1 Corinthians 13

For me, I find it’s the little moments that reveal major issues. There’s the moment the other day where I’m talking with Michelle about buying a particular thing, which she’s fine with, all the while I’m building and executing a defense case for why we should if she ever decided to disagree with me. Or the other night where I took deep offense to Michelle simply helping me out – as though she were implying I’m stupid and forgetful and an oaf of a man.

I see more clearly these days how self-righteous I am (hence the defensiveness) and how much I imply into what other people do. I don’t love people. While I don’t love people, I do know God has something to say about that. In 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, we have the infamous “Love is” statements from Paul that have for ages and ages, unfortunately been gutted of all context and read at thousands of weddings every weekend.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Meditating on my own failings in this is helpful enough, but then I though of my good friend D.A. Carson and asked him what he thought of this passage. Here’s what he helped me see:

If I must say a few words what is distinctive about God’s love for us, it is that it is self-originating. When a young man reveals his heart with a passionate declaration, I love you!” at least in part he means that he finds the woman he loves lovely. At least some of his love is elicited by the object of that love. But God loves what is unlovely. If, as John 3:16 tells us, God loves the world, it is not because the world is so lovely God cannot help himself: judging by John’s use of the term world, God loves the world only because of what he is. And derivatively, that is how Christians learn to love: they learn to love with love that is, like God’s self-originating. Of course, unlike God’s love, our is not absolutely self-originating; but it is self-originating in the sense that God’s grace so transforms the believer that his or her responses of love emerge out of the matrix of Christian character, and are correspondingly less dependent on the loveliness of the object. Showing the Spirit, 65

The root and spring of love is not in the actions of it, or even the character of particular actions or words, it’s in character of the soul. Am I loving as a person. DC Talk was wrong, love is not a verb, it’s an attribute. Love is a quality of who we are. Like water is wet, so is a person who is loving – they are love.

What kind of love? The love that loves simply to love and be kind. The kind God has for us – springing from genuine interest and kindness. God loves the unlovely (you and me) because God is love. One exercise to do here is to go through 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and write out “(your name) is patient, (your name) is kind,etc.”. You’ll feel the conviction. But that’s the point of growing in love because Jesus is patient and kind, and he wants us to look like him.

So how do I grow in love? Certainly there are practical things I just need to do, but the change I need is something I can’t do. Thankfully, the Bible helps us out again here.  Paul tells us that “the fruit of the Spirit is love” (Galatians 5:22). Relying on the Spirit in prayer, repenting of our hardheartedness is the means of cultivating the Spirit’s activity in our lives. It’s when the Spirit is active in the humble soul that the fruits of that activity begin to shoot up. Suddenly, for no apparent or immediate reason, you just start loving people just to love them, despite who they are or what they’ve done. This is a God-thing here, not a pragmatic thing. Love, you see, is different than you think.