A More Excellent Way

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We had a birthday in our house this weekend. Some of you all already know my oldest son turned 13. And I told him that in Bible times, in Jewish culture, he would now be considered a grown man.

And then I coached Jojo to keep telling him, go get a job. So she’s on top of that for me. I know he can’t get a job, but he does help out around the house and with the animals when I need him to.

But we kept talking to him about getting a job and where’s your car and things like that. And it led to some conversations about what’s considered a man in our culture. And I know our culture is thoroughly confused about that.

But even amidst us, what makes somebody a man? Is it that you reach a certain age? Is it that your body has gone through certain changes?

Is it that you have a job and can support yourself? Is it when you make a certain amount of money? Are you a real man when you drive a certain kind of car or achieve a certain social status?

We talked about some of those things. I think all of those are really bad tests of what it means to be a man. And I’ve been teaching my son through the years and will teach the younger one when he’s old enough to understand.

Some of the things that I think are biblical tests of what it means to be a man, things like taking responsibility for yourself, things like being a leader in your family, somebody who influences your family to seek after God, things like being in control of your emotions. Not that you don’t have emotions. I think our society has done men a disservice by saying you shouldn’t have emotions or show emotions.

It’s okay to have them. we just don’t want to be led by them or controlled by them. Things like self-control, things like putting others’ needs ahead of your own needs or especially your own desires, things like that.

I think we could look at a lot of things that the world teaches about what it means to be a man or a woman or an adult and say those are really bad tests of how you know whether you’re grown or not. Some of what our society teaches is very confused. I think the Bible has much better tests of how we can tell if somebody’s mature.

That also applies to the spiritual realm. And what we’re going to look at this morning, as we come through our series on 1 Corinthians, if you’re new with us this morning, we’re working our way through 1 Corinthians piece by piece. And we come this morning to a passage that a lot of times is read at weddings, because it’s about love.

And certainly it works in the context of a marriage and how we ought to treat one another. But it goes beyond that. When we read this in context, we understand this is talking about how we’re supposed to treat one another within the church.

And I bring up the tests of maturity that we sometimes apply to ourselves and to others, because that’s what Paul’s talking about. As we’ve studied so far, Paul is talking about the Corinthians and their desire to show who was more spiritual than the others. Well, I’m more spiritual than you are, and I’m more spiritual than you are, and way more spiritual than you are, but he’s more spiritual than me, so I’ve got to try to catch up with him.

And it was a competition, and they were looking at the wrong things to be able to determine who really was spiritual. How do you know when you’re spiritually mature is what we’re going to be looking at today? Because the Corinthians were using wrong tests. They were looking at things like we’ve talked about, who had the most influence in the world.

the church, who had the most money, who had the most influence outside, who was the most powerful. Last week we looked at how they were considering who had which spiritual gifts. Oh, if you were really spiritually mature, you’d have the same gifts I do.

If we’re not careful, we can still look at each other the same way today. And so we want to look at what Paul has written here in 1 Corinthians under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to tell us how we can know that we’re spiritually mature or not, or how we can tell if we are maturing spiritually. And so we’re in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, if you’d turn with me there this morning.

1 Corinthians 13, we’re going to pick up where we left off last week. And once you turn there, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have a Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians 13, it’ll be on the screen for you. We’re going to look at this familiar passage in a way that may be unfamiliar to us.

We’re going to start in verse 4 here. Paul says, love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous. Love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they will cease.

If there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. And you may be seated.

And as I studied through this passage this week, it really falls into three different sections here. And for the sake of us understanding it, because we’re not the Corinthians, we’re not the people this was originally written to, I want to take this backwards and unpack Paul’s argument here. I want start with the last three verses here, 11 through 13.

You and I have a tendency, not you specifically, but we as humans, we have a tendency to get to a point where we think we’ve arrived, or at least we want to feel that way. We want to get to the point where we think, well, I’ve done everything. Spiritually speaking, I’m everything I’m supposed to be.

I’m good. I can just sit here and coast from now on. But despite that tendency, the Christian faith calls us to continually grow and mature.

Paul says elsewhere that I’m persuaded that he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it to continue it until his coming to paraphrase to paraphrase that passage it’s a continual thing that that we’re expecting God to continue working in us and growing us until the time that he calls us home that we should never get to a point in this life where we say I’ve grown as much as I need to or as much as I’m going to. It is a continual growth until He takes us home. And we see this in verses 11 through 13 here.

