Paul’s great list is a bit like the Law of Sinai.  A wonderful revelation of what is right and good, but beyond our ability to keep.  And so, let 1 Corinthians 13 not only confront your struggle to love like Jesus.  Let it also point you to Jesus.  We can only love at all because God has first loved us.  May our hearts be so captivated by his love that our churches increasingly look like the body of Christ!  We can only live this life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

The most famous literary description of love is surely 1 Corinthians 13.  It has been read aloud at countless weddings, and yet, it was not written for a wedding.  It was written for a church.  Actually, it was written for a struggling and divided church in Corinth.  This was a church that was splintered by factions, by immature Christians flaunting their supposed superiority, and by a whole host of interpersonal tensions and issues.  This was the church into which Paul unleashed “the love chapter!”
The chapter sits at the heart of a section addressing the right use of spiritual gifts in the church.  It begins by underlining the necessity of love (v 1-3) and ends with the never-ending reality of love (v 8-13).  And at the heart of the chapter, in verses 4-7, we find a familiar and poetic depiction of the nature of love.  In just four verses, Paul offers fifteen descriptions of love.
Their world, like ours, was a confusing melee of ideas when it came to love.  There was romance, passion (appropriately marital and many harmful alternatives), family, and friendship.  I don’t know whether they used “love” to speak of food and sport, quite like we do in English, but let’s not imagine their culture was any less confused than ours.  In the face of that confusion, Paul offered a confrontation with God’s kind of love.
What do we do with a list like this?  Our tendency is to see it as a behavioural checklist and to consider it as a suggestion for greater effort on our part.  The problem is, not only do we all fall short of God’s perfect love, but we are unable to self-generate genuine godly love.  We can only love, John tells us, because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).  So, while it may look like a list of descriptions, actually, Paul wrote it as a list of verbs.  This is love dressed up and going to work!
So, as we consider this love in action, we should let it confront our own areas of lack, but also point us to the only one who perfectly lived out God’s love in this world.  Let this list point you to Jesus, and then let his love flow more freely in your local church setting.  As we look to Christ’s love, it will stir Christlike love in us.  And when the body of Christ starts to look like Christ, we can pray for the church to have an impact like Christ!
1. Paul begins with a basic foundation: Love gives.  He begins his list with two positive statements: love is patient and love is kind (v 4a).  Patience here speaks of having a long-fuse with other people, giving them space and time, instead of flaring up at the first opportunity.  Patience is partnered with kindness, which gives of our own usefulness for the higher good of the other.  A loving church is a place where grace infiltrates every relationship.  Grace for the weaknesses of others, and grace that gives of ourselves to build them up.  Love gives.
2. Paul zeroes in on the Corinthian core issue: Love is not selfish.  His list shifts into a sequence of nine points, most of which are negative.
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Everyone who cried out was lifted by God’s lovingkindness. None deserved it. None knew how to receive it. None could have done it themselves. They simply, humbly cried out, and God lovingly, kindly helped them.

One of the richest words used in the Old Testament Hebrew is “hesed” or “chesed,” often translated “lovingkindness.” It is used 250 times in the Old Testament and most often used to describe God Himself. It is defined this way:
LOYAL LOVE: an unfailing kind of love, kindness, or goodness, often used of God’s love that is related to faithfulness to his covenant. Mercy, compassion.
It is not merely love, but loyal love; not merely kindness, but dependable kindness; not merely affection, but affection that has committed itself.
Psalm 107 calls us to “consider the lovingkindness of the Lord” (Vs. 43). Each paragraph illustrates God’s lovingkindness to a different group of people, always people who did not deserve it. See if these describe you right now or have in the past.
The Wandering
Those who “wandered in the wilderness in a desert region … they were hungry and thirsty and their soul fainted within them” (Vs. 4-5).
The Imprisoned
“Those who dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and chains because they had rebelled against the words of God and spurned the counsel of the Most High. Therefore He humbled their heart with labor” (Vs. 10-12).
The Foolish
“Fools, because of their rebellious way and because of their iniquities” (Vs. 17).
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Reconceiving of marriage in terms of “self-expression” has been a terrible, value-laden mistake, betraying the pretensions to liberal neutrality. Plural marriage is inferior for raising children and for maintaining marital harmony; but most of all, in today’s climate, it creates a culture dedicated to adult sexual self-expression rather than the good of children and deep love.

Public support for polygamy increases inexorably. According to Gallup, nearly a quarter of Americans now think it is morally acceptable when a married person has more than one spouse at the same time, up from 5 percent in 2006. These changes track others chipping away at public support for enduring, man–woman, procreative marriage. Moral approval of sex outside of marriage, same-sex marriage, same-sex sex, divorce, having children outside of marriage, and long-term unmarried cohabitation have risen sharply in recent years. One of the only dams that has not yet broken is the importance of fidelity, which nearly nine in ten respondents claim to support.
From one angle, it is surprising that public disapproval of polygamy has endured so long. Polygamy has a far deeper and better historical track record than same-sex marriage, and with good reason. Great polygamous civilizations have existed. Polygamous relations emphasize duties binding sex, procreation, marriage, and parenthood into an enduring relation. Biblical injunctions against sodomy and lesbianism abound; the New Testament has no explicit injunction against polygamy for laymen, and the Old Testament has more than a little legitimate polygamy. Polygamous marriages have their problems, to be sure, but they are secondary problems, in a way.
Same-sex marriage (SSM) is in every way more of an affront to civilization than polygamy. SSM reconceives the institution away from duties and children and toward adult self-expression. Most civilizations have, in one way or another, stigmatized and proscribed the same-sex sex at the heart of SSM; SSM blesses same-sex sex. Most civilizations point human sexuality toward enduring, procreative man–woman marriage; SSM requires alternatives to procreative sexuality like surrogacy, adoption, and turkey-basters. No wonder no civilization has ever adopted, much less celebrated, same-sex marriage before our global empire has.
Revolutionaries instead first sought public approval of SSM. This is revealing. Revolutionaries planted sex-centered, self-expressive, duty-free “pure relationships” (as British sociologist Anthony Giddens calls them) within our old marital arrangements and allowed that seed to grow. Transforming sex became the means of transforming the goals of marriage in law and opinion. By the time they got to polygamy, revolutionaries were actually advocating polyamory. (Polygamy is where a man or a woman has more than one spouse—the most common kind of polygamy is polygyny, where one man has several wives; polyamory is a group of people sexually involved, with or without marriage.)
The crucial shift from polygamy to polyamory reveals that what now matters is the love, not the form. The United States Supreme Court allowed laws against polygamy to stand in the late 1800s. Mormons claimed polygamy was an expression of their protected First Amendment freedom of religious practice. The Supreme Court upheld restrictions on polygamy because it was a patriarchal form of marriage that violated the principles of equality at the heart of republican citizenship. Condemning polygamy was part of defending monogamy.
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