“A Still More Excellent Way”: Love Is Joyful and Forgiving
Every local church and ministry needs to remember that it is by this great qualification—love—that God assesses all our giftedness and service. It is no exaggeration to say that without these characteristics, a church will drift away from its mission and may even disintegrate. So while we can be known for any number of things, let us be known always as people who seriously, humbly, and realistically ask the Spirit of God to make our hearts and minds so full of love that it will overflow into the church and the world.
Though 1 Corinthians 13 is largely regarded as a cozy part of the Bible, a closer look reveals that these “feel-good” verses confront us, humble us, and begin to show us that the things we think matter most are not what matter most to God.
The church in Corinth faced circumstances from within that threatened its existence. So, in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul showed the church “a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31)—that is, the way of love, of agapē, rooted in the very character of God and revealed in the life of Jesus Christ. It is only by growing in Christlike love that the Corinthians could grow in Christian maturity and effectively handle such difficult situations.
Paul describes the beauty of God’s love with fifteen characteristics, like the facets of a diamond. His emphasis here is not so much upon what love is as what love does. Love behaves itself in a certain way. It is not only felt but acted on. And these actions and attitudes are to be habitual in the lives of those who love as God does.
Each facet of this Christlike love is worth taking a moment to meditate on. In a previous article, we considered the first eight. In this article, we consider the latter seven.
Love Keeps No Record of Wrong
Think of how the Lord Jesus has treated us:
Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sins are covered;
blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. (Rom. 4:7–8)
The Lord will not count forgiven sin! When we enter His presence, He’s not going to run the video and show it to us all over again. And when we try to play it back ourselves, the Lord essentially says, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
One of the great skills in life is learning what to forget. When people come to confess sin to us, we need to remember the grace God has shown us in response to the enormity of our offenses. Surely, then, we ought to forgive and do our best to forget the offenses done against us. When love invades a life, harboring a record of wrongs received ceases. Love knows there are greater truths worth remembering.
Love Does Not Rejoice in Evil
Human nature is intrigued by evil. To a certain extent, people seem even to enjoy witnessing evil, especially in others. The covers of newspapers and magazines are filled with adultery, indecency, cheating, lies, corruption, and filth because men and women have an appetite for it. But such hunger is inconsistent with godly love.
One of the primary ways Christians fall into the trap of delighting in the murky and sordid is in gossip—often even under the cover of prayer. When we gossip in this way, we violate agapē love by gloating over the sins and shortcomings of others.
Paul says that when the transforming love of Christ marks a fellowship, it’s going to make us the kind of people who do not rejoice when evil is exalted but turn their attention to better things: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8). The challenge is clear: we ought to gauge our reading, viewing, speaking, and listening habits by this measure.
Love Rejoices with the Truth
J. B. Phillips gives us a wonderful paraphrase of verse 6b: love, he says, “is glad with all good men when truth prevails.” Love cannot rejoice when truth is denied. Love and righteousness cannot be separated. There is no love that is indifferent to moral considerations.
This is one of the ways cultural ideas of love fall short.
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A Crisis of Leadership and the Elder Solution (Part 1): Theology Is Upstream
We don’t muddle through life trying to make the best of things without a robust dependence on the Word of God as it proclaims the lordship of Christ, only at the end to say, “Oh yes, and one more thing, this is how you can be saved.” The grand redemptive narrative of our Trinitarian God, as it is revealed in the Bible, is the primary way we are to make sense of all the world, whether it is currently occupied by pagan leaders or those who claim Christ. As that narrative clearly says, sin and the dominion of Satan are the problem, and Christ is the conquering solution. This means that leadership problems are ultimately spiritual problems that require theological solutions.
