Love Never Ends: The Heart of Christian Marriage | 1 Corinthians 13
Brian Hedges | July 5, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture this morning to 1 Corinthians 13 for our final message in this series called “Redeeming Marriage.” Today we’re going to talk about love, the importance of love in marriage.
Everyone agrees that love is a good thing, right? John Lennon said love is all you need—“All you need is love.” St. Augustine said, “Love God and do as you please.” There are not too many things that the Beatles and a church father would agree on, but there’s agreement that love is important.
The question is, what kind of love? How do you define love? Is there something distinctive about Christian love?
The most basic requirement in marriage is unselfish love; both husbands and wives are commanded to love their spouses. Paul in Ephesians 5 says, “Husbands, love your wives,” and in Titus 2 he commands wives to love their husbands. Love is what virtually every couple commits to and vows to do at their wedding. The question is, what is Christian love? What is the kind of love to which God calls us in our marriage relationships?
Over the past three weeks, we have looked at several different aspects of marriage. We’ve talked about God’s design for marriage in creation all the way back in Genesis 2, how God created marriage to be an intimate partnership between a man and a woman for life, but sin and the fall have brought brokenness into that relationship, and only God’s grace can bring restoration to that intimacy that God designed. We’ve talked about the Christian household and how Christ himself is the Lord of the Christian home. Then last week we talked about marriage in the new creation and how God calls us to put off the old self, put on the new self, and how that works itself out in marriage in the realm of communication and our emotions and our conflicts and the expression of forgiveness to one another.
Today we’re going to talk about love, love that is right at the heart of the marriage relationship, and we’re looking at that classic text on love, 1 Corinthians 13. These are words that most of us are familiar with; we’ve heard them read in weddings, we’ve maybe heard them read in church or maybe even in films. Today I want us to look at this passage of Scripture with a specific application to the marriage relationship. So let’s begin by reading it, 1 Corinthians 13. I’m going to read the entire chapter, thirteen verses, beginning, of course, in verse 1.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
“Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
This is God’s word.
In these verses, Paul shows us four great truths about love:
1. The Supremacy of Love
2. The Character of Love
3. The Permanence of Love
4. The Embodiment of Love
I want us to look at each of these in turn, beginning with the supremacy of love in verses 1-3.
1. The Supremacy of Love
I don’t need to read those verses again, but they remind us of the importance, the supremacy, the priority of love, as Paul tells us that without love our gifts, our knowledge, our understanding, even faith is just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; in other words, just a loud noise but without any substance. He says even faith and personal sacrifice to the point of giving my body to be burned, apart from love, has no value.
Of course, in its original context, Paul is not speaking about marriage, he’s speaking to the church in the context of spiritual gifts. The church of Corinth was divided by their different gifts and these different factions in the church, and Paul is pointing them to a more excellent way, the way of love. So he’s saying that you can have prophecy, you can have knowledge, and you can have faith; but if you don’t have love, you are nothing.
This means that a religion professed without love is an empty profession. A life that is lived without love is an empty life. And a loveless marriage is a contradiction of terms. There are no achievements, no virtues, and no laws that are more important than love.
Scripture everywhere attests to the supremacy of love. The Scriptures teach us that love is the fulfillment of the law. You find this in the words of Jesus in Matthew 22, when he says that “all the law is fulfilled in these two commandments; to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself.” You find this also affirmed by the apostle Paul in Romans 13.
Love is the first quality listed as a fruit of the Spirit, and it is one of the primary evidences that someone has been born of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love.
Love is the badge of Christian discipleship. In other words, it’s the identifying mark of a true follower of Jesus Christ. In John 13 Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
And here in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul tells us that love is the greatest of all the virtues. He names these three virtues, these three graces—faith, hope, and love—but he says, “The greatest of these is love.”
This means a couple of things for us. It means, positively, that love is the heart and soul of all that God requires of us. There is nothing good that we can ever do without love. Love should be the prime motivation of all that we do for others. Love is the way we are called to live.
