Before Paul writes the verses the world will one day quote at weddings, he writes three sentences that level a Christian to the ground.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am noise. If I have prophecy, knowledge, and faith to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own and let my body be burned at the stake for the gospel, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
Three sentences. Three of the most impressive things a believer can do — speak in tongues, possess revelation, give until there is nothing left to give — each weighed and found weightless without love. That is where this chapter begins. Not at love is patient, the familiar warm opening of the love poem. At three statements that destroy a Corinthian believer’s most carefully built theology about what makes him spiritual.
We will get to love is patient. But we cannot get there until we walk through the doorway Paul puts in front of it, and that doorway is one of the most uncomfortable openings in the New Testament.
Where this passage sits
To understand why Paul writes these sentences here, you have to understand what he has been writing about up to this point.
The church in Corinth was a mess. Paul does not put it that way — he loves them too much — but the letter itself is a series of corrections, problem after problem after problem. In the first four chapters he addresses the factions tearing the congregation apart: I am of Paul, one group said; I am of Apollos, said another (1:12). In chapter 5 he addresses a man living openly in sexual sin while the church looked on and felt sophisticated about it. In chapter 6 he addresses believers dragging one another into pagan courts. In chapters 8 through 10 he addresses arguments over food sacrificed to idols, where knowledge was being prized over love and the strong were wounding the weak. In chapter 11 he addresses the Lord’s Supper, which the Corinthians had managed to turn into an occasion for division — the rich eating well while the poor went hungry. In chapter 12 he addresses the spiritual gifts, which the Corinthians had elevated into a ranking system that exalted those who had the showy gifts and despised those who did not. And in chapter 14 he will return to the gifts and try to bring some order to a worship service that had become a competition.
Sitting in the middle of all that correction, between chapter 12 on the gifts and chapter 14 on the gifts, Paul writes chapter 13.
He does not write it because he wanted to compose a poem.
He writes it because the church he loved had managed to acquire most of the impressive gifts and had simultaneously lost the one thing without which the gifts are not even worth having. They had eloquence without love. They had knowledge without love. They had sacrificial gestures without love. And what Paul does, in the three sentences that open chapter 13, is hold up a mirror in which they can see that everything they were most proud of was, by the only measure that mattered, nothing.
That is where this passage sits. It is not a love song. It is a verdict.
A still more excellent way
The last verse of chapter 12 is the bridge into chapter 13:
But earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way.
1 Corinthians 12:31 (NASB)
The Greek phrase translated a still more excellent way is kath’ hyperbolēn hodon — literally, a way according to excess, a surpassing way. The word hyperbolē is where we get our English word hyperbole. It does not mean better in the sense of slightly preferred. It means surpassing in the sense of beyond comparison. The way Paul is about to describe is not one option among several. It is the way that surpasses every other way.
What is the way? Love. The way that surpasses tongues, prophecy, knowledge, faith, sacrifice, and martyrdom. The way every believer is called to walk, regardless of which gifts he has or has not received. The way that does not depend on how the gifts have been distributed in the body, because love is the road every member of the body is on — or should be on — together.
This is the first thing the Corinthians needed to hear, and it is the first thing many believers still need to hear. The Christian life is not, at its core, about the gifts you have or do not have. It is about the way you walk. And the way Christ has set out for His people to walk is the way of love.
Three statements that level the ground
Now Paul takes the gifts the Corinthians prized most and runs them, one by one, through the filter he has just named. The structure of all three is the same: If I have X, but do not have love, I am/it is… The conclusion in each case is devastating.
The first — tongues without love is noise.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
1 Corinthians 13:1 (NASB)
Tongues was the showcase gift in Corinth, the one that drew attention, the one that seemed to mark a believer as especially spiritual. Paul takes that gift and pushes it to its imaginative limit — the tongues of men and of angels. Even if you could speak the language of angels, even if your speech reached the very limits of created communication, without love you are not a vessel of God’s word. You are a metal pot being struck. You are a cymbal in an empty room. The sound is loud. The substance is nothing.
The image is not subtle. A noisy gong and a clanging cymbal are not musical. They are interruptions. Paul is saying: the showcase gift, exercised without love, is not music to God. It is noise.
The second — knowledge and faith without love leave you as nothing.
If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:2 (NASB)
Notice how Paul stacks this one. Not just prophecy — the gift of prophecy plus all mysteries plus all knowledge plus all faith plus mountain-moving power. Paul is piling on every spiritual asset he can think of, every gift that would mark a man as a giant in the Christian life. And then he says, without love, I am nothing.
Not I have less than I could have. Not I am missing one ingredient. I am nothing. The Greek is outhen eimi — literally, nothing I am. The man with every gift and no love is not a discounted version of a great Christian. He is, in the only accounting that matters, zero.
