Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through 1 Corinthians 13, emphasizing the paramount importance of love in the Christian life. He explains that without love, even the most impressive spiritual gifts and sacrifices are meaningless, illustrating this with various examples and Greek terms for love. The sermon challenges listeners to evaluate their motivations and actions, asking whether they reflect the sacrificial love of Christ, which should be the foundation of all they do.
Welcome and Housekeeping
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. All right, good job on that, and thankful that Jesus can change our life.
If you have a young person that wants to go to Children's Church, you can be dismissed at this time, first grade and younger. That's available for you at your convenience. But we'll be in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 today, 1 Corinthians 13.
We're going to spend a couple of weeks looking at what is love. We started this last week by looking at the great command that Jesus gave to love as Christ loved and to be the way his disciples,
that model that he gave to his disciples. And so today we're going to the, over the next couple of weeks, we'll be at the most famous chapter on love.
And I want to give some background and some of that today and sort of lay the stage for where we'll be at for the next couple of weeks. So if you have your place, we'll stand at reading of God's word, 1 Corinthians 13, 1 through 3.
The Bible says, If I have faith so that I can move mountains, but I do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give away all my possessions, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but I do not have love, I gain nothing.
God, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. We thank you for sending your son to die on a cross 2,000 years ago for our sins. God, I pray that you'll be with the message this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. You can be seated.
You may have heard of the book, Gulliver's Travels, written by Jonathan Swift.
He made this statement in his book. He said, We have just enough religion to make us hate people, but not enough to make us love one another.
Spiritual gifts, no matter how exciting and wonderful, are useless, and can even be destructive if there's not a ministering of love behind it. In all three of the body passages of Paul's letters, as we read through the New Testament, Paul emphasizes love in all three of his letters.
And Warren Wiersbe said it like this, He said it like this, It has well been said that the love is the circulatory system of the body of Christ.
Because without love, we as a church are no better than any other organization out there.
It is the love of Christ that makes us different. And I believe one of the best passages of scripture, 1 John 14, 4, 16, says it like this, And we have come to know and believe that the love of God that he has for us,
God Is Love
God is love. And the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. It is the most simple definition of God. God is love.
Another way we could say this in this passage is true love to God and true love to man.
All of these things were missing in the life of the 1 Corinthians church. They had gifts. They had sacrifice. They had theologians.
They had some of the greatest theologians of their time, and if not of all time, who saw Jesus and experienced Jesus,
and he looked at this church, and in his writing of a lot of things that he wrote about, he gets to chapter 13, and he says, You've got so much, but you're missing one simple thing. You're missing love.
As I began studying through these words of love, I don't do a lot of Greek studies.
If you've sat under my preaching for over a year now, you know I don't give a lot of Greek, and I don't give a lot of Hebrew. It's just not how I think, and it's not how I process things.
And so in this process, when we think through this, I want to give three and actually four Greek terms for love. And I didn't put these in your notes because it sort of came to me afterwards, but I put them on the screen for you. The first one is this.
Maybe it's a Greek term you've never heard before. It's called storge.
Storge is the means of affection. You see, when we use the word love, this is how we use it in our day and age. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love Big Macs. I love Chick-fil-A. I love long walks on the beach.
We use the word love freely, and it diminishes the meaning of love.
And the Greeks had circumvented this problem because they had come up with different terms for different styles of love. So storge was the means of affection, and this was how someone would feel toward his cat or his dog. You have an animal that's close by you.
You have an animal that's near to your family, and you love that dog.
This would be the term they would use. They would use the word storge. They storge that dog. We go to the next word. It's eros. E-R-O-S. Eros.
And this is the love between a husband and wife. This is the physical sexual love that someone would have toward one another.
And so they would not use this term if they were talking about their dog. That wouldn't make sense. They wouldn't use this term if they were talking about a food that they really liked.
They would use this love in a term of a husband and wife. And then the one that you've heard of probably the most familiar is the phileo love. This is where we get the word Philadelphia. This is a brotherly love.
This is a love that says, I'm going to be nice to you if you're nice to me. This was the most common term in the Greek terminology that they used most familiar was phileo.
It was not until the New Testament came about that we get a new term, a new definition of love, which is what we have today in the New Testament, which is the agape love. Agape is a love that says, I am going to love for the sake of loving.
I am never going to expect anything in return. And people who don't know the Lord can never experience this type of love.
