-Transcript-
00:25 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the cafe.
00:29 Welcome to the program. Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe. Thank you for joining me today.
00:34 Today we have a great topic. We’re looking at what we have here on earth, faith, hope, and charity. Think about this.
00:42 Faith, hope, and charity out of 1 Corinthians 13.We won’t need faith and hope in heaven, will we? We won’t need faith because you’ll see Jesus face to face. You won’t need hope because your hope will be realized.
00:56 And so you’re not hoping for something that’s already happened. That’s you’re realizing it. You’re living it.
01:04 Amen. Faith, hope, and charity is what we’re dealing with in this life. And here Paul writes about this so eloquently in 1 Corinthians 13:12-13.
01:17 For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity.
01:33 These three, but the greatest of these is charity. And charity, of course, signifying love, specifically that agape love, that sacrificial love. Right? And I think that’s important to understand.
01:45 You tell somebody, oh, I love you, and you don’t want to do anything for them. I mean, do you really love them? Hey, okay. I love you.
01:53 You know, here I’m going to give you a kidney. Okay. You really love them.
01:57 You see, sacrificial love. But we see here this idea of seeing through a glass darkly and only knowing in part. You know, part of the Christian walk for the believer is not being able to see Jesus.
02:09 You know, Jesus says, blessed are them that believe and not see. He said that when he was speaking to Doubting Thomas and Thomas needed to, you know, put his hand through his finger and put his hand in Jesus’ side. And he said, yeah.
02:23 And you know, okay. I believe now. And Jesus said, that’s great.
02:30 You know, but blessed are those that haven’t seen and believe. One reason why they’re blessed is because they’re using faith. And the Bible says in Hebrews 11:6, it’s impossible to please God without faith.
02:40 We are exercising faith. You know, I tell our kids at homeschool, we’re going to do an exercise. They think they’re going to go outside and run around.
02:48 But you know what? Exercising faith is a muscle movement, is a action. It’s not passive. You are actively believing.
02:56 The world wants you to think it’s passive. Don’t do anything. Be ambivalent and lull you into hell when it’s too late to make a decision for Christ.
03:06 What is looking through the glass darkly reveal? Only part of the picture. I think of an amber bottle. And yes, you can see an amber bottle in, you know, where, okay, a certain aisle at the grocery store, but you also could see an amber bottle at the florist, amen, at the florist.
03:28 We’ll use that example. And you put the flower in an amber bottle and you know, you say, oh, does there water in there?
03:35 I can somewhat see how much water is in there. Oh, but what if, is there plant food in there? Is that green? I don’t know.
03:43 I can’t tell. I can’t see clearly what’s in the bottle. And that’s the kind of idea that we can’t fully make out who God is.
03:50 And think of who’s writing this, Paul, who met Jesus Christ himself on the road to Damascus. Paul is the one writing this saying he can’t fully make out who Jesus is. Now, yes, he was blinded by Jesus.
04:02 That is true. But he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. As I understand it, he went off to Arabia for three years, was taught the doctrine of the apostle, being the apostle to the Gentiles by Jesus himself, not by man.
04:17 So he knew Jesus as well as anybody on earth. Paul, by the way, went up to the third heaven, amen. He was up there in heaven.
04:23 The Lord let him see heaven and he didn’t, he still fully couldn’t say who Jesus is. Amen. How can we fully know who he is? So we have to have faith and say, okay, we’re believing what, you know, these characteristics.
04:40 Yeah, that’s how we start to get to know God, by the way, you get in the Bible. The Bible says faith come with by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
04:47 You get in the Bible and you start learning about the characteristics of God, which we talk about pretty much every program here at KJV Cafe, characteristics of God.
04:57 We look at who he is, amen. And we look at what he has done and what he’s going to do through prophecy. And we understand more and more about God.
05:03 But something that kind of bubbles up here from this time on earth that Paul’s describing is faith, hope, and love.
05:09 That’s what bubbles up, right? And we see the importance, especially when it comes to love. And so Paul’s focus turns to love.
05:17 If you read 1 Corinthians 13, it turns to love rather quickly. Amen. Though I speak with tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
05:33 And though I have a gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing.
05:45 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and not have charity, it profiteth me nothing. We see here very familiar passage of scripture,
05:52 1 Corinthians 13:1-3, Paul describing what these well-to-do, well-meaning attributes, these great things, well-meaning attribute does not mean anything, but what these great characteristics look like without love, they’re meaningless, and that sacrificial charitable love.
06:12 Things like having great speech. I think of rhetoric. That was my graduate study was in rhetoric and communications.
06:22 What is that? That’s basically a politician in a nutshell, politician. They can certainly be so slick and you could think that they have great care and they are raving wolves. They have no love.
06:37 I’m sure everyone could think of somebody over the years politically that has been like that. And you say, oh, they really pulled the wool over some people’s eyes. And that is the idea.
06:48 Without love, it’s nothing. Prophecy, future history. Without love, it’s nothing.
06:55 I think of the psychic, the mystic, you know, there’s people doing that in the Bible. There’s people doing that these days. Guess what? If they love the Lord, they’d stay far away from it.
07:04 The Bible tells us to stay away from magic and darkness and all the rest. So without love, it’s nothing. It’s fruitless.
07:11 In fact, it’s dangerous. All wisdom, knowing everything without love is nothing. You know, I’ve known some college professors that have all this knowledge.
