Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through 1 Corinthians 13:4, focusing on the qualities of love, specifically that love is patient and kind. He emphasizes the importance of self-examination in embodying these traits, encouraging the congregation to reflect on their own actions and relationships. The practical application highlights the need for believers to demonstrate Christ-like patience and kindness in their interactions with others, as a reflection of God's love towards them.
Welcome and Church Information
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Amen. Thank you this morning, choir.
If you have a child to be dismissed at Children's Church, you can be dismissed at this time. The opportunity for them to be in their own lesson.
And if you have your Bibles, we'll be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. And we're going to look at the first couple of words of verse 4. And we looked two weeks ago at the great command.
Jesus gave this command to his disciples of love as Christ loved, love the way the disciples are going to love, and they're going to know you're my disciples by how you love one another. And then last week we began looking at the first couple of verses in verse 13,
chapter 13, of the prominence of love.
And without love, ultimately we are nothing, is what Paul wrote here.
And today we're going to look at some introductory thoughts again, some main thoughts here of what Paul describes, some descriptive thoughts of what love is.
Because it's just a couple of words and we've been up and down, we're just going to put the words on the screen. I'm going to read them this morning. In chapter 13, verse 4, it says, Love is patient and love is kind.
Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Lord, be with us this morning as we open your word. Help me to be faithful to your text. And we love you so much in your name we pray. Amen.
As we begin to walk through this passage, we have to understand that this is not a hymn or a poem like you would see in the book of Psalms, but this is some instructions or even we could say
corrections to the church. Paul, as he's writing the book of Corinthians, is addressing some hard topics. If you read the context of this, he's not just throwing in this love chapter, but he's saying we need to examine our hearts, examine our lives to where we're at this morning.
And church, it's a good time for us to examine our hearts as well. Over the next couple of weeks, we're going to look at these descriptive terms of love. Paul lays out 15 descriptive words, and each one of these words in the Greek are verbs.
We use them as adverbs in the English language, but they're ultimately describing what love does and what love doesn't do.
And so this is the thought we want to ask ourselves as we look through these things. Am I living a life that is exemplifying the love of Christ, the way that these verses are laid out, or am I not?
Self-Examination Questions
Am I doing these things or am I not? And as we examine these behaviors, I want to sort of lay the foundation of two questions for us.
And you may want to write these down and sort of ask yourself over the next couple of weeks. Ultimately, compare the actions and the behaviors of what we talk about to Christ and examine how Christ lived his life and what Paul was saying from these verses of how we should live our life.
And the second thing we should be doing is examining how they compare to the actions and the behaviors of ourself. And begin to say, am I these things? Am I exemplifying these things in my life?
We have a marriage coming up. It's good to see Miss Hall here today. And she's going to be getting married this week. And I'm sure you've been to a marriage or wedding ceremony before.
But a woman, I came across this past, this little story this week, this past week, and I thought it was appropriate. A woman came to her pastor for advice and she said to her pastor,
I have this man and he says, if I don't marry him, he's going to kill himself. And she came to him and she said, what should I do? And the pastor responded,
ultimately what you should do is absolutely nothing. That man does not love you at all. He loves himself. And such a threat isn't love. It is simply selfishness.
And as we begin to examine even that story, we have to ask ourselves, are we loving the Lord in a selfish manner because loving the Lord is going to benefit me?
Or are we loving the Lord in a sacrificial manner to where it doesn't matter what I get in return or what I get in return from anyone else.
I'm simply loving in order to love Christ supremely and to love him in all that he is for.
And so the first one we'll look at is love is patient. And what is this terminology of patience? As we begin to examine the first of these two this morning,
the first we need to ask ourselves is, what would you say a loving Christian leader would exemplify?
What would you say if you were to make a list and you were to say the top 10 things that you would want to see in someone, a husband or a wife or a boss or whatever, would the first thing on that list be a patient person?
You see, as Paul was writing this list of, and I sort of see it in a list of superiority, he begins to say, I gain nothing in verse 3. And so therefore love is patient.
And we begin to ask ourselves in this terminology of this word, the actual root word is the word long suffering, which means you're going to suffer long for the sake of love. And so as we begin to ask ourselves,
are we like Christ in this area? Are we quick to react and quick to get angry? Or are we long suffering and patient with one another?
For me, you know, given some personal background here, I had a quick temper in playing football.
It was easy for me to lose my cool. It was easy for me to get mad at someone. And looking through this passage as a teenager and the fruit of the spirit as a teenager, I continued to come across this patience and long suffering. And I began to ask myself,
I'm a Christ follower. I love Jesus, but I don't have this area of patience in my life.
