Love Endures All Things

The Greek verb here is hypomenei — from hypomenō, literally to remain under. The prefix hypo- means under. The verb menō means to remain, to stay. Put them together and Paul’s word is, in flat English, stays under. The picture is mechanical. A weight has been placed on a man, and the man stays under it. He does not move out from under it. He does not collapse. He does not run. He bears the weight for as long as the weight is there.

This is the last of Paul’s four positive verbs in verse 7. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it is, by design, the strongest of the four. When the bearing has stretched into years, when the believing has been worn down by repeated failure, when the hoping has gone on so long it has started to feel like wishful thinking — what does love do then? It stays under. It does not move. It is still there in the morning. It will still be there next year. The verb is the verb of a man who has decided that the weight he is under is the weight he was given to carry, and that the carrying is the love itself.

The other three verbs of verse 7 describe what love does in the various seasons of relationship — covering, trusting, hoping. This last verb describes what love does when the seasons have all passed and the weight is still there. It is the verb of long marriages. It is the verb of long parenting. It is the verb of long ministry in one congregation. It is the verb of long friendship through hard years. The Christian who has been loving for a long time recognizes the verb when he sees it, because it is the verb his life has been spelling out, one ordinary day at a time, for as long as he has been walking with the Lord.

What was happening in Corinth

The Corinthians were not endurers. They were quitters.

The factions of chapters 1 through 4 were exercises in quitting on each other — the believer who attached to Apollos had quit on the believer who attached to Paul, and vice versa. The lawsuits of chapter 6 were quitting on the slow work of private reconciliation in favor of the fast satisfaction of public verdict. The food disputes of chapters 8 through 10 were quitting on patience with brothers whose consciences had not yet caught up. The Lord’s Supper in chapter 11 had been turned into a quick gathering for the wealthy rather than the long waiting for the whole congregation to arrive. The worship in chapter 14 had been disordered into a competition that the more impressive gifts won quickly rather than into the slow, patient, orderly building up of the body that takes time. The Corinthians did not stay under things. They moved out from under, found a quicker resolution, took the satisfaction available now rather than waiting for the work to be done properly.

Paul names the verb in 13:7 because the church that learns this verb will look completely different from the church that does not. A church of quitters is the church Paul has been describing for twelve chapters. A church of endurers is the church Paul has been writing the letter to produce.

In the spiritual-gifts setting, the quitting was constant. The brother whose growth in his gift was slow was being abandoned by the believers who had expected faster progress. The newer convert whose theological understanding was rough was being given up on by the older believers who had expected him to learn faster. The congregation that had hoped, in the early years, to be a model of unity had given up on that hope and settled into the comfort of its divisions. Love endures all things is the verb that turns all of this around. The slow growth is endured. The rough understanding is endured. The hope of unity is endured for, year after year, until the body actually becomes what the body was meant to be.

The God who stays under

The verb hypomenō is a verb Scripture uses about the believer’s response to trial — and the trials are real and the staying-under is hard. But the deeper truth is that the God we serve is Himself a God who has stayed under His commitments to His people across every generation. He did not give up on Israel through forty years of wilderness rebellion. He did not give up on the kingdom of David through generations of bad kings. He did not give up on Israel when she was carried into exile. He did not give up on the world when it was so dark He had to send His only Son into it. He did not give up on the eleven disciples who scattered the night of the cross. He did not give up on Peter who denied Him three times. He did not give up on Paul who was breathing threats and murder against the church. The God we serve is the God who stays under.

