Can you imagine what it would have felt like on November 1, 2010, when the San Francisco Giants had won the World Series for the first time in 52 years, and the owner of the team took that trophy and handed it to Mike Murphy, who’s followed Mike Murphy’s career. Mike Murphy was a superstar for the San Francisco Giants. All 52 years that they had been there, he had been there.
He had trouble putting the ball over the fence after that long. No. He started out as a bat boy for the team and eventually worked his way to working with the equipment and became the equipment manager and had done so much for them all behind the scenes.
So when that day came in 2010 where they won, the owner handed him the trophy, knowing how much he had put in over all those years. He wouldn’t get the MVP of the World Series. He’s not going to get into the Hall of Fame, but the stuff he did behind the scenes made the team a better team and was a great part of their success.
We all probably have people behind the scenes for us, people who love us, people who stick with us through thick and thin, people we can credit for. Do you have anybody for any success you have in your life you can give some credit to? If it’s not yourself, if you raise your hand, then you need to stay around and talk a little while longer. You see, behind the scenes, some people push us through.
Behind the scenes, some people do great things. Now we’ve been talking about, through the whole summer, being the body of Christ. We’ve worked up to this point through 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul talks about the body of Christ and the significance in the body of Christ that we all are different.
None of us are alike. We all have spiritual gifts, but none of us have all the gifts to do everything. No one can do everything, and each one of the gifts is needed, and each one of the gifts is important.
And each one of the gifts, especially as we talked about last week, where Paul said, seek the higher gifts. And the Greek means seek the gifts that help the church out the most. Seek the gifts from God that make a difference in people’s lives.
Then he closed 1 Corinthians 12 by saying, and I will show you a more excellent way. And that more excellent way is what we’re going to start digging into. It is the heart, the core, of what it means to be the body of Christ, of what it means to trust in Jesus.
And 1 Corinthians 13 is probably very familiar to you. It’s actually, I’ve used this in many weddings. You’ve probably heard it in weddings.
And it works great for weddings. But its original purpose is Paul talking to the body of Christ and how this is an important thing. Will you stand as you are able? We’ll just read the first three verses.
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 my body up to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
You may be seated. Now, I’m pretty sure that in the back of my mind, I’ve just had this chapter going. And it was probably the inspiration for why we’ve been spending so much on chapters 12.
And now we’re going to spend some time on chapter 13. It’s because in the spring at Colin, my youngest son’s school, I would go in at 7.30 on Thursdays. And we would work on, well, first we worked on memorizing the books of the Bible.
And then we worked on memorizing different books. And we had some trivia games and some fun and learn our way around the Bible, which is pretty cool to be able to do that with my son. Because there’s a lot of things I wish I would have known when I was 11 years old.
But in the spring, instead of memorizing smaller chunks, we ended up memorizing the whole book of 1 Corinthians 13. And I was hoping he could say it from memory. But maybe they’ll be able to come back next week and do it.
My wife was sick, so they didn’t come in. But when you spend one morning each week looking at 1 Corinthians 13, it kind of works on you. It works on the heart.
It works on us in a different way. When Paul says, I will show you a more excellent way, he’s saying whatever amazing, powerful, glorious, heavenly gift that you have. Without love, it’s a shell.
It’s just a whitewashed tomb. It’s nothing. The greatest things we do in life, our greatest successes, and our successes as a church are only outward successes if there isn’t something going on behind the scenes.
Basically, our Mike Murphy is love. Love may not get the spotlight. And love in today’s world, if you listen to the definition of love through Hollywood or through the news or through the world, it doesn’t sound much like what the Bible tells us about love.
Love is not a fleeting thing. It’s not a feeling that we go here, and I’m not feeling like this today, so I can say and do whatever I want to tear down this person. Love says whatever you do to me, I’m going to show you love.
Love says whatever you say to me to cut me down, whatever you do that hurts me, I’m going to show you love. It’s much different than the world who, it’s amazing how if you follow social media, sometimes it’s a good idea not to read the comments. Because someone can say something that is so innocent, and then somebody else comes back saying, oh, that was horrible.
What are you thinking? You’re such an idiot. And then they cut him down, and all they said was, I hope you’re having a good day. You know, people know how to rip us to shreds for anything we say and anything we do in the world today.
But none of that has anything to do with Jesus Christ. Even if you think you’re fighting for Jesus, even if you think you’re fighting for the kingdom of God without love, it’s meaningless. It’s worthless.
It’s just us boasting on ourselves. Now, when we sang how great the Father’s love for us, he said, I won’t boast in any gift. I won’t boast of any measure.
I won’t boast in any accomplishment. I’ll only boast of the Father’s love for me. That’s what we have.
And that’s what we can never forget, because that’s who we are as the church, as the body of Christ, that love is the one who may not get the glory, but if we don’t show love, it rips the church in pieces. And it shows the world that we may be no different than them. You know, sometimes I think, well, let’s do something amazing, a miracle, and the world will see that God is alive and God is real.
But without love, it just falls apart. In fact, Paul was talking about some of the greatest gifts. And in the end of 12, in verse 28, and God has appointed the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and some of those gifts, like those speaking gifts, you know, I try not to be the pastor who stands up here just to impress you with my knowledge.
Sometimes there’s so much I want to tell you. I was just reading a post from one of my friends that said, this is, it showed a picture of, oh gosh, what’s the name of the bearded guy in the Harry Potter show, the big beard? Haggard. He had a list he was reading from, and that list was a scroll that dropped down to the floor and went on out.
And he said, this is me in seminary preaching my first sermon and trying to tell everyone everything I know. But if the basis, if the drive behind every word I say, behind every conversation you have is not love, then Paul says this, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. When my son, my oldest son, which you probably figure out when I tell you this, was a baby, and he’d be on the changing table.
I can tell this story because he’s not here today. He’s a teenager now, so he doesn’t like me to tell this story. He was on the, he would be on the changing table, and all of a sudden, he would just start screaming.
And at first, that alarmed us as new parents, going, oh my gosh, what is he doing? He’s just screaming. And eventually, we’d go, he just likes to hear the sound of his own voice. And that was pretty telling.
Sometimes, what we say, we think we sound so eloquent and so graceful, and so, sometimes, we think we sound so holy and wonderful, but it doesn’t sound any better than a baby screaming on a changing table. I mean, do you picture that in your head? You know, I also have heard of pastors who someone said, he was a great pastor, but for some reason, whenever he prayed, he’d always switch to the King James to pray, you know, to sound amazing, to sound really godly. And we could say, and thou art here in our midst, and it sounds so cool.
But in the Holy Spirit, here’s what it sounds like. Gong, a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. When we speak from our own boasting or for our own purpose, if we come up to someone and we say, hey, did you know God loves you? But we don’t love them, it sounds like a gong.
It sounds like a cymbal. When I was in, how many of you were in band when you were in school? A few, not too many. I played the trumpet, but the trumpets got to know everything about the drums, because the drums, as we got into high school, they were broken up, and a lot of them played the snare drum, but you had the bass drum.
And when we marched, there was the great one who got to play the cymbal. And do you know how much a cymbal stands out if you don’t play it on the right beat? We learn that very well when we speak. It’s not the loudest voice that wins.
It may seem like it in our world and in our lives. It’s not the most educated and eloquent voice. It’s the voice that speaks with love.
It’s the voice that has God’s love on our hearts. I mean, even if you’re sharing Jesus with someone, if you’re doing it to get a notch, to say, hey, I saved them. Oh, really? Didn’t know people could do that.
It’s just noise. It’s just noise. 1 John 3.14 says this.
We know that we have passed from death into life because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Meaning our words, even though they sound so cool to some, even though we think they’re powerful, they’re words of death.
Unless love is behind them. Paul goes on to say, 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. Prophetic powers, we just talked about how, and in 14, the first thing he’s gonna say, pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy, that you may speak directly the words of God, but if you don’t speak those words from God.
I mean, even if you understand mysteries of the universe, you could probably have a pretty good podcast if you understood the mysteries of the universe. And if you had all knowledge, you had the gift of knowledge, you understood and could see how something fit with scripture, and if you had the faith of someone, Jesus said, if the faith of a mustard seed could take a mountain and move it from here to here, but have not love, I am nothing. You see, it is love is all that we can boast in, because that’s all that we have.
What we do is insignificant for kingdom purposes, if it’s not done by kingdom love. John the Baptist, who had a great ministry in his own right, who had followers come and he was baptizing people, he was showing people the way to Jesus, he was saying, one will come after me, who will be more powerful than me, who I cannot tie their sandals, who will not baptize with water, but baptized with fire and the Holy Spirit. And he was paving the way and he was showing people the way that a Messiah was gonna come along and change the world.
And up to that point, Jesus said, he is the most important prophet because he paved the way for Jesus. And then after he met Jesus at the river when he baptized him, John said these short words, he must increase, but I must decrease. I am nothing.
