I was in high school and college in the 1980s, so, naturally, I look on those days with a particular fondness.
Those were heady times for a teenage hillbilly.
Reagan was in the White House. Herschel was toting the rock at UGA. Pete Rose, my baseball hero, was chasing hard after Ty Cobb. Major League Baseball had not yet slouched into the steroid era. My parents mostly paid for everything (I was a kid, after all). That last line may be why I view those days with such affection.
And there was music. All of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s feel certain we had the best music. You could attend a concert without hearing a political lecture on pronouns or similar nonsense from a liberal rock star. We were just happy to be here, and we were singing about it, usually in terms of love: “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Love Stinks,” “Love Hurts,” “Love Bites,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Love Somebody,” “Love Is in the Air,” “You Look So Good in Love,” “Love in the First Degree,” “Lookin’ for Love,” “I Want to Know What Love Is” (the guy who wrote that really should read this article and 1 Corinthians 13), and the grammatically challenged “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” Love, love, love — it was all about love.
But did/do we really understand it?
The world has nothing on Christians when it comes to talkin’ ’bout love. As redeemed sinners, we talk and talk and talk about it, and well we should. We talk about love because the Bible has been called God’s love letter to sinful man, which I like.
After all, Jesus summarized holy living according to the moral law as loving God and loving neighbor as we love ourselves. And He gave us these sobering words: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” With that in mind, how we love is vitally important, and the ultimate Lover, our Lord and Savior, shows us exactly how genuine love looks.
After John 3:16, perhaps the most beloved biblical passage on love is Paul’s pithy unpacking of what love does and what it does not do in 1 Corinthians 13; it is most often found cross-stitched on wedding gifts that adorn the walls of newly married couples.
Cross-Stitched Love
Because it is so concise, memorable, and familiar, this passage is often taken out of context to a degree that it loses its full impact — and what an impact it has, rightly interpreted and applied. Given the context — it is sandwiched between a discussion of spiritual gifts in chapters 12 and 14 — it is a devastating text. How is it devastating? It is devastating to us because it is a powerful revelation of the nature of divine love as summed up in Christ.
But here’s what makes it devastating: It is also definitive of the way in which God’s people are to love one another. I’m borrowing this insight from Jonathan Edwards’ book, Charity and Its Fruits, an exposition of 1 Corinthians 13.
I Want to Know What Love is: It Is Patient and Kind
Verse 4 begins the gauntlet of love-defining fruits with patience. The word here connotes patience with people rather than circumstances. Early church father Chrysostom said of patience as it appears here: “It 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.” Patience never retaliates, it refuses to pay back evil for evil. The stoning of Stephen and, of course, Jesus’s words at Calvary — “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing” — are profound illustrations here. This is devastating to our selfishness and self-love.
Next, love is kind, the counterpart to patience. To be kind is to be useful, servant-oriented, and gracious. It goes two miles when it only had to go one. The first test for parents here is in the home and posture toward the children. This is devastating to our tendency toward having our own way.
Aint’ Talkin’ ‘Bout Love: What Love is Not
Love is not arrogant or rude, and it does not always insist on its own way (which pretty much defines arrogant and rude). Love is neither envious nor boastful. Love neither breaks the 10th commandment, nor does it strut its accomplishments. Envy temps us to put others down, while boasting causes us to build ourselves up.
The opposite of this is humility. “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” I think this is what Paul was getting at when he admonished us in Philippians 2:3: “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”
The word for arrogant here is a striking word picture: puffed up. My ego is the size of the Michelin Man, but it must shrink in the light of Christ. I am arrogant when I forget the correct answer to the question Paul put to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 4:7: “What do you have that you have not been given?”
Don’t Do Me Like That: What Love Avoids
Love does not insist on its own way. It does not live for itself. Christ certainly didn’t, and neither should His followers. Central to the Christian faith is laying down your life.
Love is not easily irritated. Irritable here is when we easily grow upset with a person or circumstance — the unintentional actions of others. This usually happens in the mundane moments; we get worked up like Archie Bunker over an annoying personality type, or we instantly grow into a sourpuss like a drill instructor by someone who’s habitually late. It is a specie of impatience.
Love does not keep a record of wrongdoing. It does not hold a grudge when it is wronged but forgives others as Christ has forgiven (Eph. 4:32). Love does not rejoice with sin but rejoices with truth. It is loving to hate sin and to rejoice with sound doctrine. And love covers a multitude of sins — meaning, it is loving to be patient with the foibles and sins of others as God is patient with us. Feeling the difficulty yet?
Love in the First Degree: What Love Does
Here’s part of the reason love is so often misunderstood: It is a principle of action rather than of emotion. It is a matter of doing things for people out of compassion for them, whether we feel personal affection for them or not. It is by their active love to one another that Jesus’s disciples can be recognized.
What does love do? Look at this litany of others-centered righteousness: It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love does the heavy lifting in the Christian life. Don’t miss “all things,” for therein lies the reason I call love a “devastating doctrine”: Love, rightly understood, devastates us because it requires the slaying of the old, sinful man. It requires us to lay down our lives for others. In that way, a good way, it devastates us because love toward others requires us to give our lives away as our Savior did. And apart from grace, that is impossible.
Jesus Paid It All: Calvary Defines Love
What are these attributes of love but a powerful portrayal of the love Christ poured out at Calvary? Christ demolished our record of wrongdoing by depositing His righteousness into our account — won through His sinless life (active obedience) and His substitutionary death (passive obedience). His death bore all things, even all our sins, gave us a sure and settled hope, endured to the point of death. The atonement is both the model that shows us how to love one another and the fuel that drives the engine of obedience through hearts transformed in the new birth.
Love, rightly understood, properly lived, is devastating to our old man and is impossible to accomplish apart from the enabling grace of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said it in John 15:12-13: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Christ laid down His life for us so to enable us to lay down our lives in service of others. Christ bore the devastation we deserved to bear, so that we might be set free from bondage to self and live for the glory of another.
JEFF ROBINSON is editor and president of The Baptist Courier. He also serves as an adjunct professor of church history at North Greenville University.