Christ on the cross is the deepest demonstration of hypomenō the universe has ever seen. He stayed under. He could have come down. He had every angel of heaven at His call (Matthew 26:53). He stayed under. He stayed under the betrayal of Judas, the denial of Peter, the scattering of the eleven, the false accusations of the Sanhedrin, the cowardice of Pilate, the cruelty of the soldiers, the mockery of the crowd, the weight of every sin every elect sinner had ever committed and was ever going to commit, and the silence of His Father on Friday afternoon. He stayed under. The salvation of the world was purchased by His hypomenō, and Hebrews names the verb directly:

…fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Hebrews 12:2 (NASB)

Endured the cross. The verb is the same family. He stayed under the cross because there was a joy on the other side of it and a Father who would raise Him out from under. The believer is being asked to learn the same posture toward the load his life has placed on him. The marriage that is hard. The child whose growth has been slow. The brother who has wounded him for years. The congregation whose faithfulness is small. The ministry that has not yet borne the fruit he had hoped for. The personal weakness that has not yet been overcome. Stay under. There is a joy set before you. There is a Father who will raise you out from under in His time. The carrying is not forever. The carrying is for now. The endurance is what love does in the meantime.

From the hoping, the staying

The last chapter named love’s hope — its refusal to write off the brother or the situation when the evidence has gone dark. This chapter takes up what love does when the hope itself has been wearing thin. The believer who has been hoping for the prodigal for fifteen years is the believer most tempted to give the hoping up. The mother who has been praying for the wayward son for sixteen, twenty, thirty years is the mother whose endurance Paul is writing about. The hoping has been hard. The hoping has been long. The hoping has not yet been visibly answered. And still — love endures. The mother prays in the morning of the thirty-first year as she prayed in the morning of the first. The weight has not been moved out from under. The mother has not been moved out from under. The endurance is the love still being practiced.

That is why this verb is the right last verb. The chapter on love does not end with the believer’s victory; it ends with the believer’s steadiness. Hypomenei panta — endures all things — is the verb of a love that has nowhere to be in a hurry, because the love itself is the destination and the staying-under is what love looks like over time.

What it looks like

Enduring all things looks like a teenager whose parents have been walking through a hard season for as long as he can remember, and who has not lost his footing in his own walk with the Lord, and who is still showing up for family dinner on a Tuesday night, still being part of the household, still loving the people God placed in his home. The household has endured. He has stayed under. The endurance is the love he has been quietly practicing for years.

It looks like a teenager whose sibling has a serious physical or developmental difficulty, who has spent years of his own childhood watching his parents bear it and helping where he can, and who has not turned bitter about the attention the sibling needs, the freedoms he has missed, or the cost the family has carried. He has stayed under. The verb is the love he has been practicing since he was a small child.

It looks like a teenager who has grown up in the same congregation his whole life, through preachers he liked and preachers he found harder to listen to, through seasons when the youth group felt alive and seasons when it felt small, through brothers who have wounded him and brothers he has helped — and who is still there on the first day of the week, still wanting to be there. He has endured. The congregation has endured. The endurance is the body of Christ being a body of Christ.

It looks like a high-school student who has been waiting on the Lord for something he has prayed about for years — a friend he hopes will come to Christ, a parent he hopes will return to the Lord, a healing for someone he loves, a clear sense of direction for his own life — and who has not turned bitter and has not stopped serving the Lord while he waits. The waiting is the form. The serving is the form. The not-bitterness is the form. The verb the young person has been practicing in his prayer life is the verb verse 7 is calling him into, and the season of waiting is not wasted — the season is where the endurance is being grown.

It looks like a teenager whose home life is harder than his friends know, and who is choosing, day after day, not to give up on his parents, not to give up on his siblings, not to give up on the slow work of being faithful in a difficult house. The teenager does not know what he is doing. He is hypomenō-ing without the Greek word for it. The Lord who sees him is teaching him the verb that will shape his marriage one day, and his parenting one day, and his service in the body for the rest of his life.

It looks like a student who has been praying for the same classmate to come to Christ for years and has not yet seen the answer, and who keeps praying, keeps showing up for him as a friend, keeps living the gospel in front of him without ever giving up that this is the year, or the next year, or some year God has not yet shown. The harvest the student is praying for is not in his hands. The praying is, and he keeps doing it.

It looks like a teenager who has been praying for a relative he barely knows to come to faith, for as many years as he has been able to pray, and who is still praying. He may not see the answer for decades. He may not see it in this life. He prays anyway. He stays under.