Negatively, this means that every sin we ever commit is a violation or a distortion or a lack of love. This was the great insight of St. Augustine, who talked about the disordering of our loves. It’s only when our loves are rightly ordered, with a supreme love for God as first and primary and all other loves subordinate to that love, that we live truly virtuous lives. That’s why he can say, “Love God and then do as you please.”
David Naugle in his book Reordered Loves, Reordered Lives argues that the classic “deadly sins” are really just forms of disordered love. Pride is the immoderate love of self, lust is disordered sexual desire, and so on. In other words, every sin is ultimately a failure to love others rightly, and love is the most important thing in our lives and the most important thing in our marriages.
Over the past week, I’ve been revisiting one of my favorite books on marriage, a book I recommend, The Mystery of Marriage by Mike Mason. I want to read to you what he says about love.
“Are there problems in marriage [he asks]? Every one of them results from the partners trying desperately to renege, however subconsciously or surreptitiously, even secretly, on a choice they have already made, a choice to which they have been led by love. Marriage involves nothing more than a lifelong commitment to love just one person; to do so, whatever else one does, a good, thorough job of loving one person.”
All the problems in marriage are because we renege on that promise, on that basic vow. We are called to love one another, not least of all in the marriage relationship.
2. The Character of Love
The question, then, is, what does this look like? What is Christian love? Paul describes this love in verses 4-7 in what we might call the character of love. It is a character description, a description of love in these four verses.
What’s really quite interesting is that Paul is not merely giving us adjectives that describe love; he is, rather, defining and describing love in terms of its actions, in terms of its behavior.
New Testament scholar David Garland notes that Paul does not use adjectives to describe love but verbs, fifteen of them in three verses. He says,
“Love is dynamic and active, not something static. He is not talking about some inner feeling or emotion. Love is not conveyed by words; it has to be shown. It can be defined only by what it does and does not do.”
In other words, love is not a passive emotion that happens to you, much less a state into which you fall. Rather, love is a dynamic, powerful, active force that is expressed through our concrete behaviors and actions, the way we treat one another. “Love is patient and kind…love is not proud or boastful or rude. Love is not self-seeking, not easily angered. Love keeps no record of wrongs.” These are the ways that Paul describes love. All in all, he uses sixteen different verbs, painting a stunning portrait of love in bold, clear lines and vivid, living color.
The seventeenth-century theologian John Bois summarized all that love entails in this way: “Of love there be two principle offices: one to give, another to forgive.” This is Christian love: to give and to forgive. This is what love does. This is what we are called to in Christian marriage, to give of ourselves unconditionally, without reserve, and to forgive when we have been hurt or sinned against.
This kind of love is costly love. This is different from a merely human love, worldly love. This is the kind of love that requires what Jesus calls us to: it requires self-denial. In fact, Paul says it here in verse 5: “Love is not self-seeking.” There is nothing in the Christian’s life like the marriage relationship that tests us more in the basic requirement of discipleship. But Jesus says, “You must deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me.” The call to love is the call to self-denial.
That means that love and self-centeredness are mutually exclusive categories. To love another person necessarily requires you to look outside of yourself. And this is exactly what marriage commits us to: the unrelenting commitment to the happiness of the other person rather than seeking our own interests.
Listen once again to Mike Mason. He says,
“Marriage comes with a built-in abhorrence of self-centeredness. In the dream world of mankind’s complacent separateness, amidst all our pleasant little fantasies of omnipotence and blamelessness and self-sufficiency, marriage explodes like a bomb. It runs an aggravating interference pattern, an unrelenting guerrilla warfare against selfishness.”
Now just lock onto that phrase for a moment. This is what marriage is: “an unrelenting guerrilla warfare against selfishness.” I can’t think of a better description of how marriage works in our lives. Marriage is an institution given by God that sanctifies us because it chips away at the self-centeredness of our hearts as we are called to love another person.