And so it was a deep soul searching multiple years of praying for the Lord to give me patience. And I want to say I have long patience. I want to say that I have this ability to be patient.
There are times where my patient comes to an end. And I think we would all say that. For instance, for me, one of these illustrative times of where my patience came to an end is my first year in Bible college. And we're all picking around.
And if you've been in a dormitory, whether Bible college or regular college, it doesn't matter. Boys are boys.
And we're going to pick on each other and make fun of each other. And I'm sort of a water off a duck's back type of guy. Like you're going to say something to me and it's not going to affect me much. I had this one guy.
He was from the New Jersey area. His name was Jerome.
My wife laughing because she knows who Jerome is. And Jerome constantly wanted to pick on the hillbilly from the south, the redneck that didn't really know English well.
And he constantly is just picking and saying things and doing things. And weeks and weeks and months of this happened. And it got to the point where my patience had ran out with Jerome. And he did something or said something.
I don't really remember the thing that happened. And Jerome was not a big guy. He was a little guy. And I just picked Jerome up and I just put Jerome up against the wall. And I just held him there for a little bit. And I said, Jerome,
I think it's time to stop this. And he just sort of looked at me like, oh, I didn't think this was going to happen.
I was just going to keep having fun. And I responded. But it was patience. I didn't lose my cool even in that manner. But oftentimes, we, myself included, have this patience that is not long-suffering.
Riding down the road in a vehicle with three kids in the back seat. I can only handle so much noise and ticking and constant bickering back and forth until I lose my cool.
And ultimately, we have to examine our lives with God himself as the supreme example of patience. And we have to ask ourselves, how did the Lord and how did God give patience throughout Scripture?
The first way I wrote down is the patience that God gave with the children of Israel. Think about how God spared the children of Israel, took them out of Egypt. They began to wander in the desert for 40 years, and they complained to the Lord the whole time.
Lord, we would rather go back and be in bondage than be set free. And ultimately, you look at the first children of Israel, those first ones that came out of Egypt, and the Lord said, you're not going to go into the promised land because of one main reason. You complained too much.
You didn't have patience. You didn't have the ability to long-suffer well.
And that entire first generation never saw the promised land because they didn't have this thing of patience.
But yet the Lord looked down at patience with them and gave them patience. One of my favorite stories that I teach to children specifically is the story of Samson, right? All men, I think, love the thought of Hulk and this strong guy that's able to whip an entire thousand people and kill foxes.
And Samson in his life had been given so much and yet wasted so much.
And at the end of his life, looked to the Lord and said, grant me strength one more time.
And God looked down and said, I'll do it one more time. And how often is it in our life where we smack the Lord in the face in the same way and yet go back to the Lord over and over and over again, and he's faithful and he's patient to us.
Jesus with his patience with his disciples. If you begin to look at those last couple of questions, the last couple of teachings of Jesus, he's telling them, guys, I'm going to go away. I'm going to be leaving.
And they're like, well, where are you going to go? And I can just imagine if I was a teacher and if I was Jesus in this moment, I would grab whatever's closest of a loaf of bread or a cup or a plate and just sort of smack the
Examples of Patience in Scripture
disciples inside the head and be like, I've been talking about it for three years. How are you not getting this? But yet Jesus with his overabundant amount of patience continued to love his disciples. And I look at the Lord's patience of myself personally.
How many times I've failed the Lord, how many times I've failed his goodness to me and my family, how many times I've failed to be the proper wife or husband to my wife, the proper pastor to the church, the proper husband to my kids or father to my kids.
And ultimately, as I look through that, I understand that the Lord in his patience for us personally could have smoked me many years ago. But yet he saw fit to continue to allow me to live and gave me ultimately that gift of salvation.
And the patience of the Lord begins to overwhelm me so often.
See, if each and every one of us as a church member begin to look at the deficiency of the patience in our life and begin to examine our own Christian life, it would be like a doctor coming into
you at a doctor's visit or a doctor's office or maybe you're in the hospital and the doctor will look at you and say, you know, you're low on iron today. And if you don't get an iron transfusion right now,
your body's going to start shutting down and ultimately there could be death or destruction to your body.
And you look at it and you say, eh, I'm going to go ahead and take the gamble, doctor. I don't really want to trust you in this area. I'm going to do my own thing. And then you walk out and you begin to have these problems because we didn't listen to the doctor.
The Lord is looking at us today and Paul is looking at us today and he's saying, I believe there needs to be a transfusion of patience in our walk, a transfusion of long suffering in our life so that we are able to live a better way.