Agape Love in the New Testament
For them, agape love is only found in God. You see, this is the term that is used the most in the New Testament, is agape.
Agape is the New Testament term for love from when Jesus began teaching to the end of Revelation. Very rarely will you see Philadelphia.
Very rarely will you see Eros. You won't see Storgi because it wasn't a word that they would have used during this time. But they would have constantly been using this term of love in a sacrificial way. Purely put, it's giving, expecting nothing in return.
I like how St. Thomas Aquinas put it. He said, it's the will to do the good of another.
It's the will to do the good of someone else. It is giving to someone else and you're never going to receive any love back from it. It's like having a child and you stay up late.
It's 2 a.m. They begin to cry. They begin to, their minds are just, they want food.
They want holding. They want whatever. And you wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning and you show them love. And there's nothing that child's going to do in return back to you. This is the sacrificial love that we're looking at this morning.
And I came across a story as a historical major that I am. I love history. And in 1647 during England's Civil War,
right? America had a Civil War. England has a Civil War as well. And one of Cromwell's army members had deserted the battle.
And they captured him and they brought him before the General Cromwell. And the general looked at this man and he said, When the curfew bell rings tonight, I'm going to execute you. And all the camp had heard about it. He was going to make an example out of this man.
Who had abandoned his platoon. And word got back to his fiancee. That his death sentence was being issued. His fiancee began to try to figure out how could this be?
My husband, who I'm not married to yet, is going to die at the sound of the bell.
And she made up this, she devised this plan to where she was going to sneak into the camp.
And she was going to climb the bell tower and she was going to disable the bell. And she got to the top of the bell tower and she realized there was no way to disable it. And she knew that curfew bell was about to happen.
And so she fixed her body inside the bell. So when the soldiers began to ring the bell, the bell would hit her and not make any sound.
And the soldiers came up to the bell and they began to pull the rope to make the bell ring and there was no sound.
And they did it even harder and there was no sound. And they began to figure out why it was and they climbed the bell tower and they saw a beaten and bruised and bloodied woman inside of this bell. And they detached her from the bell.
She was still alive and they brought her before General Cromwell and they said, he said, why was the bell not ring? And the army members said, this woman sacrificed her life for her fiance. And Mr. Cromwell said, I've never seen someone with so much love.
Because of this woman's love, I'm going to spare your life.
And that man who abandoned his army was not killed because of the love of his wife, soon to be wife.
You see, Jesus didn't climb a bell tower. Jesus didn't climb to the top of a mountain. He climbed to the top of a hill called Calvary in order for your life to be spared from execution.
The Nature of Sacrificial Love
Whether the word is charity or love or agape, no matter what it is, it is the love that is extended to one another, which is the word sacrifice. It is you and I giving as no one else can give. It's sacrificing so that someone else can have freedom.
As John 3.16 most familiarly says, for God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son.
So that you and I could have eternal life. And when we look at this terminology this morning of love, we have to ask ourselves, are we sacrificing the way Jesus sacrificed? And are we giving the way Jesus gave for us? And as we examine these three verses,
there's a couple of things that come out. And I'll spend the majority of my time on the introduction. We'll briefly look at these four points. The first one is this. Love is better than speech.
Verse 1 says, if I speak with the tongues of human or angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal.
I thought about getting a cymbal up here and for a moment in time just hit this cymbal as over and over and over again while I was speaking. And at first it would have been funny and you would have probably started laughing.
But at some point you would have said, Pastor James, stop what you're doing because I can't pay attention. And you may have had in your life someone who maybe began playing an instrument.
I'm one of five and all five of us played instruments. My mom and dad wanted us to know music and know how to read music and know these things. And so they began to put us in music. And I was a tuba player.
My brother was a trombone player and a trumpet player. And my sisters, they played the clarinet and the flute.
And so we always had noises going on. But we never had them in the house. They always had to be practiced in the building. Because my dad couldn't handle the noise.
He said, if you're going to continue to play that, get out into the building. Because he knew that after a while it can become just this overbearing amount of noise.
But then the time came where a concert happened and we showed up. And all that time of practice wasn't just a noisily sounding cymbal.
But it all came together and it flowed in a progression of an event where everything was wonderful. And oftentimes we don't give it that time. We are not using the love. We're only hearing the cymbals. We're only hearing the gong.
And we're noise because there is no love. Think with me for a moment, your most impactful teacher in school.