That means we need to do some work thinking about the self-centeredness in our own hearts and lives. What are some symptoms of selfishness? Let me give you several.
First of all, do you dominate conversations? When you think about your conversations with your spouse, or if you’re not married think about your conversations with other people, what are your conversations mostly about? Are you mostly expressing your own thoughts, your own ideas, telling your own stories, expressing your own feelings? Are you hogging the microphone, so to speak, always talking about yourself? Or are you able to genuinely get into the life of another person?
Think about anger, which we talked about in more depth last week. Do you get inordinately upset or angry when you don’t get your way? That’s an indication of selfishness. Are you slow to confess your sins or admit your mistakes? That also is an indication of self-centeredness and of pride.
Do you find it difficult to show understanding or express empathy with your spouse, to really help your spouse to feel felt, to know that his or her emotions are being experienced sympathetically and empathetically in your heart and in your life as well?
Is it easy for your spouse to ask you to change your mind, or are you inflexible? Do you get your feelings hurt easily or are you easily offended?
These are all symptoms of selfishness, and if you feel like you’re safe, here’s one more. Are you sitting there thinking about how you see these traits in your spouse? That’s probably an indication of self-centeredness as well.
When we allow this guerrilla warfare to do its work, to root out the outposts and explode the beachheads of self-centeredness in our lives—when we allow it, marriage can become very sweet. But when we resist this aggravating interference, marriage will be very difficult.
This is the character of love: to give, to forgive at great cost to oneself. Love seeks not its own. Love is the call to self-denial for the sake of the other.
3. The Permanence of Love
Thirdly, I want us to consider for just a few minutes the permanence of love, because Paul not only describes this love, but he says that this is love that will never end. Verse 8: “Love never ends.” And he goes on to talk about how prophecies and tongues and knowledge, these various gifts, those will cease, those will pass away; but there comes a time when the perfect comes, when we know as we have been known. And he says that three things will last, three things will abide—verse 13—“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” It’s the permanence of love.
Paul here is giving us a little clue as to what eternity will be like. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I’ve thought about eternity, it’s been almost a frightful, scary thought. I especially felt this way as a child. People would say that “when you go to heaven, it’s just going to be like a church service that never ends.” I could think of nothing that would be more monotonous than that, to stay in church forever and ever and ever!
That’s not a good picture of eternity, though. Eternity is not going to be boring, it’s not going to be monotonous, it’s not going to leave our hearts unsatisfied. Eternity is going to be the fullness of love, the fullest possible experience of being loved and of loving others that we could ever imagine.
This is what Jonathan Edwards described as a world of love, heaven as the world of love. Edwards preached a whole series of sermons from 1 Corinthians 13, published as Charity and Its Fruits. In the final sermon, “Heaven Is a World of Love,” he shows that God is this infinite fountain of love and that the streams of his love will flow to every person in heaven, and that this love will characterize all who are in heaven.
Here are just a couple of very brief snippets from that sermon. He said, “Having no pride or selfishness, their hearts shall be full of love. The soul which only had a little spark of divine love here shall be wholly turned into love like the Sun, wholly a bright, ardent flame.” This is what we’re waiting for, this is what we’re destined for. It is to be caught up in this eternal fellowship of love.
This is what our hearts are made for, this is what we long for most deeply in our hearts; it is for a love that never ends.
I’ll bring this back to marriage for a moment, and I want to just address a question that maybe some couples, especially a happily-married couple—maybe a senior adult couple, an older couple—has had in their marriage. Maybe you recall the words of Jesus in Matthew 22, when he said, “In the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but be like the angels in heaven.” And that statement has troubled some people. “Will I know my spouse in heaven? Will I know something of this love that has brought such joy and delight to my heart here on earth? What does Jesus mean, there’ll be no marriage in heaven?” That could be troubling for many couples who have lived a life of deep love.
