1 Corinthians 13:4-7

In the opening verses of chapter 13, Paul establishes the importance, the essentiality of love. Both as individual Christians and as the church we must have love.

But what is love? Well, what is water? The dictionary defines water as “A clear, colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid, H2O, essential for most plant and animal life and the most widely used of all solvents. Freezing point 0*C (32*F); boiling point 100*C (212*F); specific gravity (4*C) 1.0.” I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that none of you could have quoted that to me. And realistically, if you met someone who had never seen water before, you probably wouldn't go to the dictionary to explain it to them. The most obvious course would be to just show them some water. Baring that, you would try to describe it; you would picture the river and the rain; the crashing of the sea and the soft purr of a spigot.

And I say all that because in 1 Corinthians 13, we never get a definition of love. Paul never says in so many words: “This is what love is.” Instead, what we get is a list of descriptions, pictures of what love does and what it doesn't do. From this picture, we come to a broad understanding of what love is, even if we don't have a succinct definition.

But before we get to the passage itself, there is another point we need to talk about. As we said before, “love” could refer to God's love for us, our love for God, and our love for one another, and it seems the main focus of Paul's thinking is our love for one another. But that is a little more complicated.

The way I see it is this. Love--the kind of love Paul describes in this passage--is the basis of all loves; it is the foundation on which every kind of love is built. So, while Paul is mainly looking at the love between fellow Christians, what he says applies to every other relationship of love. Some of those kinds of love have specific properties of their own--the love of a husband and wife is very different from the love between friends; the love shared by Christians is different from the love we give to non-Christians--but they are all still built on this foundation. Each kind of love is distinct, with unique properties and attendant duties, but they still have, or should have, the characteristics that Paul describes of love as such.

In this passage, we have several quick-fire descriptions of love. It "suffereth long"; that is, it is patient, it does not give up easily. This also includes meekness and mercy; love does not seek revenge.  

Love is kind and gentle.

Love "envieth not," "vaunteth not itself," and "is not puffed up." All these point to the humility of love. Love is not trying to lift itself up or pull other people up. Love is not a "braggart or windbag" as Arndt and Gingrich put it.

Love does not "behave itself unseemly." I think we can put it that love is respectful. Love is strong but unbridled.

Love "seeketh not her own." That is, it is unselfish. Barclay puts it that love "does not insist upon its rights." Beacon Bible Commentary remarks: “selfishness and love cannot reside in the same human spirit. Love cannot find its own happiness at the expense of others.” --Beacon

Love "is not provoked." Love does not have a temper. To be filled with anger would be incompatible with the kindness, gentleness, and unselfishness of love. Of course, that does not mean there is no connection between love and anger (both the Bible and human experience testify that there is), but hot temper should not be the mark of a loving heart.

Love "thinketh no evil." That can also be put that love keeps no account of evil. Love doesn't keep score.

Love "rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." This seems to mean that love is moral; love is concerned with right and wrong, with the truth and falsehood of reality.

Finally, love "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." 

Having seen all these individual statements, we can begin to pick up a few general facts about love.

We see here that love other-centered rather than self-centered; love puts a focus on the object of the love and places care and concern there. That is why it is long-suffering or patient with the faults of the beloved, why it does not puff itself up, and why it is not angered or embittered, because the focus is not on the one loving but the one loved. (You could make the case that this is the delineation between righteous anger and unrighteous anger--whether or not it is self-centric. And you could make the case that anger is dangerous, among other reasons, because it is so hard to make that distinction.)

Suppose you were watching a ship set out to sea on a somewhat rough, stormy night. And suppose that every cent of money you have, your entire life's savings, had been invested in cargo on that boat; your entire future hinged on that boat making it safely to its next port. Obviously, you are going to be very concerned with the safety of the ship. As you stand there on the dock, you might flinch and shudder at every crash of the waves against the boat and yet be almost unconcerned with the rains and winds which whip you yourself. All your care and concern are for the ship. Why? Because that is where your treasure is. And where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Love puts our treasure in someone else. Love is an investment in people—an emotional investment, but also usually an investment of time and other resources. And when we have that kind of investment in people, it leads to being patient, meek, respectful, and even-tempered, because our center, our concern is not in ourselves, but in others.

We know that Jesus came to this earth because of love. “For God so loved the world, etc.” But notice specifically how Jesus described His life: “But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28)

Jesus came to serve others and even to sacrifice His life for others. His love was other-centered. And He puts this down as an example for how we should act towards one another; in other words, that Christian love is also other-centered.

Look at Philippians 1:20-21: “According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Paul's love for Jesus was such that it was a secondary matter whether he lived or died, so long as Christ was glorified. His love for God was other-centered.

Another attribute of love we see here is that it is moral: it rejoices not in iniquity, but it does rejoice in the truth. There are various interpretations of that, but I take it to mean that love exists within the context of morality. If we try to define 'love', we could say something like: 'Love always desires the best for the beloved.' But that implies that there is some best to be desired; there must be some kind of standard. Love is moral; we might say that love is holy, or at least can only exist within the context of some idea of holiness.

And whether or not that is what verse 6 means, we know this is true. Look at God's love for us: “According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.” (Ephesians 1:4) Look at this example of our love for one another: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.” (3 John 4) Look at the example Paul gives for a husbands' love for his wife: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.” (Ephesians 5:25-26)

Love, in so far as it can be called love at all, is moral.