My most impactful teacher in school, I've shared this before with you. I don't think my headset's working. So I'm going to hang out right here, not move as much. My most impactful teacher in school was Mr. Schauble.
Mr. Schauble was not the most eloquent teacher. He was not the smartest teacher I had. He was not the most, whatever term you want to put in there.
But he had the most impact for me because he cared. Mr. Schauble came in and our very first day of his class, he was a technological teacher. And he stood up and he said, young people, I made my first million dollars by the age of 20.
Probably was going to get an attention of a 16, 15-year-old boy. And he said,
I made a half a million dollars in six months and another half a million in six months. I did some crazy stuff with technology and the era that I was in. He said, I've worked with Bill Gates. I've worked with Steve Jobs. I've been in the real world where it's very tough.
So my question to him was, why are you in West Rowan, North Carolina? In Mount Ola, where no one's even heard of? He said, it's because I'm seeing a generation that doesn't care.
He said, I'm raising a generation that has no apathy for anything. And I care enough to sacrifice those things and come and teach you guys.
And from that moment on, that man made an impact on my life because he cared. And the person that you would come to your mind, if I said the teacher that made the biggest impact, it wouldn't be the most smartest teacher you had.
It wouldn't have been the teacher that could get up and wax eloquently for 90 minutes and keep your attention for 90 minutes. It would be the teacher that when you walked in, they said something to you every day that encouraged you.
It would be someone who encouraged you and cared about you so much that they left a lasting impact on your life.
You see, the Corinthian church was wrapped up in the gifts that God had given them. They would come up.
It was almost like a trading card system. All right, let's get together. What gifts do you have? Oh, I can speak tongues. Oh, I can heal people.
Oh, I can do these things. And they would begin to compare. And Paul came in and he said, man, if I got up and I spoke with the angelic tongues, everyone stepped back and was like,
dude, this guy's got it. Like we can speak in English tongues, but now he's speaking the angel tongues.
And he got their attention immediately when he said this. And they were taken back. And then he makes this statement. He says, but if I don't have love, I'm just a noisy gung and a clinging cymbal. And he said, because speech and the things in life don't matter. It's all about the love.
Without love, no speech can move the heart of God.
Paul was using this sharp contrast because he's wanting to show the extremeness of love. It doesn't matter what we can do if we don't have love in our life.
The second thing he goes on in the first part of verse two and says that love is better than scholar. If I have the gift of prophecy or understand all mysteries and all knowledge. You see, you may have some big degree and I'm not discounting degrees.
Don't hear what I'm not saying. I have a degree myself.
But if all we put our knowledge, if all we put our wisdom in and all we put our stock is in knowledge. Too often we have a big head and a little heart. And God says, take the portion of your knowledge away and begin to ask yourself, where is your heart?
Strauss put it like this. Knowledge without love inflates the ego and deceives the mind. Knowledge without love inflates the ego and deceives the mind.
Often times we have this knowledge bursting from our head, but we don't have love thrusting from our heart.
We have knowledge that comes out of our mind and we can sit and we can have a theological conversation. And I will be the first in line for that conversation. I will be the first in line to debate some big theological thing.
But it's often times that the love coming out of our heart is not there. I want to illustrate it like this. The Pharisees had the entire Old Testament memorized.
You could begin a passage of Scripture and because of their knowledge of Scripture, they would be able to pick up and be able to continue to quote the entire Old Testament. You wouldn't have to say Ruth chapter 5 verse 1.
They would know where it's at. The knowledge of Scripture that they had was so great.
It was greater than everything we ever had. They knew the law. They knew everything of the Scripture. And the Savior of the world showed up in front of them. He loved them. He cared about them. He taught them for three years. And that Jesus didn't fit into their Scriptures.
That Jesus was outside of their knowledge that they had of Christ.
And outside of what they wanted Christ to be. And they said, this is not the Christ that the Old Testament talks about.
This is not the one that's going to come and set our captives free. This is not the one who we're told about in the Old Testament who was going to come and be a fierce leader. They wanted someone who was going to come and overthrow everything.
And they said, the knowledge that we have is greater than this person. And so we've got to kill this person because he didn't fit their model. He's saying, you can gain all the knowledge you want.
But we don't necessarily care about the knowledge here. We care about who Christ is. And we care about the love that Christ has given us. He continues on in verse 2 and he says, If I have the faith that can move mountains, but I do not have love, I am nothing.