Look at how Paul says it to young Timothy in 2 Timothy. I put this passage in your notes because I wanted you to have it there. It says, the Lord's servants, and he's talking about pastors here, must not quarrel. They must be gentle to everyone, able to teach and patience.
Patience is something that young or old, we must bear. One another burden with patience. We must be able to patiently look to one another.
Look at Paul's example in this own writing here, for example. He could have easily wrote off the church of Corinthians, Corinth. This is, most scholars believe this is actually the second book that was written to the church of Corinthians.
And he wrote three total because in this book he refers to another book that he wrote to them. And when you begin to examine the book of Corinthians and it goes on for so many chapters, it's one of the longest epistles.
If you take 1 and 2 Corinthians, it's the longest two letters that Paul wrote to a church. Galatians, six chapters. Colossians, four chapters.
Ephesians, a couple of chapters. And he takes this time to dig in deep with the church of Corinthians. Why is that? He could have just said, church, you're useless. You're going off the stray. You're not listening.
But Paul and his love began to write and correct and give correction to this church because he loved them and he wanted them to have an impact on the world that was greater than what he would have.
And oftentimes we look at this passage and we say, oh, this is a cool things and this is great things to look at.
But are we truly applying this patience in our life? A guy named Robert Chapman.
I came across this story this past week and it blew my mind because I have people that they reference in this article that I look to as heroes of the faith, but yet I've never heard of Robert Chapman.
Robert Chapman was well known for his love and like all loving leaders, he showed extraordinary patience with difficult people and problems. In his day, some people called Chapman the apostle of love.
Charles Spurgeon referred to him as the saintliest man I ever knew. I have many books by Charles Spurgeon. He was the spiritual mentor to George Mueller, who was the founder and director of the famous orphanages that were in England.
Chapman was also a close friend to Hudson Taylor, which was the first missionary to China in missions.
And I knew all three of those men and I began to think, man, these are great men of the faith.
These are men that did some wonderful things for the cause of Christ.
And Chapman was influential in all their lives. And Robert Chapman left his profession as a lawyer in London and became a pastor of a small, particular Baptist church in England. The contentious little congregation had gone through three different pastors in 18 months.
And he would be their fourth pastor that they would come. And he came in thinking that he would also be dismissed as their next fourth pastor. The story of how Chapman completely turned around this fighting church by simply forbearing one another,
loving one another, teaching the Bible as the Bible was supposed to be taught, and inspiring accounts of Christ-like leadership. The church eventually became one of the largest harmonious churches in the area of Barnstample, England.
And it was known throughout England for its amazing love, missionary outreach, and compassion ministries to the world around him.
By the end of his life at age 99, Chapman had become so well known for loving one another that a letter was addressed, R.C. Chapman, University of Love, England.
Chapman, and the postman correctly delivered it to his house without an address, without any other identifying markers, all because the world knew this man, Mr. Chapman, as the man of love. And as I read through that story, it challenged me so much.
It challenged me because if I were to go up to people that I have known for my 35 years of existence, would the thing that they would say about me would be the thing of love and patience. I put it in your notes like this.
Patience is love that has a long fuse and a short memory. Love that has a long fuse and a short memory.
Think with me for a moment. Stephen, one of the first deacons that was given to the church in Acts chapter 7 says this, he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice,
Lord, do not hold the sin against them. And after he said this, he fell asleep.
Stephen was showing the type of patience that each and every one of us must exhibit and will eventually have to exhibit if we're going to reach the world for Christ.
One of the presidents of the United States many, many years ago, I don't talk about politics from the pulpit, but he's been dead for a long, long time, so I feel free I can talk about him. His name is Abe Lincoln. You probably heard about him.
Abraham Lincoln, one of the earliest political enemies in his life was a man by the name of Edwin Stanton.
He called, this is the things that he said about Mr. Lincoln. He said that he was a low cunning clown. He was the original gorilla. And it was ridiculous for people to even go to Africa to see a gorilla because they could find one very easily in Springfield, Illinois.
Lincoln never responded to him in slander, but when he was a president, he needed a secretary of war.
So as he began to look through his list of people that would qualify for this position, his mind went back to a man named Edwin Stanton. And he chose Mr.
Stanton to be his secretary of war. And when he questioned, when his friends questioned him, why would you ask this guy to be your secretary of war? Lincoln's response was this, he's the best man for the job. Years later, as the president's slain body lay in state,
Stanton looked into the coffin and said through tears, there lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen. His hostility toward President Lincoln's long-suffering and non-retaliating spirit won out in the end because patience through love always wins.