It is all about God, God is first, God is the reason we’re here. The definition of agape, which is love in here, the Greek agape, we often hear that it’s unconditional love, but it’s something you can grasp a hold of a little better, is that agape love is sacrificial. Jesus gave the ultimate sacrifice, that was the ultimate act of love.
If I have not agape, I am nothing. If I don’t sacrifice myself, if everything I do is to do better than someone else, to get ahead of someone else, to show someone that I am more powerful than them, then in the eyes of God, I am nothing. Without God’s love, we are nothing.
What we do on this earth just burns up in the fire, and all we’re left with at the end of days is the love of God that’s in us. He must increase and I must decrease. We sacrifice our own selves for the kingdom.
Finally, Paul says, if I give away all I have and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Of course, when I think of this, I think of in Mark 8, 36, where Jesus said, for what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What do we gain? If we gain the whole world, if we become one of the, well, a billionaire’s not that big of a deal in the world today, is it? There’s a lot of billionaires. If we become a multi-billionaire, if we make Elon Musk look like a regular old Joe with his money, we gain nothing.
It’s all about the agape love that comes behind it. If we give away all I have, if I have the gift of generosity, but I don’t give out of love, I gain nothing. If I have, if I wanna sacrifice my whole body to be burned, they’re saying this in the first century and especially into the second century, there were Christian martyrs who they were told to recount their faith, recant their faith in Jesus Christ, and if they didn’t do it, they burned them alive.
And they did it, and they saw all kinds of visions and all kinds of miracles happened in the middle of this because they stuck to their faith. But if they didn’t do that out of love, if they did it just to prove a point, if they did it just to show how faithful I am, they gain nothing. Nothing in life is free.
Now, we’d say, well, salvation is free. There was a lot given so that we could have salvation, so that we could know God, so we could be in the presence of the throne room, that God gave his only son so that we could live. The profit we have in life comes from the love we receive from God and give to others.
Our gain is only by what we give. Does that make sense? What we gain, especially in the next life, is only by what we give. Now, how do you know if something is done by love or not love? Now, this might be a tough thing for some of us to hear, but Kelly Allen did a survey online and checked online and she said, are you a good person? There’s an easy way to tell according to an internet into the internet.
Okay, are you ready for this? You might want to write this down. Think about this. What you do with your shopping cart is what others see in you on how good a person you might be.
What do you do with that shopping cart? Do you just stick it in another slot so if someone pulls in, doesn’t see it and runs into it? Do you put it in the outside slots? Do you take it back in? Do you grab it from someone else on your way in and help them out? It sounds kind of trivial, but so many people say they watch and see what other people do with their shopping cart to understand what kind of person they are. One person said, for a date, you need to take them to a restaurant and do the waiter test, which means how they treat the waiter, and then later go to the store with them and do the shopping cart test. That’s a little superficial, too.
But how we treat others, whether we’re in front of other people, how we do things behind the scenes, how we let love propel us beyond any gift or any strength or any power we have is what we gain in the world, is what the kingdom of God is all about. If the world sees historically, and this started in the early church. Now, tradition says that there was a, Rome was trying to trip the church up to find those underground churches that would meet in homes and in caves and in other places, and they sent out a spy, and the spy stood outside and listened to a service.
And one thing they were specifically trying to trap the Christians on was saying that they, catching them actually drinking the body and the blood of Jesus, taking that more literally, like they were actually drinking blood so they could trip them up in that. And they, and he came back and they said, well, how did it go? What did you find out? Were they drinking blood? Were they plotting against Rome? What were they doing? And the spy said, I don’t know about any of that stuff. What I do know is that they sure love each other.
We are gonna be the body of Christ. We’re gonna truly use our gifts for kingdom’s purpose, kingdom purposes. Let us love one another because love comes from God.
Love is God. And if we’re gonna be like Christ, let us love. Let’s pray.
Almighty God, thank you so much for the love that you gave us in Jesus Christ. Help us to find our value in you, our value in love. When we speak words, may they not be just noise.
May they be spoken from the love that you put within us. When we give of our time, of our money, of our very lives, may we sacrifice for your love and for one another. When we seek profit in the world, may we only seek kingdom profit that comes when we love one another and love our neighbors.
God, we can’t do this on our own. Pour your love into us. Pour the love of Jesus into us.
Help us to live out that sacrificial love that can only come when we love you and our hearts are set right before you. Help us to understand this meaning of love that has really nothing to do with how we feel but who we are in Jesus Christ. Help us to grow and grow and grow in this love.
So as Dana prayed before that we can be perfected in love, that if we mess up, we mess up because of love. And we seek your grace in everything. In Jesus’ name, amen.