1Cor. 13:4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it his not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I have walked through this passage to discuss the many aspects of love. In part 1 I talked about the first characteristics of love: patience and kindness. In part 2 I made some observations about love’s selflessness and the fact that it isn’t rude. Part 3 finishes off my commentary on the specific qualities described in 1 Cor. 13. Now, I turn to some things that are not explicitly stated, but are nonetheless important observations about love based on this passage.

Other observations

In all of these things, the one thing that is not said about love is that love is a feeling, an endearment or affinity for someone. Certainly that helps us to love someone, but as strange as it seems, we can still love people we utterly despise by acting toward them as is described in 1 Cor. Love has nothing to do with hugs, or kisses; how good your taste in jewelry is or how much you have in common with another person. It has everything to do with your willingness to be good to someone else even when, or perhaps especially when, they are not doing the same to you. However, in saying all this, I don’t want you to believe that you can withhold affection–affection is very important and helps us to express our love and lets the other person feel it in more than our actions. But affection, is more an outpouring of love. Be loving first.

Being unloving

So to love someone means to do these things, but by contrast, if you do not do these things, then you are being unloving. As much as you care about someone, if you aren’t being patient or kind, being envious or boasting, being selfish, angry, rude and so on, then you are not loving the other person. This too, is a hard pill to swallow. As much as we care for and like someone else, it is still possible to show them that you don’t love them.

Love is not an all or nothing thing–it’s not like being rude to someone once or being irritable means that you hate them or that you don’t love them anymore (often times it is a sign that someone needs a nap or a cookie), but if that irritability is driven by something other than low blood sugar, we should really consider what we can do to be more loving (and should probably eat a cookie too, just in case).

In closing, I wish to charge you to be as loving as you can, and be as easy to love as possible. Make it easy for people to be kind to you, make it as easy as possible for them to tell you the truth, ask for forgiveness and to be forgiven. Beyond that, be as relentless as possible in loving everyone. Don’t be angry or hold grudges, don’t mock other people’s misery. Give as much as you can. Give as much as you can toward the goal of expressing your kindness and believing in other people. Feed them, care for them, help them study, listen to their troubles and do what you can to enable them to overcome obstacles. Let them be the best person they can be and consequently, you will be the most loving persone you can be.

it is not irritable or resentful;

I tend to get irritable if I don’t eat breakfast–what does that say about my ability to love? Not too much, but it should give an idea of how hard it is not to be irritable. When our lives lead us to situations that upset us, we need to find a way not to be irritable, or at the least to act out of anger and resentment towards another for the sake of love. Strange as it may seem, eating right and living healthy helps you love other people for the fact that your body is less stressed out and therefore less prone to react disproportionately to the situation. Beyond that, love does demand a certain amount of will power to keep our urges to get upset at bay. I’m not saying to suppress your feelings, but what I am saying is not to let your emotions go unchecked–keep them under control. Discuss your feelings calmly with someone you can trust. Don’t blow up in the heat of the moment.

it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Have you ever said, “You remember the time you bought me plumber’s tape for my birthday” or “What about that time you didn’t clean your room/pay that bill/apologize” or something like it? Sometimes we get excited when someone we love does something wrong because it makes us feel better about the time that we did the same thing. The unfortunate reality is that sometimes, probably at all times, we may all have been wrong. Even if it’s situations where there isn’t a prior offense that we are seeking to justify we should still refrain from being happy when we or the other person does something wrong, for any reason.

The clause, “…but rejoices with the truth,” has to do with recognition of the wrongdoing and being forgiving. Sometimes we lie, sometimes we make mistakes. In those situations, we are responsible to recognize the errors we have made and to ask for forgiveness. When the other person has come to us, acknowledged their error, then we should be glad, and should encourage them and forgive them (notice that I didn’t include that will apologize–sometimes they don’t and we should still forgive them). Another way to understand this clause may be to look beyond the offense entirely and to see the bigger picture. Yes, the person may have screwed up, but in the end, how much does that matter? It shouldn’t. Let go of other people’s mistakes. Celebrate the good things about them, and if there ain’t much good, then go back to all the earlier stuff about being patient, kind, and un-agitated.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love does not give up. No matter how difficult or insurmountable, we should never stop loving. Further, we should always celebrate and enjoy the good things about life. We see and believe in the capacity and ability of others. We try to see the possibility for prosperity, success, health and goodness in and for them. Consequently, we do what we can to help them become those things.

it is not arrogant or rude.

The difficult piece for people to swallow here is not being rude. I think everyone is familiar with just how rude our friends and family can be. However, we often feel justified in our rudeness, and think that other people deserve it. In reality, it doesn’t matter. Despite how loathsome and ignorant someone is; if you love them, do not be rude to them. (This may be asking for trouble, but) if you call yourself a Christian, and know you are to love everyone that means you are also expected not to be rude to anyone for any reason. I’ll wait for you to stop cursing before I continue…

Love does not put itself above others and it does not put itself before others. In saying that love is not arrogant, we are declaring that we will not hold ourselves to be superior. This can mean that we do not feel that we are the stronger person in a relationship, that we don’t need them, they need us. It also means that we do not believe our thoughts actions and beliefs to be better than someone else’s. We could even go so far as to say love means humility–it means looking the fool, accepting defeat and yielding to someone else (even when they’re being stupid).

