The Greatest of These is Love

In 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul here crowns his long argument for unity in the church by declaring sacrificial love to be the essential virtue of Christian faith that covers and governs the exercise of whatever gifts individual believers happen to have. This passage is one of the most magnetic and majestic expositions of love ever written. But it was not written in isolation. Paul specifically wrote this chapter to expose where the Corinthian believers have been falling short throughout the letter. The failure to love well is at the heart of everything that’s wrong in the Corinthian church. And modern churches would do well to suspect that it might be a lack of love that’s at the heart of the challenges and failures we experience in church life today. In this message, Pastor Ben leads us to meditate on three features of Christian love in order to remind us of the centrality of love both in the motivation and the manner of exercising spiritual gifts in the church.