1 Corinthians 13:1-3

The necessity of love 13:1-3

In these first three verses Paul showed that love is superior to the spiritual gifts he listed in chapter 12.

"It is hard to escape the implication that what is involved here are two opposing views as to what it means to be ’spiritual.’ For the Corinthians it meant ’tongues, wisdom, knowledge’ (and pride), but without a commensurate concern for truly Christian behavior. For Paul it meant first of all to be full of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, which therefore meant to behave as those ’sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be his holy people’ (1 Corinthians 1:2), of which the ultimate expression always is to ’walk in love.’ Thus, even though these sentences reflect the immediate context, Paul’s concern is not simply with their over-enthusiasm about tongues but with the larger issue of the letter as a whole, where their view of spirituality has caused them to miss rather widely both the gospel and its ethics." [Note: Fee, The First . . ., p. 630.]

"All four classes of gifts (xii. 28) are included here: the ecstatic in 1 Corinthians 13:1; the teaching (propheteia) and the wonder-working (pistis) gifts in 1 Corinthians 13:2; and the administrative in 1 Corinthians 13:3." [Note: Robertson and Plummer, p. 288.]

"It has well been said that love is the ’circulatory system’ of the body of Christ." [Note: Wiersbe, 1:610.]