He compares the things that He’s talking about, love and spiritual gifts, the growth that’s taking place. He compares this to being a child versus being a man. And says, when I was a child, I used to speak like a child and think like a child.

I used to do childish things. But when I became a man, I put those things away. I did away with the childish things.

And he’s not saying here that when you grow up, you have to be boring by putting away childish things. But he’s saying as adults, once we’ve matured, we begin to think differently. Because there’s a process of growing, not only in the things that we care about and the things that we prioritize, but even in the way we reason through things.

You think differently from my kindergartner, right? You should, right? Okay.

As a matter of fact, sometimes when we’re having to try to get through to him about something, I have to stop and think and try to put myself in his mindset because we’re not thinking along the same lines. And I have to think, he can be very reasonable if I come at it the right way. But I have to stop and think, what is going to make sense to him?

Because I’m not there anymore. I’m not in that frame of mind anymore. And that’s true with all of my kids.

That’s true even with the older kids here at the school. You’re talking to them about things, and you have to stop and think, okay, they don’t see things the way we do. Because you’ve grown to a point where you’ve put away some of those childish things.

So what he’s talking about here in verse 11 is that the Christian life includes growth, and that the people in Corinth should expect to continue maturing and growing. It wasn’t, oh, I have this spiritual gift, so I’m mature, and you all should try to be like me. And in verse 12, he says, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

He’s talking about just catching a glimpse of things. It’s not real clear. But there’s going to be a day when we see like we’re face to face.

And he’s talking about understanding spiritual things. Now I see in part, but I will know fully just as I have also been fully known. Everything that you and I have today is incomplete.

The Corinthians were incomplete in the sense that they were not yet all the things that they would be, and they did not yet know all the things that they would know. Now, the Bible does talk about our completeness. We’ve just got to understand the context of what we’re looking at.

Jesus is the one who completes us. He’s completed our salvation. He is completing our sanctification.

The process of making us holy. He will complete our glorification when we are raised to new life with Him. All of these things take place.

And so there’s a sense in which we’re complete. Jesus has done everything that’s necessary for us to be saved and for us to be sanctified. But that sanctification process is not complete yet.

I’ve been a Christian for over 30 years. I am not what I was 30 years ago. I’m not what I was 20 years ago.

I’m not what I was 10 years ago. I hope that I’m getting wiser and less obnoxious as I go along. Maybe someday I’ll be useful to the Lord.

But we change and we grow. It should be a growing experience. But we understand that no matter what point we arrive at, it’s not everything that we’re going to be.

And what we know now is not everything that we’re going to know. There’s going to come a day when we stand face to face with Jesus, and it’s a whole new ballgame. That we’re going to be what we’ve never dreamed we could be.

And we’re going to understand things with a clarity we never could have imagined. but today is not that day. And even as they grew, and as they grew in spiritual gifts, and the spiritual gifts grew in them, and as they were maturing, he says there are three things that are constant in verse 13.

When he talks about them abiding, he said, even as you grow and even as you change, and sometimes we grow faster. I don’t know that we lose spiritual gifts, but I think sometimes we grow faster in certain spiritual gifts rather than others, and so they become more prominent. And as we grow and as we change, there are three things that are supposed to stick around.

Faith, hope, and love. That no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, those three things are supposed to be there. If you belong to Jesus Christ, if the Holy Spirit lives within you, those three things are supposed to be there and supposed to be constant.

And he says the greatest of those things is love. And I started with this ending portion of the passage because we need to understand that there is a need for us to continually grow and mature. that it’s dangerous for us to think we’ve ever gotten to a point where we’re everything we need to be and we know everything we need to know.

If we get to that point, we’re actually trusting in ourselves instead of him and it becomes a form of idolatry. And idolatry is always dangerous to us. Then let’s back up for just a minute to the middle section here, verses 8 through 10.

And he’s dealing with, he deals at the end of the passage with this idea that they had that, oh, I’ve arrived, I’m everything I need to be. In the middle of the chapter, he’s dealing with what they were using to test whether they had arrived or not. He’s already dispelled this idea that they’ve arrived.

Now he needs to deal with what is the faulty thinking that makes them think that they’re everything that they need to be. And some of them were looking to the fact that, well, I have prominent spiritual gifts. We’ve spent multiple chapters now looking at how all the spiritual gifts are important.

All of them matter. But at Corinth, there were some that were just more public than others. The gift of mercy doesn’t always get acted out on a stage.