Love Over Spiritual Gifts
Love is better than bold spirituality, church. Love is better than bold spirituality. He says here,
If you had enough faith where you could speak to the mountain, as I just sang this song. But yet, you move that mountain and you don't have love, you are nothing.
This is the thought of a bold visionary who cast a vision for a company or a body or some organization. And they're willing to take the risk to go all in. They're willing to have the faith to move mountains. But there is not any love attached to it.
They are simply someone who just is wanting to move a big molehill. Because they're someone who has no love behind anything. Love creates the value behind the vision. It's having the boldness of David to race in to kill Goliath. If love isn't present, we begin to glorify self rather than God.
You see, David stepped back and he saw Goliath. And he saw Goliath mocking the children of Israel. And he didn't say, They're mocking my brothers and sisters. I'm going to go and I'm going to kill that guy. He heard them mocking God.
And he said, I can't stand by and have this Philistine mock my God. And so I've got to step up in order for God to be glorified. Because it was not about himself. It was about God being glorified. Without love, we become spiritually fruitlessness.
We don't have any of the powerhouse of Christ. And we no longer are effective Christians without love that Christ has given us.
Look at the disciples in Acts. I was telling our kids at Good News Club. I was invited to help out this year. And if you want to help out in Good News Club at Ronda Clingman, we'd love to have you.
But I was teaching this past week. And I began talking about how there were these disciples who were 16 and younger.
Teenage little boys and women that were following after him. And that Jesus chose to turn the world upside down. They didn't go out and they didn't do, they did some wonderful things.
But they ultimately stood up and they said, I love you. And because I have love for you, we're going to turn the world upside down. And I often ask myself, why is it that the church isn't turning our communities upside down?
And my mind goes back to the love of Christ is not there.
And when we have the love of Christ, we have the powerhouse of Christ. And Christ comes in and he works in and through us in order for the spirituality to happen. But love is over all those things.
The Importance of Love in Sacrifice
And then in verse 3, because I've said this multiple times, sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice.
Paul says, if I give away all my possessions and I give over my body, but I don't have love, I've gained nothing. Love is better than sacrifice. Love is sacrifice. But sacrifice without love is vanity.
If we sacrifice without love to boast, as Paul says here, to boast in all that I've given, it's vanity. You see, sometimes self-sacrifice can be done with self-interest.
You say, how can that happen, Pastor James? How can I sacrifice of self and it be all for me? Well, Paul, Peter, Luke writes about it in Acts with Ananias Sapphire.
Ananias Sapphire sold everything they had in order to look good for the apostles because everybody was coming in and giving to the church. And they wanted to look spiritual. They wanted to look good. They wanted to look a part of the church.
And so they sold everything and they came to the disciples and they said, we've sold everything and gave everything to the church.
Because they wanted to puff themselves up and look good. And they lied because it was of their own deceit. They only gave half and it wasn't that you have to give everything. But they were more concerned with how they looked than the need of the cause of Christ.
There are some people in this world that take great pride in sacrificing. They take great pride in making themselves look better and suffering for their faith.
You can look all through history of people who would beat themselves in order for themselves to look better in Christ.
We have to get to the point where we ask ourselves, what is the motive of the heart? Another way to put it that I like to say it often, what is our heart posture?
This morning, church, where is our heart at? What are we doing in order for our heart to be lifted toward God and our heart to be mended to who God is? And I like how Edwards says it.
Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist, he said, God delights in the little things when they spring from a sincere love to himself. A cup of cold water given to a disciple in sincere love is worth more in the sight of God than all of your goods given to feed the poor.
Yea, I would rather say that the wealth of the kingdom given away to the body offered up in the flames without love is more important.
You see, church, we have to ask ourselves, how is our love this morning? Are we doing it just to please self and to make ourself look good? Or are we doing it for Christ to look good and for Christ to be lifted high?
God's Example of Love
Christians are taught this, to love one another as God has loved them. God the Father showed us how to love by sending his Son.
And God the Son taught us how to love by giving his life, by commanding each and every one of us to love. The Holy Spirit teaches us to love one another by pouring out our love in our hearts.
And the most important lesson that we can learn in this school of faith is how to love one another because love enriches all that it touches. As Terry comes and begins to pray for our invitation, Paul laid out five spiritual gifts in this passage. He laid out tongues.
He laid out prophecy. He laid out knowledge. He laid out faith. And he laid out sacrificing and giving.
And he laid out the important gifts that the church had been given. And he says this.
