Love Is More Than a Tingle
1 Corinthians 131-8a, 13
In a survey of couples nationwide, when asked what makes a good marriage, the answer “Being in love” was given by 90% of the respondents. When asked to give the essential ingredients of love, no one characteristic was given by more than 50% of the respondents. In other words, we can’t agree what love is or more accurately, we don’t know what love is. As one person said, “Love is like lightning- you may not know what it is, but you do know when it hits you.” You also know it when you see it.
A group of professionals posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, ’What does ’love’ mean?’ And these are the responses they received:
’When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.’ Billy - age 4
’Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.’ Chrissie - age 6
’Love is when my mummy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.’ Danny - age 7
’Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mummy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss’ Emily - age 8
’Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’ Bobby - age 7 (Wow!)
’Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.’ Tommy - age 6
’Love is when Mummy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.’ Elaine-age 5
’Love is when Mummy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.’ Chris - age 7
And Rebecca- age 8 says, ’When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.’
What is love and what does it truly mean to love someone? In our Scripture passage today, Paul is writing to the church at Corinth which is experiencing arguments and division among its members. In 1 Corinthians Chapter 12, he talks about how they are called to serve God and serve one another. The last two weeks, we talked about the 5 Love Needs of Men and Women and how you can meet your spouse’s needs. In Chapter 13, Paul moves into talking about how we should serve each other, primarily through love. Now in English, we have one word for love. You can see an elderly couple go into Wendy’s and hear the man says, “I would love a triple cheeseburger.” Then when they get to their seat, you can also hear that same gentleman turn to his wife and say, “I love you.” Same word but two completely different meanings, or so we hope. The Greeks understood this perplexity and so they had more than 14 different words to describe the different nuances and meanings of love.
Author and pastoral counselor H. Norman Wright has identified three of those Greek words for love which he says are absolutely critical to a Christian marriage. The first is eros. Most couples begin their relationship and marriage with a preponderance of eros. Eros is desire, passion, romantic and sexual love. It is the type of love which dominates your thoughts, time and energy early in the relationship. According to Hollywood, this is the only type of love in relationships. But marriage cannot be sustained by eros alone. For it is like a hot burning fire whose embers eventually burn down. Sociologist Elaine Webster in a study of over a 100,000 persons has found that eros lasts anywhere from 6 months to 2 1/2 years in a marriage. Eros while exciting and thrilling is not lasting and sustaining love.
For marriage to last, it must include the next type of love, philia. Philia is friendship love. In a good marriage, a husband and wife are the best of friends. We learned the past two weeks friendship is one of the 5 love needs of both men and women. Yet, they look at it differently. For men friendship is about doing things together: hunting, fishing, golfing or watching the game. For women, friendship means heart to heart communication. It’s about opening up and sharing confidential parts of yourself. It’s making yourself vulnerable through revealing your heart and soul to each other, your hopes and dreams as well as your frustrations and disappointments. Philia is companionship, intimate communication and cooperation, that is, working toward a common cause or goal. Philia carries love forward when ersos dies down.
The third type of love is agape. Agape is self-giving love. Agape loves when the person becomes unlovable. It loves whether or not that person deserves love. Agape is not something that happens to you but rather it is something through the eternal love of the God happens through you. Image It’s best exemplified by Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. We have experienced agape love through Jesus Christ and thus are called to share that love with others in our life. So agape is a choice, a personal act of commitment. It is kindness, being sympathetic, thoughtful and sensitive to the needs of your loved one and seeking to meet them. Agape is placing the needs of others ahead of your own. Rick Yohn writes, “A husband who love his wife as Christ loved the church will make every sacrifice to meet her needs, not necessarily her wants. He will provide for her physical needs of sexual love, financial security, food, clothes, etc. He will provide for her emotional needs like security, effection, understanding, acceptance, the feeling of being wanted and of feeling necessary to complete him. He will provide for her spiritual needs by encouraging her to grow in the Lord. He will set the example of what it means to walk in the Spirit. Agape love is loving as Christ loved us.”
In the last verse of chapter 12, Paul says, “I’m going to show you a more excellent way: that way is love and the word he uses is agape. That is a love which is more than human, it is a love which is divine, unconditional and whose well-spring is infinite. It is the grace that God gives us. It is a love the world does not know or have but is a love of which it is in desperate need. We need this kind of love to be the husband or wife, the father or mother, God has called us to be.
