The Holy Spirit gives us many gifts, but love is remarkably different from and superior to the rest. To help us see that, Paul compares it to other gifts that seem remarkable to us: prophecy, speaking in tongues, and special knowledge. The Corinthian believers sought those but missed out on the one that was much greater.

For one thing, the other gifts are limited in scope. No one is given the gift of knowing and speaking everything that is true, but in heaven, our knowledge of God will be complete.

The big difference, however, is that unlike those other gifts, love is eternal. The rest will someday disappear.

There will be no need for prophecy about the future in heaven’s great eternal present. Nor will speaking special revelations in a foreign tongue have any value when we are in the company of the Father Himself.

But love will continue to have immense value. God IS love and heaven is permeated with love. Love is as eternal as God Himself.

Paul writes that prophecy, tongues, and knowledge will gradually disappear until “the perfect comes” (v.10). There’s been a great deal of debate across the centuries about what “the perfect” refers to in that verse. I have to say that I can’t see why this is contentious at all.

Some say “the perfect” in v.10 it is the written word of God - the Bible - and that when the Bible was complete we no longer needed prophecy, special knowledge, or tongues. But nothing in this context suggests that. The context is about love, not about scripture.

Others suggest that the perfect thing is Heaven. In Heaven we will no longer need those gifts. That is true, and this passage does mention Heaven in the next paragraph. But “heaven” doesn’t quite fit the preceding context.

“Perfect” in this context must refer to love itself – especially after considering the broader context. Remember that in chapter 12 he dealt with a problem where believers failed to show genuine love toward each other. They acted like little children on Christmas morning comparing what gifts they got to what their siblings got, strutting because they felt they got something better or getting jealous because they felt they didn’t, and arguing over it.

In doing so, they were being jealous, boastful, proud, rude, self-seeking, easily angered, keeping records of wrongs, and delighted by evil – the very opposite of the definition of love in 13:4-6. But when we have PERFECT love, we will no longer focus on our spiritual gifts or worry over which gift God gave us.

Back to v.11, Paul’s point is that the ability to love perfectly – to love the unlovely, to love the repulsive, to love without a hint of selfish motivation – is the gauge of maturity in the believer. As we mature, we no longer concern ourselves with which spiritual gifts we do or don’t have. It doesn’t matter. What God does give us, He entrusts to us, and we will no longer become discontent, envious, or proud because of it.

In V.12, the words “for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I have also been fully known” suggest that prophesying, knowledge, and speaking in tongues were intended to lead people deeper in love.


v. 13, Love remains just as faith and hope. Faith and hope help us hold on right now, but they will eventually disappear, too.

Faith won't be needed once death is defeated and we see God face-to-face.

Hope will no longer be useful then, either, because there will be nothing left to hope for.

But love is eternal and the greatest of all because God is love.

God isn’t faith. God isn’t hope. But God is love. When we love purely, we achieve the greatest value and striving possible: to become like God.