It does not insist on its own way;

A hard thing about being in a relationship is that even if only sometimes, we feel neglected or we have something we are interested in that the other is not. This is complicated by the fact that the wants and/or needs of the other person may be contradictory to our way. In all situations, we are not to insist on our own way. The emphasis on insist is key, because we should not feel that we should never deserve to get our way or that we must always do everything the other person wants. This passage is simply expressing that we do not force people to serve us, to do what we want or to do something our way. However, we can ask and sometimes, people want to oblige us. In those cases, there is no harm. As it so happens, we might extrapolate from this passage that when we are faced with circumstances where another person is asking something of us, that we should make a reasonable effort to oblige them. It might be that we can say no (I’m not sure on this one yet).

So, love is patient, kind, humble, and selfless. It is not easy to live like this. If you’re still with me, great! But don’t get too excited, because we still have three more assertions to go–and none of them include satisfaction, happiness or me-time.

1Cor. 13:4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it his not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Warning: this is a hard look at love. You may not like everything I have to say. Understand that this series is not a reflection of the degree of love that I have attained, but to which I aspire. If I have not lived up to any part of this in my own life, I am sorry.

Love is something that means different things to many people. This reflection on the meaning of love, is mine. I base it on a passage of Scripture, but I do not believe that one needs to believe in Scripture to accept this definition.

I would first like to walk through this passage to make some specific observations about the characteristics of love. I’m going to break this into pieces to make it easier to digest.

Before I get too far in, I want to highlight that if we say we love someone, believe ourselves to be loving or call ourselves Christians, then these are imperative qualities–we absolutely need to be all these things. We should be able to make our name interchangeable with the word love as it is used in the passage and the statements should all still hold true.

Love is patient and kind;

It seems today that we do not have a solid appreciation for patience. Certain things take a long time to happen and other people can be difficult to tolerate for long periods of time. As ones who love, we need to be patient and kind. This means that we must tolerate the impatient and unkind. We must endure the drudgery of monotonous life, we must struggle through continuing to interact with people that are cruel to us. We must learn to trust that things will happen in due season.

Learning to wait for the microwave to finish is tough these days, but perhaps it’s best to start there. Start somewhere small and learn to build patience. Find some way in your life to learn to accept things not happening when you want. Drive slower, walk somewhere, turn off your clock. Moving toward patience with people is a whole other ball game.

It is difficult to let people do things in their own time. However, we must learn that in loving someone, we must learn to wait for them; whether be waiting for them to say they love you or waiting for them to finally pull their head out of their lower intestine and stop doing whatever stupid thing they do. Loving people means giving them the freedom to live their own lives even if it is painful or uncomfortable for us.

Unfortunately, we are not to repay life in like kind. We are expected to be kind regardless of the kindness we receive. Speak kind words, and do kind things. Tell people the things you appreciate about them, compliment them. If you can’t do that, at the very least, resist the urge to deride and belittle them. Help people move or carry their things. Feed the hungry. Care for the sick. Use your abilities to help those who do not. Share the wealth. If you have something good, spread the joy. Let other people experience the things you love (to the degree that they are interested).

In my head, I was contemplating just how crappy it felt to have such a fun night turn into the exact opposite of what it should have been. As the tension grew higher it felt like we were caught in some sort of tractor beam of bitterness, being pulled slowly toward an inevitability a miserable night.

After realizing how pissed I was that we weren’t gonna cuddle I decided I wasn’t going down without a fight. I tried a few quick maneuvers and I was able to get us away from what felt like an inescapable force. How did that happen? James 1. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials fof various kinds.” In reflecting on our reading of James 1 in church on Sunday, I was thinking to myself, “this seems awfully like a trial.” I pondered how I would be able to find joy in sleeping all alone on my side of the bed–a trial I in no way wanted to find joy in. What occurred to me in my reflection was that maybe there was something more going than just being tired and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Perhaps something was at work trying to create division and unhappiness amidst two people who should be nothing but happy. I prayed for a moment and decided that perseverance was necessary to endure the frustration of the moment and I shared my feeling that maybe there was something spiritual to the evening’s turn. It took a little time, but eventually we were able to calm down, recognize the situation for what it was, reconcile our differences, and then cuddle.

This was, perhaps, only a small victory, but it seemed relevant considering the topic of this week’s sermon. I hope that the experience we had will bring light to the reality that there is a spiritual dynamic at work that can monopolize on our weakness–mental, emotional or physical–and can try to turn situations against us. Further, I hope that this illustrates one way in which James 1 might be understood and applied. Try to find what’s bothering you, pray about it, and most importantly, take action–don’t let the moment overwhelm or conquer you. Push back, stand your ground and trust that God in all his strength will enable you to endure whatever trial you’re facing and to emerge victorious.