Sometime during the last half of the nineteenth century, a Scottish author and evangelist by the name of Henry Drummond wrote a classic sermon called “The Greatest Thing in the World.” It was about love and was based on 1 Corinthians 13, which is certainly viewed as one of the greatest chapters in the Bible. If people know anything at all about the book of 1 Corinthians, this is probably the chapter that comes most to their mind. In any collection of great chapters, this is one that must necessarily be included.
Perhaps surprising to many of us, this chapter teaches that in a way love is greater than both faith and hope. If that is the case, then this chapter might be seen as greater than even the eleventh chapter of Hebrews—which talks about faith at such length—or the eighth chapter of Romans, which expresses the Christian’s hope. Not every theologian would say this. In Charles Hodge’s commentary on 1 Corinthians he was very concerned at this point in his exposition to defend Romans 8. He said that 1 Corinthians certainly was a great chapter but it was not like Romans 8, which has what Hodge called “the great sweep of God’s redemptive plan in history.” I think he was approaching it as a theologian and maybe rightly so. But by any measure, this chapter to which we’ve come in our exposition of 1 Corinthians is magnificent.
Whenever I think of this chapter, and particularly verse 13, which speaks of faith, hope, and love all abiding, but that it is love that is the greatest, I think of another sermon that the Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner, preached some years ago in Zurich. Stories of his sermons would circulate in Switzerland through the newspapers and in other ways. They were often talked about in Basel, some short distance away, where I spent a period of three years. One of these sermons that Brunner preached was on this text.
He said that we all have problems we need to deal with. But among all those problems, there are three that are the most important. First, we have a problem in our past, which is that we are sinners. How do we get rid of the sin and the punishment that we deserve for it? Second, all of us have a problem in the future, which is that all of us must die. The third problem we have is in the present, which concerns how we live with one another. We do not get on very well. We have difficulties in our relationships. Life is filled with estrangements. How do we deal with these three problems?
Brunner found the answers to these questions in 1 Corinthians 13. God’s answer to the problem in the past, the problem of our sin, is faith. It is faith in the work of Jesus Christ who died for our sin in order that our guilt might be removed. God’s answer to the problem in the future, our problem of death, is the Christian hope that though we will die, yet through the power of Jesus Christ, we will live again. And then, finally, he said that God’s answer to the problem that we have in the present, the problem of alienation and estrangement, is the love of the Lord Jesus Christ that works through us.
Problems in the past can be forgotten. And problems in the future can be pushed aside to deal with at some later date. But we cannot do that with the present because we live in the present. Everything we do, where we go, to whom we speak, what we are trying to accomplish, what we fail to accomplish, and everyone we meet with and try to work with brings this problem freshly to our minds. Christian people down through the ages have turned back to this great chapter of the apostle Paul and have read it as an inspired expression of the kind of life that we should each exemplify and that should be seen in a dramatic way in the Church of Jesus Christ.