Paul sets out the priority of love in all relationships. Five times he says the word, “If.” If I had tongues of men…If I had prophecy…If I had faith….If I gave all my possessions….If I deliver my body to be burned.” In other words, if I would do all manner of incredible things that would receive the admiration of everyone but do not have love, then it is worthless. And Paul continues to emphasize that anything we do without a covering or undergirding of love is not going to have the affect it needs. Paul says two things in these first three verses. First, words without love are noise. No matter how powerful or eloquent you are with words, if they are not filled and backed with love, then you are a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. Now the image of a gong refers to the entrance of pagan temples which had gongs announcing their worship of the gods. Paul is in effect saying, just as the worship of false gods is empty worship so too your words are empty if they are not filled with love. We have all heard words spoken which have been absent of love. What they may even say might be truth, but the way they say it is empty and wrong and thus they become empty words and lose the right to be heard. Communication is important in marriage but it takes more than words to keep a marriage together. It takes words spoken in love and truth. There’s the story of a guy who emailed his girlfriend, “I would climb the highest mountain for you, swim the deepest stream and cross the driest desert for you. And he goes on to profess his deep love for her. Then it ends with “PS, I’ll be over tonight if it doesn’t rain. Words without love in action are like a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
Second, gifts without love are useless. Paul mentions some extraordinary gifts, like faith and prophecy but if they are not covered in love, they’re totally useless. We can give without loving, but we cannot love without giving. When we really love others, agape love, giving becomes a natural outpouring of that love. If you love first, then the giving will naturally follow. True love is expressed not only with words but with action. There’s the story of a desert wanderer who found a crystal spring of unsurpassed freshness. The water was so pure that he decided to bring some to his king. He filled a leather bottle and for several days, he carried it beneath the hot sun without taking a single drink. When he finally laid the offering at the feet of the king, the water had become stale from the old leather bottle. But the king tasted it and gave an expression of gratitude and delight. The man went away with his heart filled with joy and gladness. After he had gone, others in the court sampled the water and expressed surprise that the king pretended to enjoy it. “Ah, said the king, it is not the water I tasted but the love that prompted the offering and sacrifice.”
Paul then goes on and speaks of the means of love, that is, how you show your love to others. We must be careful in the acts we choose to communicate our love. It is not just enough to show acts of appreciation. We must chose acts which will not only communicate our love but also will be understood and received as love by our spouse. Bill Hybels tells the story of a man he met at a function at church. During the conversation, this man repeatedly referred to how much he loved his wife and appreciated her. He loved being in her presence and told her often how much he loved her. A short time later the man’s wife came to Bill for counseling. She was convinced her husband didn’t really love her. Bill says, I couldn’t believe it. After several sessions together, I learned the husband really did love his wife but the wife didn’t really feel loved. The problem was they were not speaking the same love language. He was expressing his love but not in a way his wife could understand. And then he writes, “Just as we have inborn preferences regarding relational patterns, problem solving, decision making and structure, we have preferences in regard to giving and receiving love. Marriage Counselor Gary Chapman has identified five love languages or 5 ways we prefer to give and receive love:
1. Physical Touch: If these want to tell people they love them, they hug them, kiss them or hold their hand
2. Words of affirmation: Some find it hard to express their love in words but these people can’t stop telling the people in their lives how much they love them
3. Acts of Service: these people communicate their love by practical service like painting a room in the house, washing the car, cooking a favorite meal, washing the clothes
4. Gift givers: these people love to buy and give gifts both great and small, wrap them beautifully and give the gift with childlike glee
5. Quality Time: These people love fellowship. They will re-arrange their schedule so they can spend large blocks of time with the significant people in their lives and devote all of themselves to that time.
Paul then shares The personality of love. He says 8 things about what love is. Listen to how Eugene Petersen puts it in the Message translation: “Love never gives up. Love cares more for other than for self. Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, (and) keeps going to the end.” He then goes on to say 8 things love is not. “Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always "me first," doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, (and) doesn’t revel when others grovel.”
Finally, he share speaks of the presence of Love. Love is permanent. He tells us that love will outlast everything else. Love will never end. Second, love is complete. It will fill in the cracks of your life, heal the broken places of your life and will make you complete. Too many people are looking for love in all the wrong places, but love based on God’s agape is complete and satisfying. Third, it is unsurpassed. Faith, hope and love, these three but the greatest of these is love.
There’s the story of a man who fell in love with an opera singer. He hardly knew her, since his only view of the singer was through binoculars - from the third balcony. He was convinced he could live “happily ever after” married to a voice like that. He scarcely noticed that she was considerably older than he. Nor did he care that she walked with a limp. Her mezzo-soprano voice would take them through whatever might come. After a whirlwind romance and a hurry-up ceremony, they were off for their honeymoon. She began to prepare for their first night together. As he watched, his chin dropped to his chest. She plucked out her glass eye and plopped it into a container on the night-stand. She pulled off her wig, ripped off her false eyelashes, yanked out her dentures, unstrapped her artificial leg, and smiled at him as she slipped off her glasses that hid her hearing aid. Stunned and horrified, he gasped, “For goodness sake, woman, sing, sing, SING!”
It was easy for the man to think and say that her voice would take them through whatever might come. But he didn’t realize what he was getting into. And it’s easy to say, “I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” Words come easy. But it is quite another to live them out. Any of you who are married to a difficult spouse know how difficult those words are to follow through in actions. That’s what Paul was trying to say: Agape love doesn’t stop with an vow or an attitude. It’s not a feeling. It continues with action - sometimes difficult action. That’s why he says, Love never gives up. Love cares more for other than for self. Love isn’t always "me first," doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others. Love puts up with anything, always looks for the best, never looks back, (and) keeps going to the end.”
