THE PEARLS OF PAUL
THE LOVE CHAPTER- PART VII
COMMUNION SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
1 CORINTHIANS 13:8–13
OCTOBER 3, 1999
On August 21, 1971, Barbara and I were married. We took our honeymoon in California at Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. We stayed there at the Ahwahnee Hotel, a grand majestic hotel on the floor of Yosemite Valley, not far from the Merced River, with spectacular views of Half Dome and El Capitan. At the Ahwahnee Hotel, there is a great dining hall with a high ceiling with full log beams. Every night in that great dining hall, they have candlelight dinners. Barb and I, on our honeymoon, had a candlelight dinner there. It was one of those dinners you never forget. It’s a dinner I’ll always remember, partly because of the occasion, partly because of the ambiance, and mostly because of Barb who I love more than any other person in this world.
Most of you can look back and remember a dinner like that. Most of you can look back on your life, and perhaps you can remember a number of special meals or special dinners that were special—perhaps because of the occasion, perhaps because of the setting, or perhaps because of the person or people that you were with. The Bible tells us that the early church had special meals. The Bible tells us that the early church shared some very special dinners. The dinner, in the early church, that was more special than any other was the dinner they called “he agape,” two Greek words simply meaning “the love.” He agape was the title the early church gave to their love feast. They celebrated the love feast when the members of the church brought in their best food, their very best food, and then they shared it with one another, celebrating God’s love and celebrating their love for one another in Christ. He agape, the love feast, was shared in conjunction with communion. The love feast took place either immediately before or immediately after communion. This is also the case in the Eastern Orthodox churches today, as the agape, the love feast, is shared in conjunction with communion.
This Sunday we have communion Sunday. We share communion together, and yet we have no love feast. We have no love meal that we are sharing together this morning, but we do celebrate love, and it’s appropriate that we do this in conjunction with communion. It was on that first communion night, on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus said to His disciples, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another even as I have loved you.” It’s appropriate that we conclude our study of the love chapter and agape love, divine love, on this communion Sunday.
As we conclude this series on the love chapter, I have two teachings, and the first teaching concerns the quantitative aspects of love. The first teaching explores love quantitatively. Paul says, “Love never ends.” God’s love, divine love, agape love, never ends.
I read recently the story of Robert Hasty. Robert Hasty’s wife, Frances, died in 1995. They had been married for 52 years and loved each other very much. When Frances died, Robert Hasty was devastated because he missed his wife so much. As the months passed and the years, he would go to her grave as often as he could, and he would put flowers on her grave. He would talk to her, although he knew she was not there. He knew she had gone into heaven with the Lord, but he would still talk to her. He would pray there by her grave. He didn’t go to the grave that often because her grave was 240 miles from where he lived, and so he went to her grave on holidays and on her birthday.
Now, it was Easter Sunday 1998. Robert Hasty drove that 240-mile drive from his home in Spring, Texas to the grave in Ft. Worth, Texas. There at the grave he brought Easter lilies to adorn her grave. He knelt by her grave, and he began to pray. It was the maintenance workers at the Laurel Land Memorial Cemetery who found Robert Hasty’s lifeless body. He died there by his wife’s grave while he was kneeling in prayer, died by his beloved wife’s grave. Robert Hasty, Jr., their son said, “Dad missed mom very much, and he loved her very, very much.” Such a devoted love is worth remembering, but we should also remember that earthly love doesn’t always work like that. I don’t need to tell you that.
Eros, the Greek word for romantic love, does not always connote a lasting love. Many of you have had someone you loved come and say, “I don’t love you anymore.” Some of you have had a husband come to you and say, “I don’t love you anymore.” You’ve had your wife come to you and say, “I don’t love you anymore.” You’ve had them say, “I love someone else,” or perhaps say, “I don’t think I ever really loved you.” The pain, the sense of rejection, the anger, the sorrow… It’s not easy to get over. Love in this world, eros love, is like that. Even phileo love, friendship love, every type of love, even family love, is transitory. But, you see, God’s love, agape love, never ends.
