“31 But eagerly desire the greater gifts. And now I will show you the most excellent way. 1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient.”
I don’t think that any of us would dare stand up and say, “I’m a very patient person.” None of us would dare set ourselves up on that pedestal because we know that we would quickly be knocked down. Our own consciences would accuse us.
If you recognize how badly you need patience, please recognize the impact of patience upon you. Consider the impact that someone else’s patience has had upon you. Perhaps you had a grandfather who lovingly bore with your foolishness and sin. You know that his patience had a impact on you. Consider the ways in which God has been patient with your foolishness and sin. Consider how His patience has changed you. Consider how His patience should change you. Consider that you can have a similar impact on others by patience.
I hope that you want to be patient like God, and I hope you recognize that you can’t be patient like God. In other words, I hope that you recognize your need for the Holy Spirit, and I hope you recognize that God loves to bestow the power of the Spirit upon those who ask with right motives to make the right impact of love.
By the Spirit of God, you can show patience like God. That is wonderful news and that is the claim of this sermon: By the Spirit of God you can show patience like God.
We will study this in two points. First: the long-suffering love of God. Second: long suffering love by the Spirit of God.
First: the long-suffering love of God. We use the word patience in at least two ways. We use the word patience to signify a willingness to wait. ‘Mom, when is it Saturday so we can go to the pool?’ ‘Have patience honey.’ We also use the word patience to signify long-suffering in the face of sin. ‘Lord, I’m going back to work tomorrow, and my co-worker can be so cruel. Give me patience. I need to love them.’
Each of us needs both types of patience, but the second one is the patience of love in 1 Corinthians 13. “Love suffers long,” as the New King James puts it. Now a willingness to wait is difficult, but this long-suffering love of which Paul writes is truly divine. It is not natural to us. This patience is the choice to continue to love even as you are sinned against. When sinned against, we fight. We flee. We blame. We take revenge. We might take the high road as posture of moral superiority but that is quite different from the love of God and that is the love of 1 Corinthians 13.
Consider the long-suffering love of God toward you. Paul did. He wrote, “I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain.” Now your biography is different from Paul’s, but if you, like Paul, are what you are by the grace of God, then you know that He has been patient with you as He was with Paul. You know that God has been long-suffering with the sin and foolishness of your biography.
If you do not recognize God’s patience with you in this regard, then you are putting God’s patience to the test even now. “The Lord is… patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” Repentance involves a recognition of the patience of God. He is long-suffering with your sin now even as He delights in you as His child and because He delights in you as His child.
This long-suffering love is God’s very heartbeat. He made that clear to Moses. Moses asked to see God’s face. God, in turn, told Moses His heart, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” That is the way God sees Himself, “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” If that is the way that God sees Himself, then that certainly is the way that God is. He is long-suffering with sinners, which is good news for us sinners.
You see God’s long-suffering love in Eden. God’s betrayal at the hands of Adam and Eve was worse than any betrayal you’ve ever suffered. You’ve only been betrayed by acquaintances, or perhaps friends, or even a spouse or a child. I’m not denying the pain of that betrayal. I’m simply saying the betrayal which God suffered by that sin and by your sin is worse. God is betrayed by what He has made, and He responds in patience far beyond what is natural to us mortals. In the face of Adam and Eve’s mutilation of His creation, including the defacement of you by original sin, God responded with long-suffering love. He told Adam and Eve about of the coming of His Son. He covered their shame by sacrifice and gave them clothes to wear.
You see God’s long-suffering love with Israel. As we just saw in Deuteronomy, Israel’s covenant breaking was tantamount to adultery. It is experienced the same way. That is the point of the book of Hosea. God responded to this continued betrayal by calling Israel back to Himself in ways that would be humiliating if He weren’t God. As He put it, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations—a people who continually provoke me to my very face.” You might know what it is like to try to love in the face of betrayal. If you have, you know the terrible impossibility of loving like God without the Spirit of God. This is beyond our nature.
Man likes to imagine that he is more long-suffering than God. He points to wrath and hell and dismisses God as a monster. God is no monster. “As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die?”
What is monstrous is our hatred toward those who sin against us. By nature, we don’t plead with them to repent and live. We don’t long for harmony in relationships the way that God does. We avoid our offenders. We belittle them. We even do this towards people who don’t sin against us but merely run afoul of our expectations. The sin in the human heart is monstrous. The long-suffering of God in the face of rank sin against His authority is glorious.
