1 Corinthians 13 | Love Is the Only Currency That Lasts

There is a chapter in the Bible so well known that most people have heard it read at a wedding before they ever heard it preached in a church. At Redemption Gilbert, we have been working through 1 Corinthians from the beginning of the year, chapter by chapter, and this week we arrived at chapter 13. What Paul writes here is not a romantic poem. It is a corrective. And depending on how honest you are willing to be with yourself, it might sting a little.

You Can Have Everything and Still Have Nothing

Paul opens with a cascade of hypotheticals. What if you could speak in every human language and even the language of angels? What if you had prophetic insight into every mystery of God? What if your faith was strong enough to literally move mountains? What if you gave everything you owned to the poor and endured every hardship without complaint?

His answer: without love, none of it amounts to anything.

That is not a polite suggestion. It is a diagnosis. The Corinthian church was full of people fighting for position, competing over spiritual gifts, cutting each other down to prove they mattered. And Paul says you can be the most gifted, the most generous, the most disciplined person in the room and still be worth nothing if love is not driving it.

King Solomon comes to the same conclusion from the other direction. He had power, wealth, romance, achievement. He tried everything the world offers at the highest level. And at the end of it he said he had nothing. Because love is not one item on the list. It is the foundation the list is built on.

Paul calls love the constitution and the currency of the kingdom. Everything else is Monopoly money. You can have a stack of it this high and it will not buy you a thing in the world that actually matters.

What Love Actually Looks Like

Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy or boast. It is not proud or rude or self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. It does not delight in evil but rejoices in truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Most of us have heard this list so many times it has stopped landing. But try reading the inverse of it.

A lack of love is impatient and cruel. The unloving are filled with envy. They boast and are arrogant and rude. Hatred insists on its own way. It is irritable and resentful. It rejoices at wrongdoing. It exposes and abandons and despairs and surrenders. Hate never endures.

When you hold those two pictures side by side, you realize they are not describing abstract concepts. They are describing real people. Real communities. Real marriages and workplaces and church congregations.

The question Paul is quietly asking is: which one describes you?

If They Put Out a Wanted Poster for Loving People, Would You Be a Suspect?

There is a story from American history about a man named DB Cooper who hijacked a plane, stole a large sum of money, parachuted into the wilderness, and was never found. For decades, investigators interviewed everyone on the plane trying to build a composite sketch. A manhunt followed. Thousands of people who vaguely matched the description probably spent a few nervous moments wondering if someone might come knocking.

What if there was a wanted poster for loving people? Patient people. Kind people. People who build others up instead of tearing them down, who protect and trust and hope and persevere on behalf of those around them.

Would anyone come looking for you?

That question is worth sitting with seriously. Not as a guilt trip but as an invitation to be honest about whether the life you are living looks like the love Paul is describing.

Love Is Not a Feeling. It Is a Practice.

Paul is also realistic. Right now, we see dimly. We know in part. We are not finished products. The work of love is not something you complete. It is something you practice.

CS Lewis put it plainly in Mere Christianity: do not waste time worrying about whether you love your neighbor. Act as if you do. Because when you behave as if you love someone, you will presently come to love them.

That is not naivete. That is discipline. It is the same logic that works in a struggling marriage when one partner is asked to stop trying to win the argument and start praying genuine blessing over the other person. Not God, make them see how wrong they are. Actual blessing. What would it look like for that person to flourish? And then to act accordingly.

We only perfect what we practice. Love is not different. You are not going to get good at it by thinking about it.

What Survives

Paul ends the chapter by naming what lasts. Prophecy will cease. Tongues will be stilled. Knowledge will pass away. The things we spend so much energy arguing about and building platforms around will eventually go away entirely.

What survives is faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.

He knows it is true because God is love, and love never fails. Jesus demonstrated that in the most costly possible way. He laid his life down not for people who had it figured out but for people who were still children in their understanding, still stumbling, still only seeing dimly.

That same Jesus knows you fully. He knows the parts of you that you are not proud of, the things done to you and the things you have done to others, the ways you have fallen short of this list. And he loves you no less for any of it.

The call to love is not a standard designed to crush you. It is an invitation to live into who you were made to be.

Personal Reflection

Take a few minutes with these questions this week.

• Where in your life are you spending energy to build a platform for yourself, to be right, to be recognized, that might be costing you something more important?

• Is there a person you are struggling to love right now? What would it look like to take one small step toward them this week, not because they deserve it but because love is what you were made for?

A practice to try: pick one person this week, whether a neighbor, a colleague, a family member you are in conflict with, and pray a genuine blessing over them. Not God, straighten them out. A real blessing. What would it look like for them to flourish? Pray for that. Do it every day for a week and see what happens.

Go Deeper

If this chapter has been sitting with you, there is a lot more where this came from. Watch the full sermon in the Redemption Gilbert Sermon Library or on YouTube.

And if you want to keep practicing love alongside a community of people who are trying to do the same thing, community groups are a great next step. You were not meant to figure this out alone.

We’d love to help you get connected!