God Is Love: The Love That Never Fails

Last week I told you about a night that changed me.

It was not the first thing that changed me — there had been a season of unraveling already underway, a phrase from 1 Corinthians 13 that had already grabbed me ("love keeps no record of wrongs"), an early, trembling suspicion that the God I had been preaching was smaller than the God Scripture actually describes.

But then came the night I laid on a pillow soaked through with tears.

I won't try to dress it up or make it sound more dramatic than it was. It was just a man in the dark, finally undone enough to stop arguing, and a Father who had been waiting for exactly that moment. What broke through that night was not a doctrine. It was a Presence.

And what the Presence said — without words, but with a clarity that has never fully left me — was something like:

I love you. I love every person who has ever lived or will ever live. And I am not who you thought I was.

I have spent the years since then trying to understand that night in the light of Scripture. And I keep coming back to this:

"God is love." — 1 John 4:8

Not God has love. God is love. Which means that when Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that love "never fails," he is not describing a beautiful ideal that we aspire to. He is describing the nature of God Himself.

God never fails. That is where we pick up today.

Verse 8: "Love never fails"

"Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away." — 1 Corinthians 13:8

God never fails.

If God is love, and love never fails, then God's purpose — His declared intention toward His creation — never fails. What is that intention?

Paul describes it in Ephesians as the summing up of all things in Christ. He describes it in Romans as the revelation of God's mercy toward all. He describes it in Colossians as the reconciliation of all things — things on earth and things in heaven — to God through the blood of the cross. John describes it in Revelation as every tear wiped away, death destroyed, God dwelling with His people, all things made new.

If the God who is love never fails, then this intention — this vast, sweeping, costly, cross-shaped intention — does not fail either. It cannot. Because the moment we say "God's love ultimately failed to accomplish what He said He intended," we have — whether we mean to or not — said that God failed.

And the God who is love does not fail.

The Gifts Will End. Love Won't.

Paul makes a remarkable contrast here. Prophecies — the spectacular gifts of the Spirit, the words of fire that came through His servants — will one day pass away. Tongues will cease. Knowledge — even theological knowledge, even the most precise and careful understanding of Scripture — will be outgrown.

Every gift God gives, as important and real as those gifts are, belongs to this age of partial seeing and partial knowing. But love is different. Love does not belong to this age in the way gifts do. Love belongs to God's own nature. It is not a gift He dispenses. It is what He is.

When every gift has served its purpose and passed away, love will still be standing. Because love is not a phase of God's self-expression. It is His eternal being. And you — the person He has been patiently, kindly, non-irritably, non-record-keepingly pursuing all this time — you are not a project He will set aside when the dispensation changes. You are someone He loves. And that love is of the non-passing, never-failing, eternally-grounded variety.

Verses 9–10: Partial Knowing, Complete Love

"For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away." — 1 Corinthians 13:9–10

Paul is honest about the condition we are all in right now. Our knowing is partial. Our theology is partial. Our picture of God — even our best, most careful, most Scripture-saturated picture of God — is partial. We see through a glass, dimly.

I want to say something about this that I think is important: the Larger Hope — the conviction that God's love is wider and more relentless than traditional Christianity has often allowed — is not a claim to have finally seen clearly what everyone else has gotten wrong. It is the humility to say: maybe our picture of God has been too small.

Maybe the dim mirror has been showing us less of Him than He actually is. Maybe when we finally see Him face to face — when the partial gives way to the complete — we will find that He is bigger, warmer, more faithful, and more determinedly loving than our most generous theology had dared to imagine.

I believe that is what we will find. Not because I have all the answers. But because every time I have let Scripture push me toward a bigger God, He has turned out to be bigger still.

Verse 11: Growing Up into the Real God

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." — 1 Corinthians 13:11

Many of us were handed a picture of God when we were young — in Sunday school, in revival meetings, in the Christianity of our families and traditions — and we accepted it as fully formed. We never questioned it. It never occurred to us that a childish understanding of God might be as real a thing as a childish understanding of anything else.

Growing up in faith, I have come to believe, includes growing into a truer picture of who God actually is. Less score-keeper. More Father. Less threshold-guardian. More pursuing Shepherd. Less reluctant Savior. More One who, as Paul puts it, "desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth."

Putting away childish things, in this sense, does not mean putting away Scripture. It means letting Scripture be larger than our inherited interpretations of it. It means letting the God who is love be as large as He actually claims to be.

Verse 12: Face to Face

"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known." — 1 Corinthians 13:12

This is the verse that undoes me most completely.

I shall know just as I also am known.

Before you fully understand God, He fully understands you. Before you see Him clearly, He sees you with perfect clarity. The One who already knows everything about you — every failure, every hidden corner, every moment of your worst self, every year of the mixed gospel you preached or the half-truth you believed or the fear that drove you when love should have — that One has already seen all of it.

And He has not run. He has not revised His love downward. He has not updated the ledger. He sees you face to face already, and what He sees there has not changed what He is. He is still love. He is still patient and kind and not irritable and not resentful and keeping no record. He still bears all things and endures all things and hopes all things. And He knows you. Fully. Right now. And He has never stopped moving toward you.

Verse 13: Why Love Is the Greatest

"And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." — 1 Corinthians 13:13

Why is love the greatest? Paul doesn't explain it here, but I think the answer is already built into everything we've been saying.

Faith is our response to who God is. Hope is our response to what God promises. But love is who God is. Faith will one day give way to sight — when we see Him face to face, we won't need to believe in what we can already see. Hope will give way to fulfillment — when every promise is kept, hope dissolves into joy.

But love has no successor. There is nothing deeper behind love, no more fundamental category that explains or contains it. God does not love because He decided to. God loves because He is love. And that means love — His love — does not end when the age ends, does not stop when the gifts stop, does not have a terminus.

It is the eternal, uncontainable nature of the One who made you and is making all things new.

What the Wet Pillow Night Taught Me

I said at the beginning that there was a night — a man, a dark room, a soaked pillow — when the Father broke through in a way I have never been the same from. What He did that night was not give me a new theology. He gave me a new picture. Or maybe it is more accurate to say: He gave me Himself, in a way I had preached about but never quite received.

And what I received was not the God of the mixed gospel — the One who loves conditionally, forgives with an asterisk, keeps a file for later. What I received was the God of 1 Corinthians 13. Patient. Kind. Not irritable. Not keeping score. Not rejoicing in my failures. Bearing with me. Believing for me. Hoping over me. Enduring through all my wrong turns and wrong teachings and wrong pictures of Him.

And never — not once, not even close — failing.

An Invitation

I don't know where this post finds you.

Maybe you have never questioned the small God you were handed, and this is the first time someone has held up a bigger picture. Maybe you are exactly where I was — carrying years of a mixed gospel, a creeping sense that the God you preach or believe is not quite the One you meet when you read 1 Corinthians 13 slowly. Maybe you have your own wet pillow night somewhere in your story. Or you haven't yet, but something in you knows it's coming.