It’s not always the spiritual gift of generosity or hospitality. These are not always done in front of an audience. But you have the gift of teaching, you have the gift of prophecy, you have the gift of speaking in tongues.

These were things that you did up in front of people. And so the Corinthians bringing the love of prominence and influence from their culture in with them to the church, they thought these clearly must be the better spiritual gifts. These must make me a better Christian than the people who don’t have them.

Prominent spiritual gifts are not a good test of our maturity. We don’t need to look at certain gifts and say, well, these are acted out in front of people, so they must be better gifts, and therefore the ones who have the gifts must be better Christians. To the extent that I have the spiritual gift of teaching, it does not make me a better Christian than you.

It does not make me more mature than you. It doesn’t make me more mature than somebody who has the spiritual gift of administration or the gift of discernment or the gift of mercy or any of the others. As we talked about last week, it’s in how you use them.

We’ll get back to that in just a moment. But looking at our spiritual gifts and saying, well, I have this one, is not a good test of our maturity and it’s not a good basis for our identity. You don’t want your whole understanding of who you are in Christ to be wrapped up in that one gift Because you may come to a point where God’s ready to use you in another ministry, and He may grow you in another gift in another area, and then you’re left wondering with some existential crisis, who am I?

So He does this by pointing out that there are limitations on some of the public gifts, some of the more public gifts. Some of the gifts that He had talked about, some of the gifts that they had at Corinth, had a built-in expiration date. And people argue about when that expiration date is.

We’ll get into that tonight in our Q&A time. Not arguing. I don’t think we’ll be arguing, but we’ll get into a discussion about when that expiration date may be.

But he says here very clearly in verses 8 through 10 that some of these more public spiritual gifts had a built-in expiration date. They were not going to continue on forever. And studying this topic, I’d never thought about this before, but there comes a time when all of our spiritual gifts have an expiration date.

Because there comes a day when all of our spiritual gifts are obsolete. We’re not going to need them in heaven, as far as I can tell. Study that out for yourself.

But as far as I can tell, I’m not going to need the gift of shepherding in heaven because we’re right there with the good shepherd. I’m not going to need the gift of discernment in heaven because there’s no false teaching. I’m not going to need the gift of mercy because Jesus wipes away every tear from their eyes.

We see that at some point all of these have a built-in expiration date, But he says for some of these that they were hanging their hats on, that there was an earlier expiration date. There were limits on the sign gifts. And these were the ones that the Corinthians were most eager to exercise.

Some of these things like prophecies and tongues and words of wisdom. These were the ones that they were looking at and saying, these are what make a person spiritually mature. If they’ve got that, they’re like this close to God.

And he’s saying, how are you going to know whether you’re mature when these things go away? when they’re no longer in operation. Verse 8 tells us, love never fails, but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away.

If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away. Some of these gifts, he said, have an expiration date.

And this presented a problem for the Corinthians because they looked at these as the indicator. How do you want to know if he’s mature? How do you want to know if he’s following Christ?

How do you want to know if he’s growing? You look to those gifts. And if he doesn’t have those gifts, he’s not as mature as you are.

They were using that as the test. And if that’s your view, what happens when that gift is no longer available? How would we know if you’re one that tends to believe that these died out 1,700 years ago or thereabouts? How has anybody been spiritually mature in the last millennia and a half or more?

There’s got to be some other way. And even while these gifts were in operation, they didn’t necessarily show that someone had arrived spiritually because their messages that came through these gifts didn’t contain everything that God had put out there as far as wisdom. Verse 9 says, they knew and they spoke in part.

Even these that are speaking in tongues, even these that are declaring words of knowledge, even these that are bringing forth prophecies, he said they’re doing so in part. That means they didn’t know everything that, all of God’s wisdom that he had revealed. We can’t look at our spiritual gifts and say, I know everything I need to know.

I believe I have the gift of teaching, but that does not mean that I know everything. Many of you have played Stump the Preacher on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, right? I go into this telling you that I don’t know is a perfectly valid answer.

I don’t know, but I will try to find out. And I know that sometimes that’s probably disappointing to you, but probably better than me just making something up, right? And pretending that I know.

Listen, I don’t know everything that God knows. As a matter of fact, the more I study and learn, the more I realize there are all these things out there that I don’t know. And just because somebody spoke in tongues or had a word of prophecy and they brought some special revelation from God, that didn’t mean they knew everything.

