By Ryne Brewer
One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from The Four Loves by CS Lewis. It reads: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
Love is the ethical ideal of the Christian faith. But we live in a world where the word love is subjectively defined. I remember working with college students a few years back asking them to define love. And every time I asked the question I’d receive a different answer. Needless to say as a culture, we are simultaneously obsessed with love and confused about how to define it.
With the Spirit of God helping us to understand, 1 Corinthians 16 can begin to cut through the confusion and help settle our definitions. The ethic of love given to us by Jesus and at the core of the gospel is sacrificial love. And as we’ve read through 1 Corinthians, it becomes obvious to me that Paul was encouraging this type of love as a proof that the gospel has broken, sunk into, and redeemed the heart of the church in Corinth. It’s why here in this final chapter he summed up all his instructions as “do everything in love” (1Corinthians 16:14). Paul’s sayings to them can be summarized: Love is it, friends. And when you are loving like Jesus, it will be a self-sacrificial love—it will be a vulnerable love—a love that looks out for the well-being of other people. And the good news for any of us who are self-preserving, self-gratifying or just down right selfish—Jesus’s selfless love transforms us. It’s not a “do better, try-harder, beat the selfishness out of you, and then you’ll do everything in love” kind of command Paul gives here. It’s a resurrection-empowered new reality, birthed in us through seeing and savoring the response Jesus gave to us through the cross.
This is the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way. Love became incarnate and became vulnerable and was crucified so that we would know love, be transformed by love, and in turn do everything in love.
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