The Most Impressive Resume in the Bible

We read 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings, which is a little like reading a war telegram at a birthday party. It is a beautiful chapter and it is not a sentimental one. Paul wrote it in the middle of a fight.

The Corinthians were ranking each other. Chapter 12 is Paul explaining that a body needs a foot as much as an eye, which is the kind of thing you only have to say to people who have decided the eyes matter more. Chapter 14 is Paul imposing order on a service where everyone was talking at once, each of them convinced their gift was the important one. Chapter 13 sits between those two, and it is not a break from the argument. It is the knife.

The List

Start with what Paul actually stacks up in the first three verses, because we tend to skim it as poetry when it is really an inventory.

Tongues of men and of angels. Not just the gift they were proudest of, but that gift raised to a level no one in Corinth had ever hit. The gift of prophecy. Understanding of all mysteries. All knowledge, the complete set, nothing withheld. Faith enough to move mountains, which is the exact measure Jesus Himself used for great faith. Giving away every possession you own to feed the poor. And then the last one, which no one can top: handing over your own body to be burned.

Read that as a resume. There has never been a better one. It is not a list of ordinary Christian service, it is the ceiling of everything a person could possibly do or be given. Every item is genuinely supernatural or genuinely sacrificial. Any one of them would make a man famous in Corinth. Paul stacks all seven.

Then he says that without love, the man holding that resume is nothing.

Not diminished. Not less effective. Not still good but lacking a certain warmth. Nothing.

The Greek is ouden. Zero. Paul does not say the gifts become nothing, notice. He says I become nothing. The gifts stay real. The tongues are still tongues, the prophecy still prophecy, the mountain still moves. The man operating them is a cipher.

Where You Have Heard This Before

If that verdict sounds familiar, it should. Stand this chapter next to the crowd in Matthew 7 and read their defense again. They prophesied. They cast out demons. They did many wonderful works. Three items, all supernatural, all genuine, and every one of them on Paul's list. And the verdict from Christ is the same verdict: I never knew you. Nothing.

Two writers, two settings, one finding. You can hold a full hand of real spiritual gifts and be a stranger to God. The gifts are not the evidence. They never were.

And it works the other way too. Think of Abraham on Moriah with no gifts to speak of, no miracles to recite, no record of wonders, holding nothing but a knife and a surrendered heart. He is the photographic negative of the Corinthian scorecard, and he is the one God calls His friend. The Corinthians had the resume and were nothing. Abraham had nothing and had everything.

This is the same point running under both texts, and it is the reason I keep coming back to it. Faith is not a balance of works performed. Love is not a gift you are issued or a total you accumulate. Both of them are the real response of a real person, and no amount of performance can be substituted in.

What Expires and What Does Not

Then Paul does something the wedding readings almost never get to, and it is the strongest part of the chapter.

He tells the Corinthians that the very gifts they are fighting over have an expiration date. Prophecies shall fail. Tongues shall cease. Knowledge shall vanish away. The things they have organized their status around are temporary by design. They are scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down when the building is finished.

We know in part, and we prophesy in part. Even the best of it, the genuine article, the real prophecy from the real Spirit, is partial. Paul says we see now through a glass darkly. The word behind it is the polished metal mirror of the ancient world, which gave you a real image and a dim one, recognizable but not sharp. That is our best current sight of God. Real, and dim.

But then face to face.

That is the sentence the whole chapter has been walking toward. Everything partial gets replaced, not corrected. Not upgraded. Replaced, by sight. And love is the one item on the list that does not expire, because love is not scaffolding. It is the building.

Even as Also I Am Known

Here is the line that undoes the entire scorecard, and I think it is the most quietly devastating thing in the chapter.

Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Read it slowly. The knowing that will one day be ours is measured against a knowing that already exists. Right now, while your sight of God is dim and partial and mirror-bright at best, His sight of you is already complete. You are the one being fully known. That has been true the entire time you were building your resume.

Which means the resume was never for Him. He was never waiting to be impressed, never tallying tongues and mountains and sacrifices, never in any doubt about who you are. The performance was always aimed at an audience that already had the file open.

And He came for you anyway. That is the part worth sitting with. Fully known, seen down to the bottom, no gift on your list capable of buying one inch of it, and He came anyway. He walked into a garden calling for people who were hiding from Him, knowing exactly where they were and exactly what they had done. He has been coming ever since, past every refusal, all the way to a cross, for people whose spiritual resumes could not have bought a cup of water.

So if you have been running a scorecard, running it hard, and quietly afraid the whole time that it is not enough, hear the good news buried in Paul's rebuke. It was never enough, and it was never the point. The One who already knows you completely is not asking for your inventory. He is asking for you. Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Put the resume down and go to the One who has been reaching for you since the beginning, and who will not stop.

One day the mirror comes down and you will see Him face to face. Nothing on your list survives that morning. Love does. And love is the thing He has been holding out to you the whole time.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible