Introduction - Love

Introduction
1 Corinthians 13
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Paul devotes a whole chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, to talking about and explaining love. He had good reason too! Many people have warped perceptions of what it means to ‘love’ – is it an emotion or a way of perceiving the world; is it voluntary or uncontrollable? Some people simplify ‘love’ to mean something superficial and unpredictable, something very fallible and subjective, seeing only certain aspects of love. In particular it is when we let the world define what love is that we can run into real problems. All around us the world is screaming out about different definitions of ‘love’. Music culture, media and even general behaviour in our society tells us that love is shallow, fleeting, unreliable and totally out of our control. Consequently, in a world where love is truly a mysterious and ever changing concept, it is so important that we as Christians can build our foundations and perspectives of not only this concept of love, but also our entire lives, on the Bible. For where else can we find true wisdom but from the very book that predicts and records the life, death and resurrection of our Saviour and gives us our most reliable picture of who our God really is?
There are people that will tell you that a book on love as defined in the Bible is ‘milk’ theology – a fundamental and simple topic which is really just for beginners. However, I believe, just as Paul did when he wrote these words, that we cannot live a fully Jesus-centered life unless we can completely grasp this concept in the context of Biblical theology. When we investigate the topic further we find that the Bible itself does a pretty good job of explaining what it means to love.
Here Paul dedicates this whole chapter to defining love, to explain its importance, significance and to putting it into context. But this is no revelation, throughout the whole Bible love is a theme that runs consistently under every chapter; even the lists of names in the old testament books like Deuteronomy show God’s great love for His people that He would single those people out to be named in the most popular and most read book of all time. So let’s start at the beginning; later on in the book we will be breaking down this famous chapter, looking at different interpretations and putting it into context with other verses throughout the Bible; but to lay a foundation for Paul’s chapter on love we will first investigate how love is viewed throughout the Bible.
One of the first times that the word ‘love’ is used in the Bible – aside from use as a description of sexual intercourse or as a means to persuade Abraham, Sarah’s husband to lie about their relationship in Genesis 20 - is in Genesis chapter twenty-two.
‘Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Here we see God testing Abraham, telling him to sacrifice his only son for whom he had waited many decades, whilst he is still an innocent child, as a sign to God of how devoted and thankful he was. This was only the second time in Biblical history that a burnt offering had been made – at least out of those which are recorded. The first was in Genesis chapter eight when Noah, having lost friends and family, walking out into an almost barren land where plants were only beginning to grow back, took some of all the clean animals and birds and one by one slaughtered and burnt them on his make-shift altar as a sacrifice to God. It was a solemn act of repentance from sin and an attempt to reconcile himself to God after the immense tragedy that had been poured out from the hands of his God.
As one of the first burnt offerings in history Abraham didn’t have a lot of example; and just as spilling the blood of some of the last remaining animals on Earth must have been heart-breaking and sobering, so would this offering be. You see we can take this passage literally and think about how God is showing us the love relationship between a Father and his son, and I could go into a long interpretation about how fathers and mothers should relate to their children; but there is a far more obvious example at hand.
We now know that God was also using this as an example, a metaphor if you like, to shadow the sacrifice that He would make several thousand years later on the Hill of Calvary. God was showing us the enormity of the sacrifice He would make in a way that we could understand. So effectively when God says ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love’ He was also saying ‘I will take My Son, My only Son, whom I love’. Of course God’s love for Abraham meant that as soon as he showed that he was faithful and willing to do anything in obedience to the one true God, God poured out His mercy on him and his son, supplying a ram for Abraham to sacrifice in place of his beloved son.
On the other hand, perhaps more important than the love God describes here between father and son and the parallels He draws to show the love between God the Father and Jesus Christ, is the purpose for this passage. You see God didn’t only want this passage in the Bible because it shows us the importance of obedience, or because it gives us historical background on the relationship between Abraham, Isaac and their Father God, but I believe there is another reason. This event in history happened many thousands of years before Jesus was crucified on a Roman cross. It is a prophesy of the redemption plan which God had prepared well before the world was spoken into motion. We must remember the context of this passage, we are only 22 chapters into the Bible and already God is revealing his rescue plan for mankind! This passage not only shows us the significance of the sacrifice that God would make in a scaled down way which we feeble humans can understand, but it also shows us the reasons for the sacrifice. You see Abraham was carrying out orders. He was obeying God probably out of the fear of the LORD, probably because He knew what God was capable of, possibly because He knew the value of having the Living God on your side. Essentially, he probably didn’t have a choice. Abraham had learnt by now that you can’t run from God, He is everywhere, so his choice was to obey or suffer the consequences.
Unlike Abraham, God did have a choice.
He could have done nothing after we chose our own way instead of His, leaving us to rot in our sin, to die and go to hell to be punished justly for our rebellion and arrogance against the living God.
He could have been angry and poured out His wrath on the world and destroyed us completely like He almost did in Genesis 6.
He possibly could have just ignored us and turned His face away, refusing to look upon our sin any longer and leaving the world to fall apart without His support.
What He did do, is even more astonishing.
When we begin to look into love as defined in the Bible, in fact when we begin to look at any concept in the context of the Bible, we always seem to come back to the same thing – the cross. Love cultivates in this moment in history when the God who rules over everything makes the ultimate sacrifice to wipe clean all our sin and shame.
He didn’t have to.
By any human logic it was unthinkable; if any human had been treated the way we have treated God since that first sin in the garden of Eden, for that long and unceasingly in spite of His constant love, grace and mercy, I am sure that not one of us could honestly say that we would be willing to do what God did.
Why?
Because we don’t love like God loves us.
The only explanation for the sacrifice that God made that day, is love. The apostle John sums it up like this:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us.
This moment in history completely redefines love. It makes our feeble attempts at affection and faithfulness seem totally worthless. THIS is how we know what love is – Jesus Christ laid down His life for US! Paul puts it like this:
Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jesus didn’t die because He thought we didn’t deserve to be punished. Sometimes we can perceive the cross through a haze of arrogance; that when God showed us mercy and took the punishment for us it was because He thought we didn’t deserve it.
We do.
Just as Paul wrote: For the wages of sin is death.
If that comes as a surprise to you then you have totally missed the point of the gospel. If that revelation convicts you of the sin of pride, then you need to repent and totally renew your perception of the cross. Christ died for us not because we deserved it! Not because He thought that we were fundamentally good and just ‘made a few mistakes’ as many still believe. Jesus Christ, Son of the One Living God, died for you and for me because He loves us, and for no other reason but that.
So this is where we begin, where we should always begin; at the foot of the cross, humbled by our own sinful nature and in awe of the God whose love for us was so inconceivably strong that Christ died in atonement for our sin so that we could be in relationship with Him. We will never fully love the way that God loves us, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t aspire to that. The love that Christ displayed on the cross in Jerusalem that day is so profound, so astounding, so beyond what our feeble human minds can imagine – this is where we take our example of love. Jesus is the perfect example of a life pleasing to God and as Christians we should desire to please God in everything that we do. As the psalmist said:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting
Love was the foundation of anything and everything that Jesus ever did. And so it should be for us.

Love

Wow I haven't posted on here in a very long time - I promise to pick it up again now that my exams are over and a few other distractions are leaving :p
I was thinking I could post bits of my 'book' on 1 corinthians 13 and u guys can all help me and comment on it - then I can say that we wrote it together - let me know what u think.
:)