You see this with particular clarity in the Son of God. Jesus’ close friend Peter described what he witnessed in Christ this way. ‘When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to Him who judges justly. “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”’
I beg you to recognize that compared with the Son of God, you are not long-suffering. It will do you no good to be more patient than your dad was with your sin when you were young. It will do you no good to be more patient with your spouse than she is with your sin. Whether you are or not is irrelevant. The question is how does your long-suffering love in the face of sin against you compare with the Son of God’s long-suffering love in the face of your sin against him. That is the long-suffering love of God.
Now you might be thinking, ‘I don’t have that sort of patience in me.’ You are right; you don’t. I’m not going to give you a motivational talk about becoming more patient in the face of sin. You need the Spirit of God to empower you to give long-suffering love.
This sermon will give very little advice on patience to anyone who will not submit to the power of the Spirit of God. What you will hear in our second point will sound bewildering and foolish if you don’t have the Spirit of God. This sermon series on love will be crushing if you try to love this way under your own power. This sermon series will cause you to crush others under the weight of your expectations if you don’t recognize humanity’s desperate need of the Spirit of God. This sermon series will, by God’s grace, be convicting and invigorating if you recognize that you and others can only love this way by the Spirit’s power and if you have the Spirit. You must be born of the Spirit to love with 1 Corinthians 13 love. We saw that last week. This love is far rarer than we would like to acknowledge, and we know that when we see it in its purity.
You are called to long-suffering love. You are called to love the people of this church well and that will involve suffering as a result of each other’s sin. That is true in marriage. When I married Bethany, I made my vows knowing that she would sin against me and I would sin against her. Our love would need to suffer long. Being a member of this church or any church will require you to show this love. This is why you need the Holy Spirit.
Are you born of the Spirit? Before we can talk about your long-suffering love by the Spirit, you must know if you are born of the Spirit. Here is one test: do you believe that Jesus is the Christ? “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,” 1 John 5:1. Now this is not a question of mental assent—as in, ‘are you fine with the idea that Jesus is God?’ This is a question of submission. Are you willing to accept the words of Christ as the words of God and as therefore binding upon you and others? Are you willing to follow him trusting that wherever he leads is right? Do you agree that your sin deserves death, and do you glory in the fact that he suffered death on your behalf? Do you want to give everything for him because he gave everything for you? If so, that as a sign that you have been born of the Spirit. Without the Spirit, you can’t love this most excellent way of 1 Corinthians 13 and without the Spirit we as a church can’t love this way. Church is glorious when we live by the Spirit. It is far less when we live by what we have to offer.
If you have been born of the Spirit of God, you can love by the Spirit of God. You have an astounding gift. You can be long-suffering with others as God has been long-suffering with you. We see that in our second point: the long-suffering love of the Spirit of God.
To this point we have seen the divine, long-suffering love of God. We have considered the impossibility of any of us loving this way in the face of sin against ourselves. We have also recognized that as a Christian, that is a little-Christ, you must love this way in the face of sin against you.
What sort of sin requires long-suffering love? Wayne Mack provides a cursory list. You are called to love when others are unfair or dishonest in their dealing with you; you are called to love when others make promises they don’t keep; you are called to love when others injure you by reproaching you, slandering you, gossiping about you, and spreading evil reports about you; you are called to love when others misrepresent us or exaggerate your faults. As you can see, you can’t do this without the Spirit of God.
Yet you must show this love. You must lovingly bear with those who sin against you because God has borne with your sins against Him. You must take yourself off the judgment seat and remember that you too are a sinner. Remember Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful manager. You have been forgiven a debt that would take you 200,000 years to pay off. You cannot in good conscience refuse to forgive a debt that would take 100 days to pay off. Jonathan Edwards is right, “If we do not exercise long-suffering towards men, we cannot expect that God will exercise long suffering towards us.”
You must consider your need to love in this face of sin because you live in a world full of sin. Again, Jonathan Edwards tells it like it is; “if we are not disposed meekly to bear injuries, we are not fitted to live in such a world as this, for we can expect no other than to meet with many injuries in this world.”