The Lord, we can look at Jesus's life as Jesus was going to the cross, as Jesus was making his way down the Mount of Olives as he was being arrested and made his way to the ceremony where they
were going to try him and the soldiers began to punch him in the face and began to spit on him and began to mock him. He stood there without a word,
in patience, through love, because the love that he had towards them was greater than the hatred they had toward him. And he stood there in patience, he stood there in love, and he ultimately suffered in love
for every single person in this room. You see, the first quality that we look at is the passive quality of suffering. Because I don't know about you, but if I were to be examined the way Jesus was examined and beat the way Jesus was beat,
I don't think I could stand here today and say there would be no retaliatory statement that would come out of my mouth. Something would have been said, something would have been done from me that would not have been suffering the way Jesus suffered for you and me.
The Active Quality of Kindness
But then he turns to the second quality, and this is the active quality of kindness. Love is kind. You see, this is the other side to the same coin.
If you were to have a quarter up here and you were to have the heads of that quarter, it would be patience.
And if you were to flip that coin over and you were to see the tails, it would be the same coin, and the other side of that coin would be kindness. One commentator said like this, you can no more have love without kindness than you can have springtime without flowers.
You can no more have love without kindness than you can have springtime without flowers.
Just as patience will take anything from anyone, kindness will give anything to your enemies. Kindness will give anything to anyone that's in need because love keeps no accounts. Kindness is ready to do good at any time.
It's ready to do whatever you think or say or will do as far as it's kind to one another in a way that is so well to the world to see. And it's been well said by many different people in your notes, kindness is love in work clothes.
Kindness is love in work clothes. As I began studying through these different passages and studying through these different words, I came across something very, very unique about this word kind. It is the only time in the entire New Testament that this specific word is used in this specific occasion.
No other time in scripture is this word used for kindness than it's used here in the Greek. And this is what it means. It means because as a food guy who loves to eat food, okay, this is what it means. It means to be tasty and healthy at the same time.
It means to have a chocolate chip warm cookie coming out of the oven and to be completely healthy for you in that moment and taste as good as a warm chocolate chip cookie with a glass of milk. This is what the term is saying. This is kindness.
And I haven't yet defined a chocolate chip cookie that tastes as good as a warm chocolate chip cookie and as healthy for me as broccoli is. But yet this is the terminology that it's used in here.
He's saying that when we are kind, we should be as tasty as that warm chocolate chip cookie, but also as healthy as medicine is for someone's soul.
As when we go to the doctor and they give us the most disgusting medicine that's ever been thought or made up of mankind that's going to heal our body. As I was talking to several this past week who had been given some horrible medicine to be taken,
okay, it's that type of nasty medicine that's going to help your soul, but it would taste like a chocolate chip cookie. It's not only an action when it's easy, but it's a reaction when it's hard.
It's not only action when it's easy, but it's a reaction when it's hard. Carson said it like this, it's quick to pay back with kindness what is received and hurt.
It's been quick to give back in a way where you've been hurt and you just respond with this overwhelming amount of love and compassion toward one another. Mark Twain, a famous writer, said it like this, kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see. Me and Brody were riding down the road the other day and we're talking through a couple of different things and teenage boys have been teenage boys.
And as we were talking, my mind came to this verse, Romans chapter 12, verse 17 and 18. Then it says this, do not repay anyone evil for evil, but give careful thought to what is honorable in everyone's eyes.
And then in verse 18, if it's possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Live at peace with everyone and show kindness toward everyone.
The Bible continues on by saying that when your enemy hurts you or when your enemy needs food, give him something to eat and when your enemy is thirsty, give him something to drink for in doing so, you will heap lumps of coal on their head.
And Brody looked at me when I finished saying that and he said, dad, that's one of my favorite verses that I go to often because sometimes guys are mean to me and I just want to be nice back
because it's going to heap humps of coal on their head. And I said, that's exactly what the Bible says, that we must respond with kindness. We must respond with love in everything we do.
Think with me for a moment. The stories in the gospel where kindness was shown by Jesus to people that could do nothing in return for him.
The 10 leprosy men, the men who came to Jesus that were leprosy, that were parts of their body were falling off and Jesus showed them love and kindness in a way that everyone else in the world had rejected them. The demons possessed people that Jesus healed.
The demon of Guderia where he was strapped to a stone and chains and put off into caves because no one wanted to look at him, no one wanted to see him, no one wanted to be around him because
he was a maniac and no one wanted to even be near him. And Jesus went and found out this man and healed him of the demons that were possessing him and showed kindness to him when no one else would.
