What Is Our Church's Greatest Need?

So this morning, we finish with perhaps the pinnacle, the epitome of what it means to be a member of the church. And we've been dealing a lot with the book of First Corinthians as we've worked through this. We've looked at the metaphor of the body with its many members, how we form this cohesive whole through our distinctiveness and the various gifts and abilities that God has given us to contribute to this expression that is called the body of Christ. We've looked at the heart of that. We've looked at the way in which we can be mutually encouraging to one another to edify the body.

And so it is fitting for us to finish this look at First Corinthians again. But this time, we are going to look at chapter 13, that great pinnacle of the letter itself, the chapter on love. But before we turn there, I want us to talk honestly about the church. Honestly about our church. I want to talk about the struggle that we have from time to time, and something we may feel angry or even guilty about.

And that is that sometimes church sucks. Sometimes we don't want to be at this church. Sometimes it's difficult to feel inspired to belong. If you and I were to be honest, we would say, yep, I have felt this way at some point. Perhaps we dream of the experience of church being different.

We long for something more. Some of us long to experience a dynamic power of God amongst His people. We hear stories of other places, other times. We hear the story of the book of Acts. Or you might feel that there is a lack of warmth, a lack of fitting in, a place where you want to feel connected.

And still others may find the worship services uninspired, the preaching lacking in passion. It's like the little boy who inquired about an old plaque he saw at his church. He asked his pastor what it was for and the pastor replied that it was a plaque commemorating the people who had died in service. The boy asked, was it the morning or the evening service? Some of us would love a little bit more energy and vibrancy in the church.

And so I want to ask you the honest question, what is our church's greatest need? If we long for some of these things just mentioned, some of us might say the answer is that our church needs better preachers. Individuals who will stand above the hysteria and the confusion of our time to speak a true word about God. Still others might feel that the deepest need of the church is for people to experience the awesome power of the Holy Spirit work through the prayerful hands of those who have felt the touch of God on their lives. And all of these suggestions would be good suggestions.

We do need good communicators. Millions of Australians this morning are sitting in cafes with their brunches, relaxing in the face of an eternity without God in hell. We desperately need preachers who will speak a clear and compelling word for this generation. We need scholars, we need theologians in a time where Christian doctrine has become a swear word, where our popular churches are summed up as an experience of shallow and well-dressed pastors with church services that would humble the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in its technical ability of light and sound. At this time, we need people who clearly understand the unwavering truth of the gospel.

But in case we make the mistake of thinking that the church's greatest need is to have a theology that is clear as ice, but twice as cold, you could also suggest that today's church needs a generation that is on fire. God-fearing followers of Christ who rely on the Spirit's urgency to minister to the sick, to visit the suffering, to uphold the sad. That is the church's greatest need: for individuals to put their money where their mouth is, to do the work of Christian ministry. Individuals who purposefully, intentionally walk an extra mile, they will give the shirt off their back, who will pray on worn-down knees for their family, for their friends, for their country.

Yes. The church needs individuals like that. But to the question, what is the church's greatest need? You could suggest any of these things and they would be good, but there was a church that had all these sorts of people in it and yet God said that they had failed miserably to be the church that He had called them to be, and that is the church of Corinth. It's very obvious from the evidence we have from Paul's first letter that the Corinthian church was a place of dynamic energy, zealous preaching, intense spiritual discipline.

Even as he begins writing his letter to them, Paul says that they don't lag behind anyone in regard to their spiritual zeal. And yet, Paul recognises something in them that is terribly wrong. Even as he commends them for their zeal and he urges them to use their gifts, their amazing gifts wisely, spending two entire chapters, chapters 12 and 14, on those gifts. Even while Paul commends them for their zeal, he shows them that they still lack the one thing more important than all of those gifts combined, and what is it? Love.

At the end of chapter 12, which we looked at last week, two weeks ago, when we looked at the body of Christ, Paul transitions into chapter 13 with these words in verse 31 of chapter 12: and I will show you a more excellent way. And let us read what Paul has to say about that. First Corinthians 13, verse 1. Paul writes, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way.

It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away.

As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now, I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now, faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. This is God's word.

To the question that was being posed to the Corinthian church, what is your church's greatest need? Paul highlights three types of possible answers. The first question he poses through an example is, does our church need the most eloquent preachers? Paul begins by imagining in verse 1 a gifted individual who had been blessed with the most abundant outpouring of the speaking gift of tongues that anyone has ever received. Verse 1, he says, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Paul is imagining one of the most eloquent Christians you could ever find. Just as the Holy Spirit poured out supernatural ability to the apostles, allowing them to proclaim the gospel to the various cultures and the languages on the day of Pentecost that were there, Paul is imagining someone even more gifted than that. This is someone who's able to speak not only every language on earth, but the language of heaven itself. Someone gifted in proclaiming the truths of God to every creature under heaven and in heaven.