07:25 They have what’s called a terminal degree. That means they can’t go any further in their studies. That means that they were studying stuff when they were a full-grown adult and they got paid for it.
07:33 And studying and studying and studying and studying. And you know, I take them at that word. You know, if someone says this person has a PhD in, you know, cardboard box design or whatever,
07:48 I believe that person knows more about cardboard box design than anyone ever because they’d have to write a book about it, which is called a dissertation, right? And these professors, they have all wisdom, right? And yet they don’t have love.
08:03 It’s nothing. And it’s depressing. And there’s great depression on a lot of campuses.
08:08 I’ve known professors that have dealt with depression. That love of God is what will remedy that, by the way. All faith believer in a God, right? They believe in a God, but not the God.
08:23 It is nothing. Because we know that our God is the God of love. And so these pagan religions having all faith and not having love is completely bankrupt.
08:34 It’s nothing. Giving all possessions to the poor. You think of a nonprofit worker, there’s nothing wrong with that.
08:40 There’s a lot of things right with that. But if that becomes a workspace salvation, if that becomes your righteousness or whatever it is, if you don’t have that love, which is who God is, then it’s nothing. Giving your own body or life for the cause.
08:53 I think of the protester that lights themselves on fire for a cause. That’s very brave. I don’t think I could ever do that.
08:59 And yet if they don’t have love for their Lord, who would have surely more than likely stop them from doing that?
09:08 They don’t have anything. It’s all for naught. Can you imagine all of these individuals I’ve described? One, two, three, four, five, six, six.
09:15 Number of man. Imagine that. All these individuals dying and meeting the true living God and realizing that they never had love and that it was profitless, even though the world thought it was so profitable.
09:28 You see, the world finds the slick politician amazing. The world finds the mystic and psychic very interesting and intriguing. The world finds the professor the absolute source of knowledge and truth, even though oftentimes they’re not.
09:48 The world finds these pagan religions absolutely incredible. Look at yoga, for example. Yeah, that’s a pagan religion.
09:54 Look it up. Look it up, friends. Now they love it so much.
10:01 The world finds the idea of those that just gave all their possessions to the poor as incredible and that the righteousness should win them some kind of award in eternity.
10:07 But without God, it’s worthless. In fact, the Bible talks about it being filthy, like filthy rags, like dirty gauze pads, like medical waste.
10:15 Can you imagine that? You go and you give everything to the poor and you have no love in your heart for the true living God and you get to heaven and God says, look at this trash can. That’s what that means to me. This pile of trash over here.
10:30 Now look over to hell. That’s where you’re headed because you did not accept what Christ did on the cross at Calvary. You had to add to it.
10:37 You had to make your own way. The importance of charity, that sacrificial love is hammered home by showing all these aspects that look very attractive to the world, but are worthless without that sacrificial love.
10:53 And I keep bringing up that idea because that’s what God has done for us.
10:58 And so once we understand God’s true love, we understand our own ways, even as slick as they look to the world, are bankrupt and void without his great love in our life.
11:11 He gave, I’ve heard it put this way, that lust takes and love gives. And I think that is so true.
11:21 You know, love gives and love doesn’t give expecting something in return, amen. And yet we all like to give and, you know, you get a ministry email and I’m on all these email lists, you know, okay.
11:34 Now if you give $30, you get a t-shirt and I’m like, hmm, I wonder if they have a big guy size, you know, we’re all guilty of it.
11:47 You want something when you give, okay. Well, that’s clever marketing and so on. But the agape love is to give and know you’re not going to get anything in return, you know.
11:58 And I wonder how many people would give if they couldn’t put it on social media, if they couldn’t take credit for it, if there was no earthly reward, if they couldn’t think of any good that would come out of it, only maybe harm, would they still give?
12:13 You know, some of the best things that we can do as a Christian, no man could ever know about or else it wouldn’t be the best thing we can do as a Christian. And think about how that would look to others. People may not know.
12:26 There could be somebody that looks completely ordinary and you have no idea how much they’re sacrificially giving and loving as Christ called them to love other than maybe the smile on their face or the peace in their heart.
12:39 That importance of charity is hammered home by Paul. And this is to say that when we look at these characteristics and we look at this idea of understanding who God is, partly right now,
12:52 but fully in the days to come in heaven if we’re saved, that we see that what bubbles up from this understanding of who he is, is hope, right? Faith, number one, hope and charity.
13:04 So faith in, hey, you know what? We’re not reconciling with the world. We can’t, but we realize that we have a hope in Jesus Christ who gave this sacrificial love that no man could ever give to pay the sin debt for all humanity.
13:19 To be that ram in the thicket there is unbelievable.
13:26 I think of that example, the ram in the thicket when you have Isaac being sacrificed by Abraham and Abraham’s about to kill his own son and God says, no, I’ve provided a way. I provided a way.
13:40 And Abraham, I believe, as the Bible says, he believed Isaac would have been risen from the dead, but he didn’t have to do it because God provided the ram and God truly provided the lamb, the holy spotless lamb, Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior for all that accept him.
13:49 And God wants us to know that without that sacrificial love, we couldn’t be saved. And without living that out in our life, we can’t truly understand what it’s like to be saved as we should,
14:09 without living out this life of agape love of sacrificial love of understanding this characteristic of God and being that way in our life and not trying to cut a corner or do something that’s pleasing to the world.
14:22 Tune in next time for the second part in this two part series.
14:26 Thank you so much for listening here today. Take care. God bless and amen.