Love Never Fails

"8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears” (1 Cor 13:8–10).
For those of us who take the Bible seriously, the first part of verse 8, “Love never fails,” is both difficult and crucial. It’s a type of statement that most of us learn early on not to make; I’ve always been taught to avoid the words “never” and “always” because there are almost always exceptions that I have not imagined. So when the Bible says, “love never fails,” we should be clear about what that statement means.
One of our big problems today is that many people, including far too many Christians, teach and preach that love does sometimes fail. These critics argue that, too often, the components of biblical love (as defined in 1 Cor 13:4–7), including patience, kindness, refusal to dishonor, refusal to keep record of wrongs, and so on, do not yield the desired result. Therefore, these critics advise us to be impatient, unkind, untrusting, skeptical, and so on. 
When we look at the world through the lens of cold reason, then sure, it’s clear that love often appears to fail. But biblical Christianity is not about reason or hard evidence; it’s about faith, the “assurance of what is not seen” (Heb 11:1).  As a bible scholar and tax professional (my day job), I’m all for working with hard facts and solid logic. But since Christianity requires us to accept as truth things we can’t see, we are often called to believe things that seem unreasonable.
When we try to figure out God’s will, then, sure, we apply careful reasoning to evidence. We read the Bible as carefully as we can, look for any other evidence that may be available, then do our best reasoning, hopefully guided by serious prayer, to figure out what God wants from us today.  But when we’ve reached a conclusion about God’s will, the time has come to act. 
We Christians are not God’s buddies or counselors; God is the general, and we’re the foot soldiers.  God tells us what to do; we do it. Period.  Enlisted men may or may not be given partial information about the grand strategy.  Assuredly, they are never told the entire battle plan. They’re only told enough to know what they must do.  Consequently, they have no way to know whether the campaign strategy is working – and from the general’s perspective, the foot soldiers do not need to know. All they have to do is follow orders. 
Like everyone else, very often I have a hard time believing that love never fails.  So Paul helps us out with the rest of verse 8 and verses 9-10:
“But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.”
In the New Testament, prophecies, tongues, and “knowledge” (Greek gnosis) are extra-biblical means of learning what is true.  (If Paul were writing today, he might refer to science and logic.)  Paul anticipates our preference for determining truth by relying on extrabiblical means: scientific findings, our senses, logical reasoning, and so on.  But these things are appropriate only for our temporal world.  Eternal reality (what Paul calls “completeness” in verse 10) goes beyond human logic and scientific investigation.
This means that we can never know what is really going on when we love, or when we choose not to love.  There are times when love seems to fail.  The greatest example of this, of course, is Jesus’s death: out of love, Jesus allowed himself to be arrested and crucified.   Jesus’s love certainly seemed to fail when he was on the cross!  But there was a bigger picture that his followers could not see. 
And in the same way, when we obey God by loving as per the commands of 1 Cor 13:4–7, there is a big picture that our partial knowledge does not reveal to us.  “Love never fails” is not Paul’s finding of fact; it’s a statement of faith that loving others has a part in God’s plan.  We do not know the plan, because we do not need to know.  Our job is to love.  Therefore, our reasoning task is to figure out how to be patient when our patience is tried; how to be kind to people who are unkind; how to avoid remembering past offences, and so on.
No matter how much we Baptists like to proclaim that the Bible is true, it can be very hard to believe the clear statement, “love never fails.”  But believe it we must.  Therefore, out of faith, let’s put energy and effort into using 1 Cor 13:4–7 to help us figure out how to obey the “royal law” (James 2:8), “Love your neighbor as yourself.”