A Portrait of Love

We are in the middle of our study this quarter of First and Second Corinthians, and you already had some excellent teaching with John Pauline.

First Corinthians contains four hundred thirty-seven verses in sixteen chapters, and Second Corinthians is two hundred fifty-seven verses in thirteen chapters.

So altogether, six hundred ninety-four, or almost seven hundred verses.

Now, if you divide seven hundred verses by thirteen, because we have thirteen lessons, that means we need to cover fifty-three verses per lesson, or two point two chapters if we want to cover it all.

Now, out of sixteen chapters of First Corinthians, chapter thirteen is the shortest.

It has just thirteen verses.

And this lesson has only thirteen verses assigned, that is chapter thirteen and nothing else.

Interestingly enough, chapter fifteen is the longest chapter.

We'll have fifty-eight verses.

And chapter fifteen, we'll cover that in the very next lesson, lesson number eight.

Now, as you know, we alternate quarters, so we have exegetical quarters where we study a book, and then we have topical quarters where we study a theme, and then we go through the Bible and different books.

Now, lately, an very bad habit crept into these exegetical quarters that you take a topic and study a topic rather than the Bible.

Instead of covering the book, warts and all, things that you like and things that you don't like, because that's why we have the exegetical study, that we need to hear what we don't want to hear and see how it fits into the overall things.

We only take a topic, and yeah, we butterfly from all over the place in the Bible.

Yeah, last Sabbath when I was in a local church, sure enough, was the first Sabbath of the new quarter, and I think we had one or two verses from the book that we were supposed to study, and everything else was from somewhere else.

Now, nothing against that.

I mean, it's still inspired.

It's still God's Word.

The problem is you are not learning what you are supposed to learn.

Now, this chapter, chapter thirteen of First Corinthians, is a classical example of what happens when people start thinking about love disregarding the context in which the chapter is there in First Corinthians.

So if you look at the study notes, number one, it's the statement of purpose from the lesson, from the Sabbath afternoon.

There are many remarkable passages about love in the New Testament, but nothing compares to First Corinthians thirteen.

Last week, we saw that without love, all things, even spiritual gifts, are worthless.

This week, we will look more deeply into First Corinthians thirteen and its marvelous portrait of love.

So amazing, good.