He says, without love, they're just a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
They're nothing. And so I wrote it like this because I'm a math guy as well. My wife's a math teacher. Five minus one is equal to zero.
You can have all the tongues and all the prophecy and all the knowledge and all the faith and all the sacrifice that you can give. But without the love, it's nothing.
He says it often, many times through this passage. I am nothing. I gain nothing. I have nothing. I'm a noisy gong and a clinging cymbal. I'm nothing without love.
Ministry this morning, church, without love cheapens Christ and it cheapens the church. But ministry with love, oh, it enriches the church and it evangelizes the world.
Paul said it like this in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 5, speaking the truth in love. You see, sometimes it's hard to speak things.
Sometimes it's hard to say things. But when we have love attached to it, love enables everything we say and do.
Imagine with me for a moment, you're at your house and you're sitting at your desk.
Maybe you're at your, where you have your devotions or you're at your coffee table or you're at your living room, dining table, whatever it may be. Maybe you pick out a piece of paper, a blank piece of paper, and you just began to write as many zeros as you could on there.
Maybe you sat down and you took the time to write a million zeros on that piece of paper.
And you began to fill it up. Maybe you turned it over and you had thousands and thousands of lines that had zero on there. And you said, look at how many zeros I have. Isn't that a lot? And yet it would still be a number of zero.
And if I were to come along on that piece of paper that you had, and I were to have one positive number in front of all those million zeros, at that moment, would you have a number that was worth something?
And if Scott were to come along after me and say, you know, I'm going to take that one and I'm going to make it a two, it would be doubled all because of another positive number that was on there.
And it's one positive number at the start of everything we do that adds value. You see, our faith, our zeal, and our gifts for the Lord, it's nothing without the singular positive action of love. It's saying, God, I want to sacrifice with love. I want to do these things.
I want to help someone. I want to sacrifice my time. I want to sacrifice my gifts.
I want to sacrifice my talents that you've given me all for the sake of love. I came across someone who had rewritten this passage in the modern language.
And I want to read it for you because I think it's so powerful. Imagine here Paul, the most extraordinary teacher and leader that ever lived.
If he were to live in today's day and age, I believe he would have the largest church that would ever have existed. He turned so many people's hearts and minds to the Lord. And this is how someone rewrote it.
If I were the most gifted communicator to ever preach, so that millions and millions of people were moved by my orator, but I didn't have love, I would be an annoying, empty windbag before God and his people.
If I had the most charismatic personality, so that everyone was drawn to me like a powerful magnet,
but I didn't have the Christ-like love, I would be a phony and a dud. If I were the greatest visionary leader the church has ever had, but didn't have love, I would be misguided and lost.
And if I were the best-selling author of all theology and the church growth movement, but yet I did not have love, I would be an empty-headed failure.
And if I sacrificially gave all of my waking hours to disciple the future leaders, but did it without love, I would be a false guide and a false model. You see, this morning, we try to substitute love for things like speech. We try to substitute things like knowledge and spirituality for love.
Because we can say, well, Pastor James, I read my Bible through 10 times this year. Look at how spiritual I am. Pastor James, look, I did these things. I've got the knowledge and I've done these speaking things.
Evaluating Our Love
But the question we have to come back to and we have to ask is, did you do it to puff yourself up or did you do it to puff up Christ? Because without love, it's nothing.
And this morning, the whole point of the message is this. Because examine your hearts and ask yourself, what is the main command that Jesus gave? To love one another.
And that's how they're going to know that you're the disciple of Christ. And begin to ask yourself, are we doing everything that we can do in the love of Christ? And if not,
maybe a time to respond and say, Christ, help me to have a heart posture for you. Help me to have a heart reanalysis for you and get my heart back realigned with who you are and what you've done for me. I don't know what it is this morning.
I cannot read your heart. I don't dare to read your heart. I don't dare to manipulate you into making a decision. What I simply ask you to do is evaluate where you're at this morning. And ask yourself,
are you loving the way Christ gave? The way Christ loved and Christ gave for one another. Let's all stand.
Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. God, I'm humbled that I have the opportunity to even speak on love this morning. To speak on what you've done.
And as we continue to look through this thought of love, continue to penetrate our hearts and to ask ourselves, are we doing what we're doing for the love of Christ? Or are we doing it for some false motive?
Help us this morning to follow you and to trust you greater than you ever have. It's in your name we pray. Amen.
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