1 Corinthians 13:1-13·~1 min

Love

Paul says that speech in tongues, prophecy, knowledge, mountain-moving faith, generosity, and even bodily surrender all come to nothing without love. However impressive such things may appear, without love they are only noise, emptiness, and loss.

I¹f I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. ²If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Paul then describes love as patient, kind, and truthful, refusing envy, boasting, rudeness, self-seeking, quick anger, and scorekeeping. Love does not side with evil, but with truth, and it keeps carrying, trusting, hoping, and enduring.

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. ⁶Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love, Paul says, never falls away, whereas prophecy, tongues, and knowledge belong to what is partial and passing. Using the images of childhood giving way to adulthood and dim reflection giving way to face-to-face sight, he says the perfect will one day replace the partial, and he closes by naming faith, hope, and love as what remain, with love the greatest.

⁸Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. ⁹For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away. ¹¹When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. ¹²Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. ¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Section summaryPaul says that the most remarkable gifts and even costly acts of surrender are empty without love. He then names what love looks like in practice and why it surpasses prophecy, tongues, and knowledge: love belongs not merely to the church's partial present, but to what endures when the partial gives way.

Role in the chapterThis section is the heart of the whole gifts discussion. It reorders Corinth's values by making love, not display or ability, the defining mark of maturity.