Guided reading plans to help you read and understand the Bible.
I came across the post back in June on The Gospel Coalition and it takes this great section on love and flips it around, instead defining hate. So instead of love is patient and love is kind you get, “Impatience and unkindness is hatred.”
Read the whole article to see the full treatment. My favorite part is this good news, “but hatred ends…”
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
It wasn’t that hard to choose a memory verse for this week. It’s not an unfamiliar one but it is a powerful one. Paul wants the church to turn from all that has divided them and caused them turmoil and turn to love. In this short chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, he lays out what that means.
In putting together a visual, I wanted to keep it simple and remind us that we wouldn’t really know love if not for the love that we see in Jesus Christ.
If you’ve already read through 1 Corinthians 13, well done. If you haven’t, that’s fine and maybe you’d want to do a little exercise. This is a chapter on love. It’s a very famous chapter on love. Paul helps us to better understand what it is. But there are many other people in the world today that would want to do that job for us. Things like music, movies, and even greeting cards compete with one another to tell us what love is.
With all those definitions floating around it’d be good to know what you think. So, before you read and study this week’s passage, try sitting down and reflecting on how you’d define love. What is it? What’s love look like?
Then after you do that, see how well your understanding lines up with what we see in 1 Corinthians.
You’ve most likely read or heard about Paul’s illustration of how the church is the body of Christ. We are the body which, while made up of many parts, is one. While it is one, it has many members. The problem that Paul sees in the church is that some parts are thinking of themselves as lesser than others (or being made to feel as though they are less). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
His illustration makes sense to us without any further cultural insights, but his point is even stronger when we learn how certain body parts were viewed. His example of a foot is not chosen randomly. The foot, being the very bottom of the body, was (and still is in some cultures in the Middle East) seen as dishonorable. It would be offensive to show the sole of your foot to someone if you were to travel to certain countries. So what Paul is doing here is picking the part of the body that would most likely be seen as a lesser part and using it as the example of that which should be kept in high esteem.
But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.
Using the foot Paul makes his point that even those that may be seen as the lowest should be valued in the church body. There is no exception. The body is one and should live with unity, not stratification or divisions.
This chapter is on the diversity of the gifts the church is given by the Spirit, but while it highlights diversity, it does so in the context of the oneness of the body of Christ. Whatever differences there are, we aren’t to esteem some higher than others. We are brought together into one body that is to work together, weep together, and mourn together. These varied gifted all share the same source, the Holy Spirit, and are all to work for the common good. The one Spirit unites us, and this is a gracious work that only God can do.
Our memory verse for this week seeks to lift up and remind us of this unity that we have as a people all baptized into the same Spirit and who daily must drink of the one Spirit.
“When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”
-Jacques Cousteau
Or tweaked for our purposes, in light of a passage like 1 Corinthians 12:
When the members of the body of Christ, because they are dearly loved by God, are given gifts of the Spirit, they have no right to keep those gifts to themselves.
Paul takes chapter twelve to discuss the gifts that the Spirit of God gives to the church. But he begins by contrasting it with the idols of the Corinthians’ old faith. Paul writes:
You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols…
The way that Paul contrasts the old and the new, dark and light, death and life is powerful. Here is contrasts that which speaks and that which is mute.
I think we are reminded all the more about the way the Spirit that dwells in us speaks when we think back to past ways. The church in Corinth, in following after false religion, worshipped idols. Already Paul has discussed how these idols and so-called gods have no real existence. So when we think to the way the Spirit manifests himself in us, it is not like anything from the pagan practices. Those idols were mute. There is no way those idols were going to speak through the people. But that is not what we have now. The living God has sent us his Spirit and by the Spirit we speak. God has not sent us his Spirit to remain idle and mute in the church. The Holy Spirit in us is the only way that we can make our confession of faith, only by the Spirit can we say, “Jesus is Lord.”
Two Sundays ago I was on vacation with my family and had the chance to worship at another church. It is always good to be able to step away and see how other churches do things and be reminded that the Church of God is much bigger than what I experience.
It happened to be a Sunday that the church was celebrating communion and one of the pastors was describing the sacrament and what we were about to do. What he said next was not wrong, but it gave me pause. As I said, it wasn’t wrong, but it was problematic because he didn’t follow it up with more. He said that what we were going to do was an intensely personal act between us and God. But he spoke nothing about how communion involves community.
When we take of the Lord’s Supper it is not merely a individualized, personal encounter with God. It is an act of the body and it is an act that emphasizes the body and how we are made one. God has taken away all that divided by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. What divided us from God is taken away, but also what divided people.
When we take communion, as it says in 1 Corinthians 11, “we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” By our actions we proclaim what that death did and what it represented. That’s why Paul criticizes the church in Corinth because their practice was not uniting the community, it was dividing it. If communion should proclaim the truth of the gospel, it can’t privilege the rich over the poor as they were doing. Nor should it focus entirely on the individual. There is that component, and we all should examine ourselves before taking of the sacrament, but there is more. Christ died to make us–collectively–his church. He is our head and we are his body. If we are not remembering that good news in communion, how then can our actions proclaim it?
The next time you celebrate the Lord’s Supper, be intentional to look around you at the other sisters and brothers to whom Jesus Christ has united us. You can certainly bow your head in private reflection, but know that this meal is thankfully more than about you and God, but it is a celebration that in Jesus the church is brought together and united. As we focus on the “foolish” act of our Lord on the cross, giving his body and blood for us, we proclaim his death–a death that brings us into fellowship with God and other believers.
Year in the Bible 
