In thirteen verses in the thirteenth chapter, Paul gives deep insight into that mysterious thing called love.

In Chapter 12 he emphasized that every Christian has gifts given by the Holy Spirit, given according to the Spirit’s intentional design to carry out His purpose in the Body of Christ. He spotlighted members of Christ’s body at Corinth who felt pretty important and other believers who felt pretty insignificant. Those with “showy” gifts looked down upon the others and those with less showy gifts wanted to be like the others. Heads looked down upon feet, and feet wished they could be heads.

This resulted in some people not serving the purpose God had for them in the body and others getting way more attention than they deserved.

He ended Chapter 12 by saying there are indeed “greater gifts” that Christians should desire in earnest and promised to show them the solution, the “more excellent way” (12:31).

So what is the solution? What greater gift should I desire? Well, it is love. It is genuine, selfless love, and Paul’s going to break that down for me. But this isn’t a new theme.

In chapters 8-11 he said that I must become a willing servant to others. He said I must live my life based upon what benefits the greater good rather than upon what benefits me personally. If all of us do that, the body will be complete and will function in a healthy way.

Remember, the first fruit that the Spirit produces in a member of His body is love. Out of that love flows all the other fruit -joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

So, Paul, please give me a way to measure my love, to see if it meets the requirements of spiritual love.

1 COR 13:1 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. 2 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. 3 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.

The love Paul describes here is agape (pronounced “a-GAH-pay”) love rather than eros (attraction, erotic love) or philia (affection, friendship).

Agape is the way God loves us. It is a willful love – one that seeks rather than attracts, one that proceeds from the lover’s desire rather than from the loved one’s desirability. Agape love is a choice. Only God can make us genuinely love someone who is unappealing. That is the love God had for us while were yet sinners. Sin is detestable to Him, yet He loved us while we were sinners. That is the love we are to have toward everyone else through the Spirit’s greatest gift.

In vv. 1-3, Paul drives home a simple point. I may be a gifted communicator who can understand the truths of the Spirit and communicate them to human beings. I may have an uncommon ability to delve into the mysteries of life and prophetically reveal knowledge to others. I may care nothing about worldly possessions and give what I have to the poor.

Pause: Can we be real here? If I knew a believer who was gifted in all of those ways, I would look up to him or her and become a follower.

But Paul says here that if I have all of those gifts but do not have agape love and faith, it’s all worthless. Without love, all of those beautiful things become ugly.

Counterfeit, even. The rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-26 said he loved his neighbor as himself, yet he was unwilling to give all he possessed to the poor. His love was not the love that the Spirit develops in us.

Without love that is truly selfless, all other gifts of the Spirit lack genuine value, regardless of how wonderful they seem. So, Paul describes exactly what such love looks like in the next verses:

1 Cor 13:4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I see a common quality running all the way through this description. It is that love given by the Spirit is not situational. It never changes. If I love someone, he or she can do nothing, and no circumstances can come about, that could to cause me to love him or her any differently. Whether that person becomes aggressive toward me, treats me unfairly, betrays me, slanders me, harms me, lies to me, steals from me, harms someone else I love, etc., etc., etc., love given to me by the Holy Spirit will not change because it is not situational. After all, if love is patient, not self-seeking, and keeps no record of wrongs (vv. 4-5), how could anything cause it to end?

If I love you genuinely, I will be patient, kind, honest, protective, trusting, and hopeful. I will persevere. I will not get jealous nor boast. I won’t become proud or rude. I won’t seek my own good, I won’t get angry easily, I won’t remember times you’ve wronged me, and I will not delight in evil.

If my love doesn’t match up to those things, it isn’t agape love from the Spirit.

I’m far from acing this test. How are you doing?