There is a crisis of leadership. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or alarmist. I’m not selling a grift course on how to solve all our leadership challenges. And I didn’t create a leadership assessment tool to unlock your potential. I don’t have a leadership degree from an Ivy League school plagued with leadership malfeasance (and I don’t want one). I am trying to be a realist. And we do actually have a significant global problem that bandies the word leadership around like being a leader is an essential human right. To highlight the problem, let’s say you’re going to have a conversation with a friend a few minutes after you read this essay. Your friend will start the conversation by saying, “I just read a news article about a well-known leader.” What do you think will follow that statement? The leader’s sordid financial dealings? A sexual scandal? A report on his gross incompetence? Accusations of plagiarism? A pattern of crude and abrasive language directed toward employees and colleagues? How far down the list do you need to go before you guess that your friend really wanted to tell you about the leader’s virtue, altruism, or skill at his profession? I’d guess it would be pretty far down the list. Even when we look at the leadership of clergy, men who used to be considered paragons of virtue in a culture, we find a similar problem.1 And to that, you might respond that it is only due to the media’s propensity to publish the salacious. To that, I’d say, “yes,” and “maybe.” But beyond media coverage, what is your personal experience of folks who go by the moniker “leader”? When we’re honest, we notice a strange tension. On the one hand, leaders have never had more access to leadership training, certificate accrual, books, or podcasts. Forbes reports that leadership development is a $366 billion industry. Someone is paying an NFL franchise-sized amount of money to grow as a leader. At the same time, leaders are struggling and not improving as leaders. In other words, in the face of enormous (faux) resources, leaders are actually getting worse and quitting in record numbers. Yes, there is a problem—in our culture and in the church.
Not the Problem You Thought
No, you did not make a mistake and visit the Drucker-Lencioni Weekly. This is a theological journal. And I’m not going to make the same argument that many make. The typical take on leadership issues (which also surface in the church) is that they are best sorted out at the corporation level and then applied piecemeal to the church. In this view, the church is downstream from where the real leadership work is being done—in very large secular institutions. In fact, the modern idea is that the church is so far downstream from secular leadership that it is a minor tributary tucked away in the reeds and marsh. The church is a kind of niché leadership environment, an oddity of low consequence to modern leadership concerns. So once the adults have figured out what plagues leaders, they’ll let the kids in on what might work for them in the church. I’d like to argue that this is entirely backward and has been for a very long time.2 This is why when most pastors want to study leadership, they read business books that are five years old or older.
I contend that the leadership crisis is a theological problem, that theological problems are always upstream from practical problems, that theological solutions are always primary, and that they tell us how to form and apply practical principles. The church (should be) is upstream from every form of instantiated secular leadership. That doesn’t mean that Microsoft would make a bazillion more dollars if the Bibles were on the desks of every VP, though I would be thrilled to find out that a Bible was on the desk of every VP at Microsoft. The Bible doesn’t work that way. But the Bible does reveal Jesus and the theology that describes his person and work. And that theology governs the world in which all of us live. It describes the world not as we’d like it to be but as it is. It describes the plight of every leader, no matter what his faith commitments are. It describes the general human condition, whether that human is a leader, CEO, VP, manager, colleague, or client. So, I believe one of the major reasons that leaders are struggling today isn’t just because of a post-COVID workplace filled with DEI-silliness, ESG regulations, and corporate greed. The problem is that we aren’t solving modern problems with correct solutions.
And I should add that upstream theology trumps any non-theologically based solution—conservative, liberal, left, or right. Many on the right want to return to the founding fathers, Classical literature, or the Great Books. These solutions aren’t necessarily bad3 but are incomplete and ultimately unable to solve what ails our leaders. They are giving out bandaids to treat cancer. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics are rather profound for a pagan and can make your immediate life and workplace a significantly better working environment compared to the morass that passes as wisdom today. Plato’s Republic is rather insightful as age-old wisdom for ordering loosely associated people. But even the (secular Greco-Roman) classics of Western Civilization are downstream from Christian theology. Christian theology takes precedence.
Returning Christian theology in general, and as it speaks to leaders and organizations specifically, to its rightful place as divinely revealed wisdom, centered on Christ, and able to equip the Christian for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16) has significant import for addressing what we’re currently facing in the crisis of leadership. This reorientation frees pastors from a schizophrenic mindset that attempts to reconcile Bavinck and Maxwell. It provides the watching world with wisdom and truth that are solely accessible through the church. It restores the church elder to the prominence in society that Jesus intended, if not in status, then definitely in influence. It guards against baptizing general leadership principles with biblical footnotes and calling it Christian. Ultimately, it recognizes that there is one great leader, one great king, and his name is Jesus. But before we get to solutions, we need to parse out this idea of revelation a bit more.
General and Special Revelation
To be more precise with my upstream-downstream analogy, the church has inverted general and special revelation when it comes to considering leadership. The world will always do this, as we’ll see, because all they have access to is general revelation and because special revelation looks foolish or weak to them (1 Cor. 1:20–25). That is expected. What is not expected is for the church to go along with this switcharoo, which we have. If you have turtled your boat and want to correct the problem, an essential thing to know is the deck from the hull. And yet, when considering issues around leadership—in society and in pastoral ministry—the church has been sailing along on a capsized ship, wondering why things aren’t going so well.