In the King James version, it says, “Love faileth not.” In the NIV, it says, “Love never fails.” In the RSV, it says, “Love never ends.” In the Greek, it says, “He agape oudepote piptei.” “Oudepote piptei” literally means “never falls.” It means “never falls into ruin,” “never ceases to be,” “never comes to an end.” God’s love never ceases to be, never falls into ruin, never comes to an end, never fails. God’s love for you never fails. It’s hard for us, I think, to comprehend this. It’s hard to comprehend unfailing love, never-ending love. It’s hard to comprehend it because everything around it is so transitory. Everything around is coming to an end. Bronco fans are finding this out.
Of course, even our bodies fail us. Even our bodies come to an end. Even our bodies are transitory. I shared with the men’s Tuesday morning Bible Study recently how a week ago Monday, I was lifting weights in my basement with free weights. I was doing a bench press. There was no one there to spot me. I was benching close to my max, within twenty or thirty pounds of my max. I brought the weight down to my chest, and then I began to push it upward. I was almost to a lockout position when suddenly I felt and seemingly heard a huge snap, just a pop, in my left elbow. I lost all strength in my left arm. Now, it was the grace of God. That weight, 280 pounds, could have just come crashing right back down. I could have had a full-frontal lobotomy or a concave chest, but, by the grace of God, it slipped backward and caught the rack. Now, I’ll probably never bench press again—I mean, because of my elbow—and I’ve bench pressed for 34 years.
I said to Barb, “As you grow older, it seems like life is just a series of adjustments.” Isn’t that true? As you grow older, life is just a series of adjustments. Things you once did, you can no longer do. I think in the sight of God, what matters most is not the adjustments but how you handle them and whether you take them with a sense of humor. But life, as we grow older, is a series of adjustments, and partly because these bodies fail us. They fail us, and they eventually come to an end.
So it is with everything around us. It’s all transitory. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us in the love chapter, even the gifts of the Holy Spirit are transitory. The gift of prophecy will pass away. The gift of tongues, “glossolalia,” it will cease. The gift of knowledge, the word of knowledge, this gift of the Holy Spirit, will pass away. Those gifts will one day no longer be needed. They will pass away, but love never ends.
You see, when you come to Christ and you accept Him as your Savior and receive Him as your Lord, He saves you, and you become a child of God, adopted into the family of God, born anew, “anagennao.” Becoming a child of God, you live forever. Really it had to be that way because God’s love never ends, and He wants to love you, His children, forever. He doesn’t want it to ever end because love never ends, and so He had to give you eternal life, you who believe. He had to give us eternal life because He wants to be in a love relationship with us forever and ever and ever. Agape love, divine love, God’s love, never ends.
Well, Paul secondly and finally also discusses love qualitatively—not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Paul admits that there are a few other things that also remain: Faith and hope. These also endure. These also are eternal. Faith, hope, love. These three remain, but he says, “The greatest of these is love.” So, love is the greatest. Even amongst those eternal things, love is the greatest. So, he is here describing love qualitatively. It is the greatest.
Why is love the greatest? Why is it more important to God than anything? For two reasons, biblically. First of all, love’s the greatest because it is the core virtue. You know, the early church identified seven cardinal virtues. It began with the Pauline Triad in 1 Corinthians 13:13: faith, hope and love. These were the first three virtues, faith, hope and love. And then they added the four philosophical virtues from Greece, their quartet of virtues, the quartet of virtues espoused by Plato. These included courage and justice and self-control and wisdom. So, the Pauline Triad and the quartet of Greek virtues formed the seven cardinal virtues. It was St. Augustine who took the quartet of Greek virtues and Christianized them, finding biblical support for each. Of course, Bible scholars believe that he should have added one more virtue, the virtue of humility, since humility is so stressed biblically. But whatever list of virtues you come up with, you see the core virtue is always love. Love is the core virtue. Everything flows from love. It all begins with love.
In fact, Paul is telling us in the love chapter even faith and hope are based on love. That’s why he says, “Love believes all things, love hopes all things.” You see, faith is a response to the love of God in Christ. Hope is the response to the love of God in Christ. It all comes from love, and all the virtues flow from love. That is why when the fruit of the Spirit is listed in the Bible, it begins with love. It begins with love because love is the core virtue. The second reason biblically that love is the greatest is that it is the summation of the law. Love is the summation of the law.
All of you have heard of the Ark of the Covenant. None of you have seen the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, as far as we know, no one has seen the Ark of the Covenant for more than 2,500 years, because the Ark of the Covenant disappeared. It just vanished. Now, the Ark of the Covenant is, of course, the gold chest covered by winged cherubim that was kept in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon in the city of Jerusalem. In more ancient times, the Ark of the Covenant was kept in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle.