He’s saying you’re prophesying in part. You’re getting part of God’s message here. And he said these would pass away when something better or more complete came along.

In verse 10, There was going to be a time when the perfect would come and the partial would be done away with. And this is at the heart of the more excellent way that Paul talked about at the end of chapter 12. Chapter 12, verse 31, I believe.

He said, you keep pursuing spiritual gifts, I’m going to show you a more excellent way. I’m going to show you something better. And that something better is what he presents at the beginning of the passage that we looked at today.

That if these spiritual gifts were not the test of maturity that the Corinthians thought they were, there had to be something that was. there had to be something that helps us know whether we’re growing or not. Not necessarily, have I arrived, but has to be a sign to us that, yes, we are abiding in Christ, we’re walking with Him, we’re growing, we’re maturing.

There had to be some kind of sign. There had to be some kind of test. And we see at the beginning of this passage that love is a far better way. Love is a far better way of showing who we are in Christ and how we’ve grown in Him.

than any of these things. You can have a spiritual gift and you can use it in an unloving way and it doesn’t mean that you’re spiritually mature. You can use a spiritual gift in a mean way.

I’ve seen people, we talked about it last week, I’ve seen people use the gift of discernment to just rip people to shreds. And I believe they had the gift of discernment when it came to teaching, but not necessarily the gift of discernment about their own behavior. But it’s not even about using our spiritual gifts in a mean way.

Just using our spiritual gifts in any way It is not motivated by love. And again, that’s not a modern Western definition of love that’s warm, fuzzy feelings or affirmation of everything anybody wants to do. It’s this form of love that we see defined through the Scriptures that is a kind of love that only God can do and only God can do through us.

It is a self-sacrificial love. It is a perfect love. And the way it is lived out for us is loyalty to Jesus Christ and a desire to seek the good of His people.

It’s lived out in putting others first. It’s not even really feelings. We were taught this as teenagers in the church I attended. I spent a lot of time talking about, biblically, love is not just about feelings.

Because we were told as teenagers, your feelings will lie to you. But as adults, our feelings lie to us too. Love is not a feeling.

I think love will lead to feelings. But love is a choice and an action and a commitment. And there are some things to remember about this description of love that we read that I think reinforced this point.

First of all, this is God’s kind of love. We’re just imitating it as best we can. When God calls us to love one another like this, as we treat one another in the church, as we use our spiritual gifts to minister to one another in the church, this is an impossible hurdle.

This is an impossible level for us to reach. I cannot love like God. And the closest I can imitate that is to let God love through me.

This is something the Holy Spirit has to give us the capacity to do. That this is God’s kind of love, and we can only imitate it if we’re in Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to do so. Am I saying that non-believers can’t love?

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I’m saying that non-believers can’t love like God is calling us to love here.

Because we as believers can’t even love like God is calling us to love here unless he does it through us. So we get that objection from time to time. Are you saying atheists can’t love others?

Absolutely not. I’m not saying they can’t love. I’m saying that we as humans cannot love like this unless supernaturally empowered to do so.

The good news there is that if you’ve trusted Jesus as your Savior, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you. And the Holy Spirit gives you the ability to do this. So it’s God’s kind of love.

This is a description of Jesus. If you want to look at somebody who fulfills this description perfectly, it’s Jesus. And something I noticed this week is that the way we read these statements, love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous, love does not brag, is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, it’s not provoked, it does not take into account a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.

We read those and a lot of those sound to us like adjectives, descriptions. And I know some of you glaze over when I start to talk about grammar, because you’ve told me that. It’s okay, my wife was an English teacher.

I glaze over sometimes at discussions of grammar. So just know, I don’t bring up grammar unless it’s really, really important. This is really important.

Adjectives describe what something is like. None of these are adjectives. In the Greek, every one of these is a verb.

Every one of these is an action word. The problem is we just don’t have verbs in English that corresponds to these. We don’t have a verb for is patient, so we have to treat it like an adjective.

But it’s saying love acts patiently. Love lives out patience. Love is kind.

Love does kind things. We think of kindness in the adjective form as, he’s just over there and he’s just kind and nice. No, this is a verb.

It’s talking about going out of its way to act out kindness, to do kind things. It’s a very proactive thing. It’s not jealous.

Love does not conduct itself in a jealous way. Love is not looking at somebody else and saying, oh, I really want what they have and I hate them that they’ve got it and I don’t. Love does not brag.

Some of these we have verbs for. Love is not arrogant. Love does not act in an arrogant way.

