1 Corinthians 13:13

1 Corinthians 13:13

I. Love is of God's nature faith and hope are only of God's creation and appointment. God loves, but God neither believes nor hopes.

II. Love being of God's nature, and faith and hope being of God's creation and endowment merely, it follows that charity is the senior of faith and hope.

III. Believing and hoping give no direct affinity to the Divine nature, but love secures real oneness with God.

IV. Love fills a nobler sphere than either faith or hope. Faith embraces testimony only, but love embraces the testifier. Hope has regard to the future only, but love has regard to all duration.

V. Love is enforced by the highest examples.

VI. The very spirit of the Christian dispensation is the spirit of love.

VII. The work assigned to Christian charity on earth is the mightiest work. Within the individual it is one important evidence of his salvation.

S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Sermons, 2nd series, p. 137.

Love.

I. Whence hath love its birth? In the infinite love of God, in the essence of God. Faith and hope are towards God. They are graces put into the soul by God, whereby the soul should cling to Him, hold fast by Him, long for Him. But faith and hope can have no likeness in God. They are the virtues of the creature when absent from its Creator, companions of its pilgrim state. In heaven neither angels nor saints hope or believe, but see and know and feel and love. On this ground, then, is charity greater than faith and hope, and any other grace, because it has its source in that which God is. Love contains all virtues; it animates all; but itself is beyond all. For they are concerned with human things and human duties, with the soul itself, or its fellow-men, with deeds which shall cease when our earthly needs and trials and infirmities cease; love bears them up to God, looks out of all to Him, does all to Him, and in all sees Him, soars above all and rests not until she finds her rest in the all-loving bosom of God.

II. Holy men have distinguished four stages of love. (1) The first state of fallen man is to love himself for himself. (2) The second is to love God for the man's own sake. Such is the love of most who love God at all. (3) The third should love God for His own sake. (4) The last stage is that man should love himself only for the sake of God. In this, as holy men have spoken, the soul, borne out of itself with Divine love, forgetting itself, losing itself in a manner as though it were not, not feeling itself and emptied of itself, "goeth forth wholly unto God and cleaving to God, becometh one spirit with Him." This is life eternal, that" God should be all in all, that the creature should be nothing of itself, except the vessel of the life and love of God.

E. B. Pusey, Sermons from Advent to Whitsuntide, vol. ii., p. 41.

Consider:

I. The specific nature of each of these graces. (1) Faith. ( a ) As to its origin, it is the gift of God; as to its operation, it is the work of the Spirit; as to its object, it fastens upon Christ; as to its exercise, it is the disciple's own act. ( b ) Faith designates the act of a sinful man when he accepts Christ from God on God's own terms. It is the first stone of the building, but it is not the foundation. (2) Hope. It is a light shed down from heaven to cheer a dark and troubled scene. It is like moonlight borrowed from the sun to mitigate the darkness, which it cannot dispel. Hope is the tenant, not of a heart that was never broken, but of a heart that has been broken and healed again. (3) Love. Some fragments of this heavenly thing survive the fall and flourish in our nature. It is beautiful even in ruins. But feeble, changeable, and impure is all the love that is born in us. At the best it expatiates on a low level, and expatiates irregularly, intermittently, even there. The love which is strung in with kindred graces in our text is the work of the Spirit in renewed man.

II. The mutual relations of all. Faith leans on Christ, and hope hangs by faith, and love leans on hope. Love, the beauteous top stone on the house of God, could not maintain its place aloft, unless faith resting directly on the rock were surely laid beneath; but it is not the less true, that both its elevation and its beauty are due to the graces of the Spirit, which are piled, course over course, upon faith.

III. The superior magnitude of love. In two distinct aspects love is the greatest of all the graces: (1) in its work on earth, and (2) in its permanence in heaven.

W. Arnot, Roots and Fruits, p. 1.

References: 1 Corinthians 13:13 . Homilist, 3rd series, vol. i., p. 106; R. W. Church, Church of England Pulpit, vol. xxi., p. 37; E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons, p. 42; G. Salmon, Gnosticism and Agnosticism, p. 205. E. B. Pusey, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii., p. 41; R. W. Church, Advent Sermons, p. 88; E. A. Abbott, Oxford Sermons, p. 86; C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons Chiefly Practical, p. 39; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 85; L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal, p. 175; T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, p. 342; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 74; R. Tuck, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 346; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. iv., p. 89; vol. viii., pp. 98, 99, 224; W. Dorling, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 61; R. W. Church, Ibid., vol. xxviii., p. 417. 1 Corinthians 13:0 H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xiv., p. 148; Preacher's Monthly, vol. i., p. 425. 1 Corinthians 14:1 . W. Webb Peploe, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii., p. 161; R. Tuck, Ibid., vol. xix., p. 248. 1 Corinthians 14:1-4 . F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Corinthians, p. 186. 1 Corinthians 14:2-9 . Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 355. 1 Corinthians 14:10 . J. Stannard, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi., p. 91; Morlais Jones, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 172. 1 Corinthians 14:12 . G. W. McCree, Ibid., vol. xxvi., p. 231.