In the period of conquest, the armies of Israel carried the Ark of the Covenant with them. They carried the Ark of the Covenant before them in battle. The power of God attended it so that foreign armies were put to flight, and enemy cities were laid waste. It is a fact of history that, through the centuries, archeologists and explorers have died in a quest to find the Ark of the Covenant. It is a fact of history that nations have sought that Ark. It is a fact of history that rulers and kings have sought to possess it for themselves, laboring under the illusion that they might somehow bend its power towards their own purposes.
This past week, my mother sent me a video tape called “The Mysteries of the Ark of the Covenant.” It explores some of the current archeological efforts to find the Ark of the Covenant in Israel, in Egypt, in Ethiopia, and other places. There are those who believe that if they could ever find the Ark of the Covenant, if they could just find it, it would trigger a sequence of events, a chain of action that would culminate in a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and the consummation of the age and the return of Christ. But I would submit to you that people are too enamored with the subject of the Ark of the Covenant. You see, the Ark of the Covenant is not nearly as important as what it represents.
What does the Ark of the Covenant represent? It represents the law. The Ark of the Covenant represents the law. It represents all the commandments of God. People forget the Ark of the Covenant was simply built to house the tablets of stone upon which God inscribed the decalogue, the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Ark of the Covenant was built to carry the law. It represented all the laws of God. It represented all the commandments of God, and it was Jesus, in Matthew 22, verses 37-40, who told us that all the law, all the commandments of God, are summed up in love. He said, “The first commandment is this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. The second commandment is like unto it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Then He said, “All of the law and the prophets depend on this.” When you come to Galatians 5:13, or you turn to Romans, chapter 13, the Apostle Paul tells us that love sums up the law. If you could somehow love God perfectly and love your neighbor as yourself, you would just automatically obey the commandments of God. All of the commandments are given in love. And when we break the commandments, we fail to love. Every commandment in this book is simply an explanation of what it means to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. Every commandment. That’s why love’s the greatest. This sums up the law.
There are so many people out there in the world who believe in love. Everybody believes in love. But, of course, you can’t divorce love from the commandments of God. In fact, you really need the Old and New Testaments to understand love—what love of God requires, what love of neighbor means. So, as we come to communion this morning, remember that love is eternal and never ends, and remember that love is the greatest because it is the core virtue, and it summarizes the law.
I want to conclude with a little story. It concerns a man named Adoniram Judson Gordon. Adoniram Judson Gordon was born in New Hampshire in 1836. Reared in the finest schools, he became a Baptist minister in Boston, and he was renowned. In the second half of the 19th century, he was perhaps the greatest force in American evangelicalism. It was Adoniram Judson Gordon who stood against the tide of modernism and its attack on orthodoxy. It was Gordon who stood for the truths of scripture.
It was also Gordon who stood against some of the extremes of fundamentalism and rebuked fundamentalism for neglecting the poor and ignoring the greatest of all commandments, to love. It was Gordon who led the evangelical community in an effort to reach out to the poor and the oppressed. It was Gordon who gave a helping hand to African Americans when it was not politically correct to do so. You see, Gordon had fallen in love with Christ. He had encountered the love of God, and it had transformed him. He wrote many books and they all center on love. They center on the love of Christ as seen on the cross.
He founded Gordon College and Divinity School. Gordon College is today called The United Colleges of Gordon in Barrington, and our son, Drew, goes there. Gordon Divinity School is now called Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, where Ramona from our staff went. It’s one of the finest theology schools in the world. Gordon also wrote books and put together two hymnals, and he wrote one of my favorite hymns. That hymn is “My Jesus, I Love Thee.” It’s one of my favorite hymns. As we begin communion in a few moments, I’ve asked Marcia to sing this hymn for us. I think it sums up what God wants us to hear today. In that hymn, it says, “We love because He first loved us,” a quote of 1 John.
As you come to communion this morning, remember that He first loved you, and His love is eternal. As His child, through faith, He’ll always love you and His love will never fail you. As you come to communion, commit yourself again to love as He would have you love, to seek the virtues of which love is the core, and resolve that you will, with a new devotion, obey Him as all the commandments are summed up in love. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.