We can also say that love is indefatigable, it is persevering, that is, it doesn't give up. People often define love as 'unconditional.' That isn't true if you mean that love is irrational or baseless. But it is true in the sense that love does not stop due to difficulties and problems, even difficulties and problems in the beloved. 

This doesn't mean that love is immutable or unchanging. On a human level, different circumstances influence our relationships and, therefore, to some extent, the nature of our loves. This is inevitable. But if love simply ceases to exist or, worse, turns to hatred or spite, then something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

And having said all that, we can say love is volitional, which is to say, it is a choice, an attitude, a fundamental loyalty. When we talk about love, we strongly associate it with certain emotions. But these emotions are not love, at least not entirely. We read earlier from Ephesians 1, where Paul talks about God's plan of love for us. But look at where that plan came from: “Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” (Ephesians 1:5) We talked about this in a previous article: that phrase “good pleasure” basically mean something done from volition. It is what you chose to do. 

Why would God choose to do that? Why would God choose to love us, especially given the cost that love was going to have? I don't think we have or ever could have an answer to that. There is part of an answer, though, but we'll come back to that later.

Right now, we have to talk about the statement that love is not an emotion. At face value, that is a strange statement. In ordinary conversation, love is usually used to describe a certain feeling or group of feelings. The first dictionary definition of love is: “A deep, tender feeling of affection and solicitude towards a person, such as that arising from kinship or a sense of oneness.” In general, it would seem impossible to separate the idea of love from any emotional components—most people would say that a genuinely emotionless love is not true love at all. 

This illustration comes from C. S. Lewis. Suppose a woman has a son who is a soldier who is fighting on the front lines. She is going to be very worried and concerned about her son's safety. She might be worried to the point of being sick. But she doesn't want freedom from her worry and concern; she wants the safety of her son. If her son makes it home safely, she would be happy, but she doesn't primarily want to be happy; she wants the safety of her son. Why? Because she loves her son.

Love builds a relationship with another person; love places a value on someone else. And that will naturally lead to various emotional responses. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. In these cases, love is the cause, and emotions are the effect.

It can work the other way as well. I'm not a father, let alone a mother, so I can't speak to this from personal experience. But I'm told that for a new parent, and especially for a mother, there is often a deep, almost instinctual connection to their baby. That is an emotional (or at least emotion-adjacent) but it can lead to love; it is at least one of the causes of which love is the effect.

In other words, love and emotions are closely interconnected, entwined together like the strands of a rope. But they are not the same thing. And this can be proved because emotions are always a very transitory part of our lives. They are one of the most fragile parts of humanity. An emotion cannot bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things. Love proves itself to be a genuine reality deeper than an emotion when it continues to exist and continues to be operative even when all probable support has been removed. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Love is a choice, a fundamental loyalty, something which stands strong even in the face of all emotions. If it cannot do that, then it is not true love.

So what we see in this chapter is that love is other-centered, putting concern and value into another person. It is moral; it is always based on a foundation of right and wrong. It is persevering; it does not give up because of the faults and flaws of others. And it is volitional—it is a choice of the will that goes deeper than any emotional attachment.

Any love can be truly called love insofar as it lives up to the ideal of this chapter. Often, on a merely human level, love does not go nearly that far. Even in the church, love may not reach this level—hence why Paul was making a point of laying all this out for the Corinthians in the first place. But this is what love is supposed to be, and this is what we should be seeking in all our relationships. 

Because having seen all this that love is, we can understand what Paul meant in the first three verses by showing love's essentiality; how everything we do would be nothing without love. Interpersonal relationships, without love, would be purely competitive and based on self-interest. Romantic relationships, with no trace of love, would be purely physical and probably violent. The family, without love, would fall apart or would be held together by merely external factors. The church, without love, is a meeting of disparate and competing factions with no union. Our relationship to God, without love, if it existed at all, would be purely based on fear or selfish hope. And God's relationship to us, without love—well, there is a name for this in literature; a name for the concept of beings with powers surpassing humanity who lack love. It is Cosmic Horror. God without love is pure nightmare.

Now, let's go back and touch on something we said earlier. I said that we cannot fully answer why God would choose to love us. But we do know at least part of the answer, which is 1 John 4:16: “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Ultimately, we can say that love is divine. Love is one of the fundamental attributes of God.

That is why I said that love is not irrational or baseless. God's love was not conditioned by our worthiness, but it was conditioned by His own essential nature. And our love is based on that. Of course, there's the easy part to that—we love God because He loved us. It is reciprocal love. Our love for God could even be conditional because God will never prove unworthy. (Though God's working is often going to be difficult and unpleasant, and so the indefatigable nature of love will still be needed here.)

However, John seems to be saying something more than that. It is not just that God loves us and that we love God. It is that God is love. A pump is a machine that gives water. But it doesn't always give water; it can be disconnected or turned off. But an ocean is not something that gives water; it is water. The only way an ocean stops being water is if it goes away entirely and ceases to be an ocean. And John seems to say that God is not a pump but an ocean; not a distributor of love but its fundamental source.

If you come to a pump, you might not get wet. If you go into the ocean, you will get wet. You cannot dive into the sea and still be dry. And you cannot be in union with God and not be filled with love. Look at what else John says: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” (1 John 4:20-21)

There is an intrinsic connection between our love for God and our love for one another. If one is absent, the other will be also. If we love God, then we will love our fellow man. And if we do not, on at least some level, love our fellow man, then we do not truly love God, but some idol we have made in our own mind. 

C. S. Lewis wrote: “When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment with , all our earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours and ours only because His.”