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Theology for Everyone Obadiah: A Glimpse of God’s Kingdom
At the beginning of the prophecy, Edom is high and lifted-up while foreigners enter Israel’s gates and carry off her wealth (v. 11). But a reversal is coming! Mount Zion shall gain ascendency and Mount Esau shall be stubble. The ascendency of Israel is described in terms of possession. They will possess Philistia, Edom, Phoenicia, Ephraim, Samaria, Gilead, and the Negev – in other words, every nation will belong to God’s people!
Obadiah is a neglected text in the Old Testament. It is a short text, weighing in at twenty-one verses. A lightweight for sure. However, this is probably not the reason for its neglect. No, neglect likely stems from its subject matter. It is a book about Edom. You heard me right, Edom, the posterity of Esau (Gen. 25:19ff). A quick consult of various commentaries reveals the same basic outline. This outline is from Leslie Allen’s commentary in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Allen, 142):
The Destruction of Edom (vv. 2-9)
The Wrongdoing of Edom (vv. 10-14)
Edom on the Day of Yahweh (vv. 15-21)
The point is clear, Obadiah has Edom on the mind. And if you’re like me, the posterity of Esau doesn’t really excite you. In fact, Allen describes Obadiah as “hardly a presentation of God’s whole counsel, even by OT standards” (Allen, 137). However, despite being about Edom, Obadiah teaches us, albeit briefly, about the kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God is an Opposed Kingdom
According to Obadiah, Edom is representative of all the nations, which seems to find its parallel in Amos 9:12 where the “remnant of Edom” is synonymous with “all the nations.” When one thinks of Esau, the father of Edom, as the offspring that lives in rebellion against God, the imagery is fitting. This nation is full of pride toward self (v. 3) and animosity toward their brother Jacob (v. 10). The one nation of Edom describes them all.
This rivalry between Esau and Israel is heightened further by Obadiah’s descriptions of the two. The prophet speaks of Mount Zion (vv. 17, 21) and Mount Esau (vv. 8, 9, 21).
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10 More Words Every Christian Should Know (and Be Able to Explain)
Perseverance (of the Saints): “They, whom God hath accepted in His Beloved, effectually called, and sanctified by His Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved. (Phil. 1:6, 2 Pet. 1:10, 1 John 3:9, 1 Pet. 1:5,9)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 17.1).
A robust understanding of the nature of God, his redemptive plan in Christ, and the duties of the Christian life will give us peace, confidence, and resoluteness in a world filled with anxiety, doubt, and shifting standards. We will also be more effective in sharing the gospel with unbelievers.
Our “10 Words Every Christian Should Know (and Be Able to Explain)” post featured key words to help believers grow in love for all Christ has done for them. Here are 10 more words to know in order to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet. 3:15). Definitions are taken from the Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Larger Catechism, Westminster Shorter Catechism, and Heidelberg Catechism.
1. God
“God is a Spirit, (John 4:24) in and of himself infinite in being, (Exod. 3:14, Job 11:7–9) glory, (Acts 7:2) blessedness, (1 Tim. 6:15) and perfection; (Matt. 5:48) all-sufficient, (Gen. 17:1) eternal, (Ps. 90:2) unchangeable, (Mal. 3:6, James 1:17) incomprehensible, (1 Kings 8:27) every where present, (Ps. 139:1–13) almighty, (Rev. 4:8) knowing all things, (Heb. 4:13, Ps. 147:5) most wise, (Rom. 16:27) most holy, (Isa. 6:3, Rev. 15:4) most just, (Deut. 32:4) most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth. (Exod. 34:6)” (Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 7).
2. Trinity
“In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: (1 John 5:7. Matt 3:16–17, Matt. 28:19, 2 Cor. 13:14) the Father is of none, neither begotten, not proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; (John 1:14, 18) the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. (John 15:26, Gal. 4:6)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 2.3).
3. Covenant
“The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, (Gal. 3:12) wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, (Rom. 10:5, Rom. 5:12–20) upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. (Gen. 2:17, Gal. 3:10)” (Westminster Confession of Faith 7.2).
“Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, (Gal. 3:21, Rom. 8:3, Rom. 3:20–21, Gen. 3:15, Isa. 42:6) commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, (Mark 16:15–16, John 3:16, Rom. 10:6–9, Gal. 3:11).
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