What is the Purpose of Church Services According to Scripture | 1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 13

"If I speak with the tongues of mankind and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 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. And if I give away all my possessions to charity, and if I surrender my body so that I may glory, but do not have love, it does me no good."

"Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit. It is not provoked, it does not keep an account of wrongs suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth. It keeps every confidence, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away with; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For we know in part and prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with."

"When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things. 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 been fully known. But now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

Love, contrary to popular belief, is not just a verb. It is a person, and that person is Jesus. If you want to argue with me, just go ask John in 1 John chapter 4, starting from verse 7 through 10. That'll settle that dispute. Because when we only treat love as a verb, we get to decide what it looks like. When we treat love as a verb, normally, it's this general concept of putting others before yourself. I know that sounds good, but there are plenty of murderers in prison who said they killed someone because they loved someone else. There are plenty of people who rob stores because they said they loved someone, so they did it. There are plenty of people who've done horrific, awful things because they said it was out of love. So why don't we celebrate them? Why, if they are doing the loving act, don't we cheer them on?

Because we all know love has context. And outside of the proper context, love is not really love. It's just a general thing we've made up and slapped the label "love" on it. We have to look at love as a noun because when that noun is now Jesus, Jesus defined what love is. Jesus defines how we love. When love is a noun, rather than it now being this general thing we do, it's now an example we follow. When love is a noun, it becomes concrete.

Whether you love Jesus or not, there is something inside all of us that starts to go off when we see genuine love. You might not remember a time before you were saved; perhaps you just came out of the womb saved. But even without Jesus, when people see a loving, genuine act of selflessness, they get goosebumps. They don't know why; they're like, "Well, that's love." How do you know? It just is. Love has a context, but many of us on Earth don't know where that context is. And it's one of the many things that point us to God even when we don't know Him. Like Paul tells us, there's no excuse in this deep need for love we all have.

This deep need for love we all have is one of those things I think are one of the most useful tools to use to point people to Jesus because we all can know it. We all see it. That's why there are movies, books, magazines, and all of this that tell us beautiful stories of people who love each other. That's why there are movies totally based on this concept of someone loving someone so much they overcome the odds and give all of themselves to this person.

But again, if we take love out of the context of this person, of Jesus, as we see in our world today, love can be messy. Love can be something that we just say, "Well, if you don't let me just love who I want to and do whatever I want to with anyone, as long as it's nice, then you're blocking me from love." We see all these people trying to tell us that love is this. Love is marrying anyone we want. Love is having sex with anyone you want. Love is this, and just keep going down the list. When we know that's a distortion of the love that Jesus talks about. So when we look at love as a noun, what do we find?

Well, we have to go first to the life of Jesus. And when Jesus lived his life, it was one of self-sacrifice. It was one of complete servitude and humility to others. But he always told this one truth that those who believe in him will have everlasting life. The kingdom of God is near, and that means simply in that sentence, if you don't become a part of this kingdom, you're going to be left outside of the kingdom, which we all know means you experienced the wrath and judgment of God. So Jesus' definition of love wasn't this blanket thing: be nice to everyone and tell them everything they want to hear and everything, just tell them nice generalities and do whatever they want that makes them feel warm and fluffy inside. No.

Jesus also told the truth, and what was that truth? That He is the King of the world who has brought us a new reality in the midst of the old one, that we can now escape the wrath of God, escape the oppression of the evil powers that try to enslave us to this earth through Him. Jesus' message in the form of love is full of grace, giving us a love we didn't deserve and giving us unity with God. And as we talked about last week, giving us unity with others. But again, He said, and this is what it's going to cost you, your life. You're going to have to give everything to experience this new reality right here, right now, for all eternity.

So if love is God, our greatest act of love that we can do each and every day is then sharing the Gospel. That our greatest act of love, if we truly believe that God is love, is telling the world about this love. And I can tell you all this without giving that reference to 1 John chapter 4 because as we're going to see as we start going verse by verse through this, Paul talks about love in such an elevated context. This is the only concept outside of the life of Jesus that Paul exalts this highly ever in the New Testament. This is what he does here in 1 Corinthians; it's really extraordinary with how he - I mean, he said that love endures forever. There's only one thing in Scripture that endures forever, and that's God Himself. So if he's saying that love is the only thing that endures, then it has to be the life of Jesus.

