1 Corinthians 13:4-8
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
My wife and I were talking a bit ago about how twisted the concept of love - particularly God's agape love - has become. Under the influence of the World, pressing constantly upon the Church as it does, believers have adopted the idea that Christian love is uncritically tolerant, all-embracing, without defined borders or structure, forsaking all judgment and ultimately reflecting the character of an individual's heart rather than an objective reality originating in God. As a result, the Church has received into its midst aggressively corrupting influences that have rendered the Church (in the West, at least) largely impotent, resorting to entertainment (aka "Worship Services") or pagan thought and practice (ala Benny Hinn, Todd White, Beth Moore, etc.) to cover its growing power-deficit spiritually.
There are a number of converging points in the matter of godly love that supply a well-rounded, biblical conception of Christian agape love that have gotten...fuzzy, reworked under a relativistic and moralistic thought-current within the Church. Following are some thoughts that might help clarify and correct modern misconceptions about agape love.
"Love is patient and kind."
For folks who are passive, naturally inclined away from conflict, who are disposed by personality toward pleasing and accommodating others, this sounds like an excellent start to the definition of godly love. To them, this sounds like a license to do what comes naturally to them: embrace everything; never criticize another; always hug, never hurt; be nice.
There's nothing wrong, of course, with this sort of thinking - so long as it is tempered by a complete, biblical conception of God's love. Hugging is a very good thing; accepting others despite their "claws," and "horns," and "teeth," showing them patience and kindness when they are ugly and mean, is good and right (Ephesians 4:32; 2 Timothy 2:24-25). As a default setting, you can't generally go wrong with patience and kindness.
But, then, we see Jesus, the kindest and most patient of all, over-turning the tables of the money-lenders and pigeon-sellers, chasing them from the temple (Mark 11:15-17); we read of Jesus confronting the Pharisees with some very sharp language, calling them "hypocrites," and "the brood of vipers" and "sons of hell" (Matthew 23:15, 27, 33); Jesus even snaps a bit at Peter, saying to him, "Get behind me, Satan." (Matthew 16:23) Whoa! What happened to being patient and kind? Jesus isn't being very nice!
The more tough-minded believers want to use these occasions to deflate entirely the idea that love is patient and kind. Jesus was a hard, in-your-face dude, so enough with the milquetoast niceness stuff! But just like the more retiring, gentle, passive believer, these more A-type believers are trying to conform Jesus to their own preferences and personality rather than the other way 'round, making Jesus just a reflection of who they are.
This is the problem, really. We stop at the parts of agape love that suit us best, camping on them and exaggerating them out of all proportion, at the same time reducing and confining the other aspects of God's love that we don't much like. We do this, of course, because we are coming to God's truth out from under the control of the Spirit who would bring us to a more balanced, biblical understanding if we would put ourselves under his will and way.
"Love does not envy or boast."
This seems a strange sort of observation - mainly because it seems very obvious. I don't know of anyone, saved or not, who thinks a boastful and envious person is a particularly loving one. These things appear very plainly to be contradictory to love. Perhaps, though, what Paul is doing in this part of the description he gives of agape love isn't clarifying the nature of this sort of love so much as letting the envious and boastful believers know they are fundamentally out of alignment with God (who is Love). Paul is saying, "Stop kidding yourself. If you're a boastful, envious person, you ain't a loving person."
Boasting and envy arise from Self, from the old, fleshly, self-centered, Adam nature that was in control of us before we were saved, not from God. Boasting and envy reveal that God has not yet been enthroned in the believer's heart. Until He is, the humble, self-sacrificing love He has shed abroad in the believer's heart in the Person of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5), remains stifled, prevented from filling, and overflowing from, the life of the child of God.
"Love is not arrogant, or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful."
Again, even non-believers see that this is so. Generally, people - saved or not - don't confuse arrogance, rudeness, selfishness and irritability for love. This bit from Paul, then, isn't so much, I think, about enlightening his readers about the nature of love, but reminding them that such behaviour is completely incongruous with the claim to be a child of the God who is love. (1 John 4:8, 16)
"Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth."
Paul here contrasts truth with wrongdoing. Interesting, eh? One of the implications in this being that wrongdoing is fundamentally against and apart from the truth. The essential character of wrongdoing, of sin, is falsity, deception, a departure from what is true. And love - godly love - does not ever rejoice in such a thing; agape love does not celebrate sin - even when the culture does. Pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, gender confusion, the I-am-my-own-god current of modern thinking, these kinds of wrongdoing (and the myriad other ones, too) are anathema to godly love, however much the World promotes them.
At the heart of every sin stands a devastating lie, a falsehood, that God promises will give birth always to DEATH. (Romans 6:23; Galatians 6:7-8; James 1:13-15) To tolerate sin, then, to turn a blind eye to it, or worse, to encourage and celebrate it, is to foster death in the sinner. How is there love in doing so? There isn't. And can't be!
God's love is inextricably bound up with truth; agape love is always according to truth - even the truth that judges and condemns the lies and sin we have come to practice and adore. There is no real agape love that diverges from the truth, that is, from God's truth. (1 John 3:18) This is because God is Truth (Exodus 34:6; Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 31:5; Isaiah 65:16; John 14:6; John 14:17, etc.) Out of God arises everything we know to be real and true. As Christian philosophers have said, God is the "Ground of All Reality." To deny Him and His truth, then, is to deny reality. This is exactly what is evident - within and without the Church - as a departure from God leads to greater and greater delusion and societal dissolution in western cultures.
God's love, then, confronts and rebukes falsehood and the sin it produces - not for self-righteous reasons - but because those lies and sin lead to death and keep us from richly enjoying our Heavenly Father. Any believer, then, who proposes to love blindly, uncritically, without attendance to God's moral truth, accepting sin in order to accept the sinner, is not showing godly love, but, I believe, hatred. What can one call the conduct of a person who knows the terrible danger toward which another is moving but who encourages them toward it?
More to follow later.
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