Introduction

In this profound exploration of 1 Corinthians 13, Revd. Mark Fletcher reveals how love transcends romantic ideals to become the very essence of God and the foundation of Christian life. He demonstrates that biblical love is practical, covenantal, and transformative – not merely a feeling but a choice that reflects Christ’s unconditional love for humanity.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. Love is of course the theme of so much of our poetry and our music, our literature, and our cinema. And who can argue that it is the greatest thing? But what if it actually was. What if love is greater and more important than anything else?

And I would like to suggest to you that in real terms, it is. Love is the greatest thing because it is as close as we can get to God. Love is the very essence of God. We have so many words that we can use to describe God. You can say, God is almighty, God is holy. God is eternal. And yet the phrase that the Bible uses to describe God is God is love.

1 John says God is love, whoever lives in love, lives in God and God in them. The greatest commandment is: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. There is nothing more important than love. Now we are beginning a series on the fruit of the Spirit and the first fruit of the spirit you may well know is love.

And I’d like to suggest it’s first for a reason. It’s not just the first in a list, but because love is the source of all of the others. It is the source of joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and self-control. You know how sunlight, when it refracts through a raindrop, creates all of the colours of a rainbow? In the same way, love is like that sunlight which refracts into all of those other colours, all of those other virtues. It’s a profoundly important thing. My suggestion though is we don’t understand it very well. They say that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. Sadly, it’s not true, which is a shame. But certainly, in the Greek language that the Bible was originally written in, there are at least five words for love.

Whereas English is a rather prosaic language and we just have one. And so I think inevitably something gets lost in translation. I’d like to suggest to you that there are two major ideals about love, which we hold together. The first and arguably the dominant one in our culture is romantic love.

Love as a passion. Love as something which is a sort of transcendent experience, as something you fall into. And most of the depictions of love in music and cinema are that kind of love. Love is the happy ending, the answer to our crisis. It is the meaning that we discover and it’s wonderful and hugely important.

But have you ever noticed how strange it is that we rarely get to know what happens the day after the happy ending? When the couple finally get it together and all of the crisis is resolved, and then what? And love is the answer to that question. What next? How do we live? Because romantic love cannot be the whole story.

It ignores so many of the most important aspects of love. Whether that’s the love between parents and children, the friendship that is so essential to our lives, the love between brothers and sisters, a love amongst a family, or a love which is part of being community or a love for God. And so there is this other hugely important aspect of love.

And that brings us to 1 Corinthians 13. What a passage that is. Thank you Bill for reading that so beautifully. It’s so familiar and yet every time you read it, you’re struck by it again. It is rich and profound and in some ways a little bit uncomfortable. I was going to bring a checklist and we could measure ourselves against that list of what love is like. But I think that would be quite an uncomfortable thing. So I thought I wouldn’t do that. But one of the things that’s striking about 1 Corinthians 13 is that it isn’t very romantic at all. It is rather practical. Remember the context of this, that what is going on here is a critique of a rather dysfunctional church community. A church, which thought it was really special.

A church which thought it was very spiritual and yet seemed to have failed at the first hurdle, which was love. And so the apostle wrote, if I have a faith that can move mountains but have not love, I have nothing. And it’s all about what love looks like in the context of community or a friendship or family.

It’s about the hard work of building something rich and lasting. Which reflects the love of God. So hear these words. Verse four. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. 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, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Isn’t that wonderful? What a thing to say. And this is what the Bible says love is. You notice it’s not really sentimental at all. It’s realistic about how hard life and relationships can be. But it is the thing that we need to hear.

I will often say to couples who are getting married in church – you know that the church service, at no point do you say to one another, I love you. You say, I will love you through thick and thin, in sickness and in health through good times and bad until death as do part. It is a promise of love, not a feeling of love.

It’s covenantal, it’s faithful, and it’s the greatest project of our lives. Succeed in that and nothing else really matters. And upon that foundation, we build families and communities. And I think we need to model and live that kind of love. We need to teach it to our children. We need to share it amongst our communities.

We need to live it out amongst our friends and in our church. And of course, it isn’t just a high ideal. This description of love could equally be a description of Jesus. This is what his love looks like. He is the role model. It’s his footsteps in which we follow. Think about his encounters with people in the gospels.

I think about the woman at the well, or Zacchaeus of the tree, and the way that Jesus’ unconditional, faithful love for them is transformative of them. This kind of love changes us and changes others. However, you probably can’t do this by yourself. Theologically, we describe love as a common grace, that even in a fallen world which has turned its back on God, there is still love to be found, and that is a gift from God.

Love is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. But it is, if this is right, a very high calling. And there’s a reason why so many relationships struggle because we end up trying to do this without help. God is not only the source of life, he is the source of love, and we need to tap into that source in order to help us love.

As we’ve said, love is a fruit of the spirit, and one of the things people often point out is that fruit is not something that you can make grow. You can’t do it, can you? But what you can do is create environments where it can flourish. If you plant a tree in rocky soil where it struggles for water and nutrients and it’s buffeted by the wind, don’t be surprised that the fruit that it bears is scant and bitter. And the parallel is with our lives. The soil that we plant ourselves in, the environment that we place ourselves in shapes the kind of fruit that our lives bear. And if our lives are not lived in rich relationships with the source of love, how do we expect them to be any different?

I think we need to do the same thing in our relationships with one another. We need to do the right thing. We need to be kind and generous and forgiving. But it isn’t just about that. It’s not about the kind of the duty of it. Love is found when we make connections with each other. That’s when we experience love and see it grow.

And those crucial connections between one another: emotional, physical, listening, spending time together, making eye contact. These are the things which help us to live lives of love. It’s about creating an environment where love can flourish. It’s the same with our relationship with God. Do the right things, be faithful and dutiful, but never neglect the experience of being in God’s presence of hearing him speak to you through the scriptures of experiencing his love in prayer and seeing him at work in your life.

These are the things which help us to be fruitful and to live lives of love. Love is the greatest thing. Do that which helps it to flourish and your lives will be rich in love. Finally, the apostle says, verse eight, love never fails. But that is not to say that you will never fail in love. We all do, and the test of love is not that you never make a mistake, it’s what you do next.

That to love is to start over, to dust yourself off, to say sorry properly, and to commit yourself once more to beginning again. To say love never fails, means love never ends because there is something of God in it, something of eternity in it.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these, is love. Love endures into eternity. It is perhaps the only thing that you can take with you. So invest your life wisely. Choose the way of love above everything else. Root yourself in God. Work hard to see love flourish wherever you go.

Value it above everything else. Create communities and relationships of love wherever you go. Be rich in love and you will be truly rich in this world and in eternity. William Wordsworth once said, the small unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person’s life. May your lives be rich in kindness and love and bear fruit that lasts into eternity. And this is what the Bible calls the most excellent way.

Amen.