Recognize that Genesis 3 happened. You cannot expect perfection in any way shape and form in this life—especially moral perfection. The only way you for you to avoid being sinned against—and therefore avoid the call to long-suffering—is to avoid all human interaction. This does seem to be one of the trajectories of our culture and it is terrifying. This, most certainly, is not the way of love. Jesus didn’t live among humanity and die for humanity so that his church could avoid humanity. That isn’t love. That won’t make any impact for Christ.
Love is a behavior. “Not one element in this… list [in 1 Corinthians 13] is sentimental; everything is behavioral,” writes DA Carson. The culture in which you live considers love to be sentimental. It talks about loving everyone but never gives any specifics of how this is to be done. The Holy Spirit empowers love that is behavioral. Love calls you to do something.
Doing good to the one who offended you is the form that this long-suffering behavior takes. ‘Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.”’ That is long-suffering love in the face of sin. You do good to the person who has sinned against you while trusting that God will deal with the consequences for the sin which was committed against you. God will handle these consequences. You handle loving in the face of sin. Do the behavior.
Now, long-suffering love can confront the offender. “If your brother sins against you, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you,” as Jesus explains. If you do confront, however, remember that you are doing it not to get something off your chest, but for the sake of your relationship with your offender and for the good of your offender. Even confrontation takes the behavior of love. Anthony Thiselton is right, “love does not blunder in or blurt out… Genuine love for the other will wait until the other is ready, especially if love prompts a word of warning or rebuke.
Now, as a side note, if the sin against you is abuse, this call to long-suffering love is not a call to remain in an abusive situation. Paul not intend his words, “love suffers long,” to excuse spousal abuse. In that situation, long-suffering love looks like leaving the situation, working towards the abuser’s repentance and the reconciliation of the marriage from a safe distance.
This long-suffering love of which Paul wrote is desperately needed in this world of ours. I imagine that there are marriages here that are in need of long-suffering love. Do not wait for your spouse to love you this way. You do it. ‘Well, she isn’t patient with me.’ “What is that to you?” asks Jesus. “You follow me.”
Now, you might be to the point where you don’t consider your spouse worthy of long-suffering love. If that mistaken category is one which you want to you use, you must recognize that you are not worthy of the long-suffering love of God nor of the blood of Jesus and yet while you were a sinner, Christ died for you. A person’s worthiness to receive patience is beside the point. Long-suffering love is the call of God upon you and you will stand before him on the final day. You aren’t going to stand before Dr. Phil on the final day to talk about your marriage. On the final day, you are going to stand before God who sent His own Son to die for you so He could put His own Spirit within you to enable you to love like He loves.
I imagine that there are relationships between members of this congregation that are in need of long-suffering love due to sin or, far more likely, due to disappointments and unmet expectations. Now if you are called to love each other with long-suffering love in the face of sin, how much more are you called to love one another in the face of disappointments and unmet expectations? In what way are you acting Christ-like if wyoue belittle or avoid a fellow church member for not handling a situation as well as you thought it could have been handled? Father, have mercy on us. Spirit, help us.
When you consider the people in this church, consider Jesus’ long-suffering with Peter, who denied him. Consider his long-suffering with Paul, who persecuted him. Consider his long-suffering with Judas, who betrayed him unto death. Now you might be thinking, ‘I’m not Jesus,’ but that is why you have the Holy Spirit.
Either Christianity is a sham of unrealistic ethics or God does empower men and women to love with the love of God. There is a tendency within the church to neuter the apparently unrealistic ethics of Scripture—like love suffers long—in such a way that we can achieve them without the power of the Spirit. We are very accomplished at manufacturing spirituality that does not require the Holy Spirit. Such spirituality simply isn’t the way of Christ. It isn’t the most excellent way of which Paul is writing. It isn’t the way of love. It will have no impact.
God bestows His Spirit so that you can love in apparently unrealistic ways. If you have been loved by God in ways that you have no reason to expect, you can love others in ways that they have no reason to expect.
This love makes an impact. It makes an impact upon a church. It makes an impact on the world. People come to faith in Christ because they have treated a Christian like dirt and that Christian has responded with love. That is outreach in a world like ours. It always has been since the days of the early church when Stephen said, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” before he was put to death. It has been that way since Jesus, hanging from a cross, said, “Father forgive them they know not what they do.” You can love that way. That is why you have the Spirit of God. Amen.