Better Than Miracles
6/1/202639 min
1 Corinthians 13 is a very famous passage, but in the context of the entire book of 1 Corinthians, we see that it is a sober warning against straying from the Gospel. If a person is gifted, as many of the Corinthians were, then it is frighteningly easy for that person to mistake their spiritual gifts for spiritual fruit.
When we serve others in the church, are we serving Jesus or are we serving ourselves? To understand this passage fully, you have to understand 1) The story behind it; 2) The bombshell Paul is dropping on the Corinthians; and 3) How it applies to people today.
This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on April 14, 1996. Series: Love: The Way to Grow Up. Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 1· Host0:00
[on-hold music] What are the signs that you've truly understood what it means to be saved by grace? In 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul says it's possible to have impressive spiritual gifts or live by high moral standards and still not know what it means to have salvation in Christ. Today, on the Gospel and Life podcast, Tim Keller takes a closer look at this well-known passage about love and shows us why living a good life isn't the same as living a life transformed by the gospel.
Tim Keller· Guest0:31
[on-hold music] Every year after Easter, from, from Easter, uh, the week after Easter till the onset of summer, we choose a, a series of sermons that, that really talk about what it means to l- practically live a Christian life. And we're gonna be looking at the very famous, uh, passage of 1 Corinthians 13, the entire chapter, and we're gonna look at that for six weeks. And therefore, though I'm only gonna be looking at verses one to three today, and that's all that's printed there, I'm gonna read you the whole passage, and it's extremely, extremely familiar, very famous, probably next to, uh, the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm, the, maybe the third most famous passage in the Bible. It's, uh, Saint Paul writing in the 13th chapter of the first epistle, his first letter to the Corinthians, and he writes this: "If I speak in the tongues of men