In chapter 12, Paul has been addressing the issue of the use of tongues within the Corinthian context, and Paul has had to address it with the Corinthians because for the Corinthians, the gift of tongues was the gift to have. It was the gift to aspire to have. Why? Because the Corinthians, as good Greeks, loved articulation and eloquence. They loved good communicators.

Paul says someone who has been given the gift of tongues to this unheard of measure, not only speaking the tongue of every nationality on earth, but the heavenly language itself. This person is the epitome of eloquent. Can you imagine a preacher who had this gift? What a missionary this man would be. To have the ability to speak any language, to be understood, who could express the gospel in the heart language of every hearer.

Whether they were Ethiopian or Roman, Jew or Greek, South African or Dutch even, how many could this man reach? And yet, Paul is saying that if you have this gift to the extent that no one ever has had before or will have after, if you had this gift but not love, it would be as senseless as trying to hear a sermon from a clanging cymbal, a droning gong. Even as a drummer, I can tell you, there's no music in a cymbal.

It's noise. Hopefully played at the right place, but it's noise. What Paul is saying is that without love, a gift of unparalleled eloquence is empty and devoid of any meaning. There's a story of a member in a congregation that was passed by a well-known and much-admired preacher many years ago. She caused a controversy when she reflected one day on his ministry, saying, when he was in the pulpit and we listened to him preach, we wished he would never get out of that pulpit.

But when he came off that pulpit and we felt and saw the nature of his life, we wished he would never go up there again. Without love, eloquence is nothing. What is our church's greatest need? Good preachers. Paul says preaching without love is an empty noise.

Paul then imagines another person with another gift much admired by the Corinthians, and the second question he poses is, do we need the most knowledgeable teachers in the church? He says in verse 2, if I have the prophetic powers that could understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. If someone came along to this church with the ability to explain every single word of Scripture, with perfect clarity, and they had the gift that through their ability, they could understand the authoritative revelation of God perfectly. This person would not hold a single shred of doubt that their interpretation of the Bible was correct. They would have a faith as rock solid, a faith that could move mountains.

If we found a person like that coming into our church, we would fire the pastor and all the elders, and we'd make him the boss. This guy has all the knowledge we could hope for, all the wisdom. This person knows everything. He handles the mysteries of God, Paul says, like an adult putting together a child's nine-piece puzzle set. What a leader in the church this person would be.

And Paul says, you can have all that, but if you don't have love, you have nothing. What is our church's greatest need? Teachers who understand and explain all the mysteries of God. Paul says understanding without love is an ignorant pursuit. Thirdly, Paul gives us a final example in verse 3, and he asks, does the church need the most disciplined followers of Christ?

Paul now leaves us reeling when he twists the knife one final time with this final example, a person not simply with incredible gifts of eloquence and knowledge, but someone who simply and purely lives the Christian life perfectly. Verse 3, if I give away all I have and I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Here's an individual who is living to the T the "what would Jesus do" lifestyle. Paul is referencing here the radical discipleship that Jesus held out to His disciples when He taught them on the Sermon on the Mount. He's a person concerned for the poor, concerned for those who are struggling in need.

He or she lives to give all away. Their house is sold. Their cars exchanged for bikes. Their jewellery given away. Their bank account emptied.

Why? For the sake of helping the needy. But not only do they have incredible commitment to the needy and the desperate, they're also a person of incredible commitment to God. They surrender their bodies to the flames of persecution. They have such a commitment to the faith that they laugh in the face of persecution and death.

They know that their eternal reward is heaven. They will go to the grave for that faith. They are therefore commitment personified. And we can ask, what is the church's greatest need? Is it to have the most disciplined Christians?

Well, I'm sure Open House would be a strong and impressive church filled with these types of people. But says Paul, even if I was to give my entire life as a sacrifice to Jesus Christ, to die for the faith that rests in God's love, but have no love myself, when I will stand before God on that day expecting the crown given to the martyrs of the faith, Paul says, I will receive nothing if I have not had love. So is our church's greatest need eloquent preachers, knowledgeable teachers, or even the most disciplined of Christians? We could say these are things that are good for the church.

But of all the things that matter, it is love that matters the most. And so it raises this very important question: what is this thing called love? You and I will have all sorts of concepts in our mind of what love is, but how is it that God has defined love for us? And we find it in our final point, and Paul defines it for us. Love is defined by what it does.

Paul gives us a definition of love in our passage, telling us what love is, and he describes it by what love does. This is what he says: love is patient, verse 4, and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way.

It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. You know that there's some things that the dictionary just can't capture, isn't there? If you go to the dictionary and you look up music, what can the dictionary tell us about music?

It will tell us something like music is a set of tones brought about into a collective whole. But that's not music. What is love? How would we define love? Well, Paul doesn't give an abstract explanation.

