Love Is Permanent; The Gifts Will Cease

There is a widow somewhere this morning standing in her own front yard watching strangers walk out of her house with her husband’s things. His tools, laid out on a folding table with little yellow price stickers. His books. His hunting rifle. The chair he sat in every evening. Forty years of a man’s life, and by sundown it will all be gone, scattered into the trunks of people who never knew his name.

And she is standing there thinking, what is left of him? Not the tools. Not the chair. Not the rifle. What is left of him is the love. The way he looked at her across the breakfast table. The way he prayed with her at night. The way he said her name. Everything else had a price sticker on it. The love did not.

Paul knew a church that needed to hear that. Not a church of tools and chairs, but a church of spiritual gifts. Tongues. Prophecy. Knowledge. They were stacking them up, competing over them, measuring each other by them. And Paul had to sit them down and tell them every one of those gifts had a yellow price sticker on it. Every one of them was going in somebody’s trunk.

Love is permanent, but the gifts are temporary.

The church at Corinth was focused on the temporary

The church at Corinth was carnal, led by the flesh. Paul was led by the Spirit. Where is your focus this morning?

You might say, preacher, I am so much better than the church at Corinth. They were focused on gifts that were temporary, such as speaking in tongues. We are better than that.

Forget the specifics for just a moment, and bring it down to our level. Is your focus anything temporary? Be it money, careers, titles, or even buildings? Put a spiritual twist to it. The church building. And still, these are temporary, are they not?

It is not that temporary things do not matter. They do. But oh, to be more spiritually minded. Let me ask the honest question, not the comfortable one. When you leave a building, what do you brag on? The building? Your knowledge of the doctrines of grace or of church history? None of those are sinful. All of them are temporary. Would a stranger listening to you for an hour know that you love the Lord, or just that you know a lot about Him?

More ink is spilled on love than on the gifts

More time is spent, more ink is spilled by Paul here writing a description about love than he does about the gifts he mentions. There is a good reason. The gifts are temporary. You and I can debate about what some of them mean, but to what end?

As Ken Glisch said in his sermon during our Bible Conference last year:

We are without shame Baptist, and so if there is any part of this where we would find ourselves, it is not the tongues. It is not the prophesying, unless you take this to mean forth telling such as preaching, and there is something to be said about that. It is the knowledge.

Many in our ranks parade around like they have this gift of knowledge. And somehow all around this country we are supposed to be in some sort of competition with each other because of it. That is what happened in Corinth, and that is what happens today. These gifts are for the edification of the church, and that includes the gift of knowledge. But in this life nobody knows everything.

What is the standard? I will be the first to tell you, it is not me. It is not any other preacher either. To set men at odds with each other is to go back to carnal Corinth with their squabbling over Paul, Apollos, and Cephas.

It is not just a pulpit issue, it is a pew problem. I wonder how many of us read our Bibles to grow in the Lord. Many times it is just to try to prove we know more than the other guy, whether it is some stranger on the internet or worse yet a brother or sister in church.

I have sat in Bible Conferences where grown men dueled with verses like they were pulling pistols at high noon. Not to sharpen each other. To win. And I walked out of more than one of those thinking, if this is knowledge, Lord, give me a little less of it and a little more of the love You talked about in the next verse.

Christian, here is a Monday morning test. The next time you open your Bible this week, ask yourself before you read: am I here to know Christ, or to win an argument? One of those will be with you on your deathbed. The other one will not.

The sign gifts were ending before the completion of the Bible

There is some disagreement as to the meaning of this text when Paul writes about when that which is perfect is come, the partial being done away with. I used to take a hard stand that Paul was writing about the completion of the Bible here, but in fact the completion of the sign gifts occurred before the completion of the canon. Let me explain.

In Acts 19:11–12 we find that Paul really had the gift of healing, and extraordinary miracles were worked through him. God was doing something through the apostles that He was not doing through ordinary saints.

But consider Philippians 2:25–27. Epaphroditus was sick, even unto death. Paul loved that man. He called him his brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier. If Paul had the gift of healing on tap, the permanent, any-time, handkerchief-and-apron kind, do you think Epaphroditus would ever have gotten sick unto death? If Paul could have fixed it, he would have. He could not. The gift was winding down.

Consider also 1 Timothy 5:23. Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach’s sake and for his frequent ailments. Imagine the greatest faith-healer on television tonight saying to his own son in the faith, take a little wine for your stomach. They would lose half their audience by Wednesday. But that is exactly what Paul does. Because Paul is not a faith-healer. Paul is an apostle whose sign-gifts are fading, and he is telling his boy to use medicine.

The gift of tongues, claimed by so many in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement as a sign of salvation, is not even mentioned beyond this epistle to Corinth, and only narratively in the book of Acts. It is never again brought up anywhere in church history except in questionable fringe groups here and there. The sign gifts were ending before the completion of the Bible.

We talk about the temporary gifts of the Spirit as if there were some permanent gifts, but all are temporary. Some have already been done away with in the history of the church.

Notice Paul uses different language when he speaks of tongues in verse 8. They will cease. But if there is knowledge, it will be done away. Even though God has given us His Word, there is still much we do not know. And though we may exhaust this Book, there are limits to our knowledge.

The Perfect is the eternal state

Paul writes in our text of a coming time.

When the perfect comes there will be no need of knowledge or wisdom, or preaching. No need of pastors or teachers. In Ephesians 4:7–13 Paul teaches that the gifts of ministry were given until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. Some churches may feel they have arrived here and now, but not yet.

Verse 12 is the clearest indicator this is not about the completion of the Biblical canon. Scripture gives us a wonderful and reliable picture of our God, but this is not face to face. No Christian, even after the completion of the Scriptures, has known fully just as he has also been fully known. Not me. Not you. Not your favorite pastor. Not the most famous YouTube sensation.

I have a picture of my mother. It is a good picture. I can tell you the color of her eyes from that picture. But if my mother walked in my door right now, I would drop the picture. I would not need it anymore. The Bible is a wonderful picture of our God. But beloved, a picture is not a face. And we are going to see Him face to face.

What is Paul talking about? Is this the rapture of the saints? No, the gifts are in operation during the tribulation. It is not the Second Coming, though there is a great Reign of Christ coming and there will be gifts in operation in that time. The Perfect here is the eternal state. This is why there is a neuter form of the phrase “the perfect” here, which allows for the continuation of some gifts through the church age, the tribulation period, and Millennium. It fits the context of Paul’s emphasis on the permanence of love, and seeing face to face. This is coming.

Love is forever

The gifts are temporary. This life is temporary. Everything in your house this morning has a yellow sticker on it somewhere. But love, beloved, love is forever.

Christian, before a word is spoken to the person who does not know Christ, hear this. You have been loved with an everlasting love. That love is the one thing in your life that will not be in the U-Haul. So this week, when you open your Bible, open it to know Him, not to win. When you talk about your church, talk about Him, not the building. And when you love a brother or sister who is hard to love, remember that love is the one thing you will still be doing ten thousand years from now. Start practicing.

But if you have never known this love I have been preaching about, this permanent love, will you be with Christ in that eternal glorified state of which Paul speaks? Repent of your sins and trust in Jesus. He is the only way.