This is the Baymall Podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today I'm with Reed Dent to close out this series in an unorthodox format. Yeah, we come to the final virtue, which is love, which of course we can't talk about without talking about 1 Corinthians 13. It's the crown jewel of texts on love. And so in 1 Corinthians, there are just chapters and chapters. Paul is parsing lots of tricky issues like marriage and consuming meat, sacrifice to idols and spiritual gifts. And it's a lot of if this, then that, but unless the otherwise. But then when you get to 1 Corinthians 13, his writing, it elevates, it changes. To me, it suddenly becomes kind of euphoric when he is talking about, he's writing this great hymn to love. And I think that's because the truth about love exceeds our ability to inform or to explain. This passage, it's like a red-tailed hawk. I recently saw one flying by the highway. It's soaring. It's full of wonder. And we are just kind of watching it full of awe. And it's kind of like what we've talked about with parables in the past, where I'm afraid that the tendency of many preachers would be to kind of snare it and yank it to the ground and just dissect it. Like the Greek word for love is this, and that has these components to it. And this is the application for that. And like we said before, it's like, yeah, we all understand it better, but we kill the thing in the process. And so ending the series on virtues with love, I didn't want to do it that way. I wanted to try to, you know, watch the thing in flight, as it were. And so this episode is an attempt to do that. It's kind of an experiment in the Bema format. It's not the typical conversation back and forth. This is actually a piece that I wrote a little while back, and it comprises nine distinct, non-linear, but related entries on love. And so for the episode to the listener, Brent is going to be reading verses and quotes, and then I will read my own contributions. And yes, admittedly, this is kind of a strange way to end this 14-part series on vices and virtues, where we've had hours of conversation talking about all these different angles of our tendencies for good and harm that form, you know, that kind of web of human nature. But if Paul is right when he says that you can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, you can possess every gift, you can even give away everything you have to the poor, and yet you remain nothing if love is missing, then it seemed worth it to me to, you know, give it a try and let love have its own way. And so with that, here we go, Brent. Part one, 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have 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 do not have love, I am nothing If I give all I possess to the poor And give over my body to hardship That I may boast, but do not have love I gain nothing Love is patient, love is kind It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud It does not dishonor others, 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 completeness comes, what is in part 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 the ways of childhood behind me For now we see only a 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. Part 2. Three Stories About Love The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love, and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. That was from Frederick Buechner. I was born in 1984. When I was a boy, four or five years old, my mom used to carry me. One of the bedrock experiences of my early childhood was of her voice. Not her words, mind, but her voice. When I got tired and heavy like children do when their parents talked too long in the church lobby, she would pick me up and I would wrap my arms around her neck and press my ear up against her chest. She would carry on her conversations with whoever about whatever, it didn't matter to me. and her voice would reach me not by vibrations through the air, but through the body. It was direct. The difference between static electricity and grabbing a live wire. It was like hearing a voice underwater or from within the womb. It came from everywhere as well as right here. I felt it as much as I heard it and it comforted me This was the first time I knew love It is the love we take I graduated high school in 2002. The summer was a sort of many-eternity, timeless, paradisiacal. With high school finally over and college yet to begin, it was three glorious months of life without commitment. Anything could happen at any time And those late summer nights went on forever in the best way Leanne and I had only just started dating It was chemical, alchemical, magnetic The thrill of jumping that synapse between our hands when they rested close together We drove endlessly, listening to Let Down by Radiohead With the sunroof open and windows down to be nowhere but together This was the second time I knew love. It is the love we share. My son Graham was born in 2014, the youngest of our three boys. He's the only one left still firmly in the world of childhood. Adolescence has not happened to him yet, which means that he will still curl up and insist, keep reading for as long as I can handle it. And it also means that the darkness still has a concreteness for him, a presence. And the stillness of a dark house in the middle of the night is for him like an entirely different dimension than the daytime, one that is full of threats. Are they imagined? Sure, but imagined is real at his age. Which means that, among many other things, our ability to sleep is entwined, and his heart stakes a claim, many claims, on my freedom at all hours of the day and night. This was the third time I knew love. It is the love we give. So there's the love we take, the love we share, and the love we give. We're told by C.S. Lewis and pastors that there are different Greek words for these, and that is true. but it makes us think that they are three distinct things. And that is not true. Frederick Buechner. These are all varied manifestations of a single reality. To lose yourself in another's arms, or in another's company, or in suffering for all who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you. To lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself, is what it's all about, is what love is. Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold that is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent. To say that love is God is romantic idealism. to say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth. Part 3. A consummate experience. I do weddings from time to time. Weddings are natural times for talking about love, and 1 Corinthians is a hallmark wedding verse. During a homily for one wedding, I read this passage from Tim Keller. When over the years someone has seen you at your worst and knows you with all your strengths and flaws, yet commits him or herself to you wholly, it is a consummate experience. To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us. As children, we are the objects of our parents' love, but we don't know it. As we get older, we become aware of ourselves as objects of someone else's love, and a fear is introduced. If they really knew me, they wouldn't love me. We become convinced that we must make a choice. I can either let them know me for who I really am, or I can let them love me, but not both. It's a lie. The wife from that wedding had something to hide, and she hid it. She would not be known, so she could not be loved. He could not give it, and she could not receive it. The marriage didn't make it. Part 4. Isaiah 54.10 Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. Part 5. A Maggot in a Wound If I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. 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. Love is not proud. It doesn't dishonor others, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered. But I am proud, the kind of proud that manifests in insecurity. I'm tempted to fear that my own place in the community is at stake when people tell me how great Derek or Leanne or Marty are, which is silly because I, more than anyone, know their greatness and think more than anyone that they are great. And I am petty. I say things under my breath or sometimes over my breath when parents complain about the youth soccer team I coach. And I am impatient and angry. I have at times flipped a switch and boiled over at my boys so suddenly that I hardly knew it was happening almost like I was standing outside myself watching it along with them saddened and confused and horrified at how I could speak in such a way to my children whom I love so much But I guess I have to ask, do I love them so much? That's my point. If love is not proud or dishonoring or easily angered, but I am, then do I not have love? And then am I nothing? And can I only be something, only be a conduit for God's love once I have already gotten rid of my pride and pettiness and impatience and anger? And if so, how can I possibly do that, especially without love? I do not know how. I think some of us have thought of God's love like this, that we must somehow get rid of our unloveliness so that we can then be worthy to give and receive God's love. But that seems to me like asking a seed to become a tree before you will give it water. That's not what God's love is like. So let me tell you a story about physical therapy. My mother-in-law, Patty, worked as a physical therapist specializing in wound care at St. Luke's hospital on the plaza in Kansas City for 25 years. Once she had an outpatient man with an open wound on his leg, which she cleaned and bandaged before giving him instructions to regularly do likewise at home until he came back for his next appointment. Two weeks later, he returned. He had not changed his bandages once the whole time he was away. When Patty carefully peeled back his bandages and started to massage the tissue around the edge of the wound, she noticed that his skin started to sort of undulate, a little bubbling motion up and down. Then, suddenly, out from the open part of the wound came maggots. Patty was brave and strong and held back the revulsion from her face and squashed down the involuntary wretch that wanted to escape from her. But she said that the most curious thing happened. Once she had removed the maggots from the wound, she noticed that it was immaculately clean. And so now, here is a new sentence for you. The love of God is a maggot in a wound. God's love doesn't wait for the wound to become clean so it can move in. It is the life, the sometimes grubby, at first repulsive, slow-working, not-what-we'd-ask-for life, eating up the dead things from the inside out. God's love isn't waiting for us to become patient and humble so that it can work through us. It is the very thing working through us to eat up our impatience and pride. And while yes, I do believe that sooner or later we must learn to cooperate with the work of God and become partners in our own process of becoming whole, I also see, looking back that sometimes God's love has a way of sneaking in and doing work despite my best efforts to keep my bandages unchanged. Part six, Kareem, Jordan, LeBron. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. This is a well-known verse, and I always thought of it as a list of distinct but related things being compared for their value, like Kareem, MJ, and LeBron abide, but the greatest of these is LeBron. Faith and hope are very good, but if you had to pick one, I thought Paul was saying, love is the goat. But then I noticed that faith, hope, and love have already shown up together in this passage just a few verses earlier, and their relationship isn't quite like that. Paul writes, Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Now, this word in the verse trusts in the Greek is actually the same word as faith in verse 13. You might translate it, love always faiths or has faith. And of course, love always hopes. Faith and hope and love aren't separate entities to be weighed against each other like famous basketball players. Faith and hope are verbs that love does and is. The relationship of faith and hope to love is less like that of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan to LeBron James, and more like that of a wave and a tide to an ocean. An ocean is greater than a wave or a tide, but not because it is better water than a wave or a tide. you wouldn't pick a wave instead of the ocean because you couldn't. The wave and the tide are functions and arrangements of the ocean's water. No ocean, no wave, no tide. Nowhere are we told that God is faith or that God is hope, but we do know that God is love. To have faith isn't to circle strongly agree on a survey of certain facts about God. It is to act in the love of Christ, to live in step with the ways of God, because you trust that the love of God is what is right and real and true. To hope is to insist, either internally or out loud, that your faith is leading somewhere that God has prepared, that in the end, love will finish its work of making all things new. Both faith and hope are done despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Faith and hope are distinct components of the same action. Faith is putting one foot in front of the other. Hope is looking up ahead of you as you do. Love is the path you are walking on and the horizon toward which you walk. Aquinas wrote that love is the mother and root of all virtue. If wisdom or temperance or courage or justice are to be truly virtuous they must start from love Wisdom without love is a cold calculus of right and wrong Courage without love is reckless bravado Justice without love is perfectly fair exacting retribution. Love has to be the root, and love must be for others. It cannot be for ideas or things only. You cannot love mysteries only. You cannot love knowledge only, or belief, or comfort. You cannot love your neato talents. You cannot love what makes you better than someone else. You cannot love only the actions of giving and sacrifice. You can admire or obsess over or even worship them, but love must be for others, for people, and it must be for all if it's to be the love of Christ. Part 8. All in all. Love never fails. As love ages, it becomes less and less discriminant, less and less boundaried. This is the greatest challenge of Jesus and the reason why we most need him. Anyone can love their mother when she holds them. Anyone can love their girlfriend amid the fireflies at twilight. Anyone can love their child when they're curled up on your lap like a sleepy puppy. But what about when things fall apart? What about when the mother leaves or the summer romance becomes a bored marriage? What about when the child defies absolutely everything about you? What about when the secret is kept? And what about when it's someone who was never family or friend in the first place? What about the awkward stranger, the annoying other that you think the world would be better off without? What about depraved, unregenerate enemies? The truth is that the love of Jesus is and always has been indiscriminate and unboundaried. It just takes us time to wake up to it. But if it is to be the love of God and if it is to be for me, then it has to be for all. It has to be for the ugly as well as the beautiful, the poor as well as the rich, the clumsy as well as the cool, the oppressor as well as the oppressed, the wicked as well as the righteous. And it is. Love is not particularly special. It's everywhere, and everyone agrees love is good. The offense of the love of Jesus isn't what it is, it's who it is for, and at what cost. Because the truth is that the love of Jesus is always costly. It just takes us time to wake up to that too. When we are children, we love like children, taking, held up like a sack of potato on our mother after church. When we grow up and become parents, we realize how back-breaking that is. When we are young lovers, we love as young lovers do, brimming over with delight and desire. When we later learn how to hurt one another, we realize how much mercy costs. We learn how much God's love requires, and as we do, we learn just how much we are filled by it. We think it will end us, like a laser beam heating up a balloon until it pops. But it is actually like light passing through crystal. It isn't absorbed, it's refracted. It becomes more, not less. Part 9. Benediction. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. I used to be afraid, wondering, how do I know that I really know God? Then I learned I don't, and I won't for now. No need to be afraid. What is sure is that while I know very little, I have always been fully known and loved. Thanks be to God. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome, David чтобы мир wed March he'sраeloade. And a crazy wind that прир природы will return. We will sing this song we hope youitors prefer to engage and engage in the 조v estos times to assume a time between us it doesn't matter for anyone. Thank you.