So if we're going to love others, we have to share that life of Jesus not only through our actions but through our words and telling people about this love so they can have the chance to accept it and experience it for themselves. So how do we do that? And this is what Paul is getting at. So in this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul is actually talking about how Christians should gather. This section starts in chapter 11, and he talks about how services and gatherings should be orderly. And he ends with talking about one of the most beautiful explanations of the resurrection and new life of Jesus. So if you have time, go read 1 Corinthians chapter 15. It's a beautiful, just one of the most plain and beautiful scriptures on the resurrection and life of Jesus. So if you want some homework, read 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

Now we have to look at this with totally different eyes of "Oh". This isn't just telling us an explanation of what love is; this is how we should conduct our gatherings as followers of Jesus when we come together. The foundation of everything we do as followers of Jesus is out of the love and life of Jesus. Why do I say that? Well, Paul starts out, "If I speak in the tongues of mankind and angels, but have not love, I am nothing." And he keeps going. He goes, "And if I give all my money and possessions to charity, but I have not love, I have nothing. If I have the faith to move mountains, but don't love, I have nothing." So he explains these things, which are good things that we hope they are a part of our gatherings. We hope our gatherings are faithful. We hope there's genuine gifts of prophecy and hope there's genuine charity happening in our gatherings when we come together. But he's like, "Any of those things, but if you don't have love at the foundation of it all, it all means nothing." Because all those other things, they come and go, and we can look at these also as the other activities we do as churches. So you can fill in the blank there. But Paul is saying anything we do that comes and goes and fades away, but what remains the same is the message. What remains the same is the foundation, and that is the love and life of Jesus. This is the only thing that endures because we get caught up at times. Probably the best example of this is Exodus chapter 32. This is the story of the Golden Calf. And so if you don't know the story, I'll give you a recap.

So Moses was on Mount Sinai getting the Ten Commandments and the law. Aaron and the Israelites were all down in the desert in the valley of Sinai, and the Israelites, like, "He's taking a really long time. I think he's dead. So we need another God." "We need another God." "I got one better; I got one better." "Everyone, give me your jewelry. Give me your jewelry. Give me all the gold you got." So they give him all the gold, give him all the jewelry, and Aaron makes a golden calf.

And what does Aaron say about this calf? "This is the god that brought you out of Israel. This is Yahweh," which is the covenant name of God in its actual form. If you want to give him a name, Yahweh is the best guess we got. We don't even know if that one's exact because, in Hebrew, no one ever filled in the vowels of that name because it was too holy. But the best kind of filling in the blanks that we could do, is Yahweh. And that's exactly what Aaron says. "This golden calf. This is the God of Israel." And God wasn't happy about that. Why? "Well, God, they're worshiping you. They just made it." Yeah. And you could say, "Well, God said, don't make an image of them." But do you know why God said, "Don't ever make an image"? Because the image will always be made from human hands. An image will always have our effort, and all we will instinctively see if we start making images of God, we're going to image them not after what we know of God but what we know of us, what we want God to be.

And this is exactly why Jesus is so hard on the Pharisees and Sadducees about the Sabbath. Okay, so here's a little bit closer example to the church. I promise I have a point in all this. So we have to think about the Sabbath. It's an institution that God launched in the very beginning, the seventh day of creation was the first Sabbath, which was an institution or organization that was God-ordained. So why was Jesus so hard on the Pharisees about this? Shouldn't they be strict? Shouldn't they keep the Sabbath as holy and righteous as they can?

Well, yes. But the thing is, their definition of holiness and righteousness started to make the purpose of the Sabbath diminished. It started devaluing what the Sabbath actually was. The Sabbath was a gift to the people of Israel so that they would have one day every week to just live in complete unity and peace with God and each other, not having to worry about working, not having to worry about the craziness and busyness of their week. But when the Pharisees and Sadducees started adding all these extra rules, that day was the most stressful day in the week for some people because they had to pull out their phone and then Google: "Am I allowed to go pick flowers? No. Okay. No picking flowers even for enjoyment.

The Sabbath became such a stressor because of all the extra rules added rather than, "Wow, God, thank you for this day. Thank you, God, I get to have a day of rest that you ordained, that God, I can just enjoy today, living in unity with you because you're our God and we, the people of Israel, are your people." It was a day for them to enjoy community with each other and God. But because of all the rules and regulations that the Pharisees and the Israelite leaders put on it, the value of that and the meaning was lost. And sadly, many times we can do the same thing with the church, an organization Jesus instituted.

