire. There’s so many things that happen. But here’s one of the things I would point you to. One of the things that distinguished Christianity from all the other world religions was love. Christians loved. They took care of the elderly. They took care of the marginalized. They took care of the sick.
They stepped in when people were in trouble. Some of them would even sell themselves so they could pay a ransom for a loved one who was jailed or enslaved. They were willing to die for their faith. They constantly loved one another. When you joined this movement, you became a part of a family that loved each other, and that love was so powerful it overcame the forces of darkness in the ancient world.
Well, I’m submitting to you all this morning. It still works. Amen. And we need a heavy dose of it, because we need to combat the forces of darkness in our world. Why should I be surprised that it works? I shouldn’t be. Jesus was asked one time. What’s the greatest thing we can do? Well, what’s the all time greatest thing we can do?
What is it? What? What does the Bible say? What is the best thing that anybody could do? I’m kind of paraphrasing the question. You remember what Jesus said? Love, love, love the Lord your God and love each other. You know, I said it. It works. So let me ask you, how well do you love? Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank you so much that you’re a God of love. That your word teaches us about love. That the Scripture says you love this world so much that you gave your son. The Bible says that God is love. And so, Lord, today there may be people right now within the sound of my voice who just need to know their loved.
Lord, I just pray that today will be that day. They’ll be drawn to you to know that you love them. Lord, also, there may be those within the sound of my voice who have discovered there are people in their life that it’s a great challenge to love. And I get that. I just pray that somehow it will deepen that discipline in us so that we can love well, so that that love will transform others just like it has us.
And we pray that in Jesus name, Amen.