But once again, Mike Mason has an interesting take on this. He said, “Considering the rich imagery of weddings and marriage throughout the Bible, it seems more probable that heaven will be all marriage.” This is very close to what Jonathan Edwards was getting at, saying that heaven will be a world of love. Mason goes on to say, “Christian marital love is as close as we are likely to experience to being a piece of heaven on earth.”
We lose nothing in heaven, because love never ends. But we can have a little foretaste of that in our lives now, especially in marriage, when we learn to love as God here calls us to love.
How do we get that? Where do we see that most fully demonstrated in the world? And that brings us to point number four, the embodiment of love.
4. The Embodiment of Love
It’s important for us to note here that 1 Corinthians 13 is not just a checklist of behaviors. I want you to notice here how Paul speaks. He does not simply tell us to be patient and kind and humble and forgiving. Instead, he describes love itself, and as I’ve already said, he describes love with verbs. But the subject of the verbs is love. “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy or boast. Love is not proud or rude. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” The subject of the verbs is love. As we listen to these words, we are listening to a description of the character of love.
But where do we see the incarnation of love? Where do we see a person who is actually loved in this way? There’s only one place we see the perfection of love in a human being, and that is in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is love personified. Jesus is love incarnate, because Jesus is patient and kind with sinners. He is humble and gentle and self-giving. Jesus is the one who bore our sins. He endured all things, even the cross, for our sake. Jesus is the one whose love never failed, who loved us to the very end.
Jesus is the embodiment of love, and that means that Jesus is the perfect example of love. Jesus is therefore the standard to which he calls every believer to live, the standard to which every husband and every wife is called, to love like this.
The apostle John, the apostle of love, in his first letter said, “This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
This means that we must be so overwhelmed with the love of Christ that it works on our hearts, that it reorders our affections, and it increases our capacity to love our spouses. We must be amazed by his love for us so that we will then display that same love for the person that we are married to.
So, how did Jesus love us? I think when we look at the quality of Jesus’ love, we will see how we are to love our spouses. Let me just show you three things quickly.
(1) First of all, Jesus loved us when we were not lovable. I already read Romans 5:6-8 this morning. “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He loved us when we were his enemies, he loved us in our weakness, he loved us in our sin, and he calls us to love with that same kind of love—to love our spouses even when our spouses disappoint us or hurt us or do not seem lovable to us in that moment.
Remember the hymn-writer who said,
“I stand amazed in the presence
Of Jesus the Nazarene
And wonder how he could love me,
A sinner condemned, unclean.
“He took my sins and my sorrows,
He made them his very own;
He bore the burden to Calv’ry,
And suffered and died alone.
“Oh how marvelous, oh how wonderful!
And my song shall ever be
How marvelous, how wonderful
Is my Savior’s love for me.”
When that grasps your heart, it begins to change and reorder your heart so that you’re able to express a similar kind of love to your spouse. Jesus loved us when we were not lovable.
(2) Secondly, Jesus loved us by making our interests his own. Jesus is the model for the commands given by Paul in Philippians 2, where he says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,” and then he goes on to describe the humble, servant-hearted, self-sacrificial obedience of Jesus, who went all the way to the death of the cross.
We are called to serve one another in the church in that way, to look not after our own interests but after the interests of others. How much more does that apply to marriage? You love your spouse by putting the interests of your spouse ahead of your own interests. This means learning to ask the right kinds of questions; not, “Am I getting what I need?” but rather, “What does she need from me right now? What does he need?”
Sometimes this means laying aside your preferences. Sometimes it means listening rather than talking. Sometimes it means asking for forgiveness first, being the one who makes the repair attempt. Sometimes it just simply means doing the little things that show a preference for your spouse—doing the dishes or changing the diaper or making the difficult phone call or sitting quietly with your spouse after a difficult day. Love makes the interests of the spouse more important than one’s own interests.
