Big Pictures

I try to look at the big picture of each text I study.  In one sense it means we want to see the whole message of the Bible in our minds as we read each text.  In the smaller way it means we keep in mind the immediate portions surrounding the text we study.  In a Christian, following Jesus, way, it means we always look at the text in the eyes of Jesus, not at Jesus in the eyes of a text.

As I get ready for Sunday this week, where I am looking at part of 1 Corinthians 12, I looked at the surrounding sections and was thinking about how we use some of these texts.  Chapter 11 talks about the way we use the Lord’s Supper.  Chapter 13 talks about the way we use spiritual gifts.  And there is a common theme, most explicit in chapter 13.8-13

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

So many things are going to fail and cease.  Prophecies, tongues, knowledge – we can assume Paul is pointing to all of the gifts that are mentioned in the beginning of Chapter 12 with them.  All of them are things we have only in part.  Never something we fully hold.  We have a prophecy, but not all of it.  We have some language, not all of it.  We have some knowledge, not all of it.  But Paul leaves the limits off of three things – faith, hope and love.

These are gifts to the church that carry us when we fail in any other area.  These are gifts to the church that are consistently with us.  These are always the marks of what it means to be the church that follows Jesus.  Faith, hope and love.  And the greatest of these is love.  May we be defined more by our love than any of the other gifts we may value, even our wisdom.