Love acts in a humble way. It does not act unbecomingly. This is talking about in a sinful way.

Love doesn’t act in a sinful way. Love does not seek its own. It’s not a phrasing we use much anymore.

It means to to seek its own advantage. Love is not out to say what’s in this for me. What do I get out of it?

Love is seeking the good of the other person. Love is not easily provoked. So love doesn’t walk around on a hair trigger looking for some reason to be offended, looking for some reason to take offense or cause offense, does not take into account a wrong suffered.

Love is not standing around saying, yeah, you hurt me and I’ll get back at you. You just wait. Love is not keeping that list of wrongs.

It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. And then verse 7 says it bears all things, it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. This could kind of make love sound naive.

Oh, we just believe everything that’s taught. We could translate this a different way and say love never gives up. Love never loses faith.

Love never loses hope. Love never stops. And I dug in a little bit to try to understand the difference between bearing and enduring in verse 7.

The word bearing there seems like it means putting up with annoyances. And enduring is dealing with hardship. Love loves even when it’s costly.

It endures. Love also loves when it’s irritated. Have any of you in here ever been irritated by somebody you love?

All right. That would be most of us. That would be the honest people in here.

No, not honest, but open. I told Charla recently that until I became a parent, I never understood that you could simultaneously love someone enough to take a bullet for them and want to choke their lights out. I would never do that.

I would never do that. But I never understood that. But you keep loving despite the annoyances.

Now, as I’ve said a couple times, this is mostly read at weddings with the idea that it’s beautiful and it’s poetic and it’s a description of what love is like. These are good things to pursue in a marriage, but this is not a random thought about what love is like. This is a description of what love does and a challenge for us to do this in the church.

And more specifically, a challenge for us to use our spiritual gifts in ways that reflect this. That our motivation in the way we use our spiritual gifts is not to have people look at us and say how spiritual we are. It’s not to lord it over other people and show them that we’re more spiritual than they are.

It’s not to earn money or fame or power. It’s not to manipulate or flatter. It’s not to do anything but build up God’s people.

To seek the good of God’s people. and this leads me to my last thought this morning. Based on this text, the mark of spiritual maturity is not what gifts we have.

So don’t think, well, I’m not as spiritual as that guy because I don’t have the gift of teaching or I don’t have the gift of this or that or something that’s public. The mark of spiritual maturity or the test of spiritual maturity is not what gifts we have. It’s how we use those gifts to build up God’s people.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a spiritual gift that nobody ever notices publicly. You don’t look at that and say, well, I’m not as good as that guy. See, the test is not what gift you have, it’s how you use the gift you have.

Are you using your spiritual gifts to build up God’s people? Are you using your spiritual gifts because you understand that Jesus Christ is worth being glorified in the way that you use your spiritual gifts? The answer to both of those questions should be yes.

And of course, that presupposes that you’re using your spiritual gifts. As I said last week, if you don’t know what your spiritual gift is, don’t have any kind of idea, or maybe you have some idea, but you don’t know how to use it to serve others, I would love to talk with you and help you figure that out. I’m not saying I know and can tell you exactly what it is, but I’m saying working together and looking at the scriptures, we can probably get a good idea, and we can come up with some ideas of how God may be calling you to be used.

And I would love to talk with you about that. But if you are using your spiritual gifts, it should be out of a love for Jesus and a love for his people. That’s what spiritual maturity is.

And the reason we do this, the reason we do this is because Jesus is worth the glory that he gets when we use our spiritual gifts to build up his people. Jesus Christ cares enough about his people that he died for them. He died for us in this room.

He loves every person in this room enough that He gave up His life in the most gruesome way imaginable. And that’s not to the exclusion of anybody outside this room, but y’all are the ones here that I’m talking to. Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins so that we could be forgiven, so that we could have eternal life with Him, so that we could have a relationship with the Father, so that we could grow and be what He created us to be.

You mattered that much to Him. If you’ve never trusted in Him as your Savior, it’s very simple. It’s as simple as acknowledging that your sin has separated you from God because God is completely holy and our sin is offensive to Him.

But even amid that offense, He loved us enough that He sent Jesus and Jesus came willingly to take responsibility for our sins, be nailed to the cross and shed His blood and die so that we could be forgiven. It’s as simple as acknowledging that and asking for His forgiveness. And if you’ve got questions about that, I’d love to talk with you after the service about that as well.

but the people around you are precious enou