It looks like Christ. The One who, on the night before His crucifixion, asked the Father three times if the cup could be removed (Matthew 26:39–44), and stayed under it anyway. The One who, on the cross, when the offer of relief in the form of His own miraculous descent was hovering in front of Him for hours, did not take it. The One who endured the cross, despising the shame, for the joy set before Him. The believer’s endurance is the long shadow of His.

The world’s quitting, and ours

The world has been training the human heart to quit for a long time, and faster in this generation than ever. The advertising assumes the consumer will be ready for the next product within months. The job market assumes the worker will move on every few years. The dating culture has been built around the assumption that any difficulty is sufficient cause for the relationship to end. The marriage rates have been falling and the divorce rates rising, in part because the surrounding air no longer expects anyone to stay under anything for long. The young Christian growing up in this air has been told, in a hundred small ways, that the right response to hardship is exit.

The believer is called out of all of it. The cultivation of hypomenei panta in the believer is the deliberate refusal to exit when exit is the surrounding cultural default. The believer stays in the marriage. The believer stays in the congregation. The believer stays at his post. The believer stays under the family difficulty. The believer stays under the brother who has not yet been restored. The staying is the love. The staying is what the surrounding world will not understand and will eventually, in the believers who actually do it, recognize as something it has been missing.

The cost of the staying is real. The years are real. The unrelieved difficulty is real. The temptation to leave is real and recurring. The believer who stays anyway is doing what Christ did on the cross at scale, in his small life, and the Lord who sees him is the Lord who is teaching him the same verb that bought the world’s salvation. The staying is not wasted. The staying is what the eternity to come will reveal had been the very engine of every faithful Christian life.

A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ

If you have been quitting things for a long time, and have started to suspect that the quitting has been costing you the very kind of life you have been hoping for, hear one thing.

The endurance you have not been able to find in yourself is endurance the Lord is offering to grow in you. He has done it in every generation of believers since the church began. The Christian who has been faithful for fifty years did not start as a champion of endurance. He started as a person like you — someone whose natural tendency was to give up when things got hard. The endurance was put in him by the Spirit who was given to him when he came to Christ, and the endurance has been grown, year after year, by the same Spirit doing the same work.

The gospel is the door. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). The man or woman who hears that, believes it, repents of the long pattern of quitting, confesses Him as Lord, is baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4), and remains faithful to Him, has been given the Spirit who endures (Romans 8:11) and is being made into a person who endures. The change does not happen overnight. The endurance is grown one weight, one season, one year at a time. But the One who is growing it is the One who has been doing this work since the beginning, and what He has done in others He is willing to do in you.

Hear it. Believe it. Repent. Confess. Be baptized. And begin the new life of a believer whose Lord stayed under the cross until the work was done, and whose Spirit is now teaching the same staying in you.

Where this leaves us

The four positive verbs of verse 7 are now down. Bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things. Endures all things. Together they describe the believer’s settled, long-term posture toward the brother and toward the situation. Love covers what has happened. Love refuses to invent what has not. Love continues to expect what God can do. Love stays under the load until God’s work is finished.

That is the description of love Paul has been writing for the Corinthians and for every church since. The description has now been completed. What remains in chapter 13 is the section on what love does forever — the closing section in which Paul lifts his eyes from the practice of love in this life and sees what love does when this life is over. The next chapter takes that up, and the book closes with it. The believer who has walked through the attributes of love is being asked, in the closing chapter, to lift his eyes and see what the love he has been practicing will become when the temporary things have passed and only the eternal things remain.

That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Whatever weight has been on you — the long friendship, the long family difficulty, the long prayer for a parent or a sibling, the long waiting on a hope God has not yet answered — stay under it. Pray for the strength to stay under it. Ask the Lord who endured the cross for you to give you, day by day, the endurance that does not depend on the weight being lifted. The weight may not be lifted in this life. The endurance is being formed in you regardless, and the endurance is the love. The next morning will come. Be there for it.