He went to the people that were blind. He touched their eyes and he gave them sight. There was nothing they could do in return. But yet he healed their blindness. He healed the lame. He fed the hungry.
He stopped. And in his massive ministry of reaching hundreds of thousands of people and healing people and telling people of the gospel,
he stopped in a moment and the kids began to come around him. And the disciples said, get the kids out of here. We don't need the kids around the man. This is the Messiah. This is the one that's coming to heal the world. And Jesus said, no, no, no, no.
Push everyone else away and let the kids come to me. And he sat down and he spent time ministering to the kids that were hurting and ministering to the kids that just needed love and compassion in that moment.
He began to spend his time, the later part of his ministry, if you look through the book of Luke, he was eating and drinking with the prostitutes and the tax collectors. He said, the ones that were the religious people, they don't care about me.
So I'm going to go to the ones that care, the ones that need help, the one that needs kindness, because those are the ones that I'm going to reach with the gospel.
Titus says it like this, as Paul was writing to one of his apostles, one of his mentors in Titus chapter three, he says, but when the kindness of God, our savior and his love for mankind appeared,
God's Mercy and Renewal
verse five, he saved us, not by works of righteousness that we have done, but according to his mercy through the washing and the regeneration and the renewal by the Holy Spirit. And he pours out his spirit upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ, our savior.
And he starts out by saying, but when the kindness of God, God looked down on humanity and he said, humanity is worth saving. Humanity has done horrible things to me. Humanity has done horrible things to my creation.
As we looked at this morning in Sunday school, where Cain and Abel, the first brothers hated each other and they, there was strife and there was bickering and, and the one brother killed the other brother. God looked down and through his kindness saved mankind through his kindness showed mankind.
There's another way. As Terry comes and begins to go into our rotation, I want us to examine our lives today.
I've used that word today. I'm going to use it throughout the course of the next couple of messages, because this is an examination.
It's an examination time where you go to the doctor and the doctor begins to take tests and take blood and examine what's going on in your life. It's a time for us to begin to examine our hearts and examine our lives and take a deep dive and ask yourself this question.
How are your actions and behaviors emulating the things of the examples that Paul is saying here?
Paul gives many different ways as we're going to look at of what love does and what love doesn't do. As a husband this morning, are you kind and patient towards your wife? Are you kind and patient towards your kids? As a father, as a wife, are you long-suffering towards your husband?
Because women, if you have a husband like I am, you have to have long-suffering.
You have to have long-suffering as a mom to kids.
As a brother or sister, are you treating each other with the kindness that the Lord has shown to you? As an employee,
are you patient with your boss because your boss is just as sinful as you are?
And are you patient with your coworkers that those who are around you? As an employer, are you looking at your employees and saying, yeah, they're going to make mistakes and I'm going to make mistakes. And so we're going to show patience and kindness.
And the last and probably most important thing we can ask ourselves this morning, if you're a believer in the room today, is are you as patient and kind to others as the Lord has been to you?
Because if you're like me, when you begin to read through these six words, again, six words this morning, love is patient, love is kind, and you examine what the Lord has done in your life and how the Lord
has been patient and kind for you, have you been that same way to others and are you that same way to the Lord?
Do you look to the Lord and say, Lord, I don't know what's going on right now, but I believe that you're patient and kind to me, so I'll be patient and kind back to you. Maybe you're here this morning and you're saying, you know, my heart hasn't been this way. Maybe you're saying,
I haven't been living the way Christ would be living with inside of me. And maybe you would question and say, am I even a believer this morning? Has your heart this morning been turned to a heart of stone as the psalmist says? And the psalmist looks to the Lord and said, Lord,
turn my heart into a heart of flesh, a heart that can be mended and molded and moved to you.
Call to Reflect on Our Hearts
Or are we sitting this morning here with a heart of stone that only cares about self and selfishness?
This morning, church, as we begin to ask ourself and you begin to respond the way you see fit to respond, ask yourselves this morning, are we patient and are we kind as the Lord sees it for us to be patient and kind? Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done.
Lord, this message has been hard on my heart. It's been heavy on my heart because even this week, you've tried my patience. You've tried my kindness.
And God, I pray that you would allow me to begin this morning as I've done this whole week, Lord, to examine my life and to say, God, give me the patience of Job. Give me the patience of a Moses who led the children out of the wilderness.
Give me the patience of Jesus who withstood torment and punishment for my sin.
God, help us this morning to love you more than we ever have. In your name we pray. Amen.
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