That is hard to hear. It is also, when you sit with it, one of the most clarifying sentences in the New Testament. It means that the brother sitting next to you in worship who cannot quote a single verse but who loves his wife and his children and his neighbors with patient, kind, scorekeeping-free love is, by Paul’s measure, more than the celebrated teacher whose knowledge is encyclopedic and whose heart is cold. The kingdom of God runs on a different currency than the kingdoms of men. Love is the currency. Everything else is paper without backing.
The third — sacrifice without love profits nothing.
And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:3 (NASB)
Surely this must count. Surely the man who gives away every penny he owns to feed the hungry — surely the man who walks into the fire rather than deny the name of Christ — surely that man cannot be empty.
He can.
Even sacrifice — even the most spectacular act of self-giving the human imagination can devise — even martyrdom itself — is empty without love. The act looks identical from the outside. The same money changes hands. The same fire burns. But before God, who sees the heart, the same act performed without love and performed with love are not the same act. One is genuine love laid down for another. The other is a transaction — perhaps for praise, perhaps for self-justification, perhaps for the secret feeling of being a hero. The act is identical. The currency is not.
Three statements. Tongues. Knowledge. Sacrifice. The three things the Corinthians thought made them spiritual giants. And Paul, before he has even told them what love is, tells them what the absence of love does to everything else they were proud of.
It reduces it to noise. It reduces them to nothing. It profits them not at all.
The way Christ walked
How did Paul come to think this way?
He thought this way because the One who saved him on the road to Damascus is Himself the love that he is now describing. The more excellent way Paul commends to the Corinthians is not a way he invented. It is the way Christ walked first.
The Son of God did not come into the world wielding the impressive gifts. He could have. He had every right to. Instead He took on flesh, lived in obscurity for thirty years, gathered fishermen, taught patiently, healed quietly, and walked toward a cross He could have refused.
Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13 (NASB)
The cross is the more excellent way given a public demonstration. There Christ Himself laid down His life for those He loved — love pushed as far as love can be pushed, by the One who alone could push it that far.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8 (NASB)
That is the source of the way Paul is calling the Corinthians to walk. Not a moral principle they were supposed to figure out on their own. Not an ethic that the church was being asked to develop. The love Paul describes is the love of God Himself, demonstrated at Calvary, now being asked to flow through the people who have received it.
And that is why the gifts, taken alone, are not enough. The gifts are means. Love is the end. The gifts were given so that the body might be built up in love. To exercise the gifts without love is to take what God gave for the building up of the body and use it for the puffing up of the self. That is exactly what Corinth had done. And it is exactly what the church in every generation is tempted to do.
What this means for you
If you are reading this book, you may not have spoken in tongues. You may not believe you have the gift of prophecy. You may not have moved a mountain by faith, and you may never give away your last penny, much less be burned at the stake.
That does not let you out of the chapter.
The Corinthian gifts were extreme cases for a reason. Paul reaches for the most impressive things he can name because if those are nothing without love, then everything less impressive is also nothing without love. The eloquent prayer in the believer with a cold heart. The careful theology in the student who can quote chapter and verse and treats his siblings with contempt at the dinner table. The visible service in the believer who is secretly contemptuous of the people he is serving. The faithful church attendance in the man who is privately keeping a ledger against his brother.
All of it. Without love. Is nothing.
This is the leveling truth that opens 1 Corinthians 13, and it is the reason the rest of the book matters. Love is not the advanced material of the Christian life, reserved for those who have already mastered the basics. Love is the basics. It is the elementary lesson and the senior thesis and everything in between. It is the measure by which every other lesson is graded. And until the Christian sees this — until he has felt the weight of these three sentences and understood that without love he is, in God’s accounting, nothing — he is not ready to learn what love actually looks like.
The next fourteen chapters of this book walk through 1 Corinthians 13:4–7, attribute by attribute, with the help of all the Scripture that supports them. The closing chapter takes up verses 8 through 13 — the eternal weight of love, the reason love is the greatest of the three Christian virtues, the only one of them that lasts into the country we are walking toward.
But before any of that, this chapter has to do its work. It has to take down whatever you came in proud of, and lay it next to Paul’s three sentences, and ask whether what you have built was built on the foundation Paul has just named.
If the answer is yes — if Christ has been the source of your love and the gifts have been His tools — then welcome to the book. The rest of it will sharpen what is already there.
If the answer is no — if you are honest enough to admit that some of what you have built has been about the building of yourself rather than the building up of His body — then welcome, too. The rest of this book is written for you. You are about to be shown the way more excellent than what you have been walking, and the One who walked it first stands at the head of the road, ready to teach you.
Either way, this chapter has done its work. The ground is level. The standard is named. The way is set out.
Now we begin.
THINK
Take an honest inventory of what you have built in your Christian life — the gifts you have exercised, the knowledge you have acquired, the acts of service you have offered, the things you would name if someone asked what makes you a Christian. Run all of it through Paul’s filter: If I have __, but do not have love, I am __. Fill in the blanks for yourself. Sit with the answer. If the answer troubles you, do not rush to fix it. Stay with it long enough for the Word to do its work. The remedy is coming. But the diagnosis has to land first.