He defines it according to what it does. He doesn't tell us that love is a vague notion of goodwill towards anyone around us, an idea that we wish people well generally. And love isn't a twenty-first-century warm and fuzzy feeling of tolerance and of acceptance of everyone's quirkiness and everyone's proclivities. Paul defines love by describing how it behaves. We find out that the most important thing about love is that it is more than an emotion, it is an act of the will.

Love is a mindset. Choices, actions and behaviours deliberately entered into that puts another person's interest above my own, and seek that person's highest good. That is what love is. We'll take two examples from this list to explain this. Paul says that love does not boast.

We know that boasting thrives on comparisons. Boasting or pride comes from a comparison of being more than other people. We can boast when we feel we are more wealthy than others, to be more intelligent than others. And so either openly or secretly, when I am boastful, there's a self-centredness that places me in direct competition to my neighbour. That guy that I'm comparing myself to, that I'm boasting over and above, that guy becomes an object of my contempt as I stand on top of them to be higher.

A boastful heart comes back to an obsession with self, and this is why it's the opposite of love. Because love seeks the highest good for the other person. Another example Paul describes is that love is not easily angered. Well, I get angry at that idea of not being easily angered because the reason I get angry is well justified all the time.

When I get angry at someone driving slow on the highway, it's legitimate because I've got somewhere to go. If someone behaves badly in my church community, I have a right to get angry because how can someone behave like that in this church? I have a right to be angry. And yet, God says love is not easily angered. Once again, the reason I get angry is because I've made myself the centre of the universe.

As long as everyone orbits around my centre at just the right distance, not too close, but also not too far away to make me feel lonely. If they can fall into my rhythms and ask of my attention when I am happy and well adjusted and well rested, then everything is great. Everything is fine. I'll be as nice as the next guy, even nicer. But interfere with my rhythms, don't meet my expectations.

Well, that's when I get easily angered. We could spend half a year studying these characteristics. And maybe we should, one day. But what I want us to do perhaps this week is to go home, read through this list, maybe try and memorise them, and think about each of these aspects listed here. But here, this is what it comes down to.

Love is the opposite of self-centredness. Love is the position of the heart where I put another's interest above my own. That is why love is the supreme ethic in the kingdom of God. The supreme ethic in His church. Why is that?

Because love is revolutionary. We think love feels weak. We think love is something that everyone will trample on. But when we think love is weak, it is then that it is at its most powerful. Kingdoms that have been built on gold and blood have fallen away in history.

The kingdom of Christ built on love will never fail and has conquered the hearts of souls in every generation. It's the reason we read First Corinthians 13 this morning and we feel deep in our hearts the desire, oh Lord, I would love to love like that. The reason that we have that impulse in our heart, even as we hear these words, is that we have a Saviour who has first loved us. As we look at this list, we see the love of Jesus, don't we? That is what we feel.

That is what resonates with us. Was the love of Jesus not patient with us? Was His love for us not so kind? His love was never self-seeking, otherwise He would have never left the throne in heaven. His love was not easily angered, otherwise He would have destroyed us a long time ago.

His love always protects. It always hopes for the better. It always perseveres. It is His love that has enabled us to fully and finally love as humans were intended to love. And so, brothers and sisters, what is the church's greatest need?

It is not our gifts or our abilities, it is not our knowledge, it is not my preaching. It is not even our discipline to live the Christian life well. The church needs genuine, practical and active love. It needs your time. It needs your attention.

It needs your sacrifice. So in the life of this church and perhaps another church you are called to, wherever that may be, wherever you find yourself in the church, where you find frustration, you must persevere. Where there is unmet expectation, you must hope and pray for better days. Where there is disappointment of the things still lacking, you have to put up your hand to rectify those things in love. We, as Christians, say no to resentment.

We say no to bitterness. We rejoice in the truth. We rejoice in love, and that is what our church needs. Let's pray. Father, as we feel the weight of Your vision for this sacred community, Your heart's desire of the church, as we see that glorious picture of the ideal church, firstly, we may be disappointed that our church doesn't look like that.

And then secondly, we are troubled because our hearts don't even desire that for ourselves. Father, please, by Your grace, by the power that is at work in us through the Spirit of God, may You so revive and inspire us to pursue these actions and behaviours of love. Where there is sacrifice needed, where there is time and attention needed, help us to do that.

Help us to be inspired by Your sacrifice. Help us to be moved by Your great love. And Father, help us to always rejoice that that work is already done for us, that that sacrifice has already been paid, that we have already been recipients of this great love. And Lord, that we are not lacking in any way. We are not lacking in any aspect that would cause us or prevent us to run with freedom this race that You have set out for us.

Thank You for this great passage. Bind it to our hearts. Lord, where Satan may tempt us towards bitterness, resentment, frustration, even hatred of our brother or sister, Lord, cause us to speak against that and to be moved by these words. Create, Lord, an Open House church, a church that loves like this.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.