Our culture is much obsessed with performance. We take people who are extraordinary in their ability to perform certain feats and turn them into heroes—great actors or actresses, musicians, military heroes, professional athletes, and so forth. We are drawn, as if by a magnet, to people who are high-performance individuals. We surround these people with attention and adulation and, many times, with enormous financial rewards. We tend to measure the worth of people by what they can do, by how well they perform.
Paul turns his attention to this issue in 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” He’s talking about performance, about behavioral patterns that themselves are considered extremely virtuous. He speaks of giving away everything, making the ultimate financial sacrifice. “I am the great benefactor,” he says in effect, “and if I build museums or residential shelters for the homeless, if I give money to feed the hungry or to clothe the naked, if I do all these things, but have not love, what is it worth?”
“And if I deliver up my body to be burned . . .” Paul is not despising the martyrs who had shed their blood on behalf of the gospel for the sake of Christ. He is not criticizing the spirit of charity that has been manifest in the liberal generosity of many people in the church who give of their goods and their time sacrificially. He doesn’t say that these things are bad. He is stressing again that these things can be done without love. It is theoretically possible to give all your money away, to be the greatest donor in the world, to be the greatest benefactor in the world, and still not possess love. A person can even be a martyr for the wrong reasons.
That may sound almost impossible until we remember the ongoing dispute that Jesus had with the Pharisees. The Pharisees came under the judgment of Christ chiefly for one sin: hypocrisy. It wasn’t that something was wrong with their outward performance, but something was wrong inside. Something was wrong with their hearts. They were scrupulous in their giving, they tithed their mint and dill and cumin and made all kinds of sacrifices for the church of their day, all the while hating the Lord’s Messiah. All the while, they were enemies of God.
The best book ever written on 1 Corinthians 13 is Charity and Its Fruits by Jonathan Edwards. Edwards’ treatment of this chapter is fantastic. His understanding of the depths of Christian grace is itself extraordinary. But one of the things that he probes is this question: What would motivate a person to be sacrificial in his giving or even to lay down his life as a martyr in a particular cause if he didn’t have the love of God in his heart?
Edwards explores two ideas that are common in the history of theology. One is the concept called civic virtue. The Bible acknowledges, for example, that one does not have to be a regenerate Christian to exhibit outward conformity to the laws of God. We can’t go out to a highway and determine who is a Christian and who isn’t by noting who’s keeping the speed limit. We will find many Christians who are breaking the speed limit and many non-Christians who are obeying it. We can find all kinds of humane works performed by non-Christians, and at the same time, we will see all kinds of dreadful acts performed by Christians. People who are not yet reconciled to God through Christ can display outward conformity to the law of God. That’s called civic virtue or civic righteousness.
The second thing that Edwards explores is the cause of civic righteousness, which he attributes chiefly to what he calls enlightened self-interest. Going back to the idea of obeying the speed limit, someone may obey the speed limit at a given time not because he wants to give glory to God by demonstrating submission to the civil magistrate, not because he wants to be kind and considerate of the safety of other people whose lives he might endanger if he drives at high speed, but because he is concerned for his own personal safety, or he fears getting a ticket. People fear getting into trouble. That is enlightened self-interest—the desire to look out for oneself or to act for one’s own good.
How would that explain giving away all of one’s goods? What is enlightened about that? The answer is that some people would rather have the applause of men than silver and gold. If they live in a certain culture where sacrificial giving or getting rid of all possessions and living as a hermit or a monk provokes the exaltation of people, a person may be inclined to do that without any real love for God or for people.
What about martyrdom, the ultimate sacrifice, giving oneself up to be burned? Even in that extreme case, some people can seek their own interest. They see martyrdom as a quick ticket to immortality in history. They’d rather die and be famous than live and be nobody. Or they’d rather be dead and be looked at by their family and friends as people of courage than live and be deemed cowardly. When soldiers are asked what motivates them to take the risks in combat that they do, they answer that it’s sometimes because they’re terrified of not obeying orders and they’d rather get shot in the stomach than in the back. Ultimately, we don’t know what’s going on in people’s hearts. Only God can read the heart and know whether the performance is motivated by love. The point that we’re making, and that Paul is making, is that it’s possible to do these things and not have love. If that happens, these extraordinary acts of performance have no value whatsoever. They’re nothing. They’re worthless without love because love is the sine qua non of all virtue.
Obviously, Paul is speaking illustratively here, not exhaustively. He could continue the list forever—though I write fifty books, though I have perfect attendance in church, though I have taken care of five hundred sick people. He could give an endless list and declare that none of those things matter apart from love because the absence of love vitiates the virtue of any action or performance.
Edwards makes this comment: “Men are ready to make much of what they do but more of what they suffer.” Have you ever been in a conversation and somebody said to you, “Look at all I have done for you”? Then begins the list of sacrifices made and all the benefits provided. We want to say, “Look at the accomplishments that I have achieved in my lifetime.” We want to be recognized for our performance, for our achievements, but even more so for what we endure on behalf of others. Often, when we feel that we have suffered unjustly at the hands of another person, we want to make an ordeal out of it.
Before Paul begins to give us his exposition of what love is, he has shown us how important love is and the premium that God places on love. It’s higher than the gifts and more important than performance.
Edwards makes an important point here: “The ordinary influence of the Spirit of God working the grace of charity in the heart is a more excellent blessing than any of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit.” There is a distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Love is a gift of the Spirit, and everyone who is genuinely regenerate and indwelt by the Holy Spirit is given the gift of love. In that sense, it is an ordinary gift, as distinguished from those special powers that not everybody is given. Paul enumerates the extraordinary gifts: the gifts that not every Christian has. Edwards says that though the extraordinary gifts get all the attention, the one that counts the most and is most prized by God is love.
Ligonier Ministries