(3) Then finally, number three, Jesus loved us sacrificially at great cost to himself. And this also is the call for us as believers. We see it in Ephesians 5:1-2, which are spoken to all believers. “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.” Self-sacrificial love. Imitate Christ in this love.
Then in verses 25 and following, Paul specifically applies this to husbands when he says, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” And then in verse 28, “In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.”
Love. Love sacrificially. Love by laying down your life, by laying down your rights, by laying down your prerogatives, by laying down your wishes in order to meet the needs of your spouse.
Brian Chappell tells the story of a man who nurtured his own wife’s spiritual growth despite her unrelenting resistance to his faith. After perceived slight early in their marriage, perceived slight from members of the church, she refused ever again to attend church. And as he faithfully attended, her resentment just grew. She would try to sabotage his faith in a variety of ways. Some mornings he would walk to church because she had hidden the car keys. One time she cut all the buttons off of his church suit to discourage his attendance. She was unlovable. She was bitter. And yet his example never wavered.
Without anger he cared for her, and without speeches he demonstrated how much he valued his worship of the Lord. She paid no attention, until he was finally in old age and had become an invalid and could no longer walk. But even then, his faith did not quaver, and she finally began to consider what had kept his character and his conduct so caring through so many years of her own resentment. From his sickbed as an invalid, he finally was able to lead her to an eternal relationship of love with the Lord.
Just a few months later, a sudden illness caused her to precede him in death, and he grieved, but he also was able to rejoice in the knowledge that he would soon be with her to share in a relationship of deeper love than they had known in this life because they had both found the love of Christ.
The call to love can be a difficult call. It is the call to give and to forgive at cost to oneself in imitation of Christ. The only way that we can do this, the only way we can live this way, is if we ourselves have been overcome with the love of God for us.
The apostle John, once again, said it best: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). It’s only as we experience God’s love for us that we are able to love him or others with this kind of love.
But his love for us is a powerful love. It is love that works in us the very virtues that we so desperately need.
I want to close with this quotation from the Puritan John Owen, in his book on communion with God. He said,
“A man may love another as his own soul, yet perhaps that love of his cannot help him. We cannot love grace into a child nor mercy into a friend [I might add, nor love or change into a spouse; we can’t love it into somebody]. But now, the love of Christ being the love of God is effectual and fruitful. He loves life, grace, and holiness into us. He loves us into covenant. He loves us into heaven. His love is a powerful love. His love can change our hearts and can change the hearts of even the most difficult, hardened person.”
Brothers and sisters, whether you’re married or not, you are called to walk in love as God has loved us.
You are called to imitate the love of God in Christ, to follow in the footsteps of your Savior. Let’s learn to do this. Let’s love one another. And if you’re married especially, let’s be committed to loving our spouses as God in Christ has loved us. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you this morning for your grace and for this amazing love that you have demonstrated to us through sending your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be our substitute, to make this great sacrifice for our sins, to love us when we were unlovable, and to love us with a powerful, heart-changing, life-transforming love.
Lord, my prayer this morning is that we would be so overcome with the experience of your love that the overflow of this would be love for others in our lives, in our homes, in our marriages. We need the grace of your Holy Spirit to do this. It’s not enough even for us to just consider this love, but your word is the means of change. We need the powerful, transforming work of your Spirit to do something in our hearts, to loosen the hold of self-centeredness and pride, to reorder the affections and the desires and the loves of our hearts so that you become the supreme object of our love. And having experienced your love, we then in turn love others as you have called us to.
Lord, would you do that this morning? Would you do it in our hearts? Would you do it in our homes, do it in our marriages? Lord, change us in the ways that we need to be changed. Give us today the graces of faith and of repentance. Help us, Lord, to see afresh the beauty of your great love for us as displayed in the gospel.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, help us to see in the table the example of Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us; Christ whose body was broken, whose blood was shed because he loved us to the very end. As we receive these elements together, may we by faith receive Christ himself and be transformed into his image by your Spirit. Lord, work this great change in our hearts and lives, we pray. In Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
