An Impotent Announcement (1 Corinthians 13:1)

Summer Love: Part 1

I use biblegateway.com a lot for finding scripture. Perhaps that's because Google search almost always returns their site first when you search on any scripture directly. I found a post from their blog in 2009 that listed the The 100 most-read Bible verses at BibleGateway.com.

Seeing how their site shows up so frequently on Google this gives a good impression as to what Bible verses most people are searching for online. There are a lot of great verses in there, but if you skip straight to the list you'll miss one very important disclaimer in the opening paragraphs:

This list isn’t actually based on a straight popularity count; simply tallying the most-read verses results in a top 100 list that consists almost entirely of John 3:16 and verses from 1 Corinthians 13, Genesis 1, Romans 8, and Psalm 23.

An interesting little tidbit: Perhaps the reason that John 3:16 and those 4 chapters don't sweep the top 100 is because they only contain 90 verses total. So as I start a series on 1 Corinthians 13 it's safe to say that you have heard it before. But have you ever took the time to really understand it?

Paul starts his most famous chapter, not by telling you how awesome love is, but how useless everything else is without it. This letter is address to the Christians of Corinth, and it seems that the Corinthian's greatest spiritual desire was the gift of tongues. In short it's the ability to speak in a language understood only in heaven. As described by Paul, it's the language of the angels. The idea is that it is a direct line of communication between your soul and God a magnitude higher than "traditional" prayer. It would be as if your best friend spoke a language you've never heard before and can't find anyway to learn it. Then one day, you miraculously just know that language and can finally really talk to your best friend. Maybe this example might help visualize the joy people derive from speaking in tongues.

So now that you partially understand how much the Corinthians cared about speaking in the tongues, I'm going to rip it right back away from you. Paul starts his chapter on love by telling the Corinthians, "You know that spiritual thing that is MOST important to you? Yeah that THING is useless in every way!" WHAMMY! Why is it useless? Because you're motives are wrong. You want these amazing spiritual gifts for yourself, but you're missing the reason they exist in the first place...LOVE!

If you have a class on public speaking and for your final assignment all you do is bang a gong:

(just don't expect to get a good grade)