Now we get caught up in all the things that we do, and they're great. They're great things. I wouldn't be doing this. If I didn't think that, we have to remember our purpose as the church. That we can't allow the things we do to become more important than the purpose of why we gather, the purpose of why we're here. Why is that? Yes, to worship God and to give Him glory. But also, we have to remember every time we gather, we're supposed to be a living representative to the world, that we gather we're on our own. We have to remember when we gather our mission isn't on pause. Our mission, when we gather, is still the same. To go into the world and preach the Gospel, to proclaim the Gospel.

When we gather, and this is what this next part is about when he goes to the wedding passages, "Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous, does not brag, is not arrogant. He's telling us when we gather, it's about others, that it's about welcoming people into our community. It's about welcoming people, and it's about being kind to not only each other. It's not only edifying each other, but no, no, no, no. We have to remember this isn't about us. It's all about Jesus. It's all about experiencing Him in the beauty of community. But remember, the Great Commission never goes away. So we have to remember that when we gather, we are here on mission, that when someone we have to remember that, hey, when we gather, this isn't just for us to sing and just enjoy for ourselves and indulge for ourselves. But I don't know. We're on mission. Every time we gather, there's a purpose. What is it? To go into all the world and make disciples? Every breath we take, the moment we say Jesus is Lord, is to go into all the world and make disciples. And it's context. It's in 1 Corinthians 13. It's to love the world around us.

Our services are about bringing God's new reality to the world we are opening of. I was reading this in Mark. I was reading one of my favorite commentaries, the Anchor Bible Commentary series, and in Mark, it says the Mark chapter one, verse one says, "And this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." That word Gospel, when it says, we're preaching the Gospel, we're not only it's not mere words, it's not saying, "Hey, it's not the pages of what Jesus did." No, no, no. It's saying, "Hey, Jesus has a better life for you and wants you part of God's new people. God's new race, God's new nation." That's the Gospel, the message, and life of Jesus. And when we start talking about that, it actually helps people start seeing this new reality. If they want to, they can choose to keep their eyes closed. They can choose to not see it. But every time we talk about the Gospel, you can picture a little window of heaven opening that we can glimpse into, of a world that humanity and God live in perfect love, in unity.

And that's what the last section is all about, that we as Christians, we see in part, we know in part because this isn't finished yet. Those who don't know Jesus, they're just straight up blind. If as Christians, we see in part, we can just know then those who don't know Jesus, they're just blind. But when we start living lives of love, because again, we have to remember the context of all this, it's all about love. "Love Never fails." And then he kind of repeats what he did in the first section. "Love never fails, but if there gets a prophecy, they'll be done away with; at our tongues, they will see that there is knowledge, it'll be done away with."

It seems weird when you're just looking at it, because he jumps into, "But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away with." And then he starts talking about thinking and speaking like a child. "Well, Paul, where are you going with all this? He's giving us an example of now we are children in this. We're only experiencing the beginning of what the life God has for us. But when Jesus comes down and brings all of heaven with him and reunites heaven and earth, that will be the completion. Then we will be men and women living in God's new reality, seeing clearly for the first time, we will receive our full sight. And what will we see? All the world, all creation in perfect love. There will be no hate, no hostility, no division. Why? Because the mission of God from the beginning in the Garden of Eden has been reconciling the world not only to Himself but to each other. Paul is using love as a shorthand here for the mission and life's work of Jesus.

And we are carrying that out today. We are revealing to the world that the kingdom of heaven is near. That's what we gather. That's why we do. We live day to day as followers of Jesus, to fulfill that mission, that call that is the foundation and purpose of all we do. And the good news is, what we experience on earth is only the beginning. There's a day coming when we'll see fully. But for now, that's why it says faith, hope, and love. We need faith and hope now. Why? Because we can't see. So we must have faith. Why do we need hope? Because the world is heavy. The world, it gets discouraging. So we need hope to believe in this reality.

We have to remember, even though I can't see all that God has is doing, even though I can't see the full heavenly reality right now, I must hope it's there at this point, even though it seems like a fairy tale and dream. I just gotta hope because my faith rests in Jesus, our sight now is simply faith in the Son of God, that He is sitting as King of the universe. And our hope is He has a plan to finish it off, crush evil and death once for all. That's why we gather to love the world and to remind ourselves of this faith, of this hope.